Purdue University
From the SelectedWorks of Peter J. Aschenbrenner
April, 2014
William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws
of England In Machine Searchable Text
Peter J. Aschenbrenner, Purdue University
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/peter_aschenbrenner/220/
WILLIAM BLACKSTONE’S
COMMENTARIES ON THE LAWS OF ENGLAND
IN MACHINE SEARCHABLE TEXT
2 OCL 940
PETER J. ASCHENBRENNER
Department of History, Purdue University
[email protected]
ABSTRACT.
Our Constitutional Logic presents machine searchable text of Wm.
Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765). The text
is derived from a variety of public domain sources. The format
enables machine searching. The word count returns 676,020 words.
(The Federalist essays count 189,467 words.) Further investigation is
forthcoming. OCL’s articles and tables will be roadmapped to
indicate work completed and work in progress.
KEY WORDS: machine readable text, MR Text Format, Blackstone, Commentaries on
the Laws of England.
A.
INTRODUCTION. Machine searchable text of the corpus of Blackstone’s
Commentaries on the Laws of England is now available to researchers.
The text has been presented in a format that enables machine–
searching. The reader can save the text in MS Word .doc format and then
uses uses Ctrl-F to count words. OCL terms this style MR Text Format.
MR = ‘machine readable.’
A roadmap to all matters Blackstonian is forthcoming, as OCL’s
articles, tables and charts appear on-line.
The difference between OCL’s text and other on-line sources is
two-fold.
First: OCL’s text is entire: a search on ‘system’ as in ‘system of laws’ – one of the
phrases favored by the Philadelphians and in The Federalist essays – will return 71
matches.
Second: OCL’s MR texts are edited to the same (minimal, as OCL explains below)
standard. That is, they afford comparable results with comparable searches, with the
least possible violence to WB’s orthography.
Thus, the context of the target word – which is supplied by neighboring words –
is apparent if concordance-style results are drawn from hits. An oblique view of values
trapped, obscured and entirely untouched in target words is afforded by word searches
throughout an entire corpus.
B.
RESOURCES. For on-line access to Peter Aschenbrenner’s articles, tables and
charts see purdue.academia.edu/PeterAschenbrenner or
works.bepress.com/peter_aschenbrenner/
C.
BASIC PRINCIPLES. OCL has presented a number of on-line texts of special interest
to students of constitutional history. See:
MR Text of the Articles of Confederation, 2 OCL 376;
MR Text of the Early Constitution, 2 OCL 341;
MR Text of Farrand’s Records of the Federal Convention, Vols. 1/2, 2 OCL 190;
MR Text of Hamilton and Madison Debating the First Bank Bill, 2 OCL 247;
MR Text of The Federalist Essays, 2 OCL 333 .
The article at 2 OCL 333 introduces machine-readable text as a format and
explains its development and utility to the reader.
D.
RECOMMENDATIONS. Reading a few pages of the Commentaries will acclimatize
the reader to WB’s spelling preferences. The reader may care to essay a few trial
searches. For example, ‘ scienc ’ will return both ‘science’ (9 hits) and other words of
the ‘science’ family such as ‘sciences’ (21 hits).
The space in front of ‘science’ and at the end of the word (see white space) – as in
‘ science ’ – will save the reader from a search returning ‘conscience’.
Hints: go up a version and save your new version as a .txt file. When you search
in MS Word, using Control-F, MS Word will ask if you want to open the file as MS Dos.
Click yes. Once you have saved an untouched version (or archive), you can mess around
with the text and always return to a clean .txt version for more searching.
E.
THE APPROACH. The basic principle of presenting text in machine searchable
format is: First: ‘place no unimportant or trivial hurdle in the path of the effort to
locate and count words, while, for the most part, changing as little of the printed text as
possible.’ And, second: allow searches of the entire text.
In practice: If a modern reader, accustomed to British spelling and modestly
familiar with Law Latin and French, could find the phrase without too much trouble,
the spelling was left untouched. Thus feifin became seisin but intitled and
misdemesnor were untouched.
