As previously noted, approximately one-fifth of HLS Ms 41 is a manuscript of Novae narrationes, of the ‘C’ type, with additions from the ‘B’ type. It is separately foliated in Roman, 73 folios of which 71 contain writing, and is currently bound in a separate physical volume. Ms. Shanks dates it after 1510, but she does include a description of the manuscript, a list of headings, and some variants from it in her edition of Novae Narrationes for the Selden Society.¹

We have not yet discovered what it was that led Ms. Shanks to assign such a late date to this text of Novae Narrationes. She was a careful scholar, and there is indubitably something, probably in the marginalia, that indicates this date. What we can say with reasonable confidence is that it is highly unlikely that the basic script of the text, which is quite consistent throughout, is the product of a hand writing in the early years of the sixteenth century. Indeed, the script is quite similar to (we are not yet saying that it is the same as) that of the basic early script in the abridgement, which we have tentatively identified as being like that which we associate with the late fourteenth century. Another indication of the approximate date of our text is that it contains a precedent in an appeal of homicide (fol. 67r), not included in the Shanks/Milsom edition, which is dated to Easter of 11 Henry IV, a year that appears prominently among those in the abridgement.

Ms. Shanks was dealing with a large number of manuscripts and a complicated transmission tradition. Once she had decided that this text was late, it is quite understandable that she did not focus on it in the way that she did on some of the other manuscripts.² If, however, the manuscript is as early as we are inclined to think that it is, then its contents deserve more attention. This is not an easy task. As Ms. Shanks already noted, the manuscript, compared to other manuscripts of Novae Narrationes, is quite skimpy in the headings that it offers. We offer below those headings that it does have, followed, where we have so far identified it, with the number of the precedent as it appears in the Shanks/Milsom edition (‘C’, or occasionally ‘B’, followed by a number). These identifications are by no means complete, but we have already discovered precedents that do not appear in the modern edition. There may be more, and work is ongoing. The Ames Foundation would welcome communications from anyone who has either matched a precedent in our manuscript with one in the modern edition or who can confirm that a precedent in the manuscript is not in the modern printed edition.

In transcribing the headings we have extended abbreviations where we were confident that we had them right. We have noted and occasionally corrected some obvious errors in square brackets. Our preliminary examination suggests that this is not a particularly accurate manuscript, perhaps another reason why Ms. Shanks did not make more use of it than she did. Where the heading matched one of those given in Shanks/Milsom we did not always check to see that the precedent did. We checked enough of them, however, that we can report that the texts of the precedents freequently contains variants not reported in Shanks/Milsom, and in some cases are quite different indeed. The notes are thoughts that occurred to us as we were going through the headings; some of them are almost certainly wrong.