<Preliminary introduction>

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

“Description: 184 leaves : vellum ; 26 cm.

“Notes: Written in a neat contracted legal hand in law-French and Latin.

“Large illuminated initial and floreate side border, painted capitals in blue and red, and ornamental pen letters.”

The cataloguing in Baker’s English Legal Manuscripts, 1, no. 54 reads as follows:

“REGISTRUM BREVIUM

“MS. 27.

“C.xv, 184ff., doeskin over wooden boards. The first writ concerns land in Nottinghamshire, and is tested 5 June 2 Henry. Preceded by an index.

“‘William Godyng’; ‘Godyng William le puisne’ (C.xv); ‘Ad Thomas Bonefaunt’ (misread in Census as ‘Johnston Benesaunt'), i.e. Thomas Bonefaunt (d. 1536) adm. Lincoln's Inn 1522, attorney and filazer of the King's Bench; ‘Liber Philippi Moultonis ex dono Johanne Hendonis vidue’ (C.xvii); acquired by George Dunn in Sept. 1896; his sale, S.12 Feb. 1913, no. 238; bought privately by HLS.

“Census, I, 1027, no. 27; Early Registers, xxvi.”

For reasons suggested below, we are inclined to date the manuscript as after 1424 as opposed to the ca. 1420 date given in HOLLIS. We would also add that that Latin dominates as the language; there is relatively little ‘law-French’.

The manuscript is approximately 260 X 195 mm.

The script is neat and consistently legible, clearly 15th-century, though more likely a script of the first half of the century as opposed to the second half.

The manuscript contains red and blue paragraph marks and decorated capitals throughout. There is a particularly large, colorful initial capital and floral border at the beginning of the register (fol. 8r). We found two profile human faces incorporated into flourishes at the top of the text on consecutive pages (fol. 26).

The board-and-doeskin binding is old, perhaps even original. It has significant scoring and surface damage; most of the outer tanning on the doeskin has worn away.

Damage to the manuscript includes several torn pages (fols. 9, 184, and 195) and even more missing ones (after fols. 38, 40, 60, 67, 83, 151, and 155).

There is no medieval foliation, but chapter numbers are included in the upper corners. Signatures can be found on the first four pages of each quire with a plus sign on the fifth. Our digital foliation, like that of HOLLIS and Baker, begins with the index of contents, ignoring the initial freestanding endpapers, though these seem to be quite old.

Quiring is mostly regular quaternions with occasional quires of 6, 10, or 12 pages. Several pages are missing, which makes this collation somewhat tentative, although the signatures help:

1² (unfoliated), 2–5⁸ (unfoliated–f. 31), 6^?12 (f. 32–40, two missing after 38, one missing after 40), 7–11⁸ (f. 41–78, two missing after 60 and 67), 12¹⁰ (f. 79–87, one missing after 83), 13–14⁸ (f. 88–103), 15–16⁶ (f. 104–115), 17–21⁸ (f. 116–154, one missing after 151), 22^? (f. 155, ?many pages missing), 23–25⁸ (f. 156–179), 26⁶ (f. 180–185).

There is only one mark of foliation on the manuscript that we have been able to find: ‘201’ in pencil in a script that does not look old on the last folio. That does not correspond to our digital foliation of 184. It may, however, correspond to the number of folios that the manuscript originally had. We counted nine missing folios plus an indeterminate number in quire 22, of which only one folio seems to have survived. This could add up to the 17 that the manuscript foliation suggests are missing. It seems likely that this number was someone’s estimate of the original number of folios rather than an actual count of what was there. It may have been done at the same time as the handwriting in pencil on fol. 155r, which notes that the one remaining folio of quire 22 was bound out of order. (The signature marking does follow in order for the place where the folio is located.)

The contents of the missing folios could be reconstructed from the index of contents. Except in the case of the problematical quire 22 we have not yet undertaken to do so. In the case of quire 22, both medieval and modern notes indicate that the one of folio of it that survives is out of order and that it should appear following fol. 148v. That is certainly correct. What is not noted, but what is in fact the case, is that if we place fol. 155 after fol. 148, the text carries over to fol. 149. That would suggest that the putative quire 22 was never a full quire, but a stray folio. The index of contents tends to confirm this, because there is no indication in the index that anything like a full quire is missing at this point.

