Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 12.pdf/570

 The Manuscripts of the " Year Books."

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THE MANUSCRIPTS OF THE "YEAR BOOKS" AND THE CORRESPONDING RECORDS. BY LUKE OWEN PIKE. WHEN asked to give some account of the manuscripts of those old Law Reports which are commonly known as "Year Books," one feels that one can hardly succeed in making the subject intel ligible unless one can transport one's readers in imagination into that age in which the manuscripts were used. The earliest of them now known to be in existence is of the reign of Edward I., though we know from Fitzherbert's Abridgement that there were some reports of the reign of Henry III. The language of them is French, and that was the language actually spoken in the courts until the thirty-sixth year of the reign of Edward III. A very clear distinction must be drawn between the reports of cases earlier than the last mentioned date and the reports of the later cases. The former may be, if they are not always, a more or less accurate repre sentation of the words actually used in plead ing and arguing; the latter cannot, at most, be anything but translations from English into French. The French of the one period is a living language, a branch of the Langue d'Oil, il lustrating and illustrated by other branches of the same family. The French of the other period is a professional language, such as the lawyers pleased to make it for their own purposes. It is this latter day LawFrench which has been the subject of many gibes and jokes, and which has caused many laymen, if not lawyers also, to regard all LawFrench as a mere jargon. Down to the early part of the reign of Henry VIII., in whose time the series of Year Books come to an end, Judges and Counsel must apparently have had to rely upon manuscripts for a portion at least of

their case law, though some of the reports were printed a little earlier. Copies in earlier times were multiplied by hand only, and experience very clearly shows that these copies were not usually examined after they were made. Sometimes the scribe inadver tently repeats a passage; more often his eye deceives him, and he omits a passage begin ning or ending with the same word as the passage which he had written just before. He is, of course, liable to err in other ways, like all other human beings, and the conse quence is that any one manuscript of a re port is usually more or less defective, even though it may be approximately contempo rary. Sometimes one sees that the possessor of a manuscript has noticed a mistake and corrected it, either by conjecture, or by the aid of some other manuscript. As a rule it is possible for a modern editor to obtain a fairly satisfactory text by careful collation of a number of manuscripts, though it -some times happens that in the last resort it is absolutely necessary to correct it by the rec ord, and the record almost always furnishes information not to be found in the report. Sometimes the manuscripts differ to the extent of substituting an affirmative for a negative, or vice versa, and when such a dis crepancy occurs in the judgment, the roll settles the question beyond all possibility of dispute. It must not, however, be supposed that there was always one single authorized re port from which all copies were made. A case may sometimes be found reported in two or even three different forms. These independent reports could not all have been made officially, and there is no reascn to suppose that one was so made rather than another. The lawyers consequently had to