The Norman Conquest in English

History: Volume I: A Broken Chain?

George Garnett
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The Norman Conquest in English History
London, BL, MS. Add. 49366, fo. 3r: the elaborate frontispiece commissioned by
­Matthew Parker, archbishop of Canterbury, when he acquired this late twelfth-
century legal compilation of unknown provenance. The book consists of a copy of
­Quadripartitus, amplified in the twelfth century with other materials. It was highly
unusual for Parker to provide a frontispiece for one of his medieval manuscripts. The
poem which is featured on the frontispiece was written by Walter Haddon, a civil
lawyer, Latin poet, and associate of Parker. It is identified and printed below, p. 340
n. 45. The book later came into the hands of Sir Edward Coke, whose flamboyant
signature is scrawled across the bottom of Parker’s frontispiece. It remained in his library
at Holkham Hall until the twentieth century, and is often referred to as the Holkham
Book. Reproduced by permission of the Trustees of the British Library.
The Norman Conquest
in English History
Volume I: A Broken Chain?

GEORGE GARNET T

1
 1
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 For
The Master
 Acknowledgements

This book could never have been undertaken without the support of the
Leverhulme Trust, which elected me to a Major Research Fellowship in 2008. The
Fellowship afforded me the time to familiarize myself with periods and sources of
which I then knew a lot less than I do now. Without support on that scale it would
not have been possible for me to extend my range in such a way, mid-career.
Not only has the Trust been generous, its officials have also administered
the process with the lightest of bureaucratic touches, quite out of keeping with the
spirit of the age. The Trustees appear to have been content to wait patiently for the
fruits, which have been far slower in appearing than my ludicrously optimistic
original plans envisaged. I hope that this book will enable them to feel that their
investment has at last begun to pay off.
When I began working on this subject I could not have anticipated how rele-
vant it would become to contemporary national politics. The medieval history of
England has again begun to be invoked in current political debate, if not (yet) to
the same extent as it was in the seventeenth century. It has done so because the
crux of that debate has become the constitution, as it was in the seventeenth cen-
tury. Interpretation of the Conquest is fundamental to that of the constitution.
Nigel Farage’s sporting of a Bayeux Tapestry tie when canvassing in the Rochester
and Strood by-election in 2014 created the year’s most improbable fashion acces-
sory. On 17 May 2016, during the European Union Referendum campaign, Boris
Johnson accused the Remain campaign of ‘the biggest stitch-up since the Bayeux
Tapestry.’1 On 17 September 2018 he suggested in his Daily Telegraph column that
agreeing to the proposals recently made at Chequers by the then Prime Minister
would have amounted to a pusillanimous acquiescence in foreign rule of a kind
not seen ‘since 1066’.2 As Prime Minister himself, on 10 September 2019 he chose
to be filmed participating in a lesson at Pimlico Primary School on the subject of
the Conquest. On a more scholarly level, the eighth centenary of Magna Carta in
2015 celebrated in grand style an English exceptionalism sometimes defined, as it
was in 1215, in terms of a restored, mythically autonomous pre-Conquest past
and a reaffirmed aboriginal law. That was so in the seventeenth century too.

1 Politics Home: https://www.politicshome.com/news/europe/eu-policy-agenda/brexit/news/75095/

boris-johnson-blasts-biggest-stitch-bayeux-tapestry
2 The Daily Telegraph, 17 September 2018; cf. G. Garnett, ‘Did English Leaders “Deliberately
Acquiesce” in 1066’, BBC History Magazine Extra, September 2018; D. Hannan, ‘The Norman
Conquest was a Disaster for England. We Should Celebrate Naseby, not Hastings’, The Daily Telegraph,
14 October 2016.
viii Acknowledgements

In 2019 seventeenth-century precedents have been invoked repeatedly.3 Some of

them have followed common law tradition in assuming a law of immemorial
antiquity, untouched by the Conquest. That was implicit in the judgment of the
Supreme Court handed down on 24 September 2019, on the unlawfulness of the
recent purported prorogation of Parliament—a purported prorogation choreo-
graphed to conclude on the anniversary of the battle of Hastings. The reasoned
section of that judgment began by invoking Sir Edward Coke’s report of the so-
called Case of Proclamations, already relied upon by Lord Pannick QC in his
advocacy before the court, and in the antecedent proceedings.4 I hope that the
following detailed account of development in English understanding of the
Conquest in historiographical, legal, and political discussion over half a mil­len­
ium may offer a more nuanced perspective on the very long history of this pecu-
liarly persistent English mode of political legitimation.
Anyone familiar with the work of my second doctoral supervisor, Jim Holt, will
realize that an important part of the inspiration came from two of his essays on
the English constitutional tradition, and from the opening chapter of his Magna
Carta, which approaches his subject retrogressively, from a seventeenth-century,
legal vantage point. His supervisor, V.H. Galbraith, took a very dim view of his
doing so—‘a dreadful start . . . stupid, anachronistic mis-understanding’5—but
Holt stuck to his guns, in my view rightly so. Although he discussed my original
plans with me, and supplied one of my letters of reference (though refusing point
blank to do so in the required email format), the resulting book is the poorer in
that it has not benefited from what would have been criticism as forthright as that
he had received from his own supervisor.
The book has, however, at every stage, from initial conception to final draft,
been discussed and read by my fellow Holt pupil and closest intellectual collabor­
ator, John Hudson. His suggestions are frequently acknowledged in the footnotes

3 On 18 March 2019 the Speaker of the House of Commons cited a precedent from 2 April 1604
­(Commons Journals (1547–1628), p. 162) to justify refusing to allow the Government to bring forward
a motion for a third time in a single parliamentary session for a so-called meaningful vote on the
Brexit deal negotiated between the Government and the EU: T. Erskine May, Parliamentary Practice,
24th edn (London 2011), p. 397.
4 R (Miller) v. Prime Minister; Cherry v. Advocate General of Scotland [2019] UKSC 41, paras 32,
41; it was also given pride of place in the summary of the judgment. Cf. Lord Pannick, counsel for the
appellant in UKSC 2019/0192, and in R (Miller) v. Prime Minister [2019] EWHC 2381 (QB). Coke’s
12 Reports, fos. 74–6 (Proclamations, Mich. 8 Jac. I; The Reports of Sir Edward Coke, Knt. In Thirteen
Parts, ed. J.H. Thomas and J.F. Fraser, 13 Parts in 6 vols (London 1826), vi). It is not a report of a court
case, but of an opinion delivered by Coke when it was solicited by the Lord Chancellor and sundry
other law officers. Coke records himself concluding that ‘the King hath no prerogative, but that which
the law of the land allows him’. In support of this, he reports citing, amongst other authorities, Sir John
Fortescue’s De laudibus legum Anglie, c. 9, one of Fortescue’s key discussions differentiating a king who
ruled ‘politically and regally’ from one who ruled simply ‘regally’; for the implications of this distinc-
tion for understanding of the Conquest, see below, pp. 273–4. I should like to thank Mike Macnair
and David Pannick for help with this note.
5 Private letter commenting on a late draft of Holt’s book, and dated ‘?3 September [1964]’: Holt
Archive, University of St Andrews.
 Acknowledgements ix

