Compiling the Scottish ‘Practick’: The Method of Morison’s Dictionary

ABSTRACT Morison’s Dictionary is a nineteenth-century compilation of the earliest Scottish case reports, drawn from various manuscript and printed collections known collectively as the ‘practicks’. Although the Dictionary has been used widely since its publication, there has been little consideration of Morison’s method of compilation beyond some early criticisms levied by his contemporaneous indexer. This article reconstructs Morison’s method when compiling his Dictionary. It shows the extent of his use of the earlier Folio Dictionary to locate early-modern cases, particularly the volumes by Henry Home, Lord Kames. It also reveals his use of the manuscript traditions and printed editions of the practicks themselves, with reference to the collected decisions of Sir Richard Maitland of Lethington and the legal digests of Sir Robert Spottiswoode of Pentland and Sir James Balfour of Pittendreich. These examinations reveal both Morison’s method and its implications for how faithfully his Dictionary reflects the nature and content of the practicks included.

collections of legal decisions were compiled privately by practitioners and judges, reflecting each recorder's particular interests and idiosyncrasies. These then circulated among subsequent generations of Scottish lawyers as evidence of previous court practice. Legal digests of case law and other authorities were often started in response to centralized efforts to make the law accessible, but typically became associated with particular individuals, and indeed some private initiatives along these lines are equally notable. The distinction between the collected decisions and legal digests is somewhat arbitrary and unsatisfactory, not least because some lawyers collected practicks which included both the decisions of their practice and legal digests. However, what is important is that these sources were highly diverse in their nature and content, which variation became more pronounced through their circulation in manuscript in early-modern Scotland. Collections of legal decisions recorded by individuals began to be printed irregularly after Viscount Stair's Decisions of the Lords of Council and Session (1683-1687), while the printing of some of the legal digests followed in the eighteenth century; most collected decisions and digests remained unprinted. 1 At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the earlier 'practick' of the Scottish courts was thus still available only in these disparate manuscript traditions and a few printed versions. Accessing the court's earlier practick thus remained a significant challenge. Much the same difficulty had arisen earlier in England with the Year Books: with large quantities of case reports ordered chronologically, practitioners required tools to locate relevant previous cases. This had led to the rise of the English abridgements. Indeed, a broad comparison could be drawn between the Scottish digests and the English abridgements of the type produced by Henry Rolle in the seventeenth century and Charles Viner in the eighteenth century (i.e. digests of case law and other sources arranged by subject). 2 However, as in England, the Scottish digests became quickly dated; in contrast to England, there was no particular Scottish tradition of abridgements of case law specifically. 3 1 On the practicks, see e.g. John W. Cairns A notable attempt to address the difficulty in accessing the earlier practick of the Scottish courts was made by the eighteenth-century lord of session, Henry Home, Lord Kames, whose compendium of single-sentence summaries of earlier court decisions was printed in 1741, 4 to which were added subsequent volumes by two further compilers. However, while this publication provided a mechanism for identifying relevant cases, it did not alleviate the burden of needing to follow the compendium's citations into the earlier source material for the full case note.
Some sixty years later, William Maxwell Morison made the earliest and only large-scale attempt to compile and print a digest of the pre-nineteenth-century decisions of the Scottish courts. Morison had been admitted as an advocate in the Court of Session in 1784, and was sheriffsubstitute for Clackmannan near Stirling. His compilation of the earlier Scottish case notes was advertised in 1800 as a private project, supported by subscribers. 5 He compiled thousands of notes on cases heard before 1808 from diverse manuscript and printed sources. He selected and excerpted the full case reports from these manuscript and printed sources, provided the date and parties' names as headings above the transcribed reports, and identified the specific printed and manuscript source(s) for each case entry in postscript citations. He sometimes additionally provided a brief marginal description of the ratio of the decision for ease of reference and searching. He arranged these case entries chronologically under subject headings, and ordered the subjects alphabetically. The resulting compilation, printed in 1801-1807, spanned thirty-eight printed volumes and became known as Morison's Dictionary. 6 It was thereafter updated and printed under a slightly amended title, and with a synopsis and index taking the collection to forty-two volumes, in 1811. 7 liv; Holdsworth, 'Charles Viner', 32-33. That the two genres of legal literature developed in the reverse order in Scotland likely reflects the difference in the tradition of case reporting: the English Year Books provided a wealth of historical case authority from the thirteenth century, whereas in Scotland the decisions practicks emerged shortly after the founding of the Court of Session in 1532. 4  Further synopses, indexes and supplemental material continued to be published into 1816. 8 Some sharp criticisms were made contemporaneously by the Dictionary's indexer, William Tait, who criticized Morison for over-reliance on the earlier compendium by Kames. Tait believed that Morison thus omitted cases from his Dictionary, failed to correct inaccuracies in Kames's dating of cases, adopted but failed to improve on Kames's structure, and added erroneous marginal annotations to some case reports while borrowing other marginal annotations from Kames. 9 In making these criticisms, Tait drew on Morison's own admissions, some sampling Tait undertook himself (but without divulging the specifics), rumour, and second-hand criticisms attributed to other (unidentified) advocates said to have closely studied the text. 10 Despite Tait's criticisms, Morison's Dictionary became a key resource for Scots lawyers and, indeed, remains the principal source through which courts and scholars access pre-nineteenth-century Scottish cases. It continues to be cited by the courts in Scotland today: since 2017, judgments of the Court of Session, Sheriff Court and High Court of Justiciary have all referred to cases as printed within the Dictionary. 11 Within the same period, Morison's Dictionary has been cited in some twenty articles across Scotland's two law journals. 12 However, despite the continued importance of Morison's Dictionary, there has been no further investigation into its method and its reliability in representing the texts of the original source materials. Nor have Tait's criticisms been freshly tested. This is particularly problematic as both Morison and Tait  work. Significantly different versions of some of the collections of legal decisions have been identified, while misattribution of case reports and misunderstanding of the nature of these collections has been shown to obscure the understanding of the tradition of these texts. 13 Such moveability of manuscript sources (and indeed potentially even of printed sources 14 ) presents challenges for the creation of an authoritative edition by a compiler such as Morison. A compiler must decide which version of the text will be presented, whether as it was originally written by the author or as it was understood by later readers, presuming, of course, that the compiler considers the question at all. It is therefore both necessary and timely to re-examine Morison's method when compiling the Scottish practick into his Dictionary. This article will first investigate Morison's use of Kames's compendium, allowing a fresh testing of the criticisms levied by Tait. It will examine Morison's use of Kames both in general terms and specifically regarding one of the works indexed therein: the collected decisions of the sixteenth-century lord of session, Sir Richard Maitland of Lethington. In doing so, this article will also reflect on Morison's somewhat different use of two of the legal digests: the sixteenth-century digest by Sir James Balfour of Pittendreich and the seventeenth-century digest by Sir Robert Spottiswoode of Pentland. Morison's use of the manuscript tradition of Maitland's decisions will then be identified, allowing his Dictionary to be reappraised considering our now-increased understanding of the nature and circulation of the collections he compiled. Finally, conclusions will be drawn on the implications of Morison's method using Kames and the manuscript tradition for his representation of the original sources, as well as more broadly the accuracy and reliability of the Dictionary as a tool to access the historical practice of Scotland's courts.

