<Preliminary introduction>

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

“Description: 217 leaves : vellum ; 27 cm.

“Notes : Formerly known as MS Hale-Rogers 106; also Hale Manuscript MS. LR. 106.”

“Some marginal notes rubricated in red.

“Bound in 16c. limp vellum wrapper.”

The cataloguing in Baker’s English Legal Manuscripts, 1, no. 193 reads as follows:

“REGISTRUM BREVIUM; YEAR BOOKS; TRACTS

“MS. Hale-Rogers 106.

“Mid-C.xiv, 217 ff. Principal contents: cases from Mich. 33 to Hil. 34 Edward I; 2-19 Edward II; 1-14 Edward III; extracts from the eyres of Kent, London, Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire; extracts from Bracton, Glanvill and Hengham. Rearranged as ‘placita personalia’. (Bound in is a C.xvii paper copy of Lambard’s Archeion, 19 pp.)

“‘Ex libro Magistri Tounsh[end] March 6 Jacobi Regis 1608’ (in the Lambard); belonged to Dr Cox Macro (d. 1767), and listed in his library catalogue of 1766, Brit. Lib. MS. Add. 25473, folios no. 31; Macro sale, Christie’s, Feb. 1820, no. 55; bought privately by Hudson Gurney (d. 1864); passed to his descendant Major Q.E. Gurney (d. 1968); his sale, S. 31 March 1936, no. 212, to H.R.Creswick; bought from him by Richard Walden Hale (d. 1943) for the use of Ralph V. Rogers and HLS.

“HMC, Twelfth Report, App. IX, 122, no. vi; Rogers, 55 EHR 566–568; text of Eyre of London printed by Rogers in Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, XIX (1941); Cam, Eyre of London, 85 SS cxlviii–cxlix; Sutherland, Eyre of Nottinghamshire, 97 SS lxxiii (sigla Rd).”

For many years this manuscript has carried the title ‘England. Registrum Brevium, Year Books, and Tracts’. That is not totally wrong, but it is misleading. That title would lead us to expect a register of writs, one or more Year Books, and some freestanding tracts. Our title ‘England. Collection of Writs, Counts, Extracts from Treatises and from the Year Books, Concerning “Placita Personalia”’ is, admittedly, an awful mouthful, but it more accurately describes what is in the manuscript. The manuscript also contains a handwritten copy of William Lambarde’s Archeion, or, A commentary upon the high courts of justice in England, dated, it would seem in 1608, 17 years before the first printing of that work.

We have also changed the date in the HOLLIS catalogue from ca. 1350 to ca. 1340, in keeping with our practice of dating by the last datable medieval item in the main text of the manuscript. We will suggest below that some of the medieval contents are probably quite a bit earlier than that, but we are not sure that they were written down, as we see them here, earlier than that.

Baker’s statement that the manuscript copy of Lambarde’s Archeion is 19 pages long is mistaken. It is 15 folios (30 pages) long.

We have not yet placed in the Detailed Contents references to the Year Book reports that are summarized in Baker’s catalogue. That clearly should be done, but the task is large and laborers few.

The manuscript measures approximately 270 X 200 mm.

It is bound in limp parchment in a binding of considerable antiquity. The cords are exposed at the spine. There is a design in pen on the back cover. It cannot be deciphered on the image; it may be decipherable in situ. The endpapers do not appear to be newer than the manuscript and are included in our quiring. The manuscript copy of Lambarde’s Archeion at the end bears a date of 1608. The binding could date from that time.

A number of medieval hands seem to be at work in the manuscript. The script of these hands all looks quite similar. Some of them remind us more of scripts dating from the turn of the 14th century, some more of scripts slightly later in the century. There are many notes and additions both in medieval and early modern scripts. The base texts, however, with the possible exception of Lambarde at the end, all seem to have been written by professional scribes.

There is very little professional decoration. There are two decorated capitals at the very beginning of the manuscript. In this section there is some use of red underlining, red paragraph marks, and red boxes around the headers and some of the marginalia. The blue underlining that appears in this section may be part of an original design, but could also be an addition by an owner of the manuscript. We have found no decoration after fol. 22, although informal underlining continues. Informally drawn faces marking notable items appear occasionally on the first 22 folios, and we have found some later on. We did not search for them systematically.

The manuscript is foliated in what looks like an early modern script. It is accurate. The first folio is marked in pencil by a modern hand. We have used this foliation despite the fact that it begins after the extracts from the Secreta secretorum at the beginning. We refer to these by sequence number. We have also continued the digital foliation through the handwritten copy of Lambarde’s Archeion and the table of contents with which the manuscript ends.

There is also quite a bit medieval foliation in Roman numerals. It probably indicates that parts of the manuscript were originally in separate packets. We have included it in the Detailed Contents as ‘msfol’.

