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 1921 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 127 The evidence about the Oxfordshire chantry priests themselves is interesting ; they compare very favourably with those in some counties : all are described as men of good conversation and of honest behaviour, most of them are well learned, two very well learned. Here, perhaps, it is not fanciful to see the influence of a university near at hand. It is odd, as Miss Graham notes, that the ages of the chantry priests are, in fourteen out of the sixteen recorded instances, given in multiples of ten. These clergy were not ungenerously dealt with by the commissioners in the matter of pensions ; they lost their houses and received in most cases a smaller income than before, but they were free to seek other work. There were only twenty-six chantry priests in the whole county, most of them in the towns : seven in Oxford, two in Banbury, Henley, and Woodstock respectively, four in Chipping Norton, and the other nine in Burford, Thame, Witney, &c. ; only six were in villages like Minster Lovel. The appendix giving the list of the twenty-six chantries and guilds which were in existence in 1548 is an excellent piece of work, principally from the Patent Rolls. Miss Graham has been at pains to supply the names and dates of the founders, which the parsons and churchwardens of 1548 had forgotten or at any rate neglected to return, though they were asked for them. The bulk of the volume is concerned with what are called ' the Edwardian Inventories '. It would have been an improvement if it had been made more clear exactly which sets of inventories these are ; indeed the only fault to be found with the arrangement of these documents is that they are not classified as clearly as in the "corresponding Edwardian Inventories for Buckinghamshire in the Alcuin Club Collections, vol. ix. Excellent as the introduction to this volume is, it lacks the useful pre- cision of Mr. Page's preface to the Northern Inventories published for the Surtees Society in 1897 (no. 97). There are, as Mr. Page made plain, four classes of such inventories, viz. the returns to the commissions issued to the bishops to survey the goods of the parish churches in 1547, the returns to the commissions issued to the sheriffs and justices of each county in February 1548/9, the returns to the commissions issued to some of the gentry in each county in May 1552, and lastly the returns made to the commission issued in January 1552/3 under which the bulk of the plate, jewels, and vestments was seized and the bare minimum of the requisites for worship left to the parishes. The inventories printed here are partly those of the third class, and partly of the fourth, but this is not made as plain as it might be ; the two classes of returns are not divided from one another, but, as on p. 109, a return from Ewelme to the commission of May 1552 is immediately followed by a return from Marsh Baldon to the commission of 1553. It would have been better if the two classes of returns had been clearly separated from one another. The returns to the commission of 1552 are not specially noteworthy ; Miss Graham duly marks in her introduction such points of interest as they present. She has had the advantage of writing after the publication of Sir William Hope's and Mr. Atchley's definitive work on English Liturgical Colours, and the inventories printed here do nothing to modify, but merely enforce its conclusions. Unfortunately these inventories