The Court Records of the Delaware Valley

Abstract

T t HERE is nothing especially striking or original in proclaiming the importance of court records to the historian. That has been done before and is still being done, by precept, as with the missionary work of the Littleton-Griswold Committee, and by example, in recent works of non-judicial history in which effective use is made of judicial records, such as Miss Susie M. Ames' Virginia studies' and Professor Morris' Labor and Government in Early America. Such works are in themselves testimony that in court records we have a large body of historical material which still awaits thorough exploitation by the historians; and that one's interests need not be in legal or judicial history per se in order to profit by the use of these materials. To the genealogist and the antiquarian, court records have long been a familiar source. They have spared no pains to search these materials out, in the vaults of county and state offices and on the shelves of local historical societies. To them belongs much of the credit for publishing such of these records as are now in print. In the middle colonies, as elsewhere, the earlier court records, those of the seventeenth century, are superior in interest to those of the later period. The earlier records are real minute books, in which the whole proceedings of the court, often including detailed evidence in trials, are entered. In the eighteenth century the records come to be merely formal dockets of cases begun and continued and verdicts and judgments upon them. With the growth of population the amount of this material increases greatly, and as its bulk increases its interest,2 at least to the non-legal historian, decreases. For the Delaware River area, most of the extant seventeenth-century