x             Letter of Transmittal.




            Handwriting offered other troubles than the abbreviations. Even a person
          who knows that, in the seventeenth century, lower case o and lower case e were
          much alike, and who is, therefore, alert to distinguish between them, has
          trouble in doing so. Upper case and lower case s cannot be distinguished with
          any certainty. We do not know whether the clerk wrote St. Marys or st. Marys.
          Hundreds of times he had to write “sealed with the scale of him, the said”
          defendant; whether the s's were capitals or small letters no one can say. The
          same thing is true of p and of r and of v. Lower case n and u are often
          identical, as they are today in the handwriting of some persons. Is it Gannt or
          Gaunt? Is it commannd or commaund The manuscript has been set according
          to our best judgment, but the editor —who did the proofreading— is not so
          arrogant as to assert that there are no errors.
            One slip by the clerk must be noticed especially. On page 392 post, the page
          number of the original liber changes from 297 to 398, and the mistake is con
          tinued to the end of the liber.
            In the appendix is presented a part of Liber P.C.R. which was missing
          when Volume XLI appeared in 1922. At that time, pages 315-340 were not
          in the liber (Volume XLI, p. 343). Since then, they have been found and
          restored to their place. Like the body of the text, they have been printed as
          accurately as modern methods permit.
            The Committee wish to express thanks to several people who, upon call, lent
          their aid in producing this volume. Mr. Samuel E. Thorne, librarian of the
          Yale Law School, and Mr. Mark DeWolfe Howe, professor of law in the Har
          vard Law School, each transcribed from photostats of the original the paragraph
          on pages 87-88 of the text here. That paragraph is in mediaeval Latin with all
          the abbreviations and contractions common to seventeenth century handwriting.
          Since it was substantially impossible to reproduce the abbreviations exactly, it
          was felt to be better to expand them: what is offered here is, therefore, an
          expanded text. Mr. Richard B. Morris, professor of history at Columbia
          University and chairman of the American Historical Society's committee on
          legal history, read the introduction and indicated errors. To all of these men
          the Committee and the editor are grateful.
            Volume LXVI, on which work has already begun, will carry the record of
          the Provincial Court down to 1679. It will consist of Liber NN, now in the
          Land Office at Annapolis.
                                 Respectfully submitted,
                                     J. HALL PLEASANTS, Chairman,
                                     CHARLES A. BARKER,
                                     JOSEPH KATZ,
                                     HARRISON TILGHMAN,
                                     GEORGE Ross VEAZEY.