The manuscript appears to have 32 quires of various lengths: eight sesternions, three quinternions, nine quaternions, three ternions, six duernions, and two bifolia. One folio is missing from the beginning of the manuscript and one is missing after each of the following folios: 96, 111, 130, 157, and 216. We rather doubt that any text is missing as a result of these losses. This gives us the following collation:

1⁴ (seq. 4 – seq. 9, lacks one from the beginning of the quire), 2⁸ (seq. 10–11, f. 1–7), 3¹² (f. 8–19), 4² (f. 20–21), 5–6⁴ (f. 22–29), 7¹² (f. 30–41), 8–9⁸ (f. 42–55), 10–11¹² (f. 56–79), 12⁸ (f. 80–87), 13¹⁰ (f. 88–96, lacks one after f. 96), 14⁴ (f. 97–100), 15⁸ (f. 101–108), 16⁴ (f. 109–111, lacks one after f. 111), 17¹⁰ (f. 112–121), 18⁸ (f. 122–129), 19² (f. 130, lacks one after f. 130), 20–21⁸ (f. 131–146), 22⁴ (f. 147–150), 23–25¹² (f. 151–185, lacks one after f. 157), 26² (f. 186–187), 27⁸ (f. 188–195), 28¹² (f. 196–207), 29¹⁰ (f. 208–216, lacks one after f. 216), 30⁶ (f. 217–222), 31⁸ (f. 223–230), 32⁶ (f. 231–236).

Our Detailed Contents attempts to transcribe the extensive medieval marginalia that appear throughout the manuscript and which tie it together conceptually. Some of these transcriptions are very rough. We are working on them and would appreciate any help that we can get, large or small. We have also attempted to transcribe some of the 17th-century marginalia. Our transcriptions here are not complete. They are designed to give some idea of what the 17th-century annotator was interested in. The Summary Contents divides the manuscript into the main sections described below and adds some detail in subheadings. It will be noted that the earlier parts of the manuscript can be organized by legal topics, whereas the later parts, particularly the extracts from the eyre reports and the Year Books of Edward III cannot be.

The interest of this manuscript lies in the fact that it does not fit into any of the standard categories of English legal manuscripts. Rather, it seems to be a collection made up by someone who wanted to focus on personal actions. In the process, he put together a compilation that illustrates the main features of English legal literature in the second half of the 13th century and the first half of the 14th.

After an initial quire that appears to be only vaguely related to the contents of the rest of the manuscript, the manuscript begins with two quires that bear a distinct resemblance of ‘Brevia placitata’: writs and counts. There may be a few more writs and a few fewer counts than is typical in most versions of ‘Brevia placitata’ (hence, the initial impression of cataloguers that the manuscript contained a register of writs), but the overall pattern is unmistakable. There is, however, one major difference: The content is confined to personal actions. No real actions are to be found.

Beginning on fol. 22 with a new quire, the nature of the work changes. Rather than giving us writs and counts, the work gives us extracts from treatise-writers, including some quite substantial extracts from Glanvill.

Beginning on fol. 28 (not a quire break, though one appears before the next folio), we begin to find rules and statements derived from case reports. The work thus begins to look more like ‘Casus placitorum’ than ‘Brevia placitata’. The resemblance to ‘Casus placitorum’ declines as the section moves on, and it becomes more like simple extracts from Year Book reports on the topic of personal pleas. A medieval foliation begins on fol. 28 and runs through fol. 100. (Fol. 13 is skipped, making the final number one too high; nothing seems to be missing from the text.)

This section usually carries the header ‘Placita personalia’. About an eighth of the way through (fol. 47r), the style of headers (and some of the headings) changes. The name of the king to whose reign the report of the item is attributed appears in lieu of, or in addition to, ‘Placita personalia’, frequently, though not always, with the year, and sometimes with the term. Focusing only on the references found in the header or heading (references embedded in the text, of which there are some, remain to be explored), there are references to reports from years 33 and 34 of Edward I, from years 2, 4, 5, 11, 13, 14, 15, 19, and 21 of Edward II, and 15 references to reports from the reign of Edward II without reference to regnal year. Once the references to the reign of Edward II begin (fol. 53r), there are no more references to the reign of Edward I. This style of headers and headings does not, however, continue to the end of the section. There is a section marked simply ‘Replevin’ (fol. 72v–79v), another marked for the most part ‘Placita personalia’ and which contains no references to kings, years or terms (fol. 80r–88v), before the references to reports from the reign of Edward II return at the end of the section (fol. 89r–98v). The references to years of Edward II are not in chronological order, but earlier ones tend to be in the first group and later ones in the second, and there is no duplication of years between the two groups. The change of style from something like ‘Casus placitorum’ to something more like simple extracts from Year Book reports on the topic of personal pleas is most noticeable in the sections where the king, year and/or term is mentioned in the headers or headings.

Beginning on fol. 99r, the nature of the source material changes. It is now derived exclusively from reports of eyres. (The material for the eyre of London that begins on fol. 99r, is not case reports, but rather with the questions posed of the citizens of London at the eyre.) A new quire and a new foliation begins on fol. 101 with case reports from the eyre of London. The eyre reports have various foliations. The reports themselves continue through fol. 130.

