<Preliminary introduction>

The HOLLIS cataloguing may be found here. The following items are worth repeating:

“Description: 106 leaves : vellum ; 22 cm.

“Summary: Contains statuta vetera, tracts, and registrum brevium. Includes Opinio Anderi de Ripon (i.e. De Antiquo Dominico Corone); Hengham Magna and Parva; Judicium Essoniorum; and Cadit Assisa. The register lacks the beginning. On two fly-leaves at the end is a fragment of statutes 13-14 Richard II.

“Written in Latin by an English scribe, long lines, 30 to a full page, and rubricated.”

The cataloguing in Baker’s English Legal Manuscripts, 1, no. 62 reads as follows:

“STATUTA VETERA; TRACTS; REGISTRUM BREVIUM

“MS. 36.

“Early C.xiv, 106 ff. Includes Opinio Angeri de Ripon (i.e. De antiquo dominico corone); Hengham Magna and Parva; Judicium essoniorum; Cadit assisa. The register lacks the beginning. On two fly-leaves at the end is a fragment of statutes 13-14 Richard II.

“Belonged to Alfred John Horwood (d. 1881); his sale, S. 8 June 1883, no. 1302, to John Hirst; his sale, S. 14 Dec. 1887, no. 976, to Reader; bought by George Dunn in Jan. 1888; his sale, S. 11 Feb. 1913, no. 161; bought privately by HLS.

“Census, I, 1029, no. 36; Hengham, lxxvi, no. 40; Early Registers, xxvi.”

As will be noted below, we disagree with both HOLLIS and Baker on the dating of this manuscript, which we are inclined to date ca. 1293. In the HOLLIS entry ‘Anderi’ should be ‘Angeri’.

The manuscript measures approximately 220 X 150 mm.

The plain leather binding with knotted clasps is modern and in good condition. It was probably done after HLS acquired the manuscript, because it has none of the characteristics that are normally associated with 19th-century bindings, certainly not those that were added by George Dunn. In the process of rebinding the original endpapers seem to have been lost. All of Baker's notes of provenance could have been obtained from auction catalogues. There is evidence that the manuscript was trimmed at the top and bottom for binding. One hopes that this was done by previous binders. The blank modern endpapers at the front and back were probably added when the manuscript was most recently bound.

The manuscript now contains 106 folios less the endpapers and is foliated in a consistent early modern hand. The foliation does not account for any of several missing leaves, so it may be inferred that it was added after they were lost. In a few places, the handwritten foliation either repeats one number or skips one folio, deviating slightly from our digital foliation. We have indicated these deviations with ‘male’ in the Detailed Contents, ‘sic’ in the online display.

The signature marks were probably added when the manuscript was most recently bound. The script suggests as much.

There are no decorated capitals, though space has been left for them. The manuscript does, however, have a substantial amount of decoration in red ink, filling in the loops in the letters and the ascenders that rise above the first lines of most of the pages. The headers are usually written in red ink, and some of the text is underlined in red ink.

Some of the folios have pricks in the margin to guide the scribe in filling in the lines. Others have pencilled layout.

The script is a semi-cursive English legal hand of the late 13th century. There are probably a number of hands at work, but none of them writes a script that requires a date from the 14th century, with the exception of the two statutes of Richard II that are added at the end and are clearly extraneous to the main collection.

The script, if one might make the distinction, is more that of a clerk than that of a professional scribe. It is small and quite heavily abbreviated. The layout of the text is somewhat jammed. The quality of the parchment varies.

There are some marginalia in a contemporary script in the statutes, many of which, unfortunately, have been trimmed or disappear in the gutters. There may be such marginalia elsewhere; we did not search for them systematically.

In addition to what is missing (see below), the manuscript is damaged in a number of places. The damage is indicated in the Detailed Contents. Most of this damage does not affect the text; some of it does.

The manuscript has 13 regular quaternions, a final bifolium, and four incomplete quires. Two of these now contain only two folios, but were clearly originally larger than bifolia. The other two now contain seven folios.

