<Preliminary introduction>

The HOLLIS cataloguing may be found here. The former HOLLIS description was quite full and useful; some of it, however, was misleading and had been public for some time. We quote from it here both for the information that it contained and in order to correct it.

“Title: Statuta nova, ca. 1440

“Provenance: ‘Beauchamp’ (perhaps Henry de Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick (d. 1445) from label on ff. 1); ‘William Fletewoode’ (i.e. the serjeant at law); acquired by George Dunn in July 1886 (who inserted in 1902 a document on paper (12 April 1589) signed by Fletewoode and Mathew Dale); his sale at Sotheby (no. 275) 12 Feb. 1913; bought privately by HLS.

“Summary: Contains statutes covering the regnal years 1 Edward III to 23 Henry VI (ff. 1 r. – 225 v.). Preceded by an alphabetical index. Followed by, in a later hand, Magna Carta, and an imperfect Modus tenendi parliamentum (ff. 227–232 r.).

“Notes: Written in a legal hand in Law-French and Latin, long lines, 39 to a full page.

“Rubricated in blue and red throughout. At the beginning of the reign of each king, an initial miniature shows the King seated in royal robes holding a sceptre. That of Edward I is larger than the others. There are 97 painted and illuminated ornamental initials with floral marginal decorations.”

The cataloguing in Baker’s English Legal Manuscripts, 1, no. 48 reads as follows:

“STATUTA NOVA, 1 EDWARD III TO 23 HENRY VI

“MS. 21.

“Mid-C.xv, 233 ff., illum, initials and borders, miniatures of kings. Followed by alphabetical index, and, in a later hand, Magna Carta and an imperfect Modus tenendi parliamentum.

“‘Beauchamp’ (C.xv, in a label on fo. 1): perhaps Henry de Beauchamp (d. 1445), earl of Warwick; ‘William Fletewoode’, i.e. the serjeant at law (d. 1594); acquired by George Dunn in July 1886; his sale, S. 12 Feb. 1913, no. 275 (with plate in catalogue, showing fo. lr); bought privately by HLS.

“Census, I, 1026, no. 21; N. Pronay and J. Taylor, Parliamentary Texts of the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1980), 202.”

We begin with corrections to the former HOLLIS cataloguing. The last statute in the manuscript is 23 Hen. 6 (1445). Hence, the approximate date of the manuscript must be at least 1445 and not ca. 1440. There is no image in the manuscript that can be identified with Edward I. The larger image of a king to which the description refers (our fol. 1r) is almost certainly a stylized image of Edward III, since it appears on the first folio of statutes of Edward III. More troubling is the fact that the description said that the alphabetical index precedes the collection of statutes. Since the manuscript was rebound in 1990, it is possible that the index was misplaced in the rebinding, but the fact that Baker, who saw the manuscript in the 1980s, says that it follows the collection of statutes makes it virtually certain that the HOLLIS description was wrong in this respect.

HOLLIS, Baker, and before them Sotheby’s catalogue of the Dunn manuscripts suggest that the ‘Beauchamp’ inserted in the floral work on the bottom of our fol. 1r is Henry de Beauchamp, duke of Warwick, 1425–1446. (See Christine Carpenter, in ODNB, s.n.) We have our doubts, but these are best expressed after a more technical description of the manuscript.

The manuscript measures approximately 280 X 203 mm.

The binding dates from 1990, uncovered birch boards with the spine covered in pigskin. The report of the modern binder, Nancy Southworth, tipped in at the end of the manuscript, gives the full details. There is evidence that the manuscript was trimmed at the top for binding in some earlier period.

The HOLLIS description of the decoration is accurate other than its identification of the first miniature of a king being that of Edward I and its omitting the fact the folio that would have contained the miniature of Henry VI is missing. We did not count the number of illuminated initials; it could be as many as 97. We might add that lines of text that do not run out to the margin are filled in with red and blue streamers out to margin, an example of medieval ‘horror vacui’ that makes the overall impression of the manuscript very colorful.

The folios of the main manuscript are laid out in drypoint with lines for a header, a text block, and a large space at the bottom. There are 39 long lines of text on the full pages. Drypoint horizontal lines for the text are not visible on the images. The scribes may have done it by eye. If they did, they did a good job.

