<Preliminary introduction>

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

“Description: 308 leaves : vellum ; 27 cm.”

The cataloguing in Baker’s English Legal Manuscripts, 1, no. 97 reads as follows:

“REGISTRUM BREVIUM

“MS. 165.

“Late C.xiv, 308 ff. The first writ, for land in Lincolnshire, is tested by Richard II.

“‘Slk. AC. MS. 471. LBS’ (C.xx note in pencil); bought from Maggs by H.P. Kraus, 1940; bought from H.P. Kraus, and received on 14 Dec. 1940.

“Early Registers, xxvi.”

The manuscript is approximately 270 X 205 mm.

The informal script is consistent and legible, decorated with red and blue paragraph marks and elaborate initial capitals. There are no illustrations except for two pointing fingers on fols. 215v and 218v. There may be more than one hand at work in the main text. The initial index appears to be written in a different hand from that or those of the main text.

The leather binding probably dates from the late 18th or 19th century and is in relatively good condition. A note on the initial endpapers describes the contents of the manuscript in a quite non-standard way. Its count of the folios is one higher than ours. It is either a miscount, or it counts the fragment following fol. 125, as we have not.

Minor damage to the text includes a missing folio before fol. 93r. The stub of the missing folio is visible in the gutter, but the text carries over from fol. 92v to 93r. There is also a naturally-occurring hole in the parchment of fol. 102 that does not affect the text.

The manuscript has medieval foliation in the same area as the page headers, both recto and verso, sometimes replicated in the lower right corner of the page. In a few places these two sets of foliation differ by one number. The manuscript foliation begins at our fol. 7. Quire 14 (sig. ‘m’, discussed in the next paragraph) is not foliated, so the manuscript foliation loses 8 in comparison with ours. At fol. 238, it starts repeated numbers from 20 folios earlier. It stops at our fol. 247.

Alphabetical signatures can be found in the lower right corner in roughly the first half of each quire, sometimes with the quire break indicated by a plus sign. Only a few of the signatures are cut off. Signature mark ‘l’ (quire 15) follows signature ‘m’ (quire 14), and ‘k’ (quire 13) carries over to it, not to ‘m’. Signature ‘m’ seems to have been made up separately. It begins with an decorated capital and ends with a blank; it is a quaternion in a sea of sesternions. Signature ‘l’ carries over to ‘n’ in the manuscript foliation; signature ‘m’ lacks foliation. While signature ‘m’ is misbound from the point of view of the signature marks, one can see how it happened. Wherever the binder put ‘m’, it was going to break the order.

The quiring is fairly regular, mostly 12-folio quires for the first three quarters of the manuscript, after which it switches to quaternions. The missing folio in quire 10 must be compensated for by a folio tipped in elsewhere in the quire, because the quire itself is regular. The images do not show where the tipped-in folio occurs. The modern front and back endpapers are problematic. They may both have originally been duernions of which one folio was cut out. That is how we have mapped them, though there are number of other mathematical possibilities.

Collation follows:

1⁴ (unfoliated, lacks 1), 2⁶ (f. 1–6), 3–13¹² (f. 7–138), 14⁸ (f. 139–146), 15–18¹² (f. 147–194), 19¹⁰ (f. 195–204), 20–22¹² (f. 205–240), 23¹⁰ (f. 241–250), 24–29⁸ (f. 251–298), 30⁸ (f. 299–307, plus 1 tipped in at the end), 31⁴ (unfoliated, lacks 1).

The index is written in a script that looks a bit later than that of the main text. The folio numbers of the index seem to have been copied from the headers; both use a distinctive style of numbering by scores. The index uses the writ names from the marginal names in the main manuscript, though in some cases the abbreviations have been extended or changed. The index ends at the bottom of the page with a listing of the writs on ms fol. 98 (our fol. 103v) and the beginning of the writ on ms fol. 99 (our fol. 104r). Some of the index is certainly missing. It ends in mid-sentence. How much is missing is hard to tell. The headers in the main text combined with manuscript foliation continue until our fol. 245r.

After the headers cease, all the writs seem be administrative, i.e., not initiating or processing litigation in any of the courts. These writs seem to deal for the most part with royal administration of lands and churches in the king’s hands. Whether this collection is to be connected with the clerk(s) of the crown in Chancery or with the petty bag, or both, is unclear, but we have probably identified the part of the Chancery administration to which these writs would be of concern.

That this collection of administrative writs is a different collection from what precedes it is suggested by the fact that the quire that precedes it ends with six blank pages interrupted only by one that has a writ on it that seems to be an afterthought. The quiring of the administrative writs is also different. It is in quaternions, whereas the previous sections are normally in sesternions. The hand of the administrative collection may not be the same as that of the preceding sections, although there is nothing about the script that suggests that it belongs in a different period. The collection begins with a decorated capital.

We have discovered only one legible indication of provenance. On the last freestanding endpaper in the lower right-hand corner is pencilled: ‘Slk. AC. MS. 471. LBS’, in what Baker identifies as a 20th-century hand. This certainly looks like a shelf-mark, but neither Baker nor we have been able to identify it. If ‘471’ is to be believed, it would seem that the manuscript belonged to a large private collection, perhaps just before its sale in 1940.

As indicated above, the contents of the manuscript suggest an association with the Chancery in the reign of Richard II. It is hard to imagine that the large collection of administrative writs concerning property in the king’s hand would be of use to anyone except a Chancery clerk. Some support for locating the register in the Chancery is also supplied by the fragment (seq. 259), which seems to come from a writ. The Chancery is a place where there was likely to be a large number of draft writs that never got sent, so that one could cut one up and use it as a place-holder. The conclusion to the Analysis of Writs provides some additional support for the speculation that original owner of the manuscript was a Chancery clerk, and not one who wrote original writs.

There is no date on the initial writ of right patent. The king is clearly Richard II, 1377–1399. That the queen, in the writ just underneath, is Anne [of Bohemia] probably narrows the bracketing dates to 1382 X 1394. The initials of the escheators on fol. 251v look as if they might be real, but we were unable to tie ‘?B de L’ with any known escheator of Derby or ‘R de W’ with any known escheator of Suffolk in this period. The introduction to the Analysis of Writs suggests dates of 1390 or 1392, but it seemed safer to date the register 1382 X 1394. The indexing may have been done early in the fifteenth century, but that is not certain.

No heading found

As discussed in the Introduction, we lack a firm date for this register. The terminus post quem is quite clearly 1382, because of the mention of Anne of Bohemia in the second writ. The third writ, to the bailiffs of an honor of someone other than queen who is out of the kingdom, is to Henry earl of Derby. Henry, who had been styled earl of Derby since 1377, was out of the kingdom in both 1390 and 1392, on crusade in Lithuania. It is possible that these are clues as to the date of the register, but it seemed safer to put the teminus ante quem in 1394, the death of Anne.

The following table gives the names of the writs as found in the marginalia and counts them. Two counts of the writs are given in the right-hand columns. 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 conclusion that follows the table discusses the relationship of this register to MS 53, which we dated in 1371, and the three others that we have from the reign of Richard II, HLS MS 155, 168, and 34.