The Year Books are the modern English name that is now typically given to the earliest law report

Law report

Law reports or reporters are series of books that contain judicial opinions from a selection of case law decided by courts. When a particular judicial opinion is referenced, the law report series in which the opinion is printed will determine the case citation format.The term reporter was...

s of England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

. Substantial numbers of manuscripts circulated during the later medieval period containing reports of pleas heard before the Common Bench. In the sixteenth century versions of this material appeared in print form. These publications constituted the earliest legal precedents of the common law

Common law

Common law is law developed by judges through decisions of courts and similar tribunals rather than through legislative statutes or executive branch action...

 tradition. They are extant in a continuous series from 1268 to 1535, covering the reigns of King Edward I

Edward I of England

Edward I , also known as Edward Longshanks and the Hammer of the Scots, was King of England from 1272 to 1307. The first son of Henry III, Edward was involved early in the political intrigues of his father's reign, which included an outright rebellion by the English barons...

 to Henry VIII. The language of the original manuscripts and editions was either Latin

Latin

Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

 or French

French language

French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

.
Maitland and others have considered that the medieval manuscripts were compiled by law students, rather than being officially sanctioned accounts of court proceedings.

The best known printed version is the so-called "Vulgate" edition, which appeared in a series of volumes between 1678 and 1680, and which became the standard edition consulted by practising lawyer

Lawyer

A lawyer, according to Black's Law Dictionary, is "a person learned in the law; as an attorney, counsel or solicitor; a person who is practicing law." Law is the system of rules of conduct established by the sovereign government of a society to correct wrongs, maintain the stability of political...

s. More recent editions for the use of lawyers and historians have been made by the Selden Society

Selden Society

The Selden Society is the only learned society to be devoted to the study of English legal history.The Society was founded in 1887 by FW Maitland. The main activity of the Society is publishing historical records of English law. Since the society's inception, a volume of interesting and important...

. Traditionally, they have been divided into eleven separate series:

1. Maynard's Reports, temp. Edw. II
   Edward II of England
   Edward II , called Edward of Caernarfon, was King of England from 1307 until he was deposed by his wife Isabella in January 1327. He was the sixth Plantagenet king, in a line that began with the reign of Henry II...
   
   .; also divers Memoranda of the Exchequer
   Exchequer
   The Exchequer is a government department of the United Kingdom responsible for the management and collection of taxation and other government revenues. The historical Exchequer developed judicial roles...
   
   , temp. Edward I.
2. Reports in the first ten years of Edw. III
   Edward III of England
   Edward III was King of England from 1327 until his death and is noted for his military success. Restoring royal authority after the disastrous reign of his father, Edward II, Edward III went on to transform the Kingdom of England into one of the most formidable military powers in Europe...
   
   .
3. Reports from l7 to 39 Edward III.
4. Reports from 40 to 50 Edward III.
5. Liber Assisarum; or Pleas of the Crown, temp. Edw. III.
6. Reports temp. Hen. IV
   Henry IV of England
   Henry IV was King of England and Lord of Ireland . He was the ninth King of England of the House of Plantagenet and also asserted his grandfather's claim to the title King of France. He was born at Bolingbroke Castle in Lincolnshire, hence his other name, Henry Bolingbroke...
   
   . and Hen. V
   Henry V of England
   Henry V was King of England from 1413 until his death at the age of 35 in 1422. He was the second monarch belonging to the House of Lancaster....
   
   .
7. Annals, or Reports of Hen. VI
   Henry VI of England
   Henry VI was King of England from 1422 to 1461 and again from 1470 to 1471, and disputed King of France from 1422 to 1453. Until 1437, his realm was governed by regents. Contemporaneous accounts described him as peaceful and pious, not suited for the violent dynastic civil wars, known as the Wars...
   
   . during his reign, v. 1
8. Annals, or Reports of Hen. VI. during his reign, v. 2
9. Annals of Edward IV
   Edward IV of England
   Edward IV was King of England from 4 March 1461 until 3 October 1470, and again from 11 April 1471 until his death. He was the first Yorkist King of England...
   
   .
10. Long Quinto; or Reports in 5 Edward IV.
11. Cases in the reigns of Edward V
    Edward V of England
    Edward V was King of England from 9 April 1483 until his deposition two months later. His reign was dominated by the influence of his uncle Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who succeeded him as Richard III...
    
    , Richard III
    Richard III of England
    Richard III was King of England for two years, from 1483 until his death in 1485 during the Battle of Bosworth Field. He was the last king of the House of York and the last of the Plantagenet dynasty...
    
    , Henry VII
    Henry VII of England
    Henry VII was King of England and Lord of Ireland from his seizing the crown on 22 August 1485 until his death on 21 April 1509, as the first monarch of the House of Tudor....
    
    , and Henry VIII.

A number of abridgement

Abridgement

Abridgement or abridgment is a term defined as "shortening" or "condensing" and is most commonly used in reference to the act of reducing a written work, typically a book, into a shorter form...

s of the Year Books were compiled and circulated by various editors, who sought to excerpt leading cases and categorise them by subject. The first abridgment was made by Nicholas Statham

Nicholas Statham

Nicholas Statham , lawyer, is stated to have been born at Morley, Derbyshire. He was reader of Lincoln's Inn in Lent term 1471. On 30 October 1467 he received a patent for the reversion as second baron of the exchequer on the death of John Clerke...

, Baron of the Exchequer under Edward IV

Edward IV of England

Edward IV was King of England from 4 March 1461 until 3 October 1470, and again from 11 April 1471 until his death. He was the first Yorkist King of England...

, in around 1470.

In 1535, the Year Books were superseded by officially bound and published editions now known as the English Reports

English Reports

The English Reports are a reprint in 178 volumes of nominate reports of judgments of the English Courts reported between 1220 and 1866. They contain most, but not all, of the nominate reports....

. The earliest such reports are called the nominate reports

Nominate reports

Nominate reports is a legal term from common law jurisdictions referring to the various published reports of English cases in various Courts from the Middle Ages to the 1860s when law reporting was officially taken over by the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting, for example Edmund F...

; their original publications were named after the court reporter who compiled and edited them. Sir Edward Coke

Edward Coke

Sir Edward Coke SL PC was an English barrister, judge and politician considered to be the greatest jurist of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras. Born into a middle class family, Coke was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge before leaving to study at the Inner Temple, where he was called to the...

 was one important early jurist who published a series of court reports during his tenure as chief justice

Chief Justice

The Chief Justice in many countries is the name for the presiding member of a Supreme Court in Commonwealth or other countries with an Anglo-Saxon justice system based on English common law, such as the Supreme Court of Canada, the Constitutional Court of South Africa, the Court of Final Appeal of...

 of the Court of Common Pleas

Court of Common Pleas (England)

The Court of Common Pleas, or Common Bench, was a common law court in the English legal system that covered "common pleas"; actions between subject and subject, which did not concern the king. Created in the late 12th to early 13th century after splitting from the Exchequer of Pleas, the Common...

.

External links

• Alfred John Horwood, Year Books of the Reign of King Edward the First, 1864, 20 & 21 Edw.1, 32 & 33 Edw.1 (from Google Book Search
  Google Book Search
  Google Books is a service from Google that searches the full text of books that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical character recognition, and stored in its digital database. The service was formerly known as Google Print when it was introduced at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October...
  
  )
• F.W. Maitland, Year books of Edward II, vol. III, Selden Society 1905.