Page:Englishhistorica36londuoft.djvu/220

212 'SHIRE-HOUSE * AND CASTLE YARD April with the indispensable knowledge of the local antiquary ? It is, unfortunately, quite exceptional to find the two united in one individual. At Cambridge, by one of these exceptions, Maitland wrote of ground with which he was personally familiar and used local records over which he himself had pored. Outside of Cambridge he was of necessity dependent on the work of local antiquaries. He did, indeed, venture on the generalization : ' I believe that the castle precinct, " the castle fee ", has seldom been for all legal purposes a piece of a borough ' ; 1 but, to prove that this belief was sound, he would have had to examine and cite countless books on local history, and to satisfy himself that he could rely on their statements. Keeping to the east of England we find that another castle affords an instance in point. Colchester, like Norwich, had a castle with a mighty keep ; it had also at least two of the features that Maitland noted at Cambridge. One of these was that the bailey, in which stands (for there is no mound) the above keep (formerly used as a county jail), was, according to Morant's statement, ' independent of the Corporation and not within the bounds of any one of the parishes 2 He cites, as parallel cases, Norwich and Worcester. The other of these features seems to have been quite unknown, even to Colchester antiquaries, till a few years ago. An inquisition as to the state of Colchester Castle was made in 1334, and in the return to that inquiry there is mention of a house in the castle, where the justices sat when they visited Colchester. 3 This would be in effect, if not in actual name, the ' shire-house '. It is only by patient and careful investigation that the facts as to the exclusion of castles and their baileys from the jurisdiction of the towns in which they stood can be definitely established. There is apt to be confusion on this point between the actual site of the castle in relation to the walls of a town and the exclusion of that site from the town's jurisdiction. In the valuable book of Mrs. Armitage she states, of urban castles, that less than a third are placed inside the Roman walls or the Saxon or Danish earthworks of the towns, while at least two-thirds are wholly or partly outside these enclosures. This circumstance is important because the position outside the town indicates the mistrust of an invader, not the confidence of a native prince. 4 This question is quite distinct from that of an enclave within the town being exempt from its jurisdiction. Mrs. Armitage 's contention is that ' even when the castle is inside the town walls, 1 Op. cit, p. 38. 2 See, for his proofs, the foot-note to his account of the castle {History of Colchester, ed. 1768, p. 10). 3 Cat. of Inquis., Miscell. ii, no. 1418 4 Of. cit. p. 96.