Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/437

 1922 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 429 common form that, except to the local historian, gaps are less regrettable than in the case of other classes of town records. Colchester was one of those boroughs, commoner in the west than in the east of England, whose court had the name as well as the jurisdiction of a hundred. It normally met fortnightly, with intermediate pleas when required, but the intervals were occasionally of a week only and much more rarely of three weeks or more. There were three great sessions a year, at Hilarytide, Hocktide, and Michaelmas, at which a grand jury presented offences under what are elsewhere called the articula regis, especially in this case breaches of the assizes of breaM, beer, and measures. It is the ' leet jurisdiction ' with which we are familiar in manors and manorial boroughs, which has no doubt betrayed the editor into the misleading statement that ' Colchester was governed and regulated on the manorial system '. He might have remembered that this system of presentment was originally established in the hundreds, and only became vested in manorial courts (other than private hundreds) by royal grant or usurpation. It appears in other large boroughs. Gloucester, for instance, had a ' court leet, law day and view of frankpledge '. At Col- chester, however, at all events in the early rolls, the words ' leet ' and ' view of frankpledge ' are never used. In the lawhundred, if we may generalize from two cases, the serjeant who collected tolls and made arrests was admitted and sworn. The election by the community men- tioned on the second occasion may have taken place elsewhere. The ward constables, on similar evidence, might be elected in an ordinary hundred or in one of the special assemblies of the burgesses for important town business which usually coincided with a court of pleas between hundreds. A selection of the names of those present at such assemblies is given, no doubt to identify them with the decision arrived at. The letting of the tolls and customs of the town, which were leased to a farmer from Michaelmas to Michaelmas for 35, was most naturally done at the Michaelmas lawhundred, but in at least one year it was deferred until December (p. 61). * We hear of the bailiffs and the coroner, but never of the body which became the later town council, unless they were the assessors of the bailiffs for lack of whom to give judgement a plea at an intermediate court on 4 June 1311 had to be postponed to the next hundred. This was dis- appointing, because the case being one under the law merchant about a ship, the bailiffs had made a gallant effort to shorten the usual slow process of essoins by holding four sessions in two days (p. 36). ' Cor- porateness' seems to have been well established in fourteenth-century Colchester. It was ' the town ' or ' the community ' which leased the tolls and granted unoccupied places. There is no trace of the old Crown claim to such places. A Crown claim, of a different order, to the chattels and ' waste ' of a felon hanged by a commission of gaol delivery was resisted by the chief lord of the tenement. Much incidental light is thrown upon the customs of the borough, such as the absence- of heriot, the exclusion of ' foreigners ' from compurga- tion, except where a ' foreigner ' was a party, and more striking burghal peculiarities like the devise of land and the assize of fresh force.