Reports of Cases in the Court of Chancery from the Time of Lord Harcourt (1710-1714)

ryson rd: nd frey holz gard ll am ee ale REPORTS OF CASES The anonymous s1 includes cases from the 1 judicial tenures of Lord 1710 to 1714, and Lord commissioners to hold Chancery from 1708 to • the time of Lord Cowpe of cases decided by Si1 1727), who was Lord beginning of this collec cases, mostly from the others; they are not in s systematic reporting of collection are some case as Chancellor, Case No. Only a few of the~ of the cases in these r Clement Tudway Swan: nineteenth-century Char 'from Mr. Cox's notes, Inn MSS. Misc. 106, 10 they fill a gap in the pr during the tenure of Le much has been knowi Harcourt, only approxim been reported in print; 1 these five years in this Foss and Lord Campbe INTRODUCTION The anonymous set of law reports now first published here includes cases from the Court of Although there are a few cases from the time of Lord Cowper and earlier, the vast majority are reports of cases decided by Sir Simon Harcourt, Lord Harcourt (1661-1727), who was Lord Chancellor from 1710 to 1714. 1 At the beginning of this collection of cases are nineteen slightly earlier cases, mostly from the Court of Chancery, but there are a few others; they are not in strict chronological order. Then begins the systematic reporting of Harcourt's cases. At the end of this collection are some cases from the second tenure of Lord Cowper as Chancellor, Case No. 372 to the end. Only a few of these cases have been reported elsewhere. Six of the cases in these manuscripts were printed much later by Clement Tudway Swanston (1783-1863) in the apparatus to his nineteenth-century Chancery reports, these six cases being taken 'from Mr. Cox's notes, Lord Colchester's MSS.', i.e. Lincoln's Inn MSS. Misc. 106, 107. The importance of these reports is that they fill a gap in the printed reports from the Court of Chancery during the tenure of Lord Harcourt, about whose decisions not much has been known. From the five-year tenure of Lord Harcourt, only approximately 150 Chancery cases have heretofore been reported in print; there are now more than 350 cases from these five years in this set of reports first printed here. Edward Foss and Lord Campbell had somewhat tepid opinions of Lord