Register of Writs, manuscript in Latin, on vellum and paper [England, last decades of the fifteenth century]

Estimate

3,000 - 5,000 GBP

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Description

Paper and Vellum

228 leaves (plus 2 endleaves), 310mm. by 215mm., apparently complete, collation: i⁶, ii²⁰ (vi-vii singletons), iii-vi¹², vii-ix¹⁰, x⁶, xi-xix¹², xx¹⁰, only fols.6 and 25 vellum, single column, c.33 lines in brown ink in a number of anglicana hands, watermark that of a hand with a flower (very close variant of Briquet no.11158, recorded by him on paper used by Caxton to print the ‘Festivalis liber’ in 1483), numerous contemporary or near-contemporary marginalia, leaves of first gathering loose, some discolouration throughout, old water damage to edges resulting in woolly paper fraying at edges, but without significant damage to text, top corner of first endleaf torn away, else fair condition, nineteenth-century vellum over pasteboards (much discoloured, with spine lifting, front board detached and back board loose)

Provenance

provenance

(1) Written as a practical medieval lawyer’s tool in the last decades of the fifteenth century: inscription on fol.138r naming one of the scribes as “Barlow”.

(2) Francis Wilkinson: his eighteenth- century armorial bookplate inside front board.

(3) Alexander Gerrard of the Inner Temple: his nineteenth-century bookplate in same place.

(4) John Aspinck esq.: his nineteenth-century pencil inscription on fol.32r.

(5) T.W. Bolton: his pencil inscription beneath the bookplates, recording the presentation of the volume on 28 March 1848 to the Law Society: their MS.7(105.g).

Literature

literature

N.R. Ker, Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, I, 1969, p.121.

Catalogue Note

text

This is a working reference tool for a lawyer living in the last years of medieval England, only decades before the English Reformation. It was composed in six sections, collecting together examples of legal documents and formulae for a wide range of problems. Blank leaves have been left at the end of each section, and were subsequently filled in the early sixteenth-century with other relevant documents, lists of English inland counties, counties bordering the sea, cities and towns and ports, and on the last leaf a medical recipe in English.