<Preliminary introduction>

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

“Description : 1 v. (172 leaves) ; vellum ; 15 cm.

“Summary : Contains two different manuscripts of the same texts bound together (leaves 1-72 and 73-172). The second contains Statuta Westmonasterii II, in law-French.

The cataloguing in Baker’s English Legal Manuscripts, 1, no. 90 reads as follows:

“STATUTA VETERA

“MS. 101.

“C.xiv, 172 ff., comprising two different MSS. bound together.

“Arms tricked on fo. 172, Argent a chevron sable between three besants [sic] (c. 1500); ‘Iste liber constat Willelmo Goold’; ‘Willelmus Goold’; ‘Iste liber constat Willelmo Good de Furnyvals Ynne &c. muneris D.H.’ (c. 1500); other names on fo. 171 erased; probably from the library of Arthur Turnour (d. 1651), serjeant at law; belonged to his descendant Christopher Hatton Turnor (d. 1940), of Stoke Rochford; purchased from him by Myers & Co., and bought from them with the rest of the Turnour collection on 22 March 1924.

“Census, I, 1045–1046, no. 101.”

As will be seen below, the folio references in HOLLIS to the place where the two parts of the manuscript divide are problematic. Unlike Baker, we read Goold’s surname with an ‘l’ in all places where it appears.

The manuscript measures approximately 150 X 100 mm.

The pigskin-and-board binding probably dates from the time when HLL acquired the manuscript. It has ‘Harvard Law Library’ embossed in gold on the spine. The cords at the spine are exposed. Remnants of green fabric ties are attached to both covers at the foredge. The blank endpapers at the front and back seem to date from this binding.

These blank endpapers are a bit odd. The ones at the front are where we would expect them to be, between the front pastedown and the first medieval folio, though there are an usually large number of them (5 folios). There are even more at the end (7 folios), and they do not appear just before the back pastedown. Rather, they are inserted before a bifolium that contains medieval writing, including an informal table of contents of the whole manuscript.

There is some foliation in pencil in what looks like a 19th century hand. Digital fol. 29r seems to marked 31; 39r is marked 41; 70r is marked 72. Digital fol. 151, however, is so marked, and that puts this foliation on track to end up with the end of the Lancastrian statutes on fol. 172, which corresponds to our digital foliation. Reliance on the digital foliation is what resulted in HOLLIS marking the second collection as beginning on fol. 73 whereas, in fact, it begins on fol. 71r.

The digital foliation omits the initial endpapers and corresponds to the resulting reality and not to the pencilled foliation. It is thus two less than the pencilled foliation for most of the manuscript. We also extended the digital foliation to the end of the manuscript in order to bring in the medieval bifolium which appears just before the back pastedown. The result raises the total to 181 folios.

Excluding the initial modern endpapers, the manuscript begins with nine regular quaternions followed by eight sesternions, a quinternion, a quaternion of modern endpapers, and a final medieval bifolium. One folio is lacking after fol. 59, one after fol. 150, four between fols. 70 and 71, and one in the final endpapers. This gives us the following collation:

1–9⁸ (f. 1–70, lacks one after fol. 59 and one after fol. 70), 10–17¹² (f. 71–162, lacks at least three before fol. 71 and one after fol. 150), 18¹⁰ (f. 163–172), 19⁸ (f. 173–180, lacks one probably after 180), 20² (f. 181–182).

It seems clear that the first part of the manuscript was originally quired in quaternions, the second part in sesternions. One folio was cut out toward the end of Westminster II in quire 8, resulting in the loss of text toward the end of that statute. The folio that was cut out at the end of quire 9 (the end of the first part of the manuscript) probably did not result in the loss of any text. The three that were cut out of the beginning of the second part of the manuscript (quire 10) resulted in the loss of a large part of Magna Carta. The one that was cut out at the end of quire 16 did not result in the loss of any of the main statutory text, but may have resulted in the loss of something in the note at the bottom of the statutory text. Quire 18 may have originally been a sesternion, with what is now the final bifolium joined to it. If it was, the modern binder would have had to have remade it and the final bifolium in order to insert the modern endpapers between the two.

It seems quite clear that someone at some point had two collections of statutes that were originally separate joined together under one binding. We may even know the price of the separate manuscripts: 2/6d for the first part and 2/ for the second (fol. 70v, 180v). Unlike HLS MS 80, where the evidence points to a joining of two manuscripts in the early modern period, the evidence here points to a joining of manuscripts sometime in the Middle Ages. The notes of ownership appear only at the end. The informal table of contents that appears there is definitely in a medieval, not an early modern, script. The only owner whose name we have, William Goold, writes in a script that can be dated c. 1500. He may – and this is only a ‘may’ – be the man of the same name who was a coroner in Leicestershire in 1470. See Baker, Men of Court 1:762, s.n. ‘Gold, William’.

Goold is probaly not the man who put the two collections together. He seems to be saying that he got the manuscript as a gift (?reward for service, ‘muneris’) from one D.H.

Why would someone, probably in the 15th century, want to put these two manuscripts together? It is easy enough to see why such a person would want the second of the two collections, even if he had the first. It has quite a few more items than does the first collection, and most of what is in the first collection is duplicated in the second. Most but not all: The first collection contains all of Magna Carta; that in the second collection is defective. (Of course, we do not know that it was at the time the two collections were combined.) The first collection, but not the second, contains the sentence of excommunication on those who violate the charters, the Statute of York of 12 Edw. 2, the articles on the Statute of Winchester, and the Statute of Merchants of 13 Edw. 1. Westminster II in the first collection is in Latin (though it now lacks a folio); it is in French in the second collection. It may already have been thought that the Latin text was the official one. All of these together, or some one or more of them, probably suffice to explain why someone would have wanted to have both collections.