Page:History of the Fylde of Lancashire (IA historyoffyldeof00portiala).pdf/381

 Roger de Nasynton, public notary, etc. The result of these attestations was that the case was dismissed against the abbot of Vale Royal, and his right to the church of Kirkham, with all its chapels, fruits, rents, etc, allowed to have been fully proved.

In 1334 a mandamus was issued by Edward III., at York, to Robert Foucher, the sheriff of Lancashire, stating that, contrary to a charter of Edward I., which prohibited the sheriffs from making distraints on the rectors of churches or on estates with which the churches had been endowed, he had "under pretext of his office lately entered into the lands and tenements near Kirkham, which are of the endowment of that church, and had heavily distrained the abbot of Vale Royal, parson of that church"; and ordering the said sheriff to abandon the claim, and to make restitution of anything he might thus have illegally obtained, and "by no means to attempt to make any distraint in the lands and tenements which are of the endowment of the aforesaid church," at any future time.

Somewhere about the year 1332 a monk, named Adam de Clebury, who held the temporalities of Shrewsbury Abbey, sued Peter, the abbot of Vale Royal, for five hundred marks, which he declared were the accumulated arrears of twelve marks, ordered to be paid annually by Theobald Walter, to the former monastery, out of the funds of the church of Kirkham, according to the issue of a trial in the king's court, between Theobald and the convent of Shrewsbury, respecting the advowson, etc., of that church in 1195. Peter is said, in the Harleian manuscript, from which this account is taken, to have "redeemed that writ and many others from the sheriff of Lancashire," from which it may be understood that he had paid the sum demanded, or in some conciliatory way settled the case during his lifetime, for we hear no more of the matter until shortly after his death in 1342, when an action to enforce a similar payment was brought against his successor, Robert de Cheyneston. This ecclesiastic, however, is said to "have manfully opposed the abbot of Shrewsbury," and to have journied up to London to hold an interview with him on the subject, at which, after "many allegations on each side, he gave to the abbot of Shrewsbury £100 to pay his labours and