The lilting lament of The Coventry Carol is not especially festive, being as it is a mother’s song to her doomed infant as she waits for Herod’s soldiers to visit and murder him, however it is a haunting, beautiful tune with extraordinary history. If you’d like to know more about that, you can compare audio… Read More »
We three kings of Orient are. Bearing gifts, we traverse afar. Field and fountain, moor and mountain, Following yonder star…‘ By Madeleine Lawson ‘We Three Kings of Orient Are,’ also known as ‘The Quest of the Magi,’ is a nineteenth-century carol by Reverend John Henry Hopkins Junior. (Click here for a rendition of the song… Read More »
William Blackstone (1723-1780) studied at Oxford, joining Pembroke College at the age of 15, eventually holding high office at All Souls (where his statue now sits in his Judge’s robes in The Codrington Library) and taking the first Chair of Vinerian Professor of English Law. He held many other distinguished legal and administrative positions during… Read More »
November 22nd to December 22nd is UK Disability History Month, and in the light of that we’d like to introduce you to an eminent figure in British legal history: Sir John Fielding, “the blind beak”. John Fielding, born 1721, was the third son of the Hon. Edmund Fielding by his second wife (of four; his… Read More »
Well – new for the Bodleian and a trove at least for those lawyers with an historical bent! Law Library Microfilm Consortium – digital (as of August 2012) makes available online 5,554 titles (112,372 volumes!). The focus is on law or legal-related titles – so it may well be of use to social scientists more… Read More »
I am passing on some good news in the words of Dr Donlan himself as there is quite a short deadline to get in your proposal for a paper – on dismal February days, the lure of a couple of summer days in Valencia is extra enticing! “The European Society for Comparative Legal History (ESCLH)… Read More »
The National Archives (formerly the PRO) staff have made great strides in a project to make Chancery records much more accessible to legal historians, other historians and genealogists. About 30,000 cases from class C6 (Court of Chancery, Six Clerks Office: Pleadings before 1714, Collins) can be searched online via the Equity Pleadings Database. The friendly The Search Screen means that… Read More »
The LawBod’s subscription to HeinOnline now includes the Selden Society Publications and the History of Early English Law library. This should raise the spirits of anyone studying English legal history at Oxford! This first blog will be an introduction to what it offers – I hope to follow up with some tips for searching later. Although… Read More »
The Law Library now has both the hard copy (shelved at Ref 103) and online access to the recently published Oxford International Encyclopedia of Legal History. It is, as one would hope and expect, a pretty formidable work! If you starting by clicking on Browse, the first entry is for Ātmanastus.ht.i a Sanskrit term meaning literally –… Read More »
If you need help in tracing sources for historical research in the early common law then a new wiki may be just the help you need. Hazel Lord, Senior Law Librarian at the University of Southern California, has set up English Medieval Legal Documents AD600-AD1535: a compilation of published sources. Its goal is to be a… Read More »
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