OF ENGLISH HISTORY LEADING DOCUMENTS TOGETHER WITH ILLUSTRATIVE MATERIAL FROM CONTEMPORARY WRITERS AND A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SOURCES BY GUY CARLETON LEE, PH.D. OF JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY SECOND EDITION, REVISED NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY I dedicate this volume, by his kind permission, to The Right Reverend William Stubbs LORD BISHOP OF OXFORD In appreciation of his contributions to PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION THE generous appreciation of my fellow-workers in the field of English History resulted in the exhaustion of the first edition of the Source-Book. The opportunity for a revision of the text thus came to me. I have gladly availed myself of it in order that the usefulness of the book might be increased. This new edition, however, does not contain any radical changes. The plan of the book and the choice of selections are the same. The careful reader will, nevertheless, detect various alterations. These are, as a rule, typographical corrections discovered by a rigid triple comparison of each word of the text of the first edition with that of the source from which the excerpt was made. The chapter devoted to "The Growth of Law" has presented many editorial difficulties, owing to the fact that no one text or translation of the early English statutes can be regarded as absolutely correct. I have in this work edited the early statutes after the following plan: I have selected those parts of the best readings which were closest to the meaning of the most highly approved MSS. texts. I have combined these excerpts into what I believe to be an accurate rendition of the statute. My version will in several particulars differ from The Statutes of the Realm and The Statutes at Large. The differences are rendered necessary by the variations and errors of these antiquated works. |