210 THE MANOR COURT
whether the chief manorial officer and his underlings are satis-
factory or no; whether the beasts are well tended and the soil
well tilled; whether any have made their sons clerics without
leave, or married their daughters without licence, etc.1
We have here a hint of the confusion that was arising in the
conduct of manorial business. Matters were not kept strictly to
their various classes: at one moment the court is dealing with an
offence against the manorial economy; at another with an in-
fringement of one of the lord's franchises, but things get
muddled one with another in the record—and so are often
potential sources of confusion to modern inquirers. The thir-
teenth-century suitors and the presiding officer, however, were
clear enough, and if we look closely we can see they have put
various bodies to work in the court. We have first, and most
important, the practice of the whole court making its decisions
and giving the dooms. Secondly, we have juries of presentment,
charged with the business of enquiring into offences against the
franchises, or as a Hales entry runs: a jury " ad dicendum verita-
tem super articulis consuetis " ;2 and thirdly we have juries of in-
quisition, whose business it is to enquire into manorial offences
and matters concerning the working of the manor. The work of
what we may call these several manifestations of the suitors is
not, apparently, recorded in any very ordered way.
It is not easy to see how the jurors were selected, or what
determined the number of men thought necessary to form a jury.
At the Great Courts or half-yearly courts when the view of frank-
pledge was made, a jury of twelve seems almost inevitable, and in
general we find a jury of this size enrolled as what we have called
a jury of presentment. They are generally spoken of as "elected",
though we know nothing of how this took place. They seem to
have been elected before the actual sitting of the court, for we
find men fined for their absence.3 In some rolls a long list of
names is given, and marked "Nomina juratorum",4 and it may
be that these were a panel from which the twelve sworn jurors
were chosen.6
1 Glouc. Cart, in, 221-2. For the Articles in detail see Hearnshaw, Leet
Jurisdiction, and Selden Soc. n, xxxii, and iv, 93 ff.
1 Hales Rolls, 138. Articulis=the Articles of the View. See above, and
cf. Selden Soc. iv, no. 3 Selden Soc. II, 88.
* Hales Rolls, 46, 48, 51, 62. * Ibid. 7 n. 5.