Gilbert de Preston was one of the best-known and longest-serving justices in thirteenth-century England, his career spanning from his appointment as a royal justice in 1240 at the age of just over thirty to his death, probably in December 1273, while chief justice of the Common Bench, an office he had held almost continuously from 1260. David Crook found that he served in fifty-five general eyres as a junior justice between 1239 and 1254, and between 1254 and 1272 he was chief justice in twenty-nine eyres. Gilbert was from a Northamptonshire knightly family, which held land in several places in the county and took its name from Preston Deanery, a couple of miles from Northampton. Preston Deanery was a substantial manor with house, gardens, fishpond, dovecot, a wind-mill and over thirty virgates in demesne, thirty-seven customary tenants, twenty-three cottagers and a handful of free tenants. It also had and still has a church that today is virtually unchanged from how Gilbert himself must have known it. Though the records of his work are incomplete, many surviving eyre rolls, assize rolls, bench rolls and feet of fines bear witness to his heavy workload and constant travels. This paper focuses on one of these rolls, the assize roll JUST 1/1197.

JUST 1/1197 is in an excellent state of preservation. Of its twenty-six membranes, twenty are written on both sides, giving forty-six sides of records altogether, though some membranes are not totally filled.