The general condition of the manuscript is good. We found one page, fol. 136r, where the painting has some bleeding, perhaps because of exposure to water or humidity. There may be others; we did not look for them systematically.

Once we realized that the HOLLIS description was unreliable, we decided to discard its folio references. There is no foliation in the manuscript, either ancient or modern. The HOLLIS description said that the collection of statutes is on fol. 1–225 followed by ‘Magna Carta and an imperfect Modus tenendi parliamentum’ on fol. 227–232. Our first digital foliation attempted to reproduce this foliation, but when we did it, fol. 1r appeared in the middle of 8 Edw. 3. If we left out the index and started the foliation with 1 Edw. 3, the final section with Magna Carta and the Modus (which actually appear in reverse order) begins on fol. 203r.

It seemed best to abandon the former HOLLIS foliation and refoliate the manuscript digitally, beginning with 1 Edw. 3 and omitting the modern end papers, a document signed by Fletewoode and Dale (of which more below), and the binder’s report, all of which are clearly later additions to the manuscript. Foliating this way gave us a basic collection of statutes from fol. 1r to fol. 202v. The index follows immediately on fol. 203r and runs to 233v. Fol. 234 is blank, as is 235r. The incomplete Modus begins on 235v, followed by Magna Carta, beginning on 238r and running to 240r. Fol. 240v and 241r are blank, but 241v contains an extract from an apocryphal chronology of the rulers of Alexandria ending with St. Katherine’s father, Costus. The modern end papers follow, which we did not foliate. As already mentioned, the binder’s report from 1990 is tipped in at the end.

The quiring of the manuscript is fairly regular and straightforward. After an initial ternion of modern endpapers and the tipped-in document signed by Fletewoode and Dale, there follow 21 quires, all regular quaternions, except for one (no. 19), which lacks a folio. All but quire 8 have carryovers on the last folio set up in a quite distinctive way. Quire 23 is a quinternion with an additional folio tipped in. The additional folio has a carryover that was not filled in until the 19th century. There follow three more regular quaternions, of which only the first has a carryover. There follow four quaternions, which contain the index/calendar, also without carryovers. The last medieval quire is an addition that seems to be contemporary with rest of the manuscript. It contains an extract from the Modus tenendi parliamentum, a copy of the 1297 version of Magna Carta, and a chronology of the rulers of Alexandria. This quire looks like a quaternion lacking one folio. The manuscript closes with a ternion of modern end papers with the binder’s report tipped in at the end. This gives us the following collation:

Collation: 1⁶ (seq. 3–8, 1 cut, 1 tipped in), 2–18⁸ (fol. 1–136), 19⁸ (f. 137–143, lacks 1 after 143), 20–22⁸ (fol. 144–167), 23¹⁰ + i (tipped in) (f. 168–178), 24–30⁸ (f. 179–234), 31⁸ (fol. 235–241, lacks 1 after 241), 32⁶ (seq. 491–496, 1 cut, 1 tipped in).

There is material that is out of order in quire 8. The preceding quire ends with the beginning of c. 7 of 37 Edw. 3 (fol. 48v). The new quire begins (fol. 49r) with the end of 50 Edw. 3 and the beginning of 1 Ric. 2, which continues on the verso. Fol. 50r has c. 15 (end) – 18 (the end of the statute) of 37 Edw. 3 and the beginning of 38 Edw. 3. Edward III statutes then continue in chronological order until we reach fol. 55v, which ends in the middle of 50 Edw. 3. Fol. 56r–v contains c. 7 (end) – 15 (beginning) of 37 Edw. 3 (misnumbered 36 in the heading of fol. 56v). Quire 9 begins on fol. 57r with the continuation of 1 Ric. 2. The mistake was noticed early on. Fol. 48v contains, in the usual quite distinctive style, a carryover indicating a quire break that refers us to the first words of fol. 56r. Fol. 49v also contains a carryover, again in the usual style, that refers us to the first words on fol. 57r. (Fol. 51v also has a carryover, not in the usual style, perhaps to emphasize that this folio does carry over. Fol. 56v has no carryover, but it does have a floriated design in drypoint or pencil that points to the bottom margin, perhaps to indicate ‘go back’.)

