<Preliminary introduction>

The HOLLIS cataloguing may be found here. It repeats Baker’s provenance with some miscopying leaving only the following item worth repeating:

“Description: 260 leaves ; 24 cm.”

The cataloguing in Baker’s English Legal Manuscripts, 1, no. 98 reads as follows:

“REGISTRUM BREVIUM

“MS. 168.

“Early C.xv, 260ff. The first writ is by John Clopton against William de Clifton, for land in Nottinghamshire, tested 7 Feb. 13 Richard II [1390], altered to Henry [IV, 1412]. Preceded by a calendar.

“The calendar is signed ‘Horncastre’, presumably the name of the scribe; ‘Explicit registrum novum precium istius libri xli s. quod constat Baldewino Hyde clerico uni clericorum Cancellarie domini regis Edwardi quarti’ (adm. Lincoln's Inn 1466); ‘Willelmi Mores’ (c. 1500); ‘Willelmi Fernesley of Lyncolls Inne’ (adm. 1560); Thomas Thorpe catalogue (1836), no. 468; bought from him by Sir Thomas Phillipps (MS. 9327); his sale, S. 23 May 1913, no. 1023; bought from Sweet & Maxwell, and received on 6 May.

“Early Registers, xxvi.”

The date that this register has carried in the HOLLIS catalogue for many years, ca. 1450, is, in our view, too late. The original scribe, whose hand appears throughout the register (more on this below), dated the initial writ of right patent 7 Feb. 1390. A later hand crudely altered ‘Ricardus’ to ‘Henricus’, but did not change the regnal year or day, 7 Feb. year 13. 7 Feb., 13 Hen. 4, i.e., 1412, is a possible date, but there is no reason to date the manuscript (and little to date the alteration) to that date. There is no reason at all to put the date off to ca. 1450. The discovery of an item in the main text of the register that had to be dated after 1390 might make us change our minds, but we have so far not discovered any such item.

The manuscript is approximately 240 X 170 mm.

The binding would seem to date from the 19th century. It has a blind tooled floral border on both leather outer covers and gold lettering on the spine: ‘FORMULARIA / BREVIUM / MS IN / MEMB. SÆC. XIV’. (‘Harvard Law School’ at the bottom in gold letters is a later addition.) The marbled pastedowns, the marbled freestanding endpapers, and one folio more of endpapers, all at both front and back, were almost certainly added when the manuscript was bound. The binding is in good condition although the top of the spine has cracked apart from the front cover. Otherwise, there is no noticeable damage to the manuscript, but there is some fading of the original hand, particularly at the beginning.

The one major decorated initial capital, an ‘R’, has been crudely erased. There are small decorated capitals drawn in red and blue throughout, with paragraph marks drawn in red. The heading of the calendar is in red as are some of the marginalia. There are pointing hands in the margin of fol. 137v. There may be some elsewhere; we did not search for them systematically.

The main script is a typically English semi-cursive one, legible and consistent throughout the calendar and register. The style suggests the second half of the 14th century. It seems to be the work of one Horncastre, who signs both the calendar (seq. 23) and the register (fol. 260r). We have found one additional writ in the main text in a hand that seems to be a bit later, perhaps early 15th c. (fol. 4r). The same hand seems to have overwritten, perhaps corrected, some of the text in the early part of the register, and also seems to have been responsible for some of the marginalia.

The manuscript is foliated in Hindu-Arabic numerals in the upper right-hand corner. The ink matches that used for the main text and the folio numbers are preceded by the same kind of red paragraph mark that is used in the text. We found only one signature mark, ‘xxxiij’ on seq. 547.

The medieval foliation begins with the initial writ of right patent (seq. 24) and ends with 260 on seq. 542. We tested it digitally, and it is accurate. That causes a problem, because the medieval foliation does not include the medieval ‘calendar’, actually an index, of the writs that precedes the initial writ of right patent. That index is of some interest. Because the medieval foliation is accurate and eminently visible, we followed it for our digital foliation, necessitating reference to the index by sequence number. We have, however, continued it at the end up to the later-added endpapers, because these folios contain some notes of interest. That gave us a total of 270 numbered medieval folios, preceded by eight unnumbered medieval folios.

