that accident has put it in my power to oblige my countrymen with this opus aureum, this golden record; so infinitely superior to any record now existing, either in the archives or in the annals of any other county in Great Britain. And if Parliament has thought it an object worthy of national wisdom to print the original Domesday Book at the expense of the public, which relates only to one simple period of time, it is scarcely to be imagined that the generous good sense for which our County has been remarkable, would be inattentive to the public preservation of this invaluable record; which faithfully registers the succession, not only of their property, but of their progenitors for such a length of centuries.
In a foot-note Dr. Gower makes the definite statement that 'the Cheshire Domes-day, if I may so call it, now in my possession, consists of two folio volumes, in a very small close hand'. However, in a postscript, he sets out a number of Cheshire manuscripts not mentioned by him before, because then unknown to him, 'But I am sufficiently happy either in the promise or the possession of them'. These included nine folio volumes of Vernon's manuscripts sent to Dr. Gower by Peter Shakerley of Somerford.
Amongst these is a transcript of the principal articles contained in that singular record, the Cheshire Domes-day, which was remaining in the Castle of Chester in the year 1638. This record was always esteemed of that invaluable nature as to have been preserved only in the private custody of the Chief Justice of Chester. As such it passed into the hands of the famous John Bradshaw in the year 1647, and amidst the confusion of those times never more became the property of the public.
We shall refer again to Vernon's manuscripts. Presumably Gower had not examined them with any care (or perhaps at all), or he must have seen that in his earlier remarks he had entirely mistaken the nature of the record and that the two volumes recording the succession of Cheshire property, which he had described, were not the Cheshire 'Domesday'. They must have been something quite different, as the 'Domesday' Roll in no way answered to such a description.[1]
The miscellaneous extracts from early pleadings, &c., made in Elizabethan days and printed in 1811 by the Record Commissioners under the title of Placitorum Abbreviatio, contained an incomplete abstract of proceedings (to which we shall refer later) before the king's council in 1253–4 relating to the advowson of Sandbach, in which the enrolment of an inquisition (taken in 1224 in the time of Ranulph earl of Chester) in the Rotulus qui vocatur Domisday was pleaded and the perpetual authority of this roll, after being impugned, was upheld. Illingworth, in his
- ↑ Ormerod of course realizes this, and suggests Gower's two volumes were probably Dr. Edward Williamson's 'Abstracts of Fines and Inquisitions Henry III–Charles I' (Hist. of Cheshire, 2nd ed., I. xxxv and ii. 752). Lysons (Magna Britannia, Cheshire (1810), p. 467) thinks Dr. Gower had mistaken a Calendar of Close Rolls for the Cheshire 'Domesday'. Probably Ormerod's view is correct.
