It is noteworthy that the earliest of these three—the earliest of all our creation-charters—has the most intensely hereditary ring, a fact at variance with the favourite doctrine that the hereditary principle was a late innovation, and ousted but slowly the official position. It is further to be observed that the term "Comitatus," of which the denotation in Scottish charters has been so long and fiercely debated, has here the abstract signification which it possesses in our own day, namely, that of the dignity of an earl. * * * * * When we think of their father's stormy career, it is not a little strange to find these two successive Earls of Essex high in favour with the order-loving king, throughout whose reign, for more than thirty years (1156-1189), we find them honoured and trusted in his councils, in his courts, and in his host. Of Earl William Miss Norgate writes: "The son was as loyal as his father was faithless; he seems, indeed, to have been a close personal friend of the king, and to have well deserved his friendship."[744] His fidelity was rewarded by the hand of the heiress of the house of Aumâle, so that, already an earl in England, he thus became, also, a count beyond the sea. Yet well might men believe that the awful curse of Heaven rested on this great and able house. At the very moment when Earl William seemed to have attained the pinnacle of power, when he had reached the point which his father had reached some half a century before, then, as in his father's case, the prize was snatched from his grasp. King Richard, rightly prizing the earl's loyalty and worth, announced his intention, at the Council of Pipewell (September, 1189), of leaving him, with the Bishop of Durham as his assessor, in charge of the kingdom, as Justiciar, during his own absence in the East. Such an office would have made the earl the foremost layman in the realm. But before the time had come for entering on his exalted duties, indeed within a few weeks of his appointment, he was dead (November 14, 1189). Like his brother Geoffrey before him, the earl died childless; the vast estates of the house of Mandeville passed to the descendants of his aunt; to his earldom there was no heir.[745] Such was the end that awaited the ambition of Geoffrey de Mandeville. The earldom for which he had schemed and striven, the strongholds on which his power was based, the broad lands which owned his sway—all were lost to his house. And as if by the very irony of fate, Ernulf, his disinherited son, alone continued the race, that there might not be wanting in his hapless heirs an ever-standing monument to the greatness at once of the guilt and of the fall of the man whose story I have told. [700] "Willelmi de Say et Galfridi de Mandeville, qui apud Borewelle interfecti fuerunt" (_Chron. Ram._, App. p. 347).