<Preliminary introduction>

The HOLLIS cataloguing may be found here. That cataloguing is fuller than most, and part of it is worth quoting here to the extent that it does not repeat Baker’s cataloguing:

“Summary: Contains a copy of the Magna Carta and other statutes issued to 7 Edward IV in law-French and Latin.

“Spine Title: Statuta regum Angliae

“Notes: Written in black ink in neat lettres batardes, long lines, 45 to a full page.

“Text rubricated in red and blue, ornamental capitals, headings and marginal references in same colors, many fine pen letters in red, blue and white, and 7 large and finely painted and illuminated ornamental initials with marginal decorations the whole length of the page.”

The cataloguing in Baker’s English Legal Manuscripts, 1, no. 41 reads as follows:

“STATUTA VETERA ET NOVA TO 7 EDWARD IV

“MS. 10.

“C.xv, 492 ff. (wanting first 22 ff.), illum, initials and borders, doeskin over oak boards. Preceded by imperfect alphabetical index from Cessavit to Utlagarie.

“‘Liber . . . ’ c. 1500); acquired c. 1840 by Sir Thomas Phillipps (MS. 11911); his sale, S. 5 June 1899, no. 35, to Leighton for George Dunn; his sale, S. 12 Feb. 1913, no. 276; bought privately by HLS.

“Census, I, 1023, no. 10.”

Seq. 7 has the rubbed out indication of ownership that Baker read as ‘Liber . . . .’ The Phillipps manuscript number is on fol. 23r.

The manuscript is folio-sized, with a page size of approximately 340 by 210 mm.

De Ricci thought that the oak boards of the binding were ‘original’. What he meant by this is unclear, as is how he could possibly have told. The boards are covered in brown leather for the spine and the edges, the covers in white tooled ?doeskin. The coverings are definitely not medieval. The spine labels proclaim in lettering that does not look older than the 19th century: ‘Statuta regum Angliae. Ad annum VII Edwardi IV. M. S.’ Both covers are quite loose.

There is a Hindu-Arabic foliation that begins at fol. 23 and seems to be contemporary with the manuscript. We started a digital foliation there, and noticed that our numbers began to become smaller than the numbers on the manuscript. The last numbered folio in the manuscript is 492; the corresponding digital folio is 441. Misfoliation, at least from the point of view of what is there now, occurs at fol. 59 (number repeated and not corrected), 91 (ten numbers skipped), 121 (one number repeated), 182 (ten numbers skipped), 185 (one number skipped), 269 (ten numbers skipped), 307 (four numbers skipped), 333 (two numbers skipped), 354 (one number skipped), 407 (one number skipped), and 419 (twelve numbers skipped).

There is probably no single explanation for these incongruities. For example, the misfoliations of fol. 59 and 121 in our numbering, which are continued on those following, are probably just mistakes of the foliator. Others can be explained if we assume that the scribe (there seems to have been only one, but there is no reason to believe that he worked in strictly chronological order) started with a number of prefoliated quires, or that he deliberately left folios blank at the end of each king. At some point, probably quite early on, someone removed the blank folios, but did not change the foliation. That something along these lines happened at fol. 419 seems reasonably clear. That folio is the first that contains statutes of Edward IV. The final quire of Henry VI statutes is almost certainly a duernion (rather than the usual quaternion). If we imagine that someone cut out the final four folios of the last quire of Henry VI statutes and an entire quire that had been set aside for additional Henry VI statutes, that would account for the 12 folio numbers that are skipped at fol. 419. Roughly the same thing seems to have happened at fol. 307r, which begins the statutes of Henry IV. The preceding quire is a duernion, but the one that begins on fol. 307r has a folio number four higher than it ought to have, suggesting that 4 folios were removed from the previous quire. (The remains of cut folios seem to be visible in the gutter.) It is a bit less clear that something along these lines happened at fol. 333r, which begins the statutes of Henry V. The previous quire is a bifolium but the number on fol. 333r is two higher than it ought to be, a fact that suggests that the previous quire was originally a duernion. The skip of one number at fol. 354r, where the Henry VI statutes begin may just be a mistake, but the quiring would suggest that the previous quire was a bifolium from which one folio was removed. Similarly, the skip of one number at fol. 407r could be just a mistake, but the quiring suggests that one folio was removed at the end of the preceding quire. There is, however, no easy explanation for three skips of 10 folio numbers. The one at fol. 91r seems to occur at the second folio of a regular quaternion; the one at fol. 182r occurs either in the middle of a quaternion or the beginning of the second of two duernions, and the one at 269r occurs at the 7th folio of what seems to be a regular quaternion. At none of them is there any obvious break in the text.

