<Preliminary introduction>

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

“Description: 350 leaves : vellum ; 20 cm.

“Summary: Preceded by an index from Accusations to Worstede. Contains statutes from 1 Edward III to 9 Henry V.

“Notes: Written in a secretarial hand, by an English scribe, long lines, 26 to a full page.

“On a blank fly-leaf before the first folio of the table are tracings in ink from the border design; the blank folio at the end of the statutes of Edward III has a full-length contemporary figure of the king crowned and in royal robes in ink (unfinished).

“Bound in early 18c. English brown calf.”

The cataloguing in Baker’s English Legal Manuscripts, 1, no. 67 reads as follows:

“STATUTA NOVA, 1 EDWARD III TO 9 HENRY V

“MS. 42.

“Early C.xv, 350 ff., illum. initials and borders. Preceded by an index from Accusations to Worstede.

“Probably belonged to Charles Fairfax (d. 1673); Thomas Thorpe catalogue of MSS. (Suppl., 1836), no. 585 (which says it came from Fairfax collection); bought by Sir Thomas Phillipps (MS. 9129); his sale, S. 8 June 1898, no. 403, to Ellis for George Dunn; his sale, S. 12 Feb. 1913, no. 270 (with plate in catalogue); bought privately by HLS.

“Census, 1, 1030, no. 42; ELM, II, 22.”

We do not know what HOLLIS means when it describes the script of this manuscript as ‘secretarial’. See further below.

The manuscript measures approximately 220 X 150 mm.

The binding boards are covered in brown calfskin, with decoration on the spine and knotted clasps. The leather does not fully cover the insides of the binding. We have no reason to doubt the HOLLIS date of early 18th century. The binding is in good condition. There is evidence that the manuscript was trimmed at the top and bottom for binding. The endpapers at the front and back were probably added when the manuscript was bound.

The decoration is of a standard style and of good quality: red and blue paragraph marks throughout, initial capitals in red and blue ink with scroll-work in the margins on each statute, and multi-colored initial capitals with gold leaf and floral borders at the beginning of the statutes for each king. The ink tracing of the floral border on fol. 1r that appears on seq. 5 facing fol. 1r, noted in HOLLIS, is probably from a later time. The line-drawing of the king at prayer on fol. 182r, also noted in HOLLIS, may not be by the same artist who did the rest of the decoration. It is, perhaps, to be connected with the general pardon of 50 Edw. 3 that precedes it.

The script of the manuscript is a typical English semi-cursive legal one. It is clearly professional work. There is nothing about it that would lead us to date it any later than the first quarter of the 15th century. It is possible that the entire manuscript, save for an occasional marginal note, is written in the same hand; it is certainly written in the same script.

There is no foliation in the manuscript, either ancient or modern. Leaving out the initial endpapers, the main medieval text contains 350 folios, as Baker and HOLLIS note. We have extended the foliation digitally to 354 to incorporate the medieval folios at the end that are marked with pencilled layout, stopping short of the early modern endpapers.

We have found no signature marks, but most of the quires in the text of the statutes have a carryover on the last page each quire. Using these as a guide, the statutory text is made up mostly of regular quaternions with one ternion towards the end and one at the end. The alphabetical index lacks carryovers, but its 62 folios map nicely into seven quaternions and one ternion. Quire 8 may originally have been a quinternion because one or two folios have clearly been cut out of it, but no text seems to have been lost. The endpapers were bifolia out of which one was cut at the beginning and one at the end. That gives us the following tentative collation:

1² (seq. 4–9, lacks 1 before seq. 4), 2–7⁸ (f. 1–47), 8^?10 (f. 48–56, ?lacks 2 after fol. 54), 9⁶ (f. 57–62), 10–37⁸ (f. 63–286), 38⁶ (f. 287–292), 39–45⁸ (f. 293–348), 46⁶ (f. 349–354), 47² (seq. 718–723, lacks 1 after seq. 723).

The alphabetical index is written in a professional hand, perhaps the same hand as the one that wrote the main text. If it is not, it is certainly contemporary with it. The layout of the index is a bit different from that used in other alphabetical indices of statutes. The lemma appears at the top of the entries to which it refers. These are written below it in wide measure, with the citation tucked in at the end usually with a streamer in the regular ink shifting it over to the right.

