Excerpt from Year Books of the Reign of King Edward the Third: Years XII and XIII Apart from the value of the year-books as law re ports, they illustrate, or can be made to illustrate, not only what is generally known as legal and constitutional history, but the actual effect of the laws and constitu tion in operation. They show, or can be made to show, not only what the law was, and what use was made of it by Judges and Counsel, but much also of the social condition of the litigants, and even of persons who were not litigants at all. The end which has been kept in view in editing and translating the reports in the present volume has been to render them accurate, by deriving as much aid as possible from every source of informa tion connected with them. The object of this Intro duction is to explain the method which has been adopted, and to indicate some of the very important facts which either the reports themselves or the records which supply their deficiencies may be brought to reveal. The year-books, too, are sources of philological in formation quite swi generis. They are not only a great storehouse of the French language as used in England, but (subject to the errors made by the various tran scribers) they also exhibit that language as employed in every day speech by the most highly educated English men of the period. They are thus, in their diction alone, of inestimable value for two distinct purposes for comparison with the French language of the conti nent, on the one hand - for the illustration of the English language and its history, on the other. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.