Robert Paynell’s Exchequer Reports (1627-1631)

Robert Paynell’s law reports of cases in the Court of Exchequer are extraordinarily good by the standards of law reporting of his time, the seventeenth century. Paynell made it his business to be regularly in the Court of Exchequer to record systematically the arguments of counsel and the opinions of the judges as they were being rendered. He apparently was doing this with a wider audience in view, but, due to the vagaries of seventeenth-century law publishing, this book now published by ACMRS is the editio princeps.

These reports cover a wide range of legal topics, but, directly or indirectly, they all touch on the sovereign prerogative and the royal revenue. This was the period of the personal reign of Charles I, and these legal issues had major political ramifications, which make these cases interesting to political historians as well as legal historians.

The bibliographical importance of this book is that it publishes all of the remaining known manuscript Exchequer law reports from the time of Charles I, thus completing that which was begun by Selden Society, vol. 118 (2001), and Reports of Cases in the Court of Exchequer in the Time of King Charles I (Hein, 2006). Also, it extends the recent publication of seventeenth-century Exchequer cases, complementing those from the time of the later Stuarts, Equity Cases in the Court of Exchequer 1660 to 1714 (ACMRS, 2007), and Samuel Dodd’s Reports 1678-1713 (Carolina Academic Press, 2000).