rolls relating to the revenue, expenditure, debts and accounts of the
Crown, New Year's gifts, the royal household, mint, foreign bills of
exchange, military and naval affairs, instruments relating to
treaties, truces, and infractions of peace, chiefly between England
and France; mercantile matters, foreign possessions of the Crown,
proceedings in the Admiralty, military and other courts of the great
officers of the Crown, pardons, protections, petitions, subsidy rolls,
Scotch homage rolls, pardon rolls, privy seals, signet bills, writs of
various descriptions from Edward I. to Edward IV., exist there,
without calendar or index; and in such masses as to defy the patience
of any inquirer, however ardent. It need not be said that in such a
variety of documents their value must vary considerably, or that many
of them are of little use; but each of them is at least worthy of
being examined; and there are few of them which, if properly
scrutinized by apt labourers, would not at least contribute to the
elucidation or ratification of some branch of history. Some of them
would render still more important services; and, by pointing out the
daily habits and most familiar occurrences of the lives of our kings
and other eminent personages who figure in our history, lead us to a
much more accurate estimate of their genius than any that has hitherto
been formed. With this view, the close rolls are amongst the most
minute and interesting of those documents which remain unexplored. The
character of King John has had but scanty justice done to it; and
perhaps those who have formed their notions of that monarch from the
ordinary accounts of him, will be surprised to find him writing to the
Abbot of Reading to acknowledge the receipt of "six volumes of books,
containing the whole of the Old Testament, Master Hugh de St. Victor's
treatise on the Sacraments, the Sentences of Peter Lombard, the
Epistles of St. Augustine on the City of God, and on the 3rd part of
the Psalter, Valerian de Moribus, Origen's treatise on the Old