Prompted by a post in a local-history group asserting that a Staffordshire village is not in Domesday Book. It is. The College, founded in 978 and therefore unimpressed by anything first written down in 1086, opened a file anyway and found two older claims underneath.
Of the village’s three claims the Department confirms the one nobody doubted, supports the one nobody can date, and declines the one a vicar invented, and records that the village has held all three for four hundred years with a consistency the College would like to learn. The Bursar adds that the village was worth five shillings in 1086 and has, in his opinion, been living on it since.
Domesday Book, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Camden, Plot, Whitaker, Redfern, the Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture, the scheduling entries, the county record and the village’s own memories are real and referenced. The Department, its Reader, the scorecard, the Convenience Index and the pegs behind the Red Lion are not. Nobody who posted in good faith is named, and the resident who supplied the battle-site tradition has asked not to be identified, on the grounds that everyone knows who he is.