One of the two-folio quires begins the manuscript (our quire 1, sig. ‘a’). An error in the photography (which will be corrected) has omitted the recto of the fol. 1 (the image in its place duplicates the recto of fol. 2). It is clear, however, that the manuscript starts in the middle of the Forest Charter, which typically follows the Magna Carta. Magna Carta probably, and some of the Forest Charter definitely, have been lost.

Quire 1 ends toward the end of c. 4 of the Provisions of Merton. Quire 2 (sig. ‘b’), a regular quaternion, begins in the middle of c. 9 of the Statute of Marlborough. A whole quire may be missing before it.

The other two-folio quire (our quire 3, sig. ‘c’) carries over regularly from quire 2. The first folio (our fol. 11) ends in the middle of c. 37 of Westminster I. The next folio begins at the end of c. 2 of Westminster II.

The amount of missing text and the regularity of the extant quiring lead us to suspect that both two-folio quires were originally quaternions. In the case of quire 1, six folios are missing from before what we have (and what was left would have had to have been resewn). In the case of quire 3, the six missing folios were in the middle of the quire.

The seven-folio quires are more complicated. Our quire 5 (sig. ‘e’) breaks off at fol. 26. Fol. 27 does not carryover from fol. 26, nor does it carryover to fol. 28. Whether fol. 27 is all that is left of what was once a quaternion, or whether quire 5 was orginally longer than a quaternion, but lost all but one of its folios at the end, we cannot tell. The modern binder seems to have tipped fol. 27 into what was left of quire 5.

Quires 12 and 13 (sig. ‘l’ and ‘m’) are both regular quaternions, but something is missing between them. Cadit assisa ends quire 12 in mid-text, and the register of writs, which begins with quire 13, lacks the writ of right and begins in the middle of the ecclesiastical writs. Hence, probably, a full quire, perhaps more, is missing after fol. 67.

Our quire 15 (sig. ‘q’), the other seven-folio quire, is clearly missing something at the end; our fol. 106 ends in mid-sentence. It may not be missing much. Assuming that the organization of the register was similar to those of the same period, we are approaching, if we have not quite reached, the end of the register.

The final bifolium contains extracts (beginning and ending in mid-sentence) from statutes of 13 and 14 Richard II (1390). The bifolium was excised, it would seem, from a statute book that contained statutes of that king’s reign in chronological order. It probably was orginally the endpapers in our manuscript (‘fly-leaves’ in Baker’s catalogue), and is clearly extraneous to the basic collection.

What are now the freestanding endpapers at front and back are probably bifolia, but we have left them out of our foliation. That gives us the following suggested collation:

1⁸ (f. 1–2, lacks 6 before 1, lacks ?1 quire after 2), 2⁸ (f. 3–10), 3⁸ (f. 11–12, lacks 6 after 11) 4⁸ (f. 13–20), 5⁸ (f. 21–26, lacks 2 after 26, 1 [f. 27] tipped in after 26), 6–14⁸ (f. 28–99, lacks ?1 quire after 67), 15⁸ (f. 100–106, lacks 1 after 106), 16² (f. 107–108).

The last datable item in the statutes is Statutum de illis qui debent poni in iuratis et assisis, 21 Edw. 1 (1293). Lacking the incipit, we cannot tell whether the version of the Forest Charter given here is the one confirmed by Edward I in 1297. The inclusion of the Opinio Angeri de Ripon (i.e. De antiquo dominico corone) suggests a date in the early 1290s, though that text continued to be included in statute books of a later date.

We have yet to find anything in the register that would require a date later than the early 1290s. We have found no formedon writs, though it is possible that they were included after our text breaks off. The writs of entry seem to be struggling with entry in the cui, without quite having reached entry in the post.

With due consideration being given to the fact that we do not have the full text, this seems to be a manuscript designed for someone who who wanted the basics and not much more. The statutes and the register are both quite skimpy. The treatises, except for the Opinio Angeri de Ripon, are all fundamental and well known: Hengham Magna and Parva, Judicium essoniorum, Cadit assisa. This is a `starter’ book for an aspiring lawyer of the 1290s.

