University of Virginia Library

The Piltdown Man and the Norman Conquest: Working Volumes and Printer's Copy for Charles Dawson's The History of Hastings Castle
by
Peter Miles

Charles Dawson (1864-1916) played a central but essentially still unresolved role in one of the greatest controversies in the history of science. The Piltdown Man hoax centered on the 'discovery' of what were many years afterwards recognized as a five-hundred-year-old human skull and the doctored jawbone of an orang-utang. Yet before they were discredited, these artifacts found international acceptance as the fossil record of a transitional creature between ape and man, and as a validation of Darwin's account of human evolution. For the period of the hoax's public success, from 1912 to the mid-1950s, science knew this missing link as Eoanthropus dawsoni—Charles Dawson's Dawn Man. The Piltdown hoax continues to be documented and analyzed, Dawson himself being variously construed as the principal hoaxer and as main victim of the hoax.[1]

For the learned community of the day, Dawson's credibility in the Piltdown affair was supported by a reputation that extended beyond palaeontology into archaeology, antiquarianism and local history. Indeed, his most substantial publication in any of these fields was his two-volume study The History of Hastings Castle (London: Constable, 1909 [1910]). The preface of Hastings Castle is signed as from Uckfield, the Sussex town (some four or five miles from Piltdown) where Dawson practised as a solicitor in the years after 1890. More than twenty years ago a small cache of books was retrieved from builders' waste during renovation of an Uckfield store-room with a remote association with Dawson.[2] In 1953, at the time of the British Museum's reassessment of the Piltdown material, it had been understood that there were 'no papers of C[harles] D[awson]'s at Uckfield, and that the lofts [of his office premises there] had all been cleared out during the war for salvage'. The latest study of the Piltdown story has reconfirmed this view (Piltdown Papers, p. 217). The purpose of this article is to modify that understanding (i.e. that Dawson materials did not survive in the Uckfield area); to present, indeed, the evidence for this particular cache having once formed part of Dawson's library; more specifically, to suggest that the books constituted working volumes in Dawson's preparation of Hastings Castle, and in one case provisional printer's copy for part of that study.[3]

The evidence of the cache also has some implications for the larger Piltdown debate in terms of the detail that it adds to knowledge of estimates of Dawson's scholarship.[4] In this context, those proposing Dawson as the Piltdown hoaxer have at times called into question the scholarly integrity of Hastings Castle. Referring to the British Museum investigations in the 1950s led by J.S. Weiner, Frank Spencer summarizes this aspect of the debate:

Like his colleague Langham, Spencer concludes that the charge of 'plagiarism' against Dawson on this particular head was 'quite inaccurate' (Piltdown . . . Forgery, p. 231, n. 70). However, the evidence of the Uckfield cache in fact highlights at least one minor instance of effective plagiarism elsewhere in Hastings Castle. Moreover, at the same time as it provides a snapshot of some fairly meticulous work on Dawson's part, it also raises questions concerning the depth of his scholarship.

The title page of Hastings Castle bears the date 1909. Spencer has pointed out that the English Catalogue of Books lists the study as in fact published in July 1910, and also cites a letter dated 10 July 1910 from Dawson to his principal associate in the Piltdown affair, Smith Woodward, mentioning that 'I have been very busy lately attending to the last details of my book on Hastings Castle etc (2 vols) which is published tomorrow (Monday). I am glad to get it off my hands'. Spencer also observes that 'the reason for the delay in publication is not known' (Piltdown Papers, p. 10). The evidence of the Uckfield cache additionally suggests where some of the problems in producing a final text, and perhaps some of the consequent delays in publishing the study, may have lain.

