nomic or philological interest, to be taken as they are found, with such casual reservations as it has pleased a few inquiring minds to propound". The question whether a charter has been preserved in the original or in a copy has rarely been raised, and no systematic examination has been made of the habits and interests of the various religious establishments in the matter of forgeries. The grouping of charters by monastic houses, which has long been the practice of continental critics, is the more necessary in England if we grant Mr. Hall's negative conclusions respecting the Old English chancery. He finds no sound. evidence of a royal chancellor or notary before the Conquest-" Regenbald priest and chancellor" becomes a simple priest at his hands-or even of the sealing of charters, as distinguished from writs; and while "there is abundant evidence of a highly developed style of diplomatic composition", in "this primitive age the grantee drew his own grant and obtained its ratification by his personal supervision and supplication, supplemented on occasion by a judicious offering. . . . The Old English charter is a religious and a local product. The handwriting is local, the language is local, the formulas are adopted by local scribes from academic models; the attestation only is official, inasmuch as the court by which it is ratified followed the king into the locality ".

The Formula Book, originally planned as an appendix to the Studies, to which it is the natural complement, is the work of Mr. Hall's seminary at the London School of Economics. Seven students collected and transcribed the documents, while the labor of direction and editorship was performed by Mr. Hall. The result is a handbook of two hundred and twenty-five classified specimens of English official documents, ranging in date from the eighth to the nineteenth centuries and forming a collection at once more convenient and more scientific than the Formulare of Madox with which the student has hitherto been obliged to content himself. Besides the examples of individual types, the editor has at certain points brought together a series of writs or letters which show a connected sequence of transactions, as in the grant of letters patent to Connecticut in 1661-1662. The method of printing the documents will not command universal assent. No indication is given where words have been extended, and the device of representing Latin final ae by é could prove of assistance to the unpractised reader, only if it were generally followed in medieval texts. Mr. Hall's use of the term original for such early copies as Nos. I and 8 is apt to mislead, and his annotation of Henry I.'s charter concerning the local courts (No. 16) could have profited by Professor Adams's commentary in an earlier number of this journal.

A second part is in preparation, comprising "formulas of surveys, inquisitions, accounts, and of such judicial records as chiefly lend themselves to diplomatic study".

CHARLES H. HASKINS.

Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History. Volume II. By various authors. Compiled and edited by a committee of the Association of American Law Schools. (Boston: Little, Brown and Company. 1908. Pp. viii, 823.)

READERS of the first volume in this series (see AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW, XIII. 628, 629) will find the second equally attractive and helpful. The general surveys in volume I. are now followed by twentyfive essays grouped into four parts on the history of particular topics. The editors warn us that the symmetry of the earlier volume is not to be expected in this one. It certainly is true that the essays of volume II. have, in the words of Coleridge, only "the same connection that marbles have in a bag-they touch without adhering". But the marvel of it is, that in a volume composed of so many separate essays written by different hands at different times there should not be much more "touching without adhering" than there actually is; and after all we are clearly the gainers. We do not mind the overlapping in subject-matter and the conflict of views when the subject-matter is the origin of equity and the conflict of views is between Mr. Justice Holmes and Professor James Barr Ames. This only adds zest to the reading, and when so much still remains to be done in the study and mastery of English legal sources, it would be surprising indeed were there no disagreements among the pioneers. The time for a symmetrical account of legal development in England and in other countries under the sway of English law has not yet come--but is coming.