While it is possible that the scribe copied the material in the wrong order, it seems much more likely that he was working with quires that were not sewn, or not permanently sewn. When quire 8 was permanently sewn, the outer bifolium was folded in the wrong way, which resulted in what should have been the last folio of the quire appearing at the beginning and what should have been the first folio appearing at the end. The scribe who was putting in the carryovers noticed this, but did not want to resew (have resewn) quire 8 and so put in the unusual carryover on fol. 49v. The error could have been corrected when the manuscript was rebound in 1990, but apparently the binder, like her predecessor 540 years earlier, did not want to resew the quire.

The missing folio after fol. 143 has, unfortunately, a simple explanation. It should have contained the end of 9 Hen. 5 and the beginning of 1 Hen. 6. That folio would also have contained an image of Henry VI. It seems likely that the folio was vandalized because of the image.

The unusual quire 23 needs a more complicated explanation. The binder reports that it is a quinternion (more about this below). She does not mention the additional folio, which seems to be tipped in. We can explain the unusual size of the quire if we imagine that a quire had already been begun for 14 Hen. 6, which starts the next quire. The scribe, who was not necessarily a different scribe from the one who had been doing quire 24, realized when he began quire 23 that he was going to need more than a quaternion to get in all of the long 11 Hen. 6, so he had a quinternion made up. He did not finish 11 Hen. 6 in the quinternion, so he put what was left of it on an extra folio, which was then tipped in after the quinternion. He put in a box for the continuation at the bottom of the added folio, but did not fill it in. It was not filled in until the 19th century, and what was filled in in pencil is hard to read and even harder to make sense of. It is not a continuation to fol. 179r. It may be related to the fact that the text at the end of 11 Hen. 6 is a bit different from that in S.R.

It remains to see if we can reconcile our quiring with what the binder says about it in her report: “There are 29 signatures, 15 sewing holes 5 from the 19th century, 4 leaves per signature, except: sig 18 has 7 pgs, sigs 20 and 21 have 8 leaves, 22 has 5 leaves, and 29 has 7 pgs. . . . The last signature had been cut into single sheets and these were rejoined with vellum.” Most of the report is devoted to describing technically, and in considerable detail, the handsome piece of binding work that she did. Clearly, no one told her how important it is to leave a precise description of what she found when she disbound the quires. As it is, we can reconcile what she says with what we found if we assume that she made a couple of mistakes and used somewhat unusual terminology: First, she did not count the endpapers that she herself added. Second, she started by counting only those quires that contained the main manuscript. Those add up to 29, and the fact that what are almost certainly her quire numbers in the lower-left hand corner of the our quires 27–30, which she numbered 26–29, supports that proposition. Normally when she says ‘leaves’, she means bifolia, just as when she says ‘pages’ she means folios. Thus, when she says that quire 29 has 7 pages, she means that it has 7 folios, and the quire to which she is referring is her quire 30 (our 31). That she made up this quire out of single sheets that she found at the end of manuscript seems plausible. All we have to do to make this make sense is to assume that she forgot that her initial count of the quires did not include the last one. The only way that we can explain what she meant when she said that quires 20 and 21 (our 21 and 22) have 8 leaves is that here she is using ‘leaf’ in its more normal meaning of a single folio. As noted above, quire 22 (our 23) does seem to be a quinternion; she did not mention the additional folio which seems to be tipped in at the end.

The last datable item in the main collection is the statute of 23 Hen. 6; hence our approximate date, ca. 1445. That 23 Hen. 6 was written in different hand from that of the preceding statutes of Henry VI suggests that most of the statute book was substantially complete before 1445. Since the alphabetical index contains references to 23 Hen. 6, we might want to date its composition a bit later. Hence, our queried date of ca. 1450 in parentheses. The fact that fol. 4r refers to Edward III as ‘nunc rex’ suggests that the statute of Northampton, and perhaps other statutes of Edward’s time, were copied from a manuscript that dated from that time.

The alphabetical index is written in a professional hand, indistinguishable from, and probably the same as, the hand that wrote the last statute. It is thus not the same hand as the one responsible for most of the statutes. The decorative pattern, however, could be work of the artist who was responsible for the main manuscript. It has red and blue braces grouping the items that fit under the lemma in the margin and streamers in the same colors joining the abridgement of the statute to its citation.