below, but they give a very inadequate impression of the extent of his contribution.
I am unsure whether he will interpret this as an unalloyed compliment, but for
me he has come to fill Jim’s shoes, though some of the hobnails seem to have been
removed.
I must also acknowledge the continuing influences on my approach of my first
supervisor, Walter Ullmann, several of whose few works on English subjects
proved fecund in the development of the argument, and that of Quentin Skinner,
whose Special Subject remains formative forty years after I took it. For me, an
important lesson of the latter was that many early modern thinkers continued to
frame their arguments in medieval terms—a lesson with an obvious bearing on
the current project. Like many of those who taught me in that golden age of the
Cambridge History Faculty—Jonathan Riley-Smith and Brendan Bradshaw leap
to mind—Walter and Quentin inculcated a belief that trying to understand what
people thought, and how thought informed action, is the most interesting and
rewarding challenge in historical inquiry.
It is also a pleasure to record the importance of my time as a Title A (Research)
Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge. Toby Milsom and Peter Linehan were both
then Fellows, and Peter was working on a book about the history and his­tori­og­raphy
of medieval Spain which bears some similarities to what I have attempted.
My role as convenor for the Oxford History Faculty’s Special Subject on the
Norman Conquest of England has required me to reflect on all sorts of aspects of
the topic. John Blair and I continue to disagree in our overall interpretation of the
Conquest, but listening to his developing views on architecture has led me to
appreciate its significance in ways which I would not have done otherwise, and I
am grateful.
At the weekly class, Stephen Baxter and I now put on public disputations rem­
in­is­cent of those in which I once engaged with James Campbell and Patrick
Wormald. From these I learn much. With respect to this book, however, I am
even more indebted to Stephen for inviting me to deliver a lecture at King’s
College, London in 2009, in memory of Patrick. It prompted me to begin to hone
my thoughts at an early stage of the project.
Years of argument with Patrick forced me to refine my understanding of
English legal matters. Much of what follows could not have been written without
the foundations laid by his The Making of English Law, which will endure as one
of the great works of scholarship on Anglo-Saxon history. Whereas Patrick was
interested in the twelfth-century legal compilations for the light they might throw
on pre-Conquest law, I have tried to use them as evidence of how pre-Conquest
law was understood (and fabricated) in the twelfth century, and of how that
reconstructed (or invented) law was exploited thereafter. Indeed, Quadripartitus
and the various apocryphal codifications of Old English law with which it became
associated are the most obvious thread running through the long period covered
by this book. It remains a cause of great regret that I have had to do my best to
x Acknowledgements

formulate and voice Patrick’s objections for him—though I could never hope to
replicate the piercing, patrician insistence of his tone.
Still more important than Richard Sharpe’s classes on writs and charters and
his published scholarship has been a series of early evening drinks with him, post
class. Ruminating on some of his comments made me realize how I could tie
together architectural transformation and the resurrection of English historical
writing. In Durham Cathedral that realization became an epiphany.
Even after decades of teaching the Special Subject, tutorial discussion of the
sources each year continues to prompt fresh insights, some of which I hastily jot
down. It may not be invidious if I single out one fairly recent pupil, George
Molyneaux, because he has had the generosity and patience to subject much of
what follows to a forensic critique.
One of the advantages (or disadvantages) of attempting to cover such a long
timescale, across several different fields, is that I have been obliged to give myself
crash courses in subjects of which initially I knew little or almost nothing. In order
to do so, I have unashamedly solicited the assistance of authorities. I have already
mentioned Richard Sharpe, who has responded with an exacting patience to
numerous inquiries on palaeographical and codicological matters, and has read
much of the book in draft. The constructively unforgiving quality of his criticism
is rem­in­is­cent of that of Jim Holt—there seems to be something distinctive about
medieval historians who hail from Yorkshire (a view shared by Galbraith, another
Yorkshireman).
I must also thank John Baker, who has been generous, encouraging, and
in­struct­ive by turns, as I have attempted to grapple with English common law in
the later middle ages and early modern period. Others who have read and com-
mented on portions include Paul Brand, Hugh Brodie, Hugh Doherty, Elinor
Garnett, Adam Leach, Katie McKeogh, John Pocock, Magnus Ryan, Liesbeth van
Houts, and George Woudhuysen. The prospect of John Gillingham’s relentless
scepticism has been an important discipline. At the very beginning, Barbara
Harvey gave me much needed orientation in later medieval English history. In the
final stages, Gregory Garnett acted as computer technician. I have tried to
acknowledge all other assistance in the footnotes.
I am indebted to the many librarians whose patience I may from time to time
have tried, most often through electronic ineptitude. These include the staffs of
the Bodleian Library (perhaps especially Isabel Holowaty, its History Librarian,
who seems willing to answer queries at any time of any day or night), of
Cambridge University Library, of the Manuscripts Reading Room in the British
Library, and last but most, of St Hugh’s College. Nora Khayi, the College’s
Librarian, and her recent locum Marjory Szurko, have been as receptive to sug-
gestions for recondite acquisitions as they have been willing to turn a blind eye to
borrowing in grotesque excess of any prescribed limits.
 Acknowledgements xi

I am grateful to St Hugh’s and my other Oxford college, Lady Margaret Hall, for
allowing me periods of sabbatical leave, and to my tutorial colleagues over the last
decade, especially Jon Parkin and Grant Tapsell, for covering for me while I have
taken it. Other colleagues in the wider Oxford History Faculty who deserve a
special thank you are Rana Mitter, Julia Smith, and John Watts, who collectively
persuaded the University to award me an extra term’s leave in order to put the
finishing touches to the typescript. In addition, John quietly made 2018 the
Faculty’s 1956.
It is a pleasure to acknowledge the nurturing I have received from Stephanie
Ireland, Cathryn Steele, and Katie Bishop, my editors at OUP.
Finally (in chronological terms), I am indebted to another taker of the Special
Subject, Kerrith Davies, who responded to a last-minute plea for help by agreeing
to compile the index. That he was willing to do so even after indexing an earlier
book of mine is a sign of true friendship.
I have yet to mention the one person who has not only read the whole more
times than she will wish to remember, but also ended up living with it on a daily
basis, even on successive Cretan holidays. Helen Pike covered drafts of every part
with characteristically purple (in literal more than metaphorical terms) criticism,
and buoyed me up through the darker intervals, repeatedly advising that close
study of Quadripartitus was bound to be deleterious to health. That it seems in
the event not to have proved to be so is thanks to her, and to Elinor, Edmund, and
Gregory. They have all supported, diverted, and delighted me, the last three toler-
ating the Broken Chain rattling in the background for almost half their lives.
This book is for Helen.

