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 1921 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 109 Meanwhile, we may cheerfully admit that one result of the tendency is to encourage the exploration of some exceedingly difficult aspects of medieval history. The work will certainly be fruitful of results, even if it does not exactly justify the guiding idea of the explorers. The special problem which Professor Tout proposes is extremely interesting, if we understand him rightly. What kind of administration would England have possessed in the middle ages if the policy of Henry III, of Edward I, and of the abler favourites of Edward II and Richard II had not been thwarted by an opposition which was predominantly baronial ? The answer which these volumes suggest is that the control of national finance, and the business of authenticating royal commands addressed to all administrative officials, would have been transferred from the exchequer and the chancery to the wardrobe or to the chamber, that is, to some branch of the king's household. Stubbs, it is true, has long taught us to think of the constitutional history of the thirteenth and fourteenth cen- turies as a running battle between a court party and a constitutional party. But he leaves us in considerable uncertainty as to the precise aims of the court and the precise methods by which the courtiers attempted to evade the control of great council and parliament. Mr. Tout takes us behind the scenes, and shows us the mechanism of the new machine which was designed to put the court programme into execution ; though it must be admitted that his documents do not allow us to make very precise inferences as to the nature of the programme itself. The Household Ordinances, to which we have already referred, show that the new bureaucracy had not developed on an imposing scale by the year 1279, when the financial staff of the wardrobe consisted of a treasurer, a controller, and four other clerks ; nor is any great expansion of the department visible in the Ordinance of 1318. But in the latter part of the reign of Edward I this handful of clerks proved themselves capable of managing the larger half of the national expenditure. They were not statesmen of original views, but they were expert financiers, sufficiently esteemed to be rewarded on retirement with bishoprics or other valuable benefices. And their department had traditions behind it ; for it had played a considerable role as early as the reign of Henry III. The ward- robe, it is true, did not often attract the attention of thirteenth-century chroniclers. The records of its activity are to be found scattered about the Public Record Office and in the manuscript collections of the great English libraries ; though many of them have been printed or calendared, no one before Mr. Tout had attempted to take stock of them as materials for institutional history, and there are whole series — notably the Issue Rolls, the wardrobe accounts, the privy seals, the wardrobe debentures — which have only been calendared or indexed in a provisional fashion. One cannot be too grateful for the skill and labour which he has expended in blazing a track through this jungle. Naturally he has to warn us again and again of gaps in his evidence, of the tentative nature of some of his deductions, of the importance of questions which he has been obliged to leave open. No one man can hope to clear up the whole of this immense subject. But it is a great feat to have indicated the right lines of inquiry, and to have made such an extensive survey of the available sources.