From this interpretation of the "Middlesex" of the charter, it, of course, followed that the writer took the _firma_ of £300 to be paid in respect of Middlesex _exclusive of London_.[1016] We need not wonder, therefore, that to him the grant is difficult to understand. Here are his comments on its terms:— "If we could estimate the reasons which led to this grant with any degree of certainty, we should understand better what the citizens expected to gain by it besides rights of jurisdiction.... The meaning and nature of the grant are subjects of which we should like to know more. But here we can obtain little help from books ... and we may inquire in vain for a definition of the position and duties of the sheriff who acts for the citizens in their subject county.... There must have been advantages to accrue from the payment by London of £300 a year, a sum which, small as it seems to us, was a heavy tax in those days. We may be sure the willing citizens expected to obtain correspondingly valuable liberties" (pp. 121-123). Then follow various conjectures, all of them necessarily wide of the mark. And as with the ferm, so with the sheriff. Mr. Loftie, taking the sheriff (_vicecomes_) in question to be a sheriff of Middlesex exclusive of London (which he hence terms a "subject county"), is of necessity baffled by the charter. For by it the citizens are empowered to appoint (_a_) a "vicecomes," (_b_) a "justitiarius." As the "vicecomes," according to his view, had nothing to do with the City itself, Mr. Loftie has to account for "the omission of any reference to the portreeve in the charter," his assumption being that the City itself was at this time governed by a portreeve. Though his views are obscurely expressed, his solutions of the problem are as follows. In his larger work he dismisses the supposition that the "justitiarius" of the charter was the "chief magistrate" of the City, _i.e._ the portreeve, because the citizens must have been "already" entitled to elect that officer. Yet in his later work, with equal confidence, he tells us that by "justitiarius" the portreeve is "evidently intended." The fact is that he is really opposing two different suppositions; the one that Henry granted by his charter the right to elect a portreeve, the other that he did not grant it, but retained the appointment in his hands. Mr. Loftie first denies the former, and then, in his later work, asserts the former to deny the latter. But really his language is so confused that it is doubtful whether he realized himself the contradictory drift of his two arguments, both based on the same assumption, which "it is manifestly absurd," we learn, to dispute.[1017] And the strange part of the business is this, What is the "proof" that Mr. Loftie offers for the later of his two hypotheses? If the "trial" to which he refers had ever taken place at all, and, still more, if it had taken place before 1115, the fact would have an important bearing.