Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 4.djvu/409

393 Harvard Law Review. Published monthly, during the Academic Year, by Harvard Law Students, SUBSCRIPTION PRICE, $2.50 PER ANNUM 35 CENTS PER NUMBER Editorial Board. Wilfred Bolster, .... Editor-in-Chief. Guy Cunningham, David T. Dickinson, Louis Hicks, Francis C. Huntington, M. Day Kimball, James M. Newell, Ezra R. Thayer, Herbert H. Darling, Treasurer^ Stephen A. Foster, Carleton Hunneman, Ralph A. Kellogg, James G. King, Oliver Prescott, Jr., Frank B. Williams. Editors Harvard Law Review : — Your January issue announced that Vol. 4 of the Selden Society publications, by Professor Maitland, was in the press. I am sure that your readers will be interested in not a few of the formulce which the proofs are bringing to hand ; for it should be stated that this volume will differ from the preceding vohimes, inter alia, in being a collec- tion of precedents. Professor Maitland is printing from MS. books of precedents dating in their earlier part as far back as about the year 1265. In one of the earliest, a precedent is given of so interesting a char- acter that I must beg the editors of The Review for space enough to print it, in advance of the publication of the volume in which it will appear. It is a precedent in a Court Baron (all these precedents are of Courts Baron) of what we should now speak of as a malicious interfer- ence with a contract, anticipating by six hundred years what the English judges struggled so much with, and some of them against, in the well-known cases of Lumley v. Gye, 2 El. & B. 216, and Bowen v. Hall, 6 Q. B. D. ^2>Z' '^^'^ whole thing was, it seems, a matter of course to the lawyers of the thirteenth century. Perhaps, too, the judges in the well-contested case of Mogul Steamship Co. v. McGregor, 21 Q. B. D. 544, s. c. 23 Q. B. D. 598, would have found something of value in the old precedent. The precedent is given in the translation by Professor Maitland, pp. 40, 41. M. M. B. Of Disturbing a Bargain : — Sir Steward, William [Vintner] of Woodstock, who is here, complaineth of R[obert] Baker, who is there, that wrongfully he supplanted him of a ton of wine of a merchant of Southampton, Bernard Taneys by name, which he [the plaintiff] bought of him [Bernard] for 36s. and gave [earnest] and found pledges to duly pay the said sum on a certain day without any delay; this done, came the said Robert and in despite of W[illiam], who is here, spake so much ill and villainy of him to the merchant and drove his own bar-