Out of Print
Author's Preface This book is based on a course of lectures delivered in the Law School of Harvard University between February and June, 1923. The main purpose of what I said was to help students who might wish to undertake research in the history of English law.
In two directions it seemed to me that a certain amount of toil could be made lighter by a few hints to the beginner; first, by an attempted valuation of the groups of authorities which he must consult; secondly, by some account of the more important individual sources in each group.
At the time when I began to collect materials for my course, our legal literature was lamentably deficient in anything like a complete bibliography of the historical side of the system. The classical work of Pollock and Maitland incidentally covered most of the sources down to the end of Henry IIl's reign. Their History of English Law was not, however, primarily a bibliography, though the wealth of references in it makes it equivalent to one in the hands of a trained reader.
Again, only two volumes of the new edition of Professor Holdsworth's History of English Law had then been published. That monument of industry and scholarship is now approaching its completion, and the quantity of bibliographical information in it is immense.
It has gone a long way toward removing the reproach to which I have referred. I have respectfully urged elsewhere that the best tribute to Professor Holdsworth's volumes is not so much what reviewers say of them as what teachers do with them, and that is to insist on them as the starting-point in any piece of investigation in our legal history. But it must be recollected that the History of English Law is first and foremost a history and not a bibliography.
We are still far short of any book that corresponds to Charles Gross's Sources and Literature of English History on which we might rely as a guide to printed matter.....
P.H.W. Cambridge, England July 5, 1925.
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