Spelman, Henry, 1564?-1641.
Spelman's Glossarium archaiologicum : English Law
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Spelman's Glossarium, 1687 |
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| Spelman's Glossarium, 1687 |
Antiquarian and historian Henry Spelman led a long and very full life. He graduated from Cambridge in 1582, and then studied at Lincoln's Inn, but never seemed to have had a view to practice law. While living the life of a country gentleman on his family's considerable estate in Norfolk, a newly-married Spelman began writing on antiquarian subjects in about 1595, transcribing Latin documents and soon moving on to original treatises. He became a well-respected and prolific writer, publishing more than a dozen major works and many other minor dialogues and essays. Although he once wrote, "I am no parliament man," Spelman was successful in public life, drawing the attention of James I early on. He served as a member of parliament, high sheriff, and justice of the peace.
Spelman's Glossarium (first published in 1626, covering terms through the letter "L"; the complementary volume was published posthumously in 1664) superseded all previous law dictionaries. Holdsworth wrote, "It is a great deal more than a law dictionary, being a dictionary of Latin and other words to be found in all the post-classical authors and documents English and foreign. In fact it is a product of that new school of historians and historically minded lawyers." The work grew out of Spelman's efforts to compose a significant work on the bases of English law as described in the original documents. However, during his research Spelman found such difficulty assigning the proper meanings to Anglo-Saxon and Latin terms that he felt he had to postpone this work until he compiled a glossary of law terms. The work has been praised for its painstaking derivations and definitions; Spelman conducted considerable archival research and consulted with scholars throughout Europe to write his entries. The Glossarium was the first English dictionary of legal terms based on philological methods, and for his efforts Spelman earned "a title to the name of inaugurator of philological science in England."
See W.S. Holdsworth, Sources and Literature of English Law (Oxford: Clarendon, 1928); Dictionary of National Biography.
Bibliography
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