<Preliminary introduction>

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

“Description: [223] leaves : vellum ; 8 cm.

“Notes: Illuminated initials.

“Leaves unnumbered; a few incorrect leaf numbers were supplied, in blue pencil, by a former owner or librarian. Some leaves between parts are blank.”

The cataloguing in Baker’s English Legal Manuscripts, 1, no. 84 reads as follows:

“REGISTRUM BREVIUM

“MS. 61.

“C.xiv-xv, 221 ff. Includes a calendar; and a list of kings of England. The first writ in the register is by John de Stanmere against Thomas de Welton for land in Lincolnshire. The Articuli were written in C.xv.

“Calendar includes dedication of St Andrew’s church, Holborn; ‘pertinet Harvy de Lyncolnes Inne’ (c. 1500); ‘Ric. Clerke’ (early C.xvi), probably the one (d. 1530) who was adm. Lincoln’s Inn in 1496; armorial bookplate of Edward Hailstone (d. 1890); not identified in his sales; acquired by George Dunn in Feb. 1892; his sale, S. 12 Feb. 1913, no. 236; bought privately by HLS.

“Census, I, 1035, no. 61; Early Registers, xxvi.”

The total number of folios is 223, not Baker’s 221, which is the result of a mistake in the pencilled foliation. In addition to the pencilled foliation described in HOLLIS, there are three medieval foliations described below.

The manuscript is approximately 80 X 55 mm.

The 19th-century leather binding is decorated with impressed lines on the covers and gold lettering on the spine. It is in fair condition with the spine worn and detaching from the covers. It probably dates from the time of Hailstone’s ownership.

The overall condition of the text of the manuscript is good. The quiring suggests that there are two folios missing, neither of which seems to have resulted in the loss of any text.

The Registrum Brevium includes a large initial capital on the first page (fol. 32r) and red paragraph marks throughout. The calendar is laid out in red and black. Illustrations are limited to informal drawings on fols. 141r and 142v.

The text is written in three distinct scripts: a formal bookhand for the Calendar; a fairly neat semi-cursive legal script for the Registrum Brevium; and a third, much less regular script, for the Tabulae, Articuli ad Novas Narrationes, and Reges Angliae. The script of the calendar is from the 15th century, probably quite late in that century or even from the beginning of the 16th. The script of the register would seem to date from the first half of the 14th century. That of the Tabulae, Articuli, and surrounding material dates from the 15th century, and of a number of hands at work they all seem to date from quite late in that century.

There are three sets of medieval foliation, one in letters in the calendar, one in the Registrum Brevium, and another in the Articuli ad Narrationes. There is also a modern foliation in blue pencil in the upper right-hand corner. It is incomplete and has some errors. We have refoliated the manuscript digitally and arrived at a total of 223.

We are unsure whether there are any medieval signature marks. If there are, they are sufficiently faint and irregular as not to be helpful. The quire breaks, however, in both the register and the articuli are, in most cases, quite obvious, and we have based our collation on these. Everything can be made to fit into quite regular quaternions. This will have to suffice until the manuscript is rebound.

Quiring/collation:

1⁸ (f. 1–7, one missing before ?1), 2–17⁸ (f. 8–135), 18⁸ (f. 136–221, one missing after 142), 19–28⁸ (143–221), 29² (f. 222–223).

The contents of the manuscript are listed in the summary table below and described in notes to the Detailed Contents. We note here that the manuscript contains a short treatise, principally a collection of sample documents, on the ‘Modus levandorum finium’ in Latin. All the rest of the contents have previously been noted.

The calendar contains a feast for the dedication of the church of St Andrew’s Holborn on 9 March. The church may go back to the Anglo-Saxon period. The wooden church was replaced with a stone one in the 15th century, and the church may have been rededicated at that time. Be that as it may be, the mention of the feast suffices to set the calendar firmly in London.

The Easter day in the calendar is 7 Kal. Apr., i.e. 26 March. Assuming, though this is not certain, that that was the Easter date in the year in which the calendar was made, the possible years are 1475, 1486, and 1497.

The list of the kings of England begins with Edward the Confessor and ends with Henry VII. The regnal years and death dates of all the kings are given except for Henry VII. For him the list gives the date of his accession at Bosworth Field and of his coronation later in 1485. The last line seems to refer to his victory at the battle of Stoke Field, 16 June 1487.

The other items in the manuscript are less easy to date. The writ of right patent in the register is issued in the name of a King Edward but the attestation clause is left out. The script suggests a date later in the 14th century than 1307, and the contents are reminiscent of a cut-down version HLS MS 28, which has a rather firm date of 1325. Articuli ad Narrationes is a 15th-century text, but has not been well studied, and we are unaware that anyone has attempted to date it more precisely.

How the manuscript as we now have it was put together, however, seems reasonably clear. Someone in the late 15th-century, perhaps the mysterious ‘Harvy of Lincoln’s Inn’,¹ wanted a portable copy of a register of writs. He was not looking for one that was particularly up-to-date, and he obtained one that dated from sometime in the first half of the 14th century. To this he added, or had added, a tabula for the register and some notes prior to the register, and a copy of Articuli ad Narrationes and a tabula for it after the register. The script of the list of kings suggests that it was added at the same time. We can be less sure about the calendar but there is nothing about it that requires a later date.

