HLS MS 1
De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae
attributed to Henry of Bratton
and supplementary items

HLS MS 1 is officially called ‘Bracton cum additionibus’. (For more on the Bracton, click here.) The principal interest of the Bracton text in this manuscript lies not in the text itself (it is one of the many manuscripts of Bracton that were used in creating modern edition), but in what the illustrator, the scribe, the rubricator, and a collection of owners did with it.

The illustrator had a field day, no more so than on the first folio of Bracton.

Perhaps the most famous passage in Bracton is the so-called additio de cartis, which suggests that not only is God superior to the king but also, perhaps, under some circumstances, the earls and barons collectively. In our manuscript the passage is not marked as an additio. The rubricator, who may be the same as the scribe of the base text, perhaps mistakenly, perhaps because he thought the passage too hot handle, has the wrong title for the passage. The owner, or perhaps a later scribe, has put the correct title in the margin and has corrected it in three different places. And he, or perhaps another, has marked the passage by drawing a little picture of a king at the head of the column.

Another interest of our manuscript is that bound with it are more than fifty short items about English law, dating, mostly, from the late thirteenth century. A previous owner of the manuscript, the famous English collector of manuscripts Thomas Phillipps, made a table of contents of these items in 1827 and attached it to the end of the manuscript.

The manuscript was disbound to take the images. There are many instances where the marginalia reach into the gutter, and the disbinding has made them visible. The binding, which seemed younger than the c. 1700 assigned to it in the HOLLIS catalogue, was not worth preserving. It probably dated from shortly before the time when the manuscript was in the Phillipps collection, because it incorporated his index at the end but that folio also contains a date, 26 December 1801, and the name of Thomas Bryan Richards, an owner who was probably the one from whom Phillipps acquired it.

There are two foliations, a modern one in pencil in the lower left-hand corner of the recto that begins, for reasons that are not entirely clear, on the third folio of the manuscript, and an ancient one, in red, centered at the top of the recto, that begins on the first folio of Bracton. We have used the modern one and have added the ancient one, where it appears, in this form: ‘f. 13r, i.e. 1r’.  In the original fol. 94 is duplicated; we have called the duplicate ‘fol. 94[bis]’. Neither foliation includes the final quire, which contains Phillipps’ index.

Bracton ends on fol. 162ra, i.e. 149ra, with the curious note: Explicit liber H. de Barton’ de legibus et consuetudinibus anglicanis. Phillipps’ item 17 (Regulae de Scaccario) begins immediately, and the ancient foliation continues in the same style up to and including the first seven folios of Phillipps’ last item, a register of writs. The script, but not the style, of the ancient foliation changes with a new quire at fol. 195, i.e. 182, and continues for the next nine folios (the last of which is rather badly damaged). The ancient foliation ends at fol. 203, i.e. 190. The modern foliation continues on for one more folio.

The Regulae de Scaccario, the first item added after Bracton, are written in a much more informal script than is Bracton. But the Summa bona ad cassandum omnimoda brevia, which begins on fol. 162v, i.e. 149v, is in the same script and probably by the same hand as Bracton. The same pattern continues throughout the additional material. Texts in the same style and script as Bracton are intermingled with texts in a more informal script. The introductory material before the ancient foliation begins are largely in a more informal script, though item nos. 2 and 14 are in book hand. There was a moment when I thought that no. 2, a subject index of the entire work, might be in same hand as the base text, though I now rather doubt it.

These pieces of information allow us to form some tentative conjectures as to how the manuscript was put together. Bracton and the items that are in the same hand are clearly the work of a professional scribe. He was told to leave room for additional matter in what we might call ‘the statute book’ at the end. He may or may not have been told about the register of writs that closes the manuscript. If he was, he rather badly underestimated how much space it would take, and another quire was added to accommodate it. It seems unlikely that he had anything to do with the introductory material that appears before Bracton. Except for the subject index, it is rather idiosyncratic and local, the kind of thing that gets added later, though, as we shall see, probably not much later.