II. Kames's Dictionary and the Folio Dictionary
By the mid-eighteenth century, Kames recognized the various collections of manuscript and printed case decisions as 'unwieldy by their bulk', motivating 13  the compiling of his own compendium. 15 This work is no longer widely known. A thorough understanding of it is, however, required to appreciate the importance of its structure, content and editorial process to Morison's own method.
Kames's Dictionary classified Scottish case reports according to a system seemingly of his own devising, which he called his 'new plan'. 16 His plan was scientific in a broad sense, but was criticized for being idiosyncratic and not particularly accessible. 17 The plan relied upon three levels of categorization. The first division was into alphabetically-arranged titles on broad areas of law, procedural rules, legal institutions, and professional positions or offices. Larger subject titles were divided into narrower, thematicallyarranged chapters and then into 'clauses', which were essentially paragraphs. Shorter titles without further sub-division were given where the subject matter was narrow or infrequently the subject of civil litigation. 18 The choice and depth of treatment of topics reflect Kames's interests as a lawyer working in the eighteenth-century Court of Session. 19 The number of titles, sub-headings and clauses which Kames devised was extensive: the list of these spans more than sixty pages in the printed version. 20 Kames discussed relevant cases within each clause. He drew these cases from seventeen collections of legal decisions as well as five digests of law. 21 The ratio of each case is typically summarized within a single sentence, immediately followed by a citation to the collection of decisions or digest in which the case was found. Cases on the same point of law found in other practicks might be cited thereafter, with varying degrees of additional description. The order of the cases reflects an interest in developing a narrative on that point of law rather than, say, a chronological arrangement. This is in keeping with Kames's stated aim that his 'distribution has been to make the ratio decidendi evident as far as possible, from the very place in which the decision is found'. 22 It is unclear to what extent Kames undertook fresh research into the manuscript and printed sources: he explicitly relied 'upon an abridgement done by another hand', 23 but this abridgement is not further identified by him. Gero Dolezalek, during the compilation of his three-volume census of Scottish legal manuscripts, raised the possibility that it might be the late seventeenth-or early eighteenth-century manuscript Advocates Library Adv. MS. 24.2.3, 24 but this has yet to be further investigated. Nonetheless, some inferences can be made about Kames's use of the abridgement from his declaration that 'he has been careful to consult the originals, wherever he had suspicion of error'. 25 This seems to indicate that he used the abridgement to a significant extent, both when identifying cases for inclusion in his Dictionary and for the details of his case summaries.
Supplements by two later compilers became appended to Kames's collection. Alexander Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee produced two supplementary volumes, which were printed in 1797 as the third and fourth volumes of Kames's collection. 26 Woodhouselee adhered largely to Kames's arrangement but added new titles on the election of Members of Parliament, policing, literary property and insurance. 27 He excerpted cases from manuscript and printed collections which were not available through Kames's original volumes. 28 In 1804, a further Supplement was printed. 29 It was published anonymously but was subsequently attributed to a 'Mr.
