Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 3.djvu/406

376 that the king wrote to them as such, that if any rich abbey or bishopric should fall vacant during his absence they were to keep the same for him: although, ultimately, he gave express authority to the earl and William de Kilkenny to confer ecclesiastical benefices. But Lord Campbell cites a document which he terms "a commission," to support his case, as proving that the great seal was committed to the queen's keeping. We object in the first place that the document relied on is not a commission, but letters patent, conveying a general notification of an act done, and secondly that instead of corroborating his lordship's assumption the instrument in question shews its fallacy, and confirms also the narrative of Matthew Paris.

This patent recites that theking, about to set out for Gascony, had committed his great seal to the custody of the queen, "under our privy seal and the seals of our beloved brother and liege-subject Richard earl of Cornwall, and of certain others of our council;" the condition of such trust being that if anything should be sealed in the king's name with any other seal than that, which might tend to the detriment of the king or his realm, it should be of no moment and wholly void. It must be sufficiently obvious from the circumstance of the great seal being under the king's privy seal, and the seals of others of his council, that it was sealed up in its pouch, and that the queen could not use it without the intervention of the council, and, therefore, that she was not de facto keeper of the seal in the usual sense of that phrase. The seal was rather in the hands of commissioners: but had they any power to use it? As the privy seal was upon it, the just inference would seem to be that it was the king's intention the pouch should not be opened at all during his absence. This view is supported by the next correction of Lord Campbell's narrative, which it is our unpleasant duty to make. His lordship says, "the sealing of writs and common instruments was left, under her direction, to Kilkenny, archdeacon of Coventry." It would naturally be supposed from these words that Lord Campbell had good authority for a fact so circumstantially stated; yet there is not the shadow of a foundation for it; and the authority which he cites, and on which he must be held to depend, contradicts him in every particular. The seal which the queen, in obedience to the king's precept, delivered to Kilkenny, was not the great seal, but the seal of the exchequer, which the king states in his letter he had deputed to be used "in place of our great seal which he will cause to he shut up until our return from the parts [of Gascony] aforesaid ." Although Lord Campbell prints that which purports to be a copy of this writ, the words we have distinguished by italics are left out in his work; yet even despite this remarkable omission, which we cannot suppose to be otherwise than accidental, or to have arisen from his copying at second-hand from some very careless compiler, it will be seen