Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/634

 626 SHORT NOTICES October be mistaken, but he is not likely to be convinced merely by being told so. It is to be feared that Mr. Laski has not met his difficulties fully hitherto, and he is likely to be disappointed once more when he finds practically no reference to the subject in this volume except one in which he is asked to look back to a passage in an earlier work by the author. Is it too much to ask of Mr. Laski that he should aim at greater simplicity of style, at any rate when he is not addressing a technical audience ? Dr. Figgis used an allusive method, probably due to the influence of Lord Acton, which made him very hard to follow : it is possible to share without qualification Mr. Laski's admiration for the high quality and value of Dr. Figgis's work, and yet not to desire that that characteristic of it should be imitated. H. The fourth volume of the fourth series of the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society is a little stouter than the last and contains varied fare. Dr. Alexander Bugge's paper, ' The Norse Settlements in the British Islands', draws attention to a number of interesting types of material, but appears to us, especially in the discrimination of what is Norse and what is not, to betray a certain rashness. The Eev. W. Hudson contributes a paper on the status of different classes of tenants in Danish East Anglia before the Norman Conquest. Miss Margaret Ley Bazeley gives a careful and useful account of ' The Extent of the English Forest in the Thirteenth Century ' with a good map. Miss C. A. J. Skeel's paper, ' The Council of the West ', is brief like the duration and records of the council itself, but, as might have been expected, is authoritative. Mr. A. H. Thomas, the clerk of the records at Guildhall, provides a valuable introduction to the un- charted and comparatively unexplored Records of the Mayor's Court of London. The scrappy notes given by Mr. F. W. X. Fincham from the ecclesiastical records at Somerset House reveal the great interest and value of those collections, but we have little confidence in the accuracy of his transcripts and translations. I. Dr. W. S. Holdsworth has contributed to the Law Quarterly Review for April and July 1922 (vol. xxxviii, pp. 141-64, 280-96) an important paper on ' The History of Remedies against the Crown '. He traces the develop- ment of the petition of right, and argues that the legal recognition of this form of procedure could usefully be extended to a wider range of actions without any departure from medieval and modern tradition. The July number of the same Review also contains the first part of an article by Dr. E. F. Churchill on ' The Dispensing Power of the Crown in Ecclesiastical Cases '. F. M. P. In the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, vol. 7, no. 1, the Rev. Dr. F. J. Powicke publishes, from the Baxter manuscripts in Dr. Williams's library, eleven letters written to Richard Baxter by the earl of Lauderdale from 1657 to 1659. If they supply little historical information of any value, these letters do at least raise and partly answer an interesting problem about Lauderdale's character and his relation to Baxter. Mrs. W. D. Sharp describes, with a facsimile, a licence to leave