works, I know of no pitfall into which the local antiquary is more liable to fall. Wonderful are the things that people look for in the pages of the great survey; I am always reminded of Mr Secretary Pepys' writing for information as to what it contained 'concerning the sea and the dominion thereof'.[19] Like other inquests, the Domesday Survey--'the great inquest of all', as Dr Stubbs terms it--was intended for a special purpose; special questions were asked, and these questions were answered in the returns. So with the 'Inquest of Sheriffs' in 1170; so also with the Inquest of Knights, if I may so term it, in 1166. In each case the questions asked are, practically, known to us, and in each they are entirely different. Therefore, when Mr Freeman writes: The survey nowhere employs the feudal language which became familiar in the twelfth century. Compare, for instance, the records in the first volume of Hearn's _Liber Niger Scaccarii_. In this last we find something about knights' fees in every page. In Domesday there is not a word--[20] it is in no spirit of captious criticism, but from the necessity of demolishing the argument, that I liken it to basing conclusions on the fact that in the census returns we find something about population in every page, while in the returns of owners of land there is not a word. As the inquest of 1166 sought solely for information on knights and their fees, the returns to it naturally contain 'something about knights' fees in every page'; on the other hand, 'the payment or nonpayment of the _geld_ is a matter which appears in every page of the survey' [of 1086] because 'the formal immediate cause of taking the survey was to secure its full and fair assessment'.[21] Nor is this all. When the writer asserts that 'in Domesday there is not a word' about knights' fees, he greatly overstates his case, as indeed is shown by the passages he proceeds to quote. I shall be able to prove, further on, that knights' fees existed in cases where Domesday does not mention them, but even the incidental notices found in the Great Survey are quite sufficient to disprove its alleged silence on the subject. As Mr Freeman has well observed: Its most incidental notices are sometimes the most precious. We have seen that it is to an incidental, an almost accidental notice in the Survey that we owe our knowledge of the great fact of the general redemption of lands.[22] Here then the writer does not hesitate to base on a single accidental notice the existence of an event quite as widespread and important as the introduction of knight service.[23]