For nineteenth-century readers of these three editions of Matthew Bacon’s A New Abridgement of the Law, the printed case cites in the margins of the page were just as authoritative as the main text. A lawyer before the U.S. Supreme Court during Chief Justice John Marshall’s tenure invoked the cases collected in the margin of page 609 of Henry Gwillim’s edition of the Abridgement to substantiate an argument about a common law evidentiary rule. This may have been the move of a savvy advocate, since Marshall himself cited cases collected in the margins of Gwillim’s edition in his common law opinions. 

The editors of the three editions displayed here reshaped the substance of Bacon’s Abridgement through their marginal notes. As the advertisement to John Bouvier’s edition acknowledges, editors added cases to the margins that they felt were “useful to his professional brethren” and which would “elucidate” the proposition in Bacon’s main text. But these marginal annotations did more than elucidate Bacon’s work. Each marginal annotation put a new gloss on Bacon’s original exposition of common law rules. Editors elevated cases to positions of authority by citing them in the margins.