1. There are a number of Harveys of Lincoln’s Inn in Baker’s Men of Court. Perhaps the most plausible is William I (id at 1:830), admitted Lincoln’s Inn 1480.

On the assumption that the 15th-century contents all date from the same time, we assigned them a date of ca. 1487 on the basis of the list of kings. We originally dated the register ca. 1325 on the basis of the comparison with HLS MS 28. The introduction to the Analysis of Writs identifies one of parties to the writ of error at the end of the register as an Italian merchant who is known to have been active in 1324.

That the manuscript passed from Harvy to Richard Clerke of Lincoln’s Inn in the early 16th century seems plausible.² It became, then, a book for lawyers or aspiring lawyers, and probably it always was.

2. William I did not die until 1538, making the transfer to Clerke (d. 1530, id. at 1:480, admitted Lincoln’s Inn 1496) a bit problematic. William I, however, became a landowner by ca. 1500 and is not recorded as being involved in legal affairs after that time. He may have sold or given this book to Clerke, when it became clear that he would not need to be active professionally.

No heading found

We originally dated both HLS MS 60 and 61 as ca. 1325 on the basis of their contents rather than on the basis of any firm evidence of the date. The next paragraph provides some confirmation of that date for MS 61. 1325 is the same year as the much more solidly dated MS 28, but MS 28 is quite different from 60 and 61, both of which are portable manuscripts in which we would expect to find a selection of writs rather than an attempt at comprehensiveness. That is certainly true of MS 61. Whether it is true of MS 60 is harder to know because quite a bit is missing. All three manuscripts have something in them other than a register, statutes in MS 28, Novae narrationes in MS 60, Articuli ad novas narrationes in MS 61. What is in MS 60 and 61 is much more directly related to the register. Here is the writ, and here is how you plead it. MS 61 is unique among the three in that, as described in the Introduction, the 14th-century register was put together with an index and Articuli ad novas narrationes sometime, probably in the second half, of the 15th century.

As one might expect in a portable register, we have as yet found no dating clauses in MS 61, and only one writ where the names look real. The last writ in the register is a writ of error to the mayor and sheriffs of London in a case between one Franciscus de Florencia and Baukinus de Florencia, merchants. A Florentine merchant with the unusual name Baukinus (and the surname, misspelled, of Brunelleschi; the given name could be either Bauchino or Banchino; both exist; neither is common) is the subject of a commission to William de Bereford, Hervey de Stanton, and William de Herle dated 6 Aug. 1324 (Cal. Pat. R. [1324–7], 68). The case is probably not the same, but the man probably is, and that tends to confirm our tentative date.

The following table gives the names of the writs as found in the marginalia and counts them. Two counts are given in the right-hand columns of the table. The first counts all the writs, excluding any marginalia marked ‘nota’ or ‘regula’. The second excludes from that total all the writs where the heading includes the words ‘eodem’ or ‘aliter’.

As we might expect in a portable manuscript, the total number of writs is considerably fewer than MS 28 (486 vs. 941, using in both cases the larger of the two counts). When we mapped the structure of MS 28 with their approximate proportions onto that of MS 61, however, it fit quite well: Right (13%), Ecclesiastical (11%), Waste (4%), Replevin (12%), Trespass (10%), Account (3%), Debt (3%), Annuity (3%), Covenant (0%), Rights in land (5%), Ejectment (Quare eiecit) (0%), Wardship (3%), Dower (1%), Local courts (5%), Novel disseisin (9%), Mort d’ancestor (2%), Entry (11%), Formedon (1%), Error (0%). (Proportions given as zero percent are less than half a percent.) Quite well, but certainly not perfectly: there are some differences in the proportions, e.g. Right, 13% vs. 11%; Ecclesiastical, 11% vs. 14%. Granted, however, how crude the calculation of the proportions is and how small the differences, one should hesitate to make anything out of these differences. Indeed, as a general matter, MS 61 seems to have reduced the number of writs in all the categories proportionally to those in MS 28 ending up with proportions in each category that are approximately the same as those in MS 28. Criminal precedes trespass in MS 61 rather than following it as in MS 28, and is, if we are to rely on the headers, thought of as part of trespass (fol. 77r ‘de minis trans’’, when there is no other writ on the page that could be thought of as trespass). Some of the categories in MS 61 seem to be improvements over those in MS 28: Account is clearly broken out rather than buried in rights in land. It is followed by debt. What follows is, as in MS 28, made clearer than it ought to be by our categories, but it is not in the same order of MS 28. Annuity is buried in debt followed by writs of execution in personal actions (debt and trespass are both mentioned), followed by warranty of charter, customs and services, and covenant, before we reach anything that could properly be described as rights in land (De ponte reparando). Mesne, quare eiecit, and escheat separate rights in land from wardship. Cessavit is buried in entry. The writ of error at the end is clearly a one-off, and, as noted, above, a clue to the date and perhaps to the provenance.

The register has a fairly full set of contemporary headers that show some capacity for generalization. ‘De recto’ marks the initial folios. Indeed it proceeds too far running into not only De recto de advocacione, but also Quare admisit, Utrum, etc. As we have already noted, there is a hint in the header on fol. 77r, that the maker of the headers thought of De minis as a trespassory writ, but he did not follow up with that suggestion, not marking trespass again until he got to the civil action. The 15th-century index of writs at the beginning of the manuscript does not attempt to group the writs but, rather, lists them alphabetically.