Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/134

 126 REVIEWS OF BOOKS January resiilts. He has done his work solidly and carefully, and in a fashion that suggests little need for comment or criticism. He has, too, the supreme merit of getting his books out. An occasional vagueness in translation, here and there a doubtful suggestion or an unprecise identification, is all that a fairly careful scrutiny of the text suggests to those hypercritically disposed. In the introduction Mr. Bolland sticks, after his fashion, pretty closely to his texts and succeeds in elucidating some of the most doubtful points in them. He goes furthest afield in his preliminary disquisition on ' attorneys and bailiffs '. In this he advances good reason for identifying the * responsalis ' of Glanville with the ' bailiff ' of later texts, and shows clearly the difference of the powers of the ' bailiff ' and the ' attorney ' when representing their principals in legal proceedings. Into the wider and more difficult question when the ' attorneys ', who appear so often in the Edwardian Year Books, became a specialized professional class, a definite branch of the legal profession, differentiated from the ' Serjeants ' or when an * attorney ' plays the ' Serjeant's ' part in court by cross-examining witnesses and asking for judgement, shows that the exclusive right of audience in court, later allowed to the Serjeants, was not fully established by the death of Edward I. It looks as if * attorney ' in the early fourteenth century still suggested to the contemporary mind the general representa- tive of a person in all sorts of business, and that there is some danger in the modern legal mind carrying back the technical and late-legal sense of attorney into an age in which differentiation between layman and lawyer, to say nothing of differentiation between professional lawyers of varying grades, was still far from being complete. A few notes on details may be added by way of suggestion. It is a pity that Mr. Bolland still translates a fixed day, the ' quindene ' of a saint, by the vague form ' in the quindenes of ' the said day. It is a trivial matter, but it tends to destroy the essential point, which is the assignment of a definite day for appearance or hearing, not giving a fortnight's latitude within which the appearance is to be made. Again * dozener ', for the representation of a tithing in a hundred court, obscures in the same fashion that the name stands for ' ten ' and not ' twelve '. And it is hard to know why ' Henricus ' or ' Henri ' is always picturesquely translated and not * Salop ', as on p. 132. There is no need to appeal to the record in substituting ' Coventry ' for * Chester ' on p. 53, since Walter Langton was indifferently called bishop of Chester, Lichfield, and Coventry. On p. 3 Mr. Bolland notes quaint words, like ' smearman ' and ' steelturner ', which do not appear in the New English Dictionary. Where is the Bromley of p. 94 which the index, p. 268, locates in Surrey ? And does ' Tan carder ' define the place and not rather the profession of the ' Walter the Beaconer ' of Bromley referred to on pp. 94 and 268 ? Mr. Bolland well emphasizes the importance of the clerks of the court whose opinion is quoted in agreement with Toudeby the pleader by way of chnching the similar opinions of Chief Justice Bereford (p. 45). These clerks receive on one occasion the whole, on another a third, of damages assessed (pp. 65 and 118). But the Adam of Rothley, who put a question
 * counsel ', he hardly enters. His happy reference to a case in 34 Edward I,
 * Harry '. ' Levesque de Salop ' is of course ' Salisbury ', as on p. 129,