Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 4.djvu/403

Rh     Map of Brittany.    1em  BRITTON, the title of the earliest summary of the law of England in the French tongue, which purports to have been written by command of King Edward I. The origin and authorship of the work have been much disputed. It has been attributed to John le Breton, bishop of Hereford, on the authority of a passage found in some MSS. of the history of Matthew of Westminster ; there are difficulties, however, involved in this theory, inasmuch as the bishop of Hereford died in 1275 (3 Edward I.), whereas allusions are made in Britton to several statutes passed after that time, and more particularly to the well- known statute &quot; Quia emptores terrarum, &quot; which was passed in 18 Edward I. It was the opinion of Selden that the book derived its title from Henry de Bracton, the last of the chief justiciaries, whose name is sometimes spelled in the Fine Rolls Bratton and Bretton, and that it was a royal abridgment of Bracton s great work on the customs and laws of England, with the addition of certain subse quent statutes. The arrangement, however, of the two works is different, and but a small proportion of Bracton s work is incorporated in Britton. The work is entitled in an early MS. of the 14th century, which was once in the possession of Selden, and is now in the Cambridge Uni versity Library, &quot; Summa de leglbus Anglie que vocatur Bretone ;&quot; and it is described as &quot; a book called Bretoun&quot; in the will of Andrew Horn, the learned chamberlain of the city of London, who bequeathed it to the chamber of the Guildhall in 3 Edward III., together with another book called the Mirroir des Jutticei. Britton was first printed in London by Robert Redman, without a date, probably about the year 1530. Another edition of it was printed in 1640, corrected by Edmund Wingate. A third edition of it, with an English translation, has been lately published at the University Press, Oxford, 1865, by F. M. Nicholls, M.A. An English translation of the work without the Latin text had been previously published by R. Kelham in 1762.  BRITTON,, a topographical and antiquarian writer, was born at Kingston-St-Michael, near Chippenham, July 7, 1771. His birthplace, an old-world village of the dullest and sleepiest kind, had also the distinction of being the home of the antiquary John Aubrey. His parents were in humble circumstances, and he was left an orphan at an early age. He grew up with no better education than was to be had in the poor schools of his native Wiltshire village and neighbouring places, the last to which he was sent being at Chippenham. At the age of fourteen he became possessed of a small lot of books, and among them were Robinsaii Crusoe, the Pilgrim s Progress, and The Life of Peter, Czar of Muscovy. At sixteen he went to London, 