Battle Abbey Roll

The Battle Abbey Roll is supposed to have been a list, lost since at least the 16th century, of the Companions of William the Conqueror, which had been erected or affixed as a memorial within Battle Abbey, Hastings, founded by William ex-voto on the spot of the slaying of Harold in the Battle of Hastings in 1066.

Traditional sources

It is known to modern historians only from supposed 16th century copies of it published by Leland, Holinshed and Duchesne, all imperfect and corrupt. Holinshed's is much the fullest, but of its 629 names several are duplicates. The versions of Leland and Duchesne, though much shorter, each contain many names found in neither of the other lists.

Criticisms

Several names on the role are disputed; Camden, as did Dugdale after him, held them to have been interpolated at various times by the monks, "not without their own advantage." Later writers went further, Sir Egerton Brydges denounced the roll as "a disgusting forgery," and E.A. Freeman dismissed it as "a transparent fiction."

Duchess of Cleveland's work

A derivative work published in 1889 by Catherine Powlett, Duchess of Cleveland, entitled Battle Abbey Roll (3 vols.) attempts to vindicate the existence of an original roll and contains biographical details of most of the prominent Anglo-Norman families known in Victorian times.

Auchinleck Manuscript Roll

There is a copy of the Battle Abbey Roll which predates Leland's supposed copy by two centuries, which was not apparently known to the Victorian antiquarians. It comprises one portion of the mid-14th century manuscript known as the Auchinleck Manuscript, which in fact contains several manuscripts, including one of the Battle Abbey Roll. The MS is described as "one of the National Library of Scotland's greatest treasures. Produced in London in the 1330's, it acquired its name from its first known owner, Lord Auchinleck, who discovered the manuscript in 1740 and donated it to the precursor of the National Library in 1744. "A comparison of the list of family names in the Auchinleck version of the Battle Abbey Roll with the other extant lists would be informative, but appears as yet unperformed".^[1]

Assessment

It is probable that the character of the roll has been quite misunderstood. It was not apparently a list of individuals, but only of family surnames, and seems to have been intended to show merely which families had "come over with the Conqueror," and to have been compiled in about the 14th century. Although 1066 was more than a century before the widespread use of heraldry, it may have been an early pre-cursor of the roll of arms, common in the 14th.c. The compiler appears to have been influenced by the French sound of names, and to have included many families of later settlement, such as that of Grandson, which did not in fact come to England from Savoy until two centuries after the Conquest. The roll itself appears to have been unheard-of before and after the 16th century, but other lists were current as early as the 15th century, as the Duchess of Cleveland has shown.^[2]

Modern lists

In 1866 a proposed list of the Conqueror's followers, compiled from Domesday and other authentic records, was set up in the church of Dives-sur-Mer in Normandy by Léopold Delisle, and is reproduced in the Duchess's work. Its contents are sufficient to show that the Battle Roll is of dubious evidential value. The fact remains that only 15 of the combatants at Hastings in 1066 can be named with certainty, as given in GEC's Complete Peerage,^[3] which select group is known as the Proven Companions of William the Conqueror. Up to 20 further names have been proposed by others, most notably D.C.Douglas in 1943^[4] but these are arrived at by circumstantial evidence alone.

Bibliography

• John Leland, Collectanea
• Holinshed, Chronicles of England
• André Duchesne, Historia Norm. Scriptores
• Samuel Egerton Brydges, Censura Literaria
• Augustin Thierry, Conquête de l'Angleterre, vol. ii. (1829)
• Sir John Bernard Burke, The Roll of Battle Abbey (annotated, 1848)
• James Planché, The Conqueror and His Companions (1874)
• The Battle Abbey Roll with some Account of the Norman Lineages by the Duchess of Cleveland, 3 vols., London, 1889.
• J.Horace Round, "The Companions of the Conqueror" (Monthly Review, 1901, iii. pp. 91–111).
• The Auchinleck Manuscript eds. David Burnley and Alison Wiggins.
• The Battle Abbey Roll Timekeeper (midgleywebpages.com)
•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 

References