Oxford
14 October 2019
 Contents

List of Plates xv
List of Abbreviations xvii

Introduction 1
1. The Early Twelfth-Century Perspective in
English Historical Writing 13
2. The Audiences for English History in the
Early Twelfth Century 81
3. The Excavation, Reconstruction, and Fabrication
of Old English Law in the Twelfth Century 104
4. Edward the Confessor: From Critical Standard to Patron Saint 132
5. The Conquest in Historical Writing from the
Late Thirteenth Century 173
6. The Conquest in Later Medieval English Law I: Jurisprudence
and Forensic Practice in the Thirteenth Century 209
7. The Conquest in Later Medieval English Law II:
Edward II’s Reign and After 247
8. The Preservation of the Sources for English Medieval
History in the Sixteenth Century 286
9. Elizabethan Study of Old English Law and Its Post-Conquest
Endorsement 332
10. The Printing of Twelfth-Century English Historiography, and
the Integration of Law with History 360

Manuscripts 387
Printed Sources 393
Modern Literature 407
Index 439
 List of Plates

Between pp. 234 and 235.

1. London, BL, MS. Yates Thompson 26, fo. 1v: Bede kissing the feet of St Cuthbert.
Reproduced by permission of the Trustees of the British Library.
2. Malibu, J. Paul Getty Museum, MS. Ludwig XI. 6, fo. 44v: a portrait of Eadmer writing.
Reproduced by permission of the Trustees of the J. Paul Getty Museum.
3. London, BL, MS. Cotton Vespasian B. xx, fo. 95v: from Book 1 of Goscelin of
St-Bertin’s account of the translatio of St Augustine’s relics. Reproduced by permission
of the Trustees of the British Library.
4. London, BL, MS. Yates Thompson 26, fo. 2r: Bede writing. Reproduced by permission
of the Trustees of the British Library.
5. William of Jumièges presenting his history to William the Conqueror: Rouen, BM
MS. 1174 (714), fo. 116r. Reproduced by permission of the Bibliothèque Municipale
de Rouen.
6. A watercolour by Charles Stothard of the coronation of St Edward from walls of the
Painted Chamber of Henry III (1263–72), in the medieval Palace of Westminster.
Reproduced by permission of the Society of Antiquaries.
7. Cambridge, UL, MS. Ee. 3.59, fo. 29r: death and reception of St Edward in heaven,
illustrated in La Estoire de Seint Ædward le rei. Reproduced by permission of the
Syndics of Cambridge University Library.
8. The interior left wing of the Wilton Diptych, which depicts a kneeling Richard II,
flanked by Edmund of East Anglia, Edward the Confessor, and John the Baptist.
Reproduced by permission of the Trustees of the National Gallery.
9. Statues on the ruined, thirteenth-century west end of Crowland Abbey church.
Reproduced by permission of Crowland Abbey.
10. London, BL, MS. Cotton Cleopatra D. ix, fo. 51r: an excerpt from the early fourteenth-
century Lichfield Chronicle. Reproduced by permission of the Trustees of the British
Library.
11. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS. 258, fo. 1r: Mirror of Justices, title page.
Reproduced by permission of the Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College.
12. William Lambarde, portrait in oils by an unknown artist, c. 1600. Reproduced by
permission of the Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery.
13. London, BL, MS. Add. 62540: a self-portrait sketch by Laurence Nowell. Reproduced
by permission of the Trustees of the British Library.
 List of Abbreviations

Acta, ed. Sharpe Acta of William II and Henry I, ed. R. Sharpe: http://actswilliam-
2henry1.wordpress.com/
AM Annales monastici, ed. H.R. Luard, 5 vols, RS (1864–69)
ANS Anglo-Norman Studies
ASE Anglo-Saxon England
Bede, HE Bede, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum
(BI)HR (Bulletin of the Institute of) Historical Research
BL British Library
Bracton  Bracton on the Laws and Customs of England, ed. G.E. Woodbine,
trans. and rev. S.E. Thorne, 4 vols (Cambridge, MA, 1968–77)
CBMLC Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues
CCC Corpus Christi College
CCCM Corpus Christianorum, continuatio medievalis
CCR Calendar of Charter Rolls, 6 vols (London 1903–27)
CM  Matthaei Parisiensis, monachi Sancti Albani, chronica majora, ed.
H.R. Luard, 7 vols, RS (1872–83)
Cod. Codex Iustiniani
CREE  Chronicles of the Reigns of Edward I and Edward II, ed. W. Stubbs,
2 vols, RS (1882–83)
CRR  Curia Regis Rolls preserved in the Public Record Office: Richard I – 1250,
20 vols (London 1922–2007)
CRSHR  Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II and Richard I, ed.
R. Howlett, 4 vols, RS (1884–89)
C&S I  Councils & Synods, with Other Documents Relating to the English
Church, I, ad 871–1204, Parts i and ii, ed. D. Whitelock, M. Brett, and
C.N.L. Brooke (Oxford 1981)
C&S II  Councils & Synods, with Other Documents Relating to the English
Church, II, ad 1205–1313, Parts i and ii, ed. F.M. Powicke and
C.R. Cheney (Oxford 1964)
Davis, MC G.R.C. Davis, Medieval Cartularies of Great Britain and Ireland, rev.
C. Breay, J. Harrison, and D.M. Smith (London 2010)
DB Domesday Book, 4 vols, ed. A. Farley (London 1783–1816)
Dig. Digestum Iustiniani
EcHR Economic History Review
Eadmer, HN Eadmeri historia novorum in Anglia, ed. M. Rule, RS (1884)
edn edition
EHR English Historical Review
Foedera  Foedera, conventiones, litterae et cujuscunque generis acta publica, ed.
T. Rymer, new edn, 4 vols. in 7 parts (Record Commission 1816–69)
xviii List of Abbreviations