If quire 22 was originally only one folio, there remain 9 folios that appear to be missing because of breaks in the text. While closer examination of the manuscript in situ might reveal evidence that some or all of these were cut out, there is no evidence in the images that they were. That would suggest that the loss of folios occurred quite early, before the manuscript was bound. There is evidence that the binding dates from the 15th century. The initial and final endpapers almost certainly do so, and there is nothing that we can discern in the style of the binding that would require a later date. The medieval writing on the front cover confirms the date.

Turning to the index of contents, it is laid out in double columns in a clear script that is roughly contemporary with the register itself. It begins with a decorated capital ‘D’ with scrollwork and for a while the chapter numbers are painted in blue (‘prima pars’, ‘tercia pars’, etc.), alternating with ‘capitulum’ (‘capitulum secundum’, ‘capitulum iiij’ etc.) in ink. The blue decoration does not continue, but the chapter numbers in ink do continue. They correspond, for the most part, to the chapter numbers found in the register itself, 46 in all. (No. 30 in the text continues through no. 31 in the Contents, and the numbers fall one behind until we reach no. 40, which is skipped, so that the text chapters end up corresponding to the Contents chapters.) A later hand has, in some cases, put a general word in the margin of the Contents to describe the contents of the chapter.

We have sectioned the manuscript according to these chapter numbers and were pleased to discover that contemporaries were dividing the writs in the way that we have for registers that do not have built-in sections. Our sections have tended to be broader. For example, our large section ‘Ecclesiastical writs’ that follows writs of right is divided in this manuscript into six: (1) basic ecclesiastical writs: Right of advowson, Darein presentement, Quare impedit, Ne admittas, Quare non admisit, Utrum; (2) Prohibition; (3) Consultation; (4) Writs in favor of royal clerks; (5) Royal rights; (6) De excommunicato capiendo. Of particular interest is the way in which the indexer has divided the large collection of miscellaneous writs following formedon that had accumulated over the course of the 14th century (cc. 37–46), as indicated in the section table below, which follows the numbering in the Contents.

The initial writ of right patent is tested 5 June in year 2 of a King Henry. Depending on which Henry we choose this could be 1401, 1414, or 1424. Without in any way being decisive, the script suggests the last of those dates. An impossiblity in the second writ suggests the same result. It is addressed to the bailiffs of Queen Catherine ‘consortis nostre carissime’. Catherine of Valois was not the queen of Henry VI; she was his mother. She did not, however, marry Henry V until 2 June 1420. What seems to have happened is that the maker of the register used a writ dating from sometime after 2 June 1420 but before 1 Sep. 1422, but updated the date in the intial writ of right patent to reflect the date on which he was writing (or began to write).

Baker argues that the manuscript was owned by both a William Godyng and a William Godyng le puisne. The former name appears on fol. 149r; the latter on fol. 185r where ‘Godyng Willm’ is crossed out but not ‘le puisne’. It is possible that the son crossed out his father’s name but left in ‘le puisne’ to indicate the passage of ownership from his father to him; ‘le puisne’ does not have to have been written in the same hand as ‘Godyng Willm’. The same page that contains the mark of ownership of the putative Godyngs also contains a mark of ownership of one Thomas Bonefaunt. Between the two there is what appears to be a mark of ownership of another that is rubbed out. It might be legible under uv.

A William Godyng was a Chancery clerk first mentioned as such in 1429 and last so mentioned in 1451. Baker, Men of Court 1:761–2. That he was one of the owners of this manuscript seems virtually certain. Thomas Bonafaunt was the King’s Bench filazer, the clerk in charge of the writs, who died in 1536. He also seems to be a virtually certain owner. That the manuscript passed from William Godyng the father to William Godyng the son and then to Bonafaunt is possible chronologically. That would not, however, account for the illegible putative owner who may have intervened, but who also may have preceded the first Godyng. The latter possibility might explain why the name of the illegible owner was rubbed out but not the Godyngs’ names.

Certainty about the date is not possible, though we are confident enough that the writ of right patent is in the name of Henry VI that we have raised the terminus a quo from 1420 to 1424. What the evidence does show is that the manuscript was owned by a Chancery clerk close to the period of its initial composition and that it was owned by a clerk who specialized in writs at a later time. The contents confirm the association with men who ‘did’ writs, as opposed to a lawyer who used them, much less to someone who wanted to know about the law more generally. It is very large; it is well organized. It covers, seemingly, everything, not just the writs that were associated with the courts, but administrative writs as well.

