these questions elicited can be seen at the session of the eyre in
Shropshire in 1256: seven cases of the escape of thieves were presented
there, compared with eleven of wrongful imprisonment by sheriffs or
serjeants and of the taking of bribes ranging from 12d. to 16s. to let
people go. The bailiff of Munslow hundred had taken a measure or half
a measure of corn from several persons ‘so that they should not be
arrested’ (ne caperentur). The jurors of Halesowen accused not a royal
official but the abbot of Hales of imprisoning men of the township and
letting them go again ‘at his pleasure’ (pro voluntate sua).^19
In the 1250s Henry III’s government was facing a crisis precipitated
by the financial demands of the king’s ambition to win the kingdom of
Sicily for his younger son, but behind this lay a longer-term failure to
keep order at home. The English system of writs and actions was
founded on the work of the sheriff and shire court, no less than French
justice was founded on what was done in the bailliagesand assizes, but
too often feudal lords and the new officialdom contested control of the
localities at the expense of the people. In the seventeenth century the
great lawyer Sir Edward Coke described this as ‘the irregular time of
Henry III’ when great men took distresses ‘of the beasts of their tenants
or neighbours... to enforce the owners of the beasts for necessity to
yield to their desire’.^20 The distraint of peoples’ goods was a normal way
of compelling them to appear in court, and lords were using it to make
tenants come to their courts rather than the king’s. An article added for
the eyre of 1239 aimed to discover who had withheld suit (attendance
at) shire and hundred courts without royal grant of the privilege, though
perhaps by the consent of the sheriff or his bailiffs. In Shropshire in
1256 another of the charges against the abbot of Hales was that he pre-
vented the men of Hales from taking pleas of replevin (seeking the
return of distrained goods) to the county court and the king’s bailiffs
from freeing the distresses he had taken.^21
The inquest was developed by the kings of England and France in the
first place to enforce their own rights and discover offenders against
their peace. The annals of the monastery of Burton which give the
articles of inquiry before the justices at Lichfield in 1254 also list twenty-
two questions asked by special commissioners sent out by Henry III
at their session at Stafford in 1255. These are about the ‘subtraction’ by
154 New High Courts and Reform of the Regime
Press, 1921), and Crown Pleas of the Wiltshire Eyre, 1249, ed. C. A. F. Meekings. Wiltshire
Archaeological Society Records Branch, 16 (Devizes, 1961), 27–33.
(^19) The Roll of the Shropshire Eyre of 1256, ed. A. Harding, Selden Soc. 96 (London, 1981),
pp. xvi–xvii, 395.
(^20) D. A. Carpenter, ‘King, Magnates and Society: The Personal Rule of King Henry III,
1234–1258’, Speculum60 (1985), 50–1; A. Harding, England in the Thirteenth Century
(Cambridge UP, 1993), 276–9.
(^21) Wiltshire Eyre, ed. Meekings, 31–2; Roll of the Shropshire Eyre, 236 (no. 647).