The English Historical Review (Volume 31) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The Office of Sheriff in the Anglo-Saxon Period office of sheriff is the one secular dignity generally known JL in English-speaking lands which for more than nine centuries has maintained a continuous existence and preserved its distinguishing features. Its constitutional importance is as well recognized as the variety of its functions, and it throws light on the question whether the elements which combined to form the English state of the twelfth century were in origin native or Norman. Yet no systematic attempt has hitherto been made to trace its early development. Kemble's account, which is based mainly on the charters, is brief and contains a good deal of untested surmise. Stubbs made use of other materials as well, but the needs of his work called only for an outline of the subject, and this he borrowed largely from Kemble. The great work of Dr. Liebermann necessarily looks first to the laws, a class of sources which for this particular period contains suggestion rather than definite information. Since the beginning of the present century an entirely new view concerning the origin of the shrievalty has been put forward. The abandonment of the mark theory as an explanation of English institutional origins involved, to be sure, the rejection of the older conception of an elective sheriff ruling over a primitive community.1 But Mr. Chadwick assails the foundation upon which rests the existence of a scirgerefa or shire-reeve from the reign of Ine to 'that of Athelstan: the shireman of Ine may be regarded as an alderman, but hardly as a sheriff.2 Furthermore, the fact that, so far as record goes, the more important type of king's reeve until about the middle of the tenth century occurs in association with a king's tun or a burghal district rather than a shire, destroys conf...