Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/620

 6io Reviews of Books Norfolk manor, arranged it logically, and thus furnished a contribution to our knowledge of medieval economic conditions that is thoroughly trustworthy. Not the least part of her labor lay in getting together her materials, which consisted of widely scattered manorial documents, some of them in private hands, and some in the great collections of the Public Record Office, the British Museum, and elsewhere. Many of these she has printed in whole or in part as appendixes, and they form an interesting and useful part of her book. Comparison of an Elizabethan survey with the entries in Domesday Book helps her to show in her first chapter the topography and terri- torial development of the manor, the amount of land held by different classes of the population, and the general correspondence between the number of free and servile messuages at the later date and the number of free and unfree tenants at the earlier. Three chapters are then devoted to the history of the demesne. She is able to describe in detail what this was and how it was managed in the reign of Edward the First, a time when manorial changes were few and insignificant ; but. unfortunately, owing to lack of materials there then follows a period of seventy years about which she can tell us little. When the tale is resumed with the aid of ministers' accounts for the years 1376-1378, it is shown that the organization and management of the manor had been totally changed; and though the changes are described, the causes of them must be left to surmise. The lord had ceased forever to have the demesne lands tilled on his own account. He preferred to lease them for a term of years, and during the next century there was a marked tendency to lengthen the term till the tenure developed into fee-farm. In her account of the tenants and their land the author follows the same plan as in her account of the demesne. She traces concisely the situation at the beginning of the fourteenth century, the disorders and confusion prevalent two generations later, and the gradual evolution of the copyholding yeomen from the sokeman and the bond- man ; and in doing so she gives us many concrete facts of interest and importance. It cannot be too much deplored that the years that brought the downfall of the ancient manorial system are just the years for which her materials were wanting. It was a broken organization and decaying institutions, uncertainty and disorder, on which the ministers' accounts of 1376-1378 cast a brief and lurid light. The old order had fallen into a confusion out of which were slowly to emerge security of tenure and industrial freedom. That we are left in ignorance of what had happened on this particular manor to cause the confusion is in no wise the fault of the author, however much the gap here in her history may diminish our satisfaction with it. The reviewer feels that the author would have added to the useful- ness of her book by making some comparison of conditions on the manor she studied with conditions that are known to have prevailed else- where. In the case of the rate of rent she does this. If she had done the same in other cases, nnich that she tells us would have added sig-