Elizabethan Land Law, Annotated
PERKINS, John.
A profitable Booke of Master John Perkins Fellow of the Inner Temple treating of the Lawes of England … [(Colophon:) London, Richard Totell, 1567].
Small 8vo, ff. [20], 168; printed in black letter throughout, the text in law French and Latin, with occasional English terms; woodcut initials; a good copy; in modern full brown morocco; contemporary ownership inscription to titlepage of Roger Rawlyns, heavily annotated throughout in the margins, as well as on nine initial blank leaves, four terminal blanks, and a blank inserted before 2B1; from the Porkington Library.
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A profitable Booke of Master John Perkins Fellow of the Inner Temple treating of the Lawes of England …
A copiously annotated copy of Perkins’s Perutilis tractatus, an immensely popular work on conveyancing first printed 1528, much re-issued and translated into English in 1555 as A Verie Profitable Booke.
Likely of South Welsh stock, Perkins ‘was admitted to the Inner Temple about 1518 … and called to the bar in due course. There is nothing to suggest that he had much to do thereafter with the affairs of the inn, which in 1530 discharged him from all offices except those of steward and reader … [B]y the later 1530s Perkins was residing and practising in Oxford, where he became a thorn in the side of the university and Osney Abbey … Despite his disturbed professional and personal life, Perkins was a household name for generations of law students by reason of his little book on land law, called Perkins’ Profitable Book, which first appeared (in law French) in 1528 under the Latin title Perutilis tractatus magistri Johannis Parkins interioris Templi socii … The Profitable Book was intended as a kind of supplement to Littleton’s Tenures, dealing chiefly with points of conveyancing which were not to be found in Littleton …. [It] has a thoughtful jurisprudential preface, is clearly written, and was considered authoritative’ (ODNB).
Provenance:
A Roger Rawlyns/Rawlins matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1575 (BA 1578), and another of the same name matriculated at the same college in 1580. One or other of these was admitted at Gray’s Inn 1583, and the other[?] was admitted at Lincoln’s Inn in 1584 and called to the bar in 1594. In a minute hand our Rawlins has added a copious index at the front and rear of the volume and cross-references to Littleton etc. in the margins throughout.
ESTC S114282; STC 19635.5.