Oddly, Blackstone seemed to have preferred ‘ized’ to ‘ised’ in words which have
reached this century with ‘ised’ in British writings. He preferred ‘surprized’ and
‘exercised,’ respectively, to their transpondian counterparts.
Vasals went to vassals.
Dozens of similar spellings were regularized. Or regularised. The closer the
problematic spelling appeared to the beginning of the word, the more likely OCL was
tempted to insist on the modern spelling of the word.
The long ‘s’ draws our attention. Readers will be familiar with the faux ‘f’
appearing in both the Constitution and Bill of Rights, for example. Appearing.
Fashions in both handwritten and printed documents dating back to the Renaissance,
on this point, preferred the long ‘s’ which, on close examination, appears to be the long
tail of a letter resembling an ‘f’ – ∫ – but with a cross-bar at the middle. Note that the
cross-bar is one-sided; it touches the tail of the ∫ but does not cross it. Therefore, this
symbol is not an ‘f’.
The cross-bar is frequently obscured in on-line presentations of Eighteenth
Century documents: http://research.archives.gov/description/1408042. But close
examination will reveal the tell-tale cross-bar is there crossing the middle of what
would otherwise be the symbol ∫.
Printers abandoned the fashion in the 1790s.[1] Rather oddly the long ‘s’ will
appear as an ‘f’ in searches in MS Word. This only increases the reader’s confusion.
Hence, in accordance with our basic principles, words containing these letters
were updated to modern British orthography. This is how Morrison’s edition treated
the matter, at any rate.
F.
MORE HINTS TO THE READER:
WB’s (or the printer’s) underlining has been removed.
WB’s italics are untouched.
Words in small and large caps remain untouched. The search should not stumble
on caps.
All footnotes remain untouched without exception. The ‘a’ in the text at the full
stop (hopefully) or at Imperial semicolon (nearly as often) guides the
reader’s attention to the ‘a’ foot of the page, signaling the note.
When the work of conforming the text is complete, the footnote
signals / will appear in both the text and below the page; this will render
searching for footnotes and within the text of footnotes possible. No nonBlackstonian critical apparatus will appear in the text.
Although certain words appear to have micro-spaces inserted
(especially at the beginning of WB’s paragraphs), these are searchable as if the spaces
did not exist; ignore the appearance of these spaces.
Section, book and chapter numbering are maintained.
G.
PAGE NUMBERS. There are no page numbers at present. Wayne Morrison notes the
history of pagination customs in the Cavendish edition (2001): Preface at ix. He
introduces the topic at the beginning of his Preface at v.
Page numbers which match the University of Chicago edition and/or Cavendish
edition would seem problematic, without (that is) marring the appearance of the text
beyond hope.
In any event, the numbering of these two editions do not differ wildly: The
University of Chicago edition’s ‘true’ page numbers, that is, the facsimile Arabic
appearing at the top right of recto pages and the top left of verso pages drifts by 12 from
the Cavendish edition by the time the reader reaches the end of volume 1. The
University of Chicago’s Chapter 18 begins at 455 while the Cavendish edition shows
‘[467]’ – brackets appearing – but the page number at the bottom of the Cavendish
edition matches neither system, apparently to save paper. OCL’s suggestion to writers:
cite to the Book, Chapter and paragraph by first words.
An example: if OCL cites to Bk. I, c. 7, ¶ ‘It is probably and almost certain … ’ the
reader will find the page with quam diu bene se gesserint. This seems a bit more
straightforward than insisting the quote is at I:258 or I:267-268 when serious scholars
know that a variety of pagination choices are available to the investigator.
What both the publishers at Cavendish and the University of Chicago have
proved, however, with their competing citation systems, is that word searches of the
entire text offer the greatest utility to the reader. Find passage/s of interest, print off a
few pages, and read them on the road. That’s why public transportation was invented.
‘Section’, ‘Book’ and ‘Chapter’ appear at the full left left margin; this
a function of moving the document from MS Word into text, that is, into
.txt file format. White space or ‘pretty on the page’ is irrelevant to the
purpose of machine searchable text.
