<Preliminary introduction>

The HOLLIS cataloguing may be found here.

The cataloguing in Baker’s English Legal Manuscripts, 1, no. 114 reads as follows:

“STATUTA VETERA; REGISTRUM BREVIUM; TRACTS
“Unnumbered MS.
“Late C.xiii or early C.xiv, 181 ff., oak boards. The principal tracts are: Quot modis dicitur exceptio; Hengham Magna and Parva; Fet asaver; Judicium essoniorum; Ordo exceptionum; Summa bastardie; Modus componendi brevia; Officium senescalli; Brevia placitata (‘Les cas de brefs pledes et les demaundes et les jugements’); Walter of Henley; and ‘Cy poet un juvenes houme ver coment il deyt sotylment parler en court’ (printed in translation from this MS., 1936).

“‘Fuit homo missus a Deo, cui nomen erat Kymb’; (C.xv); ‘Liber Willelmi Crofton Templi interioris consocii, precii xii d.’ (C.xv); ‘MS. 166’ (C.xix, pencil); belonged to Sir Gregory Osborne Page-Turner (d. 1843) of Battlesden House; his sale, Christie, 3 Nov. 1824, part of no. 2718 (cf. no. 13, above), to Sir Thomas Phillipps (MS. 3128); his sale, S. 24 June 1935, to Sweet & Maxwell; bought from them, and received on 6 May 1941.

“H. M. Briggs, Curia Baronis. Here may a young man see how he should speak subtly in court (Sweet & Maxwell, 1936); Dunham, Casus Placitorum, 69 SS lxxiii, no. 14.”

To Baker’s description we may add: that the manuscript is now numbered HLS MS 184, that the note on fol. 2r reads ‘Fuit homo missus a Deo cui nomen erat Johannes’, i.e., Jn. 1:6 (‘Kymb’’ is below it and is either a signature for the preceding or an insert in the following line, which difficult to read), that the identification of the hand of inscription that attributes the ownership of the manuscript to William Crofton is problematical (see below), and that the identification of one of the tracts as Brevia placitata needs further discussion below.

The pencilled foliation is modern and postdates Dunham’s edition of Casus placitorum (1950). It skips fol. 24r, so that the folios thereafter are one less than they ought to be. On fol. 34r(33r), the foliation moves from the top right to the lower left. Fol. 43r(42r) is not foliated, and the foliation appears only occasionally from then on, but where it occurs, it corresponds to the actual foliation less one. We have foliated digitally to correspond to the actual foliation. We have not included the stub between fol. 105v and 106r, which brings our foliation back to the pencilled foliation. After a consistent foliation every five folios from 106r to 170r, the pencilled foliation skips fol. 175r and numbers fol. 176r as 175r, and this misnumbering occurs on each folio until we reach the end of the manuscript. There are signature marks of uncertain date on the first three or four fols. of many quires.

Except for the initial tract, the manuscript is laid out consistently, though a number of hands are at work. Red and blue paragraph marks throughout. Decorated capitals and scrollwork in a consistent style throughout.

The manuscript has 23 quires: one quinternion, 21 quaternions, and one ternion. The quinternion and the ternion may originally have been quaternions that were remade to accommodate the text. The quinternion appears just before the register of writs; the ternion is the last quire of the register. One folio is missing after fol. 105 and two are missing from the second half of the final quire. Additionally, two folios (f. 51 and 52) are switched. This gives us the following collation:

1–14⁸ (f. 1–111, lacks one after f. 105), 15¹⁰ (f. 112–121), 16–19⁸ (f. 122–153), 20⁶ (f. 154–159), 21–23⁸ (f. 160–181, lacks two from quire 23).

