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 1920 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 593 council ' whether they are heard in parliament or not. But we should have liked the distinction drawn a little more at length and in detail ; for many, if not most, of these cases seem to have been heard in parliament and to illustrate the development of the jurisdiction of the future house of lords at least as much as that of the jurisdiction in council. The case on pp. 5-8 is one subsequently transferred to parliament ; the cases on pp. 8-18 are a bundle of parliamentary petitions ; the pleas on pp. 27-32 and 48-53 are definitely stated in the record to be ' placita coram domino rege in parliamento suo ' ; it is the king and ' the very noble lords of this present parliament ' whom the tailors of London petition (pp. 74-6) for remedy, and so do the petitioners on pp. 81-2, while John Atte Wode approaches ' the very wise lords and commons ' (pp. 86-91). Even when the address is to the king and council, the case is often heard in parliament, and as Mr. Baldwin remarks (p. xxi), ' Our records will show that at any stage a case before the council might be treated in parliamentary session without change in the character of the proceedings beyond the manifest advantages of larger attendance, wider discussion, and stronger sanction '= We may be asking for premature distinctions, and the cautious-confusion of the Public Kecord Office's category of Parliamentary and Council Proceedings indicates the magnitude of the task. But we cannot evade it if we are to understand that genesis of modern parliaments which gives the constitutional history of the middle ages its chief importance. A. F. POLLABD. Codice Diphmatico dei Re Aragonesi di Sicilia, 1282-1355. Vol. i. Edited by Giuseppe La Mantia. (Documenti per servire alia storia di Sicilia pubblicati a cura della Societa Siciliana per la Storia Patria. Serie I, vol. xxiii. Palermo : Boccone del Povero, 1918.) In this large and handsome volume, whose format does great credit to the Sicilian publisher working under war conditions, the veteran librarian of the Societa Siciliana di Storia Patria issues the first volume of what promises to be an important addition to the material for the study of the history of his island. His undertaking does not aim at covering the whole of the ' Aragonese ' period, and he has given good reasons for leaving to other hands the years between 1355 and the definitive union of Sicily and Aragon early in the fifteenth century. The present instalment, though including more than 200 documents, only covers the reign of Peter I (1282-5) and the greater part of that of King James (1285-91), stopping just short in 1290 of the accession of Frederick, who, first as lieutenant of his brother and afterwards as king, really established the independent kingdom of insular Sicily, which, free alike from Aragonese and Neapolitan control, made the monarchy of Sicily a reality as well as a phrase for some hundred and twenty years. During the nine years covered by the book Sicily was always closely related to Aragon, either through union under a single king or by the close relations of the local ruler, whether as king or lieutenant, to the head of his house. But the Aragonese connexion had this good result for Sicilian history that it extended to the island some of the advanced methods of the Aragonese VOL. XXXV. — NO. CXL. Q q