Minute Book

A book kept by the clerk or prothonotary of a court, in which minutes of its proceedings are entered.

A book kept by the clerk or prothonotary of a court, in which minutes of its proceedings are entered. ^ MINUTE TITHES. Small tithes, usually belonging to the vicar; e. g. eggs, honey, MIRROR OE8 JUSTICES. The Mirror of Justices, a legal treatise once supposed to have been written during the reign of Ed* ward IT. Andrew Horne is its reputed author. But it has been thought that the germ of it was written before the Conquest and that Horne only made additions to it; Marv. Leg. Blbl. 396. But F. W. Maitland holds to the contrary; and also that the evidence that Home wrote It is not conclusive. It was first published in 1642, and in 1646 it was translated into English by William Hughes. It was first cited in court in 1550. Coke said (9 Rep. Pref.): “In this book in effect appeareth the whole frame of the common law.” It was published by the Selden Society with an introduction by Prof. Maitland. Through Coke’s use of it, it was long regarded as an important source of English legal history; but it is known now that it is no authority for the law of the 13th or any other century; 2 Holdsw. Hist B. L. 284. Palgrave (2 Engl. Commonw. cxlll) regarded it as apocryphal. See 13 L. Q. R. 85; 11 id. 395 (Sir F. Pollock). Maitland’s opinion of the work may be gathered in a few words from his introduction to the reprint of It in 1893, by the Selden Society; “Is he [its author] lawyer, antiquary, preacher, agitator, pedant, faddist, lunatic, romancer, liar? A little of all, perhaps, but the romancer seems to predominate.”

A book kept by the clerk or prothonotary of a court for entering memoranda of its proceedings.

Defined under Minute in Black's Law Dictionary.