Beschreibung:

MANUSCRIPT-LEGAL] Elizabethan legal manuscript . [London: circa 1585]. Full flexible vellum with laced vellum sewing-strips threaded through the covers at the spine, traces of vellum fore-edge ties, titled on spine in ink in a later hand, the binding apparently contemporaneous with the text. 11 3/4 x 76 7/8 inches (20 x 30 cm); 88 ff. on paper, written in a variety of hands ranging from a fine secretarial bastarda script to personal cursives. Wear and soiling to the binding, the vellum somewhat shrunken and creased; generally clean within. Ad I: Notes of a series of lectures on copyholds given by Charles Calthrope at Furnival's Inn in 1574. This work circulated in manuscript before being printed in 1635 as The Relation between the Lorde of a Mannor and the Coppy-Holder his tenant, (ESTC S107474). There are manuscript copies of the lectures at Harvard (HLS MS 46) and at the Folger Library; neither of these appear to be as extensive as the present. Ad II: The order of procedure at quarter sessions (this court was reserved for more serious offences). Ad III: Copy of a letter from Edward Cooke to Sir Thomas Sackwill, dated from the "Inner Temple" 2nd January 1581, transmitting case evidence. Ad IV: Notes on a case of land tenure, 11th Elizabeth (1569), written in legal French. Ad V: The report of an argument used by Edward Plowden, as an apprentice of the Middle Temple, dated 25th Elizabeth (1583), written in legal French. Ad VI: A detailed table of the fees for Chancery proceedings, 2 pp. This very rare survival shows the costs of a wide variety of 16th century legal services. Ad VII: An attractive drawing of the Table of Consanguinity, the Arbor Civilis, 2 pp. Ad VIII: The arraignment of Lord William Dacres for high treason, 26th Henry (Dacres was acquitted). Elizabethan legal manuscripts are rare as a class, and this example has exceptionally interesting content. The Folger manuscript of Calthrope (which was number 70 in Halliwell-Phillips's Calendar of Shakespearian Rarities) is both later and less extensive than the present work. Calthrope's work is the most important discussion of the law in regard to tenants until Sir Edward Coke's The Complete Copy-Holder of 1641. The watermark of the paper used in the manuscript closely resembles Gravell's Pot.079.1, used in the Bagot Papers 1551/2 (Folger Shakespeare Library). C