McGrugar', 30 probably the Thomas McGrugar who was admitted to the bar in 1786. 31 This volume added cases heard before 1796 but which were not included by Woodhouselee, most notably those heard by the High Court of Justiciary, and added a title on jury trials to the existing structure. 32 The complete set of these worksby Kames, Woodhouselee and McGrugar became known as the Folio Dictionary. 33 However, soon after its publication, Morison's Dictionary superseded the Folio Dictionary. Tait

III. Morison's Use of the Folio Dictionary
Morison relied heavily upon the Folio Dictionary. As Tait identified, Morison explicitly adopted its 'mode of General Classification' as his own structure, including the titles added by Woodhouselee. He praised this scheme as 'so ingenious … that it is unnecessary, and would be improper[,] to employ another'. 38 Morison made only minor changes to the scheme: he renamed 'chapters' to 'divisions' and 'clauses' to 'sections', and adjusted the wording of some headings. Furthermore, as will be shown in the following sections, and again somewhat validating Tait's criticisms, Morison also relied upon Kames and Woodhouselee to identify and locate cases in the practicks, and borrowed from the Folio Dictionary some of his marginal descriptions of cases. Going beyond what Tait identified, it will also be shown that Morison sometimes drew from the Folio Dictionary the substantive text of his entries on cases rather than excerpting them from the original sources. These elements of borrowing will be explored in turn below, principally with reference to the collected legal decisions of Sir Richard Maitland of Lethington, after which Morison's parallel use of the legal digests of Sir Robert Spottiswoode of Pentland and Sir James Balfour of Pittendreich will be considered. 34 Tait, Index, 512. 35

Morison's explicit use of the Folio Dictionary to identify earlier cases
It is already known that Morison used the Folio Dictionary to identify and locate some of the cases which he excerpted from the practicks. Tait stated that: 'He has given at full length what they have abridged: in every other respect, his Dictionary is just a new edition of Kames' Dictionary, with Woodhouselee's and McGrugar's Supplements, and the Faculty Decisions up to 1808, incorporated'. 39 The extent of this reliance can be identified because Morison typically cited the relevant page of the Folio Dictionary in his postscript citations. A digital search of Morison's 1811 edition suggests that it contains more than 11,500 such postscript citations of the Folio Dictionary. Nearly 8300 entries apparently cite Kames's two volumes: almost 5300 cite the first volume, and more than 3000 cite the second volume. 40 This is, of course, an imprecise method of research: the transcription which is searched by the online engine may erroneously differ from the original printed page, 41 while there may also have been errors in Morison's original printed text. 42 Nonetheless, even if broadly correct, this suggests a significant reliance by Morison on Kames and Woodhouselee.
Yet, Morison became generally disinclined to cite the Folio Dictionary in the latter volumes of his Dictionary: a digital search suggests that volumes thirty-seven and thirty-eight, as the last two volumes with excerpted reports, together give around eighty references to the Folio Dictionary, which is considerably lower than the average of circa 550 citations per double volume. Yet, as will be shown below, Morison continued to use the Folio Dictionary to access earlier case notes for those latter volumes. The change of practice was therefore in his explicit citation of the Folio Dictionary, rather than his use of it.
These observations are important because an analysis of the entries themselves shows that the Folio Dictionary was Morison's principal tool for locating interesting cases in the manuscript and printed traditions of preeighteenth-century cases. Indeed, it would seem he used Kames's volumes in particular: while his reliance on Kames's volumes to access earlymodern source material appears to have been extensive, a digital search of 39 Tait Woodhouselee's volumes suggests that no cases heard in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries were received from them by Morison. 43 However, Kames summarized only a selection of the early-modern cases, hence (in part) the need for those supplementary volumes to be added later. Thus one of Tait's central criticisms of Morison's Dictionarywhich he attributed to the overuse of Kameswas the omission of a high number of the case reports extant in the practicks. He calculated that around 2800 case-notes from printed collections and some 10,000 entries from manuscript collections were lacking. 44 In making this calculation, Tait provided lists of the collections of legal decisions which Morison sampled, along with the total number of entries thought to be in each collection overall and the number included in Morison. As will be shown below, Tait's understanding of the nature and content of these collections was flawed, so these details are incorrect for at least some of the practicks. However, his wider point that most entries from within these collections are omitted by Morison is correct.
These observations all raise important questions about Morison's method generally and his reliance upon Kames's compendium specifically. It also raises questions about the extent to which Morison provides a reliable source with which to access early-modern cases. These questions can only be answered through a more detailed investigation. Given the size of Morison's Dictionary, it is necessary to examine only a sample of the entries and draw conclusions as to his method thereupon, with the assumption that these findings would likely be applicable to the wider text by extension. The collected legal decisions of Sir Richard Maitland of Lethington provides a useful such sampleparticularly because recent studies have provided a detailed understanding of the original recording of these notes by Maitland, the subsequent manuscript transmission through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and how the nature and reputation of this collection of decisions changed during that process of transmission. 45

Identifying relevant cases in Maitland's decisions
Sir Richard Maitland of Lethington was a lord of session in the sixteenth century and maintained the second-earliest collection of notes on cases heard by the Court of Session. He began recording cases within a fortnight of taking his seat in December 1550 and seems to have stopped doing so in 1577. He made altogether some 400 notes on cases, written in the 43 For occasional citations of early-modern cases within notes on eighteenth-century cases, see e.g.
