THE GENERAL EYRE.
THE actual conditions of life in mediaeval England are reflected more vividly in the Year Books, in which were reported the proceedings of the courts, than anywhere else. The efforts of the Selden Society to re-edit such of these neglected records as have been published and to print others that had remained in manuscript deserve a wider recognition by historians as well as by lawyers. The human interest of the Year Books was well brought out by Mr. W. O. Bolland in some lectures published last year. He has now made a further contribution to the subject in a set of lectures, delivered in the University of London, on The General Eyre (Cambridge University Press, Os. net), to which Professor Hazeltine has contributed a prefatory essay. Mr. Bolland, who has done more work on the Year Books than any other living scholar, is here concerned with that terrible institu- tion, the Eyre, through which in the twelfth, thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries the Crown at uncertain intervals asserted its authority over the local courts and jurisdictions, and amassed great sums for the Exchequer. The Justices in Eyre, while at work in a county, exercised the whole power of the King and replaced for that county the courts at Westminster. A jury from each hundred had to answer for all that had been done amiss since the last Eyre, and officials and others who were found wanting were heavily fined. Mr. Bolland draws his illus- trations mainly from the Eyre of Kent in 1313, which may have lasted a year, so numerous were the inquisitorial Articles to which the hundreds of- jurors had to answer, and so many were the Crown pleas and the official acts of commission or miasma
With which the Justices had to deal. The Justices were pecu- liarly harsh and arbitrary. After reading Mr. Bolland's book, we can understand why in 1233 the Cornishmen, on hearing the Eyre proclaimed, took to the woods for fear of the tribunal. Thus at one Eyre it was reported that a coroner had died, leaving his rolls in the custody of his executrix. The Justices ordered her to be arrested and caused her lands and goods to be seized. At another Eyre the bailiffs of 'Canterbury were held liable because, many years before, their predecessors, long since dead, had been ordered by Royal writ to send certain prisoners to Gascony ; the writ had been lost, and the disappearance of the prisoners from safe custody was attributed to the unlucky bailiffs in office at the time of the Eyre. Again, in a case of sheep-stealing, the thief had taken sanctuary and then abjured the realm, whereupon the -Sheriff had restored the sheep to their- owner. The Justices in Eyre took strong exception to this. Why had not the plaintiff prosecuted the thief to conviction— as he obviously could not do ? The sheep had become the King's property, and the Sheriff was held responsible to the Crown for their value. Mr. Rolland has extracted from the records •some cases of assault and battery—sithilar to those mentioned in the Poston Letters—showing that law and order were sadly lacking in mediaeval England, which resembled Bolshevik Russia or the Irish Free State. The severity of the Justices in Eyre was perhaps needed to recall local transgressors to a sense of their duty to the commonweal.
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