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 1921 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 253 but unprofessional reader, it is not all news to historical students, yet it is full of fresh light and suggestion for them too. Though many in- tricate and hotly debated problems are involved, Dr. Pollard's concep- tion of the development of parliament is, with rare lapses, remarkably self-consistent. There is not the least need for him to apologize for venturing into the middle ages in search of an explanation of the pheno- mena of the Tudor parliament, and if we confine ourselves, mainly to matters which seem- to require reconsideration or correction, it is because we feel sure that he will not lack an early opportunity of revising his work. In tracing back the history of the institution which enabled the Tudors to suppress feudal liberties and to create a national church, Dr. Pollard found in the position of the king's council in the parliaments of Edward I as analysed in Maitiand's masterly but too-little-known introduc- tion to the Memoranda de Parliamento (1305) an illuminating explanation of the sixteenth-century title, ' high court of parliament ', and the secret of the sustained vigour and permanence which its foreign congeners lacked. On the general lines he was anticipated in publication by Professor Mcllwain's well-known book, but he looks at the subject from a different angle and is the first to make an exhaustive investigation of the evidence afforded by the records of parliament, besides bringing to bear that of parliamentary antiquities. The presence of the judges and other regular councillors in the parlia- ment of estates from 1295 onwards * and the judicial powers of parliament have of course always been known, and even the former has left its traces in the house of lords to this day. It is a question only of the relative prominence of the different aspects of a nascent institution. Stubbs noted that the regular terminal parliaments of Edward I were ' judicial sessions of the council ', but he unconsciously antedated the clear definition of the executive, legislative, and judicial powers and of the various kinds of council. The mistake he made, as Dr. Pollard points out, in convert- ing the commune consilium of c. 14 of Magna Carta into the title of a national assembly of all tenants-in-chief (though, curiously enough, he translated it quite correctly ' common counsel ' in his commentary on the charter) gave too much prominence to a concession which applied only to feudal aids and scutages and was omitted from all reissues of the charter. At the same time there is no doubt that the Crown from time to time found it necessary or prudent to obtain, for measures not merely financial, the consent of a wider circle of barons than those who were regular counsellors ; and there is some evidence that c. 14 preserves the method of summons. Dr. Pollard is perhaps too much inclined to ignore both these and the revolutionary precedents of 1258, anil so to attach undue weight to the conciliar parliaments of Edward I and to the judicial aspect of the parliament of estates from his time forth. For, after all, the first known precedents for his small terminal parliaments are the three annual ])arlemenz of the Provisions of Oxford in which the general body of the 1 Dr. Pollard has missed the resemblance of the four woolsacks arranged in a square, on which they sat, to the four benches (scamna) which were a feature common to English shire courts and the courts of German towns.