Woodhouselee, Dictionary, vol.3, 392. Digital search undertaken on the Eighteenth Century Collections Online text. Available online at: http://find.galegroup.com/ecco/. 44 Tait, Index, 516-517. 45 Wilson, 'The Elchies Manuscript'; Wilson, 'The Transmission and Use'. vernacular, sometimes including more than one action between the same parties within a single note. The earlier cases tended to be short and perfunctory, with increasing levels of detail as time went on. It has been suggested elsewhere that this reflected his likely motivation for recording cases as being to teach himself the law in Scotland, having been a political appointment to the bench rather than being promoted from practice. 46 Maitland gifted some early presentation copies of his collection to fellow members of the judiciary while he continued to record cases, but these appear to have had little impact on the manuscript tradition. Once he finished recording case notes, he allowed the collection to be copied again, and over time this led to two distinct branches of descendant manuscript texts. One, elsewhere termed the α group, remained close to the original text. The other, termed δ group after a subsequent common ancestor, became the most sought-after version of the text even though (and indeed almost certainly because) it differed in important ways. In these copies, the text of Maitland was bound with two other sixteenth-century collections of legal decisions, those by John Sinclair and Alexander Coville of Culross; this was the origin of the continued understanding of an association between these three practicks. 47 Also added were nearly another 100 case-notes made by different, unidentified recorders, largely relating to cases heard between 1564/5 and 1570, which were inserted into Maitland's decisions and interrupted the chronological order of his case-notes. These were added as a block into the text and, lacking any explicit alternative provenance, became attributed to Maitland. 48 Conversely, a subsequent loss of text within some of the manuscripts of this group at this same place meant that around ninety entries either by or inserted into Maitland became wrongly attributed to Colville, whose decisions followed those of Maitland in this group of manuscript copies. This loss of text also meant that, by the eighteenth century, the dominant view was that Maitland's collection contained cases heard only until 30 July 1565, even though some of the cases reported earlier in that collection than either the insertion or the loss of text were heard in 1570. 49 Finally, the δ group added additional detail to some of the case reports, which was likely 46 On these points, see Wilson initially added as marginalia but became intercalated into the text such as to appear in later copies as if original. This included citations of learned authority, most notably of Roman law and continental juristic literature. 50 These misattributions of case notes, both to Maitland and those by Maitland to Colville, are found in Kames. He attributes Maitland's latter cases to Colville and describes Maitland's decisions in his list of sources as spanning the period 'from December 1550, to July 1565'. 51 However, he does not attribute to Colville those cases heard after 1565 but which appear in Maitland prior to the insertions and loss of text. Kames is therefore reflective of the odd contradiction in the transmission of Maitland that, having declared that this collection ends in 1565, Kames nonetheless attributed to him cases heard up to December 1570. 52 Morison's use of Kames, as well as some of the manuscripts identified below, meant that his Dictionary likewise reflects this distorted understanding of the collections of Maitland and Colville. Thus, for example, twenty-eight of Morison's entries wrongly attribute to Colville case-notes which were recorded by Maitland. 53 Overall, 140 of the case entries in Morison's Dictionary were recorded by Maitland or were insertions added and attributed to Maitland, 54 from a total collection of approximately 500 case notes overall (including the insertions). This differs from Tait's understanding: he wrongly suggested that around 120 case-notes from Maitland had been included in Morison's Dictionary, from an overall total of 360 cases. 55 While he must in any case have failed to identify all the cases which Morison excerpted from Maitland, these numbers suggest that Tait's understanding of this collection, like that had by Kames and Morison, was affected by the misattribution of Maitland's latter decisions to Colville.
These 140 entries provide an appropriately-sized sample group for a detailed study of Morison's method and willfor brevitybe referred to simply as notes by Maitland, obscuring for immediate purposes the misattribution of some. The Folio Dictionary is explicitly cited for 113 (i.e. eighty-one per cent) of these 140 entries. Morison was thus prepared to acknowledge a heavy reliance upon Kames in accessing Maitland. Typical of the latter 50 Ibid., 341-343. 51  volumes, however, Morison's method regarding citation of Kames changed towards the end of the Dictionary. None of the last fifteen entries on notes from Maitlandthose after the title 'Thirlage' in volume thirty-sixcite the Folio Dictionary despite all being discussed in Kames. Nonetheless, Morison's use of Kames in even these latter entries is highly likely despite the lack of explicit citation. Although there is no clear evidence of borrowing in six of these latter entries, 56 in seven he adopted Kames's summary for his own marginal description, 57 and in another two he replicated Kames's wording as his own entry text. 58 This textual borrowing clearly identifies Kames as a source for these entries, and can be shown to be typical of Morison's wider practice.  cases reported by Sinclair, 60 and one case found in Balfour's digest. 61 Morison twice adhered to this practice even where the citations in Kames were separated by short sections of non-substantial text. 62 On two other occasions, minor errors meant that the summary was applied to the later case chronologically: once because Morison arranged a later case recorded by Colville to be before an earlier case drawn from Maitland and Balfour, 63 and once where the summary was simply applied to the later case from Maitland and the earlier case from Sinclair was left without a marginal description. 64 Overall, some seventy-seven (i.e. fifty-five per cent) of Morison's entries on Maitland's case-notes have or can thus be associated with marginal descriptions which are borrowed from Kames. Morison explicitly cited the Folio Dictionary under seventy of these entries; 65 the other seven have no such citation, but the replication of Kames's summaries verbatim, 66 or almost verbatim, 67 proves the origins of these marginal descriptions despite the lack of citation. It is notable that all seven entries which lack a citation of the Folio Dictionary despite the borrowing of the marginal description are found in the latter part of the Dictionary, by which point Morison had stopped citing this source for the entries on Maitland.