There are a large number of lemmata, running, roughly alphabetically, from ‘Accusements’ to ‘Wursted’. In the Detailed Contents, we have made a preliminary transciption of the lemmata in the field for marginalia. There are 316 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. So far as we have yet determined, the citations in this index are all to be found in statutes that are in the manuscript, and, hence, unlike the citations in MS 40, 170, and 185, do not include any citations to statutes that antedate Edward III. As mentioned above, the latest statute that we have found cited is 23 Hen. 6, the last statute in the manuscript and itself a later addition.

We doubt, however, that, with the possible exception of a few statutes of Henry VI, this index was made up from the contents of this manuscript. It bears a close resemblance to the alphabetical index in MS 42. A comparison of the two will be found in the introduction to MS 42.

The suggestion noted above that the ‘Beauchamp’ inserted in the floral work on the bottom of our fol. 1r is Henry de Beauchamp, duke of Warwick, is possible, but the fact that he died on 11 June 1446 (when he was barely 22) is a bit difficult to reconcile with the presence of the statutes from 1445 in the main manuscript and even more difficult to reconcile with the fact that the index contains at least one reference to 23 Hen. 6 in the proper alphabetical order. The elaborate illustrations in the manuscript certainly suggest that it was made for someone who did not lack for funds. With some hesitation, we suggest that the ‘Beauchamp’ is more likely to be Henry’s distant cousin John (c. 1400–1475), who was a soldier and administrator in this period and who ultimately became the first Baron Beauchamp of Powick. See John Watts, in ODNB, s.n. The title went extinct with the death of John’s son Richard in 1503, and one can imagine how a manuscript like this one might well have been sold, ultimately to come into the hands of William Fletewoode in the Elizabethan period. Fletewoode’s signature appears at the bottom of fol. 1r.

The largely non-statutory section at the end also suggests that the original owner was not a practicing lawyer. A practicing lawyer would almost certainly already have had a copy of Magna Carta (and others of what came to be called the Statuta vetera). The Modus tenendi parliamentum is not normally found in medieval statute books. (The only copies in Baker’s Cambridge Legal Manuscripts are in Lord Littleton’s collection of materials on parliament from the 17th century, although a short extract from it is found in HLS MS 20 and the whole text in MS 32.) And while the short, fanciful chronology of the rulers of Alexandria could be found tucked into the back of any medieval manuscript, it is more appropriate for a display manuscript than for a lawyer’s working book.

The only indication to the contrary is the marginalia on fol. 130r, which seem to be emphasizing the terms of an inquest that the parliament had ordered into the endowments of hospitals. The marginalia are written in what seems to be a fifteenth-century hand. We should remember, however, that John Beauchamp was deeply involved in administration. There is no reason why he might not have had occasion to look up such a statute or to have someone working for him look it up and note it for him. Indeed, since Beauchamp was at one point the Lord Treasurer, he might well have been interested in this statute in his official capacity.

The HOLLIS description said, and still says, that George Dunn had the Fletewoode and Dale document tipped into the manuscript in 1902. There is no reference in the manuscript to support that statement, but unlike the foliation (which seemed to be the result of miscounting) and the references to the order of the material (which seemed to be simply confused), this is the kind of thing that probably at one time had some support, such as a note by Dunn folded into the manuscript. That note now seems to be lost, possibly when the manuscript was rebound, but we are inclined to believe it. The document is certainly tipped in. It is not connected to any quire other than by modern binders.

What this document is doing there is something of a puzzle. There is good reason to believe that Fletewoode owned the manuscript. His signature appears at the bottom of fol. 1r. What is puzzling is why he would have left this document in the manuscript. The whole point of the document seems to be to provide evidence that a subsidy was paid. It has both Fletewoode’s and Dale’s seals on it in addition to their signatures. Perhaps the man who paid the tax never picked it up, or perhaps he never paid. There are notes at the bottom of the document that seem to record the payments of the tax by others. (The raised seals on the facing page have been partially cut out and folded to face their corresponding signatures; they need to be checked on the physical manuscript.)