A new quire begins on fol. 131 with a foliation that may be intended to continue that which ended on our fol. 100. The heading ‘Placita personalia’ returns. (The heading for the eyre of Derby actually runs over to fol. 131r, but we doubt the attribution. The material on fol. 131v is certainly not from the eyre.)

A new quire begins on fol. 147. The medieval foliation starts over again. The Year Book reports begin with 1 Edw. 3. Reports from that king’s reign proceed, more or less in chronological order, until we reach year 14, where both the reports and the medieval foliation end.

It is clear that the nature of the work changes as it proceeds. The focus, however, remains always on personal pleas. There are some exceptions in the later Year Book reports, but not many. The question is whether this is simply a collection of different types of material that someone at some point – it need not have been in the Middle Ages – put together, or whether this is to be regarded as medieval work.

We are inclined to think that the latter is the case, though we are also inclined to think that more than one compiler was involved. The fact that the work bears different medieval foliations certainly suggests that pieces of it had at one time some sort of independent existence, though it might be that at one time the different compilations were kept on separate quires and later bound together.

Let us be a bit more precise about what the different pieces are: (1) Personal pleas in the style of ‘Brevia placitata’ (fol. 1v–21v). (2) Extracts from treatises about personal pleas (fol. 22v–27v). (3) Rules about personal pleas derived from reports of cases in the time of Edward I and Edward II (fol. 28r–98v). (4) Rules about personal pleas derived from eyre reports (fol. 99r–130v). (5) A return of rules about personal pleas derived from Year Book reports (fol. 131r–146r). (More work is needed to identify the dates of this material; the headers and headings are no help.) (6) Rules about personal pleas derived from reports from the time of Edward III (fol. 147r–216r).

The chronological range of the material here is quite wide, making it unlikely, although certainly not impossible, that the same person who put together a ‘Brevia placitata’ about personal pleas is the same person who entered the final extracts from 14 Edw. 3. The different hands at work in the manuscript, however, could be contemporary. We are inclined to think that the script at the very beginning may be a earlier than that of the entries for Edward III, but we may be overly influenced by the fact that we know that that material could be quite a bit earlier. Perhaps more telling is the fact that the manuscript begins with a definite style of decoration, which disappears when we reach fol. 23.

Certainty is not possible. It might be achieved by a more careful examination both of the contents and of the possible sources of this material. The evidence does, however, seem consistent with the notion that there were two compilers, one operating at the end of the reign of Edward I or the beginning of that of Edward II, the other operating in the second decade of the reign of Edward III. The second compiler probably had to hand parts (1) and (2), and perhaps only some of part (3) of the manuscript that we now have. He may have had to hand part (5). He may be responsible for the sections in part (3) where the cases are identified by king, year, and/or term. If he was, he probably had the whole part recopied. There is a consistency in script and style throughout it, and the quire breaks do not fall at the beginnings of the different subsections. The putative second compiler started the eyre of London on what were blank folios at the end of part (3). He combed, first, the eyre reports, presumably from existing manuscripts of those eyres, looking for material on personal pleas. This was, we might note, a good place to look for such material, granted the breadth of eyre jurisdiction. He then either inserted that material between the existing parts (3) and (5), or, he compiled part (5) himelf from sources that need more exploration. His source for part (6) is easier to discern. It almost certainly was existing manuscripts of Year Books of Edward III arranged by years and terms.

The result is a very full exploration of the concept of personal pleas and rules about them. The substantive content of this manuscript deserves, in our view, more attention than it has heretofore received. We might speculate that it was, or became, a manuscript of someone who was teaching about personal pleas.

The history of the manuscript does not end in 1340. Someone, probably early in the 17th century, had the manuscript bound in the binding that it now has, and he, or a contemporary, did a considerable amount of work on it. The binding added to the manuscript a handwritten copy of Lambarde’s Archeion (fol. 218r–232v). That copy is dated 1608. After Lambarde there is a detailed list of the contents of the medieval manuscript in an early 17th century hand (fol. 233r–235v). The hand may be the same as that of the copy of Lambarde, although it is sloppier and more informal. The folio references seem to correspond to the early modern foliation in the manuscript that we have used digitally. Whether the same hand is responsible for the 17th-century notes that appear throughout the manuscript we are less sure, but it could be.

Whether the extracts from the Secreta secretorum (seq. 5–9) that begin the manuscript were added when the manuscript was bound in the 17th century is unclear. The script is definitely medieval; the style is not legal. We will not attempt to date it more precisely. It is perhaps more likely that a 17th-century antiquary would have added this item rather than a medieval lawyer who was focused, it would seem almost exclusively, on personal pleas. The extracts deserve more attention than we have been able to give them. Some of them might be connected to the idea of a personal plea, but only at a very general level.