Note 175 — PART I TERRITORIAL STUDIES (continued 3)

Before leaving the subject of this levy, there is one point on which I would touch. When we find, as we often do, that the sum paid in 1168 in respect of a fief does not tally with the number of fees recorded in the cartae, we must remember that in the Liber Niger and Liber Rubeus we have not the original cartae, but only transcripts liable to clerical error. Checking the cartae by these payments, we constantly find cases in which the number of fees should be slightly greater than is recorded in the carta.175 I suspect that the transcriber, in these cases, has omitted entries in the original carta, and this suspicion is strongly confirmed by the fact that where the original return enables us to test the transcript, we find in the great carta for the honour of Clare that the original transcriber has omitted half a fee of William de Hastinges, has left out altogether the entry 'Reginaldus de Cruce, dimidium militem', and has changed the quarter fee of Geoffrey fitz Piers into half a fee; while in that of the Bishop of Chichester, Robert de Denton's half fee is converted into a whole one. The later (Red Book) transcriber has made a further omission.