<Preliminary introduction>

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

“Description: [230] leaves : vellum ; 10 cm.

“Summary: Written by an English scribe, long lines, 28 to a full page. The register is imperfect at the beginning. C-type text of Novae Narrationes, imperfect at end.

“Notes: Several ornamental pen letters in blue and red, and many small illuminated initials.

“Leaves are numbered 23-254 in a later hand; evidently many folios missing throughout since then.”

The cataloguing in Baker’s English Legal Manuscripts, 1, no. 83 reads as follows:

“REGISTRUM BREVIUM; NOVAE NARRATIONES

“MS. 60.

“C.xiv, 229 ff., illum, initials. The register is imperfect at the beginning. C-type text of Novae narrationes.

“Acquired by George Dunn in Nov. 1896; his sale, S. 12 Feb. 1913, no. 232; bought privately by HLS.

“Census, I, 1034, no. 60; Novae Narrationes, 80 SS ccxviii, no. 37; Early Registers, xxvi.”

The manuscript is approximately 100 X 70 mm.

The manuscript was rebound recently, probably at the Northeast Documents Conservation Center, though it lacks that binder’s report that usually accompanies such rebindings. It is in pigskin and board, and is in excellent condition. In the process of rebinding, however, the original endpapers seem to have been lost. Baker’s notes of provenance antedate the rebinding. We seem, however, to lack George Dunn’s notes, which are sometimes quite helpful.

The decoration is handsome and consistent throughout. We counted 132 decorated capitals, in blue and what looks on the images like a shade of brown and another of pink. Blue and brown paragraph marks appear throughout. Many of the paragraph marks have penned scrollwork in red or blue. There are no illustrations, though some of the scrollwork moves in the direction of a human profile.

There is no significant damage to the manuscript, as we now have it, though, as we will see below, there is quite a bit missing.

The script is consistent throughout, and eminently legible. It is a typically English semi-cursive legal script that seems to date to the first half of the 14th century. While it may not be all in the same hand, it may be. If it is not, the scribes who worked on it made every effort to make it look the same.

There is an early modern foliation in the upper right-hand corner of the rectos. It runs from 23 to 254, corresponding to our digital foliation of 1 to 230. That suggests that we have lost 22 folios at the beginning and 2 more in the middle. The situation is, however, more complicated than that. There is a medieval foliation in the lower left-hand corner of some of the versos. The first visible number is xxvij on our fol. 3v, fol. 25 of the early modern foliation. That would give us 24 folios that are now missing at the beginning of the manuscript, probably three quaternions.

Although the early modern foliation suggests that two folios are missing between our fol. 1 and 230, the early modern foliation is not a good guide to what is missing. As will be seen in our reproduction of it in the Detailed Contents, it skips fol. 43, 154, and 155, and then duplicates fol. 160, leaving the total 2 short of where it ought to be.

There are, however, missing folios in the middle of the text, although the early modern foliation does not indicate them. The carryover on our fol. 96v does not carry over. At least one folio is missing, perhaps more. They may not, however, be missing from our quire 13, which follows fol. 96, because that quire begins with two blanks. In order to make the quiring fit, however, we need to imagine that one more blank was cut out. That would mean that the missing folio(s) were inserted between our quire 12 and quire 13, perhaps a single folio that was tipped in and that got lost when the original binding deteriorated.

The early modern foliation is given in the detailed contents below. Since we did not have room to include the medieval foliation, which is quite irregular and incomplete, we list it here: our fol. 3v–15v = medieval fol. 27–39; 16v (the quire breaks here) – 24v (the quire also breaks here) = 41–49; 25v–29v = 40–44; 30v–40v = all 44; 41v–42v = 45–46, 47v–49v = all 52; 50v–54v = 53–57; 58v–63v = 59–64. This may have made some kind of sense to the person who put it in; we confess that we have been unable to make any sense out of it.

Signature markings appear on the first four folios of some quires; the markings are, however, faint and difficult to read. Some have markings that suggest that others of the first four were so marked. There seems to be a sequence that begins with signature ‘a’ on our fol. 17r, two quires into what we now have. Beginning with fol. 33r, the signature seems to change to the Hindu-arabic number ‘36’, although later in the quire, it is marked ‘c’. ‘d’, skipping ‘e’, and ‘f’ follow where we would expect them. Fol. 57r seems to be marked ‘37’, but ‘g’ is found later in the quire. Fol. 65r has ‘38’ at the beginning and ‘h’ following. Fol. 81r has what may be ‘29’ or ‘39’, with ‘k’ following. After this, lettered signature marks cease, but ‘43’ is found on fol. 106r, and numbered signatures, sometimes with indications of the second, third, and/or fourth folio in the signature continue throughout the rest of the manuscript, ending with ‘58’ on fol. 230r.

The signature markings and the quite consistent use of carryovers to indicate quire breaks makes the following collation relatively secure:

Quiring/collation (does not include modern end pages):

1–12⁸ (f. 1–96, ?three quires missing before the first), 13¹⁰ (f. 97–105, ?one missing after 96), 14–17⁸ (f. 106–137), 18¹² (f. 138–149), 19–29⁸ (f. 150–230, ?seven missing after 230).