To everyone helping to prepare the way for that time part 1. of the present volume will appeal especially, for it is devoted to the sources. Professor Brunner of the University of Berlin has placed all legal and historical scholars under an additional debt of gratitude by revising, enlarging and recasting for the present volume a portion of his Ueberblick über die Geschichte der französischen, normannischen und englischen Rechtsquellen. The portions relating to French and Norman sources are now omitted, and the essay is entitled The Sources of English Law. The learned author states that Gilbert de Thornton's treatise entitled Summa de Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae of about 1292 was not published and is now lost. But what was lost yesterday may be found to-day. Following up the clue given by Selden in his Dissertatio ad Fletam, Mr. George E. Woodbine of Yale University now believes he has identified MS. Hale 135 in Lincoln's Inn Library as the missing Thornton (see Mr. Woodbine's article entitled "The Summa of Gilbert de Thornton ", Law Quarterly Review, January, 1909, which appeared shortly after the publication of Professor Brunner's essay). The second essay in the present volume is the late Professor Maitland's Materials for the History of English Law, an account of sources and literature down to the time of Henry VIII. Mr. Holdsworth's essay on the Year Books traces the origin of these medieval reports, discusses

their characteristics, and furnishes a brief account of the manuscripts and printed editions. Mr. Holdsworth follows recent editors-Horwood, Pike and Maitland-in the view that the year-books had no official origin, as the traditional legend would have us believe, but were, at first anyway, purely private work, the very earliest of them most probably "students' notebooks" (see Maitland, Year Books 1 and 2 Edward II., pp. xi-xiv, 3 Edward II., pp. ix-xvi); though Professor Brunner, in the essay above noted, seems to adopt the traditional position. The story of the reporting of judicial decisions is carried on in Mr. Van Vechten Veeder's The English Reports, 1537-1865. Included also is an Historical Survey of Ancient Statutes by the Record Commissions, an interesting account made up of extracts from the introduction to Statutes of the Realm. Appended to part 1. are three valuable lists. Professor Wigmore provides us with a new and hitherto unpublished list of references supplementary to Mr. Edward Jenks's List of Principal Sources of Medieval European Law. From Professor Reinsch we have a Short Bibliography of American Colonial Law. Part II. contains essays by Inderwick, Spence, Holdsworth and Mears on the history of the courts-common law, equity, ecclesiastical and admiralty, their organization and jurisdiction. Part III, the largest of the four, traces the history of procedure, and the ten essays range from the late Professor Thayer's Older Modes of Trial and Sir Frederick Pollock's King's Peace in the Middle Ages to Professor Hepburn's Historical Development of Code Pleading in America and England. It is difficult to single out for comment any one or more of these ten delightful esays, but it may be permitted us to draw attention, in addition to the three just mentioned, to Professor Maitland's History of the Register of Original Writs, Mr. Hubert Hall's Methods of the Royal Courts of Justice in the Fifteenth Century, and the General Survey of the Rules of Evidence by Professor Wigmore, one of the learned editors of the present collection. In part IV. are six essays on equity. When Mr. Justice Holmes's Early English Equity first appeared some twenty-odd years ago, it not only attracted much attention by reason of its originality of view but also marked the beginning of a new period of investigation in the history of equity, Professor Ames's brilliant Origin of Uses and Trusts being one of the results. The late Professor Langdell's Development of Equity Pleading from Canon Law Procedure and essays by Solon D. Wilson and Sydney G. Fisher on the history of equity in America complete part IV. and the volume.

Of course the present series, volume II. of which lies before us, presents only a selection from the many scattered essays on AngloAmerican legal development that have appeared in recent years. We are glad to see that the editors have included in volume II. at the beginning of each part longer lists of such essays than they did in

volume I. We may hope for even more complete lists in the forthcoming volume III. In future editions of the whole work the editors might possibly see their way to publish still more of these scattered essays. This step would be welcomed by the legal profession and by teachers and students of law and history.

HAROLD D. HAZELTINE.

Studies and Notes supplementary to Stubbs' Constitutional History, down to the Great Charter. By CHARLES PETIT-DUTAILLIS, Honorary Professor in the University of Lille. Translated by W. E. RHODES, M.A. [Publications of the University of Manchester, Historical Series, no. VII.] (Manchester: University Press. 1908. Pp. xv, 152.)

