x                 Letter of Transmittal.

        general, the court clerks, and the lawyers practicing before the court. The
        nature of the cases which came in various ways from the county courts to the
        Provincial Court in its appellate capacity are also reviewed in the introduction.
          The records of the criminal cases which came be fore the court—murder,
        rape, assault, barratry, and theft—contain much of human interest, and are
        summarized in the introduction, where some of the more noteworthy civil
        cases are also discussed. These latter include suits for debt, breach of trust,
        land disputes, damage suits for slander and assault, disputes between masters and
        indentured servants, and prosecutions under the English navigation acts. The
        several changes in the clerkship of the court explain the successive changes in
        the way the court minutes and the records of the cases are phrased and entered
        by the different clerks.
          Attention is also to be called to the very early, or unusual, use, of certain
        words to be found in this record. Thus we find here the earliest recorded
        employment in the English language of the term fire-ship for a prostitute.
          The enjoyment of fowling and fishing privileges by the seller and purchaser
        of manorial lands, reserved in a deed to both of them and to their heirs, is
        perhaps the earliest Maryland antecedent of the ducking and fishing club
        of to-day.
          There will be found numerous references to physicians, chirurgeons, and
        medical matters; and in one instance the great plague of London was urged
        as an excuse for failure to carry out a contract for the sale of Maryland
        lands. Indian affairs were rather in the background at this period. Quakers,
        who had given the authorities so many headaches in the previous decade, were
        now looked up to and respected, although their refusal to take an oath some-
        times subjected them to fines. The Roman Catholic question was quiescent;
        and although a Jesuit priest was allowed to take title to lands for the church,
        the glass windows of a chapel were maliciously broken. We find the record
        of three ships forfeited to the Lord Proprietary, and not to the crown, for
        violation of the English navigation acts.
          The records reproduced in this volume are printed verbatim and punctuatim
        from the two old Provincial Court libers FF and JJ. A few obvious clerical
        errors in the dates of day by day court sessions, and the repetition or omis-
        sion of words due to the carelessness of the recording clerk, will be detected
        by the observant reader. Of seventeenth century spelling little need be said,
        except that in this respect old Latin legal terms seem to receive on the whole
        rather better treatment from the clerks than do English words. In the case
        of Liber FF the criminal cases are entered chronologically throughout the
        record, mingled with the civil suits, but in Liber JJ the records of criminal cases