Fulman, Scriptores 
Scriptores Rerum Anglicarum scriptores veteres, ed. W. Fulman
(Oxford 1684)
Gesetze F. Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, 3 vols (Halle 1903–16)
GG  William of Poitiers, Gesta Guillelmi, ed. M. Chibnall and
R.H.C. Davis (Oxford 1998)
Glanvill  The Treatise on the Laws and Customs of the Realm of England com-
monly called Glanvill, ed. G.D.G. Hall, rev. M.T. Clanchy (Oxford 1993)
GND  The Gesta Normannorum ducum of William of Jumièges, Orderic Vitalis,
and Robert of Torigni, ed. E.M.C. van Houts, 2 vols (Oxford 1992–95)
GP  William of Malmesbury, Gesta pontificum Anglorum, ed.
M. Winterbottom, 2 vols (Oxford 2007)
GR William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum, ed. R.A.B. Mynors,
R.M. Thomson, and M. Winterbottom, 2 vols (Oxford 1998)
HA  Henry, Archdeacon of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, ed.
D. Greenway (Oxford 1996)
HNa William of Malmesbury, Historia novella, 2nd edn, ed. E. King, trans.
K.R. Potter (Oxford 1998)
HSJ Haskins Society Journal
JEH Journal of Ecclesiastical History
JW  The Chronicle of John of Worcester, ed. R.R. Darlington and
P. McGurk, 3 vols (Oxford 1995–)
Ker, MLGB N.R. Ker, ed., Medieval Libraries of Great Britain. A List of Surviving
Books, 2nd edn (London 1964); Supplement to the Second Edition, ed.
A.G. Watson (London 1987)
LECf Leges Edwardi Confessoris
LHP Leges Henrici primi, ed. L.J. Downer (Oxford 1972)
Litt. T. Littleton, Tenures novelli, first edition c. 1481
LMA London Metropolitan Archives
LP  Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII,
ed. J.S. Brewer et al., 21 vols in 33 (London 1862–1932)
MGH Monumenta Germaniae Historica
ODNB H.C.G. Matthew and B. Harrison, eds, Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography (Oxford 2004); and electronic supplements: http://www.
oxforddnb.com/view/article
OV Orderic Vitalis, Historia ecclesiastica, ed. M. Chibnall, 6 vols (Oxford
1969–80)
PBA Proceedings of the British Academy
PL  Patrologiae cursus completus, Series Latina, ed. J.P. Migne, 221 vols
(Paris 1844–65)
P&M F. Pollock and F.W. Maitland, The History of English Law before the
Time of Edward I., 2nd edn, 2 vols, reissued with a new introduction
by S.F.C. Milsom (Cambridge 1968)
Potthast A. Potthast, ed., Regesta pontificum romanorum (1198–1304), 2 vols
(Berlin 1874–75)
PQW  Placita de quo warranto, temporibus Edw. I, II, & III, Record
Commission (1818)
 List of Abbreviations xix

PRS Pipe Roll Soc

RCR  Rotuli curiae regis, ed. F. Palgrave, 2 vols, Record Commission
(1835)
Reg.  Regesta regum Anglo-Normannorum: The Acta of William I,
1066–1087, ed. D. Bates (Oxford 1998)
repr. reprinted
RH Rotuli hundredorum, 2 vols, Record Commission (1812–18)
RP Rotuli parliamentorum, 6 vols (London 1767–77)
RS Rolls Series
S. P.H. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters: An Annotated List and
Bibliography (London 1968), revised and updated at http://
www.esawyer.org.uk/
Seipp D.J. Seipp’s Abridgement, which indexes all Year Book reports
printed for all the years between 1268 and 1535, and many of
the reports printed only in alphabetical abridgements: www.
bu.edu/law/faculty-scholarship/legal-history-the-year-books/
ser. series
Soc. Society
SR Statutes of the Realm, 11 vols (London 1810–28)
TCBS  Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society
Tite, Records C.G.C. Tite, The Early Records of Sir Robert Cotton’s Library.
Formation, Cataloguing, Use (London 2003)
TRHS Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
VSD Vita Sancti Dunstani
VSW  Vita Sancti Wulfstani, in William of Malmesbury, Saints’ Lives.
Lives of SS. Wulfstan, Dunstan, Patrick, Benignus and Idract, ed.
M. Winterbottom and R.M. Thomson (Oxford 2002), pp. 1–155
Walt. Cov. Memoriale fratris Walteri de Coventria, ed. W. Stubbs, 2 vols, RS
(1872–73)
WAM Westminster Abbey Muniments
Wormald, Legal Culture P. Wormald, Legal Culture in the Early Medieval West. Law as
Text, Image and Experience (London 1999)
Wormald, Making P. Wormald, The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the
Twelfth Century, Vol. I, Legislation and its Limits (Oxford 1999)
 Introduction

From 1066 successive Norman kings of the English presented themselves as the
Old English royal line continued. They came close to glossing over the fact that
the kingdom had been conquered at all. Their legitimacy as kings was founded on
an official version of certain key events, or rather alleged events, primarily of the
1050s and 1060s. Very quickly, this version of recent history became intrinsic to
the operations of the new regime. This was already the case prior to the first
extant written statement of Duke William’s claim to the throne of England, in
William of Jumièges’s Gesta Normannorum ducum, c. 1071. In the name of con­
tinu­ity with Edward the Confessor’s England, this version of events played an
important part in shaping the way in which the kingdom was brutally trans­
formed: most fundamentally in terms of who held land on what terms, and most
visibly in terms of architecture. Domesday Book was the monumental written
consummation of the tendentious premise that nothing had changed since King
Edward’s day, at least so far as tenurial structure was concerned. Many of the indi­
vidual tenants, clerical as well as lay, might be different, but they all held as suc­
cessors of Edwardian antecessores, and the tenurial system was presented as
unaltered. The Book purported to be an objective record of facts, most im­port­
ant­ly the corresponding facts for any particular tenancy at two fixed points: ‘now’,
in 1086, and ‘in the time of King Edward’, meaning on 5 January 1066, the day of
Edward’s death. This chronological framework, first formulated many years
before the Domesday Survey had been conceived, meant that the Book embodied
an official history which was already deeply entrenched by 1086. The conse­
quences of the trans­form­ation in the kingdom of England which had been
administered by reference to that interpretation of the past were so fundamental
that they continued to set the context of politics in the twelfth century, and in
some respects long afterwards.
Twenty years after 1066, Domesday Book was the most substantial early treat­
ment of change over the Conquest, but change disguised as continuity with the
Old English past. This study addresses many subsequent treatments in different
forms of the same issue, over a far longer time scale. It considers the roles that the
Norman Conquest played in English historical writing, in English law, and in
English political argument, over a period from c. 1090 to c. 1700. The subject has

