[437] Hunt’s Bristol, 103-5.
[438] For the variety of modes in which juries were elected then and later see Rep. Mun. Corporations, 27.
[439] We find also special juries—for example a jury of masons and carpenters to judge “because of a waterfall which fell from the house and gutter of Richard Maidstone upon the house and ground of William Bennett” (Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 169); and groups of umpires appointed to settle differences (Boys’ Sandwich, 786).
[440] This was the custom in Exeter. At Bayonne every new citizen was sworn upon a book containing the charter and statutes of the commune (Luchaire, 47).
[441] Ricart, 2.
[442] At Wycombe and Dartmouth two Italian copies of the Pandects of Justinian and commentaries were used in the fifteenth century to bind up the corporation books.
[443] See pp. 310-11, 334-6, 366-70. A decree of 1328 in Preston was made by “the mayor, bailiffs, and burgesses, with all the commonalty, by a whole assent and consent.” (Thomson, Mun. Hist. 105.)
[444] Mr. Maitland describes the communal organization of the villein tenants on the manor of Bright Waltham in 1293 (Manorial Pleas, Selden Soc. 161-4, 168). They formed a “communitas” which held property, could receive a grant of land, could contract and make exchanges with the lord (172). These rights were recognized in the manorial courts, though at Westminster they would have been held very irregular (163). They elected or recommended the reeve, shepherd, ploughman, swineherd (170), the whole ville “undertaking” for him (168). The steward kept watch that no land of servile tenure should be treated as free, and the villeins themselves were very unwilling that a villein should set up as a freeman on the ground of holding a freehold acre (164).
[445] In Barnstaple a deed concerning a tenement in the High Street in 1416 was sealed with the seal of the commonalty, not that of the mayor. (Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 213.) In Rye there was a seal of the community different from the mayor’s seal, which last was first used in 1377. (Ibid. v. 489, 511.) Also in Lydd (ibid. 530-2).
[446] See note A at end of chapter.