Sir William Searle Holdsworth: A History of English Law Volume 4: Book IV - Part I The Common Law and Its Rivals 1485-1700 3rd ed (I)

The dust jacket image shown is of the 1966 reprint. The current edition has no dustjacket.

Sir William Searle Holdsworth was professor of constitutional law at University College, London (1903–8). After 1922 he was Vinerian professor of English law at Oxford. Holdsworth's greatest achievement is his History of English Law in 17 Volumes.

Sir William Holdsworth's monumental legal history extends from Anglo-Saxon times to the nineteenth-century Judicature Acts. It was interrupted by his death in 1945, when he had reached Volume 12.

Subsequent volumes have been edited by Professors A. L. Goodhart and H. G. Hanbury, at first from Holdsworth's typescript and later, with more difficulty, from his manuscript notes.

Volume 4 incorporates the first two chapters of Part I of Book IV The Common Law and Its Rivals and covers the period 1485-1700, dealing with sources and general development.

In Chapter I Holdsworth considers the sixteenth century at home and abroad, and in Chapter II the enacted law of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.