INTRODUCTION xli 



close connexion between these copies. It appears that, 

 though the number of MSS. is small, we can trace them to 

 more than one distinct centre of transcription. 



A very curious part of this treatise is the table for 

 reducing acres based on poles of 18, 22, or 24 feet to acres 

 based on a pole of 16 feet. 1 This must ha\e been a 

 difficult sum to work out, and it is to the author's credit 

 that his arithmetic is correct, though he had evident 

 difficulty in the addition of fractions, and expresses 1 acre 

 3^ roods by the cumbrous form ' cne acre and a half and 

 a rood and a half and the sixteenth of a rood.' After all, 

 his results give only a very rough approximation, for the 

 recognised pole, as defined by statute, was not 16 feet but 

 16£. The accurate calculation involving a square perch of 

 30£ yards was probably too much for the author to attempt, 

 and he solved the difficulty by understating the length of 

 the statute pole ; but it may be that a pole of 16 feet was 

 used in his part of the country. 



V. 



SENESCHAUCIE. 



There is no indication, so far as I am aware, that 

 enables us to identify the author of the Seneschaucie, or to 

 assign its date with any exactness. As already stated, it 

 furnished the scheme for some chapters of Fleta, and it 

 cannot therefore be later than the time of Edward I. ; it 

 also occurs in a MS. in Cambridge marked Mm. i. 27 f. 133, 

 which must be assigned to the same reign. This is a quarto 

 on parchment containing a Begistrum Brevium, a collection 

 of statutes, proclamations, an assise of breads of the time 

 of King John, and many other documents. This work also 

 occurs in the same hand as Walter of Henley in the Liber 

 Horn, Dd. vii. 6 f. 50&, at Cambridge, and also in the same 

 hand as the anonymous Husbandry in the fifteenth century 

 Cambridge University MS. (Hh. iii. 11 f. 167 bis) which 

 contains all these three treatises. 



1 See below, p. 68. 



C 



