Itinerant justices appointed by the crown to hold pleas in the English shires were, by the 1170s, and probably much earlier, regularly handing in to the Exchequer lists of the penalties they imposed during their sessions, so that these sums of money could be included in the summonses sent to the sheriffs for collection, along with other dues. Such lists are twice mentioned in the Dialogue of the Exchequer, a treatise about the workings of the Exchequer written by the treasurer, Richard fitz Nigel, between 1177 and 1179. Firstly, in the section describing how the summonses were drawn up, they are described as ‘smaller rolls of the justices in eyre … from which are extracted the debts to the king in each county’, in contrast to the ‘great roll of the year’, the Pipe Roll itself. Secondly, when the judicial circuits in the counties are mentioned, the financial penalties are said to have been written down in ‘rolls of the itinerant justices’ that were handed to the treasurer at the Exchequer; after that, they could not be altered in even the slightest way.

These rolls of ‘estreats’, as they later came to be called (because they consisted of information ‘extracted’ from the records of pleas, which were by then kept in plea rolls), are rarely referred to in the enrolled accounts of the sheriffs in the Pipe Rolls themselves. Their most obvious characteristic was their ephemeral nature.