No two manuscripts of either ‘Brevia placitata’ or ‘Casus placitorum’ are quite alike, and the distinction between the two may be the product more of modern editors than of the Middle Ages. Dunham identifies the text in this manuscript as ‘Casus placitorum’ (p. lxxiii, no. 14). The first entry in this text corresponds to No. 19 in the Dunham’s edition of ‘Casus placitorum’, the second entry to No. 162. (Dunham ed., at 4, 39). (Both, admittedly, have parallels in ‘Brevia placitata’.) What makes this text more like ‘Casus placitorum’ than ‘Brevia placitata’ is that like ‘Casus placitorum’ and unlike the modern edition of ‘Brevia placitata’, this tract does not give the count, but proceeds directly to notes about what seem to be real cases or doctrinal principles taught. Although Dunham referenced this manuscript, it was not one of the ones that he used. It merits a closer comparison with his edition.

The HOLLIS and the Baker description mention an inscription in a 15th-century hand that records the ownership of the manuscript of one William Crofton of Inner Temple. The Crofton in question is Baker’s William Crofton III (The Men of Court, 1:543). He was admitted to Inner Temple in 1534 and may have been active as late as 1572. The hand of the inscription does, however, look earlier, and since it appears at a bottom of fol. 3r, it may have been deliberately ‘antiqued’ to make it look like the writing on the rest of folio.

We have yet to find any clear indications of provenance prior to the 16th century. The contents of the manuscript certainly suggest that it was compiled for someone who was interested in manorial administration. The fact, however, that a quite sophisticated but old-fashioned register of writs is included may point to a local lawyer, who served as a manorial steward but who may, on occasion, have been an attorney in the central royal courts or, at least, dealt with men who were. The inclusion of the pleading treatises might suggest that the original owner was himself an attorney. Indeed, the contents would be of use to an apprentice or a serjeant who was engaged, or hoped to be engaged, in manorial administration.

So far as the date of the whole manuscript is concerned, there is nothing in the main collection of statutes that needs be dated later than Articuli super cartas (1300). A later hand has included a portion of the statute of Fines. That statute is normally dated to 1299, but reference in it (in both S.R. and in our text) to ‘rex Henricus avus noster’ suggests that the version of it that we have comes from the reign of Edward II. The Analysis of Writs shows that there is are similar references to H., the grandfather of the king who is speaking, in the register in the main body of the text, but that the register itself is quite old-fashioned for the reign of Edward II. Those facts lead to the suggestion that the manuscript dates from the beginning of his reign, and to our suggested date of ca. 1307.

Registrum cancellar’ domini Regis

There are no running heads in the register, but the script, style, and layout are basically the same as in the rest of the manuscript. The quiring (see the Introduction) suggests that it was made up separately from the rest of the manuscript, but there is no reason to doubt that it was part of the same project, and probably by the same scribe. The initial writ of right is to the king’s bailiffs of a royal borough threatening action by the sheriff of Leicester, tested ‘etc.’ Lacking a date for the initial writ of right, the best evidence of a terminus a quo is that in writs on fol. 144r, 148r, 153r, the king speaks of a King H. as ‘avus noster’. We have not, as yet, found any dated writs. There are very few names that seem to those of real persons, though there are some initials that could be pursued. The G. Giffard, one of the defendants in a De fine facto on fol. 144r, is probably Bishop Godfrey of Worcester, who died in 1302. What leads us to date the register, at least tentatively, at the very beginning of Edward the Second’s reign is that, as we shall see in the conclusion following the Table of Writs, this register is quite old-fashioned for a supposed date in that king’s reign.

The following table gives the names of the writs as found in the marginalia and counts them. Two counts are given in the right-hand columns of the table. The first counts all the writs, excluding any marginalia marked ‘nota’ or ‘regula’. The second excludes from that total all the writs where the heading includes the words ‘eodem’ or ‘aliter’.

