Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/581

 1922 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 573 (though ample justification on other grounds) why Sir Henry should have confined his attention to the documents used by the compiler of the original Book of Fees. A few additions, in fact, have been made : A few documents which were not transcribed into the Book of Fees have been included in certain sections of this edition. In some cases it was clear that the scribe of 1302 had omitted them accidentally. In other cases the new matter was so closely connected with the old that it seemed unreasonable to exclude it merely on the ground that the scribe had not made use of it. But no attempt has been made to correct all unprinted documents relating to feudal tenures during the period covered by the book (p. xxii). We propose to defer comment upon the contents of the Book of Fees until the second part of this new edition has appeared. F. M. POWICKE. Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History. Edited by SIR PAUL VINO- GRADOFF. Vol. VI. xi. Studies in the Hundred Rolls. By HELEN M. CAM. xii. Proceedings 'against the Crown (1216-1377). By LUDWIK EHRLICH. (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1921.) No better illustration could be desired of the openings presented by the rich stores of the Public Record Offipe for the revision of current accounts of even the best-known pages of our constitutional and administrative history than Miss Cam's illuminating investigation of the so-called Hundred Rolls of 1274-5. Bishop Stubbs, though he guarded himself by rather obscure references to the wider aspects of the inquiry which they record, dealt with them only as the basis of the Statute of Gloucester and the Quo Warranto proceedings. Almost exclusive attention has thus been given to the feudal encroachments revealed by the inquisitions, which were nowhere the sole subject of inquiry, and, in a county like Essex, to which a special chapter is devoted, are quite outshadowed by the mis- doings of royal officials which they disclosed. Yet looking at the positive results of the inquest, Stubbs is not without some justification, for Miss Cam has to admit that while Quo Warranto cases bulk largely in judicial records from 1279 onwards, no evidence has been found of any action against the sheriffs and other local officials whose oppressions preoccupied the minds of so many jurors. On taking up the reins of government after his four years' absence, Edward had an obvious interest in securing as accurate an account as was possible of the state of local administration throughout the kingdom, though the sufferings of his people at the hands of officials may have been less prominently in his mind than the effects of local maladministration upon the revenue of the Crown. In any case, however, he was not likely to arouse the fears of the holders of feudal liberties prematurely by confining his inquiry to these. As a matter of fact, the Hundred Rolls inquest takes its place, as Miss Cam shows very fully in her first chapter, in the long line of administrative inquests which Henry II began, and, though the commissioners did not receive judicial powers, links on at both ends to the general eyre, for which it provides a new set of articles of inquiry, the Nova Capitula. The identification of the mysterious Rageman (Ragman) Rolls mentioned in records from 1278 with the Hundred Rolls, the original returns of which had a ragged appear- ance owing to the strips bearing the seals of the jurors, clears up much doubt and confusion and, as Miss Cam justly claims, sets in its true