Year Books

the lay people may talk as they please, after their own ‘talent’ as the Year Books say, but every lawyer who has sat on committees knows that untrained amateur pedantry can be both more absurd and more unjust than any professional bias.

not official or formal records (as we now know, thanks to Maitland, and as at least one American scholar suspected before), but notes of young lawyers keen on learning their business, and eager to make sure how far they could venture to be ingenious without rashness.

Antiquarian jurisprudence was militant and triumphant, with the compilers of the Abridgments and the printers of the Year Books for its armourers, and Sir Edward Coke for its champion;

but to you at least I shall say much in saying that from Willes I learnt to taste the Year Books, and to pursue the history of the law in authorities which not so long ago were collectively and compendiously despised as “black letter.

This interpretation, which was adopted by the author of the Mirror of Justices, and by the writer of the notes appended to the Year Book already cited, found favour with Chief Justice Holt in 1700.