Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/177

1922 when a sheriff was replaced, and he then paid according to the proportion of the specified time he had been in office. Fulk, the nephew of Gilbert, left office owing eighty pounds of gersoma, presumably the amount due for the four years he held his various counties. Whenever applied, this whole procedure was obviously in conflict both with indeterminate office-holding and with hereditary expectancy.

The evidence of curial control over the shrievalty in and just before 1130 is both varied and convincing. Further proofs which may be cited are the increased activity of itinerant justices and the obvious subordination of the sheriffs' fiscal activities to a strong exchequer. Sheriffs were beginning to come and go in comparatively rapid succession as in the time of Henry II. The last of the hereditary sheriffs in the south-west was superseded. Some were mulcted at the exchequer for negligence. One whose administrative incapacity is fairly well established by the Pipe Roll of 1130 had lately been dismissed from office. Furthermore it is clear that special curial agents who had long held the position were being shifted from county to county very much as was done at some later periods of administrative reorganization. A final and still more potent consideration appears in the personnel of the shrievalty for the fiscal year 1129–30. The king's household and other state officials now serve as sheriffs in larger number than in the two preceding reigns. The few feudal figures of importance who are still sheriffs are so employed. Such are the two hereditary sheriffs Miles the constable and Walter de Beauchamp, who sits in the seat of Urse d'Abetot, and is probably the king's dispenser besides. The second Robert d'Oilly, another constable, seems to be the Robert who for the past year has been sheriff