"Bracton and Azo" did more than define the "Romanesque" quality of the great treatise; it was a brilliant contribution to the scholarly edition of the future. The best manuscript (_Bodl. Digby 222_) was minutely described, four others carefully collated, and fifteen in all examined. One of the features of the Digby manuscript, which, though not a perfect copy of the autograph, appeared to Maitland on many grounds to be the best approach to the autograph to which research had attained, was the presence of a large mass of additional matter written in the margins. Now these marginalia were not glosses but additions to the text and additions possessing a peculiar value from the fact that they came from Bracton himself. "If the annotator was not Bracton he had just Bracton's interests and just Bracton's style." In later manuscripts some or all of this supplementary matter is received into the text but "too often at inappropriate places." Accordingly the future editor of the Treatise will be obliged to pay special heed to these "addiciones"; and, to smooth a path which will be none too easy, Maitland made a list of more than a hundred and fifty passages in the printed text of 1869 which in the Digby manuscript stand in the margin. Such labour occupying but a few pages of Appendix looks but a small thing on paper, and is too technical to interest the general reader: but scholars will measure the devotion which it implies; and the future edition of the _De Legibus_ will be based on the results of Maitland's unsparing toil among the Bracton manuscripts in London and Oxford, Cheltenham and Eton. FOOTNOTES: [23] Maitland was probably drawn too far on the path of scepticism. See Vinogradoff, _Growth of the Manor_, pp. 135-40, and Brunner, _Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte_, 2nd ed., vol. 1., pp. 110 ff. VII. In the summer vacation of 1895 Maitland wrote as follows to his friend, Mr R. L. Poole, the editor of the _English Historical Review_: