Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 12.pdf/572

 The Manuscripts of the " Year Books." The word ""marques " is clearly a misprint for " manques," but the whole sentence would be unintelligible, if there were no earlier edi tions to which reference could be made. Without them, indeed, it might be supposed that the whole announcement dated not from the year 1679 but from the year 1350. One thus sees how difficulties are imported into the printed editions which have no existence in the original manuscripts. In the different manuscript reports of the same case, however, one sometimes finds not only that the same point is differently put, but also that the general outcome of the whole is not quite the same. After a deci sion, too, on some particular point, there not unfrequently appears some expression of doubt in a contemporary hand, which is to all appearance a part of the report. A question, for example, having arisen whether a wife could be her husband's attor ney, the Court said that she could, but the reporter, or some one writing very soon after him, nevertheless added the word Quere. Sometimes the reporter travels a little out of his way to inquire what would have hap pened if the facts had been slightly different, or if the pleadings had been in a different form, and sometimes he supplies his own anssver in the words "jco crey qc" etc., " I think that," etc., as the case may be. No Year Books or copies of them have been found among the records of any of the Courts. Some of the manuscripts are still in private hands; and those which are in public libra ries can usually be traced to a particular donor or vendor. From these and other facts it may be in ferred that the Year Books owed their exist ence to private enterprise rather than to public authority. That there was a consid erable demand for them there can be no doubt, as the Judges must have had them, and the Counters and the Apprentices of the Law must have depended largely upon them for the legal education of the day. The imper fections in the manuscripts were probably of

535

less importance then than they are now, be cause the number of copies in existence must have been much greater, they must have been much more readily accessible to the profes sion, and the continual use of them must have rendered many obvious corrections a matter of comparative ease. The worst of them, it must be remembered, were not as bad as the best of the printed black letter editions of the Year Books, and they are not very often found wanting in those main features which were of vital importance to the lawyer. His chief object was to know how to con duct every kind of case, what pleadings would be useful to him at each particular stage, how he could advance towards the goal which he had in view, and, by no means least of all, how he could delay his adversary. All this he might learn fairly well even from an illcopied manuscript, when he could supplement his reading by listening to similar proceed ings in Court. To an untrained modern eye, however, the manuscripts present difficulties, which, at first sight, seem almost insuperable. The letter с can rarely be distinguished from the letter Л The letter n is commonly indistin guishable from the letter и (which may be equivalent to î1) and the letter m from the letters ni or in. Long words may thus some times be read in quite different ways even when written at full length; miniere, for in stance, might be read numere and vice Tersa. The most common words, however, are not usually written at full length, and the correct extension of the abbreviations must in many cases depend upon the context and upon a knowledge of the law and practice of the period. " Dcf" for instance, may mean dé faut or defendant or defendants; "¿" may mean tenant or tenants, or tenements. In these instances, of course, the context usu ally supplies the meaning without the ne cessity for much consideration. It is far otherwise with some other contractions. The letter;- is, perhaps, the most troublesome of all the single letters, and it is not free