There was nothing incongruous about Dawson seeing Hastings Castle through the press well into the period when he was supposedly also pondering the first 'finds' at Piltdown (allegedly dating from 1908). The cultural environment that fostered the search for (and eventually the fabrication of) a native British prehistoric skull to rival the discoveries of continental, and especially German scholarship, equally fostered an attention to the Battle of Hastings as one of the 'Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World' (vol. I, p. v) and as a key moment in the ineluctable making of Britain as great power. (Dawson's colleague Smith Woodward was to entitle his account of the Piltdown discoveries The First Englishman; in discussing the ancient coinage of Hastings, Dawson found space to highlight the 'humiliation to modern ideas' involved in the best specimens of the Hastings mint then being preserved in Copenhagen, a legacy from the payment of Danegelt [vol. I, p. ix].) One must assume that Dawson was glad to get Hastings Castle 'off his hands' only because of the difficulties and delays in its production rather than because of its relative lack of importance to him. On the contrary ('2 vols', he stresses to Smith Woodward), it was the culmination of Dawson's multifarious studies to that date.

The Uckfield cache consists of ten nineteenth-century texts in the publishers' bindings, which by the time of their salvage were somewhat battered and damp-stained. Viewed against the background of Dawson's work on Hastings Castle, they can be divided into three hypothetical categories: (a) primary sources; (b) secondary sources; (c) others.

• (a) Primary Sources

• The Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History of England. Also the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. by J. A. Giles, Bohn's Antiquarian Library, 5th edn (London: Bell, 1884).

  The Annals of Roger de Hoveden. Comprising the History of England and of Other Countries of Europe from A.D. 732 to A.D. 1201, trans. by Henry T. Riley, Bohn's Antiquarian Library, 2 vols (London: Bohn, 1853); I, A.D. 732 to A.D. 1180; II, A.D. 1181 to A.D. 1201.

  The Chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon, Comprising the History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Accession of Henry II. Also the Acts of Stephen . . ., ed. and trans. by Thomas Forester, Bohn's Antiquarian Library (London: Bohn, 1853).

  Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages, ed. and trans. by Ernest F. Henderson, Bohn's Antiquarian Library (London: Bell, 1892).

  Ordericus Vitalis, The ecclesiastical History of england and Normandy, trans. by Thomas Forester, Bohn's Antiquarian Library, 4 vols (London: Bohn, 1853): I.

• (b) Secondary Sources

• Augustin Thierry, History of the Conquest of England by the Normans; Its Causes and Consequences, in england, Scotland, Ireland and on the Continent, trans. by William Hazlitt, Bogue's European Library, 2 vols (London: Bogue, 1847): I, II.

  George Townsend, Russell's History of Modern Europe Epitomised. Being A Complete Text-Book of Modern History . . ., eighth thousand (London: Routledge, 1858).

• (c) Others

• The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, trans. by C. D. Yonge, Bell's Classical Library, 4 vols (London: Bell, 1884): III, Orations for his House, Plancius, Sextus, Coelius, Milo, Ligarius, &c. &c.

(This classification of the copies is only modified below to suggest that vol. I of Thierry's History of the Conquest is better regarded as having functioned as a primary, rather than as a secondary, source.)

The section of Hastings Castle to which most of the cache relates is the distinctive set of twenty-seven separate 'sheets' bound in between pp. 568/569 of the second volume. Each sheet consists of a pair of standard-sized leaves printed on one side only and mounted after the fashion of atlas bifolios in order to allow text to be scanned across a flat-lying verso and recto. Mark Antony Lower, a Sussex antiquarian of a generation preceding Dawson's, commented of the Battle of Hastings that 'it is only by collation of many descriptions . . . that a writer can hope to convey a moderately accurate idea of such a scene'. Dawson effectively followed Lower's hint by using these sheets to allow readers to compare the standard sources' accounts of the battle. The various narratives were edited to produce a parallel-text format involving five printed columns per sheet. The twenty-seven sheets fall into twelve numbered sections, each devoted to a phase of the preparations for battle, the battle itself, and its aftermath. Two sections are made up of only one sheet each (5; 10); six have two sheets (1; 2; 4; 7; 11; 12); three have three sheets (3; 6; 8), and one has four (9). The presence of the third or middle column on each sheet necessitates the special form of mountings, though the

factor ultimately determining this presentation may rather have been the decision to include across the head of the first sheet of each section the relevant portion of the Bayeux Tapestry as a visual parallel to the accounts printed beneath.

