Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/486

 478. SHORT NOTICES July tical courts are vitiated by a confusion between the jurisdiction claimed by great ecclesiastics in their spiritual capacity and that claimed by them as holders of baronial franchises. Mr. Gilbert Stone's very clear and valuable paper * Concerning the Action of Debt at the Time of the Year Books ' will, it is much to be hoped, be followed by other similar studies. We deal elsewhere with Mr. Bolland's note upon article 13 of the Articles of the Barons.^ The number for April (no. 142) contains a very pleasant and well-informed paper by Mr. W. Senior on * The Rise of the College of Advocates '. Mr. Senior shows clearly the influence of the revived study of the civil law upon this association of civil lawyers, better known as Doctors' Commons. He emphasizes the importance of the college in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a nursery of ambassadors and civilians of political, sometimes international, repute. In a paper on * The Nature of our Constitutional Law ', Mr. H. A. Smith urges the point that conven- tions of the constitution not enforceable in the courts have been almost as important in the evolution of the English constitution as statutory law and custom which is enforced. He thinks that Professor Dicey has * exag- gerated the importance of purely legal sanctions and under-estimated the great weight which attaches to a continuous tradition in the conduct of national affairs '. This number of the review contains also a paper by Mr. C. A. Hereshoff Bartlett on the legal aspects, both civil and ecclesias- tical, of Napoleon's divorce. F. M. P. The volume of the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society for 1919 (fourth series, vol. ii) contains the first instalment of a set of reports on British and allied archives during the late war. The value of these is diminished by the fact that the different authors have understood very variously what was required, but several of them give useful information about the state of national and other records. Miss Rose Graham con- tributes an account of Archbishop Winchelsey's visitation of the Diocese of Worcester in 1301, and Mr. Godfrey Davies a careful study of the attitude of the whigs to the Peninsular war. Mr. G. W. T. Omond's paper on the question of the Netherlands in 1829-30 and Sir Harry Stephen's lecture on the legal aspects of the trial of Sir Walter Raleigh do not contain so much unfamiliar matter. V. The last two numbers of the Transactions of the Baptist Historical Society (London : Baptist Union Publication Department, 1919) include two articles of historical interest, on Bunyan's licence under the Indulgence, by Mr. G. L. Turner, and on Richard Baxter's relation to the Baptists, by Dr. Powicke. The rest is chiefly good antiquarian material. Mr. A. S. Langley has collected notes for a directory of the Baptist ministers in England about 1750. He enumerates 142 of the particular and 65 of the general branch. It is noteworthy that the Socinianism which was general in the latter had several adherents among the Particular Baptist ministers of London, though not elsewhere. A few ministers held Scottish degrees in divinity, and a considerable number were masters of arts of Providence College, Rhode Island, — no doubt, an honorary
 * See pp. 401-2 above.