Excerpt from Pleas of the Crown for the County of Gloucester Before the Abbot of Reading and His Fellows Justices Itinerant: In the Fifth Year of the Reign of King Henry the Third and the Year of Grace, 1221 What is here transcribed is so much of the record of the Gloucestershire eyre of 1221 as relates to pleas of the crown. Perhaps it may be welcome, not only to some students of English law, but also (if such a distinction be maintainable) to some students of English history. It is a picture, or rather, since little imaginative art went to its making, a photograph of English life as it was early in the thirteenth century, and a photograph taken from a point of view at which chroniclers too seldom place themselves. What is thence visible in the foreground is crime, and crime of a vulgar kind - murder and rape and robbery. This would be worth seeing even were there no more to be seen, for crime is a fact of which history must take note, but the political life of England is in a near background. We have here, as it were, a section of the body politic which shows just those most vital parts, of which, because they were deep-seated, the soul politic was hardly conscious, the system of local government and police, the organization of county, hundred, and township. It is not indeed supposed that there is anything in this roll which should startle any one who has learnt the story of our constitution and the story of our criminal law from the best modern books, still less any one versed in Bracton's treatise De Corona, and such other first-hand authorities as are already in print; but it is believed that a large stock of examples, given with all their concrete details, may serve to provide a body of flesh and blood for the ancient rules which, whether in the pages of Bracton or in those of modern historians, are apt to seem abstract, unreal, impracticable. For the reason just given this brief preface will attempt no general account of the criminal law as it was in the days of Henry the Third. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.