It is possible that this pattern of borrowing is more widespread than has been identified here. Another two entries which do not cite the Folio Dictionary have marginal descriptions which are broadly comparable to Kames's summaries but are insufficiently close to conclude that they were borrowed from him. 68 However, whatever the case with those two entries, it was certainly not Morison's practice to routinely devise original marginal descriptions for the entries excepted from Maitland. For whatever reason, he chose not to supply marginal descriptions for twenty-four of the entries from Maitland which explicitly cited the Folio Dictionary. Only the remaining five entries which cite the Folio Dictionary seem to have marginal descriptions devised by Morisonat least, these marginal descriptions were not borrowed from either Kames or the manuscripts which will be shown below to have been used by him. 69 Yet, despite Tait's criticism, it is important to observe that Morison did not (at least always) rely upon the Folio Dictionary uncritically. For example, Kames's summary was received verbatim by Morison as his marginal description of Cranston v Brown (1567), under which entry he cited the Folio Dictionary and the relevant manuscript and added the postscript 'This case is called by mistake in the Fol. Dic. Home against Kennedy'. He is correct in this observation: the summary correctly applies to Cranston v Brown, which is the case immediately before that which would properly be cited as Dalrymple and Home v Kennedy in Maitland. 70 In this instance, therefore, Morison was able to recognize and correct Kames's confusion. 71

Morison's use of Kames's summary as his own entry text
Beyond borrowing Kames's text for marginal headings, as observed by Tait, Morison also sometimes copied the single-sentence case summaries in the Folio Dictionary as the text of his own substantive entry. The substantive texts of twelve (i.e. nine per cent) of Morison's entries from Maitland were copied from Kames, in full and verbatim or nearly so. 72 Eight of these twelve entries are on cases which are additionally entered elsewhere in Morison under different subject headings. On each occasion, the case-note as excerpted from the manuscript is provided in the entry appearing first in the Dictionary; the entry for the second appearance of 69 This includes one marginal description which simply compares the entry to that above. the case replicates Kames's summary and cross-references the previous note. 73 Normally Morison cited the Folio Dictionary in both entries, although twice he failed to do so beneath the first entry, 74 and twice he omitted this reference in the latter entry where he received the text from Kames. 75 Morison's motivation in borrowing Kames's text for these eight duplicate entries seems clear: it was a pragmatic practice which offered both time and cost savings. The provision of shorter entries on the second occurrence of these cases in his Dictionary avoided the unnecessary repetition of these entries' transcriptions; borrowing Kames's summaries saved Morison from devising original descriptions; the cross-references to the fuller excerpted entries ensured that the longer text found within the manuscript tradition remained available to readers. Interestingly, there is only one example of case being entered twice where Morison did not receive Kames's summary for the latter entry, although it is unclear whether Morison understood that he had already supplied a note on the same case given the corruption of the parties' names. Some suggestion that he did not is found in him having transcribed these entries from two different manuscripts. 76 The other four of the twelve entries Morison borrowed from Kames are, however, not duplicates but the only entries on those cases. Morison did not cite a specific page or folio of any manuscript for these four cases, but each one provides a cross-reference to elsewhere in the Dictionary. One of these might reflect a lapse in the rigour of Morison's method: he relied on a description of the same case drawn from Balfour entered elsewhere in the Dictionary, and simply cross-referenced this below the entry from Maitland; 77 no difficulties with the manuscript tradition would seem to explain Morison's failure to follow up on the reference to Maitland. 78 However, the others can be explained by his likely being unable to provide a full transcription of Maitland for these entries, and his attempting to use Kames to provide his readers with as much detail as possible. One such entry cross-refers to a more recent case on the same topic recorded by the seventeenth-century judge, Sir Alexander Gibson of Durie, entered earlier in the Dictionary; 79 Morison's provision of a transcript of Maitland's decision in this instance was likely hindered by the case's omission from the manuscript he used for the collection early in his compilation. 80 The inability to locate the full case-note in the manuscripts because of an erroneous date or omission might also explain the other two entries for which no transcription is provided. Both entries also provided cross-references which seem to indicate that further information about the cases would be found at a later point in the Dictionary, but if that was Morison's intention then in neither instance was that fulfilled. 81 The conclusion is therefore unavoidable that the record of these cases preserved in Morison's Dictionary has been entirely transmitted through Kames.

Morison's use of Kames to access the legal digests
As is clear from the above analysis, Morison also provided entries drawn from the legal digests, sometimes as parallel reports of the same case alongside excerpts of the case drawn from different practicks. The legal digests as a 78  genre of legal literature normally provided extracts or brief descriptions or summaries of cases and other legal authorities which, read together, would provide a loose narrative outline on the law. These extracts and discussions were then arranged under subject headings, which might themselves be organized topically or alphabetically. The sixteenth-century digest of Sir James Balfour of Pittendreich, for example, had a topical arrangement, in a structure that has been criticized as 'lacking in organisation' but which very broadly reflects the Roman institutional structure of the nature of law, the law of persons, the law of things (including land law, obligations and matters connected to commerce) then finally actions (including jurisdictions, court procedure and crime). 82 Conversely, the seventeenth-century digest of Sir Robert Spottiswoode of Pentland was arranged alphabetically, although a parallel manuscript tradition of the same text rearranged the titles topically. 83 A parallel report from one of the legal digests is provided alongside twenty-two (i.e. sixteen per cent) of the 140 entries drawn from Maitland: four from Spottiswoode, 84 and eighteen from Balfour. 85 These entries provide a small sample to allow further conclusions to be drawn on Morison's method in identifying and locating case-notes in the manuscripts and printed sources, and to test whether Morison's use of Kames in accessing Maitland might extend to this other type of source.
