ASSERTING the importance of the Lindsey Survey, Mr. Chester Waters observed that “this is the sole record of its kind which deals with the interval between the completion of Domesday in 1086, and the compilation of the Pipe-Roll of 1129–1130, and that no similar return of the landowners of any other county is known to exist” (p. 2). And, indeed, it would seem that the survey to which I now address myself has hitherto remained unknown. It is found in the form of a late transcript on an unidentified roll in the Public Record Office.

Comprising the whole of Gosecote Wapentake, and in part those of Framland and Gar tree, it retains for these divisions the Domesday name of Wapentake–they are now “Hundreds”–while subdividing them into small “Hundreds,” of which the existence seems to have been hitherto unsuspected. Proceeding, like the I.C.C., “Hundred” by “Hundred,” and Vill by Vill, it enables us, like that document, to reconstitute the aggregate assessments, and thus affords priceless evidence on “the six-carucate unit.” But apart from this, it is invested with no small importance from that “great want of documentary evidence” for the reign of Henry I. which Mr. Hunter rightly lamented in his elaborate introduction to the first great roll of the Pipe (p. ii.).