LETTER OF TRANSMISSION
ROOMS OF THE MARYLAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY,

BALTIMORE, September 1, 1922.
To The Maryland Historical Society:

GENTLEMEN :

We have the honor to submit the forty-first volume of the Archives of Mary-
land, containing the Judicial Business of the Provincial Court from January
1657/8 to 1662. The text of the volume is taken from the manuscript in the
Land Office at Annapolis, which had been copied some years ago, while de-
posited with the society. This is the third volume of the Proceedings of the
Provincial Court, volumes four and ten of the Archives containing the Proceed-
ings of that Court in the early years of Provincial History. The latter of
these volumes was printed in 1891 and now, after a lapse of thirty years, the
third volume in the series is issued.

We have made a break in the series of Proceedings and Acts of the Pro-
vincial Assembly at the year 1740, in order to publish this volume, for several
reasons. It seems desirable to remind those interested in Maryland Provincial
History that the Archives, as originally planned, should consist of several
series, including the proceedings of the Council and the Provincial Court as
well as of the Assembly. The publication of the Council series has progressed
as far as the year 1779 and we hope, in some future volume, to continue it
from that date.

The intrinsic interest of the volume of Provincial Court Proceedings is a
second reason for issuing. There have been several requests from students of
Maryland History that we make accessible to them these Proceedings for the
period subsequent for that included in the earlier volumes.

Minor reasons for inserting this volume in the series at this point are, first
that the material embraced herein has long been copied and, by printing it,
the expense of copying manuscript is avoided, and, further, that the editor of
the series, himself a lawyer by profession, has long desired to have the privilege
of editing for publication some of the early reports of the Courts of Maryland,
in the hope that he may be able to make toward the History of Jurisprudence in
the Province a contribution, comparable in kind to that made to the History of
English Jurisprudence by the publications of the Selden Society. A very few
of the decisions of the Provincial Court appear in the first volume of Harris &
McHenry's Reports; but, for the most part, these Provincial decisions exist
only in manuscript.