Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/131

 1920 BE VIEWS OF BOOKS 123 memoranda rolls of the exchequer, and of the miscellaneous records of the reign such as Ancient Correspondence and Ancient Petitions, and less use of the Enrolled Accounts. He thus supplements the orderly lists of officers given by Mr. Tout with a vast quantity of miscellaneous material, of which he makes excellent use. Not the least valuable part of the work is the Appendix of 130 documents arranged according to the classes in which they are to be found in the Public Record Office. Not all of these are germane to the problem with which Mr. Davies is dealing. It is, for instance, difficult to find out what point is illustrated by no. 110, a letter from the earl of Pembroke to one of his clerks assigning part of the rent of one of his estates in Guienne for the payment of a debt. The form in which these documents appear is not completely satisfactory. No dates are given. This is comparatively unimportant when the documents, e. g. Privy Seals, bear their own date, but in many cases a date could have been assigned without difficulty. From the neglect of this measure Mr. Davies has missed an opportunity of bringing together the letter (no. 62) in which Edward II lays before the council the reply of Thomas of Lancaster to his requests for help against the Scots in the autumn of 1315, and the reply itself (no. 101) which was presumably an enclosure to the letter. The former is now a ' Chancery Warrant ', while the latter is ' Ancient Correspondence ', but a comparison of the two leaves little doubt that they belong to each other ; and the futility of Thomas as a ruler is apparent when the date of this letter is considered. Furthermore, the transcription is occasionally faulty, whether owing to printers' errors or to a well-meant attempt to reproduce the exact spelling and punctuation of the documents. The vicissitudes of the public records during the war prevented Mr. Davies from revising the proofs of these transcripts with the originals. In the circumstances a bold handling of the text would have been a smaller evil than the admis- sion of apparently impossible forms of words, e. g. ' key ' for ' ley ' (no. 14), ' deserm ' for ' deserui ' (23), ' lestrouet ' for ' lescrouet ' (24), ' pronours ' for ' prouours ' (93), &c. The table of materials used shows that Mr. Davies has not missed any important sources, although he does not mention Lord Harlech's ' Letter Book of Richard de Bury ' described in the Fourth Report of the Historical MSS. Commission, which he would have found useful as illus- trating the working of the Privy Seals. It is a pity that he contents himself with quoting the press-marks of the manuscripts consulted without specifying their nature. It is easier to estimate the value of a reference if we know whether the manuscript is e.g. an original wardrobe book, a copy of a chronicle, or a legal miscellany. Some of the records used are also insufficiently described. It is more difficult to make a fair estimate of the book itself. It rests on a large body of research, particularly among original documents, and there is a great deal in it which is both new and true. Furthermore, the point that the barons had no effective mode of controlling the administra- tion is proved beyond contradiction. The method of argument is to describe the working of the household and the means open to the king to influence the executive machine ; showing incidentally that this