<Preliminary introduction>

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

“Description : [235] leaves : vellum ; 13 cm.

“Summary : Laws of England in the time of Edward I, including the laws from the Magna Charta to the Summa Magna of Radulph de Hengham; tracts include Judicium essoniorum, Cadit assisa, and Expositio vocabularum.”

The cataloguing in Baker’s English Legal Manuscripts, 1, no. 106 reads as follows:

“STATUTA VETERA; TRACTS

“MS. 175.

“C.xiv, 235 ff. The tracts are: Judicium essoniorum; Hengham; Cadit assisa; Expositio vocabulorum.

“‘Mavery Amen’ (C.xv, at end); ‘John Hooper’ (C.xvii); ‘William Price 1774’; tiny circular bookplate (C.xviii) with arms, Or three crescents each enclosing an estoile gules [BATEMAN] ; later belonged to Edwin Freshfield (d. 1918); and to his son Edwin Hanson Freshfield (d. 1948), of Reigate, Surrey, in 1926; sold at Hodgson’s, 11 July 1947, no. 311, to Maggs; purchased from them, and received on 4 Aug.

As will be explained more fully below, we have doubts that someone named ‘Mavery Amen’ ever existed. The title of the ‘Expositio’ (or ‘Exposicio’) should be ‘Expositio vocabulorum’, as it is in Baker.

The manuscript measures approximately 130 X 90 mm.

The board-and-vellum binding is probably not original but is of considerable age. The first freestanding endpaper, which seems to older than the endpapers that follow, has a note dating to the reign of Richard II. That the manuscript was rebound at some point probably with the original boards is suggested by the fact that the initial freestanding endpaper and the first folio of the capitularia are tacky, but the intervening endpapers are regular and clean. It also looks as if endpapers were inserted at the end between the final item of the main text and the final freestanding endpaper, which, once more, is in much worse condition than the preceding endpapers. A possible clue as to the date of the (re)binding is found in the table of kings (seq. 7), which is on one of the inserted endpapers. As originally conceived, it contained the number of years of the reign of Edward IV, perhaps that of Edward V, which would give us a date shortly after 1483. The signature marks, which are extensive but not complete, could date from that time.

The decoration is not elaborate, but where it is finished, it is well executed. The capitals have some red and blue painting; some have penned scrollwork in the margins. Whether those that we marked in the Detailed Contents as ‘unfinished’ really are unfinished, or just more modest efforts, we leave for the art historians to decide. There are red paragraph marks throughout and some filling of the loops in the letters in the text with red.

The primary hand that begins with the text of the Magna Carta is neat, legible, and professional. There is nothing about it that requires a date after 1300.

We have found no foliation either ancient or modern in the manuscript. Baker and HOLLIS achieved a count of 235 by starting with the capitularia on seq. 19 (actually they begin on seq. 20, a verso), and ending with the end of Officium coronatoris on seq. 488. Doing this leaves unfoliated medieval and early modern material that appears on the old endpapers before the more recently inserted endpapers at the front, after the end of Officium coronatoris, and after the more recently inserted endpapers at the back. Left to our own devices, we would have foliated the whole manuscript from front to back. As it is, it seemed best to leave the starting point where it has been for some time and to refer to the material before it by sequence number, but to continue the digital foliation from 235 to the end. That gives us a total of 266 numbered folios with 14 unnumbered folios before the foliation begins.

That the quiring of this manuscript is irregular seems clear. That some of the quires are as large as what we were able to see on the images seems unlikely, but we did what we could, supported by the signature marks. Pending an examination in situ we came up with 25 quires of various lengths, including the initial and final endpapers: one 18-folio quire, five 16-folio quires, one 14-folio quire, five sesternions, three quinternions, seven quaternions, one ternion, and one bifolium. One folio is missing from the beginning of the manuscript before fol. 1, as are two in the last quire of blank endpapers before fol. 260 and after fol. 265. The first (seq. 5–6) and last (fol. 266) folios are single folios tipped in. This gives us the following collation:

i (seq. 5–6), 1⁶ (seq. 7–18), 2² (f. 1, lacks one before f. 1), 3¹⁶ (f. 2–17), 4–5¹⁰ (f. 18–35), 6¹⁶ (f. 36–53), 7¹⁴ (f. 54–67), 8–9¹⁶ (f. 68–99), 10¹⁸ (f. 100–117), 11–14⁸ (f. 118–149), 15–17¹² (f. 150–185), 18¹⁰ (f. 186–195), 19–20¹² (f. 196–219), 21¹⁶ (f. 220–235), 22–25⁸ (f. 236–265) (lacks 1 before f. 260 and after 265), i (f. 266).

The most important clue to the dating of this manuscript is the use of the 1225 versions of the charters rather than those of 1297. When this is coupled with the fact that the last datable item in the manuscript is 21 Edw. 3 (1293), we are reasonably confident of our date of ca. 1293. None of tracts needs be dated from after that time, and while some of the statutes temp. incert. lack a firm date, the same can be said of them.

A highly speculative note in the Detailed Contents on fol. 266r suggests that the name on that page that Baker read as ‘Mavery Amen’ is actually a Latinization of the name of a man named Maelore ap Enniaun. That may suggest that the manuscript had a Welsh owner in the 15th century. The later provenance is English, but the later owners seem to have been collectors of manuscripts not professional users.