Date. A pencil note, probably by George Dunn, on the unfoliated page with his bookplate (seq. 4), dated in 1899, says: “Date of completion 1296–7. After 1296, March 8 and before 1297 Nov. Two of the pages written in other hands apparently of 1291–2. The other addenda are of 1297, 1300, 1301.” This brief note is remarkably accurate. When Dunn refers to ‘date of completion’, he means the part written in the book hand of Bracton and those parts of the appendix of statutes (etc.) that are written in the same hand. His terminus a quo is based on item no. 41, which is so dated. His terminus ante quem, it would seem, is based, on the fact that the text of Magna Carta does not mention its reissue and confirmation in November of 1297. This makes the terminus ante quem a bit less certain, but it is given added plausibility by the fact that a later hand has noted the confirmation in 1300 in additions to the basic text of the 1227 version of Magna Carta. So far as the ‘addenda’ are concerned there is clearly a group with dates clustering around 1290–2 and another with dates clustering around 1300. We have not discovered one dated as late as 1301, but such a document may be there. A bit more precision might be obtained by dating the clerical gravimina, but we have not yet undertaken this.

Provenance. The connection of our manuscript with Worcestershire has long been noted. Some of the items make sense only if the manuscript was located in Worcestershire at a very early time. What has not, so far as we aware, been previously noted is that the collection of documents supplementing Bracton has a decidedly ecclesiastical bias. We doubt that many lay owners would have described their copy of Magna Carta as ‘Magna Carta de libertate ecclesiae’, though the charter does contain such a clause. Perhaps even more telling is the fact that the additional documents include three clerical gravimina of some length, and a collection of documents both papal and English imposing sanctions on violators of the peace of the church. Connecting legal works with lists of kings and chronicles of them is a tradition that goes back to Anglo-Saxon times, and is a feature of the work of Wulfstan, who bishop of Worcester (and archbishop of York) in the early eleventh century. The type of work that was done on the Bracton portion of the manuscript suggests, though it certainly does not prove, a monastic owner. A monastic house would have the time and inclination to borrow another manuscript and carefully correct its own. There are a number of monastic houses in Worcestershire that could have been the owner (e.g., Pershore), but there is some temptation to think that it belonged to the cathedral priory. Any monastic house in Worcestershire might have included a list of the bishops of Worcester in such a manuscript, but any monastery other than the cathedral priory would probably also have included a list of the heads of their house. The interest in, and knowledge of, contemporary political developments reflected in these documents also suggests the cathedral priory. Godfrey Giffard, the bishop of Worcester at this time, was formely the chancellor of England and well-connected politically. Giffard became quite ill in 1300 and died in 1302. The absence of any material in our manuscript that clearly dates from after 1300 or 1301 might be explained by that fact. One might argue that the continuity of this institution (the present dean and chapter of Worcester are direct descendants of the prior and chapter of medieval times) militates against the manuscript ever having left the cathedral priory once it was there, but the history of the cathedral library suggests that it suffered numerous losses of manuscripts over the centuries, including, as the online history of the library (last visted 17.vi.12) states, from “book collectors who took manuscripts away from the cathedral for their own collections.”

Metadata. The metadata given below marks the various pieces of the manuscript. Phillipps’ index was used as a guide. The notes tell a bit more.

Preparing metadata for the Bracton text itself is a challenge. That the scribe was using a non-standard set of headings is clear enough from the first folio. At the very head of the text there is a non-standard title Summa legis et de consuetudine et iudicibus. The initial subheading that appears in Woodbine-Thorne, Quae sunt regi necessaria, is no place to be found. The first rubric that appears after the main title seems to say hic est distinctio qualibet dividitur, a phrase that is difficult to parse. The author of the marginalia has put in by way of gloss the more standard heading prohemium auctoris. He has also added in the first paragraph in the same manner the standard heading si insipiens et indoctus cathedram [iudicandi] ascenderit. In the very first sentence he has inserted between pacis and possit a word which is probably recte, as in the standard text. Clearly, what the author of the marginalia is doing is comparing his text with another manuscript that contained a more standard text, and this characteristic of the marginalia continues throughout the manuscript.

Until we can prepare metadata for Bracton (which will involve transcribing the headings in the manuscript and comparing them to those in Woodbine-Thorne), it may help to know that one page (half a folio) in the manuscript text represents approximately five pages in Woodbine-Thorne and approximately two folios in the printed edition used for the traditional foliation.

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This page last updated 06/18/12. Contact Rosemary Spang with comments.
URL: http://www.law.harvard.edu/digital/Bracton/HLSMs1Metadata.html .
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