As with Maitland, Morison clearly used Kames to identify relevant cases in the legal digests. Three of these entries' parallel reports from both Spottiswoode and Maitland were clearly identified and located by Morison using the Folio Dictionary: Kames cited both Spottiswoode and Maitland in respect to those three cases, and Morison cited the Folio Dictionary in the entry. It is of small interest that Morison made the editorial decision to vary the order of the reports from the order of Kames's citations, always giving Spottiswoode's description of the case first (whereas Kames twice cited Spottiswoode first, 86 and once mentioned Maitland first 87 ). Similarly, six of these entries give cases for which Kames cited both Maitland and Balfour; it seems likely that Morison used Kames to access the reports. This includes four occasions where Morison explicitly cited the Folio Dictionaryincluding one where the different practicks reported different hearings of the case. 88 On the other two occasions, Kames cited both Balfour and Maitland, and evidence of Morison's textual borrowing from Kames in at least one of these two entries proves that he used that discussion. 89 It is, in many ways, unsurprising that Morison would have used Kames to access the legal digests as he did for Maitland. Where brought to his attention by Kames, it would have been worth Morison's time to examine these sources as well: the private nature of early-modern case reporting meant that the digests might provide a description of a case independent from those notes found in any single collection of legal decisions. That reports would differ might be particularly true in comparisons with Balfour: Gordon showed that Balfour used the (now lost) court registrum rather than contemporary private collections of legal decisions for information about cases. 90 However, unlike his treatment of Maitland, it seems that Morison also undertook a more comprehensive search of the legal digests to find additional cases described therein. In doing so, he also used these legal digests as a second tool to access, identify and locate relevant case notes in Maitland. Thus, the fourth and final parallel report of Spottiswoode and Maitland, Tutor of Congilton v the Lady (1550), is found towards the end of his Dictionary, by which point Morison had stopped explicitly acknowledging the Folio Dictionary as a source. He therefore did not cite the Folio Dictionary for this entry, even though it seems probable that he became aware of at least Maitland's report of this case through Kames's citation of it. However, Kames did not cite Spottiswoode for this case, nor did he cite an earlier hearing of it, found in Balfour and entered elsewhere in Morison's Dictionary. It seems instead that Morison identified the discussions of this case in Spottiswoode (and Balfour) independently, likely through a more comprehensive reading of the digests. He made the association between Spottiswoode's and Maitland's reports, perhaps because the brevity and content of Spottiswoode's report suggests he took the case from Maitland. Morison entered Balfour's report separately, probably because it supplied a different date to that given by Kames and the manuscript copy of Maitland which he used for this transcription. 91 The suggestion that Morison independently consulted the digests is supported by the other entries which give parallel reports from Balfour alongside Maitland. For seven entries, Morison cited the Folio Dictionary for the note taken from Maitland; 92 in all seven instances, Kames cited only Maitland as a source for the case. In each of these seven cases, Morison provided the entry from Maitland above that of Balfour. It seems likely that Morison found these citations in Kames, then transcribed the reports from the relevant manuscript of Maitland. He must then have added below this Balfour's descriptions after locating the parallel reports through other means, given Kames did not cite Balfour for some of these cases. It seems likely that Morison consulted Balfour independently, 93 then associated the descriptions in Balfour with those reports from Maitland which he had found through Kames. That process of association is particularly interesting where Balfour's citation of the case was problematic. 94 Indeed, it seems likely that Morison's further consultation of Balfour allowed him a second tool to identify cases in Maitland, ones which had not been cited by Kames that Morison found these citations in Balfour instead. It is also possible that another case, which is discussed by Kames but not acknowledged as such by Morison, was also identified through Balfour. 95 Using Balfour independently of Kames would have provided some additional cases of interest, but that Morison took the time to then follow up in Maitland is interesting. It is possible that he did so because he sought a more detailed description of the case than Balfour provided: three of the entries from Balfour are only around seventy words or fewer, 96 although the fourth spans more than 260 words. 97

IV. Morison's Use of the Manuscripts of Maitland
The above examination confirmed that Morison used Kames to identify and locate relevant cases within Maitland, Spottiswoode and Balfour. Morison additionally undertook a wider examination of the legal digests, which allowed him to access a small number of further cases in Maitland which Kames had not cited, although he does not appear to have undertaken an independent consultation of the manuscript copies of Maitland. 98 Yet, even though Morison was heavily reliant on Kames, he did also advance the text. He returned to the manuscripts to provide a full transcription of the entries as well as a citation of the relevant page in the manuscript he used to ensure what he called 'the authenticity of this Edition'. 99 He assured the reader that he preserved the entries faithfully as they were found in the source materials: 'The corrections on the text, will extend only to dates, references, punctuation, and such like'. 100 Morison's use of the manuscripts of Maitland is thus critical to the overall reliability of the text of this collection as preserved in his Dictionary.
Morison did not acknowledge in the front matter of his Dictionary which manuscript copy (or copies) of Maitland he consulted. However, this information can be reconstructed through a comparison of the twenty extant manuscript copies of Maitland with the wording of Morison's transcriptions and the page or folio numbers given in his citations. text. This would not be unusual: the use of more than one manuscript to consult a single source appears to have been common among earlier compilers of Scottish legal materials. 101 1. 'L. Hailes's Copy', Advocates Library Adv. MS. 25.4.11 Morison identifies the source of his transcription of one case entry as 'Maitland MS. L. Hailes's Copy, fol. 44'. 102 A manuscript now held in the Advocates Library -Adv MS. 25.4.11contains a copy of Maitland's decisions which can be dated to around 1600 and bears an inscription identifying it as 'formerly the property of Lord Hailes'. 103 This was certainly the source of Morison's transcription of that entry. First, the case appears on folio forty-four according to the contemporaneous series of foliation, per Morison's citation. 104 Secondly, a comparison of the precise wording of the entry in the manuscript and in Morison's Dictionary shows that these are essentially identical texts. The only difference between them is Morison's modernization of spellings and his pluralization of one word which was singular in the manuscript. Such variations are typical of copying errors and, in scribal terms, would be inconsequential for identifying relationships between texts. 105 This evidence therefore strongly suggests, first, that this manuscript was Morison's source for this transcription and, secondly, that he copied it carefully.
However, none of the other entries from Maitland were borrowed from this manuscript. This might be explained by the nature of this manuscript's text: the copy is essentially complete but many entries have been abridged, sometimes extensively. Perhaps Morison found that this text was less helpful for his purposes than those other two manuscripts which he used, both of which provided more fulsome entries.
2. The 'Second copy', Advocates Library Adv. MS. 24.1.4 Only one other entry gives any specific indication as to the manuscript copy used for the transcription, with the entry for Dalrymple v Kennedy (1567) citing 'Maitland MS. p. 96. (Second copy.)'. 106 This page number is correct to only one of the twenty extant manuscripts, Adv. MS. 24.1.4, which contains a seventeenth-century copy of Maitland's text. 107 This manuscript can be identified as Morison's second-most frequently used copy of Maitland.
