Law Library of Congress

LCCN: 93170789 / Call Number: KD6937 .L53 1640

A folio volume of legal tracts relating chiefly to the Court of Chancery, in several professional secretary hands (including that of the ‘Feathery Scribe’), 216 leaves (plus a few blanks), in contemporary calf. c.1620s-30s.

Inscribed on a flyleaf ‘M: Bayley’. Later in the library of Sir Thomas Phillipps, Bt I1792-1872), book and manuscript collector: Phillipps MS 15142. Bookplate of F. William Cock, MD (1858-1943), surgeon, of Appledore, Kent. Acquired 25 October 1944. Formerly shelved as LAW MS. 14.

Peter Beal, In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and their Makers in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1998), pp. 267-8 (No. 111).

ff. 169r-84v

BcF 247.8: Francis Bacon, Ordinances in Chancery

Copy of 101 Ordinances, as ‘Orders made by the Lord Chancellor’, followed (on ff. 184v-7r) by fifteen ‘Addicionall rules’, in a professional secretary hand.

First published as Ordinances made by...Sir Francis Bacon Knight...being then Lord Chancellor For the better and more regular Administration of Iustice in the Chancery (London, 1642), beginning ‘No decree shall be reversed, altered, or explained, being once under the Great Seale...’. Spedding, VII, 755-74 (mentioning, on p. 757, having seen some ‘MSS and editions’ of this work but without specifying them or his copy-text).