x                 Letter of Transmittal.

        has therefore seemed an opportune time to round out the seventeenth century
        judicial picture by the publication of a volume of the records of the equity
        court, and to follow this by printing the earliest proceedings which have been
        preser ved of certain of the county courts. With this aim in view, the mid-
        seventeenth century court records of Kent, Charles, Talbot and Somerset coun-
        ties are now being prepared for publication. As the only extant record of a
        Maryland manorial court, that of the Court Leet and Court Baron of St.
        Clement's Manor, St. Mary's County, is already in print (J. H. U. Studies in
        Hist. & Pol. Sc. ser. i, no. 7), the student of the early development of Ameri-
        can law will soon have before him in printed form a complete cross section
        of the entire judicial system of the Province of Maryland—and one which is
        perhaps more complete for the period than that possessed by any other colony.
          A history of the Maryland Court of Chancery for the first century of its
        existence, by the editor, appears elsewhere in this volume. Down through the
        year 1668, the proceedings of the Court of Chancery and of the Provincial
        Court were recorded together in the same old libers, for the judges of both
        Courts, the Governor and Council, at the same court sessions sat in Chancery
        to hear equity cases, and in the Provincial Court as a court of law, and both
        courts had the same clerk. Beginning in 1669, however, separate records for
        each Court were kept, and although until 1694, the same individual acted as
        clerk and recorder for both courts, in the Court of Chancery he was called
        “Register in Chancery “, and in the Provincial Court was styled “Clerk “.
          The material to be found in this volume is taken from two old Chancery
        libers. One of these, known as Liber C. D., was transcribed in 1729 by Griffith
        Beddoe, from an older liber then designated by the same initials, which was
        at that time in a very defective condition, the transcriber certifying that the
        blanks to be found in his copy were for words defaced or not legible in the
        original. The copy is in a clear hand and is well transcribed, but like the
        original from which it was transcribed, has suffered severely from the ravages
        of time, and most of the omissions in this printed volume are due to the dis-
        integration of the copy of 1729. As no Chancellor, Recorder, or Clerk in Chan-
        cery with the initials C. D. is known, the designation is puzzling. There is
        some reason to think, however, that it originally bore different initials. This
        liber is divided into two parts. The first part, designated by the clerk as “The
        Regr Book in the Chan.c * * * of Maryland Beginning 16th ffeb.r [1668/69]
        370 Caecilii &ct," and which extends through the year 1684, was evidently
        begun by Robert Carvile, then Register in Chancery. This portion of the old
        liber fills the first three hundred and ninety-nine folio pages, and is followed
        towards the end of the book by a second section, designated as “An Entry
        of All Such Writts as Issued Out of the Chancery Since the 13tth of February