The Elchies manuscript and the method of Sir Richard Maitland of Lethington

This article examines the text of a collection of mid-sixteenth-century legal decisions found in the so-called Elchies manuscript: Edinburgh, Advocates Library, Adv. MS 31.2.2 (i). This manuscript has previously been identified as the authorial holograph of that collection, attributed to the contemporary Scottish judge, Sir Richard Maitland of Lethington. This article confirms that attribution and refines our understanding of the text of the Elchies manuscript. It sets out a method for revealing material distinctions between the authorial holographs of cumulative compilations over time and the descendant manuscript copies of them. This method of material analysis reveals that the Elchies manuscript was used as Maitland's authorial holograph for only the first decade of the period during which he collected decisions. Thereafter the text appears to have been only a copy. Another volume seems to have superseded the Elchies manuscript as Maitland's authorial holograph. This article reconstructs Maitland's method as a collector of legal decisions from the scribal evidence of the early part of its text, and provides a fresh opportunity for comparison with the practices of other judges in this task, such as Haddington and Stair in the seventeenth century. This research, thus, provides significant insight into the method of Scottish judges in the early-modern period, both in their practice in hearing cases and in the collection of notes on those cases.