Of the copies in the Uckfield cache, none bear any explicit inscription or annotation identifying their owner as Charles Dawson. Indeed, vol. II of Thierry's History of the Conquest and the singleton volume of Cicero's Orations bear no annotation at all. Russell's History carries on its title page, as the only annotation of the copy, the pencil signature 'G. E. Hart Junr'. As a solicitor in Uckfield, Dawson was senior partner in the firm of Dawson and Hart.[5] While this connects the book to Dawson's partner, no closer link with Dawson himself can be established on the strength of the evidence of this volume alone. Indeed, the claim for the provenance of these three volumes largely rests simply on their collocation with volumes which are much more demonstrably Dawson's. At the same time, they are obviously the three texts with the least bearing, in terms of their content, on the concerns of Hastings Castle: their lack of annotation may then be construed as consistent with a view of the cache as having had a specific function in the preparation of that study. Nevertheless, the case of Russell's History (and even of Cicero's Orations) could certainly involve nothing more than one or two of Hart's books getting mixed up with some of Dawson's. However, the circumstantial evidence for Dawsonian provenance is rather stronger in the case of vol. II of Thierry's History of the Conquest in the light of the annotation of the associated vol. I discussed below. The evidence is also a little stronger still in the case of the barely annotated copy of Bede's Ecclesiastical History [and] The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, partly in the light of the evidence of the annotation of Henderson's Documents discussed below, but also because the three extracts from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that Dawson used in his battle sheets do follow the wording of the translation in Giles's edition. Moreover, while many of the pages of the copy in the Uckfield cache remain uncut, the uncut pages do not include those dealing with the years 1065-1070. That section of the copy also includes a marginal mark and an underlining in pencil which isolate, with a significance which becomes more apparent and consistent in the light of the annotation of the other copies, the heart of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's extremely minimal treatment of the Battle of Hastings itself: '[and Harold came from the north,] and fought against him before all his army had come up' (p. 443).

Vol. I of the Annals of Roger de Hoveden displays the kind of annotation associated with informal research: a great number of pencilled marks in the margins, a little underlining and the odd word of comment. These annotations are consistent with a particular interest in Hastings on the part of the

annotator: any mention of Hastings or of the Eu family, for example, tends to be marked, though these factors do not by themselves provide strong evidence of provenance. Vol. II of the Annals is very similar in the characteristics of its annotation and in the paucity of their implication.[6] At the same time, the evidence of the copy of Henderson's Documents (see below) has a bearing on the provenance of both volumes of the Annals of Roger de Hoveden. In short, while these six volumes reveal no evidence wholly contradicting the idea of Dawson's ownership of them, the evidence that they do present is merely consistent with the idea rather than actively forwarding the case. The strongest evidence for Dawson having owned all or the vast majority of the volumes in the cache, and for their having constituted material stages in the writing and printing of Hastings Castle, lies in just four of them: Henderson's Documents; the Chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon; vol. I of Thierry's History of the Conquest, and the Ecclesiastical History of England and Normandy of Ordericus Vitalis.

