Volume 5

The thirteenth-century Latin legal treatise best known as Bracton is now thought to be the work of several hands, and Henry de Bracton (d.1268) to have been only the last of these. Work began on it in the 1230s and largely ceased in the early 1250s, but the treatise - an ambitious survey of English law - was never finished. Between 1878 and 1883, the scholar and jurist Sir Travers Twiss (1809-97) edited and published this work in six volumes for the Rolls Series. His text was mainly based on the first printed edition of 1569. Although he provided the first English translation of Bracton, Twiss's work has been criticised and since superseded. Volume 5 contains the final part of Book 4 and the first part of Book 5. These discuss writs of entry and writs of right, and procedural issues relating to essoins, defaults and the view.