The _Inquisitio Eliensis_ is a document of the same kind with the Exeter Domesday; relating to the property of the Monastery of Ely recorded afterwards in the two volumes of the Domesday Survey (p. xiv). From this it would seem that Ellis believed the _Inquisitio_, at any rate, to be previous to Domesday Book, but he practically left its origin altogether in doubt. Sixty years later (1876) the _Inquisitio_ was published anew, but without any further solution of the points in question being offered.[217] For this edition three MSS. were collated, with praiseworthy and infinite pains, by Mr N. E. S. A. Hamilton. Taking for his text, like Ellis, the Cottonian MS. Tib. A. VI, which he distinguished as A, he gave in footnotes the variants found in the MSS. at Trinity College, Cambridge, viz.: O. 2, 41 (which he termed B), and O. 2, 1 (which he distinguished as C). In Mr Hamilton's opinion (p. xiv) the 'C' text 'appears to have been derived from the "B" MS. rather than the Cottonian' ('A'). From this opinion, it will be seen, I differ wholly. A careful analysis of the three texts has satisfied me beyond question that while C is the most accurate in detail, it is marred by a peculiar tendency to omission on the part of its scribe. This, indeed, is its distinctive feature. Now B cannot be derived from C, because it supplies the latter's omissions. On the other hand, C cannot be derived from B, because it corrects, throughout, B's inaccuracies. Consequently they are independent. More difficult to determine is the genesis of A, the worst of the three texts; but as it virtually reproduces all the inaccuracies found in B (besides containing many fresh ones), without correcting any, it can only be inferred that B was its source. Thus we have on the one hand C, and, on the other B (with its offspring A), derived independently from some common source. And this conclusion agrees well with the fact that a long catalogue of lands abstracted from the House of Ely is found in C, but not in A or B,[218] and with the circumstance that the famous rubric ('Hic subscribitur inquisitio'), which heads the inquisition in A and B, is placed by C at the end of the lists of jurors.[219]