ANECDOTES OF FEUDAL TIMES IN ENGLAND. 159 



be deprived of his eyes, arid other parts ; and that such privilege has 

 been used time out of mind.* 



The vellum register of the manor of Spalding, in Lincolnshire, to 

 which Gough refers, records the execution of eighty felons, from 

 41 Henry III. to 16 Henry VIII. ;t an interval, however, of above 

 two centuries and a half, which furnishes an average of three exe- 

 cutions in a year, with an excess of seventeen, 



It may easily be conceived that these numerous jurisdictions in 

 capital felonies were detrimental to public justice. Persons were 

 often adjudged to death for offences which more competent tribu- 

 nals than the courts of baro/iies and manors would have dismissed 

 with slighter punishment. A man sometimes committed a felony, 

 which ought to have been tried before the king's officers, but was 

 seized in his flight through the territory of some petty sovereign, 

 for a real or supposed offence, distinct from the first, and executed 

 by a judgment in the baronial or manorial court, as the case 

 might be. Certainly the judges could have done no more than put 

 an end to the felon's career ; but, as in the instance of the men at 

 Derby, who committed one offence, for which they deserved hang- 

 ing, and were hanged for another which they had no means of 

 committing, the justice of the country was outraged. A ridiculous 

 case of this kind occurred in the reign of Edward I. The presump- 

 tion and subsequent obstinacy of the haughty baron are not more 

 remarkable than the absurdity of the means seriously adopted to 

 revive the lustre of the monarch's tarnished crown, and to heal the 

 wound sustained by his dignity. 



At the michaelmas parliamentary pleadings at Clypston, in 1290, 

 Bogo de Knowil, the king's bailiff of Montgomery, complains that 

 a person in that county, whose name he knows not, having slain a. 

 servant of the bishop of Hereford, fled to the land of Edmund de 

 Mortimer, of Wiggemor, where he was seized and thrown into 

 prison. Edmund de Mortimer, though frequently required by 

 Bogo to surrender the felon into the king's prison of Mortimer, 

 absolutely refused to part with him ; and afterwards by a judgment 

 obtained in his own court at Wiggemor, at the suit of the deceased's 

 relations, hanged the felon, in violation of the liberties of the king's 

 castle of Montgomery, and against his crown and dignity. On the 

 baron's admission of the fact, and submission to the king's will, 

 judgment was formally pronounced, that as he could not deny having 

 adjudged the felon in his court of Wiggemor in violation, &c., he 

 had entirely forfeited his liberty of Wiggemor ; but, by the king's 

 especial favour, it was granted that Edmund de Mortimer should 

 not lose the liberty on this account, but be amerced one hundred 

 marks for his offence ; and, in token of restitution of the king's 

 liberty, he should render to Bogo de Knowil, the king's bailiff, a 

 mannikin or puppet (" quandam formam hominis") in place of the 

 executed felon. At the same time, the bailiff was solemnly enjoined 



* Blount, Tenures, p. 150. f Camden, vol. II. p. 345. 