No heading found

As noted in the Introduction, the initial writ of right appears to be dated in 1424. The register was for quite some time the property of clerks who were concerned with making or verifying writs. It is also accompanied by a good index that groups the writs into 46 categories, shown in the summary table above.

The following table gives a rough transcription of the marginalia in the register in the order in which they appear on the page. Two counts of the writs 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’.

The totals are very large: 1905 writs in the long count, 1281 in the short. The nine missing folios would have added approximately 49 or 33 to these totals. The totals are not so large as HLS MS 34 (2417, 1591) or MS 155 (2412, 1638), which are the largest in the collection, and which we have dated approximately 20 years earlier.

We consolidate some of the categories in the contemporary index here (and slightly normalize them) in order to compare this register to contemporary ones and those from the reign of Richard II: Right (9%), Ecclesiastical (18%), Waste (1%), Replevin (3%), Trespass (11%), Error (1%), Criminal (1%), Account (1%), Debt (5%), Rights in land (1%), Warranty of Charter, Annuity, Mesne (1%), Covenant (1%), Wardship (1%), Dower (1%), Writs on statutes (6%), Statute of labourers (1%), Novel disseisin (10%), Mort d’ancestor (2%), Succession (1%), Ejectement (Quare eiecit) (0%), Entry (3%), Cessavit (0%), Formedon (1%), Testaments (1%), Ad quod dampnum (5%), Rights of those of lower status (1%), Corodies and pensions (1%), De libertatibus allocandis (1%), De idiotis, leprosis, viis et venellis (1%), Ecclesiastical addition (3%), Mainprize (3%), Miscellaneous, including weights and measures (1%), Charters of pardon (5%). (Proportions shown as zero are less than half a percent.)

As is shown in the conclusion to the Analysis of writs for MS 26, which we believe is almost exactly contemporary, the categories and order of the material are the same in that manuscript. They both have they same index. The proportions are also almost exactly the same, which would not necessarily be true even if the index is the same.

The question is how much and in what way does MS 27 differ from the registers that date from the reign of Richard II. Although the patterns and proportions of the registers from the time of Richard II are all quite similar, no two of them are exactly alike. MS 168 comes the closest to MS 27: Right (9%), Ecclesiastical (19%), Waste (2%), Replevin (3%), Trespass (12%), Error (1%), Criminal (1%), Account (1%), Debt (4%), Rights in land (2%), Annuity, Mesne (1%), Wardship (2%), Covenant (2%), Dower (1%), Writs on statutes (5%), Statute of labourers (1%), Novel disseisin (11%), Mort d’ancestor (3%), Ejectement (Quare eiecit) (0%), Entry (4%), Cessavit (0%), Formedon (0%), Testaments (2%), Ad quod dampnum (4%), Rights of those of lower status (1%), De libertatibus allocandis (1%), Corodies and pensions (1%), De idiotis, leprosis, viis et venellis (1%), Ecclesiastical additional (3%), Mainprize, De supersedendo (3%), Weights and measures (0%), Pardons (0%). The categories are the same with two exceptions: The succession category (Nuper obiit, De ventre inspiciendo, Diem clausit extremum, De etate probanda), which is also found in MS 34, is actually there in MS 168 after Mort d’ancestor and before Ejectment; it just did not get picked up in the categories of MS 168. De supersedendo, however, which appears in the categories after Formedon in MS 168 is not there in MS 27. Rather, writs De supersedendo appear with the type of case that is being superseded, an organizational improvement, at least from our point of view.

Slight differences in proportions appear throughout the comparison, e.g., Ecclesiastical is one percent less in MS 26 than it is in MS 168. No one of these likely to be any significance; they could be attributable to differences in rounding. They do add up, however, over the course the comparison up to and including formedon, with the result that 21% of MS 26 is found after formedon, whereas only 16% of MS 168 is. This 5% is represented almost entirely in MS 27 by Charters of pardon, which is only a trace percentage in MS 168. It contains much more than just charters of pardon and may be the ‘add-on’ category, recent writs of interest not yet incorporated into a conceptual scheme. It is certainly the category that changes the most, not only in comparison with MS 168 but with all the registers that date from the reign of Richard II.

A comparison with MS 23, which we argue is roughly contemporary with MS 27, may be found in the conclusion to the Analysis of Writs for MS 23. In comparison with MS 27, MS 23 seems to be slightly less ‘modern’.