Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/505

1922 time of the next justiciar, Philip de Orreby) or by some of the other collectors who saw the roll.

On general grounds we feel inclined to suggest that the establishment of this roll was due to the great earl, Ranulph de Blundeville (1181–1232). It was to him that the county palatine owed its own register of original writs and other developments and reforms of legal procedure, and there are many claims by the county after the annexation of 1237 for the observance of the law and custom as it had existed in his day. Neither have we any certain knowledge of the date when the roll ceased to be used. It seems clear from the Gough manuscript that entries were being made on it in the middle of the fourteenth century, and probably it continued to be used so long as the county meetings maintained their representative character. With the decay of these assemblies except purely for the purpose of litigation the opportunities and occasions for resorting to the use of the roll would become gradually less and less, and other methods of preserving evidence would be adopted.

If, for the reasons mentioned above, we are right in thinking that it was only about the last decade of the twelfth century that these enrolments commenced, it is certainly remarkable that by the year 1254 the Cheshire 'Domesday' Roll had attained such a great reputation that the royal judges at Westminster, who can hardly have had many opportunities of considering the standing of the roll, affirmed its perpetual validity. The occasion arose in litigation over the advowson of Sandbach. Ormerod in his Memoir has given a full account of the suit, which commenced in the county court of Chester by an assize of last presentation at the instance of Roger de Sandbach, the claimant. It need only be said here that the defendant, the abbot of Dieulacres, set up the enrolment in the 'Domesday' of an inquisition, taken in 1223–4, thirty years before, finding that the advowson had belonged in earlier days to Earl Ranulph II and his successors, and he produced a subsequent grant of it to the abbey by Ranulph III (Blundeville). Only one of the objections raised to this plea by Roger de Sandbach concerns us, but in that one he seriously impugned the 'Domesday' Roll by the suggestion that the earl had been powerful enough to get anything he liked entered upon it. The allegation was:

"Et eciam idem Randulfus Comes tempore suo ita potens fuit in Cestersira, quia princeps fuit, patere voluntarie cum volebat inquisiciones et precepta facere potuit ut Dominus, et inrotulari facere quid volebat in rotulo de Domesday quoniam ille rotulus fuit tunc in custodia ipsius et clericorum suorum."