Excerpt from The Year Books: Lectures Delivered in the University of London at the Request of the Faculty of LawsVery few words are necessary by way of prefaced this little volume. In the first place I want to thank the University of London for giving me, on the suggestion, I believe, of Mr G. H. J. Hurst - palmam qui meruit ferat - the very welcome opportunity of doing something towards making those priceless storehouses of many kinds of learning, our old Year Books, more generally known than they are at present. They have been too long neglected, but it is not yet, I trust, too late to hope that interest in them may be revived, and that their unique value to many branches of scholarship may be increasingly recognized.Here, too, I gladly find an opportunity of thanking my learned friend, Sir Frederick Pollock, for the sympathetic Introduction which he has contributed to this volume. Year Book scholarship has ever had his very active and sincere support, and in my own personal struggles in the editing of many Year Books I owe much to him.Finally this is to be said. No one can now write or speak at length on the Year Books and their story without owing much to the earlier work of Maitland and Pike. I have made frequent specific references to them in these lectures, and here I gratefully acknowledge my general indebtedness to them for what they have taught me and for what, through their teaching, I have been enabled to learn and to say.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis 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.