The Norman Conquest in English History: Volume I: A Broken Chain? George Garnett, Oxford University Press (2021).
© George Garnett.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198726166.001.0001
2 Norman Conquest in English History: Vol. 1

proved to be so vast that it has been necessary to divide the study into two vol­
umes. This first volume takes the story up to the point in the early seventeenth
century when the bulk of what were then recognized as the most important
sources on the Conquest and what had preceded it had become widely available
in print. The second volume will begin a little earlier than the end of the first.
It will examine the use made of these materials in scholarship and in political
debate from the later years of Elizabeth’s reign into and through the seventeenth
century, when the Conquest rapidly became an even more contested issue than it
had been in the twelfth.
This first volume opens by showing how and why, within forty years of 1066, a
number of writers suddenly and almost simultaneously began to write Latin his­
tories not just of their own monastic houses, but of England. Almost all of them
were demonstrably monastic precentors, so in charge of libraries, record-keeping,
and liturgy in their communities. Ex officio, they found themselves at the nub of
establishing and demonstrating continuity over the Conquest. They were obliged
to play a key part in dealing with the implications of the comprehensive rebuild­
ing of the kingdom’s major churches, most pressingly establishing which saints’
relics merited translation from the old into the new churches. They also had to
ensure that their institutions’ titles to estates were reliably documented, in a con­
text where traditional titles to land, like traditional claims to sanctity, were subject
to newly intense, sceptical scrutiny. The scale of the demolition and construction
work which surrounded them must have constituted an even more insistent daily
reminder of transformation than the intermittent threats to ancient landed pos­
sessions. In diverse locations around the kingdom, these writers appear to have
recognized that it was necessary to reconstruct, or more accurately to construct, a
history of England which traversed the Conquest and reached back at least as far
as the conversion to Christianity of the Angles and Saxons—collectively termed
the English—at the very end of the sixth century and beginning of the seventh. In
doing so they were well aware that they were resurrecting a literary genre which
to most intents and purposes appeared to have died out in this island with the
demise of Bede, the great historian of the conversion, almost four centuries
before. Bede’s shadow fell on each of them in a different way, but they were all
acutely conscious that they were writing in it. Each after his own fashion sought
to provide an historiographical continuation (or in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s
revealingly exceptional case, prologue) to Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis
Anglorum, which the intervening centuries had lacked. They did not work in iso­
lation; many of them were demonstrably aware of what their peers were up to.
Precentors in different houses were obliged to correspond with each other by one
of their official duties: the commemoration of the dead.
William of Malmesbury, by his own estimation and that of posterity the pre-
eminent member of this select group, and certainly the most learned in classical
literature, neatly formulated the point in a metaphor he adapted from the late
 Introduction 3

antique model provided by the preface to Justinus’ epitome of the otherwise lost
histories of Pompeius Trogus. English historical writing was a chain which had
been broken with the death of Bede. William and his contemporaries—Eadmer of
Canterbury, Florence and John of Worcester, Symeon of Durham, and the secular
canon and archdeacon Henry of Huntingdon being the most prominent at the
time and subsequently—were attempting to forge a long new section of chain, to
be linked to what had been left dangling in 735.
For reasons discussed below in Chapter 1, it seems likely that they were right to
think that Latin historical writing in England had all but died out after Bede. Why
this should have happened here, in striking contrast to West and later East
Francia, to Italy and Iberia, is a very interesting question which has scarcely been
touched upon by modern historians of the Anglo-Saxon period.1 An obvious fac­
tor is likely to have been the continuing and unique importance of the written
vernacular throughout the various kingdoms of England. This was still very much
the case after the English kingdom had been formed in the early tenth century.
Indeed, it remained so until the half century after the Conquest, when written
Old English quickly became obsolescent as a language of legislation, administra­
tion, and devotion. But why the role of the vernacular might have made English
monks disinclined to write history in Latin is not immediately apparent. History
was an antique genre, so it was probably difficult to conceive of writing it—as
distinct from the rudimentary and often shambolic vernacular annals of the vari­
ous manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, initiated at the end of the ninth
century—in anything other than an antique language. The explanation for histo­
ry’s post-Bedan demise in England is unlikely to be simple. To provide a fully
satisfactory one for this particular instance of English exceptionalism would
require a quite different book from that which follows.
The question arises because the sudden efflorescence of English historiography
about England at the start of the twelfth century threw into striking relief the
long, antecedent hiatus, which William of Malmesbury sought to characterize in
the metaphor he borrowed and adapted from a Roman historian of the later
Empire. That dramatic and in the event collaborative outburst, which burned
most brightly in the second quarter of the century, is the subject of the opening
two chapters. In the view of William and his contemporaries, writing the history
of England and the English necessarily involved filling the post-Bedan gap, and in
most cases also recapitulating in summary form much of Bede’s Historia ecclesias-
tica. Several of them also suggested that the Norman Conquest had represented
some sort of break in the course of English history, as distinct from English his­
torical writing. The Conquest was generally interpreted as a rupture of a magni­
tude exceeding that caused by any earlier invasion. But in so far as they felt the

1 J. Campbell, ‘Some Twelfth-Century Views on the Anglo-Saxon Past’, repr. in his Essays in Anglo-
Saxon History (London 1986), pp. 209–28, at 216; J. Campbell, ‘Placing King Alfred’, in T. Reuter, ed.,
Alfred the Great. Papers from the Eleventh-Centenary Conferences (Aldershot 2003), pp. 3–23, at 21.
4 Norman Conquest in English History: Vol. 1

need to repair it, to trace connections with what had preceded it, they were
obliged to mend the historiographical chain which had been broken many cen­
tur­ies before it. Almost all of them were members of institutions which had sur­
vived it, and most were charged with establishing and recording aspects of the
continuous life of their churches stretching back into the distant past. For this
reason a study of the Conquest’s role in the germination of English historiography
about England necessarily involves a consideration not only of the treatment of
the Conquest itself by these historians, but also of their awareness that they were
writing up for the first time most of English history in the interval between the
death of Bede and the immediate aftermath of the Conquest. Mending the his­
torical chain involved mending the historiographical chain.
It is striking that one difference between Eadmer’s Historia novorum, the earli­
est of these works, and those which followed was that he did not attempt to mend
the latter chain. He was concerned with explaining what the Conquest had
changed, and why, not with writing a sequel to Bede, though he was acutely con­
scious of the Bedan model of ecclesiastical history. He opened his account not in
the early eighth century but in the second half of the tenth, in the reign of Edgar.
In his view it offered a model of equable collaboration between king and prelacy,
in counterpoint to the tension which had come to prevail in the aftermath of the
Conquest. Things had begun to go awry long before, shortly after Edgar’s death,
with the sacrilegious outrage of the assassination of his son and immediate suc­
cessor, Edward the Martyr. That abomination had brought God’s wrath down on
the heads of the English. The Conquest had been the latest and most devastating
in a succession of divinely ordained afflictions. There could be no certainty that it
would turn out to be the last. Eadmer’s immediate historiographical successors
expressed enormous admiration for his book, and drew on it. Some of them evi­
dently sympathized with his assessment of the Conquest as providential punish­
ment for sin, Old Testament-style. But none of them borrowed his starting point.
Although, like him, they were attempting to explain the Conquest, unlike him
this prompted them in their various ways to try to mend the broken historio­
graphical chain.
Their research excavated and preserved most of what we know about Old or
Anglo-Saxon England, and organized it in a fashion which has proved definitive
ever since. In that sense, pre-Conquest English history was largely created from a
post-Conquest perspective, with the inevitable consequence of reading current
early twelfth-century preoccupations back into the Anglo-Saxon past. We are all
familiar with the ‘Beyond’—meaning the retrospective extrapolation—of
Domesday Book;2 something similar is more self-consciously true of the great
historians of England who wrote in the half century after the Book’s production.

