No evidence of settlement on the site of Lyme Regis exists before that afforded by a grant, dated 774, purporting to be by Cynewulf, king of the West-Saxons, of land here to the church of Sherborne, and a similar grant by King Æthelstan to the church of Glastonbury.
His Geheimes Jagdbuch, containing about 2500 words, is a treatise purporting to teach his grandsons the art of hunting.
A document was published in London purporting to be a "Declaration of Mr Alexander Henderson made upon his Death-bed "; and, although this paper was disowned, denounced and shown to be false in the General Assembly of August 1648, the document was used by Clarendon as giving the impression that Henderson had recanted.
At the beginning of the 17th century a collection of songs was published by a Norman lawyer, Jean Le Houx, purporting to be the work of Olivier Basselin.
Two short treatises exist, purporting to be lives of Gildas, and ascribed respectively to the 11th and 12th centuries; but the writers of both are believed to have confounded two, if not more, persons that had borne the name.
