THIS PAPER IS a preliminary exploration of the Domesday returns for bishops with English sees in the light of current debates around written returns. The bishops held estates in every Domesday county except Rutland and some of their endowments, unlike the recent assemblages of the bishops of Norman sees, provide examples of associated private hundreds. They were also routinely involved in local government (far more so than even the best-placed abbots) and therefore well placed to negotiate the whole inquest process with maximum efficiency. Two examples of effectively unaltered returns, those of Bishop Wulfstan of Worcester for Oswaldslow and Abbot Baldwin of Bury within Suffolk, include some highly tendentious claims, but it is unhelpful to conflate two distinct issues. Embedded returns, contrary to knee-jerk assumption, need not reflect manipulation, and in challenging this assumption the paper also contributes to the wider debates around forgery. Instead of focussing yet again on Oswaldslow, ‘some of the most blood-stained acres in English medieval historiography’, it examines other exceptional episcopal returns and their local administrative context. The results suggest very few unaltered returns and no necessary relationship between any that exist and manipulation. On manipulation the paper ends by examining Archbishop Lanfranc's silence around TRE tenures.

That written returns were submitted to the Domesday inquests is uncontroversial. Oral testimony remained supremely important but given the requirements for detail and the known deployment of written geld rolls it would be remarkable if those tenants-in-chief who were routinely using written documentation had not done so here. The degree of writing probably varied between bishoprics but Worcester was certainly not alone. The bishops, recruits from Normandy and Conquest survivors alike, were also keyed into general administration. The standard route to a see was via a spell in the royal household, in some cases as chancellor; nor was this a post-Conquest phenomenon, as the career of Giso of Wells (1061–88) amply demonstrates. All immediately found themselves at least in theory presiding with the sheriffs in the shire courts and receiving the attendant writs, which presumably means that they were automatically involved in the first, county-based stages of the inquest.