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 1921 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 119 parisis at each particular epoch. The questions of exchange demanded all the energies of the campsor thesauri. They were infinitely more complicated than anything we have to deal with in modern times. In spite of obvious differences there are close analogies of method in the financial offices of the two kingdoms. In English and French records alike we read of officers drawing money pro secretis expensis regis or pro hospicio regis or pro hospicio regine or super vadia sua. We find the Italian bankers hard at work and very necessary for the purposes of the short advances which enabled the Crown to pay its more pressing creditors before the revenue from domains or taxes slowly came in. The Bardi and the Peruzzi are as active in France as in England, and the Frescobaldi had disappeared as completely from France as if there had been ordinances for their expulsion as in England. The Genoese banker knight Antonio Pessaigne, after breaking with Edward II between 1318 and 1320, is here revealed as active in the French service at a time when England and France were drifting into war. It is interesting how little a part customs play in treasury finance in France when they loom so large in England. The chief sums payable under that head come from Italian merchants for licences to export prohibited commodities, notably English wool, which they were suffered to take through France on paying adequate dues at the frontier place where they left the kingdom. T. F. Tout. The Sign Manuals and Letters Patent of Southampton. Edited by Harry W. Gidden. 2 vols. (Southampton Record Society. South- ampton : Cox & Sharland, 1919.) The valuable town records of this country would rarely be copied and printed but for the self-denying labours of the local scholar, and the publications of the Southampton Record Society show what may be done in this direction. Such work takes long in doing ; the volumes before us, together with Mr. Gidden's other books on the Southampton charters, have apparently taken ten years to complete. Transcriptions of this kind are full of minor difficulties, and the work may be very wearisome when, as not unfrequently happens, the document is so full of lawyers' verbiage that much labour yields little matter ; nevertheless the impor- tance of the publication of such documents is recognized on every hand. These before us show much of the peculiar character of Southampton, the importance of its harbour, the presence of foreign merchants, and the national significance attached to its fortifications. The letters bearing Richard Ill's sign-manual have an interest which always belongs to everything touching on the dramatic personality of this king. We see in them the usurper trying to coin popularity by reviving the restrictions on the retail trade of foreign merchants, or — his throne having become unstable — ordering the arrest of sowers of sedition. One letter deals with a daring feat of Channel piracy, though we fail to understand at this date Mr. Gidden's comment on the matter of the bales of cloth which formed part of the pirates' haul : ' the woollen goods were being brought over from Flanders ... as no manufactured wool was as yet produced in England.' Another capture by pirates is mentioned in a missive of Edward IV,