<Preliminary introduction>

Manuscripts 29 and 30 may originally have been bound as one. They are now bound separately, but they clearly belong together and have traditionally been, and are best, described together.

The HOLLIS cataloguing may be found here. The description is quite full and useful; some of it, however, is misleading and has been public for some time. We quote it here both for the information that it contains and in order to correct it.

“Title: Statuta nova, 1326-1469

“Provenance:[As in Baker.]

“Description: 2 v. ([216], [229] leaves): vellum ; 25 cm.

“Summary: At the beginning is a calendar and index to statutes from Magna Carta to 23 Henry VI (1441-1444), covering Accusations to Xp̄ien courte, followed by the Modus Tenendi Parliamentum, in Latin and law-French. The statutes covered are from 1 Edward II to 8 Edward IV and begin on fo. 71.

“Spine title: Statutes from I ED III to VII & VIII ED IV

“Notes: Written in long lines, 36 to a full page.

“Statutes contain illuminated initials in colors and gold with floreated borders at the beginning of each reign. The Calendar is in red and black.

“Bound in English green morocco with gilt back and borders.

“First volume numbered HLS MS 29, second volume numbered HLS MS 30.”

The cataloguing in Baker’s English Legal Manuscripts, 1, no. 56 reads as follows:

“56 STATUTA NOVA, 1 EDWARD III TO 8 EDWARD IV

“MSS. 29–30.

“C.xv, 216 + 229 ff., now bound in two volumes, illum, initials and borders. Preceded by a calendar; Modus tenendi parliamentum; an index of statutes to 23 Henry VI, from Accusations to Xp̄ien courte.

“Calendar includes obit for Richard Pigot (d. 1483), serjeant at law; belonged to Christopher Crispe (entries of births of his children, 1535-1539); later belonged to Bertram (d. 1878), 4th earl of Ashburnham (MS. 187 in App.), and to his son the 5th earl; his sale, S. 1 May 1899, no. 119, to Leighton for George Dunn; his sale, S. 12 Feb. 1913, no. 271; bought privately by HLS.

“Census, I, 1028, nos. 29-30; N. Pronay and J. Taylor, Parliamentary Texts of the later Middle Ages (1980), 202.”

We begin by correcting the HOLLIS entry. 1 Edw. 3 is 1327, not 1326, if one uses new style years, as are used throughout HOLLIS. The last session of the parliament of 7 & 8 Edw. 4 was in June of 1468, so that date should be the terminus post quem rather than 1469. The order of the material is as given in Baker, not as given in HOLLIS, i.e., Calendar, followed by Modus tenendi, and then Index of statutes. Neither HOLLIS nor Baker mentions the treatise on the office of the steward of England, which appears between the Modus and the Index. As will appear more fully below, both HOLLIS and Baker seem to be mistaken in identifying the obit on fol. 4v as being that of Richard Pigot, the serjeant who died in 1483.

The bindings of both manuscripts are the same and quite handsome, leather (‘English green morocco’ in HOLLIS, our image does not suggest green, but the color in the image is misleading) covers tooled with floreated designs filled in gold on the borders of the covers. The spines have gold details of flowers and Greek keys with blocks of red behind the titles. Marbled paper with bookplates appear inside both covers. The binding on both volumes is in good condition. The bindings probably date from the 19th century.

Both volumes are written in long lines, 36 to a full page. The script is professional, English semi-cursive. A number of hands are at work, all clearly datable to the 15th century. We hesitate to be more precise than that, but the hands in MS 29 may be earlier than those in MS 30.

The statutes contain illuminated initials in colors and gold with floreated borders at the beginning of each reign. Paragraph marks throughout are in red and blue. The initial Calendar in MS 29 is more elaborate in its decoration: red, blue, and gold ink mixed with black throughout and large gold capitals. Some remarks on the decoration of the alphabetical index is found below.

There is a modern pencilled foliation in the upper-right hand corner on a very few of the folios of MS 29 (e.g., fol. 71r). It begins with the Calendar and ends with the last folio in MS 29 on which there is medieval writing. It corresponds to the digital foliation that we have used. We did not find any foliation in MS 30 and have used a digital foliation that corresponds to that of MS 29.