The copy of Henderson's Documents has the publisher's 24-page 'Catalogue of Bohn's Libraries' bound in at the rear. The catalogue is annotated in pencil where it deals with 'Bohn's Antiquarian Library' (pp. 10-11). One title is marked with a cross (Matthew of Westminster's Flowers of History, Especially Such as Relate to the Affairs of Britain, from the Beginning of the World to A.D. 1307). Another title is marked with a deleted cross (Matthew Paris's English History, from 1235 to 1273). Fifteen other titles are ticked:

The ticked titles include all the Bohn's Antiquarian Library volumes in the cache (which are also all the volumes above proposed as 'primary sources' for Hastings Castle). There is one apparent exception, which is the volume in which the annotated catalogue itself appears. The reason for its omission

is that as the title does not itself appear in the catalogue, it could not be ticked: although Henderson's Documents was published in 1892, the same year as the catalogue (March 1892), the catalogue appears simply not to have been completely updated. Meanwhile, what this particular act of annotation suggests is that the collocation of the copies in the cache is on the whole by no means fortuitous, and that the majority of them cohere as a fragment of a discrete historical collection of antiquarian texts. Moreover, even when reconstructed only in respect of its holdings of Bohn's Antiquarian Library editions, that collection was certainly somewhat larger than the extant group of copies. It is at least a reasonable speculation that the ticked titles represent holdings in that historical collection while the crossed title represents a deficiency in the collection which the annotator felt needed remedying. The deleted cross is possibly explained by the fact that the text of Matthew Paris's English History is, lower down the catalogue page, reattributed to Roger of Wendover and presented by the publishers in another edition. This title the annotator ticks, presumably then returning to delete the cross by the edition which attributes the work to Matthew Paris. Indeed, the presence of crosses as well as ticks suggests that these annotations are more than a post facto taking stock of books in the collection: rather they have the appearance of reflecting the musings of a scholar checking off what he possesses, what he does not possess, and what he really ought to get hold of. If one were wholly confident that these annotations were Dawson's, they would clearly help confirm that the books in the cache were his own copies, as well as indicating something of the wider contents of his library in 1892 or later. The evidence from this particular volume for moving to those conclusions is very slight, but it continues to point in that direction. For example, in the Documents (p. 12) the names of John, Count of Eu, and of William of Hastings are selected for underlining out of a long list of the names of nobles who witnessed the Constitutions of Clarendon. Bearing in mind that six members of the Eu family (including John) successively held Hastings Castle following the original grant by William the Conqueror (and that they figure prominently in Dawson's study), this particular annotation does not, at the very least, conflict with the proposition that the annotator here was the author of Hastings Castle. Moreover, a number of the titles which the annotator ticked but which do not happen to be represented in the cache are nevertheless texts which Dawson did use, and quote from, in Hastings Castle: the chronicle of Florence of Worcester and that of William of Malmesbury are cases in point. In other words, the profile of the larger collection of antiquarian texts indicated by the ticks is indeed what one might anticipate as appropriate titles for a scholar working in the area covered by Hastings Castle.

The annotations to the Chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon relate far more closely to the text of Hastings Castle. Among these, the opening of the chronicler's paragraph-long entry for A.D. 490 is marked with two horizontal lines in pencil and the word 'Begin', while the paragraph closes with similar

marks and the word 'End' (p. 45). The marked lines are quoted to precisely these boundaries in Hastings Castle (vol. I, p. 12, note 2). However, they are also quoted a little too fully. Forester's edition of the Chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon has a footnote to the sixth line of the quoted passage; curiously, Dawson's footnote reproduces not only the passage but also Forester's related footnote of approximately fifty words. It does so quite without acknowledgement, interpolating Forester's words by breaking the quotation of the text at the point where the original note was keyed in. Effectively this is plagiarism. However, there is something to be said in mitigation or explanation. Forester's note refers to 'the great wood mentioned in a preceding note' (i.e. a preceding note of Forester's to the Chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon), but by chance Dawson also had an immediately preceding note to the text of Hastings Castle mentioning the same wood (vol. I, p. 11), and so the borrowing would certainly have sat far less conspicuously in the proofs than it might have done—and this perhaps explains how Dawson himself came to overlook it. As far as 'Begin' and 'End' are concerned, these terms must be assumed to be Dawson's notes, possibly to himself, just possibly to a compositor, but most probably to a secretary, to transcribe (or set up in type) the passage for use in Hastings Castle. There is one substantive variant in Forester's reproduced note: Forester's awkward expression 'the subsequent details of Henry of Huntingdon' is improved to 'the subsequent description given by Henry of Huntingdon'. While an authorial hand is apparent in this stylistic emendation, the inclusion of Forester's note at all tends to suggest a scribe's mechanical and over-dutiful transcription which Dawson failed to register as a blunder. Any other interpretation provides a crumb for the detractors of Dawson as 'underhand scoundrel' (Piltdown . . . Forgery, p. 10).

