Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/435

 1922 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 427 worker, the late Mr. W. 0. Massingberd, rector of South Ormsby, issued a privately printed volume of ' final concords ' for the county, with a brief introduction, the technical work of preparing the abstracts of the fines having been executed, as he explained, by Mr. Boyd. He was only able, however, to carry the work down to the middle of the reign of Henry III, although he expressed the hope that ' within a short period ' the remaining fines of the reign might follow. For the fulfilment of that hope the county has had to wait until Canon Foster was able to issue, for the Lincoln Record Society, this admirable volume. The method of publishing a county's fines is by no means uniform, nor has the learning or capacity of their editors been of equal merit. One has, however, to remember that the materials now at their disposal for the illustration of these records are greater and more easily available than they were a quarter of a century ago. Canon Foster has not only made the fullest use of such materials, but has provided the student with an apparatus of elaborate learning. All future editors of fines should carefully examine his work and profit by his labours. He has himself gratefully acknowledged the assistance of Professor Stenton and others with special knowledge of medieval Lincolnshire. A point which must not be overlooked is that he has given the exact date, by the modern reckoning, of every fine : this has greatly increased his labour, but will be a real boon to those who use his volume. One has seen fines so edited that even the year is not given on the page where they are printed, while to ascertain the exact date one has to turn to a work of reference. On the other hand, a note in the introduction (p. xi), as I have shown in this Review, erroneously dates the Pipe Roll of 1130 (31 Hen. I) as ' 1130-1 '. A point on which the editors of fines and indeed of other early documents are not yet agreed is the right rendering in English of certain Latin terms. If we look for guidance to the staff of the Public Record Office, we find a certain tendency, at present, to what may be described as pseudo-archaism. For my part, I agree with Canon Foster, who, in the section that he devotes to the ' Explanation of Certain Terms ', renders villa by ' vill ', on the ground that this term is ' free from ambiguity '. In this he follows Mait- land. ' Town ', he urges, ' might have been the best equivalent in former days ; but the name has now been appropriated by the larger centres of population.' On the other hand, he adopts ' foreign service ' as his rendering of servitium forinsecum. I cannot myself accept this rendering as the best ; for the modern reader must be misled by it, unless he is warned that it had not then the meaning now accepted. Mr. Stenton contributes a lengthy note on this ' difficult phrase '. Canon Foster's introduction, of more than seventy pages, is divided into sections and sub-sections, and its arrangement, under these sections, has been carefully thought out. It is not only those who are interested in ' final concords ' who will learn much from its perusal. It is impossible here to deal adequately with the information it affords ; but the editor's local knowledge and research are well shown in his dissertation on ' Lost Vills and other Forgotten Places '. Outside his county one has naturally more hesitation in always following his guidance, even when he corrects