330 THe Feriod ot Constitution Making
we hear of a larger group with communal obligations—•
the ''four neighboring vills"1 which had many petty but
burdensome things to do. Moreover, the parish was
already appearing as a "unit of local obligation": upon
the parishioners rested the responsibility for the upkeep
of the church, providing ecclesiastical apparatus, audit-
ing churchwardens' accounts, and levying an embryonic
church rate—functions which on the continent rested
mostly upon the incumbent.
Less famiHar, but of the same general character as all
the preceding, were the king's direct and personal uses of
the people in getting special jobs done and his local in-
terests safeguarded. These uses are most miscellaneous
and dovetail endlessly, but may be roughly classified as
follow: estimates and oversight connected with building
and repairing the king's houses and castles, running all
the way from extensive work on a whole building to a
gate, a window, or a shelf; furnishing the greatest variety
of data relating to land, custodies, and the rights to them
or the services connected with them; oversight of trans-
portation or estimating the cost of transportation: money,
armour, prisoners, venison, lumber, most often the king's
wine, and here and in some other cases including purchase
or estimate of value; fixing the value of land, surveying
it, laying out a highway, etc.; reckoning certain expenses
1 Perhaps there was an original notion of the four points of the com-
pass of the neighbourhood. The expression had a meaning when the
duties arose in connection with a crime or other localised event; but in
many cases apparently it was but a traditional way of expressing vill obli-
gation. Sometimes the work was done by one vill and sometimes by
four, but we kaow almost nothing of the ways in which such duties were
regulated and enforced. In the boroughs the parishes or wards had cor-
responding duties. The vills were to "take charge of felons, to lead them
to gaol and even to the gallows; to receive the head of a culprit who had
been decapitated by summary justice; tc hold and account to the king
for deodands and the lands and chattels of felons; to watch any person who
had fled to sanctuary, and to be present at his adjuration of the realm; to
send for the coroner when a sudden death occurred; to guard the dead
body until the coroner came, and to be present at the view and burial;
to make good the loss incurred by merchants of the staple through the
unlawful seizure of their goods; to repair hedges, bridges, dikes, and
pitches; to appraise and take charge of wrecks on behalf of the king,"—
Cross, Select Coroners' Rolls (Introduction), pp. xxxix., 3d.