With apologies to Matt Tompkins for sending this reply by mistake to his email address and not to the newsgroup: On 6/06/2017 10:35 PM, Tompkins, Matthew (Dr.) wrote: > > As was the custom, it is written as one long sentence with minimal > punctuation (the dots are more in the nature of commas, and the > occasional initial capital letters introduce sense blocks or phrases > rather than sentences). Punctuation added by editors can be misleading - medial stops (as you say, more in the nature of commas, though not necessarily interchangeable with them) should be left as written rather than turned into commas, especially when the editor is going to add more of these anyway. That seems to me a more useful principle than trying to standardise name forms. > It's difficult to be certain who 'avus suus' refers back to. The more > proximate Walter de Beauchamp seems more likely, but it is not > impossible that Reynold de Breause is meant. He isn't so far distant > syntactically: the operative part of the fine begins 'Reynold > acknowledges and grants to Walter £15 of land in the manor of Tetbury, > to wit [lengthy description of land follows], to have and to hold to > Walter ...' In this case Elrington has left out an important point - for "Habenda et Tenenda ip[s]i Walt[er]o et h[ere]dib[us] suis ut lib[eru]m maritag[ium]" he has given "To hold to Walter in free marriage", without mention of his heirs. If the tenancy held as the result of a maritagium was heritable from Walter alone, without specifying a limit to heirs of Berta, then I suppose he was more probably her son and William de Braiose's grandson. Peter Stewart