Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/433

 1922 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 425 Only experts can judge the validity of the criteria used to effect this reassemblage of parts and to restore the old Kentish dialectical forms of the original Widsith-Lied, but each of the divisions arrived at certainly seems to have a unity of its own. The texts edited by Dr. Fehr and Dr. Wildhagen are in one respect complementary inasmuch as the Corpus manual for the visitation of the sick, &c., contains a calendar and both the Corpus and Laud manuscripts have litanies with lists of saints and confessors. As it happens too, the Laud and Vitellius manuscripts certainly, and in the opinion of its editor the Corpus manuscript also, are of Winchester provenance. Both editors therefore devote some attention to the selection of saints which is made in their documents. Curiously enough, the Corpus calendar is not among those which Wildhagen compares with that of Vitellius E. xviii, and so he does not note that the Breton saint Machlovius (St. Malo), who appears under 15 November in the latter, is inserted at the same date under his other name of Machutus in the Corpus text. By far the longest contribution to the volume is Dr. Max Forster's elaborate and most valuable study of ' Keltisches Wortgut im Englischen '. He rightly deprecates the old fashion of referring all Celtic loan-words in English to Old Irish forms, though only a very narrow range of words introduced by the Irish missionaries or later by the Scandinavians can be traced to this source. By which of these channels the most important of Irish loan-words, ' cross ', came into England, Dr. Forster holds to be uncertain, though Ekwall is inclined to derive the English word mainly from Scand. Jcross. In connexion with this and some other words of British or Irish origin, Dr. Forster has much to say that is of interest to the student of place-names, but he does not profess to deal otherwise than incidentally with the Celtic survivals in local terminology, which, as he rightly complains, have been almost totally neglected in our place- name studies. As specimens of a better way, he appends a careful examina- tion of the history of the names London and Strathclyde, the former of which, however, he believes to be pre-Celtic. It is rather surprising to find him falling into a confusion of Elmet with northern Strathclyde (p. 233). The most striking novelty in Dr. H. Boehmer's full and penetrating study of the ownership of churches (Das Eigenkirchentum) in England, which he traces back as a universal feature to the first age of church foundation, is his attempt to prove the existence of a lost law of Cnut. allowing church owners to levy a maximum annual due of 2d. per acre on glebes. This confessedly bold hypothesis he rests mainly upon the figures of the East Anglian Domesday, in which churches are generally mentioned and the number of acres in the glebe is usually given, followed by their annual value (valet). In Suffolk values of 2d. per acre are com- monest, in Norfolk not infrequent, though Id. is more regular. Similar values are comparatively rare in ' Great Domesday ', but 2d. per acre is not uncommon there too, according to Dr. Boehmer, although, as the glebes are seldom given in acres and some of the south-western counties seem to have had a hide of few acres, one would like a fuller statement of the evidence than he has supplied in a note of four lines. Apart from this