Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/460

 462 REVIEWS OF BOOKS July of municipal constitutions must be deferred until the appearance of the minutes in the second volume. What we have here is in the main a register of the deeds and wills of the citizens of Lynn between 1307 and 1372. There are a few of later and more of earlier date. The general arrange- ment is chronological, but the documents earlier than 1307 are mingled with the others, especially in the first few folios, in a fashion which seems to justify the editor's conclusion that the entries in the earlier part of the book were not made contemporaneously, but transcribed into it at some subsequent date, not perhaps much before 1342. An opposite view has been expressed, indeed, by Mr. Gilson of the British Museum, to whom the volume was submitted for examination, but it is not clear from the preface that he took into consideration other than palaeographic and allied evidence. The work of transcription is very competently, though not quite impeccably, done. The errors in the Oxford charter already referred to (e. g. ' mercatoriam ' for ' mercaturam ', and ' insvdis ' for * in siluis ') may be due to a faulty copy (the point is doubtful, for no textual notes are supplied), but there are words given in wrong cases on pp. 82-3 and 92, ' oblatis ' for ' oblitis ' on p. 97, and some misprints. In the translations of a few of the more important documents which are appended to the text, the editor falls into some confusion in one crabbed sentence of the agree- ment between the bishop and the citizens entered on fo. 8 d, and in another on fo. 15 he might have given the modern forms of the names ' Gripeswalde, Strellesound, and Lubice '. More serious are the defects of the glossary which he has supplied. Some explanations such as heriot = * feudal service ', and terriddium = ' produce of the land ' (correctly ' peat '), are so vague as to be useless, while others are incorrect and misleading. By sf mistranslation of ' bidentes ', a young woman is represented as receiving a legacy of twelve anchors instead of sheep (p. 160). The described as ' officers who made up the accounts of deceased brethren ', although the testator defines them as * qui obitum suum per totam Angliam pronunciabunt '. Half a ' warderoba ' situated on a tenement bequeathed by a testator (p. 39) is amusingly explained as half the contents of a ward- robe in the restricted modern sense. One wonders what Mr. Ingleby made of the ' communa warderoba ' on one of the quays, the upkeep of which was imposed on a certain tenement (p. 144). A list of names of streets, &c. (a plan of fourteenth-centvury Lynn could almost be con- structed from the boundaries of tenements given in the wills), would have been much more useful, had references been given to the pages on which they occur. On the other hand, the editor's introduction is, within its limits, sensible and helpful, and if he had enlisted expert help in com- piling the glossary, as he has done in the transcription and dating of the documents, there would have been little to criticize. By far the most numerous documents entered in the register are the wills of citizens and their widows, a predominance largely attribut- able to the inclusion of two destructive visitations of the Black Death within the period covered. The mortality among executors in the years of plague affords almost a better gauge of the severity of the plague than the
 * breviatores ' of the four orders of friars mentioned in a will (p. 147) are