The decorative pattern could be work of the artist who was responsible for the main manuscript. It has red and blue paragraph marks throughout, ultimately extended to embrace all the entries connected with each lemma. The initial capital for the first entry for each letter of the alphabet is decorated in red and blue ink with scroll-work in the margin. The first capital at the beginning of the index is decorated in color and gold leaf with a floral border.

We have as yet found no citations to any statutes prior to Edward III. We have found citations to statutes of 1, 2, 6, and 8 Hen. 6. There are probably more citations to statutes of Henry VI. Hence, the index could not have been composed from the contents of the manuscript, which ends with 9 Hen. 5.

There are a large number of lemmata, running, roughly alphabetically, from ‘Accusacions’ to ‘Wursted’. In the Detailed Contents, we have included preliminary transcriptions of them, marked as marginalia. There are 312 lemmata, about 50% more than the average (200) found in MS 40, 170, and 185. We have argued in the introductions to those manuscripts that the indices found in them are all variants on the same text, and hence not drawn from the contents of the manuscript. Not only do the lemmata in this manuscript differ from the common pattern of MS 40, 170, and 185, the index also differs in what it cites, and in the fact that it includes abridgements of all of the statutes, whereas the abridgements in MS 40, 170 and 185 are highly selective. In this regard, this index is more like that in MS 10, which we have already argued is an ancestor of that printed by Lettou and Mechlina in 1481. It is not, however, nearly so close to the printed abridgement as is the index in MS 10. Also unlike the index in MS 10, this one, as noted above, does not seem to include any citations to statutes earlier than Edward III.

The index in this manuscript bears the closest resemblance to that in MS 21. Like that in MS 21, this index has lemmata from ‘Accusacions’ (‘Accusements’ in MS 21) to ‘Wursted’. MS 21 has a few more lemmata than does this manuscript (316 vs. 312), and we have found a few later citations in MS 21 (23 Hen. 6 vs. 8 Hen. 6). The overlap, however, is substantial. The wording and citations in the seven entries in the lemma ‘Accusacions’/‘Accusements’ is the same, save for minor scribal variations and errors. There are seven lemmata in this manuscript that are not found MS 21, and eleven in MS 21 that are not found in this manuscript.¹ Hence, there are 305 that they have in common, and, with one exception, they proceed in the same order.² Although more work is needed in comparing the texts of the two abridgements, it seems reasonably clear that they are derived from a common source. That source may also be one of the sources of the index in MS 10, but exploration of that possibility must await another day.

1. MS 42 only: ‘Clerk du mardi’, ‘Enquestes’, ‘Entre ove force’, ‘Fime & ordure’, ‘Prescheours’, ‘Suours’, ‘Travers’. MS 21 only: ‘Crikes’, ‘Forein plees’, ‘Gaolers’, ‘Gardeyn’’, ‘Heedpence’, ‘Herefordshire’, ‘M’shal de bank le R’, ‘Maynpr’s’’, ‘Marchandisez eskippez’, ‘Meere’, ‘Seint esglise’. MS 42 has an entry ‘Englesherie’ whereas that in MS 21 is ‘Englet’re’. The first two entries under these lemmata are the same. MS 21 adds a reference to the statute of 7 Hen. 4 providing for succession to the crown.

2. ‘Entre sur disseisine’ appears in alphabetical order in MS 42; it follows ‘Entre ove force’, out of alphabetical order, in MS 21.

Prior to the probable ownership of Charles Fairfax in the 17th century, we have no names to which we can attach the manuscript. A late 16th- or early 17th-century owner entered a learned note on fol. 92r where he gives the membrane number of the statute roll in which 10 Edw. 3, stat. 3, appears and then, it would seem, asks us to compare it with an entry on the Close Rolls for 9 Edw. 2. In the medieval period, probably in the mid-15th century, someone wrote next to c. 5 of 16 Ric. 2: ‘L’estat’t de p’munir’ / Nota bene’ (fol. 248v). This is one of only two HLS statute manuscripts (the other being MS 185) that contains the so-far-unidentified ‘Articles’ on the Merciless Parliament (fol. 219v–228r). This is not much to go on, but when we couple these scraps of evidence with the high quality of manuscript, we may speculate that the original owner was someone of quite high status who was interested as much in the political as in the more strictly legal.