out in tabular form the list of the reports of this period, together with their chief characteristics. Then I shall endeavour to state shortly the points in which these reports resemble, and the points in which they differ from the Year Books on the one hand, and from their successors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on the other. Lastly I shall say something of the epitomes and indexes to these reports which soon began to appear, and of Rolle's Abridgment-the earliest of the Abridgments which summarize the contents of the modern reports, the successor to those Abridgments of the Year Books which have been already described,1 and the precursor of a new stage in the history of these Abridgments. In the following Table I have arranged the reports of this period in the chronological order of their publication. I have included in this list many reports which were published in the latter half of the seventeenth century, because they contain cases decided in this period, or during the period of the Commonwealth. The Table shows that we cannot as yet divide the reports very accurately according to the courts in which the cases reported were decided Many of them contain cases decided in all the common law courts; and some of them contain cases decided in the court of Star Chamber, in the court of Wards and Liveries, and occasionally even in the court of Chancery. The state of the reports thus illustrates what I have said above as to the penetration of the common lawyers into some of the courts outside the sphere of common law jurisdiction. When they penetrated into these courts they naturally introduced their habit of reporting the cases there decided. There can be little doubt but that if the Star Chamber and the court of Wards had had a longer life, we should have had a series of reports of their doings, similar to the series of reports of the doings of the common law courts and the Chancery. It is clear also from the Table that some of these reports were published by their authors; that others were published after, and, in some cases, long after their authors' death; and that, in many cases, no sufficient account is given of the MS. from which they were published. We shall see that all these are circumstances very material to be considered in estimating the authority which is or should be attached to these reports in our modern law. Finally, the fact that most of these reports were, except during the period of the Commonwealth, written in the first instance in law French, illustrates the 'Vol. 1 543-545. The only deviation from the chronological order which I have made is in putting the last two parts of Coke's Reports with the first eleven parts; for these reports see below 461-465. + Above 163. 3 Vol. iv 270-272. long life of this language in the law; while the dates at which some of them were translated give us a very accurate idea as to when the lawyers really ceased to think in and write this peculiar tongue. With these introductory remarks I shall let the Table (see pp. 358-363) speak for itself. If it were true that the Year Books were official publications, it is clear that there would be little in common between them, and these collections of cases, privately reported and separately published. But, as it can now be taken as certain that the Year Books were not official publications, the transition from them to these reports loses much of its abruptness. And in fact, although there are great differences between the reports of this period and the Year Books, there are also strong resemblances; and these resemblances are the more striking in some of the earlier reports than in the later. I think that these resemblances, which I shall now describe, create at least a presumption that the later Year Books, like the earlier, owed their origin, not to official action, but to the needs and energies of the legal profession. We shall see that the differences, which in the course of this period begin to emerge, can be accounted for, partly by the different conditions of publication which the introduction of printing involved, partly by changes in legal procedure, and partly by the hardening of the view of the common lawyers as to the binding force of decided cases. And, in this connection, it is important to remember that there is a certain amount of continuity in the organization of the trades associated with the production of books before and after the introduction of printing. The older association of writers of text letters and limners became the craft of the Stationers, and, on the introduction of printing, joined with the printers, and became the company of Stationers. It is therefore a probable inference that, in the particular case of the production and publication of law reports, though there were changes, there was no entire break between the period of the Year Books and the period of the reports. The reports of this period resemble the Year Books (i) in the manner in which most of them originated; (ii) in the circumstances under which many of them were published; (iii) in the existence of MS. authority far more authentic than that upon 1 The Reports published during the Commonwealth were published in English in accordance with the legislation of the Commonwealth, vol. vi c. 6; but this was an interlude; at the Restoration there was a reversion to French-indeed Style, who reported cases in the upper Bench, is very dubious as to the value of these English reports, see Preface to his Reports. 2 Vol. ii 532-536; vol. iv 262. 3 Vol. vi c. 7. |