Subject Guide: Law: Archives and Special Collections

The university initially had a Reader in Law from 1833 to 1872 in the person of Mr William Gray, and BCL degrees were awarded from 1837, principally by means of commuting an MA degree. DCLs were awarded from 1838. However, law lectures only really began in 1907 at the university's Armstrong College in Newcastle where a law school was established in 1923 with Christian B. Fenwick as the lecturer in Commercial Law, and LLB degrees being awarded from 1931. This made Durham unique amongst English universities in providing two law degrees. By 1963, when King's College became the independent Newcastle University, Law there comprised Prof Derek William Ellicott and 9 lecturers. 

There was then technically a brief hiatus in the teaching of Law at Durham University until Law was established as a subject in Durham in 1964 with Frederick Christian Tuboku-Metzger as the first lecturer. Law was upgraded to a faculty in 1970 with Prof F.E. Dowrick as dean, by which time it also included a senior lecturer, 6 lecturers and 2 part-time lecturers. It reverted to being a department in 1985 when the number of faculties in the university was streamlined to just three, with by now two professors (including still Dowrick), two visiting professors, a reader, three senior lecturers, nine lecturers and a part-time tutor.   

This development of the subject and faculty/department of Law in the university is reflected in the university’s own archive, in central, faculty and departmental files, in the records of the meetings of its various committees from Senate and Council down, in the exam papers, pass lists and mark sheets for the subject, and the university’s publications of such as the Gazette, Calendar, Journal, and Vice-Chancellor’s Reports, and newsletters and the like. The archive also includes the formal legal documents of the university itself, including its charters, various Acts of Parliament, statutes, memoranda of association etc. 

There is a significant collection of medieval law within Archives and Special Collections. Of particular importance is the Durham Cathedral Archive, which constitute one of the most extensive medieval archives in Britain. The collection contains medieval court-rolls and court-books as well as scraps of medieval canon law books used in archival and other bindings, and also various reissues of a cornerstone of our current legal system, Magna Carta. 

A number of medieval law books can also be found in the Bishop Cosin Manuscripts, including a volume of statutes, whilst the Weardale Chest contains sixteenth and seventeenth century copies of many earlier items from 1377 onwards. 

In addition amongst the Durham Cathedral Library manuscripts at Palace Green Library is a particularly fine set of illuminated legal texts written in Bologna in the later thirteenth century. The set comprises a Decretals and three volumes of civil law, the Volumen, the Codex and the Digestum novum. 

Good holdings of common law can be found in the Bamburgh Library. Most of the common law books date from the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and include A Discourse of the Laws of England (1681) by Thomas Hobbes and A Grand Abridgment of the Common and Statute Law of England (1675) by William Sheppard. The Routh Library, Routh 59.E.13 

Ralph Waggett and general SB sequence collections also have numbers of similar books.  

Bishop Cosin’s Library, held by Archives and Special Collections, includes numerous works relating to canon law. The Bishop Cosin Manuscripts dating from the sixteenth century onwards include the Constitutions and Canons of the Church of England (1761) as well as several editions of the Canon Law Collections of the Catholic Church, dating back to 1555. The Routh Library also has an extensive range of canon law books, and the Big Library at Ushaw College has even more, with further volumes in the Lisbon College Library and Weldbank Catholic Parish Library collections there. 

A substantial amount of material relating to the law of probate and inheritance can be found in Archives and Special Collections. Relevant collections include the Baker Baker Papers, the South Durham Deeds, the Salvin Papers, the Janson Deeds, the Fenwick (Hylton) Papers, and the Love, Pearson, Ferens and Marshall Papers. 

Researchers interested in probate law, wills and inventories should also consult the North East Inheritance Database, an online digital image catalogue of over 150,000 wills and related archives from across County Durham, Tyne and Wear and Northumberland. The probate records date from 1527-1857 and are an invaluable source for the study of probate law and social history. There are also some earlier medieval wills and inventories in the Durham Cathedral Archive.  

