The Sheriffs of William the Conqueror

Summary

The Norman sheriffs are larger than life characters: powerful and aggressive, their depredations were recorded both by chroniclers and in Domesday Book. Who can forget the story of Urse d'Abetot, who achieved the distinction of being cursed in English for digging up part of the cathedral graveyard in excavations for the castIe at Worcester, ‘Hattest thou Urse, have thou God's curse'?’ Or Picot of Cambridge, for whom the author of the Liber Hiensis could hardly find language sufficiently vituperative, ‘ravening wolf, cunning fox', and who, when accused of robbing St Etheldreda of her lands, replied, ‘Etheldreda, who is that Etheldreda of whom you speak?' Such men made a powerful impression on their contemporaries and on following generations. They held an office then at the height of its influence, for the effects of the Conquest had added to its responsibilities in several respect. As earldoms collapsed after 1066, sheriffs were left as the king's chief officers at the county level, to be employed in a variety of executive and policing tasks. They also had financial duties, collecting royal revenue, though the system may not have been as centralised under their control as it became later. Their military functions in the post-Conquest period may have been more important than often thought, for not only were they still responsible for local levies raised under the old obligations, but in some cases they were also put in charge of the new castles erected in principal county boroughs. Most of all, however, their presence in the shire and hundred courts gave them a crucial role, for it was there that many of the disputes arising from the vast transfer of land to the Normans took place. Much depended on the calibre of sheriffs, therefore, for the success of Norman rule in England.

Surprisingly little has been written about the Conqueror's sheriffs. W. A. Morris devoted most of one chapter to them in his book Thc Medieval English Sheriff 1300, and it is on Morris that most modern commentators have based their view of the post-Conquest sheriff. He believed that the first generation of Norman sheriffs represented ‘the golden age of the baronial shrievalty'.He thought the period remarkable not only for the power inherent in the office but also for the wealth and status of the men who filled it.