which I received from old John Booth of Twamlow', and he proceeds 'there was a Doomsday book in our Exchequer at Chester formerly, wherein many deeds and records were enrolled, but this Book of Record is now lost'. Under Dunham-Massy[1] he mentions the enrolment in the Cheshire Domesday Book, 'which is now lost', of a grant to Birkenhead Priory.
Sir Thomas Mainwaring, in his Reply, dated 1673, to Leycester in their controversy over the legitimacy of their ancestress Amicia, also gives the Barterton entry 'from a roll of antient charts called Doomesday remaining in the Castle of Chester among the records there'.[2] He does not refer to the loss of the roll, and was probably quoting from Leycester.
We have seen that Dr. Gower, writing in 1772, stated that the roll was in Chester Castle in 1638 (a fact no doubt derived from one of the volumes of Vernon's manuscripts lent to him by Peter Shakerley), and also that the document, after passing ex officio in 1647 into the hands of John Bradshaw, the chief justice of Chester, was lost in the confusion of the times. We do not know the authority for the last statement. Inquiries made from the present representatives of the Bradshaw family have been unsuccessful in discovering any trace of the document among the family papers, and the suggestion that what was left of the record was lost about 1647 appears a not unlikely one if this had not happened earlier.
John Bradshaw, the famous president, was appointed in 1637 as one of the earl of Chester's attorneys-at-law for Cheshire and Flint. He became chief justice of Chester in 1647, and held the office, as he contended, until his death in 1659. One of the terms of the surrender of Chester by Lord Byron to the parliamentary general, Sir William Brereton, on 3 February 1646/7, was that all the records in the Castle 'without diminution, embezzling, or defacing' should be given up. In 1649 Bradshaw's deputy at Chester proclaimed the king a traitor. The royal arms were removed from the Shire Hall and those of the earls from the exchequer. The sword of Chester and the mace had been sent up to London as trophies, but were afterwards returned to the city. Among the records which thus should have come into the hands of the chief justice or his deputy, would be the roll constituting the Cheshire 'Domesday', but Vernon, curiously using the same word as in the surrender treaty, tells Dugdale shortly afterwards that it had been 'embezzled'. We hear no more of it. Our theory as to the earlier gradual dismemberment of the roll has already been given above, and if that process continued, its final destruction, if not intentional, must have been inevitable within a short period of time.
