Battle Abbey Roll The Battle Abbey Roll is supposed to have been a commemorative list , lost since at least the 16th century , of the Companions of William the Conqueror , which had been erected or affixed as a memorial within Battle Abbey , Hastings , founded " ex - voto " by Duke William on the spot of the slaying of King Harold in the Battle of Hastings in 1066 . Traditional sources . It is known to modern historians only from supposed 16th century copies of it published by Leland , Holinshed and Duchesne , all imperfect and corrupt . Holinshed ' s is much the fullest , but of its 629 names several are duplicates . The versions of Leland and Duchesne , though much shorter , each contain many names found in neither of the other lists . Criticisms . Several names on the role are disputed ; Camden , as did Dugdale after him , held them to have been interpolated at various times by the monks , " not without their own advantage . " Later writers went further , Sir Egerton Brydges denounced the roll as " a disgusting forgery , " and E . A . Freeman dismissed it as " a transparent fiction . " Duchess of Cleveland ' s work . A derivative work published in 1889 by Catherine Powlett , Duchess of Cleveland , entitled " Battle Abbey Roll " ( 3 vols . ) attempts to vindicate the existence of an original roll and contains biographical details of most of the prominent Anglo - Norman families known in Victorian times . Auchinleck Manuscript Roll . There exists a copy of the Battle Abbey Roll which predates Leland ' s supposed copy by two centuries , which was not apparently known to the Victorian antiquarians . It forms one section ( folios 105v - 107r ) of the mid - 14th - century manuscript known as the " Auchinleck Manuscript " , one of the greatest treasures of the National Library of Scotland . Produced in London in the 1330s , it acquired its name from its first known owner Alexander Boswell , Lord Auchinleck , who discovered the manuscript in 1740 and donated it to the precursor of the National Library in 1744 . A comparison of the list of family names in the Auchinleck version of the Battle Abbey Roll with other extant lists appears as yet unperformed . Assessment . It is probable that the character of the roll has been quite misunderstood . It was not apparently a list of individuals , but only of family surnames , and seems to have been intended to show merely which families had " come over with the Conqueror , " and to have been compiled in about the 14th century . Although 1066 was more than a century before the widespread use of heraldry , it may have been an early pre - cursor of the roll of arms , common in the 13th . and 14th . centuries , for example the " Roll of Caerlaverock " or " Poem of Caerlaverock " made in 1300 by English heralds for the purpose of recording the knights present during King Edward I ' s siege in 1300 of Caerlaverock Castle , Scotland . The compiler of the Battle Abbey Roll appears to have been influenced by the French sound of names , and to have included many families of later settlement , such as that of Grandson , which did not in fact come to England from Savoy until two centuries after the Conquest . The roll itself appears to have been unheard - of before and after the 16th century , but other lists were current as early as the 15th century , as the Duchess of Cleveland noted citing in the introduction to her work the 1426 " Chronicle of John Brompton " , Abbot of Jervaulx in Yorkshire , in which he announced his intention of giving a catalogue of those who came over with the Conqueror as contained in a " piece of old French verse " . Modern lists . In 1866 a proposed list of the Conqueror ' s followers , compiled from Domesday and other authentic records , was set up in the church of Dives - sur - Mer in Normandy by Léopold Delisle , and is reproduced in the Duchess ' s work . Its contents are sufficient to show that the Battle Roll is of dubious evidential value . The fact remains that only 15 of the combatants at Hastings in 1066 can be named with certainty , as given in GEC ' s Complete Peerage , which select group is known as the Proven Companions of William the Conqueror . Up to 20 further names have been proposed by others , most notably D . C . Douglas in 1943 but these are arrived at by circumstantial evidence alone .