Still, the fact remains that on a few pages of Domesday we have been able to detect a considerable number of inaccuracies and omissions. The sacrosanct status of the Great Survey is thus gravely modified. I desire to lay stress on this fact, which is worthy of the labour it has cost to establish. For two important conclusions follow. Firstly, it is neither safe nor legitimate to make general inferences from a single entry in Domesday. All conclusions as to the interpretation of its _formulae_ should be based on _data_ sufficiently numerous to exclude the influence of error. Secondly, if we find that a rule of interpretation can be established in an overwhelming majority of the cases examined, we are justified, conversely, in claiming that the apparent exceptions may be due to errors in the text.
The first of these conclusions has a special bearing on the theories propounded by Mr Pell with so much ingenuity and learning.[35] I have shown, in an essay criticizing these theories,[36] that the case of Clifton, to which Mr Pell attached so much importance,[37] is nothing, in all probability, but one of Domesday's blunders, of which I gave, in that essay, other instances. So, too, in the case of his own Manor of Wilburton, Mr Pell accepted without question the reading '_six_ ploughlands', as representing the 'primary return',[38] although that reading is only found in the most corrupt of the three versions of the _Inquisitio Eliensis_, while the two better versions (B and C texts) agree with Domesday Book, and with the abbreviated return at the end of the A text itself (Tib. A. VI fo. 67, _b_, 1), in giving the ploughlands as _seven_. Really it is nothing but waste of time to argue from a reading which is only found in one out of five MSS., and that one the most corrupt.
This brings me to the existence and the value of duplicate entries in Domesday. Mr Hamilton describes as 'a curious reading' the words in the I.C.C., 'sed soca remanebat _Harlestone_'. Now it so happens that in this case we have five separate versions of the original entry: one in the I.C.C., one in the I.E., and three in Domesday Book. Here they are side by side:
_I.C.C._ _I.E._ _D.B._ _D.B._ _D.B._ (p. 46) (p. 106) (I. 200, (_ibid._, (I. 191, _a_, 2) in margin) _a_, 2)