2o6 THE MANOR COURT
after which he must appear or he made default; and the number of
his essoins is indicated in the rolls by the figures, j°, ij°, iij°. When he
appeared he justified the previous essoins, and all was then in order.1
Probably early in the proceedings the jury—or juries—were
sworn in: indeed on the Ramsey manors of the thirteenth century
this was always the first business. The presence of these juries
and the problems they present will demand a great deal of our
attention, but nevertheless this must not be allowed to obscure
the fact that behind them was the whole body of the court, and
that it was to this that they reported, and that it was the court
that made the final dooms. We can go a good deal farther in
asserting this to-day than Maitland could nearly fifty years ago.
Thanks to the publication of some excellent series of Court
Rolls of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries it has been
possible to make much more detailed and extensive investiga-
tions than were possible then, and to give chapter and verse for
the tentative views Maitland expressed in his often-quoted
Introduction to the Selden Society volume of Select Pleas in
Manorial Courts. There he summed up his conclusions thus:
We may believe that even the customary tenants, even the born
villans, were or had been entitled to the judgment, not merely of the
lord's steward, but of the manorial curia; we even hear a distinct
claim of villan tenants to have the judgment of their neighbours....
When, too, we consider that even the king's courts gave the villan an
action against all but his lord, and that the freeholders and customary
holders of the manor must often have been involved in the same dis-
putes, we shall have some difficulty in believing that the tenants in
villanage had no judge in the manor court save the lord's steward.2
Maitland was able to show that for freehold tenants, or on
ancient demesne, or at the court of a fair, it was not for the lord's
steward to make the judgments, but he is forced to add
Elsewhere the position of the curia is less clear because it seems to
discharge many functions: now it judges, now it presents, now it
1 Hales Rolls, Intro, xxvii-ix withfull references. It is worth noting that there
seems to be some doubt at times as to a serf's essoining, as at Ingoldmells in
1291, when it is said, "the essoin does not lie because A. holds bond land".
See p. 2 Ingoldmells Court Rolls. The whole law of essoins, however, was
very complicated. See Hales Rolls, xxviii-ix, and Selden Soc. n, 67, for
examples, and Kitchin's Le Court Leete (1651 ed.)> pp. 187-93, for much
information and law.
* Op. ctt. Ixx.