Elsewhere, a long section of the text of the Chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon is marked with a pencilled line in the margin, running from near the foot of p. 209 to near the foot of p. 212; again the words 'Begin' and 'End' appear in the margins. This marked section includes Henry of Huntingdon's entire account of the Battle of Hastings. It also duly represents the exact span of Henry of Huntingdon's account quoted by Dawson in his battle sheets, broken into units appearing on sheets 3A, 5, 6, 7A, 8B, 9B and 11A. Elsewhere in the volume, a pencilled marginal annotation reading 'trans?' by a reference to William II's 'infamous debauchery' (p. 240) suggests (as do a number of less articulate squiggles) that the annotator was not at all happy with the general quality of Forester's translation. It is indeed the case that the version of the Battle of Hastings from the Chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon that appears in Dawson's battle sheets is considerably emended stylistically. Further, within this marked section, a pencilled marginal note (p. 212) relates to Forester's use of the phrase 'making a rampart' (which the annotator underlines): the marginal note reads, in modification of the printed expression, 'quasi a sort of castle'. The relevant passage in the printed battle sheets departs from Forester to read 'making a castle as it were of them'.

Read as a sequence ('making a rampart' [Forester] / 'quasi a sort of castle' [annotation] / 'making a castle as it were of them' [Hastings Castle]) these phrases enact the development of Dawson's phraseology out of Forester's, the annotation constituting a transitional stage in the evolution of the text as printed in Hastings Castle. The annotation also gives some substance to one of Dawson's prefactory statements:

As a general point, then, Dawson can certainly be shown to have put work into modifying and improving some of the translations that he presented in the battle sheets; others, however, he let stand as they were, and perhaps simply because he was quite satisfied with them. What, however, may well be regretted is that his references to the early authorities do not deal in references to editions (and so not in page or line numbers), nor, beyond the general declaration in his preface, does he specify which accounts are taken verbatim from existing editions or which have undergone modification (and how). Here, however, one is left in a double-bind, responding with one set of expectations to the impression of considerable scholarship that Dawson conveys, yet also aware of his stated concern to provide for an 'average reader', leaving one unsure where to excuse and where to condemn. Is the absence of a bibliography a scholarly failing? Does Dawson's justification of his limited index (prepared in any case by another hand) hold water? Certainly his formal notes on the authorities represented in the battle sheets gave him an appropriate place to note information about editions and the modification of particular translations (vol. II, pp. 567-568), and even the introductions to Bohn's editions (such as Giles's) could have reminded him of the decorum; instead, he arguably chose to create a slightly misleading impression of the depth of his scholarship by rather noting in each case the language and date of 'the oldest-known manuscript now extant'. In this context it is also hard to overlook the fact that, at the time Dawson was working, Bohn editions of the classics (at least) did have a standing reputation as the English schoolboy's crib for translation exercises. In The Hill, Horace Vachell's 1905 novel about Harrow School, an older boy warns younger ones that 'You kids ought not to use "Bohns". Besides, its dangerous.' The context of the use of Bohn editions in The Hill (boys cheating in their schoolwork and thereby risking punishment) is of course a very different one, and one involving different materials, to the case of the composition of Hastings Castle. Nevertheless, with such connotations, Dawson's silence about his use of Bohn editions as working sources might well be interpreted as a sin of omission.

