The geréfa was not necessarily a royal officer: on the contrary we find bishops, ealdormen, nay simple nobles with them upon their establishment. Of course the moment an immunity of sacu and sócn existed upon any estate, the lord appointed a geréfa to hold his court and do right among his men, as the scírgeréfa held court for the freemen in the shire. And if any proof of this were necessary, we might find it in the title _socnereve_ (sócne geréfa) which occurs at page 12 of the valuable book known as ‘Liber de antiquis Legibus,’ but which would have been much more justly entitled Annals of the Corporation of London. We may be assured that in every vill belonging to a bishop or a lay lord, in every city where there was a cathedral or a castle, there was found a bisceopes or an ealdormannes geréfa, as the case might be, performing such functions for the prelate or the noble, as the king’s geréfa exercised for him; and if there were an immunity, performing every function that the royal officer performed. Thus in some towns I can conceive it very possible that the king’s, ealdorman’s and bishop’s reeves may have met side by side and exercised a concurrent jurisdiction: and as the bishop’s geréfa must have led his armed retainers, (at least whenever it pleased the prelate to remember the canons of his church,) this officer may be compared to the Vogt, Advocatus, Vice-dominus or Vidame, who fulfilled that duty on the continent. The bishop’s reeve is empowered by the king to aid the sheriff in the forcible levy of tithe[467]; he is recognised in the law of Wihtrǽd as an intermediary between a dependent of the bishop and the public courts of justice[468]; the thane’s or nobleman’s reeve was allowed on various occasions to act as his attorney: the great landowner was admonished to appoint reeves over his dependents, to preserve the peace and represent them before the law; and lastly so necessary a part of a nobleman’s establishment is the geréfa considered to be, that Ini enacts[469], “whithersoever a noble journeys, thither may his reeve accompany him.” Of course in many cases these geréfan would be merely stewards[470], but in nearly all we must consider them to have been judges in various courts of greater or less importance, public or private as it might chance to be. This one original character distinguishes all alike; whether it be the scírgeréfa of a county-court, the burhgeréfa of a corporation, the swángeréfa of a woodland moot, the mótgeréfa[471] of _any court_ in which plea could be holden, or the túngeréfa of a vill or dependent settlement, the ancient steward of a manorial court. ----- Footnote 467: Æðelr. i. § 1. Cnut, ii. § 30. Footnote 468: Wihtr. § 22. Thorpe, i. 43. Footnote 469: Ini. §63. Footnote 470: Cod. Dipl. No. 931. Footnote 471: