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24 developed with the growth of the ages, and records have been quietly accumulating to show posterity how education expanded in the nineteenth century and afterwards, and how it was supervised by an authority born of the old King's Council.

Yet another important department which, to some extent, owed its existence to the Privy Council, though separate from it, was the Board of Agriculture, which absorbed the Land Commission, and the earlier Copyhold Enclosure, and Tithe Commissions. The President of this Board had to be a member of the Privy Council, but in all other respects the department had, by Act of Parliament, a separate existence. In the year 1903 it became, in virtue of another Act, the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries, and various powers and duties relating to Fisheries which formerly belonged to the Board of Trade were transferred to it. Some of the functions of this Board remind us of the compilation of the Domesday Book, which was prepared by direction of the Conqueror and his Council. It has to collect statistics relating to agriculture and forestry, and this is precisely what was done in the year 1085. It now has charge also of the Ordnance Survey, by which some of the Conqueror's ends are attained through modern and more precise methods.

I shall now have to take you back to the Chancellor as he existed at the time of the Conquest, and show how other branches of the executive, with their corresponding records, grew out of the functions originally belonging to him. At first he seems to have had documents prepared, and, where necessary, to have had the Great Seal attached, without much intermediate formality. In the earliest Patent Rolls which are now extant—those of the reign of King John—we find at the foot of each instrument the words Teste me ipso, 'witness myself' (i.e. the King himself). Later on,