Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/485

 1922 SHORT NOTICES 477 parishioners of Copgrove ', who will find in it a readable account of their former rectors. Before the Keformation, Copgrove was a cello, of the Knights Hospitallers. It has a little Norman church and a well dedicated to St. Mungo. Mr. Major gives extracts from the parish books and a transcript of the registers, 1584-90. The book is attractively printed and illustrated. H. H. E. C. Much interesting information about the old French colony of Louisiana is to be found in Creole Families of New Orleans, by Grace King (New York : Macmillan, 1921). In a series of short biographies of the more eminent French colonists and their descendants the author relates from various points of view the vicissitudes of the colony's history from the time when Bienville laid its foundations to the time when Clasiborne became governor on behalf of the United States. Glimpses of the original settlement, of social and economic life under French rule, of the struggle against subjection to Spain, and of later efforts to retain the colony's language, customs, and laws recur again and again and shed light on a little known story. The book shows a painstaking search for material, but it is lacking in concentration and style, and most of its figures belong to local rather than general history. E. A. B. In L'Histoire Traditionnelle et la Synthese Historique (Paris : Alcan, 1921) M. Henri Berr, ' Directeur de la Revue de la Synthese Historique,' describes the attitude taken up by four distinguished historians to the principles of his ' Synthese en Histoire '. The note is naturally subjective, not to say egotistic, but the first and the last portion show powers of vivid character-sketching. The first chapter describes the life and character of an ideal researcher into historical records (Tamirez de Larroque), quite indifferent to theories. The last part of the book traces the varied and very interesting mental career of Paul Lacombe, a ' theoricien de PHistoire- Science '. The two intervening chapters (on MM. Halphen and Xenopol respectively) are more controversial and show less literary power. A. G. Mr. R. L. Poole has devoted a pamphlet of twenty-five pages to The Beginning of the Year in the Middle Ages (from the Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. x. London : Milford, s. a.) in which he amplifies and corrects the information given in the ordinary date-books. Particu- larly interesting is the discussion of the origin and early history of the two methods of dating from the Annunciation, known respectively as the calculus Pisanus, which seems to have spread from the kingdom of Burgundy or Aries, and the calculus Florentinus, which Mr. Poole is inclined to connect with Fleury. The instances which he gives are of the greatest value for the accurate dating of documents of the tenth and eleventh centuries. He rejects the Easter beginning of the year in docu- ments before the thirteenth century though it is given by Cappelli (on the authority of Riihl) as occurring in Artois in 856. The date on which this view is based is discussed in detail and shown to be more probably of the year 857, which destroys its value as evidence for the Easter reckoning. The paper should be carefully compared with the current date-books and the