That the manuscript was the product of a professional scriptorium seems quite clear. While we know of no evidence that London scriptoria producing legal manuscripts worked with pecie as did Italian scriptoria in the same period, it is possible that they did. The high numbers in the later signature marks in the manuscript would certainly seem to suggest that the later parts of it were made up of already existing quires designed for a much larger manuscript than this one, or simply to be included in a manuscript if the person who ordered the manuscript wanted them. They all, however, have the same style of decoration and script. The blank folios that begin quire 13 may be further evidence that multiple duplicate quires of this material once existed. There are, unfortunately, no visible signature marks on this quire.

How much is missing at the end of the manuscript is difficult to determine. The text of Novae Narrationes that we have ends with waste, which appears close to the end of the modern printed edition. Assuming (as it may be risky to assume), that our text followed the order of the modern printed edition, the remainder of the last quire and perhaps one more quaternion is missing.

Both the register of writs and Novae Narrationes have chapter numbers on their headings, which almost certainly refer to capitularia that we no longer have. The register begins with waste, with just of hint that what preceded it was the end of the section ‘de recto’. If that is right, then this register lacked the extensive section on ‘ecclesiastical’ writs that is normally found in between the writ of right and waste. (There is further discussion in the conclusion to the Analysis of Writs.) Three quires would probably have been enough to include all of the writ of right and a capitularium of the register. The capitularium of Novae Narrationes would have to have appeared at the end.

We have yet to discover anything that would give us a more secure date than the ca. 1325 that has been given to it by previous cataloguers. The introduction to the Analysis of Writs offers some dating points that are not inconsistent with that date, but do not tie it down. The contents of the manuscript seem to be contemporary with Hall’s register ‘R’ and the ‘C’ version of Novae Narrationes, both of can be dated around 1325. The script and the decoration are consistent with this date.

What we have is lacunose and poses a puzzle as to what the original purpose of the manuscript might have been. As noted in the conclusion to the Analysis of Writs, when full, the register would have contained about 200 fewer writs Hall’s register ‘R’, which contains 886. That is quite large for a manuscript that seems to have been designed to be portable, and contrasts with MS 61, another portable manuscript from roughly the same period, which contains about half of the writs that are in ‘R’ (486). Novae Narrationes occupies more than half of what we have and probably would have contained almost half of what there originally was. The manuscript was quite well made. It was certainly not made for someone who lacked for funds. The contents of the register are idiosyncratic. (Again, see the conclusion to the Analysis of Writs). They suggest that the manuscript was made for a clerk who specialized in royal writs. That suggestion, however, is hard to reconcile with the presence of Novae Narrationes. We leave the reader, then, with a puzzle that may not be soluble on the basis of what we have.

No heading found

We originally dated both HLS MS 60 and 61 as ca. 1325 on the basis of their contents rather than on the basis of any firm evidence of the date. The next paragraph provides some, but not much, confirmation of that date for MS 60. 1325 is the same year as the much more solidly dated MS 28, but MS 28 is quite different from 60 and 61, both of which are portable manuscripts in which we would expect to find a selection of writs rather than an attempt at comprehensiveness. That is certainly true of MS 61. Whether it is true of MS 60 is harder to know because quite a bit is missing. All three manuscripts have something in them other than a register, statutes in MS 28, Novae narrationes in MS 60, Articuli ad novas narrationes in MS 61. What is in MS 60 and 61 is much more directly related to the register. Here is the writ, and here is how you plead it. MS 60 is, unfortunately, unique among the three in that it lacking quite a bit, perhaps as much as three quires at the beginning. (See the Introduction.)

On fol. 43v of MS 60, there is a reference to a change that John de ‘Langetoft’ made in the writ De odio et atia when he was (‘fuit’) chancellor. No John de Langetoft was ever chancellor of England. This is probably a reference to John Langton, who was chancellor twice, leaving office for the second time in 1310. (If our date for the register is right, he would still have been alive. He became bishop of Chichester and did not die until 1337.) On fol. 123r, there is writ in favor of the prior of Newstead (Notts.) against one Gervase de Clifton. A man of that name was sheriff of Notts. and died in 1324. If that is the right man, that fact would tend to confirm our tentative date. Unfortunately, a descendant of his, also named Gervase de Clifton, was also sheriff of Notts. in 1345. (See Clifton Family of Clifton.) We think the script and the layout of MS 60 are too early for 1345, but that is a bootstrapping argument. Folio 118v has a writ of entry brought by one Simon de Boyton against Thomas and Marjory ‘Ponyn’. The first name is not that common but a Simon de Boyton appears in Cal. Close R. (1313–18), 207 (9 Jan. 1315), as the demandant in another piece of land litigation. The surname Ponyn does not exist, but Poynings does. Thomas de Poynings, the father of the first lord Poynings, was killed at Honnecourt in 1339. His wife, however, was not named Marjory, but Agnes, but his mother may have been so named. Her husband, however, seems to have been named Michael. There are no dates in the writs that we have yet found, and the real names are not many. There are, however, some of the latter, and a more assiduous search might allow someone to tie down the date of the register more precisely.

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 following table. The first counts all the writs for which there are marginal notes, excluding, however, the notes that are labelled ‘Regula’ or ‘Nota’. The second excludes from the total all the writs where the marginal note includes the words ‘eodem’ or ‘aliter’.