“ subject was that I much regret that, instead of this work [i.e. Justinian] , useful as it may be, you had not bestowed the same time and research rather on a translation and notes on Bracton, a work which has never been performed for us, and which I have always considered as one of the greatest desiderata in the Law. the laws of England, in their progress from the earliest to the present times, may be likened to the road of a traveller, divided into distinct stages, or resting places, at each of which a review is taken of the road passed over so far. the 1 ^st. of these was Bracton’s De legibus Angliae; the 2’d Coke’s Institutes, the 3 ^d. the Abridgment of the law by Matthew Bacon, and the 4 ^th. Blackstone’s commentaries. doubtless there were others before Bracton which have not reached us . . . but, all records previous to the Magna charta, having been early lost, Bracton’s is the first digest of the whole body of law, which has come down to us entire. what materials for it existed in his time we know not, except the unauthoritative collections by Lambard & Wilkins, and the treatise of Glanville, tempore H.2. Bracton’s is the more valuable, because being written a very few years after the Magna charta, which commences what is called the Statute law, it gives us the state of the Common law in it’s ultimate form, and exactly at the point of division between the Common and Statute law. it is a most able work, complete in it’s matter, and luminous in it’s method . . .

" Of the 4. digests noted [i.e. Bracton, Coke, Bacon and Blackstone] , the three last are possessed & understood by every one. but the first, the fountain of them all, remains in it’s technical Latin, abounding in terms antiquated, obsolete, and unintelligible but to the most learned of the body of lawyers. to give it to us then in English, with a Glossary of it’s old terms, is a work for which I know no body but yourself possessing the necessary learning & industry. the latter part of it would be furnished to your hand from the glossaries of Wilkins, Lambard, Spelman, Somner in the X. Scriptores the index of Coke & the law dictionaries. could not such an undertaking be conveniently associated with your new vocation of giving law lectures? I pray you to think of it. a further operation indeed would still be desirable--to take up the doctrines of Bracton, separation et seriatim, to give their history thro’ the periods of L ^d Coke and Bacon, down to Blackstone; to shew when & how some of them have become extinct, the successive alterations made in others, and their progress to the state in which Blackstone found them . . . ”

In his letter to Bernard Moore, quoted to John Minor on August 30, 1814, as having been written “ near 50. years ago,” Jefferson wrote: “ . . . for so much of the admirable work of Bracton is now obsolete that the student should turn to it occasionally only, when tracing the history of particular portions of the law . . . ”

Henry de Bracton, d. 1268, English ecclesiastic and judge. This is the second edition of his work, the first was printed by Tottell in 1569.