earl. The original was lost between 1580 and 1647, as mentioned below; but copies of a portion of it remain in the libraries of earl Grosvenor at Eaton and in the College of Arms; and the author has also a transcript from the first mentioned MS. with additional entries, collected from Vernon's papers and the Chartulary of St. Werburgh, with which they had been incorporated. The Eaton copy (which the author was permitted to transcribe by the kindness of earl Grosvenor) was the only one known when the account of Eaton was printed; but as it is incorporated with extracts from Flower and Glover's Visitation of 1580, the author referred to the visitation book itself (MSS. Coll. Arm. I. D. 14) and there found Glover's original abstract which agrees with the Eaton copy, excepting that it [the latter] contains at the end a few more deeds[1] relating to the advowsons of Astbury and Neston.
After remarking that the Cheshire 'Domesday' appeared to be unique as a legal document, Ormerod classifies the entries in the herald's extracts under various justiciars of Chester; points out that the original roll seems to have been in the exchequer of Chester in the time of John Booth (1584–1659) and was certainly there at the Visitation of 1580, but was lost when Sir Peter Leycester was making his collections; shows by analysis that the herald's extracts were a portion of the true 'Domesday' Roll because they included charters known from other sources to have been entered upon it; and also proves (as we can now more abundantly show) that there were many other entries which the herald did not copy.[2]
Many years after the publication of his History, Ormerod again turned his attention to the Cheshire 'Domesday' Roll, and in 1851 he issued, for private distribution, a Memoir on the subject, with a Calendar of Fragments of the record collected by him, and some notices of the thirteenth-century justiciars of Cheshire.[3] In this little known and scarce essay he emphasized the true nature of the record as a series of enrolments of judgements, charters, grants and agreements, suggested by quotations that it was rather a roll (rotulus) than a book (liber), and, by means of extracts from other records and collations, confirmed his earlier conclusion that the extracts in the College of Arms Manuscript were taken from the original Roll then (1580) in existence. He gives in considerable detail, by way of proof of his statements, the pleadings in the Sandbach case from the Coram Rege (Curia Regis) Roll of 38 Henry III, to which reference is made below.
- ↑ We think this is an error, and that the additional deeds were not part of the Domesday abstracts.
- ↑ Hist. of Cheshire, 2nd ed., i. xxxv.
- ↑ 8vo, 27 pp., 1851, not published, for private distribution only, limited to 120 copies; with Additions and Index, 1856, 8 pp. It is included also in his Miscell. Palatina, 1851.
