Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/277

 1922 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 269 last to his father's house in Greenland. The story is certainly well told and life-like ; while, as Mr. Gathorne-Hardy well argues, there is nothing in it that any one could have a motive for inventing. The details are rather better than here represented : ' whereupon they left the land on the port side and let the sheet turn towards it ' (p. 26) is unintelligible, though, or because, it is a literal translation. Skaut means either ' tack ' or ' sheet ', as the case may be. The meaning clearly is that they were sailing on the port tack, with a westerly wind. Here it looks, again, as if there were a true tradition. There is no obvious motive for invention, while the particulars are clear in themselves. There are many other points and matters of interest in the book ; the author is to be congratulated on his skill in putting so much into three hundred pages. W. P. KER. Mediaeval Archives of the University of Oxford. Edited by the Rev. H. E. SALTER. 2 vols. (Oxford Historical Society, vols. Ixx and Ixxiii, 19204.) THESE volumes appeal to students of history with a double emphasis ; they are published for the Oxford Historical Society, and edited by Mr. Salter. And they are peculiarly important because the documents printed are given in their complete form, and the details of them described in a competent fashion by a master of his subject. As the editor says in an introduction that is all too brief, ' students are always glad to have original documents ', and it may be added that no mere study of enrolments, still less of calendars, will ever enable the acutest mind to get to the bottom of the mysteries of the administration of the medieval chancery. But in the first volume of his book Mr. Salter has given us a complete collection of material, and just because it is a complete collection and not a selec- tion of the most striking documents he has thrown new light on one of the obscurest points in medieval chancery practice, the make-up and sealing of the so-called letters close. If we look at the terminology of the medieval chancery itself apart from the actual documents, we find at first sight an apparently simple classification based either on the diplomatic form of the instruments or on administrative convenience. And it is easy to conclude that this classification into charters, letters patent, letters close, fines, and so forth, represents the whole system used by all departments of the chancery. As a matter of fact it represents only the practice of the enrolling depart- ment, and is at its best only a cross-classification. The ' hanaper ' depart- ment which looked after the sealing and issuing of the instruments used a completely different set of terms, and speaks of writs close, writs or letters' patent, charters of the small fee, charters of the great fee ; and it must be noted that not one of these terms is used in the sense given to them by the enrolling department. Again, if we look at the work of the engrossing clerks we shall find that the method in which the actual instru- ments are prepared for sealing is not simple ; and the character of the writing and the make-up of the documents are not governed by the rules of the enrolling department. So far, indeed, as charters and letters patent