Percy Henry Winfield

“ The sources of Anglo-Saxon law are traceable with some wealth in the works of Brunner, in Pollock and Maitland's History of English Law, in other English, American, and German books, and, above all, in Liebermann's Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen. In his preface to the first volume, Liebermann tells us that he consulted 180 MSS.,3 and gives a list of these with all additions necessary for their identification.4 This is in itself an inestimable bibliography of Anglo-Saxon law. ”

“ Maitland and others have written of the weariness that attends the mere physical labour of turning over skins of parchment. It is regrettable enough that a great scholar should have to spend any part of his energy in doing this, essential though it may be; but it is something worse than regrettable that in books which are printed for the benefit of scholars, on the text of which great care has been lavished, and the production of which has been costly and toilsome, the sole method of settling a particular fact should be the antiquated one of looking through every volume page by page. ”

“ Haenel enumerates heartrending obstacles that would have deterred many a less persevering man from spending his energy upon such a work. It was not the first step that cost - it was every step - the surliness of librarians, the perils of travel in some of the countries which he visited, the disappointment caused by the destruction or sale of libraries which he imagined to be still existing and accessible, the inconvenient hours at which some libraries were open, and the wretched internal confusion in others, where MSS. and printed books were in a disorderly heap. ”

“ Yet this will make his task much more difficult if the contents of the book, or series of books, are a miscellany of different legal topics, such as the Year Books, or the Parliament Rolls.1 He can, if he likes, take refuge in a general reference to the whole series, and leave the searcher after information to find it for himself; but this involves an amount of labour on the part of generations of searchers quite disproportionate to the time needed for anyone with an average legal education to make an index once and for all. ”

“ Thus, to hope that the older collateral reports will be standardized so as to satisfy the needs of all who are likely to use them is to betray an insufficient conception of the variety of those needs.
One feels diffident of recommending reforms for the difficulties which have been considered, much more of offering any complete scheme of bibliography ”

“ The seventeenth-century printed editions of the Year-Books have many faults - mistakes in spelling, in Latin, in French, in wrong insertions, in bad cross-references, in binding, in paging, in dating. These faults in the subject-matter need no illustration; they are familiar to every one. But one further criticism is relevant; their indexes are very indifferent. They are only roughly alphabetical, they are inexact in classification, they occasionally refer to a plea when a folio is meant, or more often refer to a wrong folio altogether. ”

“ In our own times the maker of a catalogue is freer from the external circumstances that handicapped his predecessors. A comparison of Liebermann's preface with that of Haenel shows that libraries have become more orderly,2 more accessible, and more hospitable. ”

“ By collecting (but not editing1) all reports of all the cases and publishing them verbatim in a series of volumes. This saves mechanical labour, and is the most that can be done for the legal historian; for excision of any portion of a case might involve the omission of matter which he ought to examine, however worthless it might be from a modern point of view. ”

“ Many of the documents in which our law after the Conquest is contained have been printed in careful editions, but a vast mass remains in MS. form. Some of the earlier attempts to catalogue MSS. are instructive as throwing light on the trouble that beset such an undertaking.
In 1697, Catalogi librorum manuscriptorum Angliae et Hiberniae in unum collecti, by Edward Bernard, was published at Oxford. This, the preface admits, is not exhaustive. To take the case of
1Rot. Parl. in six folio volumes had been printed for nearly fifty years, before an index was added to them in 1832. 2P. & M. i. 1. 3p. ”

“ Again, proof of the courtesy of the owners of collections appears repeatedly at the end of the reports of the inspectors appointed by the Royal Commission on Historical MSS. to examine particular libraries.
But what may be called the geographical difficulty still remains. In Oxford and Cambridge alone there are at least forty separate repositories of books, and though admirable catalogues of the MSS. in most of these exist, the lack of re-editing some of them may involve tedious inquiry and occasional travel. To take a single instance, Mr. ”

“ Some Bibliographical Difficulties of English Law. 199
to the execrable - some form of critical notation in quoting the case would materially save time in consulting it. Competitive private enterprise in law reporting may have had some of the advantages which competitive railways now have ”