possible to fix upon certain constants. Repetition was bound to give them a 
life independent of agreement, adding thus a further example to the list of 
rules and legal institutions which have emerged from consistent use of contract. 
That the limits of an office should have depended on compact, the 
modern mind finds strange indeed, but in those times an office was a species 
of property and so quite properly the subject of contract. There were sound 
fiscal reasons, too, to say nothing of the expedience of being safeguarded 
against the whims of prerogative. The sources dealing with various dominions 
disclose a constant intervention by the crown that must often have driven a 
prudent administrator to distraction. The example of Henry 111 overriding 
the mandates of his son in Ireland is well known, 28 and likewise the efforts 
of Edward 111 to draw to himself the appeals from Gascony after its incorporation 
into Edward of Windsor's principality. 27 Covenant furnished the only 
means of placing a few barriers against the antic exercise of royal pleasure. 
Patent rolls and council records both show the bargaining process continuing 
in the fifteenth century. 28 In the course of these eventually disastrous years 
the content of commissions is pretty well stabilized, a result which was partly 
due to the occasional practice of commissioning by the formula of mere reference 
to a predecessor's patent. 29 A comparison of the commissions to the 
seneschal of Gascony of 1415 30 with those used for Ireland in 1423, 31 1428, 32 
1462, 33 and finally in 1495 34 suggests that certain basic constituents of the 
governor's office are settled. The latter instruments are particularly important, 
because after the loss of Gascony a few decades before Columbus' first 
voyage, Ireland remained the only considerable possession of the crown 
and administratively the significant link between old and new policies. What 
Henry VII grants to Prince Henry and Edward Poyning, his deputy, is destined 
to be the core of what James I later grants to Lord Mountjoy 35 (1603) 
—a document which anticipates matter later to appear in royal commissions 
to American colonial governors. The threads of historical continuity are here 
■they want only the tying. 
26 3 Orpen, Ireland under the Normans (1920), 
270-72. 
27 5 Tout, Chapters in the Administrative History 
of Mediaeval England (1930), 313; cf. 
injra, p. xlvii. 
28 E.g., 10 Rymer, Foedera 282 (Ireland, 1423); 
Calendar of Patent Rolls 1429-36, 69 (Gascony, 
1430); Calendar of Patent Rolls 1436-41, 
140 (Ireland, 1438); Calendar of Patent Rolls 
1476-85, 90 (Ireland, 1478); 2 Proceedings and 
Ordinances of the Privy Council of England, 
130; 3 ibid., 6, 8; 4 ibid., 53, 79, 92; 5 ibid., 
206. 
29 E.g., Calendar of Patent Rolls 1467-77, 205; 
ibid., 1477-84, 153, ibid., 1485-94, 84. 
30 9 Rymer, Foedera 239 to John Tiptoft. 
31 10 ibid., 282 to The Earl of March. 
32 Calendar of Patent Rolls 7422-29, 475, to 
John Sutton. 
33 Calendar of Patent Rolls 1461-67, 142, to the 
Duke of Clarence. 
34 Calendar of Patent Rolls 1494-1509, 12. 
35 1 Repertory of lnrolments on the Patent 
Rolls of Chancery in Ireland (1846), 17.