INTRODUCTION TO THE LEGAL PROCEDURE.

                         CARROLL T. BOND,

           CHIEF JUDGE OF THE MARYLAND COURT OF APPEALS.

          Sufficient explanations of the proceedings here recorded are to be had by
        reference to the law and practice in England at thc time. Dcparturcs and

        modifications in adaptation to the needs of the colonists were relatively slight,
        and it remains substantially correct to say that proceedings in the provincial
        Chancery were identical in form with proceedings of the home country. The
        fact will be made apparent in the present record, not only by a comparison
        of proceedings, but also by explicit declarations of the court. The rules of the
        Court of Chancery in England were kept at hand and referred to for correct
        practice, the Register was ordered to take fees “in this Court as the officers
        of this Court in England,” for scandalous matter a bill was ordered taken from
        the files, and the attorney who filed it was muicted in costs in accordance with
        the rules and practice of the High Court of Chancery in England, and a limita-
        tion upon the jurisdiction in England was cited in a controversy on jurisdiction
        of the court of the province.
          It has sometimes been supposed that in the early years of the English settle-
        ments in America there must have been in them a reign of crude, untechnical
        law. It seemed reasonable to assume that the pioneers would not have trained
        lawyers in their midst, and would themselves have no considerable knowledge
        of formal justice under the law, and that therefore the highly developed juris-
        prudence of the home country would be reproduced among them only at a
        much later stage, when increased litigation would provide an attractive field
        for the lawyers. But the early judicial records now being published in the older
        states seem to contradict that supposition. Close adherence to the law and
        practice in English courts is a striking characteristic of the proceedings entered
        in most of them, and this is especially true in the present volume. Punctilious
        adherence will be found here. Many things will declare the truth that they
        change their sky but not themselves who cross the sea.
          The book has always been designated as the first Chancery record of the
        Province, and properly so, it would seem. The judges whose sessions are re-
        ported in it did, indeed, hold sessions for both the Chancery Court and the
        Provincial Court jointly, a combination of functions not practiced in England
        but familiar in the courts of modern Maryland and in those of the United
        States government, but with only a few exceptions the entries included in this
        book were confined to proceedings and documents such as belonged to the
        Chancery Court or the Chancery Office in England. There were four other
        volumes filled with Provincial Court proceedings of the time
          Not all the entries here are of judicial proceedings. There are writs of elec-
        tion, or formal orders for the holding of elections of members of the legislative