The total number of writs, comparing the shorter count, is far fewer than that of MS 52 (226 vs. 507), which has a roughly similar date. It is much closer to that of MS 39 and 36 (217, 275), the registers in which seem to date from than twenty years previously. The comparison may be a bit unfair to MS 184. The register includes many writ forms as subforms of a basic writ, and the marginalia, on which we based our count, do not always note the subform. A particularly striking example is formedon (fol. 157v–158r). There are two marginal notes, the first of which describes the writ as ‘De forma donacionis per descensum’ and the second simply ‘De forma donacionis’. If all we had go on was the marginalia, we might imagine that there are only two formedons. We might even imagine that those two were the possibly pre-Westminster II forms found in MS 33 and 39. In fact, the writ next to the second marginal note is a formedon in the remainder, and between the two notes are two other formedons, both in the descender. In short, if we just relied on the marginalia, we would be likely to get both the count and the chronology wrong. Another thing that makes the comparison with MS 52 a bit unfair to MS 184 is that MS 52 has nothing but writs and three times as many folios devoted to them (38 vs. 130); of course, MS 52 is going to have more writs.

That said, we hold to our view that this register is old-fashioned for its time. If we break the register into groups, as we have with previous registers, and note the approximate proportion of coverage we get: Right (14%), Ecclesiastical (18%), Replevin (7%), Criminal (4%), Miscellaneous (24%), Novel disseisin (13%), Mort d’ancestor (7%), Ejectment, Escheat, Formedon, Entry (11%), Trespass (1%). Trespass is tucked in at the end, as if it were an afterthought. We have not seen that since MS 33, a register that we dated to 1277. (The trespass add-on also has rescue, but that is frequently found with trespass writs.) Another thing that is striking and old-fashioned about this grouping is how miscellaneous the miscellaneous category that occupies almost a quarter of the register is. It includes, more or less in this order, distraint for suit of court, account, repair of bridges, common of estovers, right of pasture, de ventre inspiciendo, annuity, mesne, debt and detinue, warranty of charter, customs and services, assize of bread and ale, covenant, de fine facto, wardship, dower, making attorney in local courts, and view of frankpledge. Some of these items remained in a miscellaneous category that we have called ‘Rights in Land’, but the registers that are contemporary or shortly before this one all seem to do a better job at breaking out some of them, particularly account, debt, and covenant, and treating them more fully. Waste is buried among the ecclesiastical prohibitions (fol. 137v), as it is in MS 36, and as it is not in MS 24 and 52. Pardons and Ad quod dampnum are simply not there.

The manuscript is not totally out of date. As we have seen, MS 184 does a better job with formedon than do its predecessors two decades earlier (though the marginalia do their best to hide it). Entry in the post is there, as it is not in MS 33, 49, and 36. This register is not hopelessly out of date for one made in a time when the king’s grandfather was named Henry; it is just, as we said, old-fashioned, particularly in what it does with trespass.

We close with a paragraph that we wrote before we had analyzed many registers. We leave it in because it lays out in narrative form how the writs are arranged in this register, and gives the folio references: The preliminary analysis suggests that there are relatively few writs in personal actions. The overall pattern seems reasonably clear. The writ of right with variants and subprocedures of it occupies fols. 122r through 127r (5 fols.). Attention then turns to ecclesiastical matters without regard to the type of writ (right of advowson, darein presentement, quare impedit, prohibition, de excommunicato capiendo): fols. 127v through 134r (7 1/2 fols.). Secular matters return with replevin: fols. 134v through 136r (4 fols.). This is followed by three folios (137r–138r) concerning criminal matters, particularly appeals, including De minis. The contents from fol. 138v through 147v (10 fols.) are decidedly miscellaneous: distraint for suit of court (138v), account (139r), repair of bridges (139v), common of estovers (140r), right of pasture (140v), de ventre inspiciendo (141r), mesne (141v), debt and detinue (142r–v), assize of bread and ale, covenant, and de fine facto (143v), wardship (144r–v), dower (145r–v), making attorney (146r–v), view of frankpledge (147r). Despite the insertion of personal actions (debt and covenant), minor criminal matters (assize of bread and ale), and procedure (view of frankpledge, making attorney), the general theme here seems to what we would call rights in land and rights of lordship. The pattern in the rest of the register (147v–159v, 13 fols.) is clearer: novel disseisin and its variants (147v–152r), mort d’ancestor and its variants (152v–154b). Quare eiecit and escheat are coupled with writs of entry (155r–158v), with formedon jammed in the middle of them (157v). The register closes with trespass (159r–v).