Excerpt from A Collection of the Laws and Canons of the Church of England, From Its First Foundation to the Conquest, and From the Conquest to the Reign of King Henry VIII, Vol. 1 of 2: Translated Into English With Explanatory Notes

Notwithstanding the large General Preface and the Advertisements which Mr. Johnson has prefixed to this work, it is necessary for the Editor to add some further explanation of the sources from which it is derived, and also to give some account of the corrections and additions which have been made in the present edition by the help of later publications.

Mr. Johnson's translation of English Canons, &c., , of which the first and only previous edition was published A.D. 1720, is mainly founded upon the Concilia of Sir Henry Spelman, who had formed a plan for collecting all "the Ecclesiastical councils, decrees, laws and constitutions of the British Isles" in three periods, namely, from the first introduction of Christianity to the Norman Conquest, from the Conquest to the Reformation, and lastly from the Reformation to his own time. The first part of the intended work, completed amid the greatest difficulties, of which the almost universal ignorance of the Anglo-Saxon tongue was even greater than the troubles of the times, was published A.D. 1639, and the second A.D. 1661, by his nephew after the author's decease, which event prevented the execution of the third part.

Besides the Concilia of Spelman there arc two other works in which Johnson consulted the originals of the documents he translates, namely, the Arclueonomia of Lambard and the Provinciale of Lyndwood. The first of these is not confined to ecclesiastical regulations, but is a general collection of the ancient laws of the English, published by William Lambard, the Kentish antiquary, A.D. 1508, and afterwards edited with additions and corrections by Abraham Wheloc, professor of Arabic at Cambridge, A.D. 1644.

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