The document is highly unusual, and, as far I know, the only one of its kind as yet known to historians. The circumstances in which I came across it are in themselves evidence of its novelty and importance. In the spring of 1938 my wife and I were paying one of our recurrent calls on Mr W. T. Mellows of Peterborough. A couple of years previously he had introduced us to the great collection of documents in the archives of Peterborough Minster and in his own possession; since then both of us frequently visited Peterborough to work on the archives and to discuss them with our charming and enthusiastic friend. On this occasion the conversation turned on the misdeeds of the antiquaries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Sparke's credulous edition of a Peterborough survey started us off, and as a further illustration of how careless the great antiquaries could be, Mr Mellows took down from his shelves a little volume in what appeared to be a parchment cover, bearing on its back the legend ‘Carte Nativorum’. He hoped to look more carefully into its contents than he had so far been able to do, but he thought that the volume must have belonged to an eighteenth-century antiquary, who may or may not have assembled it, but who certainly gave it its title. And all three of us agreed that an antiquary should have known better than to perpetuate on the cover the title of Carte Nativorum.