Manuscripts in the Hampton L. Carson Collection in the Free Library of Philadelphia

The Hampton L. Carson Collection of Anglo-American Common Law comprises one of the largest collections of English common law manuscripts in North America. The statute collections in the Carson Collection provide samples illustrating a range of topics of central importance to the study of English legal history, bibliography, and medieval English culture. LC 14 20.5 and LC 14.21 date to around 1300, and are among the earliest statute collections, copied as the nature of statutes as law was still developing. LC 14 09. 5 dates to the later fifteenth century, as legal manuscripts were beginning to compete with print. MS 14 09 5's illuminations have been used to identify a group of manuscript artists who seem to have specialized in legal manuscripts. In "Manuscripts in the Hampton L. Carson Collection" I will introduce these manuscripts and others as I assess the usefulness of the collection for scholarly research.