The geréfa was not necessarily a royal officer: on the contrary we find bishops, ealdormen, nay simple nobles with them upon their establishment. Of course the moment an immunity of sacu and sócn existed upon any estate, the lord appointed a geréfa to hold his court and do right among his men, as the scírgeréfa held court for the freemen in the shire. And if any proof of this were necessary, we might find it in the title socnereve (sócne geréfa) which occurs at page 12 of the valuable book known as ‘Liber de antiquis Legibus,’ but which would have been much more justly entitled Annals of the Corporation of London. We may be assured that in every vill belonging to a bishop or a lay lord, in every city where there was a cathedral or a castle, there was found a bisceopes or an ealdormannes geréfa, as the case might be, performing such functions for the prelate or the noble, as the king’s geréfa exercised for him; and if there were an immunity, performing every function that the royal officer performed. Thus in some towns I can conceive it very possible that the king’s, ealdorman’s and bishop’s reeves may have met side by side and exercised a concurrent jurisdiction: and as the bishop’s geréfa must have led his armed retainers, (at least whenever it pleased the prelate to remember the canons of his church,) this officer may be compared to the Vogt, Advocatus, Vice-dominus or Vidame, who fulfilled that duty on the continent. The bishop’s reeve is empowered by the king to aid the sheriff in the forcible levy of tithe[[467]]; he is recognised in the law of Wihtrǽd as an intermediary between a dependent of the bishop and the public courts of justice[[468]]; the thane’s or nobleman’s reeve was allowed on various occasions to act as his attorney: the great landowner was admonished to appoint reeves over his dependents, to preserve the peace and represent them before the law; and lastly so necessary a part of a nobleman’s establishment is the geréfa considered to be, that Ini enacts[[469]], “whithersoever a noble journeys, thither may his reeve accompany him.” Of course in many cases these geréfan would be merely stewards[[470]], but in nearly all we must consider them to have been judges in various courts of greater or less importance, public or private as it might chance to be. This one original character distinguishes all alike; whether it be the scírgeréfa of a county-court, the burhgeréfa of a corporation, the swángeréfa of a woodland moot, the mótgeréfa[[471]] of any court in which plea could be holden, or the túngeréfa of a vill or dependent settlement, the ancient steward of a manorial court.
[358]. Cod. Dipl. No. 235. The Chronicle even calls Cæsar’s Tribune, Labienus, geréfa.
[359]. The laws of Eádweard the Confessor show at how early a period the word was unintelligible. “Greve autem nomen est potestatis; apud nos autem nichil melius videtur esse quam praefectura. Est enim multiplex nomen; greve enim dicitur de scira, de wæpentagiis, de hundredo, de burgis, de villis: et videtur nobis compositum esse e grið anglice, quod est pax latine, et ve latine, videlicet quod debet facere grið, i. e. pacem, ex illis qui inferunt in terram ve, i. e. miseriam vel dolorem.... Frisones et Flandrenses comites suos meregrave vocant, quasi majores vel bonos pacificos; et sicut modo vocantur greves, qui habent praefecturas super alios, ita tunc temporis vocabantur eldereman, non propter senectutem, sed propter sapientiam.” Cap. xxxii.
[360]. Page 753. Gloss. in voc. Grafio.
[361]. Grimm seems to think the word was originally Frankish, and only borrowed by the Alamanni, Saxons, and Scandinavians. Rechtsalt. p. 753. I am disposed to claim it for the Frisians and Saxons as well as the Franks.
[362]. Rechtsalt. p. 753.
[363]. Æðelst. v. 8. § 2, 3, 4.
[364]. “Eliguntur in iisdem conciliis et principes, qui iura per pagos vicosque reddunt.” Tac. Germ. xii. Some tribes may have called these principes by one name, some by another: ealdorman, ǽsaga, lahmon, are all legitimate appellations for a geréfa.
[365]. Leg. Eádw. i. § 1. Thorpe, i. 158. Leg. Eádw. i. § 2. Thorpe, i. 160. Leg. Eádw. i. §. 11. Thorpe, i. 164. See also Inst. Polity, § xi. Thorpe, ii. 318.