POLITICAL HISTORY 



for panic-stricken exaggeration in the rough contemporary estimate of 

 13,180 deaths between 8 September, 1349, and 11 January, 1350, in the 

 ten parishes of the deanery of Amounderness,"' there can be no doubt that 

 the mortahty was very heavy, and here as elsewhere affected social and 

 economic as well as religious conditions.^"" 



A year after this visitation Lancashire was erected into a county 

 palatine, and became to a large extent an imperium in imperio. The crown 

 had already by a series of grants divested itself in favour of the earls of 

 Lancaster of a number of jura regalia of a more or less profitable nature. 

 Earl Edmund was empowered to exercise the minor jurisdiction described in 

 the old Anglo-Saxon phrase as ' sac and soc, infangenthef and outfangenthef ' and 

 obtained immunity from a number of ancient taxes, tolls, and services due to 

 the king.^" These franchises were common enough, but Edward III in the 

 early years of his reign conferred upon his cousin Earl Henry rights which 

 the crown was much more chary in granting away ; the return of all royal 

 writs, all pleas of withernam [de vetito namio), and all the fines and amerce- 

 ments imposed upon his men and tenants in the king's courts.^"^ A 

 subsequent charter (7 May, 1342) confirmed and extended these liberties. 

 The right to execute the summonses of the exchequer and to make all 

 attachments arising out of pleas of the crown completed the transference of 

 what may be called judicial administrative work from the king's officials to 

 the earl's. Also he was henceforth to take not only the fines and amerce- 

 ments incurred by his men and tenants, but their chattels when they committed 

 offences for which they ought to lose them, together with all forfeited issues, 

 and forfeitures which would otherwise have gone to the crown. To these 

 lucrative rights was added exemption from pavage, passage, and a number 

 of other tolls throughout the kingdom.''^ 



The enjoyment of these jura regalia was not, however, confined to 

 the county of Lancaster ; they were granted for the whole of the lands held 

 by the earls. Their position in the county only differed from that they 

 occupied in their other estates in so far as they were themselves hereditary 

 sheriffs of Lancashire, while elsewhere they merely excluded the sheriffs in 

 matters covered by their charters.^" Though the ordinary revenue of the 

 county went, with insignificant exceptions, into the earl's coffers, and most 



"' Engl. Hist. Rev. v, 524 sqq. See above, p. 29. In 1 35 1 William de Liverpool v^as charged with having 

 caused a third part of the men at the vill of Everton, after their death, to be carried to his house at the time 

 of the plague, in respect of whom he did not fully answer to the lord ; Assize R. 445 m. I. 



'"' Yet there seems to have been no scarcity of agricultural labour here after the pestilence. In the 

 Statute of Labourers the men of Lancashire, Staffordshire, Derbyshire, Craven, and the Marches of Wales and 

 Scotland, whose custom it was to go to other counties in August for the harvest, were specially exempted from 

 the restrictions on the fi-eedom of movement of labour; Rot. Pari, ii, 234. This outflow was due to the limited 

 area under tillage in these districts. 



'^^ Engl. Hist. Rev. x, 37. 



"' W. J. Hardy, Chart, of Duchy of Lane. 1. On the strength of these liberties Robert de RadclifFe, Earl 

 Henry's deputy as sheriff in 1 341, attempted without success to exclude the king's escheator from the 

 county; Cal. Close, 1 341-3, p. 275. 



''^ W. J. Hardy, Chart, of Duchy of Lane, 2. These franchises were granted to Earl Henry and the heirs 

 of his body, but in 1349 his son, whose heirs were young unmarried daughters, surrendered the grant-in-tail, 

 which was described as having been made ' to the very great damage and excessive disinherison of the King,' 

 and accepted a new grant for life ; ibid. 4. 



'^ The earl was sheriff of Lancashire de feodo, and appointed a deputy who was strictly called sub- 

 viceeoms or under-sheriff, but is often described, even on the Rolls of the Exchequer, as sheriff simply. 

 Objection was taicen in 1340 to a writ in which he was so styled, but was not sustained because as acting 

 sheriff he took the sherifPs oath in the Exchequer; Tear Book, 14-15 Edw. Ill (Rolls Ser.), Ixv, 90, 98. 



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