Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/34

26 January The End of the Norman Earldom of Chester TOWARDS the end of October 1232 a great earl of Chester, Ranulph de BlundeviUe, * almost the last relic of the feudal aristocracy of the Conquest ' } was on his death-bed at Walling- ford. King Henry, who had so often relied upon him for help and advice, must have felt that by his death the Crown was losing the much-needed support of a bold and independent spirit. Almost the last act of the earl had been to save the king from letting loose the mob of London to bring back the fugitive Hubert de Burgh. Doubtless in gratitude and relief, and following the custom of the times, the king on 25 October (apparently while yet the earl lived) gave to the abbey of St. Werburgh at Chester a yearly sixty shillings from the revenues of the town of Newcastle-under-Lyme to support a chaplain who should celebrate divine service daily for the soul of the earl.^ His death took place the following day. It is with more material matters that we shall alone deal here, the partition of his vast estates, the devolution of his honours ; and the same processes upon the death, five years later, of his nephew and successor in the earldom of Chester. Ranulph's great inheritance was divided among his sisters or their heirs, and after the death of Earl John (the Scot) the county palatine was annexed to the Crown, the title of earl of Chester remaining as a dignity of the eldest son of the king of England to this day. Twice within a few years the inheritance of an earl of Chester, says Maitland, ' fell among the spindles ' ; but if the question had been asked what exactly happened on the deaths of these earls it would not have been possible to point to any collected narrative of the facts. The history of the great county palatine, in many ways one of the most interesting of our counties, has yet to be written in the light of modern research. Ormerod's work, a fine performance for the early years of the nineteenth century, is directed mainly to- wards manorial history, and he has added little to the statements » Stubbs, ConsU Hist. ii. 47. The Complete Peerage (ed. V. Gibbs) gives 28 October as date of his death. This is certainly wrong. For various dates given see Obits of St. Werburgh^s Abbey (Rec. Soc. for Lane, and Chesh., vol. Ixiv), p. 101. » Col. of Charter Rolls, 25 October and 27 December 1232.