We might note in closing that the provenance of this manuscript is quite distinguished. It was not only owned by George Dunn, who accurately noted in pencil many of problems with the manuscript as it now stands, but also by Alfred John Horwood, the first modern editor of Year Books. It is possible that the identifications of statutes pencilled in the margins of the manuscript, which are not by Dunn, are by him.

Registrum

As noted in the Introduction, the register is deficient at both the beginning and the end. Hence, the question of its date is best treated after we examine its contents. We would only add here that the script of the register, which is quite similar to that of the statute-book, is not so regular as is that of the statute-book. Half of the marginalia (those on the versos) have been cut off in a later binding. Those on the rectos are more complete but, unlike the texts of the writs themselves, hard to read and not particularly helpful.

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 smaller total of writs is 275. Thus, this register, even in its lacunose state, already has more writs than the three that are probably earlier: MS 33 (220, leaving out the false start), 49 (237, estimate of the contents before the losses), 39 (217). If we estimate how much is missing (a quire of 8 fols. at the beginning and 2 fols. at the end) and multiply by the average number of writs per folio (7), we can estimate that the total number of writs in the original register was 345, which is moving toward, but does not reach the totals of MS 24 (471) and 52 (507), which may be about fifteen years later. From what we have we might doubt that much, if any, of the substance of this register postdates 1285. The material on writs of entry is still struggling with the degrees and does not seem to know writs in the post. (The writ on fol. 87r, which cites a statute without specificity, seems to be based on Marlborough c. 9. The case is a complicated one involving parceners, similar to Hall’s R637.) There is no formedon (though that may have been contained in the folios now missing at the end). The limitation period in De nativo habendo (fol. 79r) is the coronation of Henry III, which does correspond to the period in Westminster I, c. 39. On fol. 91v a statute of merchants is cited. That could be the statute of 1285, but it could also be Acton Burnell of 1283.

What we have can grouped in the way that we grouped the writs in previous manuscripts, though the grouping shows some peculiarities: Right is missing entirely, though there is no reason to doubt that it was in the missing initial quire. Ecclesiastical (incorporating about one folio [roughly 3% of total fols.] of waste writs) (20%), Replevin (with De minis and De odio et atia tucked in toward the end) (13%), Trespass (9%), Account (13%), Local courts (3%), Debt (5%), Rights in land (5%), Mesne, Annuity, Warranty of charter (7%), Covenant (1%), Dower (3%), Wardship (5%), Entry (6%), Mort d’ancestor (9%), Escheat (1%). We have seen waste awkwardly incorporated in the ecclesiastical writs before (MS 33). It will soon emerge as a proper category of its own (MS 24). Both trespass and account have emerged as categories in their own right, with a substantial amount of space devoted to them. The real surprises come at the end. Novel disseisin is no place to be found. Entry is before mort d’ancestor, whereas it usually follows it, and escheat is stuck in at the end, perhaps being thought of as the opposite of mort d’ancestor. In MS 33, escheat is buried in entry; it does not seem to be in MS 36 and 49. While the absence of anything clearly attributable to Westminster II makes us hesitate to date this register any time after 1285, the contents do show development in what they do with trespass and account. In this regard the register is more advanced than MS 49, though it may not be any later. (Recall, however, that because of what is missing from MS 49, we do not know what, if anything, it did with trespass and account.) Perhaps ca. 1285 would be the best way to date this register.

If this was, as we suggested in the Introduction, a starter book for an aspiring lawyer of the early 1290s, then he got cheated in the register of writs. Not only was it out-of-date, but the absence of novel disseisin would likely be fatal for any beginner. Perhaps, however, he did not get cheated, but made up the book himself from examples that he found scattered about, though he probably turned them over to a not-particularly-skilled clerk to do the copying. Our putative original owner may have been responsible for the marginalia, which are not necessarily in same hand as the main text.