Note 263 — BOOK III THE COMPANIES (continued 2)

Cf. ch. ix. The patent is printed from the Patent Roll in M. S. C. i. 262; also from a copy of the entry on the Patent Roll preserved amongst Rymer’s papers in Sloane MS. 4625 by Steevens, Shakespeare (1773), ii. 156, and therefrom in Variorum, iii. 47. This text omits the words ‘oure Citie of London and liberties of the same as also within’. Collier, i. 203, and Hazlitt, E. D. S. 25, printed the Signet Bill, erroneously describing it as the Privy Seal, from the State Paper Office. This has the omitted words, and Collier correctly explains the omission in Steevens’s text as due to an inaccurate copyist, pointing in proof to the words ‘in oure said Citye of London’. This did not, however, prevent Fleay, 45, from asserting that in the Patent ‘an alteration had been made from the Privy Seal’, on the ground that its terms ‘infringed on the powers of the City authorities’. Such an alteration not merely did not take place, but would have been a diplomatic impossibility, as the Patent Roll was made up, not from the Letters Patent, but from the Privy Seals on which these were based.