Le Court Leete et Court Baron Collect per Iohn Kitchin de Graies..

1623. An Important Contribution to the Development of Modern Legal Theory Kitchin, John [c.1520-c.1590]. Le Court Leete et Court Baron Collect per Iohn Kitchin de Graies Inne un Apprentice in Ley. Et les Cases & Matters Necessaries pur Seneschals de Ceux Courts Ascier, & Pur les Students de les Measons del Chauncerie. London: Printed for the Companie of Stationers, 1623. [xii], 289, [3] ff. Octavo (6-1/8" x 3-3/4"). Recent period-style calf, raised bands, gilt fillets, and gilt title and publication date to spine, pastedowns and free endpapers renewed. "Kitchin" in early hand to fore-edge of text block, "Kitchin's Courts" to foot. Moderate toning to interior, inkstains to edges of a few leaves, faint offsetting and light edgewear to preliminaries and final two leaves, brief eighteenth-century annotations, dated 1717, and an owner name date 1710 (M. Foster) to front endleaf. An attractive copy. $750. * Later edition. By outlining the differences between the previously undivided court, Kitchin, along with Coke, helped lay the foundations of modern legal theory. "In fact Kitchin was doing on a small scale what Coke was doing on a grand scale. Both were representatives of that school of literate Elizabethan lawyers...whose great and enduring work was the adaptation of medieval law and institutions to modern needs. Imagination necessarily played some part in this process of adaptation; and thus they are responsible not only for the enunciation of the rules of modern law, but also for legal and historical theories, the soundness of which was considered by many generations of lawyers and historians to be as incontestable as their statements of law" (Holdsworth). The first edition of this work was published in 1579. Our edition also includes the anonymous Retorna Brevium, a treatise on writs originally published in 1538. Holdsworth, A History of English Law IV:130. English Short-Title Catalogue S108081.