Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/162

 154 SHORT NOTICES January use. Till Wyclifs time heresy was unknown in England, and there was complete liberty in the expression of religious views. Preachers, for instance, required no licence. It is, therefore, risky to say that * the church ' taught this or that ; it may be the private opinion of some exhorter whose work has survived. But Mr. Manning does well in laying emphasis on the importance of preaching, though his generahzation that confession was losing ground and the sermon gaining excites doubt. The purpose of the private chaplain maintained by the wealthy was not, as Mr. Manning says it was, that his patron might ' obtain information about Christianity '. He lays due stress on the austere side of medieval orthodoxy, which has its resemblance to puritanism, and on the prevalence of Augustinian theology. But he does not attempt to estimate the practical influence of such teaching, nor does he weigh the possibihty that the preachers and tract-Avriters demanded more than they hoped to achieve. However, he collects evidence for their comparative failure. But there remains the question whether they failed in the case of those who listened or only of those who turned a deaf ear. In every age the majority is indifferent, and the important question is that of the effect of a doctrine upon those whom it attracts. We cannot dismiss Simeon by reminding ourselves that Creevey was his contemporary. We must discover what power he had within his own circle of influence. Thus Mr. Manning's evidence of irreligion and immoraUty in Wyclif's time is not altogether relevant. On the other hand, his facts concerning the witchcraft and astrology of the age are to the point, for these displaced religion in the minds that succumbed to them. The whole book is marked by good sense and sympathy, and is a thoughtful and useful contribution to an important subject. E. W. W. Sir Matthew Cradock and some of his Contemporaries, reprinted by Mr. Ifano Jones from the Archaeologia Camhrensis of July 1919, elucidates, in somewhat discursive fashion, various points in Glamorganshire local history, more particularly under Richard III and the first two Tudors. Much of the paper is devoted to a discussion of the information given by certain poems of lorwerth Fynglwyd and other fifteenth and sixteenth- century Welsh bards, concerning a rather obscure episode in Cradock's career. The questions involved are outside the scope of this publication, but Mr. Jones's handling of them raises an interesting speculation as to the possible historical value of the considerable body of extant Welsh poetry dating from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. The subject as a whole has not been adequately investigated. Valuable pioneer work has been done by Dr. Gwenogvryn Evans in his Reports on Welsh MSS. — though Mr. Jones points out two slips which indicate that so extensive a catalogue cannot always be infallible — but as yet no considerable further progress has followed. If the poems discussed by Mr. Jones are typical, it would seem that the serious historical value of the class of literature to which they belong is at best dubious. J. G. E. Ill The Company of Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa (reprinted from The Journal of Negro History, 1919) Professor G. F. Zook has given