The important point for the modern user of the manuscript is that none of these skips in foliation (except the one at the very beginning of the manuscript) indicates a loss of text. The presence, however, of these skips considerably complicates the task of figuring out the quiring of the manuscript. It is a large manuscript and visually determining where the quire breaks lie is difficult because they are buried so deep in the binding. The scribe frequently put carryovers on the verso of what seems to the last folio of the quires. There are signature marks, some of which are sufficiently mysterious that we simply marked them as ‘yes’ where we saw them. Where the signature marks and the carryovers coincide, we can be quite confident of the quiring. Where they do not, we have preferred the carryovers, since all the signature marks may not be genuine. We are particularly skeptical of those marked on fol. 99r–105r, some of which look like ‘co^a ’, which may be an abbreviation for ‘communia’, whatever that might mean in this context. Where the skips in the folio numbers helped to interpret the carryovers and the signature marks, we used them. Where they did not, we ignored them.

With these principles in mind, we offer the following collation. It probably is not quite right. When the manuscript is rebound, there will almost certainly be some surprises, but this is the best that we can do now:

Collation: ii (unfoliated), 1⁸ (f. 23, 7 f. have been lost, as have the original first 2 quires), 2–8⁸ (f. 24–78), 9² (f. 79–80), 10–21⁸ (f. 81–177), 22–23⁴ (f. 178–185), 24⁸ (f. 186–192, lacks 1), 25–32⁸ (f. 193–256), 33⁶ (f. 256–262), 34–38⁸ (f. 236–302), 39⁸ (f. 303–306, lacks 4), 40–42⁸ (f. 307–330), 43⁴ (f. 331–332, lacks 2), 44⁴ (f. 333–336), 45–46⁸ (f. 337–352), 47² (f. 353, lacks 1), 48⁶ (f. 354–359), 49–53⁸ (f. 360–399), 54⁸ (f. 400–406, lacks 1), 54⁸ (f. 407–414), 55⁸ (f. 415–418, lacks 4), 56–57⁸ (f. 419–434), 58⁸ (f. 435–441, lacks 1), i (unfoliated).

Quires 22–23 could be one quaternion, but the skip in foliation in the middle suggests that they are two duernions. Quires 47–48 could be a quaternion, lacking one, but the skip in foliation and the change of king suggests this collation. The two unfoliated folios at the beginning and the one at the end are almost certainly later additions, made when the manuscript was bound. At least two of them are, however, of considerable antiquity. Seq. 6 has stains that suggest that it was originally a pastedown; seq. 7 has a recipe for medicine written in what is probably a 16th-century hand; seq. 847 has notes in hands that may be medieval and are certainly no later than the early 16th century; seq. 848 (the back pastedown) has sums on it (in millions of pounds!) in what looks like a 17th century hand.

The first capital of Magna Carta is illuminated with gold leaf and much color, with a strap floreated border issuing from it. Similar capitals are found on the first page of the statutes of each king from Edward III through Edward IV. Other capitals are decorated in red and blue with fine scrollwork issuing out of them into margins. Red and blue paragraph marks appear throughout. Red is also used for the lemmata in the abridgement. The script throughout is in a clear and consistent late 15th-century semi-cursive hand, sometimes called ‘bastard’. (An image of it can be found on the banner header at the far right.) The main scribe was capable of some decoration himself often extending letters into the margins. He may also be responsible for some of the red and blue quill-work. This is obviously a high-quality production.

