In 1607, James I suggested that he, as king, might sit as judge in the courts of common law, the questions there arising being, after all, decided by reason, and reason being a faculty he possessed in no less degree than his judges. Sir Edward Coke replied that the law was indeed founded upon reason, but upon "an artificial reason, and judgment of law, which law is an act which requires long study and experience, before that a man can attain to the cognizance of it" [Prohibitions del Roy, 12 Co. Rep. 63 (1607)]. The king, Coke maintained, was not learned in the laws. James, reportedly, was "greatly offended." Coke kept his seat—for the time being.

The episode is famous as a constitutional landmark: the moment at which English law asserted its independence from royal will. But the phrase artificial reason is worth pausing over on its own terms. Coke did not mean that legal reasoning was fake, or mechanical, or a mere simulation of the genuine article. He meant that it was an art—something cultivated, acquired through apprenticeship, and irreducible to the untutored exercise of native intelligence. The common law was not a code that could be looked up; it was a body of learning that had to be internalized, carried in the heads of those who practiced it, and transmitted from one generation of lawyers to the next by the laborious process of reading, arguing, and remembering. It was, in a word, a tradition. And traditions, unlike statutes, must be learned by heart.

Coke's Reports, published in eleven volumes between 1600 and 1615, with two more appearing after his death, were an attempt to fix this tradition in text. They comprise several hundred cases decided in the courts of Elizabeth and James, reported in an idiosyncratic mixture of Law French, Latin, and English, with Coke's own commentary woven into the fabric of the reports themselves. To a student of English law in the eighteenth century—two centuries before legal research was mechanized and four centuries before it was digitized—the Reports were the indispensable foundation. Not the only foundation: Littleton's Tenures [1481], Coke's own Institutes [1628–44], and Blackstone's Commentaries [1765–69] all had their place. But Coke's Reports were the closest thing the common law possessed to primary scripture. Certain of the cases reported therein remain good law today. American lawyers still cite Semayne's Case [5 Co. Rep. 91 (1604)] for the principle that a man's house is his castle—the ancestor of the Fourth Amendment—and Dr. Bonham's Case [8 Co. Rep. 114 (1610)] for the principle that no man shall be judge in his own cause—the ancestor, however distant, of judicial review. Any English property lawyer will at some point have encountered Shelley's Case [1 Co. Rep. 93 (1581)] and the Rule in Spencer's Case [5 Co. Rep. 16* (1583)], whether or not she knows the cases behind the rules.

It is not surprising, then, that someone should have versified the Reports. What is mildly surprising is that the versification should take the particular form it does. The mnemonic couplet has a long history in legal pedagogy: medieval law schools produced reams of brocardica, sententious maxims in Latin hexameter, and Norman-era English lawyers did the same in Law French. By the Augustan age the proper vehicle had become the heroic couplet. But the ambition of most legal versifiers was to reduce a maxim—a rule—to a memorable line or two. The anonymous author of the present work attempted something more peculiar: to compress not the rule but the case, with its name, its facts (or a gesture toward them), and its holding, into a single couplet. Some two hundred and twenty times he tried this. He was no Pope. But he had read his Coke, and he could scan.

The result is a poem organized to follow the structure of the Reports: eleven Parts, each subdivided into numbered cases, each case allotted (with a few exceptions) exactly two lines. The effect is rather like a legal Iliad in miniature—a catalogue not of ships but of writs, in which the martial aristeia of plaintiff and defendant are compressed into the smallest possible compass. Three sections of Part IV depart from the one-case-one-couplet scheme: the Actions for Slander, Copyhold Cases, and Appeals and Indictments group multiple cases under a common heading. Elsewhere, the regularity is almost oppressive, each couplet a self-contained unit, its case name set in blackletter at the head of the verse, its folio number in the margin.

