Volume 57, Preface 10 View pdf image (33K) |
x Letter of Transmittal. general, the court clerks, and the lawyers practicing before the court. The nature of the cases which came in various ways from the county courts to the Provincial Court in its appellate capacity are also reviewed in the introduction. The records of the criminal cases which came be fore the court—murder, rape, assault, barratry, and theft—contain much of human interest, and are summarized in the introduction, where some of the more noteworthy civil cases are also discussed. These latter include suits for debt, breach of trust, land disputes, damage suits for slander and assault, disputes between masters and indentured servants, and prosecutions under the English navigation acts. The several changes in the clerkship of the court explain the successive changes in the way the court minutes and the records of the cases are phrased and entered by the different clerks. Attention is also to be called to the very early, or unusual, use, of certain words to be found in this record. Thus we find here the earliest recorded employment in the English language of the term fire-ship for a prostitute. The enjoyment of fowling and fishing privileges by the seller and purchaser of manorial lands, reserved in a deed to both of them and to their heirs, is perhaps the earliest Maryland antecedent of the ducking and fishing club of to-day. There will be found numerous references to physicians, chirurgeons, and medical matters; and in one instance the great plague of London was urged as an excuse for failure to carry out a contract for the sale of Maryland lands. Indian affairs were rather in the background at this period. Quakers, who had given the authorities so many headaches in the previous decade, were now looked up to and respected, although their refusal to take an oath some- times subjected them to fines. The Roman Catholic question was quiescent; and although a Jesuit priest was allowed to take title to lands for the church, the glass windows of a chapel were maliciously broken. We find the record of three ships forfeited to the Lord Proprietary, and not to the crown, for violation of the English navigation acts. The records reproduced in this volume are printed verbatim and punctuatim from the two old Provincial Court libers FF and JJ. A few obvious clerical errors in the dates of day by day court sessions, and the repetition or omis- sion of words due to the carelessness of the recording clerk, will be detected by the observant reader. Of seventeenth century spelling little need be said, except that in this respect old Latin legal terms seem to receive on the whole rather better treatment from the clerks than do English words. In the case of Liber FF the criminal cases are entered chronologically throughout the record, mingled with the civil suits, but in Liber JJ the records of criminal cases |
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Volume 57, Preface 10 View pdf image (33K) |
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