Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/416

 408 THE FORGERY OF FINES July known to many people in London and Westminster, where we may suppose Kernetby to have been. To abstract one or more files, which would provide ample choice of models as well as the ultimate repository for the forgery, would probably be easy at that time, certainly easier than at any other.^ Once committed to a story of a meeting with Kernetby early in October and the employment of a scrivener, the other details had to be made to fit, and hence possibly the statement that the tampering with the file took place on 27 October. But the well-invented terms of forgery and the details of the scheme betray so intimate an acquaintance with official procedure as to raise a serious doubt that an outsider could be the sole projector ; ^ and the hand- writing, although a common one, may well be that of a clerk of the exchequer, of Coppedale himself. There are, it is true, two difficulties : one, that a plotter so well equipped as an exchequer clerk presumably was should have been so clumsy a forger, for once the forgery had been placed with the genuine fines the contrast in handwriting was so great that discovery was certain when a copy had to be made ; and the second that the forged fine — assuming the record to be correct — should have been placed, not on the file to which it purported to belong, but on one for the thirty-second year of Edward I. Coppedale 's forgery was by no means without precedent ; and it is of particular interest if only as evidence of the increasing skill of the forger — deficient as that skill was when measured by the requirements of the situation — for there are two earlier recorded > Feet of fines were then filed by year and term. This is clear from the indentures (recording the delivery of feet of fines into the exchequer) printed in Palgrave, ArUient Kalendara and Inventories, iii. 100 fF. ; fines levied before justices in eyre would be in county groups (ibid. pp. 99, 100), but would be fitted into the scheme without diflficidty. That this method was followed early in the thirteenth century is shown by document no. i here printed, and doubtless it was the original exchequer procedure. The practice of searching the records and obtaining transcripts of fines and other documents had provided an opportunity for exchequer officials to exact fees ; these had been forbidden in 1279 and again in 1319 (Hall, Bed Book of the Exchequer, pp. 973-4). That access to the records in the treasury, at least at the Tower, was normally confined to officers of the courts appears incidentally from a case heard in 1323 (Coram Rege Roll, no. 254, Rex m. 37 ; Abbreviatio Placitorum, p. 343). It will be observed from document no. ii here printed that the officers of the exchequer were prepared to stat« definitely that on a certain date a forgery was not on the file. All the evidence points to the methodical arrangement, careful custody, and frequent consultation of fines and other records at this period, although the supervision of searchers, such as William de Houghton (vide infra, p. 414), might leave something to be desired. Cf. Baldwin, King's Council in England, pp. 525 ff. ; Select Cases before the King's Council (Selden See.), pp. 97 ff. the four justices named. Bereford appears to have been absent about that time ; the four justices are, however, named in a fine levied in the Trinity term following (Feet of Fines, 181/8, no. 37). Assuming, however, that Bereford was not present on the date given, it is improbable that a discrepancy of this kind would have been noticed.
 * I have not traced a genuine fine, for the day given in the forgery, levied before