Page:American Historical Review vol. 6.djvu/361

 Round: Calendar of Documents 351 another saga, the Serglige Concuhiind. Mistakes like these are trivial, but they are sometimes annoying out of all proportion to their impor- tance. F. N. RoiiiNsoN. Calendar of Documents prescnicd in France, illustrative of the History of Great Britain and Ireland. Edited by J. Horace Round, M.A. Vol. I., A.D. 918-1206. (London: Printed for her Majesty's Stationery Office, by E)Te and Spottiswoode. 1899. Pp. Iv, 680.) However much scholars may have been disposed to regret in the past the long delay in the publication of the transcripts of French charters, made two generations ago for the Public Record Office, everyone may now rejoice in the fact. It would have been difficult to find another English scholar so competent for this task as Mr. J. Horace Round who has now com- pleted it. There may have been some as competent upon the side of diplomatic, or in special points more so, and some with as great a knowl- edge of the other sources of the period or of the history of the early families, but the combination in Mr. Round's case has never been rivalled. One has only to glance through these pages to learn how much we owe to the editor's pains and knowledge. Not merely has the number of the charters been largely increased, over the original transcript, but there are frequent corrections of the text both in the body of the charters and in the lists of witnesses, some of them of great importance. The labor spent upon this work, which only those can estimate who are familiar with its demands, must have been enormous. The first question which one asks about such a work is naturally : how has the calendaring been done? Can we depend upon it to give us the really important points so that we may use it with confidence, when the original is inaccessible ? I am sure that no one who has read many charters can read more than two or three of the important ones of this book without saying to himself: Of the most essential parts, this is not a calendar at all ; it is a translation. Comparison with the full text of such of the charters as are to be had in print shows this to be actually the case. Two other points are to be noticed. In the body of the charters, through- out the book, the original words are inserted in parenthesis where there may be any reasonable doubt about the rendering, or where there is any especial interest attaching to them, and the lists of witnesses are given in the original in every case. There is no need to call attention to the im- portance of these two matters. If we compare this calendar with the latest work in the same line of the Germans, who have devoted so much attention to this method of publication, with the second edition of the Bohmer-Miihlbacher Carol- ingian Regcstcn for example, which bears the same date on the title-page, we feel no need of apologizing for the English work. There are many fewer references to printed texts of the charters, or to studies on them.