As far as the Chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon is concerned, there can be little doubt that the pencilled notes are Dawson's own. As for the instructions 'Begin' and 'End' in this case, such are the differences between Forester's

translation and the version that Dawson presented in the battle sheets that there is no room to propose that the annotations constitute Dawson's instructions to a compositor. Instead, the likelihood is again that these are Dawson's instructions to a secretary (though with a reminder to himself about the work to be done on improving the translation), perhaps in the context of arranging a transcription of this section of the Chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon more conveniently laid out for the subsequent work of stylistic emendation than the closely set pages of the Bohn's Antiquarian Library edition.

The interest of vol. I of Thierry's History of the Conquest lies in the annotation of Appendix VII, which is devoted to presenting, in Norman French, 'Poetical Narrative of the Battle of Hastings'. Here the word 'Begin' appears as a pencilled annotation at the head of a passage from the narrative of Geoffroi Gaimar; the instruction 'End' appears at the conclusion of a longer passage from the narrative of Benoit de Sainte-Maure which immediately follows on in the appendix. In the battle sheets in Hastings Castle an English translation of Geoffroi Gaimar's narrative appears on sheets 2A, 4, 8B and 11A, and of Benoit de Saint-Maure's on sheets 1A, 2A, 3, 3A, 4, 5, 6, 6B, 7A, 8B, 9B, 11A, 12, 12A.

In the case of Geoffroi Gaimar, the translation running through the battle sheets duly begins with the first and ends with the last line of the marked passage in the appendix to Thierry. Just one block of six lines between the first and second extracts appears not to have been used.

The case of the Benoit de Sainte-Maure narrative is rather different. The extracts translated in the early battle sheets (1A, 2A, 3, 3A) fall outside the lines quoted in the Thierry appendix. Nevertheless, the translated extract on Sheet 4 ends with the opening three lines of the appendix passage. The subsequent extracts then translate nearly the entirety of the long passage quoted in the appendix, though with some reordering of the material (and in which process just one or two lines appear to have been omitted). On sheet 12A the final translated extract from Benoit de Sainte-Maure also extends, by a few paragraphs, beyond the lines quoted in the appendix. In this context, however, there is an interesting pencil annotation at the conclusion of the Benoit de Sainte-Maure passage in the appendix which reads: '[The Duke placed a guard in Hastings from the best of his knights, so as to garrison the castle well & went thence to Romend (Romney)] (Beniot de Sainte-Mre)'. This may indicate that the annotator already found the appendix extract too short for his purposes, and that he was noting further lines to be presented—or indeed indicating the further boundary of the required supplement. The translation of the narrative of Benoit de Sainte-Maure does indeed end on sheet 12A with a short paragraph beginning: 'At Hastings he put guards. With his best knights he garrisoned the Castle; thence he went to Romney.' One further annotation, though cryptic, is also of interest. A unit of two or three lines in the appendix is marked with green crayon, and this unit turns out to be one of the three units of the passage which in translation are presented

out of their original order. In respect of vol. I of Thierry's History of the Conquest, then, Dawson's hand as annotator again seems evident. 'Begin' and 'End' once more appear to be instructions to a secretary to transcribe the Norman French narratives in order to provide a working copy of some kind en route to establishing an edited translation, a task which clearly must have required Dawson to supplement Thierry's appendix with a fuller version of Benoit de Sainte-Maure's narrative. Although matters were here at an early stage of development, the annotations also suggest that Dawson was already thinking ahead to the shape and extent of that translation as it would appear in the battle sheets.

The copy of vol. I of the Ecclesiastical History of England and Normandy by Ordericus Vitalis is the most striking of the working volumes and shows a number of different layers of annotation. There is one discrete phase of pencilled marks running through pp. 454-465, in manner resembling the annotation of the Annals of Roger de Hoveden (though with the incidental interest that they specifically relate to pages dealing with the years 1061-1066). Pages 480-488, however, specifically dealing with the Battle of Hastings, are annotated in pencil, in green crayon and in black ink. In addition, interleaving in the form of a number of annotations on slips glued between leaves occurs between pp. 480/481 (two separate slips annotated in ink on the verso), and between pp. 482/483 and 484/485 (where in each case there is one larger slip with annotations in ink on both recto and verso). Together, these features make this section of the Ecclesiastical History of England and Normandy the most formally and intensively annotated section of any of the working volumes.

