the earl or his justiciary as well as of the 'barons' and knights who were present, had to be obtained, and no doubt fees were payable for the work of enrolment. Most of the documents enrolled are witnessed by the justiciar and magnates present. In some cases it is recorded that the seal of the justiciar or of his deputy was affixed to a charter which it was intended to enroll, in addition to those of the parties. This practice may explain the occasional presence on documents of seals which otherwise do not appear to be related thereto.
There are instances of these enrolments in pleno scaccario, and the roll seems to have been kept in the exchequer at Chester Castle, the depository of the palatine records, just as the treasury at Winchester and elsewhere contained the national exchequer records and the great Domesday Book itself. More than half of the enrolments recovered consist of charters and agreements, both new and old, granting lands or rights to laymen or clerics. Quitclaims and final concords are numerous. Other entries are of exchanges; admissions of many kinds, such as that a man, his son, and sequela, are free and not in villeinage, or of rights of common, or of verbal grants; perambulations, boundary agreements, acquittance of suit by the earl, grants of custody of heirs' inheritances and such like; in fact, the entries in the 'Domesday' Roll illustrate many phases of the daily medieval life when few could read and write and the publicity and permanence now provided by the evidence of press and book did not exist as means of record. An interesting feature is the large proportion of entries which provide evidence of transactions in which women were concerned. Charters in which husband and wife are grantors are frequently enrolled. The settlement of dower is often recorded. Three sisters formally appear to quitclaim lands to the heir of Poole in Wirral. The daughter of the 'baron' of Wich Malbank comes to Chester to admit in public her grant of land, and it is enrolled. A quitclaim of her dower lands by the widow of Ralph de Kingsley; agreements between mother and son, and brother and four sisters; an admission of tenure by a husband for his wife and of homage due to an heiress; these all illustrate a class of transaction for which entry upon the 'Domesday' Roll was evidently considered particularly desirable and appropriate. In one case a grant of 1287 to Ralph de Vernon by Richard de Lostock alone begins 'Noveritis nos dedisse', and proceeds to state that 'Sigilla nostra' had been affixed. The seventeenth-century collector of the Shakerley MS. observed this and remarks, 'Nota, he wryts in the plurall number and his wife is not named by whose right he had the lands'.[1] She was Agnes, co-heiress to her brother Richard de Wilbraham
- ↑ Shakerley MS., no. 4, fo. 103.