Property law is also strongly represented in the collections. The British Records Association Deeds relate to transactions and transferrals of property situated within County Durham whilst the Salvin Papers relate to property at Sunderland Bridge and many other places in County Durham, Yorkshire and London. Other relevant collections include the Rivington School Papers, the Mawson Papers, the Littleburn, Holywell and Nafferton (Brancepeth) Deeds, the Kennett Family Papers, the Crayke Deeds and the Church Commission Durham Dean and Chapter Estates Deposit. 

Collections relating to land law in the local area include the Shafto (Beamish) Papers, the Rivington School Papers, the Redheugh Estate, County Durham Deeds, the Packe Papers, the Fenwick (Hylton) Papers, the Eden Papers and the Dixon-Johnson Papers. In the Sudan Archive, the papers of S.R. Simpson relate to land settlement and custom in the Sudan whilst the papers of J.G. Mavrogordarto include a 1967 report by S.R. Simpson on land law in the Sudan, and Ann Lambton’s papers have material on land law in Iran. The Durham Cathedral Archive might also be of interest to those studying land law, with many records relating to the medieval landholdings of Durham Cathedral Priory and then to the post-dissolution landholdings of the bishop of Durham and the Durham Dean and Chapter, the largest landowners in the north-east of England. 

Several collections make reference to marriage settlements and marital law including the Fenwick (Hylton) Papers, the Dixon-Johnson Papers, the Clayton and Gibson Papers, the Backhouse Papers and the Claxton in Greatham Deeds. In the Sudan Archive, the papers of M.W. Parr make reference to marriage laws in the Sudan, and the David Brooks papers have much on marriage in later 20th century Iran.  

These local land transactions are some of the staples of archives and can be found throughout the collections, especially in the archives of such as Durham Cathedral, the Lords Eden, and, especially for the city of Durham, the University of Durham. These deeds provide a crucial insight into land and property transactions in the region of Durham and beyond from the medieval period to the present day. 

A substantial number of court records can be found within Archives and Special Collections. Many of these records relate to local courts in the region of Durham, including the chancery and other courts of the Palatinate of Durham, with much supporting documentation for their working in the 17th and 18th centuries to be found in the papers of lawyers working in them then, the Mickletons and Spearmans. Then there are also records of the consistory court of the bishops of Durham. Furthermore, there are the records of the halmote courts for the bishops’ estates, and similar courts for Durham Cathedral’s estates, and records of the cathedral’s medieval local courts within Durham itself. Further local court records are to be found in the Chester Deanery Manorial Records, the Old University Manuscripts, the Frosterley Manorial Records, the Clayton and Gibson Papers, and the Gibson Maps, Plans and Volumes. Further afield, by contrast, the papers of B.D.McD. Dee, part of the Durham University Sudan Archive, contain summaries of cases heard at native courts in Equatoria. 

The Durham University Archives and Special Collections contain numerous records relating to the work of lawyers and solicitors covering not just their own legal businesses, but also often their administration of others’ estate and business interests. Records of a number of solicitors’ businesses operating in Durham and beyond include those of Clayton and Gibson (Co Durham, Newcastle and the wider estates of the Marquesses of Bute),  Booth and Lazenby (Co Durham, Yorkshire, Derbyshire, including mining and tile-making interests), Mawson (Co Durham estates, especially those of the university but also such as a paper mill), Smith Roddam (especially Bishop Auckland), and a firm of Newcastle solicitors. The Sudan Archive contains the papers of two members of the Sudan Legal Department, A.J. O’Meara and K.H.J.O. Hayes. 

Three sets of manuscript notes belonging to J. Mawson, a 19th-century Durham lawyer, can be found in Add.MS. 1461/1-3 whilst the Dixon-Johnson Papers include Christopher Johnson's Book of lawyer's working papers and precedents, many of which relate to County Durham. Vincent Eyre’s manuscripts at Ushaw mainly concern the operation of the penal laws against Catholics in 18th century Britain and the Big Library at Ushaw includes books from the collection of the 19th century recorder of Newcastle & lay chancellor of Durham, Robert Hoppen Williamson. The collection of J.J. Howe, a Durham probate registry clerk, includes some 18th century palatinate chancery court examples and extracts, and some precedent books, along with sample deed collections.