The dry-point layout is not always visible on the images, but there can be little doubt that it existed on all the pages. There are quite consistently 45 wide lines to the page. The texts are corrected in what for the most part looks like the same hand that wrote them. There are relatively few marginalia other than chapter numbers and corrections.

The presentation quality of the manuscript is somewhat marred by the fact that the scribe omitted a number of passages in the texts, particularly in the older statutes. He did, however, go back and make marginal additions. That he had to do so may suggest that his initial copy was made from an imperfect text, which he then went back and corrected from a better one.

Despite the loss of the first two quires and most of the third, the alphabetical index of statutes at the beginning of manuscript (fol. 23–81) is of considerable interest. We have called it that to call attention to its relationship to similar indices that we have found in other 15th century manuscripts of statutes: HLS MS 21, 29–30, 40, 42, 163, 170, and 185. Unlike some the others, however, this one amounts to more than an index. It is really an alphabetical abridgement of the statutes. We have made a preliminary transcription of the lemmata in the marginalia section in the Detailed Contents below. Some of the ‘abridgements’ are quite long, so there are pages with no lemma. There are acute accents on some of the final é’s that we did not reproduce

The first few abridgements on fol. 23 correspond to those in the abridgement of statutes, printed by Lettou and Mechlina, probably in 1481. Our 264 lemmata correspond to those in the printed edition with three minor exceptions.¹ Particularly telling are the ones on the last page, which from a modern point of view are out of alphabetical order. They are in the same order in the printed edition. We are thus looking at what is probably the source of the printed abridgement, though it is not impossible that our abridgement was derived from the printed one. If that is the case, however, we would have to advance the probable date of our manuscript considerably. It seems more likely that the text in our manuscript is not derived from the printed one, but that the converse is the case. It is probably not the very manuscript from which Lettou and Mechlina took their text, but a copy derived from a common source. More work comparing the two texts is clearly called for.

¹ Lettou and Mechlina lack the lemmata ‘Money de galeyhalpens’ and ‘Mynte’ found on fol. 52v–53r, but the same abridgements, with minor variations, are found at the end of the lemma ‘Money’ in Lettou and Mechlina (sig. [h6r–h6v]). There is no lemma ‘Redisseysun’ in MS 10 (sig. l4v, in Lettou and Mechlina), but the same three abridgements with the same wording are found on fol. 69r without a lemma.

There is some evidence that the person who commissioned MS 10 was thinking in terms of what later became the division in the printed statute-books between Statuta vetera and Statuta nova. Illuminated capitals, as noted above, appear for Magna Carta and for every king between Edward III and Edward IV. There is little attempt to organize the material from Magna Carta to the beginning of the reign of Edward III in chronological order. They are, we might imagine, though the term in not used, all ‘statuta vetera’. From Edward III forward there is considerable effort to arrange the material in chronological order. From Richard II forward, the chronological order is quite strict. There are only three items from Edward III forward that are not found in S.R.: a document connected with the Despensers found at the beginning of Edward III’s reign (fol. 186v, cf. HLS MS 170, fol. 33r–34v; may actually date from the 1320s), the ‘Statute of Absentees’ for Ireland (3 Ric. 2, fol. 265v), and an ordinance concerning Lancaster that implements a petition on the parliament rolls for 1420 (fol. 384v). There are 14 such items in the section before the formal beginning of the statutes of Edward III: Tractatus de antiquo dominico (fol. 129r); Articles of inquiry, 2 Edw. 1 (fol. 129v); Modus exceptionum (fol. 132r); Early case report (1268) with memorandum (fol. 133v); De averiis imparcatis (fol. 139r); Distinctiones socagii (fol. 143v); Tractatus de homagio (fol. 144r); Juramentum vicecomitis (fol. 152v); Modus exceptionum (again, fol. 156v); Exposicio vocabulorum (fol. 157v); Ne quis occasionetur in posecucione hugonis le despenser patris et filii (fol. 179v); Distinctiones socagii (again, fol. 180v); De warrantia carte (fol. 181r); and Consuetudines Cantiae (not the same text as in S.R., fol. 181r). It will be noted that these items are clustered at the end of the section that runs from Magna Carta to the beginning of the reign of Edward III. This section also contains a large number of items that are in S.R. but as temp. incert.

