Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/617

 1922 SHORT NOTICES 609 The essay by the late M. de Pachtere, a French archaeologist who lost his life on the Macedonian front in 1916, on La Table Hypothecate de Veleia, which forms the 128th volume of the ' Bibliotheque de 1'^cole des Hautes Etudes ' (Paris : Champion, 1920), was well worth publishing, and is a model of careful research and close reasoning. The table of Veleia is excellently edited in the eleventh volume of the Corpus of Latin inscriptions, and fre- quent references are made to it by historians and archaeologists who have dealt with the alimenta and with Roman agriculture ; but no one has before attacked in detail the problem of the location of the pagi mentioned in the inscription or the formation of the estates on which the mortgages were secured. M. de Pachtere has reached some interesting results. He has found traces of the various strata of population Ligurian, Celtic, and Koman or Romanized in the local and personal nomenclature, and has made a distinct contribution to economic history by tracing, so far as is possible, the disintegration and re-formation of the larger properties. He has also shown, by a minute examination of the figures, that the advances made to landowners were regulated by a definite percentage scale of the value of the estates pledged, and that the margin of security was raised during Trajan's reign. The map which accompanies the volume is not his work, and is not altogether satisfactory : and there is a slight difficulty about the location of the Pagus Salutaris, which was on the confines both of Placentia and Parma. C. The intention of Mr. F. J. Foakes Jackson's Introduction to the History of Christianity, A.D. 590-1314 (London : Macmiltan, 1922), is to encourage its readers to pursue further the study of the middle ages. It treats in a general way the main features of the period in a series of somewhat disconnected chapters, ranging from Gregory the Great in the first to Dante's Divine Comedy in the concluding chapter. Though it will no doubt interest its readers, it will be a very unsafe guide to their further studies. It is full of the most amazing inaccuracies. To take one or two examples : on p. 83 the author describes the famous episode of the deposition of three rival popes, 'in 1048 the Emperor Henry II made Sylvester III a prisoner for life in a monastery, and forced Benedict VIII to resign all his claims to the See. Gregory was also deposed and taken to Germany and interned in a monastery with his friend Hilde brand. . . .' Now the year was not 1048 but 1046, the emperor not Henry II but Henry III, and one of the popes was not Benedict VIII but Benedict IX; nor yet is the description of the fate of the three pontiffs much more in accordance with fact. With due allowance for printers' errors, such carelessness is reprehensible and misleading to the student the book is intended to encourage. On p. 306 Mr. Foakes Jackson, in speaking of the development of the church in England, makes the statement that Thomas Becket was the first archbishop of Canterbury who was ' a native of England', and infers therefrom that Becket was a champion of English nationality. It is true that Thomas was born in London, but his father was a merchant of Rouen and his mother a native of Caen ; by birth at any rate he was scarcely more English than his predecessors with whom he is contrasted. The book is almost devoid of foot-notes, and the only biblio- VOL. XXXVII. NO. CXLVIII. R r