Le Beau-Pledeur
by Sir Humphrey Winch
Sir Humphrey Winch (1554/55-1625) entered [Lincoln's Inn] in 1573 and was called to the bar in 1581. Winch served as a Chief Baron of the Exchequer in Ireland followed by a brief stint as Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench there before returning to England and accepting an appointment as justice of the common pleas.[1] However, despite his aptitude as a judge and legal authority in England and Ireland, his legacy remains tainted by his involvement in the Leicester Witch Trials of 1616 in which he sentenced nine women to death for suspected witchcraft.[2]
Winch’s work, Le Beau-Pledeur: A Book of Entries continues in a tradition of published collections of precedents of pleading which dates back to as early as 1510.[3] Arranged alphabetically by the writs which begin the actions, Le Beau-Pledeur, like other works of this type, throws "overboard any notion of combining reports of cases, or notes upon the law, with the forms" which it gives.[4] Nevertheless, While Sir Humphrey Winch may have spent his last days disgraced by the Leicester Witch Trials, his collection of cases and pleadings for civil procedure graced law libraries across early America, the founding fathers, England, Ireland, and France, and preserved his legacy as a significant contributor to modern civil proceedings.[5]
Bibliographic Information
Author: Sir Humphrey Winch.
Title: Le Beau-Pledeur: A Book of Entries, Containing Declarations, Informations, and Other Select and Approved Pleadings, with Special Verdicts and Demurrers, in Most Actions, Feal, Personal, and Mixt, Which have been Argued and Adjudged in the Courts at Westminster, Together with Faithful References to the Most Authentick Printed Law-Books now Extant, Where the Cases of These Entries are Reported.
Published: London: Printed by George Sawbridge, William Rawlins, and Samuel Roycroft ... for Thomas Basset ... Richard Chiswell, and Benjamin Tooke, 1680.
Edition: First edition; [8], 1183 [i.e. 1067], [85] pages.
Evidence for Inclusion in Wythe's Library
Listed in the Jefferson Inventory of Wythe's Library as Winch's entries. folio and given by Thomas Jefferson to Dabney Carr. The 1680 edition appears to be the only edition published.[6] Accordingly, both the Brown Bibliography[7] and George Wythe's Library[8] on LibraryThing include the 1680 edition.
Description of the Wolf Law Library's copy
View this book in William & Mary's online catalog.
References
- ↑ Wilfrid Prest, "Winch, Sir Humphrey (1554/5–1625)" in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004- ), accessed Oct. 10, 2013.
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ Percy H. Winfield, The Chief Sources of English Legal History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1925), 303-304.
- ↑ Ibid, 304.
- ↑ Howell J. Heaney, "A Signer of the Declaration of Independence Orders Books from London: Two Documents of George Read of Delaware in the Hampton L. Carson Collection of the Free Library of Philadelphia," The American Journal of Legal History, 2, no. 2 (1958): 181.
- ↑ J. G. Marvin, Legal Bibliography or a Thesaurus of American, English, Irish, and Scotch Law Books (Philadelphia: T. & J. W. Johnson, Law Booksellers, 1847), 741.
- ↑ Bennie Brown, "The Library of George Wythe of Williamsburg and Richmond," (unpublished manuscript, May, 2012) Microsoft Word file. Earlier edition available at: https://digitalarchive.wm.edu/handle/10288/13433
- ↑ LibraryThing, s. v. "Member: George Wythe," accessed on September 16, 2013, http://www.librarything.com/profile/GeorgeWythe
