Historical
There is no record of an official with the specific duty of enforcing the law and keeping the peace in Anglo-Saxon England (although there undoubtedly was one). After the Norman Conquest, specific counties appointed sheriffs to enforce the law (such as Yorkshire for example), although sometimes the duties of these sheriffs would cross the border of their respective counties. Nottingham would have come under the "High Sheriff of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire" after the Norman Conquest.
In 1449, the city of Nottingham itself was appointed its own sheriff for the first time (although the post was held simultaneously between two men, William Sadler and Thomas Lyng). The sheriffs at that time may have been responsible for "the delivery of prisoners to the courts, the collection of rents and taxes and generally keeping the ‘King’s Peace’".
From 1450 until 1835, the office was shared between two people, one of whom may have been chosen by the Mayor, the other by the town council. The change to a single sheriff was explained by Lincoln city website merely as "Local Government changes". The article can be seen here (possibly the Municipal Corporations Act 1835).
Read more about this topic: Sheriff Of Nottingham (position)
Famous quotes containing the word historical:
“The analogy between the mind and a computer fails for many reasons. The brain is constructed by principles that assure diversity and degeneracy. Unlike a computer, it has no replicative memory. It is historical and value driven. It forms categories by internal criteria and by constraints acting at many scales, not by means of a syntactically constructed program. The world with which the brain interacts is not unequivocally made up of classical categories.”
—Gerald M. Edelman (b. 1928)
“We can imagine a society in which no one could survive as a social being because it does not correspond to biologically determined perceptions and human social needs. For historical reasons, existing societies might have such properties, leading to various forms of pathology.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“Historical! Must it be historical to catch your attention? Even though historicity, like notoriety, denotes nothing more than that something has occurred.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)