Reeve Synonyms

It is the more curious that the gerefa should end as a servant ("reeve"), the Graf as a noble (count).

Thus ends the Saxon period, and the Norman period in London begins with the submission of the citizens as distinct from the action of the rest of the kingdom, which submission resulted soon afterwards in the Conqueror's remarkable charter to William the bishop and Gosfrith the portcity, reeve, supposed to be the elder Geoffrey de Mandeville.

The Saxon title of reeve was continued during the Norman period and the shire-reeve or sheriff has continued to our own time.

The third division would consist of the collections of the so-called Pseudo-leges Canuti, the laws of Edward the Confessor, of Henry I., and the great compilation of the Quadripartitus, then of a number of short notices and extracts like the fragments on the "wedding of a wife," on oaths, on ordeals, on the king's peace, on rural customs (Rectitudines singularum personarum), the treatises on the reeve (gerefa) and on the judge (dema), formulae of oaths, notions as to wergeld, &c. A fourth group might be made of the charters, n as they are based on Old English private and public law and supply us with most important materials in regard to it.

Local tradition asserts that Frome was a medieval borough, and the reeve of Frome is, occasionally mentioned in documents after the reign of Edward I., but there is no direct evidence that Frome was a borough and no trace of any charter granted to it.