2 F.W. Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond. Three Essays in the Early History of England
(Cambridge 1897).
 Introduction 5

In parallel with this intense, concentrated historiographical phenomenon—

unparalleled in medieval Europe, and, in terms of analytical influence, through­
out subsequent English history—was a simultaneous attempt to unearth, preserve,
translate, and to a considerable extent to invent, Old English royal law, conven­
tionally termed, after the Conquest, the ‘law of King Edward’ (Chapter 3). This
William the Conqueror was said and shown, by and large, to have endorsed—
much like other aspects of the Edwardian status quo. It was a further mani­fest­
ation of continuity with Old England. The research project into pre-Conquest law
was much more focused in terms of subject than that into pre-Conquest history.
It was, however, less concentrated in terms of duration: it was still in train in the
thirteenth century. By contrast with the historiographical project, the names of
the scholars who engaged in it are unknown, or can only be guessed at. But it
reached back just as far into the Old English past, and it was animated by similar
imperatives. Sometimes its products appeared in the same manuscripts as the his­
tories; sometimes they were clumsily spliced into the very text of the histories;
often they were written up in law books which contained no accompanying his­
torical narrative. Precentors who were charged with record keeping and drafting
documents were likely to be sensitive to legal matters, and were also likely to
appreciate that they sometimes required awareness of an historical dimension.
But those who engaged in this highly specialized type of research and fabrication
are unlikely to have been precentors, because precentors’ professional responsi­
bilities did not involve the use of royal legislative texts (as distinct from royal
charters and writs). They may have needed to consult from time to time the gloss­
ar­ies of Old English technical terms which were compiled in the twelfth century,
partly on the basis of the codes. But that is a quite different matter from compil­
ing, translating or confecting codes, which in any case say almost nothing about
land law.
The resulting collections of genuine and apocryphal Old English codes, often
translated with varying levels of competence into Latin, together with various
codified versions of what purported to be the Conqueror’s legislation, are conven­
tionally judged to have been quite rapidly superseded by the results of a series of
new legal procedures invented in the later twelfth century. It is these new pro­ced­
ures which we now see as the origins of English common law. They are generally
considered to have represented a fresh start, and not in any sense to be dependent
on the antiquated and moribund legislative relics of Old England, or what in the
early twelfth century was considered to have been Old English law. One of the
claims advanced below is that many of the collections, most especially what pur­
ported to be the laws of King Edward which William I was said to have endorsed—
imaginatively reconstructed in a number of pseudo-codes, one of which is the
earliest extant law code in French—continued to be recognized as an important
foundation of current law, and therefore to exert influence throughout the rest of
the middle ages and later. These texts, still revered and consulted for current
6 Norman Conquest in English History: Vol. 1

purposes in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (as shown in Chapters 5, 6, and
7) could not but import interpretation of the Conquest into current jurispru­
dence, and therefore contemporary politics. Moreover, for other and very par­
ticular ­reasons, the Conquest remained a point of reference in certain types of
forensic proceedings. A case involving ancient demesne, a category invented in
the thirteenth century but deemed by definition to date from before the
Conquest—hence ‘ancient’—could only be settled by reference to Domesday
Book (Chapter 6).3 Exceptionally, the Book might also be consulted in other types
of case. Ancient charters were occasionally quoted and, more rarely, brandished
in court. Although the limit of legal memory came to be fixed at Richard I’s cor­
on­ation, that did not prevent the occasional invocation of documents dating from
much earlier.
By the second half of the twelfth century there were, then, two categories of
text written or at least compiled and translated in the first half of that century:
histories, and legal compilations. Both bore upon the long history of Old England
and the Conquest which had—or had not—terminated it. Counterintuitively, it
was the more narrowly focussed legal tradition which was to do more to preserve
the Conquest as an issue of debate or dispute during the later middle ages. The
extraordinary richness of English historical writing in the first half of the twelfth
century was not sustained in the second, even by the decreasing number of his­
tor­ians who continued to attempt to cover the full range of English history. From
the thirteenth century there was a growing tendency to concentrate on the recent
past, or on the history of a particular church, or on universal history in which
eleventh-century England could claim only a minor part. Very occasionally, some
arresting (and unsubstantiated) episode from 1066 or its immediate aftermath
was recounted (Chapters 4 and 5). But on the whole, and in so far as the Conquest
continued to be considered at all, existing accounts were simply cut and pasted,
and usually heavily condensed, from earlier treatments. The Conquest became a
convenient starting point for histories which aspired to cover more than the very
recent past, but that did not mean that much was said about it. It had become a
familiar punctuation mark in the course of English history. It did not need to be
revisited and probed, just briefly summarized.
By contrast, translated collections of Old English codes, and the post-Conquest
confections to varying extents based upon them, continued to be copied, espe­
cially in London, and not just in the city’s churches. That recent pieces of legisla­
tion were appended piecemeal to a London compilation of these materials, known
as the London Collection of the Leges Anglorum, strongly suggests that it was not
manufactured in order to satisfy an interest in legal antiquarianism amongst the
upper echelons of the city’s administration. Most of these officials were unlikely