The quiring in both manuscripts is mostly regular quaternions. There is a bifolium of freestanding endpapers at the beginning of MS 29, and another with a marbled freestanding endpaper tipped in at the beginning of MS 30. There is a ternion of freestanding endpapers in the back of MS 29, a quaternion in MS 30. There is one ternion and one bifolium in the medieval part of MS 29, two ternions and one quinternion in MS 30. Two quires have been bound out of order in MS 30. Collation follows:

MS 29: 1² (seq. 4–7), 2⁶ (fol. 1–6), 3–27⁸ (f. 7–214), 28² (f. 215–216), 29⁶ (seq. 440–445).

MS 30: 1² (+ i tipped in, seq. 4–9), 2–21⁸ (f. 1–159, lacks 1 after 2 and ?126, two quires switched after f. 79), 22⁶ (f. 159–164), 24⁸ (f. 165–180), 25¹⁰ (f. 181–190), 26–29⁸ (f. 191–222), 30⁶ (f. 223–227, lacks 1 after 227), 31⁸ (seq. 464–471).

The Calendar on fol. 1r–6v is a perpetual lunar calendar, typical of those used in England in the later Middle Ages. The saints are decidedly in the English pattern. We have not checked to determine whether there are any indications of regional saints. It is laid out in six columns, the first of which is the ‘golden number’, the second the dominical letter, the third the day of the month in Roman reckoning, and the fourth the name of the saint or feast celebrated on that day. The fifth marks, somewhat irregularly, whether the feast has a vigil. The sixth is a ‘d’, which marks some, but not all the feasts, that are in red. It may stand for ‘duplex’, but that would not correspond to the feasts that were, in the pre-1962 Roman Catholic liturgy, ‘doubles’. It may indicate those feasts on which the faithful were supposed to observe a dominical day of rest. The other peculiarity that we have noticed is that a day for Easter is marked on 27 March, something that should not appear in a single-year perpetual calendar. Easter fell on 27 March in 1440 and not again until 1502. The former seems too early for our calendar, the latter may be too late.

Folio 4v notes the death of a Richard Pigot in a different script. If we accept Baker’s identification of the Richard Pigot in question as being the serjeant of that name, the calendar must date from before his death in 1483. There are reasons, however, to doubt the identification. Richard Pigot, the serjeant, died on 3 June 1483. (The evidence for that in Baker, Men of Court, 2:1277, is solid.) The note on fol. 4v is not easy to read (it may be in the same hand that notes the birth of Crispe’s children), but it is next to 6 August and seems to say: ‘Obitus Ricardus Pygott generosus anno domini M C xxvi littera dominicali tunc existente ?G et anno regni Henrici viij xviij.’ The dominical letter in 1526 was G. The letter given in the manuscript could be ‘E’, in which case it is wrong. Everything else tracks with 6 August 1526, a generation later than the death of Richard Pigot the serjeant.

As Baker notes, the Calendar also contains (fol. 2v) notes of the births of the children of one Christopher Crispe in the years 1535–1539. The eldest and heir presumptive, Henry, was born at a place that Crispe calls ‘Copton’, which may be Copt Hewick in Yorks., WR. That may provide a connection with Richard Pigot, the serjeant. Copt Hewick is 2 miles east of Ripon, Pigot’s place of origin. Pigot remained associated with Yorkshire throughout his long career. It is possible that the obit is that of his son, but this needs more exploration.

To return to the problem of the date of the calendar: we can now no longer be sure that it antedates 1483. The hand seems to antedate 1502, but it is a book hand and calendars tend to be conservative in their style. The decoration is definitely more elaborate than that in the rest of the manuscript, with extensive use of red and blue and the initial ‘KL’ in gold leaf. It may well be a later addition; there is nothing that connects it with the rest of the manuscript. Hence, we would say that it definitely dates from before 1526, perhaps 1502, although Easter also fell on 27 March in 1513 and 1524.

The tract on the office of the steward of England appears to be the same as that printed in L. W. Vernon-Harcourt, His Grace the Steward and Trial of Peers (London 1907) 164–7 (trans. in id., p. 148–51). The incipit and explicit are the same with minor spelling variations. (Incipit: ‘Hic annotatur quis sit Sesencallus Anglie et quid eius officium. Senescallia anglie pertinent ad comitivam leycestre et pertinuit ab antiquo’. Explicit: ‘tanquam inimicus publicus Regis et regni decollatus apud le Glakelowe in Com’ Warr’’.) How far the whole text differs from what Vernon-Harcourt printed we have not explored. Whether we should attribute this tract to the reign of Edward II, as Vernon-Harcourt does with some hesitation (p. 144), is a matter about which we may have some doubt. Vernon-Harcourt dates one of his manuscripts to the reign of Richard II, the other three to the fifteenth century, as, of course, this one is.

