 Professor Baker, ar y fwy ysgolwydau i gynlluniaethol, sy'n mynd i'w fawr o'r cyflawn ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd. Felly mae'n dod o ffodol o'r ddau'r mynd i gael cyflawn o'r ffordd o'r gael o'r ysgolwydau a'r ddau'u gael, ac i'r rhesonegau i'r strategi ac i'r meathodologi. Felly, i'w wneud yn fawr o'r llythbu gyda iawn hwnnw, yna, eich cwestiynau lligwyd bwysig i'r llwyr mewn gondol. Roeddwch rywbeth am fy sefydlu i ddiweddau y cwestiynau hynny. Felly, y dyfodol yn y cwestiynau llythbu, ein cwestiynau llygwyd ar yr ysbryd yma, wedi gweld rydyn ni'n cynhwyl treadlau mewn llygwyd, ac 어� byddwn i'n fyddechau rhywbeth arwot. Byddwn i'n ddweud, yn cael ei gwybod yn gyfail o'r llythbu i'w perthyniadol. I didn't think I ever felt I understood anything legal unless I knew where it had come from and why and no doubt agreeing to write a textbook on legal history was some sort of decision so it was quite early on. I wondered how your interest evolved over the years. Was it opportunistic as you made various discoveries? Well to some extent although discoveries tend to be related to what you're going looking for Rwy'n meddwl i wneud i gyrw'r ffordd i'r ystyried mewn cyfyrdd yn eu meddwl a fewnwch ar weld arno i gynnwyd, fwy o ddigonion arhoedd o'r dwydym nhw. Rwy'n meddwl i gyd i'r gyrw i. Dyma, dyma ydych chi'n meddwl oes gennych maen nhw i'r thilydd. Mae'r arddangos oherwydd iddyn nhw, rwy'n meddwl o'n meddwl ein slog i'w goffydd. Rydyn ni'n meddwl padsio gyrfa, ac mae'n gilydd at y mi nydig i'r taeth mewn tyniadau. Dydw you have periods of intense reading, and then perhaps you were doing a sabbatical, or were you able to do your writing interspersed with a lecture programme? Well, there are two stages, obviously there's the collection of material, and then when you think you've got enough, there's trying to write it off and working out if you've got something worth saying. The collecting material had to be spread out over odd moments and intervals, precious visits to the public record office of the British Museum, or even the UL, sometimes difficult to get to in turn time, and one just did that whenever one could. For writing up, it is a good idea to have a bit of extended peace and quiet if one can get it, so vocations provided that. I didn't ever have that many sabbaticals, and they're not that conducive to the research stage, because one is always tempted to go far away, and one is away from the sources. They are very good for writing up, because it's an advantage to be away from the sources and you don't go away chasing footnotes when you should be concentrating on the main writing, and the All Souls Fellowship was particularly helpful in that respect, I got a lot done there. Many or most of your works describe how you need access to particular materials, for example play rolls, yearbooks and a range of manuscripts. I wondered how quickly you managed to master the Latin and the Law of French to translate such texts. I started with the printed yearbooks in the Inner Temple Library, as I mentioned previously, and it's much a matter of understanding the abbreviations as the language, and eventually you realise it's all standardised and you come to know what the forms are. My biggest learning period, I suppose, was editing spellmen when I had to grapple with the Law of French and with the Latin of the play rolls, and they thought editing is something you can't duck issues, you've got to translate every word, so you just have to keep at it until you've made sense of it. Eventually I ended up writing a little glossary of Law of French, because no one had done one before. It even went into a second edition, it doesn't have a vast readership. A feature of your works is your constant use of original research, even in your introductory book, and many start with the discovery of a manuscript. This must have given you a strong intellectual base upon which to set your articles in your books. We're not just reinterpreting previous cases, or other scholars' theories, but presenting completely fact-based observations upon which to base new ideas, and this place and much of your work beyond dispute. It seems to me a very scientific approach, and I wondered whether this was a conscious strategy that you adopted throughout your career. I'm not sure I've ever had any conscious strategies, I just got on and done it, did what seemed obviously necessary to gather the evidence, and I've always tried to stick to the evidence. I get accused of sticking too close to it and being an internalist and not taking enough account of what's going on outside the sources. My work has been very largely based on manuscripts, what I find in them. Having settled on legal history as your chosen subject, can we briefly look at the early years of your research? I wondered whether you could tell us something about your first book, Introduction to English Legal History, which appeared in 1971, and presumably you spent several years at UCL working on it on the sources for this book. Do your earliest papers give clues as to your thinking and your approach, as they were written while the book preparation was ongoing? The earliest paper that I found was published in 1968, when you were about 23 years old, a sixth copy of Blackstone's lectures published in the law courtly review. No, that was just an announcement of a find in the law library. The law library at UCL had just moved from the rather stately Donaldson library into this warehouse-like building, and I think they probably decanted the contents of the store there as well when this Blackstone manuscript turned up. It hadn't been in the old library. And I just took it to the issue desk and they stamped out the return date inside it. I took it straight to Professor Keaton, the head of departments, and he said you should put a note in the law courtly review, so that's what I did. But it wasn't a piece of research at all. But it was the start of a long and enthralling journey that you began? Well, it showed an interest in manuscripts, I suppose. There were other papers, 12 papers, published during the gestation period of your book, your introduction to English legal history, and I wondered if they represented parallel projects or were they spin-offs from your research for the book. For example, councillors and barristers, this was a paper on an aspect of a legal profession and there's also a section in your book on barristers. It's quite a short section, I think, of two pages. The truth is I didn't do much research for the book, if any, because my object wasn't to set out the results of research, but to try to summarise very briefly what was known for the benefit of students. So the research was going on in parallel, and of course if I discovered something that seemed to be necessary in a brief outline, I put it in, but it wasn't designed to alter what I was saying. Later on, in subsequent editions, of course, one finds a bit more results of research than I'd done, but that's inevitable. Incidentally, in your Irish jurist paper, you made a youthful conclusion, you were 25 years old at the time, that the 16th century battle between Cook and Ellesmere was more about personalities than equity and law, and I wondered whether this conclusion has stood the test of time. I think so, and I don't suppose anybody now believes that that dispute was about the need for equity, which it wasn't, and it was certainly a clash of personalities. It was also, I think, a constitutional crisis of a kind, and I've been exploring that in my latest book on Magna Carta. I think that was actually one of the best articles I ever wrote, and having revisited it 30 or 40 years later, I wasn't able to add very much to it. It was based, and what sparked off was the discovery of Timothy Turner's notebook in the British Museum, which had some very significant comments on what was going on in 1616. That was a happy discovery, and I haven't found anything more telling since then on that particular subject. Just as an aside, your funeral monuments in the air, published in the Irish Jurist in 1970, seems quite an esoteric topic, and I wondered what drew you to this in this earlier period of your research. Well, that was another tangential piece of work, and obviously it related to an early interest in monuments, but it wasn't an antiquarian piece. I was interested in the doctrine which put forward that the ownership of a funeral monument belongs to the person who put it up during their lifetime, and then it goes to the heirs of the person commemorated. That seemed to me one of the most extraordinary doctrines in the common law because it's the only example of a remainder in real property by operation of law rather than by grant, and I wanted to know whether Cooke had just made it up. That's what that was about, but it stood alone as a subject that doesn't relate to anything else.