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 52 THE TWO EARLIEST MUNICIPAL January always Rand? de Glanville not Kann' as here, and Bigot is without le ; but these are points that might vary with the scribe. 1 As the Coventry charter of Henry II thus appears to be genuine, 2 and cannot be a confirmation of the extant charter of Earl Ranulf III of Chester, though they have so much in common, we are thrown back upon Miss Bateson's assumption that it confirms some other (unknown) charter of that earl. The idea that Henry was confirming the charter oi an earlier Earl Ranulf suggests itself for a moment, only to be at once dismissed. Even if the privileges confirmed were consistent with a date in Ranulf II 's time (1129-53), it is impossible to get over the fact that the charter which Henry had before him had in its preamble the words : ' Sicut unquam in tempore patris prefati comitis vel aliorum antecessorum suorum,' which are used mutatis mutandis in the known charter of Ranulf III. That earl, too, had he been confirming an almost identical charter of his grandfather, would surely have made a more direct reference to it than the above sentence. If we accept Miss Bateson's suggestion that Ranulf III issued two charters to Coventry couched in very much the same terms, within a period of not more than about twenty-five years, the first of which was confirmed by Henry II, is it possible to discover a reason for the double grant, and to account for the complete disappearance of the earlier one ? Perhaps the solution may lie in the fact that Ranulf, who succeeded his father in 1181 as a boy of eleven, was for a number of years a ward of King Henry. 3 As a minor he may have issued a charter at the instance of his guardian which in his full age he thought well to reissue with some modifications. The divergences between the charter confirmed by Henry and his extant charter certainly fit in well with this suggestion. The substitution of a vague assurance that amercement should be reasonable for the clauses limiting fines in the earl's court to a shilling, and even less in the case of poor men, looks like an attempt to minimize a concession which was considered too generous. 4 A similar motive may have led to the omission of the clause limiting the earl's power of borrowing 1 He notes the existence of an original private deed of 1184 in which Glanville appears as a witness, where his Christian name is written Rann'. 2 The following corrections of the transcript used by Miss Bateson (ante, xvi. 98) may be noted : c» 1, 1. 11, LincolP ; c. 2, 1. 2, portmannemot, libere ; c. 3, 1. 2, et qui ; c. 5, 1. 1, poterit ; c. 8, 1. 2, portmannemot ; c. 9, 1. 4, Kann', 1. 5, Rann', 1. 6, Geddeng'. The c's in * pertinencia ', &c, are t's in the manuscript. There is a double slit in the centre of the lower margin (without overlap) for the suspension of the seal, which has disappeared. 3 Pipe Roll 28 Henry II ff. 4 This seems in itself more likely than Miss Bateson's contention that the differ- ence in wording ' shows that the twelvepenny amercement may sometimes be alluded to in very vague terms '.