and no record remains for the next year or
two. Then they begin once more, and have been preserved with unbroken
regularity. At Raynham, in a parish of 1,400 acres, there were three
small manors. The courts of one of them were held three times in the
year 1348. _Upon the same parchment,_ and immediately following
the records of the previous year, come some scarcely legible notes of
a court held in 1349, the precise day of the month omitted, the
entries scrawled informally by a scribe who not only did not know the
forms of the court, but who was evidently not a professional writer.
He bungled so that he seems actually to have given up his task. The
next court of the manor was not held till three years had gone by. At
Hellhoughton, a manor now belonging to the Marquis of Townshend,
where two courts were held annually, the series of rolls for the
first twenty-two years of Edward III. is complete. Then comes one
which scarcely deserves to be called a Court Roll, so entirely
informal is it, and so evidently drawn up by some one who did not
know his business, and who did not pretend to know it. It is little
more than a collection of rough memoranda of deaths. Twelve of the
_suitors_ of the court had died without heirs; seven others had
come to do fealty to the lord as successors to those whose heirs they
presumably were.
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