the first ‘articles of the eyre’ were drawn up at the end of the twelfth
century, the Inquest of Sheriffs of 1170 had asked about people accused
out of hatred or for reward and those whom officials let off in return for
money. In 1224 justices were sent from the curia registo hear com-
plaints of the misdeeds of Fawkes de Breauté and his henchmen, who
had been established in control of the midland counties by King John a
decade earlier. A series of accusations was made to them that Richard
Foliot, undersheriff of Oxfordshire, had imprisoned people unjustly in
Oxford castle or extracted land, horses, and money by threatening
imprisonment; in one case Richard and a fellow undersheriff were
alleged to have taken from a man ‘thirty quarters of hard corn and malt,
six oxen, two cows, two horses, thirteen pigs, forty ewes and as many
lambs, the flesh of twelve pigs with the lard, yarn for making a hundred
ells of linen cloth, three of his wife’s cloaks, three rochets, four shirts,
two silk wimples and three linen ones, one brooch of gold and three of
silver, three bushels of linseed, all his domestic utensils and all the iron-
work of his plough, ten linen sheets, two blankets, two napkins, two
towels and four pillows, and one silver mark’, as the price of his not
being put in prison.^17
The articles of the eyre were at first concerned less with extortion by
threats of imprisonment than with the escape of prisoners from custody
and the king’s consequent loss of felons’ chattels. Then, probably for the
eyre of 1239, a question was introduced concerning bailiffs who took
bribes for removing recognitors from juries. For the eyre of 1246 there
were new questions about ‘sheriffs and bailiffs who fomented actions in
order to gain lands, wardships or debts, whereby truth and justice are
stifled’, or ‘took bribes with both hands, from one party and the other’;
and about petty bailiffs who held ale-drinkings at the time of the greater
half-yearly meetings of the hundred courts or extorted forced gifts of
crops at the harvest season. In 1254 the justices were also to ask which
sheriffs and bailiffs had taken money from those indicted of homicide
or of theft to release them on bail, when such persons were not to be
released without the king’s express order; and which had taken money
several times for one amercement, or had distrained several people with
the same name for a fine when only one of them was ‘in mercy’.^18 What
Complaints against officials 153Series, 1864), 330–1; see C. T. Flower, Introduction to the Curia Regis Rolls, Selden Soc. 62
(London, 1944), ch. 7 for the role of the sheriff in local government.
(^17) Select Cases of Procedure without Writ under Henry III, ed. H. G. Richardson and
G. O. Sayles, Selden Soc. 60 (London, 1941), lv, 49–57 (esp. no. 35j); see Curia Regis Rolls of
the Reign of Henry III, xvii (1242–3), ed. A. Nicol (London: HMSO, 1991), 16–17 (no. 53),
and Roll and Writ File of the Berkshire Eyre of 1248, ed. M. T. Clanchy, Selden Soc. 90
(London, 1973), 381–2, for other typical examples of complaints against officials.
(^18) For the development of the articles of the eyre, see H. M. Cam, Studies in the Hundred
Rolls, Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History, ed. P. Vinogradoff, 6 (Oxford: Clarendon