The question of the date of this interesting survey is no less puzzling than important. Mr Greenstreet held that 'there is hardly any room for doubting' that it was previous to 1109. This conclusion was based on a misapprehension, and Mr Waters claimed to have 'established' the date as 'between March 1114 and April 1116' (pp. 2-4). In this conclusion he would seem to have been anticipated by Mr Eyton, as is shown by that writer's note-books,[15] but I cannot accept the identical and somewhat far-fetched argument on which they relied. They obtained their limit on the one hand from a passage in 'Peter of Blois', and on the other from the fact that Robert, the King's son, is entered in the roll as 'filius Regis', and 'was therefore not yet Earl of Gloucester', whereas he was certainly Earl, they say, 'before Easter, 1116', when he witnessed as Earl, a charter they both assign to that date. Of the latter date I disposed in my paper 'The Creation of the Earldom of Gloucester',[16] in which I showed that Robert did not become Earl till several years later. The other evidence, if it cannot be disproved, cannot at least, be relied on. For, without asserting that the chronicle assigned to 'Peter of Blois' is so daring a forgery as the 'Historia Ingulphi', of which it is a 'continuatio', it must be plainly described as absolutely untrustworthy. Apart from the passage on Cambridge University,[17] we have a description 'Inclyti Comitis Leycestriæ Roberti tunc validissimi adolescentis, burgensiumque suæ dictæ civitatis' in 1113, and of his presence, with his knights, at the laying of the Abbey foundation stones next year.[18] Now the future Earl of Leicester was some nine years old at the time, and his father, the Count of Meulan, lived till 1118. So also, about the year 1114 we meet with 'Milonis Comitis Herfordensis', who did not become Earl of Hereford till 1141, and whose father, Walter of Gloucester, was living long after 1114; while on the next page we find the notoriously false Countess Lucy legend, with the additional blunder of converting her son, the Earl of Lincoln, into her husband's brother![19] It is in the midst of all this that we have the vital passage on which Mr Waters relies: We know from the _Continuator_ [_sic_] _of Peter of Blois_ (p. 121) that Stephen and his elder brother Theobald were on a visit to Henry I, at Oxford, at some period between March 7th and August 1st, 1114, when Theobald is described as Count of Blois, and Stephen as 'pulcherrimus adolescens dominus postea rex Anglorum'. It is manifest that at this date Stephen was not yet Count of Moreton, so the Roll must be later than March 7th, 1114 (p. 3).