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of his first cares was to adopt an eligible ancestor. And the adoption of an ancestor was in many ways a much easier operation than the adoption of a child.' For instance, he surmised, it would be difficult to adopt a child who did not actually exist, but there was on the other hand no difficulty in adopting an imaginary ancestor. Again a child usually had relatives and their consent to the adoption had to be obtained; but a person who wished to adopt somebody else's ancestor never troubled about such formalities. 'Thus,' White went on, 'a really popular ancestor might accumulate quite a number of unconnected families as his descendants, much as a comet might develop a number of tails, or a Hollywood star a number of husbands, although I believe that the stars usually shed one husband before adopting the next.'

There were many in White's audience who were rather inclined to believe in the Falaise Roll. Disconcerted by the mocking tone with which White had begun his lecture, they listened edgily to what he had to say next. The compilers of the Falaise Roll and the list at Dives-sur-Mer had certainly undertaken a very great deal of work; but what divided them from serious researchers was the reliability of the sources used. To White and most historians, reliance could only be placed on the very earliest historical records, and unfortunately these mention only a handful of William's companions by name. White considered that the reliable sources were limited to William of Poitiers and the Bayeux Tapestry. On the basis of these two sources he came up with his own list comprising a meagre thirteen 'companions' who could be proved, in the strictest sense, to have been directly involved in the battle on the Norman side. Descent in the male line could not now be shown from any of these persons. Even our Wadard and Vital were not accorded the distinction of being proven warriors at Hastings, for the tapestry merely illustrates them in the run-up to the battle and they occur in no other historical account. Wadard is shown organising the plunder of food in the days beforehand [scene 37; plate 8] and Vital [scene 46; plate 9] is a scout shown speaking to Duke William shortly before the commencement of actual hostilities.

When White had concluded his paper, his colleague Dr T. R. Thomson rose to echo the same conclusions and even went so far as to imply that the compilers of the Falaise Roll were 'charlatans'. This now provoked an angry reaction from the floor. A Mr Townroe stood up to read out a letter from Professor Macary, the historian from Falaise who had worked extensively on the list. Macary had taken umbrage at the unfriendly attitude of the Society of Genealogists' previous note and now indicated that he was not prepared to enter into any further discussions on the matter. A Mr de Carteret gallantly rose to defend the probability that his eponym had been a 'Companion of the Conqueror'. Others made similar protests and the meeting concluded on a distinctly unfriendly note. In summing up the chairman, Lord Ferrer, likened the verbal sparring to another Battle of Hastings.

The compilers of the Falaise Roll included not only Wadard and Vital but hundreds of others as well. They used the poet Wace extensively. Wace, writing an account of the battle a century after it had happened, gives us 116 additional names, but his lateness as a source has generally meant that he has been dismissed by modern historians as unreliable. More obviously unreliable are the various redactions of the 'Battle Roll', which purports to be a record of the principal knights who fought at Hastings preserved at Battle Abbey, the monastery that William founded on the spot where Harold fell. The 'Battle Roll' is nowadays considered to have been compiled only in the fourteenth century and to be worthless as evidence. Following the stormy meeting of the Society of Genealogists the matter rested for another decade. In the 1940s the question was re-examined by Professor David Douglas.2 Using scattered charter evidence, the Carmen de Hastingae Proelio and Orderic