In The Llandaff Charters Wendy Davies proceeds directly from establishing the relative chronology of the witness lists to a discussion of the vexed question of the absolute chronology of the charters, only one of which bears an A.D. date (charter 218: A.D. 955). Some readers may be unprepared to make this leap until it is demonstrated that the witness lists originally belonged to the transactions to which they are attached in LL, since it is often the persons named in the transaction that enable us to suggest an absolute date for the list. It is easy to imagine how an originally independent witness list might wrongly be attached to a statement to the effect that ‘X gave Y to Z’, in which case one could not use any chronological indication of the date of X or Z to settle the date of the witness list and, hence, of other related lists. It could be countered that in LL the names of X and Z often reappear at the head of the lay and clerical witness lists, were it not that the inclusion of the names of X and Z in the witness lists is inconsistent. For instance, Greciel episcopus (the recipient) heads the clerical list in 171b and Mouricus rex (who consents to the grant) heads the lay list, but both names are absent from the lists in the doublet 74. Again Berthguinus episcopus (the recipient) heads the list of 186b but is absent from the list in its doublet 175. More seriously, in 158 the Disposition gives the recipients merely as ‘Deo & sanctis Dubricio et Teliauo & Oudoceo et omnibus suis successoribus ecclesiæ Landauiæ’ but the witness list is headed by Episcopus Oudoceus, almost certainly an interpolation, since the otherwise convincing list resembles those attributed elsewhere to Bishop Berthwyn. Because the occurrence of the name of X or Z in the witness list cannot be taken as proof that a Disposition and a witness list were originally connected, it will be worth assembling some evidence to show that generally the two's relationship was not fluid.

In a collection of 159 charters it is almost inevitable that some will have appropriated witness lists, and indeed we have already seen that the list of charter 77 is under that suspicion.