Morison provides page numbers which correspond to this manuscript for thirteen of the entries taken from Maitland, including Dalrymple. 108 A comparison of the wording of a sample of these thirteen entries confirms that they could have been transcribed from this manuscript. For example, in Dalrymple, Morison provides no words or phrases which are not found in this manuscript, although there are some insubstantial differences. 109 That this manuscript was indeed the source for these transcriptions can be confirmed further by a textual comparison of sample entries from Morison with all twenty extant manuscript copies of Maitland. This shows that Morison's text of these entries is closer to that of Adv. MS. 24.1.4 than any other extant manuscript's text.
One example of this is particularly interesting in terms of its scribal history. In 1574, Thomas Craig of Riccarton (the author of a notable Scottish treatise principally on Scottish feudal land law, Jus feudale 110 ) pursued his fellow advocate and distant cousin, William Johnston, for the tutorship of a shared nephew. Maitland's report on this case is an excellent example of the extent to which the text can change through transmission by manuscript: the case-note as originally written by Maitland was replaced by a completely different, and much longer, version in a common ancestor of twelve of the extant manuscript copies of Maitland, which all received this revised report. Morison's transcription reflects this revised report. 111 116 There is thus clear evidence for the identification of Adv. MS. 24.1.4 as Morison's 'second copy' of Maitland, from which thirteen cases (i.e. nine per cent) of his entries on Maitland were transcribed. 117 Yet, two further points might be made about Morison's use of this manuscript. Firstly, in identifying those entries excerpted from this manuscript, it can be concluded that Morison worked through the titles of his Dictionary sequentially rather than through the manuscripts chronologically: those transcriptions drawn from the second copy are nine of the first ten entries and five of the last eight in the Dictionary, so he only used this manuscript at the beginning and end of the Dictionary. Secondly, several of Morison's entries on cases from other sources refer to 'Pitmedden's copy' of Sinclair, 118 or the decisions, cases or appendix 'at the end of Pitmedden's copy of Colvil'. 119 A full textual comparison of these entries is outwith the scope of this research. However, it is very probable that this is the same manuscript which has been used for these entries: an inscription in Adv. MS. 24.1.4 identifies that it was copied from a manuscript owned by Sir Alexander Seton of Pitmedden. 120 If this is correct, then the so-called appendix could be identified as selected abstracts from the decisions of Sir Thomas Hamilton, 1st Earl of Haddington. 121 3. Morison's principal manuscript, Advocates Library Adv. MS. 24.1.5 Morison also used a third manuscript, and it is this third manuscript which was his principal source for Maitland's text. Indeed, it seems clear that the explicit references to the 'second copy' and the Hailes manuscript were to distinguish them from this principal manuscript, which is otherwise unidentified. This third manuscript can be identified as the mid-seventeenthcentury copy, Adv. MS. 24.1.5. 122 One hundred and eight of the entries taken from Maitland give page numbers correct to Adv. MS. 24.1.5. The use of this evidence to identify this manuscript as the source for these entries is all the more convincing because there are significant problems with its pagination. These problems make this manuscript's pagination unique, and explain what otherwise would have had to be (given the page references given) an erratic and unjustifiable restructuring of Maitland in Morison's source. 123 Only five of Morison's entries from Maitland have not now been identified by this research as having been transcribed from either Kames or one of these three manuscripts. A comparison of their wording shows that at least three of these were copied from this same principal manuscript, but that the page numbers given in their citations were subject to printing errors. 124  what is found in Morison's Dictionary; the note on Oliphant is incomplete in the 'second copy', Adv. MS. 24.1.4, which indicates that this manuscript was not Morison's source for this note at least. Morison's transcription of these two notes is, however, very close to the text of Adv. MS. 24.1.5, while that of Ld of Kinfawns is also very close to the 'second copy' as well. The differences are, in scribal terms, insubstantial: modernization of spelling, the omission of a few words, etc. Setting aside the possibility that a fourth, closely related but now lost manuscript was used for just these two textswhich seems rather unlikelythese notes can probably be considered to have been taken from this principal manuscript, but that Morison merely omitted the relevant page number from his citations. 125 Overall, therefore, at least 111 but perhaps 113 (i.e. eighty to eight-one per cent) of the entries in Morison were transcribed from this manuscript.

Situating Morison's transcriptions within the manuscript tradition
The identification of the three manuscripts used by Morison is important because, as mentioned above, the manuscript tradition is known to have two distinct branches: the α group, closer to Maitland's original text, and the δ group, with various important changes introduced at the turn of the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries. 126 All three of the manuscripts used by Morison were part of that latter group. All three manuscripts were thus part of the tradition which received the 100 extra cases as insertions, and indeed Morison's use of them meant he received twenty-four such insertions. Conversely, it was mentioned above that one branch of the δ group suffered a loss of text. Adv. MS. 24.1.4 sits within this group. This loss in the 'second copy', and the resulting impression of an incompleteness of its text in comparison to Adv. MS. 24.1.5, might explain why the latter manuscript was favoured by Morison.
That loss of text also led to the misattribution of the latter part of Maitland's collection to Colville, which again affected the second copy, Adv. MS. 24.1.4. That misattribution occurred in an influential group of texts, such that other copies of Maitland were contaminated with this attribution by later annotatorsincluding Morison's principal manuscript, Adv. MS. 24.1.5. 127 Morison thus wrongly attributed twenty-six of the cases which were recorded by Maitland to Colville. His reliance on manuscripts within the δ group would have reinforced rather than corrected Kames's erroneous understanding on this point, discussed above.
