Welsh Journals

Search over 450 titles and 1.2 million pages

Vale Royal; under Edward III, to support the household of the heir, the Black Prince, and to sustain his foreign campaigns, which were largely fought and paid for by the men of Cheshire. In the intervening reign revenues declined, while control of the chief local office, the justiciarship, was contested between Edward II and his baronial opponents; and this latent tension between the needs of patronage and of finance became still more obvious under the Black Prince. Existing offices were granted out for life; new and unnecessary ones were created; a large part of the county's ordinary revenues was disbursed on annuities; and adminis- trative efficiency was impaired by the taking of important offices from 'professionals' and their bestowal on amateurs whom the prince needed to reward. The financial organisation which managed this lordship both resembled and differed from that of other counties. Like them, Cheshire had a sheriff who paid a fixed sum for his bailiwick, and an escheator who supervised the lord's feudal assets. But it also had a justiciar, the sheriff's superior, whose farm of between £ 485 and £ 1,000 a year provided the most valuable source of ordinary income. In some periods, and perma- nently after 1346, the justiciar's farm was abandoned, and the county's chief financial officer, the chamberlain, accounted for all the Cheshire revenues. Other concurrent changes in the mid-1340s brought a tighter and more effective central control. Revenues were no longer sent to the local exchequer at Chester but directly to the prince's exchequer at Westminster; accounting methods came to be based on those of the royal exchequer; and increasing severity accompanied the raising of money. Dona were exacted from the county community, and justice became magnum emolumentum; so much so that the county was sometimes willing to pay heavily to buy off a judicial visitation. In these years the old traditions of good lordship were abandoned before the demands of war. Firmly grounded as it is on the records, Mr. Booth's account supersedes all that has been written on these matters; it is a powerful contribution to the history of royal estate management. Yet its balance and arrangement make it an unnecessarily difficult book both to read and to use. Its longest chapter discusses the form of the Cheshire accounts and sets out to show the difficulty of deducing from the accounts figures for profit and loss. The length of the argument here contrasts with the few pages on 'the people and the land', though it was upon land and people that the resources of lordship ultimately rested. Information on such major changes as those inaugurated by the Black Prince in the 1340s is scattered through the book and has to be brought together by the reader for himself; while much of the writing has about it a pervasive lack of sharpness and clarity which weakens the author's presentation of his case. More disturbing is the narrowness of the approach. This is a book which is largely concerned with life at the top: that is to say, with the county's officials and the financial system which they administered. There is very little about the reactions of the governed, though the county court, where those reactions were often expressed, was clearly able to resist innovation from above and to define custom to the county's advantage. In the early fourteenth century, for example, it won the abolition of customary