There seems little doubt that MS 10 was derived, at least ultimately, from sources considerably older than the date of the manuscript. At least two sources lie behind the section from Magna Carta to the formal beginning of Edward III. From Magna Carta on fol. 82r to the statute of Westminster III on fol. 105v the material proceeds in the order that we have come to expect from other manuscripts that are now called ‘Statuta vetera’: Magna Carta and the Forest Charter, as confirmed by Edward I, Merton, Marlborough, Gloucester and its ‘explanation’, Westminster I, II, and III. At fol. 105, the chronological order breaks down but we are still dealing with Edward I statutes: De viris religiosis, 7 Edw. 1; Fines, 27 Edw. 1; De bigamis, 4 Edw. 1; De illis qui debent poni, 21 Edw. 1; Winchester, 13 Edw. 1; Merchants, 11 Edw. 1. The pattern is interrupted by the Prerogativa regis, temp. incert. (fol. 109r) and Judicium pillorie, temp. incert. (fol. 110r), but returns with Circumspecte agatis (pt. 1), 13 Edw. 1; Joint-tenants, 34 Edw. 1; De quo warranto and De quo warranto novum, 18 Edw. 1, and Circumspecte agatis (pt. 2), 13 Edw. 1. At fol. 112r, we begin to get more statutes temp. incert. mixed in with Edward I statutes. The first statute of Edward II (Sheriffs, 9 Edw. 2, stat. 2) appears on fol. 113. A run of Edward III statutes (4; 1 stat. 2; 5; 9 stat. 1; 10 stat. 1) appears on fol. 115v–122v. We then return to statutes temp. incert. and mixed statutes of Edward I and Edward II, until we reach fol. 129r with the first item that does not appear in S.R. at all. As the marginal notes point out, the portion of Judicium pillorie on fol. 110r occurs again in a better text on fol. 153v; 1 Edw. 3, stat. 1, occurs again on fol. 187v, and 9 Edw. 3 occurs again on fol. 196r. All of these duplications occur in the section that has the statutes of Edward III, pretty much complete and pretty much in chronological order.

There is also duplication within the long section between Westminster III and the beginning of the formal run of statutes of Edward III, two of which have already been noted (Modus exceptionum, fol. 132r and 156v; Distinctiones socagii, fol. 143v and 180v). The Statute of Westminster IV, 14 Edw. 2, appears at both fol. 142r and 159r; the statute De consultatione, 18 Edw. 1, at both fol. 140v and 176v. That suggests that the first source of this material ended someplace after fol. 143, and the second began someplace before fol. 156. The section between fol. 132r and 143v also contains the case report of 1268 (one of only two copies of it known) and the statute De anno et die of 40 Hen. 3. There is nothing in it that needs be later than 14 Edw. 2 (1320–21).

When we couple this evidence with the fact that the scribe seems to have been comparing more than one manuscript to make his corrections, it seems reasonably clear that more than one source lay behind this manuscript. There is also some evidence, suggested above, that the later statutes came from independent sources for each king.

The man who commissioned the manuscript might be described as omnivorous. He wanted as much as he could get and was not, it would seem, concerned that some duplication might result. His desire led to a manuscript that is quite handsomely produced and quite comprehensive. It is, for example, the only manuscript that we have found so far that contains the Ordinances of 1311 (and their repealer). The duplicated items give us, we believe, two independent witnesses of the same text, without going outside the confines of one manuscript. Clearly, more work on it would repay itself.

Hence, we know something about what the man who commissioned the manuscript wanted and what he got. Unless the early rubbed-out indication of ownership can be read under ultraviolet light, however, we have no idea who he was. We might speculate that he was a senior lawyer or even a justice. He wanted as much as he could get; he wanted it to look good, and he had the money to pay for it. Before we go too far down that road, however, we should remember that the evidence so far is also consistent with the speculation that he was a rich young man, who wanted to become a serjeant or a justice, but never made it.