<Preliminary introduction>

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

“Description : [204] leaves : vellum ; 10 cm.

“Notes : Illuminated initials, rubricated.

“This work begins with the Book of Genesis in Latin, starting at leaf [3] and ending at leaf [4] recto line 8.”

The cataloguing in Baker’s English Legal Manuscripts, 1, no. 109 reads as follows:

“STATUTA VETERA; OFFICIUM SENESCALLI

“MS. 179.

“Early C.xiv, 204 ff.

“‘T.W. May 1647’; ‘Empt. 6 May 1647 pret. 2s. T.W.’; bought from Cary, and received on 26 April 1951.”

The initial text, identified in HOLLIS as Genesis 1, is in fact from the Gospel of John, 1:1–14.

The manuscript measures approximately 100 X 60 mm. It is thus eminently portable.

It is bound in floral tooled leather with marbled pastedowns and marbled first and last endpapers. The binding probably dates from the 19th century.

There are red and blue decorated capitals throughout, with red paragraph markers in the text, red underlining of the headings, and some red filling in the loops of the letters. The program of decoration begins with the Gospel extract and continues through the Statute of weights and measures at the end, though the last-named lacks a decorated capital. It is absent from the note on conspirators (fol. 10v) and the florilegium (fol. 212r–213v). The execution of the decorative program is of good quality.

The script throughout (including the florilegium and the note on conspirators) is a typical semi-cursive legal script of the late 13th or early 14th century. The hand that writes that script in the florilegium and the note on conspirators may not the same as the hand of the base text of statutes. That latter hand may be same throughout.

There is no foliation either ancient or modern that we have been able to find in the manuscript. The count of 214 folios in both Baker and HOLLIS begins with the first obviously medieval folio, even though it is blank, and continues until the modern endpapers begin at the end of the manuscript. We have adopted it for our digital foliation.

The manuscript has 19 quires, excluding the initial and final endpapers: 17 sesternions, one quaternion, and one bifolium. This gives us the following collation:

1² (f. 1–2), 2–18¹² (f. 3–206), 19⁸ (f. 207–214).

The initial blank bifolium may have been the medieval freestanding endpapers before the manuscript was rebound into its current binding. The last two numbered folios were probably the end of the medieval manuscript.

No medieval provenance has yet been found. That the original owner was clerical or religious seems highly likely. The Gospel extract and the non-standard Latin prayers, which seem to be part of the original scheme, both point in that direction. The collection of Latin maxims and verses at the end probably points in the same direction, particularly if our initial impression that the focus of the collection is on penance proves to be correct. That the only tract in the work is the Latin ‘Officium senescali’ may suggest that the original owner was a religious house and that the book was held to the use of a monastic obedentiary. More careful examination of the note on conspirators (fol. 10v) and the cryptic notes on fol. 214r might tell us more, as might the discovery of the sources of the prayers or of the collection (as opposed to individual instances) of the maxims and verses.