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was the predecessor of the English Bill, and was not affected by the Act, though the en rolments in Chancery of Letters Patent and Letters Close were always in Latin. For some reigns after the Act, too, the language of the Rolls of Parliament continued to be, in part at any rate, in French. All these rolls have to be consulted, at times, for the proper illustration of the re ported cases, but those which have to be most frequently used are rolls of the Courts of Common Pleas and King's Bench, and in the earliest times the rolls of the Courts of Eyre. It must not be supposed, that where there is a French report and a Latin record of the same case, the one is a mere translation of the other, and contains precisely the same information. The arguments of Counsel and the pleadings for which they attempt, but fail, to gain acceptance are all omitted from the final record — the plea or judgment roll. In this, however, the pleadings, as allowed by the Court, are entered, followed by the verdict, if the case went so far, and the judg ment, both of which are often omitted from the reports. In this, too, the names of the parties and the parcels of land (often want ing or erroneously stated in the reports) are set down with incontrovertible authority. The orthography is more uniform in the Latin of the rolls than in the French of the Year Books, and is indeed fairly well fixed, except in the names of persons and places. The writing is abbreviated but not quite so much as in the reports. On the other hand, the rolls present diffi culties of their own, and are full of pitfalls for the uninitiated. In the reports each ac tion is usually described by its appropriate technical name, e. g. Aiel, Cosinage, Debt, Entry, Formedon, Mesne, Quarc impcdit, Right, etc. In the rolls it is otherwise and a knowledge of the formal words used in each action is necessary for the pur pose of distinguishing one kind of action from another. The names of most of the

old actions are French, and very terse French, too, while the Latin writs which were used were in accordance with a set form that did not even necessarily include any Latin word equivalent to the French title. There is a notable instance of this in the term " Attaint." The word never occurs in a writ of Attaint; and in Letters Patent and Close the action is commonly called a "Jurata viginti et quatuor militum ad convincendumjuratares " of an Assise of Novel Disseisin, or as the case may be. Some curious mistakes have in consequence been made by officials unacquainted with the forms, but the details might be out of place in this article. Even when the name of the action has preserved a Latin garb there may not be any use of that particular description in the record of the case. The distinctive words, for instance, in the record of a Quare impcdit do not include the word " Quare" at all, but are Quod pcrmittat prœsentare, and for this reason a Quarc impcdii has, be fore mittat,now, which beenis described an action as of a totally Quod perdif ferent kind. The greater part of the cases in the Year Books were heard in the Court of Common Pleas, the records of which are probably the most technical that can be found. Most even of the actions of Assise (of Novel Dis seisin, etc.), which are reported, were re moved into that Court from the Courts of the Justices of Assise, proptcr difficultatcm. On the Plea or Judgment Rolls of the Com mon Bench are consequently to be sought the majority of the records corresponding with the reports. The Court of Common Pleas was described by Sir Edward Coke as the lock and key of the Common Law, and it is almost needless to say that its records are of the highest value not only for the history of the Law, but also for the social history of the country. Yet, owing probably to the difficulties which they present to the unlearned, nothing has been done except incidentally to make their