REVIEWS: Domesday, Monachorum of Christ Church, Canterbury - Archaeologia Cantiana

Domesday, Monachorum of Christ Church, Canterbury. Edited by David C. Douglas, M.A., and published at the offices of the Royal Historical Society, 96 Cheyne Walk, S.W. 10.
THIS very large folio is an important addition to the literature of Kent. It contains the Domesday Manachorum in facsimile together with a very careful transcription and copious although by no means exhaustive notes. There are no translations and practically no subject index, but the index of names is very full and useful. The chief interest of the Editor seems to have been in the lists of knights, to which he gives a great number of pages, nearly thirty out of a total of 73 devoted to commentary. Another ten are devoted to the genesis of Domesday, and even into these the persons of the knights are apt to intrude. We could wish that more time and space had been devoted to a detailed study of the manuscript itself and to the commentary on the church lists which seems to us somewhat too perfunctory. The attempt to show that Charing, Teynham, Wingham, Milton Regis, Lympne, etc., were		Minister churches, which sent out clerks to minister to the inhabitants of the large areas over which they presided, by citing the fact that these places chance to be mentioned, in quite other connections, in certain Saxon Charters, seems to us ill advised. Nor can we agree that the parishes as we know them to-day were of later origin than the Domesday Monachorum itself, in which the majority of the parish churches of Canterbury diocese are listed and named. These are small defects, if they are defects at all, compared with the great service which the Editor has done to scholarship in making available to all students this ancient manuscript, and he is to be most heartily congratulated upon the results of his labours. The binding and production, and the paper used, would be regarded as adequate in peacetime and are really handsome for a book produced in 1944. G.W.
The Register of Daniel Rough, Common Clerk of Romney, 1353-1380, transcribed and edited with introduction by K. M. Elisabeth Murray. Kent Records, 1945. The Custumal of New Romney, English version, John Forsett, 1564, transcribed and edited by F. W. Jessup. Kent Records, 1945.
IT was a happy chance which led to the survival of the fourteenth century register of Daniel Rough, for it		disappeared from Romney in the middle of the sixteenth century, and did not find a secure home