Letter of Transmittal.        xi

      come up for a hearing. It was not until the close of 1674 that the Charles
      County Court had its own court house; before this it held its sessions at inns, or
      possibly in some instances in private houses.
        During the nine year period covered by the present volume the records of
      the Charles County Court show the ill effects of the frequent changes in the
      clerkship. Four court clerks held office during this period, two of whom,
      Boughton and Bonner, seemed to have lost office through financial irregularities,
      and a third, Gibbon, died not long after taking office. It would appear that
      these three clerks, when they were appointed, were recent arrivals from Eng-
      land, and had doubtless come to Maryland with Proprietary promises of civil
      preferment. The court record for this period, defective and fragmentary as it
      often is, indicates that the newly arrived holders of the clerkship had con-
      siderable acquaintance with legal forms. Missing in this period are the pic-
      turesque and ofttimes coarse and sordid descriptive details of criminal and civil
      cases as recorded by earlier clerks, neighborhood men, who were less versed
      in technical legal phrase but more familiar with the personalities and local
      backgrounds of neighborhood squabbles and feuds. Although these newly
      imported clerks were apparently better legal technicians than their local prede-
      cessors they have left behind them a record which contains for us much less
      of human interest. One of them, Boughton, appears to have studied law in
      Gray's Inn, London. There is also conclusive evidence that these newcomers
      often failed, either intentionally or from indifference, to make entries in the
      court records in many instances, especially in criminal cases, which should have
      been recorded. Probably this was because their reward in fees, at so much an
      engrossed line, was less for these entries than it was in the case of civil actions
      where the losing litigant was obliged to pay for the entries in the court record
      as part of the “costs” charged against him.
        The character of the various matters which came before the court and are
      entered in the court record is discussed in detail under various headings in the
      Introduction which follows. The record gives us a picture of seventeenth
      century life in a Maryland community having a population of something like
      two thousand souls, and, it may be added, in a community having a strongly
      litigious urge.
        The Committee on Publications takes this occasion to call attention to the
      irreparable loss which the study of American colonial law, and more especially
      early Maryland law, has suffered in the recent death of Judge Carroll T. Bond,
      late chief judge of the Maryland Court of Appeals. His two books, The Court
      of Appeals of Maryland, and Proceedings of the Maryland Court of Appeals,
      1695- 1729, together with his other writings and addresses on colonial law,
      gave him an unrivaled position in this field. During the past twelve years five