Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/461

 1920 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 453 increase in the number of wills. As is well known the medieval boroughs, which were museums of archaic law, retained the right of disposing of land by will long after it had been disallowed by the common law. When the practice of probate of wills came in, they claimed the right of approving the testamentary dispositions of their citizens so far as these dealt with land, and though they could not interfere with the ecclesiastical probate of bequests of goods, they usually registered the whole will in which tenements were bequeathed. The series on the Red Register is a very interesting one, both for the details of the wills themselves and for the procedure in probate. In the later years of the period covered a record of probate both by the official of the bishop and by the town authorities is nearly always appended. Prior to this, however, such curious variations occur — sometimes one and sometimes the other being given alone, some- times none at all — that one is almost driven to suppose that those who transcribed older documents into the register (assuming that it was begun in that way) allowed themselves a good deal of discretion in regard to what they copied. As far as the town was concerned, wills were proved, after public notice, before the mayor, alderman, and commonalty in the Guild Hall, but soon, if not from the first, the last were represented by a few persons chosen for this duty. The Hustings court, before which wills were proved in London, is only mentioned once in this volume (p. 34) in a record of a land suit brought under a writ 'de recto '. The ecclesiastical probate, as was natural in view of its subject-matter, came first. Indeed there are cases in which the town probate was deferred for some years. A relic of the rights of the kin is possibly preserved in the provision inserted by one testator that a tenement which was to be sold by his executors should be offered to his son for £10 less than the highest sum that any one else would give (p. 230). The tenement is not said to have been purchased by the testator, as those dealt with before it are, and there is some ground, therefore, for regarding it as an hereditary property. Many other points of interest present themselves on a perusal of these pages, but what has been adduced may suffice to indicate that the volume is a valuable addition to the printed materials for the study of English town life in the middle ages. James Tait. Henry V. By R. B. Mowat, M.A. {Kings and Qtieens of England, edited by R. S. Rait and W. Page. London : Constable, 1919.) Mr. Mowat takes the most favourable view of Henry V as ruler and man. ' He educated the whole nation, and infused it with the spirit of his own youth and energy. . . . He left an empire that would crumble, but an ideal that could never die.' And again in another place Mr. Mowat writes.: The present writer has no desire to quarrel with this opinion, which is certainly more just than the rather depreciatory judgement on Henry which has been passed by some recent writers. Still it may be questioned whether Mr. Mowat does not go a little too far in attributing the whole success of the reign to the personality of the ruler, and whether he. does not under-estimate the innate strength of the nation at the time of Henry's
 * Henry's most permanent gift to England is the sentiment of patriotism.'