IN 1907 appeared a French translation of the first volume of Stubbs's Constitutional History, edited with notes and supplementary studies by M. Petit-Dutaillis. These studies have been Englished, says Professor Tait in his preface to the present work, to furnish English students. with a supplement to this first volume, for English historians have been "too much engrossed with detailed research to stop and sum up the advances". M. Petit-Dutaillis found that not only had much important work been done since the last edition of the Constitutional History, but that in later editions Stubbs had made slender and unsatisfactory use of several noteworthy achievements already effected. Furthermore our author notes the changed tone of recent medievalists, who are less swayed by the conception of England as "the messenger of liberty to the world". These supplementary studies impress one as a discreet and learned attempt to safeguard a public, which is likely to learn all that it will know of a great subject from a single book, against the shortcomings of that book. The utility of translating them for English students, of whom such as are sufficiently advanced to profit by these technical discussions should be familiar with much of the monographic literature behind them, seems to the reviewer doubtful. There will be English readers, however, thankful to have the nub of a mass of hard reading given them with a Frenchman's brevity and precision. Seventy-five books (most of them recent monographs) and over thirty-five articles are cited, many of them repeatedly, in one hundred and forty-five pages of text.

There are twelve studies and notes, varying in length from twentyeight pages to two pages. In the first seven (pp. 1-66), the author confessedly does little but sum up the work of others, showing however the shrewd discrimination and sound judgment of the experienced researcher. The three most extensive of these treat the origin of the manor, the origin of the Exchequer, and the tenurial system. The first skilfully combines a historical sketch of the rural classes in England with a critical outline of the literature of the subject, bringing the

famous controversy down to date. He holds with Vinogradoff as to origins, but believes that scholar to have over-emphasized the similarity between the thirteenth-century manor and the Anglo-Saxon community; he approves Maitland's caution on this point; and commends to Englishmen Delisle's Etude sur la Condition de la Classe Agricole en Normandie, believing that the effect of the Conquest upon English agriculture has not been appreciated nor Norman conditions sufficiently studied. Under the last head, much should be expected from the present researches of Professor Haskins. In the last five studies, M. PetitDutaillis speaks with authority, his Etude sur la Vie et le Règne de Louis VIII. (Paris, 1894) having led him to original investigation of several important English institutions. These studies are upon the origin of English towns, twelfth-century London, the two trials of King John, the Unknown Charter", and Magna Carta. He emphasizes the economic aspect of borough origins rather at the expense of their institutional aspect; he appears to have disproved Mr. Round's theory that the official confederation of the Cinque Ports was subsequent to John's reign; he believes that London was a commune in the French sense only during Richard I.'s absence, but has not successfully accounted for the mention of London's aids in the feudal twelfth article of the Charter. He upholds Bémont's original theories regarding the trials of John; believes that the "Unknown Charter" is the report by an agent of Philip Augustus of negotiations between king and barons shortly before the Articuli Baronum were formulated; and supplements some of McKechnie's conclusions by an acute study of several articles of Magna Carta, contributing some original suggestions upon points of detail. He strangely fails to take account of Professor Adams's studies on the Charter. One cannot accept his statement that art. XIV. was solely in the king's interest nor that "there is no question" in the Charter "of the reign of law". Several other supplementary studies that might have been added promptly suggest themselves; certainly recent work on scutage is very inadequately dealt with in the footnote on p. 56.

L'Angleterre Chrétienne avant les Normands.

A. B. WHITE.

Par Dom FERNAND

CABROL, Abbé de Farnborough. [Bibliothèque de l'Enseignement de l'Histoire Ecclésiastique.] (Paris: Victor Lecoffre.

1908. Pp. xxiii, 341.)

THE Abbot of Farnborough has placed students of ecclesiastical history under various obligations and the great dictionary of archaeology and liturgics appearing under his editorship would alone secure for him a distinguished place among scholars. The present slight work will not add much to his reputation. At first sight it looks pretentious, with its unnecessarily elaborate critical apparatus. Much space is given to bibliographies and the pages are loaded with references to authorities