THE OLD LOCAL COURTS i6r 



to the special justices responsible for its enforcement/ states 

 that actions against takers and givers of excess wages are to 

 be brought in the court of the lord of the place in which the 

 ofifence occurred, and that lords if guilty of infringement of 

 the ordinance, are to be sued in the court of the county, 

 wapentake, or trithing, or in any other of the king's courts. 

 Proof of refusal to serve for legal wages is to be made be- 

 fore two witnesses in the presence of the sheriff, bailiff, 

 lord or constable; mayors and bailiffs of towns are bound 

 to enforce the victuallers' clause." The net result of 

 these rather confused administrative provisions certainly 

 gives the impression that the old local courts were to deal 

 with the ordinance; in the case of the statute, however, 

 there is no warrant for any such assumption, since no 

 courts are mentioned save quarter sessions. As far as my 

 limited investigation goes,^ the facts of the case are as fol- 

 lows. The one county court record for this decade that 1 



'See p. 10. "App., 9-1 1. 



' Rolls of the communal courts, that is of the old county courts, and 

 of hundred courts not in private hands are rare; cf. Select Pleas in 

 Manorial Courts, introduction, xv. Rolls of seignorial courts, how- 

 ever, exist in great abundance, both of the ordinary feudal courts of the 

 manor and of the hundred, and of franchise courts; and are to be found 

 in all the great repositories, e. g., the British Museum, the Bodleian, 

 the Cambridge University library, and the Public Record Office, as well 

 as in many private collections. (For these latter, cf. the reports of the 

 Hist. MSS. Comm.) For an account of printed rolls, see Gross, 

 Sources of Eng. Hist., s. 57, "Local Records and Local Annals;" 

 also Davenport, Classified List of Printed Court Rolls. The number 

 in print is being steadily increased each year. 



The group in the Record Office though including some hundreds of 

 rolls (see List of Court Rolls, Lists and Indexes, no. vi) is small in 

 comparison with the total number in existence. As it was impossible 

 for me to make an exhaustive study of even this group, still less to ex- 

 amine rolls in other archives, I endeavored merely to gain an impres- 

 sion of the attitude of these courts toward the statutes. For this pur- 

 pose I went through some 50 rolls for the decade 1349-1359, selected 



