84 
of which at least would be interesting enough to repay the trouble 
of searching out and extracting. In the collection of similar 
records which were in the Record Office before, and have been 
calendared, I have noted some scores of calendar headings re- 
lating to disputes about lands, coal mines, corn mills, &c., in the 
Burnley district. 
3. Inquisitions Post-Mortem.—A class of the Duchy Re- 
cords which composers of Lancashire family history find of the 
greatest assistance are the Inquisitions Post-Mortem, the pur- 
pose of which at the time they were held may be briefly ex- 
plained. Under the ancient feudal system of English land 
tenure, freeholders held their lands directly of the King as chief 
lord. In Lancashire many estates were thus held of the King 
as parcel of the great fee of the Duchy of Lancaster. As a con- 
sequence of this, whenever a freeholder died without natural 
heirs, his estates reverted to the Crown, and if his son, or other 
heir was a minor at the time of the father’s death he remained 
in the wardship of the King until he came of age. Hence the 
necessity for an enquiry, held directly after the death of a free- 
holder, as to the fact and date of his death, the situation, deserip- 
tion, and acreage of his lands, the number of his messuages, 
mills, &c.; the nature of any incumbrance upon the estate ; the 
name, age, and relationship of the next heir to the deceased, 
and other cognate matters. These inquisitions were held by the 
King’s Escheator, generally at the nearest town to the estate of 
the deceased tenant, who took the necessary proofs upon the 
oaths of a jury constituted of neighbouring gentry and yeomen. 
The report or record of the Inquisition was inscribed by the clerk 
of the Escheator upon a skin or skins of parchment, and was de- 
posited for security and future reference if needed in the archives 
of the Duchy. This system of tenure and the enquiries it en- 
tailed came to an end at the Restoration in 1660. The docu- 
ments known as Inquisitions post-mortem are now in the Public 
Record Office, London. There are about 8600 of them; and 
others are believed to have been lost. Occasionally copies of In- 
quisitions of which no official writing is in the public depository 
are found amongst the older title-deeds of local estates The 
recently-formed Record Society for Lancashire and Cheshire has 
just issued as one of its earliest volumes « selection of between 
2C0 and 800 of the Inquisitions relating to Laucashire estates, 
reduced from the contracted Latin of the originals to full abstracts 
in English. The Record Society will print hereafter other 
volumes of these documents. I myself have abstracted about 150° 
of them from the originals at the Record Office during the 
preparation of my History of Blackburn Parish Two or three 
generations back, when Whitaker wrote his histories, these 
records of Inquisitions were as good as buried, no calendar of 
