Beschreibung:

[Care, Henry]. English Liberties: Or, the Free-Born Subject's Inheritance, containing I. Magna Charta, The Petition of Right, The Habeas Corpus Act; and divers other most Useful Statutes ... II. The Proceedings in Appeals of Murther ... III. All the Laws against Conventicles and Protestant Dissenters ... 1st edition, printed by George Larkin, and are to be sold by most booksellers, 1682, with the initial blank (A1), variable browning, outer leaves slightly brittle, marginal chipping and nicks to title-page and other early leaves, B10 chipped to loss of pagination, final 2 leaves chipped to loss of text, modern cloth, 12mo (14.5 x 7cm) (Qty: 1) ESTC R30882; Sweet & Maxwell I pp. 154-5 (misdating this imprint 1684); Wing C517; cf. Sabin 10819. One of three variant imprints, the others being 'G. Larkin, for Benjamin Harris' (Wing 515), and 'G. Larkin, for John How' (Wing 516). Wing describes all three versions as separate editions, and conjectures a date of 1680 for the copies printed for Harris or How, which are undated. ESTC, however, suggests 1682, and the collation is in each case the same, except for four advertisement leaves in How's copies, and the absence of an initial blank in Harris's: the three imprints therefore appear at most to represent separate issues, rather than editions. 'Building on the authority of the Great Charter, this work defended trial by jury and established the persisting legal freedoms based on Magna Carta' (BL, online). Benjamin Franklin is believed to have assisted in the printing of the first American edition in Boston in 1721, and the work subsequently 'had a much longer and more significant reach in the American colonies than in England ... [playing] an important role in spreading concepts about English law, history, government, liberties and especially juries' (Schwoerer, The Ingenious Mr. Henry Care, Restoration Publicist, p. 233).