In his Historia novorum, Eadmer narrates Canterbury's failure to assert primacy over York before the royal court in 1120. Immediately following this episode, he describes the discovery of important documents by the monks of Christ Church after a diligent search of ‘the hidden places of ancient cupboards and ancient Gospel books, which had been looked on only as ornaments in the house of God’. Eadmer then inserts copies of ten papal bulls into his history. As we now know, these documents were forgeries. But nonetheless they were presented before the papal curia in 1123 and, according to Hugh the Chanter of York, they were literally laughed out of court:

This humiliating failure at the papal curia is the end of the story of the ‘Canterbury forgeries’ this article recounts; but where did it begin? Where did these forgeries come from?

In 1902, Heinrich Böhmer identified these ten papal bulls concerning the primacy of Canterbury as wholly or partially forged. Böhmer attributed them to the machinations of Archbishop Lanfranc, who he believed was asserting novel claims to primacy in the wake of the Norman Conquest.