Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/138

 130 REVIEWS OF BOOKS January the policy of exclusiveness embodied in the new charters procured by London monopolists, were themselves seeking powers to exclude the competing capital of younger merchants and prosperous clothiers from foreign trade. Miss Sellers is quite right in regarding the charter of 1580 as inaugurating a period of retrogression, and in passing the same judgement on the merchant adventurers' charter of 1564 ; but it is a little inconsistent with this view to speak of the expulsion of the Hanse merchants from London whictf*was achieved by the vested interests of a minority of merchants to the detriment of the community at large * as a great national undertaking '. The conflict was between two sets of corporate monopolies and not national in any true sense on either side. Nor can we acquiesce in an earlier obiter dictum that it was the fear that the market of Flanders would be closed to our wool that caused the Hundred Years' war. The Merchants' Hall at York is the most interesting relic of medieval commerce still extant in England, and it is most satisfactory to learn that all the company's documents, arranged in chronological order, are now accessible there to students. Our gratitude to the editor would have been increased if she had tempted students to York by adding to her book a list of the documents. George Unwin. Geschichte der Serhen. Von Constantin Jire^ek. IL i : 1371-1537. (Gotha : Perthes, 1918.) Death has unfortunately prevented Professor Jirecek from finishing his monumental ' history of the Serbs ', the first volume of which was reviewed in this periodical nine years ago.^ He lived, however, to complete the first half of the second volume, which brings the narrative down to the end of the Serbian despots in south Hungary in 1537. Thus, he more than concluded the mediaeval history of Serbia, and has left us the first exhaus- tive work upon that subject based upon minute study of practically all the available sources, Serbian, Greek, Turkish, Hungarian, and Italian, and of nearly all the voluminous literature that modern research has accumulated in the last forty years upon the Balkans. The war prevented him, of course, from keeping abreast with what was being published in allied countries, and his summaries of Serbian art and literature, therefore, take no notice of Dr. Pupin's volume on Serbian Orthodox Churches or of Professor Pavle Popovic's Jugoslovenska Knjiievnost. It is, however, to be regretted that his invaluable work is marred by a complete lack of style. Even the battle of Kosovo fails to inspire his narrative, which consists of a dry and jejune statement of facts, without perspective and without generalizations. He has constructed a vast store-house full of materials for some future historian who can make the dry bones live — no very difficult task in the case of a history so fascinating as that of Serbia in the middle ages. One-third of the present volume is devoted to the institutions and social life of the Serbs under the Nemanjid dynasty and should have been included logically in the first volume. The author had already treated this subject in his (unfinished) essays on Stoat und Gesellschaft im > Anle,xxn. 761. i