Description
This volume honours the work and writings of Professor Sir John Baker over the past fifty years, presenting a collection of essays by leading scholars on topics relating to the sources of English legal history, the study of which Sir John has so much advanced. The essays range from the twelfth century to the nineteenth, considering courts (central and local), the professions (both common law and civilian), legal doctrine, learning, practice, and language, and the cataloguing of legal manuscripts. The sources addressed include court records, reports of litigation (in print and in manuscript), abridgements, fee books and accounts, conveyances and legal images. The volume advances understanding of the history of the common law and its sources, and by bringing together essays on a range of topics, approaches and periods, underlines the richness of material available for the study of the history of English law and indicates avenues for future research.
Table of Contents
1. Year book men David J. Seip; 2.Errores in Camera Scaccarii David Ibbetso; 3. Law reporting in the seventeenth century W. H. Bryson; 4. The law of contracts as reported in The Times, 1785-1820 James Oldham; 5. Reading terminology in the sources for the early common law: seisin, simple and not so simple John Hudson; 6. 'A photograph of English life'?: the trustworthiness of the thirteenth-century crown pleas rolls Henry Summerson; 7. Law, lawyers and legal records: litigating and practising law in late medieval England Jonathan Rose; 8. The fees they earned: the incomes of William Staunford and other Tudor lawyers Nigel Ramsa; 9. The fifteenth-century accounts of the undersheriffs of Middlesex: an unlikely source for legal history Susanne Brand; 10. Local courts in Eastern Sussex, 1263-1835 Christopher Whittick; 11. Visualising legal history: the courts and legal profession in image Anthony Musson; 12. The engraved facsimile by John Pine (1733) of the 'Canterbury' Magna Carta (1215) Simon Keynes; 13. The abbess, the empress and the 'Constitutions of Clarendon' Elisabeth van Houts; 14. The Tractatus de Antiquo Dominico Corone ascribed to Anger of Ripon Paul Brand; 15. Another way of doing manuscript catalogues? Charles Donahue, Jr.; 16. Common opinion in the fourteenth century: before the common learning, before the inns of court Ian Williams; 17. Henry Sherfield's reading on wills (1624) and trusts in the form of a use upon a use N. G. Jones; 18. Civilians in the common law courts, 1500-1700 R. H. Helmholz; 19. The widow's apparel: paraphernalia and the courts Janet S. Loengard; 20. 'The glorious uncertainty of the law': life at the Bar, 1810-1830 Michael Lobban