H. MORE ON WB’S (OR HIS PRINTER’S) CHOICES. The text presented
includes WB’s original capitalization or lack thereof.
Some but not much attention was paid to long Latin quotes; if the reader has the
full quote in hand these variances will not defeat the intrepid.
Singular and plural are mixed and matched, at WB’s whim.
Original proper names were reconciled with the current fashions on proper
names. Moderns prefer their Puffendorf with one ‘f,’ WB (save an instance) with two;
OCL renders all of WB’s Puffendorfs consistent.
Words like ancestral remain as WB spelled them: if the reader searched for
ancestral and found nothing she might be expected to shorten her search
to ‘ancestr’ and proceed accordingly. This search will return three hits,
while 374 hits are returned for ‘ancest’. This will become second nature.
As for antient: it is such a short word that if the investigator got off
on the wrong foot she’d be lost at the starting gate. 507 hits on ‘ancient’
are recorded.
Ditto for treson and unwholsome. WB’s treatment of words such as
every thing for everything was not disturbed, since the reader could find
either or both.
WB mistook (by our modern standards) it’s for its. But, then again, so did the
Philadelphians, at least on one remarkable occasion: Article I, Section 10, Clause 2 is
frequently but not always sanitized. Or ‘cleansed’ as Blackstone might have said.
‘-our’ remains British. WB offers 78 instances of ‘behaviour.’ The Philadelphia
constitution offers a single instance, in Article III, which most certainly owes
something to Blackstone’s paraphrase “the judges are continued in their offices during
their good behaviour.” Neither WB nor the Philadelphians used ‘behavior.’
{OCL has launched an investigation into British and American orthographic and
punctuation practices: OCL’s Table Annexed to British Orthography in the Early
Constitution, 2 OCL 788, introduces the topic. In many respects, the Philadelphians’
preferences were rejected and long before they were laid to rest. Our Vice President has
now acquired an ‘-’ as has ‘two thirds’ if that is indeed the same number as ‘twothirds’.}
I.
WORD COUNTS. A working guess would be that 675,000 words, net of footnotes,
comprise the text of WB’s Commentaries. A precise figure will eventually be supplied;
the total will match up, on favourable terms, with the total words recorded at the
federal convention, in The Federalist essays, and in other meta-text relevant to the
Americans project of competing with all things Blackstonian. The federal convention
clocks in at 386,049 (in Farrand’s version) and The Federalist essays at 189,827 words;
throw in Hamilton’s post-retirement works and Madison’s post-retirement works
(mostly drawn from Farrand’s vol. 3) and another 87,768 and 25,339 words are
available to swell the total on this side of the Atlantic: Total = 810,917.
The point is not merely that Americans have to scrap about, here and there, to
meet Blackstone in quantity. That’s obvious.
The point is this: when an author models his effort on Justinian’s Institutes, a
lively attention to five to ten thousand rules of municipal law will push the total word
count high into the six figures, without the author even working up a sweat.
When it is noted by commentators of any dignity that lawyers work as if they are
paid per verbum, there’s a lot of truth in the judgment rendered. Always has been;
always will be.
J.
STATUS. Complete.
K.
CITATION FORMAT. Please cite as 2 Our Constitutional Logic 940 or 2 OCL 940.
L.
SERVER LOCATION. This file is maintained on the I/D server.
M.
LAST REVISED. This file was last revised on March 25, 2014; it is version 018.
N.
FILE FORMAT. The format of this file is MS Word 2010. The format of the
associated table is .txt.
O.
REFERENCES.
[1] This is also known as the ‘medial s’ which name makes it clear that this
symbol was confined to positions other than at the end of a word. The reader is
referred to:
http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/37982/use-of-f-instead-of-s-inhistoric-printed-english-documents
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s.
It may not be out of place to note that this is the first time that OCL has cited to
Wikipedia. It is a thoughtful article and, more to the point, has the virtue of being
marked down by Wikipedians as containing that wretched evil, ‘original research.’ Any
such critique is, as far as OCL is concerned, a badge of honour.