The alphabetical index is written in a professional hand. It does not seem to be the hand that wrote the last statutes, although there is no reason not to date it to the second half of the 15th century. The decorative pattern is roughly like that of the main manuscript with red and blue paragraph marks throughout. There is, however, some filling in of the loops of the letters, something that is not characteristic of the main manuscript. The elaborately decorated initial ‘Q’ at the beginning does not seem to be the work of the same artist who produced the elaborately decorated initials in the main manuscript. It is in a somewhat different style. There are no braces joining the abridgements of the statutes to their lemmata, and the braces joining the abridgements to the citations of the statutes are done in pen-and-ink by the main scribe.

There are a large number of lemmata, running, roughly alphabetically, from ‘Accusacions’ to ‘Xp̄ien court’. In the Detailed Contents, we have transcribed as marginalia (crudely, more work is needed here) 385 lemmata, almost double the average (200) found in MS 40, 170, and 185. We have argued in the introductions to those manuscripts that the indices found in them are all variants on the same text, and hence not drawn from the contents of the manuscript. Not only do the lemmata in this manuscript differ from the common pattern of MS 40, 170, and 185, the index also differs in what it cites, and in the fact that it includes abridgements of all of the statutes, whereas the abridgements in MS 40, 170 and 185 are highly selective. In this regard, this index is more like that in MS 10, which we have already argued is an ancestor of that printed by Lettou and Mechlina in 1481. It is not, however, nearly so close to the printed abridgement as is the index in MS 10. It bears the closest resemblance to the index found in MS 21. Indeed, the wording of the entries under the lemmata ‘Accusacions’ in this manuscript and ‘Accusements’ in MS 21 is almost the same and seems to have been derived from the same source. This index differs from that in MS 21 in that, like MS 40, 170, and 185, it contains citations to statutes that antedate Edward III. As the heading says, it contains statutes beginning with Magna Carta and going up to and through 20 Henry VI. We have not checked to see if there are any beyond that. We are virtually certain that it does not extend, as does the main manuscript, to 8 Edward IV.

It is possible that this index was compiled from two previous indices, one which indexed statutes from Edward III forward, and one which indexed what later came to be called ‘Statuta Vetera’. Citations to statutes prior to Edward III are grouped together and sometimes appear after those from Edward III forward if they are not entered under different lemmata. The presence of these citations and the fact that the index stops, so far as we have determined, with 20 Henry VI strongly suggest that it is an independent text, not one compiled from the contents of the manuscript.

We did not search systematically for marginal notes on the statutes. There are some. There seem to be few, if any, on the statutes of Edward III. We found a one in 5 Ric. 2, two more in 13 Ric. Beginning with 16 Ric. 2, they are quite extensive, a brief summary of the contents of each chapter. This runs to the end of Richard II. A similar set of summaries is found in 2 Hen. 4, another in 2 Hen. 5 stat. 1, but few, if any, thereafter. The script of these marginalia is more informal than that of the base text, but the hand is not so informal that it has to have been done by an owner. They may have been copied from other manuscripts.

After the statutes of 7 & 8 Edw. 4 in the main manuscript, there is written in a more informal hand, probably of the late 15th century, a version of Judicium pillorie. After a Latin heading, the text is in English and is quite different from that given for Judicium pillorie in S.R. 1:201 ff. It gives what is described as ‘the assize’ of the miller, the baker, the brewer, and the butcher. There is room on fol. 227v for more text, but the fact that all of the subheadings begin with ‘b’ suggests that the list may not be complete. We may be skeptical of the suggestion in the heading that these provisions were somehow ‘enacted’ in Edward III’s last parliament. There are no recorded statutes for that parliament, and the rolls of it do not suggest that there was any discussion of this topic. Who the ‘king of the market’ mentioned in the heading was deserves more attention than we have been able to give it, as does the whole text.

The analysis of the statutes in both volumes shows that the contents of the statutes tracks closely the contents of S.R. for the monarchs in question. There are no statutes that are not in S.R. We have not checked to see if anything in S.R. is missing, but if there is, it is something quite minor. This fact, coupled with the probable but not certain connection with Pigot, suggests that this is very much a lawyer’s statute book. Its contents seem to have been derived immediately or mediately from the statute roll. It is a high-quality production, something that a serjeant could have afforded.

The analysis of MS 29 follows. For technical reasons, the analysis of MS 30 is found on a separate page.