[1015] Mr. Freeman himself makes the same mistake, and insists on regarding Middlesex as a subject district round the City.

[1016] Even Dr. Sharpe, the learned editor of the valuable Calendar of Hustings Wills, is similarly puzzled by a grant of twenty-five marks out of the king's ferm "de civitate London," to be paid annually by the sheriffs of London and Middlesex (i. 610), because he imagines that the firma was paid in respect of the sheriffwick of Middlesex alone.

[1017]

"It has been supposed that the justiciar here mentioned means a mayor or chief magistrate, and that the grant includes that of the election of the supreme executive officer of the City. It may be so, but all probability is against this view. For by this time the citizens already appear to have selected their own portreeve, by whatever name he was called; and it is absurd to suppose that the king gave them power to appoint a sheriff of Middlesex, if they were not already allowed to appoint their own. The omission of any reference to the portreeve in the charter cannot, in fact, be otherwise accounted for" (History of London, i. 90)."The next substantial benefit they derived from the charter was the leave to elect their own justiciar. They may place whom they will to hold pleas of the Crown. The portreeve is here evidently intended, for it is manifestly absurd to suppose, as some have done, that Henry allowed the citizens to elect a reeve for Middlesex, if they could not elect one for themselves; and if proof were wanting, we have it in the references to the trials before the portreeve which are found in very early documents. In one of these, which cannot be dated later than 1115, Gilbert Proudfoot, or Prutfot, described as vicecomes, is mentioned as having some time before given judgment against the dean and chapter as to a piece of land on the present site of the Bank of England" (London, p. 29).

[1018] Ninth Report Hist. MSS., i. 66 b.

[1019] Reference to p. 110, supra, will show at once how vain is the effort to wrench "justitiarius" from its natural and well-known meaning.

[1020] See Appendix O.

[1021] Here and elsewhere I use "shire" on the strength of Middlesex having a "sheriff" (i.e. a shire-reeve).

[1022] London, p. 126.

[1023] This springs, of course, from what I have termed "the fundamental error."