<Preliminary introduction>

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

Provenance : Ex libris James Graham (his heraldic bookplate on front pastedown) -- Bequest of Henry N. Ess, 2000.

“Description : [87] leaves : vellum ; 14 cm.

“Summary : Incomplete manuscript : initials on leaves 81 and 82 cut out; leaves 83 and 84 removed; leaves after no. 87 missing (text ends on 87 with “Incipit sum[mae] [a]pud Heingh[a]m”).

“Notes : Historiated initial with Edward I begins Magna carta; illuminated initials and initials decorated with penwork throughout.”

Not included in Baker’s English Legal Manuscripts.

The HOLLIS cataloguing is misleading. Fols. 83 and 84, at least in the foliation that we now have, are not missing. As our quiring (below) shows, what are missing are folios before the current fol. 82, 83, and 84. There is no fol. 87 as the manuscript is currently foliated. The manuscript ends on fol. 85, though much is probably missing after that.

The manuscript measures approximately 140 X 100 mm.

The binding probably dates from the 16th or 17th century, more likely the latter than the former. The boards are covered on the outside in leather with blind-tooled borders which is folded over the boards, so that the boards themselves are mostly visible on the inside. Compare HLS MS 182.

The decoration was at one time quite handsome, although the initial miniature with Magna Carta is in rather bad condition. The statutes have elaborately decorated initial capitals, many with gold leaf, in red and blue with scrollwork in the margins and some with borders. The design differs somehat from the standard. The blue that is used with the gold seems to be lighter and greener than the blue normally found in this type of manuscript. (Recall, however, that the color in our photography is unreliable.) There is only one surviving miniature. The initials that were vandalized on fols. 81r and 82r may have contained miniatures, although there is no surviving evidence of that. There are red and and blue paragraph marks throughout. (Here the color of the blue is standard as it is on the decorated initials that do not have gold leaf.)

The script is a standard semi-cursive legal one, typical of the early 14th century, clearly the work of a professional. We have not noticed any change in hand in the main text.

There is a modern pencilled foliation in the lower left-hand corner. It begins after the initial endpapers, which seem to be contemporary with the binding, and ends before the final endpapers, which also seem to be contemporary with the binding. Foliating the manuscript in this way necessitates referring to the endpapers, the first set of which has decipherable writing, by sequence number, but the convenience of having the digital foliation track that on the manuscript led us to set up the digital foliation in the same way as the modern pencilled foliation.

The manuscript consists of 11 regular quaternions, excluding the initial and final endpapers. Folios are missing after fols. 82, 83, and 84, giving us the following collation:

1–11⁸ (f. 1–85, lacks one after f. 82, 83, 84, and 85r).

The loss of the folio after fol. 82 leads to a loss of much of the tract ‘De antiquo dominico coronae’. The Statute of York, 12 Edw. 2, begins on fol. 83r. The loss of the folio after fol. 83 does not seem to have resulted in any loss of text. Chapter 3 of the Statute of York carries over from from fol. 83v to fol. 84r. The same is true of the folio that is missing after fol. 84. Chapter 4 of the Statute of York carries over from fol. 84v to fol. 85 r.

What the quiring does not show is that quite a bit more than one folio is probably missing after fol. 85. Fol. 85v ends with an incipit for Parva Hengham, but nothing of that tract follows, simply endpapers.

The Statute of York, 12 Edw. 2, may be a later addition, though we are inclined to think that it is not. The layout and decoration looks of a piece with what precedes it with the same somewhat unusual light blue for the scrollwork and considerable use of goldleaf. Except for the Statute of York, everything in the manuscript antedates 1307.

The notes at the bottom of fol. 39v deserve more attention than we have been able to give them. They are medieval and seem to be notes of writ forms, perhaps derived from Westminster II.

There are marginalia in an early modern hand that identify some of the statutes, by modern standards not always accurately.

The missing initials on fol. 81 and 82 are probably sheer vandalism and could have happened at any time. What happened, however, when the manuscript was bound looks more systematic. The tracts seem to have been systematically removed, leaving only the statutes. All we have now is a piece of ‘De antiquo dominico coronae’ with the rest of it cut out and a notice that we will get ‘Hengham parva’, which we do not. That means, of course, that it is unknowable how many tracts there orginally were in the manuscript and what they were. We suspect that there were more than just ‘De antiquo dominico coronae’ and ‘Hengham parva’, because normally a manuscript from this period that contains tracts contains a collection of tracts, but we cannot tell.

There is no reason to doubt, however, that all the statutes that were originally in the manuscript remain. That gives us an approximate date of 1318. That the manuscript contained, at a minimum, ‘De antiquo dominico coronae’ and ‘Hengham parva’ allows us to speculate that the original owner was a professional with some connection to the central royal courts. The artwork suggests that he did not lack for funds.

The heraldry on the bookplate of James Graham on the inside front cover looks very much 18th or 19th century. We have not pursued it further.