Relying on the carryovers indicating quire breaks and what little we could see of the breaks visually, we came to the conclusion that most of manuscript is quired in quaternions. There is one quinternion and one reasonably certain ternion and one probable ternion. There are no carryovers on the last two quires (which are mostly blank) and no breaks that we could see, but the signature mark at the bottom of fol. 262v pretty much tied down where the break had to occur.

That gave us the following quiring/collation:

1⁸ (seq. 8–23), 2–3⁸ (f. 1–16), 4¹⁰ (f. 17–26), 5–13⁸ (f. 27–98), 14⁶ (f. 99–104), 15–33⁸ (f. 105–256), 34⁶ (f. 257–262), 35⁸ (f. 263–270).

The interest of this manuscript lies in the writs themselves and their arrangement, topics that we discuss in the introduction and conclusion to the writs table. We are quite confident of our date of ca. 1390. Anything that dates from the 15th century is clearly an addition to the basic text, and there are not many such additions, though there are quite a few such marginalia. In addition to the date of 1390 that originally appeared on the initial writ of right patent, Horncastre’s hand, which is responsible for the vast bulk of the contents of the manuscript, including the index, is distinctive and pretty obviously a hand of the 14th century.

It remains to consider the index. As the note in the Detailed Contents indicates (seq. 8), it is laid out in two columns. The numbers that precede each grouping of writs are folio numbers, 260 in all. It lists the writs found on the folio in the same way that our Detailed Contents does. It clearly omits those that are ‘aliter’ and ‘de eodem’, but it does note where a ‘regula’ is given. It may not have everything, but it is quite full.

In the margin of the index are numbered capitula in red. Some of these cover more than one folio; some of them are multiple numbers referring to a single folio. Clearly, the organizer of these capitula, who may or may not have been Horncastre, was grouping together writs that he conceived of as dealing with the same topic. His categories are hard to discern, but if they could be figured out, they might be of some interest to those seeking to penetrate the legal mind of the late 14th century. We have tried in our Analysis of Writs and in the Detailed Contents to match these chapter numbers with the folio to which they seem to refer.

There are 116 capitula in the index. We based our Summary of Contents on them, but our categories in the Summary are broader, 46 as opposed to 116. Our organization obviously imposes more general categories on what the maker of the capitulary thought of a separate, but we were encouraged to do so by the fact that our categories group things that have been put together. In many cases, these groupings reflect the way in which registers of writs had been organized since the early 14th century. What is new about this register, as is the case with other registers that date from the same period, is that there are many more writs in the old categories and new categories have been added at the end.

This register was used. At least at the beginning of register, there are a number of marginal notes in an early 15th century hand, and there is at least one addition in the same hand. The calendar has numerous marginal notes in an informal hand, probably from later in the 15th century.

That the first recorded owner is a Chancery clerk who operated in the second half of the 15th century is not surprising. That the original owner was a Chancery clerk we cannot prove, but it is certainly possible that he was. The crude attempt to alter the writ of right patent may suggest as much: ‘If the boss comes by, we don’t want him to catch us using a register issued in the name of a king he has just deposed’.

Registrum originale

As indicated in the Introduction, the initial writ right patent is tested by King Richard [II] on 7 Feb. 1390. The later attempt to alter the name of the king to Henry is crude and obvious. The queen in the next writ is ‘phe’ as she is in MS 155, i.e., Philippa of Hainault, who died in 1369, but here she is described as ‘nuper regina’. The lord in the next writ is not named, but the following writ mentions John [of Gaunt], duke of Lancaster, as would have been appropriate for any date between 1362 and 1399, and at no date after that. There are a number of references in the marginalia to years, apparently to the regnal year in which the writ was issued, but without the name or initial of the king. We were reluctant to use these references for dating purposes because some of the numbers by their size are clearly regnal years of Edward III, and we rather suspect that most of the rest are too.

The following table gives a rough transcription of the marginalia in the register, including the additional writs, in the order in which they appear on the page. Two counts of the writs are given in the right-hand columns of the table. The first counts all the writs for which there are marginal notes, excluding, however, the notes that 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 165, 155, and 34.