The late eleventh-century compilation known as Hemming's Cartulary and preserved in London, BL, Cotton MS Tiberius A. xiii, fols. 119–200 is a remarkably informative source on the nature, composition, preoccupations and aspirations of the Worcester cathedral monastic community in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest. As I have shown elsewhere, a reconstruction of the cartulary's likely original foliation allows us to detect a shift in focus from the lands that the church of Worcester had lost throughout the eleventh century, starting with the Danish attacks of Athelred Unrad's reign, to the estates that had been gained or recovered by the cathedral community thanks to its last two Anglo-Saxon bishops, Ealdred (1046–62) and Wulfstan II (1062–95). This shift is achieved in the last section of the cartulary, which covers fols. 178–93, through skilful weaving of narrative passages with charter texts, that is, through the production of a short chronique-cartulaire. In Neil Ker's magisterial study of the manuscript, this last section is called ‘Section L’ and its only scribe, whose hand Ker describes as ‘handsome’, is named ‘Hand 3’. This chapter will deal with the contents of Section L in order to present a particularly significant, though possibly not very well-known, example of the ways in which the Worcester cathedral community ‘constructed history’ at the end of the eleventh century.

Although the production of the cartulary, and of Section L more specifically, cannot be dated with precision, the preoccupations emerging from the closing folios point towards the period following immediately after the death of Bishop Wulfstan in January 1095, a time of profound uncertainty, especially in light of the fact that the see remained vacant until June 1096 (i.e. for about 18 months), when the Norman Samson became bishop of Worcester. As will emerge further below, the monks’ worries were not ill-founded, and the new bishop provided a striking contrast to Wulfstan's saintly fame. This is attested in several sources, including William of Malmesbury's Gesta Pontificum Anglorum, which, in the section dealing with Wulfstan's death, refers to the Worcester monks’ sorrow and ‘fear of the tyranny of the next bishop’.