It will be my object in this paper to recover and identify the fragments of a great national inquest, which seems to have escaped the notice of constitutional historians, and which, if its full returns had been preserved, might not unworthily be compared with the Domesday Inquest itself. In the course of doing so, I shall hope to prove that abstracts of these returns have been wrongly assigned by all antiquaries to an earlier and imaginary inquest, and that their belief has recently received an official confirmation. The solution I shall now propound will remove the admitted difficulties, to which the existing belief on the MSS. has, we shall find, given rise. The bewildering _congeries_ of returns known as the ‘Testa de Nevill’--an Edwardian manuscript shovelled together, and printed by the old Record Commission in 1807--has long been at once the hunting-ground and the despair of the topographer and the student of genealogy. Now that the returns contained in the Red Book of the Exchequer are also at length in type,[531] it is possible to collate the two collections, and thus to remove, in part at least, the obscurity that has hitherto surrounded them. Mr. Hall, in his preface to the ‘Red Book,’ writes thus: The Sergeanties and Inquisitions which form a considerable part of the Feodary in the Red Book of the Exchequer, have hitherto been little known, and their true value has been by no means sufficiently appreciated. This neglect has perhaps arisen from the greater convenience of reference to the printed collection known as the _Testa de Nevill_; but as it is now very generally recognised that the text of this work is far from satisfactory in its present form, the evidence of the kindred returns contained in earlier Exchequer Registers deserves our most careful attention (p. ccxxi.). In the ‘Red Book’ itself the returns are headed: Inquisitiones factæ tempore regis Johannis per totam Angliam anno scilicet regni sui xii^o et xiii^o in quolibet comitatu de servitiis militum et aliorum qui de eo tenent in capite secundum rotulos liberatos thesaurario per manus vicecomitum Angliæ tempore prædicto (p. 469). They are accordingly given, by the editor, the marginal date “1210–1212” throughout (pp. 469–574). On the other hand, the ‘Testa de Nevill’ returns were, as he shows, delivered at the Exchequer on the morrow of St. John the Baptist (25th June), 1212 (p. ccxxi.). Thus then we have, according to him, two successive and “independent returns”: (1) The ‘Liber Rubeus’ returns made between May, 1210, and May, 1212. (2) The ‘Testa de Nevill’ returns made in June, 1212.[532]