Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/165

 1922 SHORT NOTICES 157 lectanea Hispanica, 1 it includes Portuguese as well as Spanish manuscripts, and manuscripts written in ordinary minuscule as well as those written in Visigothic. It also differs from Dr. Clark's work in that its plates reproduce the manuscripts in the original size, which renders them useful to the palaeographer. Unfortunately the work still suffers from the serious defects pointed out on the appearance of the first fascicule. 2 It is still difficult to discern a plan in the selection and arrangement of the material. Thus, plate i, for example, gives us a specimen of Visigothic script of the ninth century and of Gothic script of the fifteenth. The description of the plates is uneven and inadequate. There is no uniformity in the titles of the plates : Latin, French, Spanish, and Portuguese titles occur. Plate xxvi has the wrong title. Plate xxxix, assigned to the fifteenth century, is incorrectly dated 1146 in the description. Dates are assigned to the plates without any reason given in the description. Important abbreviations characteristic of the Visigothic script are overlooked, while trite and unimportant symbols are mentioned. A form of r and n in combination, typical of Visigothic writing, is unnoticed, but perfectly useless and meaningless combinations (lettres liees) are painfully enumerated. One is amazed at the alphabetically arranged lists of ligatures which serve no purpose whatever save as exercises in proof-reading. On p. 106 no less than 163 lettres liees are enumerated. Such industry is not merely fruitless ; it is wasteful, considering the cost of paperand printing. There arenota few errors in transcription. That of plate xxxi, a facsimile of great interest, has no less than six : on p. 119, 1. 2, ' terras ' should be read ' terras ' ; I. 8, ' nobis donavit ' (not ' tibi dotavit ') ; 1. 11, ' de eclesia ' ; 1. 13, ' qwicqwid ' ; 1. 14, ' fontauria '. Of the twenty plates in this fascicule, seven show Visigothic writing, the rest the ordinary minuscule current in Europe between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. Most of the manuscripts reproduced contain works of patristic and monastic interest. Five facsimiles are from manuscripts written in the vernacular. The plates are in collotype and excellently done. E. A. L. The famous generalization of Thorold Rogers that ' from the earliest times wheat has been the principal grain on which the English have lived ' 3 is attacked in Sir William Ashley's article, ' The Place of Rye in the History of English Food ' (Economic Journal, September 1921), with a heavy battery of evidence collected from various sources and from every century from the thirteenth to the eighteenth, and this article goes a long way towards proving the contention of Lord Ernie that in medieval England rye was the chief bread-stuff of the peasantry and the chief grain- crop on the holdings of manorial tenants. 4 To review the new arguments would be to transcribe Sir William Ashley's pages. Perhaps it will be more useful to supplement them by a few scraps of additional evidence. The Tax Assessment of 1283 for the Hundred of Blackbourne in Suffolk con- tains particulars of the stocks of grain held by manorial tenants : the total 1 The first instalment of this work appeared in 1912: see ante, xxix. 121-3. 2 Ante, xxxvi. 46^-6. 3 J. E. Thorold Rogers, Six Centuries of Work and Wages (1906 edition), p. 59. 4 B. E. Prothero, English Farming Past and Present (1912 edition), p. 8,