Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/132

 124 REVIEWS OF BOOKS January influence was constant, while the effoi-ts of the barons could, from the nature of things, only be spasmodic. Mr. Da vies then shows in detail how this influence affected the working of the chancery and exchequer, the council and parliament. He then examines the various projects for reform and estimates the total success which they attained, pointing out that this success could only be won with the king's co-operation. The weakness of the book is the ambiguity which resides in the word ' king ', since it is impossible to distinguish between the acts of the king as a person, and the 'Crown', which was from time to time merely the mouthpiece of the pai-ty which for the moment found itself able to speak with the royal authority ; and Mr. Davies has not at all times been able to escape from this confusion. Some of the acts which he quotes as the * king's ' were done under duress, some were not, and the argument frequently fails in clearness from the impossibility of drawing the line between them. The truth seems to be that political organization had not reached the point at which the provision of constitutional checks is possible. Except in matters of justice (and sometimes even there), a royal order was not invalidated by irregularity of procedure. This conclusion will not surprise any one who has studied the nature and history of the expedients by which parliament has secured at least nominal control of the national expenditure. The surveys of the administrative system on which Mr. Davies bases his conclusions are, next to the collection of printed documents, the most useful part of the book. They are a mine of information ; and any one who is studying any part of the system will do well to read the section which concerns him and to verify the references before embarking on original research. But the field covered is so wide, and the original material used is so various, that the author has nanowly escaped being smothered by his fiches, like the savant in M. Anatole France's lie des Pingouins. The criticism is applicable to all books based on the method popularly supposed to be advocated by Messrs. Langbois and Seignobos. One or two instances of the failings of this system may be extracted from the work under review, with the caveat that no ' superfluity of naughtiness ' is imputed to the author. Thus, for a quotation from ' Britton ', the manuscript at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, is vouched, though it differs in no essential from Nichols's text and the author does not mention that he is quoting Britton. Again, we are informed that (p. 235) ' Lieges in chancery were sometimes ordered to inquire into the truth of statements made in petitions, but this was only after the petition had been considered by the council '. The first thing suggested by this statement is that somebody has misprinted or misread a manuscript (since ' Lieges in Chancery ' are unknown to the text-books). So we proceed to verify the reference (iii. 135) to Bain's Calendar of Documents relating to Scotland. Here, indeed, we find the same words, equally unexplained, with a refer- ence to a ' Parliamentary Petition '. Fortunately, the document in ques- tion is printed in the Rotuli Parliamentorum (i. 422), and there we find the indorsement of the petition printed in full, viz. Assignentur fdeles in can- cellaria, &c., i.e. a special commission was to issue and report to the council — quite a normal proceeding. This is not the only case where stress is laid on insufficiently tested material. Thus (p. 134) it is stated