xii               Letter of Transmittal.

        which the Chancellor was one, it was not until 1720 that it became in form
        a one-man court with the Chancellor as sole judge. The editor feels that the
        story of the development of the Court of Chancery of Maryland has never been
        adequately told, so elsewhere in this volume, under the title “The First Cen-
        tury of the Chancery Court of Maryland “, he presents in considerable detail
        the history of the first hundred years of its existence, together with a list of
        all the chancellors from its beginning, until the Court ended its existence in
        1854.
          To the student of early American history the contents of this volume are
        perhaps of less human interest than are the records of the Provincial Court, or
        general law court of the Province, where we find reflected more vividly the
        every day life of the people in their relation to each other and to the Proprietary
        Government, and where both civil and criminal cases are found recorded. To
        the student of equity as it evolved during the seventeenth century in an Ameri-
        can commonwealth from its English beginnings, and to those who are interested
        in the uses which this commonwealth made of writs in their varying forms,
        as the community adapted them to its needs and discarded those that ceased to
        he useful, the contents of this volume will be of no little interest. Nor is it
        fair to say that all the entries are without human interest. Most of the cases
        recorded seem to have originated in the Court of Chancery, although a few,
        which had their beginnings in the Provincial Court, were brought into Chancery
        on technical grounds rather than by direct appeal. The editor, who is not a
        lawyer, has not undertaken an explanation of the writs and proceedings re-
        corded, but this has been contributed by Chief Judge Bond, who, as previously
        stated, has been making a study of seventeenth century Maryland judicial
        records. His explanation is designed for the general reader.
          As Judge Bond has pointed out in his Proceedings of the Maryland Court of
        Appeals, the Province was fortunate in that it had among the members of its
        seventeenth and eighteenth century bench and bar a number of competent
        lawyers who had received their training at the Inns of Court of London, al-
        though in the decade covered by this volume but two names occur of men
        who are known to have had this training. During our period the Chief Judge
        in Equity from 1669 to 1676 was Gov. Charles Calvert, who, after his father's
        death in 1675, became third Lord Baltimore and Lord Proprietary, although
        during his absence in 1676, 1677 and 1678, Thomas Notley was Governor and
        Chief Judge in Equity. It does not appear that either of these had an English
        legal training; nor is it likely that the Chancellor, Philip Calvert, had received
        such a training in England; and the same may be said of the other associate
        justices of the Court of Chancery who served during our decade. As the same
        judges or justices who sat in the Chancery Court also sat in the Provincial