Note 9 — PART I TERRITORIAL STUDIES

Such a description is most unfortunate being not only inaccurate but misleading. All that we are entitled to predicate of the document is that it is apparently a copy of the original returns from which Domesday Book was compiled. For 'the original source' of both we must look to the now missing returns of the jurors, the primary authority from which Domesday Book and the Inquisitio Com. Cant. are independently derived. This distinction is all-important, reducing, as it does, the Inquisitio from the rank of an 'original' to that of a secondary authority on the same level with Domesday Book.9 Mr Hamilton, like Mr Webb before him, assigned the handwriting of the Inquisitio to about the close of the twelfth century. The copy of the returns which it contains, therefore, was made about a century later than the returns themselves.