While much of the present discussion has necessarily dealt with the implications of non-verbal annotation, this portion of the Ecclesiastical History of England and Normandy displays words, phrases and sentences as annotations, and so provides an opportunity to consider the identity of the handwriting concerned. In brief, as far as all annotation in pencil and green crayon is concerned, here and through the rest of the volumes (with the exception of Hart's signature in Russell's History), comparison with Charles Dawson's handwriting in correspondence as held by the Natural History Museum provides a high degree of corroboration that such annotations are in Dawson's hand.[7] However, the annotations in black ink in this volume present distinctive characteristics, to which I shall return.

Of the more striking annotations here, the familiar instruction 'Begin' occurs in the margin of p. 480, this time between two lines, and on this occasion in green crayon. On p. 481 there are more horizontal lines in the margin, together with the note 'Sheet 3', again in green. On p. 482 there is an annotation in the form of pencilled lines but also more green crayon in the form of vertical and horizontal lines, and again the instruction 'Sheet 3'. Green

crayon lines and a cross also occur on p. 483, while on p. 487 there is the instruction 'end' in green crayon, subsequently struck out in pencil with the instruction 'see next page' where a further short section is lined and marked 'Begin' and 'End' in pencil (p. 488). Phrases written on the interleaved slips are lucidly keyed into the text on the facing page by means of numbers and lower-case letters. All the inked annotations in the text, as well as in the margins and in the interleaving, deal in emendations to the substance and expression of the text of the Ecclesiastical History of England and Normandy as printed.

In the event, however, Hastings Castle only made use of two short extracts from Ordericus Vitalis in battle sheets 2A and 4. Nevertheless, the extract on sheet 2A significantly incorporates the emended reading found on the first annotated slip in the working volume: 'Landed safely on the coast of England, took possession of Pevensey and Hastings' (p. 481) is emended on the slip and in the battle sheet to 'rejoicing, seized the shore of the Sea, then occupied Pevensey and Hastings'. Moreover, the two lines in green crayon define the start and finish of this extract. Similarly, the extract on battle sheet 4 is marked out on pp. 482-483 of the Ecclesiastical History of England and Normandy by means of the green lines and cross. However, it is puzzling why only two short paragraphs were eventually used, when approximately seven pages of the text had been so carefully emended, the whole involving some thirty separate substantive emendations. This is the more surprising when one follows through the layers of annotation, and surmises their function. The first layer appears to consist of pencillings that have the same characteristics as those of pp. 454-465 and which again suggest an informal process of reading and highlighting. Possibly belonging to the same phase, but more probably constituting a more formal second layer, is the pencil annotation on p. 488 involving the instructions 'Begin' and 'End'. This seems strictly analogous with the annotations to vol. I of Thierry's History of the Conquest and the Chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon, and on that basis implies instructions to a secretary regarding transcription of the passage. In this case, however, Dawson may have changed his mind about developing his version of the account of Ordericus Vitalis from a transcription, and instead gone ahead with an attempt to emend the translation in situ. (The translation was again by his bugbear Forester.) The distinctive and elaborate nature of this process, involving interleaving, the use of black ink, conscientious keying-in and carefully formed written characters, suggests that here Dawson was directly preparing copy for the printer. These processes constituted the third level of annotation. A fourth level is then apparent in the green crayon instructions 'Begin', 'end' and 'Sheet 3'. Sheet 3 in Hastings Castle covers 'Messages between the Duke of Normandy and Harold King of England' and also 'Incidents of King Harold's Preparations and Councils': the passages here marked 'Sheet 3' do indeed fall into those categories. Clearly the planning of the sheets was fairly well advanced at the stage these annotations were made (though possibly not so well advanced

