INTRODUCTION.

                         THE COURT.

       The history of the Provincial Court, established soon after the founding
     of the Province, down to its abolition in 1805, although from 1777 to 1805 it
     was known as the General Court, has been told in the introductions to former
     volumes of the Court Series of the Archives (volumes XLIX, LI, LIII), so
     will not be repeated here. It also seems almost needless to repeat that in
     the period covered by this volume, the personnel of the Provincial Court was
     identical with that of the Governor's Council, which, it may be added, also sat
     as the Upper House of the Assembly, and functioned there not only as a leg-
     islative body but also as a court of appeals. The reader is reminded that these
     same men also sat as a Court of Chancery, as an Admiralty Court, and as a
     Court of Orphans during the period covered by this volume, but generally with-
     out a specific statement in the record as to the capacity in which they were
     sitting.
       Before the year 1669, however, when separate record books for the Pro-
     vincial Court and the Court of Chancery began to be kept, we find an attempt
     on the part of the court clerk in recording cases to differentiate between the
     several functions of the court, as by an incidental notation somewhere in the
     record of a case, that it is being “heard in Chancery” or “as depending in the
     high court of Chancery”, or by a reference to the complainant as “suing in
     Chancery”. Chancery cases are, however, usually recorded indiscriminately with
     law cases. An exception is to be noted when a special session of the court was
     held at Mattapany on April 15, 1667, which is described in thc record as a meet-
     ing of “a high Court of Chancery at Mattapenny” (p. 183). Until the formal
     separation of the law and equity courts, in name as well as in fact, was effected
     in 1669, the same clerk served both as clerk and as register respectively. Begin-
     ning with 1669, however we have two different series of records kept for
     the Provincial Court and the Court of Chancery. As in the preceding volumes
     of Provincial Court records much of the space in this volume is taken up with
     records relating to land, deeds, assignments of patents, leases, powers of attor-
     ney for the sale of land, and the like, and it was not until 1679 that the clerk
     provided a separate series of libers for recording land papers.
       Beginning with the December, 1669, session of the Provincial Court, the
     clerk, John Blomfield, has segregated the criminal cases and recorded them
     together at the end of the liber. At these sessions of the Provincial Court when
     criminal cases were heard, these hearings are described in the court min-
     utes as being held “to keepe the Peace in the Province of Maryland . . .
     [and] to hear divers, felonies, transgressions, and other misdemeanours in the
     said Province perpetrated and committed” (p. 596). Before the December,
     1669, session, criminal cases and civil suits had been mingled indiscriminately
     in the court minutes.