Diwm Notes and Queries^ i8i charter to justify its being labelled as spurious." They say, toOy that " it has come down to us in copies other than the Norman Conquest, and it therefore occupies a position superior to charters, dependent upon copies made after that event, as the great majority, if not all, of the spurious O. £. charters were made in the century or so following the Conquest " (Crawford CharUrSy 37.) I admitted in my note that the land boundaries were of later date than 739, but the language of one of the three copies is stated by the editors to be that of the loth century. The fact that the boundaries are difficult to identify seems to me to be an argument in favour of their genuineness, because a forger would have defeated his own ends if he had inserted boundaries which could not have been easily followed. The boundaries were of course modernized by the copyists, who were in the habit of putting in the current names of those places they knew, and of leaving the others in their original state, but this does not prove that the three copies we have were not derived from the original charter, or that the boundaries were not given in that charter in English, or, rather, West-Saxon. At any rate, whether this charter is genuine or spurious, I see no reason at present to alter my opinion that the northern part of the county was conquered some time before the rest. R. Pearsb Chope. 139. Church Plate. — Of Western or Southern Dartmoor parishes, there is interesting old church plate at Sampford Spiney, Sourton, Ugborough, South Brent and Dean Prion Both the type and date of those I have seen — by courteous permission of the respective incumbents — are fairly alike. Apparently of Exonian make, the chalices are dated 1576 or thereabouts; their ornamentation is simple, consisting of plain incised bands with conventional foliage slightly chased. Plain as they are, they have a certain artistic interest as examples of handicraft in these days of mechanical repro- duction, but a definite and greater human interest in that they have been, so far as I know, continuously used for over three centuries by moorland clergy and parishioners. Two chalices and two marks are here illustrated. (i.) Sourton, — ^The cover of this — utilizable also as a small paten — has the date 1756, in tl^is caise probably
