Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/37

 1920 EARLDOM OF CHESTER 29 On 27 October 1232, as soon as the death of Ranulph was known, the sheriffs were ordered ^ to take into the king's hand the lands of the earl outside the county palatine, and to put them in charge of Peter de Rivaulx, then custos of escheats and about to become treasurer of the exchequer. The right of the executors of the earl's will to all chattels and wards in the lands was preserved, and also the dower rights of Clemence, the widow of the earl. A special exception was made in the case of the manor of Twyf ord (Buckinghamshire), which the late earl held of the royal demesne {de ballio) by grant of lOng John, and this was immediately given to Richard Marshal, the earl of Pembroke.^ The king was at Northampton on 21 and 22 November, where much important business affecting the heirs of the earl was transacted. The Annales Cestrienses ^ is authority for the statement that it was there, on 21 November, that John was made earl of Chester {/actus est comes Cestrie). The suggestion that this was merely a recognition of an undisputed right is strengthened when we notice that only little more than three weeks had elapsed since the earl's death. There seems to be no formal record of this creation, but there can be little doubt that John was invested by the king with the title of earl of Chester, by being formally girded with the sword of the county palatine. The Redesdale committee ^ state they had not found any docu- ment purporting that an earl on his creation was girt with a sword described as the sword of the county from which his title had its local name. But evidence of this is afforded by the style immediately adopted in contemporary records entered on the so-called Cheshire ' Domesday ' roll, where we find that for entries when Earl John was himself present in the full county court with his justiciar and 'barons', the date is given, for example, as Tuesday after Holy Trinity anno primo quo dominus lohannes de Scotia cinctus fuit gladio comitatus Cestrie et Cesterscire.^ PoBsibly for this investiture was used the sword bearing the words, Hugo comes Cestrie, now in the British Museum, by which he and his successors are supposed ^ to have held the county ita » Excerpta e Sot. Fin., 27 October 1232, and later. ' Rec. Soc. for Lane, and Chesh. xiv. 58, 127. See also the slightly different extracts in Cotton MS., Vesp. A. 5, fo. 40 (39), quoted by Miss Taylor in Journ. of the Chester Arch. Soc. xix, N.S., pp. 177-87. ' Ormerod's Cheshire (1882), i, p. xxxvi n., and Memoir of Cheshire Domesday Roll, pp. 13-14. After the annexation the style changed to the regnal year of the king, the statement of the constitution of the court then being et aliis liberis et fidelibus Domini Regis tunc ihi presentihus. In these entries Dominiis, not Comes, is used. Sitwell {Barons of Pvlford, preface and intro., p. ix). He had ' found the document from which Camden quoted ', but reserved it for a work on the Normans in Cheshire
 * Col. of Close Rolls, 8 November 1232.
 * Rep. on Dignity of a Peer, iii. 155.
 * By Camden, Brit. (1607 edition), p. 464, &c. This is challenged by Sir G. R.