Some of the couplets are genuinely good. Slade's Case [4 Co. Rep. 92 (1602)], whose resolution of the assumpsit question occupied many pages of Coke's report and many more of subsequent commentary, receives a summary of crystalline economy: "For corn sold the vendor well may chuse / Action of debt, or on the case may use." Pinnel's Case [5 Co. Rep. 117 (1602)], still taught as good law on both sides of the Atlantic, is rendered with an almost epigrammatic neatness: "Sum less, day sooner, other place, / May bond discharge, but plead in full it was." Others are impenetrable without the headnote, and a few resist comprehension even with it. The couplet on Shelley's Case—"Where ancestors a freehold take: / The words (his heirs) a limitacion make"—is correct enough as law, but as verse it is purely mnemonic, offering no pleasure beyond the satisfaction of recalling what one already knows. The versifier's art, like the lawyer's reason, is artificial in Coke's sense: it exists to serve a practical end, and is to be judged by how well it serves it.

The manuscript from which John Worrall printed the first edition in 1742 was, by his account, "ancient," but no earlier witness survives and the author has never been identified. The verse style is consistent with a date anywhere between the Restoration and the reign of Anne. Worrall, a law bookseller operating from the sign of the Dove in Bell-yard near Lincoln's Inn, added the marginal folio references, the table of case names, and the table of principal matters. He was a useful man. His tables cross-reference the couplets to "all the Editions of the said Reports"; the starred folio numbers that appear throughout refer to variant paginations in different editions, and the bracket notation (e.g., [40]) to a further variant. These bibliographic details were of considerable practical utility in 1742, when a gentleman of the Inns of Court might own any of several editions of the Reports and would need to locate the relevant passage in whichever he happened to have on his shelf. They are of no practical utility now. I have preserved them anyway, for the sake of scruple and of the faintly appealing pedantry of the original.

This digital edition was prepared from a Google Books scan of the Bodleian Library's copy (shelfmark Cw. U.K. 100 C186). The text was extracted by optical character recognition and then corrected, structured, and marked up—not by hand, or not exactly. The bulk of the work was performed by a large language model, operating under human direction: reading the scanned pages, normalizing the long-s, correcting OCR garbles, parsing the two-column tables, identifying case names, supplying missing folio numbers by cross-reference, and generating the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript of the edition you are now reading. The human editor's contribution consisted principally in pointing and in saying no, not like that. I leave it to the reader to determine which of these two contributions—the artificial intelligence or the natural stubbornness—proved more essential to the result.

A few editorial choices are worth noting. Long-s (ſ) has been silently normalized throughout. Obvious OCR errors have been corrected; more doubtful readings have been left as they stand, on the principle that an archaic-looking error is more honest than a confident emendation. Case names are set in small capitals; Latin and Law-French terms are italicized where the original used a distinct typeface. Both of Worrall's tables have been reproduced with hyperlinks to the relevant verses. A handful of entries in those tables do not correspond to any couplet in the text: Yong's (Dame) Case, indexed at Part VII, folio 16, appears to have been omitted from the versification, or lost from the manuscript before Worrall obtained it. Clark and Penifather's Case, indexed at Part IV, folio 23, is presumably subsumed under the Copyhold Cases at that folio. Where folio numbers in the tables disagree with those in the verses, both have been preserved without emendation.

Whether this poem deserves the labor of digitization is a question I am content to leave open. It is not a great poem, nor even a particularly good one. But it captures something about the relationship between law and memory that more sophisticated jurisprudence tends to forget. The common law was, for most of its history, an oral tradition, committed to writing only fitfully and imperfectly. Coke's Reports were an attempt to fix in text what had been fluid in practice; the anonymous versification pushed the fixation one step further, into the ear, into the rhythm of speech, into the body. That the attempt now seems quaint does not mean it was misguided. It means only that we have found other prostheses. Coke's artificial reason required long study and experience. The versifier's artificial memory required a knack for rhyme. Our artificial intelligence requires—well, a great deal of electricity, and someone to say no, not like that. The king, I suspect, would still be greatly offended.

An ancient manuscript of the following verses falling accidentally into my hands, in which no small pains must have been taken; the publication thereof needs little apology, when it is considered these lines may at the same time not only refresh the memory, and instruct, but also afford a pleasing recreation to gentlemen of the law, and others, by shewing them in a narrow compass a copious and learned body of the law, supported with the authority of no less person than the great Sir EDWARD COKE, whose name, so long as laws endure, will probably be esteemed and revered for his great knowledge, penetrating judgment, and fine reasoning therein.

To make this work more useful, I have distinguish'd every part and case with references to the pages in all the editions of the said reports publish'd either in French or English.