or indeed so manageable that Dawson could assign the remainder of the pages to their appropriate battle sheets). Here, the green crayon 'Begin' and 'end' look like further instructions to the printer rather than to a secretary. A fifth layer of annotation is apparent when the word 'end' is deleted and attention drawn to one more paragraph over the page, which, though previously marked, Dawson had presumably overlooked, the deletion and instruction representing an emendation of his first instruction to the printer. At this point, then, one appears to be looking at the fullest extent of the extract which Dawson at one point proposed to include from the Ecclesiastical History of England and Normandy. Eventually, however, the extract was decimated (and hence the sixth layer of annotation, the green-crayon definition of the two extracts that were ultimately printed in battle sheets 2A and 4). Such is the difference in length between the proposed extract and what was actually included, that one can only infer that Dawson came up against severe problems of space in the battle sheets and that this required considerable rethinking of them at a late stage. In such technical problems in handling the battle sheets lies the most reasonable explanation for the delay in the book's publication and for Dawson's relief, in July 1910, at getting the whole project 'off his hands'.

There remains a problem, however, concerning the handwriting of the annotations in black ink in the margins and the interleaving of The Ecclesiastical History of England and Normandy. These are in a carefully formed print-hand, and the character formation differs markedly from Dawson's usual script-hand. However, towards the end of the interleaving, the print-hand begins to deviate into script. This may suggest that the print-hand was a rather stilted medium, temporarily adopted for purposes of clarity, and indeed as the script re-emerges there are some indications that it may well be Dawson's hand which is again in evidence. However, confident attribution of the distinctive print-hand to Dawson must remain in abeyance. If it is not his hand, it may be that Dawson did after all improve the translation via a transcription and that a secretary entered up these rather finicky emendations for the printer. There is an alternative possibility that Dawson delegated the improvement of the translation to another scholar, and that it is that scholar's hand that appears here. However, Dawson had been more than happy to emend Forester's translation of the Chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon himself, and if the print-hand is not Dawson's, then there seems no strong reason to look beyond the explanation of an intervenient secretary.

The degree of correlation between the annotation and the printed battle sheets means that there can be no doubt that this copy of the Ecclesiastical History of England and Normandy was one of Charles Dawson's working volumes in his preparation of Hastings Castle. There is also a strong likelihood that it represents what was at one stage intended as the printer's copy, emended in meticulous detail to that end by Dawson—possibly assisted by a secretary. The continuities in patterns of annotation, and the separate correlations of annotation and the battle sheets, mean that the copies of vol. I

of Thierry's History of the Conquest and of the Chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon were similarly working volumes of Dawson's, though probably containing in their annotations instructions to a secretary rather than to the printer. The copy of Henderson's Documents sets itself in a very likely collective relationship, as one of Dawson's copies, not only with the Chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon and the Ecclesiastical History of England and Normandy, but also with the copies of Bede's Ecclesiastical History of England and both volumes of the Annals of Roger de Hoveden. If volume II of Thierry's History of the Conquest also creeps into the Dawsonian fold on the strength of the case made by its sibling volume, then Cicero's Orations and Hart's copy of Russell's History alone depend for their status as books from Charles Dawson's library on the bare fact of their physical association with the cache as a whole. From the annotations to Henderson's Documents can then be deduced some of the other antiquarian works in Dawson's library. The annotations also testify to a certain energy if also a limitation in the depth of Dawson's methods of working, and to some problems caused, arguably, by over-ambition and by loose scholarly method. While they suggest no fraud on the scale of Piltdown, they do perhaps suggest a man not afraid of taking a short-cut or two. Admittedly, as far as his role at Piltdown was to be concerned, such a characteristic qualified Dawson as much for the role of hoaxed as for the role of hoaxer.

Notes