[658]. See Bracton, f. 122 b.
[659]. In 1197, Richard’s Assize of Measures appointed six custodientes in each county and town. These were coroners over a limited class of offences, viz., the use of false weights and measures. Cf. infra, under c. 35.
[660]. Statute of Westminster, I. c. 10.
[661]. Cf. Coke, Second Institute, 31, “In case when any man come to violent or untimely death, super visum corporis.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE.
Omnes comitatus, hundrede, wapentakii, et trethingic, sint ad antiquas firmas absque ullo incremento, exceptis dominicis maneriis nostris.
All counties, hundreds, wapentakes, and trithings (except our demesne manors) shall remain at the old rents, and without any additional payment.
This provision also was directed against the sheriffs, and shows a praiseworthy determination to get to the root of the disease, instead of merely attacking the symptoms. The rents at which the counties (or parts of them) were farmed out to the sheriffs must no longer be arbitrarily raised, but were to remain at the old figures which had become stereotyped from long usage. To understand how such increases would injuriously affect the inhabitants of the county, some explanation is necessary. Centuries before the Norman Conquest, the long process had been already completed by which England had been gradually mapped out into shires on lines substantially the same as those which still exist. Each county had been further subdivided into smaller districts known as “hundreds” in the south, and as “wapentakes” in the Danish districts of the north; while intermediate divisions existed, exceptionally, in some of the specially large counties such as York and Lincoln, each of which had three “trithings” or ridings.
In commenting upon chapter 24, it has been already explained how the Anglo-Saxon kings entrusted their interests in each shire to an officer called a sheriff, and how a similar officer under the Norman kings became practically the chief magistrate and local judge in the county. His financial duties, however, long remained the most important: William I. and his successors had greater pecuniary interests in the English counties than their Anglo-Saxon forerunners ever had, and the sheriffs were their agents in collecting all rents and other dues. Even before the Conquest, however, the sheriff of an ordinary county had ceased to be a mere intermediary, who lifted the king’s rents and paid over, pound by pound, the yearly varying sums he might receive. He had become a firmarius: he bought for a yearly rent the right to collect and appropriate to his own uses the various revenues of the county. The Crown got only the exact sum stipulated for, known as the firma comitatus; while the balance, if any, remained with the sheriff. That officer was liable, on the other hand, for the sum agreed on, even when the annual yield fell short of his anticipations. In plain words, the sheriff speculated in the returns, and it was his business, by fair means or foul, to make sure of a handsome surplus.
Authorities differ as to the exact list of items purchased by the slump sum known as firma comitatus; but undoubtedly the two chief sources of revenue embraced were the profits of justice dispensed in the local courts, and the rents and returns from the various royal manors in the county.