Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/606

 698 REVIEWS OF BOOKS October also that excellent workmanship is put into its preparation for the reader. The present volume follows the same plan as the preceding four, but differs in the astonishing wideness of its scope. Whereas the fourth volume, in 488 pages, covered the first fourteen years of Edward Ill's reign only, the fifth, in 486 pages, completes that ^ long reign, covers the reigns of Richard II and Henry IV, and stops at the fifth year of Henry V. A calendar with so wide a range naturally must contain fish for many nets. The ecclesiastical historian will be grateful for the publication of the interesting series of enrolments (pp. 152-3, 225-7, 269, 393, 458) referring to the priory of Dominican sisters at Dartford in Kent, and its relation to the Dominican friary at King's Langley in Hertfordshire. As long ago as 1878 Father Palmer gave a detailed account, based upon wide searching among both chancery and exchequer records, of the history of these two houses, but his work, buried in The Reliquary, is somewhat inacces- sible, and certain confusions still persist, and have led the indexer of the present volume into some difficulty. Both Langley and Dartford, the first directly and the second indirectly, owed their existence to Edward II and his devotion to the memory of his mother Queen Eleanor. Though he lost her when he was only six years old, and had scarcely seen her till the eighteen months preceding her death, he seems to have received a perma- nent impression, and all whom the mother had loved were sure of the son's favour. Conspicuous among these were the Preaching Friars, whose founder was a Castilian, whose houses owed much to Eleanor's bounty, and in whose church at London her heart was enshrined. Consequently Edward had not been five months on the throne when he obtained permission froiu the pope to found a house of Dominicans at Langley, close to the palace in which most of his boyhood had been spent. By 1312 the church was ready for consecration, and three years later Edward brought to it the body of his murdered favourite, Gaveston, for splendid burial. A few years later, however, he took up with even greater enthusiasm a project for introducing Dominican sisters to England, and in 1319 went so far as to suggest to the pope that the Langley foundation should be trans- ferred to women. Neither this nor any other proposal was carried out during his lifetime, though in 1321 John XXII gave him permission to found a house of nuns anywhere he chose in England, its sisters to have the same privileges as those of Bellemont in Valenciennes. It was reserved for Edward III in 1346 to act upon this permission, and found at Dartford ' a monastery of sisters of the order of preachers, with houses, cloisters, and enclosures, to be a priory and dwelling for a prioress and thirty-nine sisters to be there enclosed, to be under the rule and habit of St. Augustine and the obedience of the prior of Langley ', who was to send some of his friars to live at Dartford and ' minister to the prioress and nuns in divine services '. The first endowment, recorded on pp. 152-3 of the present volume, consisted of £100 annually at the exchequer, and was granted in 1356. Edward II had granted the same sum for Langley alone, in its modest beginnings, and it was clearly quite insufl&cient now for ' victual, clothing, and all other necessaries ' for sixty friars at Langley and forty nuns at Dartford. The records of this and succeeding reigns show many additional grants. After the dissolution of the monasteries Edward II's