ABSTRACT
The fabrication of bogus transactions to frustrate the royal title and claims exercised the creative intelligence of the highly skilled and resourceful Elizabethan lawyers. Concealed lands, to use a contemporary expression, meant lands held of the crown by some tenure or other, in which the link had decayed or been cut by an elusive tenant. Nearly a hundred years before Johnson was writing, a commission had been set on foot, in 1505, to inquire into concealed lands, wardships and other royal interests. Many informers, however, operated on a fairly small scale, and picked up either a grant of money or a cheap wardship for their pains. More dangerous still, because it was systematised, was the grant of authority under patent to professional informers to press on with their searches. By now solicitors had been briefed, officials and courtiers rewarded, records searched, and writs and commissions returned.
