reaching the conclusion that such writings could be endowed with the quality 
of record and so dispense with reliance upon personal recollection. We have 
indicated in the margin the successive stages in the process of substitution. 74 
This involved not only an eventual recognition that tradition should give 
way to convenience in determining a question of res iudicata but also arriving 
at the more difficult conclusion when a judgment was under attack to dispense 
with the judge as a necessary participant. In this last particular developments 
were retarded by the fact that within the system of royal judicature the 
74 The conversion had progressed so far in the 
early thirteenth century that litigants will vouch 
both rolls and the justices themselves —an indication 
that it is not yet clear what is the record 
(e.g., 1 CRR 57; 2 CRR 201; 3 CRR 168; 4 
CRR 36; 6 CRR 260. In 4 CRR 210 the justices 
wish to inspect the rolls and "certificari super 
recordo"). The triumph of the written account, 
moreover, was delayed by the fact that various 
rolls were kept of the same proceedings, and 
the problem of unsnarling divergencies had not 
yet been completely solved at the time Bracton 
wrote (see the cases in 3 CRR 301, 334 where a 
diversity in rolls is involved; in 8 CRR 98 the 
roll of Pateshull is inspected and the clerk 
thinks it worth noting that Fauconberg's roll is 
in accord and cf., ibid., 114; Bracton's discussion 
of settling discrepancies is in De legibus, 352b). 
This dilemma had an obvious bearing upon the 
rule of unimpeachability. Whatever the merits 
of the rule in theory, it was hardly maintainable 
in the face of the hard reality that two rolls 
might have different versions of the same transaction. 
An enrolled entry can have force as 
record only when methods of control are established. 
The crudest way to effect this is to 
secure personal verification of the roll by those 
who participate in judgment. The earliest form 
of this appears to be the certification by justices 
itinerant of the circumstances under which a 
disputed concord was made (Glanville, De 
legibus VIII, 5). Glanville actually speaks of 
them as making a record, but since the concords 
normally occur in the course of a litigation 
and often are enrolled at large, the proceeding 
with the justices seems to be a certification. 
The entries in 3 CRR 30 and 4 CRR 270, 
275, are apparently examples of this. Note also 
the case in 8 CRR 87, where a record is ordered 
of an extent and a certification by knights. In 
2 CRR 77 is an early (1201) example of the 
certification of an inquest by four knights participating. 
If our view of the entries is correct, 
it would appear that, once written rolls were 
kept, what had earlier been a personal recording 
cv»me to be viewed as a certification of an enrollment. 
We use the word "certification" advisedly, 
since it is used in the sources in the 
sense of a mere advisement (certiorari), the 
equivalent of similar entries where scire facias 
is sometimes employed, or of an attestation (as 
in 8 CRR 77 and 8 CRR 87). Finally, it appears 
as an attestation of or amplification of a verdict 
—viz., the making certain in the sense of completeness. 
This last sort of certification, discussed 
infra in the text, becomes a technical 
term. 
Tardif (La Procedure civile et criminelle aux 
XIII et XIV siecles [1885], 123) avers that the 
oral record is made "impracticable" by the 
death of judges, and hence more certain means 
were essential. In England, in the early thirteenth 
century, testimony of surviving participants 
is used (5 CRR 50, 72, and cf. 3 CRR 45, 
where defendant puts himself on rolls of 
Richard I and the recognitors in the case). The 
record of the county is sought in a 1201 case on 
a judgment temp. Henry 11, the judge being 
dead (1 CRR 394)- 
It seems probable that the roll alone is allowed 
to serve as record first in cases of mere 
voucher (viz., where the proceedings recounted 
were not themselves under attack), and this 
was at first a mere indulgence when oral record 
was impossible; cf. 1 CRR 83, 208, 243; 2 CRR 
218, 3 CRR 170; 4 CRR 210; 8 CRR 114; 
Bracton's Notebook, pi. 583) Bracton, De 
legibus, 435b, says "rotulos et recordum 
iusticiariorum," but in the light of the cases the 
et is disjunctive. The use of the roll alone to 
establish res iudicata is certainly settled by 
1250. The practice in such cases no doubt 
helped to expedite the use of rolls as record 
when the judgment itself was attacked. This 
began, as indicated infra in the text, with 
the Irish appeal, and the use of written records 
shortly after 1250 in recordari facias suggests 
that in this relation, too, the substitution was 
accomplished at nearly the same time.