3 Claimants also needed to prove that their current lord was exacting services additional to those
received by the Conqueror as lord of the manor.
 Introduction 7

to have been of scholarly bent. The earliest extant witness of the Collection, ­dating
from the start of John’s reign, was designed both to impress and to be of practical
use. That use was not confined to municipal matters, because the Collection
treated the city as the kingdom on a small scale, and the kingdom as the city on a
grand scale. The city was said to be the kingdom’s caput. The Collection was
addressed not only urbi, but also regno; it secured the attention of both these pro­
jected audiences, which overlapped to a considerable degree. It appears to have
played an important part in expressing and informing opposition thinking in the
years immediately prior to Magna Carta. What was now for the first time
un­equivo­cal­ly termed the Coronation Charter of Henry I, and the law of King
Edward which that document had repeatedly endorsed, were turned against
Henry I’s great-grandson and successor, to telling effect (Chapter 4). This adroit
piece of political manoeuvring was of such great interest to historians of John’s
reign that some of them began to see Henry I’s Charter being invoked every­
where, even on occasions when it demonstrably was not. King John himself
became so obsessed with it that in early 1215 he attempted to demand that every
free man in the kingdom swear an oath specifically against it when he was obliged
to renew his fealty to the king.
In the 1230s John’s son and successor Henry III eventually re-appropriated
Edward the Confessor for royalty. But he did so by sumptuous elaboration of the
saint’s cult established under Henry II, most spectacularly in the new abbey
church which he constructed at Westminster to replace Edward’s own building.
In it he would eventually be interred beside the splendid new shrine which he had
commissioned for the royal saint. In this devotional expression of continuity with
Old England, the focus was entirely on Edward as saint, not Edward as lawgiver
(Chapter 4). It was epitomized in the coronation ceremony, during which a new
king was invested with regalia now identified as those of the Confessor. The evo­
cation of St Edward rendered the current king’s image more numinous, but Henry
III tacitly acknowledged that Edward’s law was unlikely ever again to buttress the
assertion of royal power. That implicit concession had left open the possibility of
again deploying against other kings the texts devised for and attributed to Edward
in the twelfth century, just as they had been against John.
This is exactly what happened in the reign of Edward II, named like his father
after their canonized predecessor. In a sleight of genius, the laws of St Edward
were inserted into the coronation ceremony itself, in the form of a new promise
on the part of the king to respect them. The ceremonial proclamation of the king’s
affinity with his only canonized predecessor became also the means by which he
was made to bind himself to respect the saint’s laws. A century or so after its first
compilation, the London Collection enjoyed a renaissance which, to judge from
the number of surviving copies, was even more influential than it had been in its
first, Johannine incarnation (Chapter 7). Despite the title devised for it by mod­
ern historians, the London Collection was not confined to the city where it had
8 Norman Conquest in English History: Vol. 1

first been put together. Its wider pertinence was betokened by the parallel it drew
between city and kingdom. Its distinctive version of the Leges Edwardi Confessoris
not only proved peculiarly serviceable to Edward II’s opponents, it was drastically
edited and spliced into a history written in Lichfield probably just after the end of
Edward’s reign in order to provide the template of an account of the Conquest.
Similarly, texts from other twelfth-century compilations of pre- and immediately
post-Conquest royal legislation were in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
inserted into the idiosyncratic narratives of the Conqueror’s reign written in
monasteries in Leicestershire and Lincolnshire. The codes which were selected for
inclusion in these histories were principally those apocryphal ones which pur­
ported to record the Conqueror’s endorsement of Old English law. The focus was,
in other words, on the nature of the Conquest, on King William’s supposed deter­
mination that it should not alter much, legally speaking. As demonstrated in
Chapter 5, however, a very early twelfth-century collection of translated Old
English codes—Quadripartitus—was adapted, probably in Yorkshire, to provide
the framework for a substantial history of England, from the Conversion to the
aftermath of the Conquest. For this, laws of Edward the Confessor had to be freshly
concocted, because there was no code attributed to Edward in Quadripartitus.
Ancient royal law codes, translated from Old English into Latin or fabricated for
the Conqueror in the twelfth century, provided in these exceptional, provincial
late medieval histories the substance of analytical treatments of the Conquest
which in all other respects were in this period rudimentary and hackneyed.
Very occasionally, the codes also continued to be drawn upon in jurispruden­
tial literature. But in this period common law jurisprudence became increasingly
technical and specialized, and was from the late thirteenth century written for the
most part in the curious law French which lawyers would eventually come to
­consider one of the few lasting legacies of the Conquest. This meant that it tended
to be confined to a small, professional audience, and therefore to be of limited
influence. Sir John Fortescue, who in the second half of the fifteenth century
explicitly discussed the Conquest, albeit to endorse the conventional doctrine of
legal continuity, was in this respect very much an exception amongst later medieval
English jurists writing about English law. But his purpose was political: to ­contrast
royal rule in England and France, always to the detriment of the latter.
In these ways the Conquest limped along as a topic of interest, or at least of
reference, in later medieval England. In the late thirteenth century Earl Warenne
might have been unusually belligerent as a defendant when he brandished his
ancestral, rusty sword (rather than a royal charter) in the midst of court proceed­
ings (Chapter 6); but his irate defence of a title to land he claimed to derive from
the Conquest would have resonated with his peers. It was and remained a mark of
distinction to assert descent from one who had come over with the Conqueror,
and/or tenure of an ancestral estate from that time. Most churches could establish
title which was far more ancient. The primary position of Henry III’s 1225 reissue
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 Fig. 2 Fig. 4
Fig. 3 Fig. 5 Fig. 1

The Boy Who Makes a Star Kite of This Type will Have a Construction
Different from the Common Run of Kites, Especially If He Decorates It in an
Attractive Manner

The flags are tied on, and the tassels are easily made of cord. The
outside streamers are at least 6 ft. long, and balanced carefully.
Ribbons, or dark-colored lining cambric, are used for them. The
funnel-shaped ends balance the kite. They are shown in detail in
Figs. 2, 3, and 4, and have 1-in. openings at the bottom, through
which the air passes, causing a pull that steadies the kite. They are
of dark blue, and the cloth fringe is of light blue. A thin reed, or fine
wire, is used for the hoop which stiffens the top. Heavy wrapping or
cover paper is used to cover the hoops. It is cut as shown in Fig. 4
and rolled into shape.
A four-string bridle is fastened to the frame at I, J, K, and L, as
shown. The upper strings are each 18 in., and the lower ones 32 in.
long, to the point where they come together, and must be adjusted
after the kite line is fastened at M.
 Second Handle on Hoe or Rake Saves Stooping

Much of the Tiring Labor in Using a Hoe or Rake is Overcome by This

Simple Homemade Attachment

Anyone who has used a hoe or rake for days at a time will
appreciate the labor saved by the attachment for the handle shown
in the illustration. It is adjustable to various-sized persons by means
of the holes at the front end of the horizontal piece. The two parts
are each made of strips joined at the middle portions, and arranged
to clamp on the handle of the hoe or rake. In hoeing around shrubs
and large plants, the handle may be set to one side.—A. S. Thomas,
Amherstburg, Ont., Canada.
 Photo-Copying Lens Increases Angle of Camera
Trying to take some indoor pictures I found the angle of my
ordinary lens was insufficient to “get in” the various objects I desired.
Not having a wide angle lens, I decreased the focal length of the lens
by using a copying attachment. The results were quite pleasing and
while there is some distortion and less of the plate is covered than
usual, there is a remarkable increase in the angle of view. To obtain
definition, it is necessary to stop the lens down, but the pictures are
very clear.—Samuel L. Pickett, Denver, Colo.
 Belt for Sprocket Drive Made of Brass Strips