Morison's use of three manuscripts from δ group also affected the texts he transcribed. The text of the group's common ancestor ('manuscript δ') was significantly expanded through a process of annotation and insertion by one of its earlier owners. As part of this process, the owner of that ancestor manuscript extensively supplemented Maitland's text with citations of learned law. 128 Early-modern collections of decisions from the Court of Session generally made frequent reference to the learned law, capturing those authorities which had been pleaded before the bench. 129 However, Maitland only rarely cited the learned laws in his case-notes, and indeed provided few citations of Scottish authorities. The owner of that ancestor manuscript therefore systematically added citations and discussions of Roman law and civilian thinking to his copy of Maitland. These additions brought the text into line with the pattern of learned citation which contemporary advocates would have expected and required, and is probably the reason why this version of the text appears to have been more widely sought than the versions closer to that as originally written by Maitland. 130 All three manuscripts used by Morison preserve this learned version of the text. Several entries in Morison provide learned discussions, maxims or citations which were not included in the text as written by Maitland and can instead be attributed to these revisions. 131 This includes the learned discussion of tutorship in Morison's aforementioned entry on Craig v Johnston (1574). Morison also preserved the similarly revised version of Maxton v Maxton (1569), which included discussion of D. 41.2.3, and the amended texts of Bryson v Somervill and of Laird of Colliston v The Earl of Errol, which were revised to include learned discussion and Latin maxims but did not directly cite the books of Roman law. 132 The citations of C. 5.71 in Morison's entry on Douglas v Foreman (1565) and D. 2.14.47.1 in the entry on Lord Symington v Weir (1566) were likewise added to the text in this group. 133 Information about additional hearings of some cases and cross-references to other cases found in Morison's entries can also be attributed to his use of manuscripts from δ group. 134 In this regard, there is an important distinction between the text as written by Maitland and as understood by later lawyers. Those wishing to access the text as written by Maitland will find Morison's Dictionary misleading with respect to the original pattern of learned citation. Furthermore, given the provenance of the learned authority added to the reports found in Morison's Dictionary, it is unclear (at least without confirming it in the paper processes) whether these citations and the discussion of them set out in the reports were actually led as part of the court proceedings. They may have been added by a judicial colleague or advocate familiar with the cases' pleadings to add in the authorities considered by the court; at the same time, they might have been fictions added by a lawyer unconnected to these cases with the aim of enhancing the collection with useful references to the learned tradition at relevant points. In receiving some of these expanded reports, a false impression of the use of learned law in the court during the period might also thus be given by Morison's Dictionary. The question thus arises as to whether Morison might have chosen these manuscripts because of this learning, but that would seem unlikely. Rather, his selection was probably pragmatic: plausibly these were the three manuscript copies of Maitland held by the Advocates Library at the time. 135

V. Conclusion
This article has revealed much of Morison's method in compiling his Dictionary, with particular reference to the entries taken from Maitland's decisions. He began with the Folio Dictionary, the structure of which he copied almost exactly. He used Kames's volumes as an index to the earlymodern material, noting the names and locations of the cases mentioned by Kames and reordering them chronologically under these borrowed subject headings. He retained many of Kames's summaries to act as his own marginal descriptions or, where he intended to provide a note on the same case under more than one title, as the latter entry's substantive text. The borrowing is so widespread that only around forty of Morison's 140 entries featuring Maitland's decisions have no text taken from Kames. Only after this use of the Folio Dictionary does Morison seem to have moved on to work with the original source materials for the content of his entries. It was Morison's provision of the full case-notes from these earlier sources which was his advancement on the Folio Dictionary and its singlesentence summaries. When consulting the manuscripts, it seems he worked through the titles of his Dictionary sequentially rather than by the manuscripts' own order. He transcribed the relevant case-notes carefully and provided a citation of the specific page (if not the specific manuscript) from which he had worked. However, the overlap in the cases entered by Kames and Morison shows that the latter did not undertake a substantial re-examination of the manuscripts to find additional cases for inclusion. Additionally, where he could not find the relevant case in these manuscripts, he again relied upon the Folio Dictionary, excerpting instead Kames's summary for the entry text and sometimes providing cross-references to other relevant cases.
Morison used three manuscript copies to excerpt notes from Maitland's decisions. He realized that one, Adv. MS. 25.4.11, was abridged so made little use of it. Another, Adv. MS. 24.1.4, appears to have been the manuscript he started with but, as it was apparently incomplete, he eventually used it only as a secondary copy. The third, Adv. MS. 24.1.5, was his principal copy for accessing the cases noted by Maitland. His use of these manuscript copies of Maitland's decisions means that Morison's Dictionary reflects the text as found in a particular branch of the manuscript tradition, which diverged in important ways from the original text. In these manuscripts, and thus in Morison's Dictionary, additional cases recorded by other lawyers were attributed to Maitland, while some of Maitland's notes were attributed to Colville. Entries were also substituted or rewritten, and many were supplemented with citations of learned authority, often framed as further debates between the parties. While it is possible that such additional content was added by someone familiar with these cases, caution needs to be exercised with regards to assuming that any such citations found in Morison reflect contemporaneous court practice.
This can be contrasted with his method of locating cases in the legal digests, identified with reference to those of Balfour and Spottiswoode. While Morison again used the Folio Dictionary to locate relevant cases in the legal digests, he also appears to have searched these sources more comprehensively for cases beyond those mentioned by Kames. This more expansive use of the digests might be explained by their subject-based structure of treatment being more accessible than the chronological structure of the decisions, as well as the fact that these digests were printed whereas the decisions remained largely in manuscript. In undertaking this wider consultation of the digests, Morison appears to have found them useful as a secondary mechanism for identifying relevant cases in Maitland.
Overall, therefore, this research has revealed much about Morison's method. While Tait's own understanding of the Scottish practicks was flawed, some of his criticisms of Morison broadly stand. The extent of his