Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 3.djvu/85

 ii s. in. JAN. 28, i9iL] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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narrates that " a volunteer of the 73rd Regiment lost his kelt [sic] in the attack," from which it may be argued that it was a " warm affair " while it lasted. See ' His- tory,' 3rd ed., p. 203 (London, J. Johnson, 1786). T. F. D.

A Suffolk Hundred in the Year 1283. Edited by Mr. Edgar Powell. (Cambridge University Press.)

MR. POWELL has published a valuable addition to the history of Suffolk, and, we may add, an important contribution to the financial practices of the Edwardian period. The original is pre- served in the Record Office in a manuscript on seventy skins of parchment written on one side only. It is with few exceptions in good con- dition, but the list of parishes is not quite com- plete. The roll is not only important as showing by what method the national finances were raised when Edward I. was king, but also in some cases it indicates how farming was carried on in days when, as many people yet fancy, the cultivators of the soil were but little above the condition of serfs.

The money which the King called for was urgently required for the second Welsh war, which broke out on Palm Sunday, 1282, and lasted till the October of the following year, when, as the writer tells us, " the last Celtic Prince of Wales suffered the ignominious death of a traitor." It was for carrying on this contest that the assess- ments were made, and, the royal treasury being empty, the King in the first instance was, it seems, compelled to apply to the merchants of Lucca to help him in discharging his most pressing needs ; but the cash he required was far more than they were willing to supply. No time, how- ever, was to be lost, so Edward in June, 1282, dispatched John de Kirkeby, Archdeacon of Coventry, who afterwards became Bishop of Ely, to borrow money of the towns and religious houses. London contributed 4,OOOZ., and York 693Z. 6s. 8d. Although, with the exception of those for Ipswich, the documents which Mr. Powell has given are the only ones providing full details, a roll remains in which we have the gross sum for each shire. In this it is strange to find that Lincolnshire and Norfolk were regarded as by far the richest counties.

Towards the end of the volume there are thirty eight carefully elaborated tables of the tax lists of the Hundred of Blackbourne. These will require much study before it will be possible to understand what were the live and dead stock belonging to the men and women who were occupiers of lands and tenements.

We know of no other documents of about the same period which give so fully the average of prices as those before us. An attempt has been made to draw a comparison between the popula- tion of the villages in 1283 and 1908. It has been impossible to make any statement that will be satisfactory, but no reasonable doubt exists that there were far more men, women, and children in the villages 625 years ago than those who follow the older teachers areVilling to imagine.

Traherne'8 Poems of Felicity. Edited by H. I- Bell. (Oxford, Clarendon Press.)

WE venture to think that too much has been made in some quarters of the poems by the seven- teenth-century poet Thomas Traherne, which were first published by Mr. Dobell in 1903, and are here edited, with additions, by Mr. Bell. There is always a danger that the discoverer of an un- known or forgotten treasure will appraise the value of his find too highly, because it is his own ; and when it is claimed that Traherne belongs to the same brotherhood as Vaughan and Herbert and Crashaw and Henry King, we cannot but dissent. On their weaker side of mystical obscurity and involved quaintness there may be resemblances, but he has little of their brightness of fancy and felicity of expression. His lines do- not arrest and stamp themselves on the memory. Traherne's lyre had but few strings, and on three of these he harps with somewhat tedious- iteration. A favourite theme with him is the superior blessedness of infancy, to which he returns again and again, contrasting its innocence and bliss, the loss of which he never ceases ix> deplore, with the deterioration of adult manhood ,. which is further off from heaven. Here he is at one with Vaughan ; and R. L. Stevenson might have written the poems entitled ' Shadow in the Water ' and ' On Leaping over the Moon.' Another subject on which Traherne loves to dwell is the deeper insight and wider scope of the inward spiritual eye. Here he approximates to W T ords- worth, who might have acknowledged as his own the lines

A meditating inward ey Gazing at Quiet did within me ly (p. 14).

A third maxim of his mystic philosophy, to which many poems are devoted, is that the world belongs of right and de facto to him who with the seeing eye and thankful heart best appreciates its beauties, far more than to the mere possessor and legal proprietor. Izaak Walton had anti- cipated him in this fine sentiment.

The editor includes thirty -nine poems inot given in Mr. Dobell's editio princeps, and tells us the little known of Traherne and his works. He need not have doubted yer (p. 144), a common spelling of ere in seventeenth- century books.

The Utopia of Sir Thomas More. Edited by

George Sampson. (Bell & Sons.) THE philosophical yarn of that veracious mariner Hythlodaye (" Babbler ") is of perennial interest, and Messrs. Bell have produced an excellent edition of it in their " Bonn's Libraries " under the care of Mr. Sampson. He has appended to the ' Utopia ' the Latin original of 1516, together with Roper's Life of More (in a critically accurate text obtained by the collation of four MSS. in the British Museum), and a selection of his letters.

Mr. Sampson falls into the common mistake of over-annotating his text. The reader hardly requires to be told in a note, when More refers to Cicero, that this was " the famous orator and philosopher M (p. 24) ; and no one will thank him for the information that CC in the text means " two hundred " (p. 81). An " algorisme stone " was certainly not a " slate," as explained p. 333 ; and " La Bruayere " (p. 137) needs to be corrected. Per contra, we have to thank him for a full Biblio- graphy, and an excellent engraving of Holbein's. I portrait of More, which forms the frontispiece.