Being unable to purchase a small driving chain for sprockets made

by cutting out every other tooth in gears taken from a clockwork, I
used a brass strip, properly punched, and found it satisfactory. The
strip was .005 in. thick and the points where the holes were to be
punched out were indicated by dividers set from the gears. I made a
punch from a nail leaving a small center on it as shown and grinding
the end to an oblong shape. I used a piece of sheet lead as a die, on
which to punch the strips. The marks made by the dividers provided
spots on which to set the center of the punch, making the result quite
accurate.—Edward M. Davis, Philadelphia, Pa.
 Rain Alarm with Drop-of-Water Contact

A Drop of Rain Water Completes the Bell Circuit, Thus Giving Warning of the
Rain

An annunciating device, which awakens a person sleeping in a

room with the window open and warns him that it is raining, so that
he may close the window, is an interesting bit of electrical
construction. On the outside of the house, as detailed, is a funnel
fixed to the wall. At its small end, two separate wires have their
terminals. The wires enter the room at the frame of the window, and
connect to an electric bell, and a dry cell. A drop of water entering
the funnel, flows down to the small end, falling on the terminals of
the wires, and acting as a conductor, completes the circuit, ringing
the bell. A switch inside cuts out the circuit, stopping the bell’s
ringing.—John M. Chabot, Lauzon, Quebec, Can.
Coaster Steering Gear Made from Cream-Freezer
Drive

A Steering Rig That Works Almost Like That on an Automobile was Made Out
of the Driving Parts of an Old Ice-Cream Freezer

In rebuilding a wagon into an automobile coaster, I used the

driving rod and gears from an old ice-cream freezer, and found that it
worked so well that perhaps other boys might be interested in the
job. The front of the coaster was covered with a hood, and the
steering wheel was set back of it, as shown. The center rod of the
freezer was used for the steering post F, and an old rubber-tired
wheel was made into a steering wheel. The casting from the top of
the freezer, with the gears in it, and the rod on which the turning
crank was fastened were set on a block, H, and braced, as shown.
The shaft where the crank was fastened, at B, was set through the
wagon bed. A crosspiece of iron, A, was wired to the axle D with
wires C. A heavy block was used for a turntable. The top end of the
casting was fastened to the hood with a brace, G, and the block H
steadies the rigging also.—L. Chester Bryant, El Dorado, Ark.
 Pad for Glass Vessels Made of Corks
In the kitchen, shop, laboratory, and other places where glass or
other fragile dishes or vessels are used, a convenient pad on which
to rest them can be made by stringing corks on a strong cord or wire
in the form of a ring. Several rings of corks may be used to make a
mat, or rings slightly larger in diameter than the bottle or vessel may
be made for certain sizes of containers. If desired, the corks may be
cut to fit closely on the radial joints, making the resulting ring more
secure.
A Shaving Lamp and Mirror for the Camp
 To make shaving possible in camp at night, or with little daylight, a
small mirror was provided with an electric flash light. The mirror was
set to swing free, in a wooden support. The light was fastened
slightly above and behind the mirror. and swings at its base, so that it
can be tipped upward or downward, throwing the light
correspondingly. A piece of wood, 1¹⁄₄ by 3¹⁄₂ in., and as long as the
mirror frame is wide, serves as a base. The arms will hold the mirror
far enough in front of the lamp to allow room in which to swing. The
body of the lamp is set on a block, and held between two wooden
pieces, into which a band of iron was set near the top. The uprights
move in an arc, pivoting at their lower fastening, on screws.—C. L.
Meller, Fargo, N. D.
 Automatic Electric Light on Talking-Machine
Cabinet

In many homes the phonograph is placed where little light is

available in changing the records, setting the needle etc. An electric
light which is lighted only while the cover of the phonograph is
raised, is well worth installing. A metal arm, A, supports the open
cover of the cabinet. When the cover is closed, this arm passes
through a slot and takes the position shown by the dotted line. A strip
of spring brass, B, is fastened to the inside wall of the cabinet, in the
path of the arm, so that it will be pushed down to the off position, as
indicated. When the arm releases the strip B, the latter presses
against the contact C. A small electric lamp, D, is set in the corner,
and electrical connection made to it through B and C, the plug
connections passing through the back of the cabinet. When the
cover is down, the electric circuit is open, and the moment it is
raised, connection is made at C, and the lamp lights. The backs of
most phonograph cabinets may be removed easily to make these
changes.—M. C. Ball, Kansas City, Mo.
Device for Suspending Parcels from Overhead
Hooks
 To hang small sacks or other articles out of reach overhead, so
that they may be easily taken down, I use a double-eye hook which I
made of wire. A single piece of wire is used, and twisted into two
loops as shown, and then formed into a twisted hook. I use a pole
with a nail, hooking it into the lower loop, to raise the parcel; this
leaves the upper loop free to be hooked on the nail above.—E. B.
Warren, Garnet, Mont.
 Steel Wool as Aluminum-Ware Cleaner
It takes little trouble to keep aluminium pots and pans shining if
they are cleaned frequently with steel wool, water, and a nonalkaline
soap. Use a very fine grade of the wool, and give the utensils a few
rubs frequently rather than attempt to clean them only occasionally,
when much soiled.—L. P. Langan, Denver, Colo.
 How to Make a Model Old-Four
Monoplane
By RALPH M. BROWN

Theflights,
old-four monoplane model, made famous by its wonderful
is one of the most graceful that has been built. Its large
size and slow, even glide make it a much more desirable flier than
the ordinary dartlike model. It gives one a true insight into the
phenomena of heavier-than-air flight. This machine, when complete,
should weigh 9 oz. and fly 1,200 ft., rising from the ground under its
own power and landing lightly. Its construction is simple, and with
careful reference to the sketches, an exact reproduction may be
made.
For the motor bases, A, Fig. 1, secure two spruce sticks, each 48
in. long, ³⁄₈ in. wide, and ¹⁄₄ in. thick, and fasten a wire hook on one
end of each stick with thread wound around after giving it a coat of
glue. These hooks are to hold one end of the rubber bands that act
as the motive power, and are designated by the letter B. At the
opposite ends of the sticks, at C, bearings are provided, which
consist of blocks of wood, each 1 in. long, 1 in. wide, and ³⁄₈ in. thick.
These are also bound in place with thread after gluing them. Holes