Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/929

 Minor Notices g 1 9 part (p. 81). It is not without significance that it coincides in time with the rising power of the Cluniac order, which came at the phenome- nal hour when the church in northern Gaul was at its lowest point owing to the ravages of the Northmen and the invasion of the sanctuary by the power of feudalism (pp. 82 ff.). The new movement — M. Halphen calls it renovation — was remarkable for the depth, grandeur, and per- manence of the forces, engaged; it was a veritable renaissance of its kind. Raoul Glaber, in allusion to the new structures rising up over France, like white samite in their freshly carved stone, says that it seemed to snow churches. The process of institutional development in i jou in the eleventh century was identical with that which characterizes the history of the Capetian monarchy from Robert the Pious to Louis VI. The Angevin counts intensively developed their power by waging relentless war upon the swarm of petty- barons who infested the land. " Comme celle de Louis le Gros, leur vie ne fut qu' una longue lutte centre les barons ; lutte non pas intermittente . . . mais une lutte sans relache et pour- suivie jusqu' a la victoire definitive" (p. 204). But as in the Ile-de- France in the eleventh century, so in Anjou, the counts were not so utterly devoid of forces in their favor (aside from the church) as is ordinarily supposed. One of the most valuable parts of M. Halphen's study is his treatment of local institutions. The persistence of Carlo- vingian local forms, of course not in a complete, yet in a fragmentary way, is admirably established. The lamented Maitland has somewhere observed that lichen and moss will survive storms that fell the oak; in the present instance some of the humbler features of Carlovingian institutional history are shown to have survived the forces that whelmed the missi doininici in ruin (pp. 107, 108). Six appendices and a cata- logue of the acts of Fulk Nerra, Geoffrey Martel, Geoffrey le Barbu, and Fulk Rechin conclude the book, and form nearly one half its body. In the list of additions and corrections the date of the capitulary of Servais, erroneously given as 953 instead of 853 in the note on page I, is not amended. James Westfall Thompson. M. L. Halphen's £tude stir les Chroniques des Comtes d' Anjou et des Seigneurs d'Aniboise is an exhaustive study of the relation between the Gesta consulum Andegavensiinn, the Liber de compositione castri Am- basiae, and the Gesta Ainbasiensinm dominorum. Mabille was the first scholar to make a serious study of these sources, in 1 87 1. The present study is a fine example of synthetic criticism. M. Halphen shows that these three sources of Angevin history were not arbitrarily composed nor confused by copyists, but that they have an intimate association. The Gesta Ambasiensium dominorum was composed in part with the aid of the Gesta consulum Andegavorum ; the author of the Liber de compositione castri Ambasiae adopted the preface of the Gesta. The result of this research is double. In the first place, the elements that