Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 3.djvu/265

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s. in. APRIL i, m] NOTES AND QUERIES.

259

vhich " the king " and the red man beat with flails

hree devils out of the body of a girl. Not less

maint is that of ' The Woman who went to Hell. 3

Che book, indeed, abounds with matter of interest.

t is to be hoped, since Mr. Larminie has been

. ollecting for fifteen years, that we shall not have

o wait long for a further instalment of these tales.

^ownship and Borough : being the Ford Lectures delivered in the University of Oxford in the October Term of 1897. By Frederic William Maitland, LL.D. (Cambridge, University Press. ) PROF. MAITLAND has studied minutely what has been called the great mediaeval land question, and the new knowledge which he has acquired is of much importance. We are most of us so under the influence of what surrounds us and what we see and hear of every day, that we cannot tear our- selves in thought away from the present so as to look on the past with unclouded vision. We do not realize the condition of things in times when a man was not, and did not regard himself as, the absolute proprietor of what we should now call his own land. The relationships of the landowning class, not only to the king, but also to the inter- mediate lords, were highly complex ; and what renders them still more difficult of elucidation is that they were very varied, so that what holds good of one place is found almost reversed in another. When historical students first took upon them- selves to investigate the conditions under which landed men held their properties, it was believed that if they could but once acquire the key it would of necessity open any lock between Berwick-on- Tweed and the Land's End. Kemble, Sir Henry Maine, and a few others were too farseeing to adopt this crude notion, but their followers, as is the manner of disciples, went further than their masters. They had no idea that what had been learnt on such good authority could be subject to limita- tions. Recent research has, however, shown that much has yet to be discovered ere any one can pic- ture what the economic state of England was in former days. Prof. Maitland has in these " Ford Lectures" confined himself mostly to Cambridge, though he repeatedly glances at Oxford, whose land system presented many analogies to that of its eastern sister. Cambridge was not a manor, and it seems not a little doubtful whether any of its lands were manorial at all in any strict sense. When, indeed, we are dealing with ancient tenures we should always be on our guard when we meet with the words manor and parish. Each of them has a definite meaning, but we find them constantly abused and extended in signification so much as to render them well-nigh useless in accurate writing. It is commonly assumed that the words are some- where about equivalent, the fornier meaning the civil and the latter the ecclesiastical aspect of the same territory. How inaccurate this is a little study of record evidence soon makes manifest. In Cambridgeshire, for instance, the author is careful to point out that the " manorial geography is

all athwart the village geography, or common fiel older time." He might have

the

tended his view much further. We doubt whether n any part of England the genuine manors were, as a rule, limited by the same boundaries as what has got to be known in conversation and in modern Acts of Parliament as the parish. The common field, with its meadow, pasture, and strips of tilled land, is probably much the older. Its origin is,

indeed, so remote that we can only make the vaguest and most unsatisfactory guesses as to when it came into being. The parish and the manor appear later, and some are very far more ancient than others. Manors continued to be multiplied by a process ana- logous to what zoologists denominate fission until the practice was put an end to by statute ; and the parishes were, in the Middle Ages, constantly having their boundaries modified by ecclesiastical authority. Prof. Maitland's lectures are the result of painstaking research. Their interest is by no means confined to one part of the country. They ought to be in the hands of all who take interest in social history.

The History of Church Preen. By Arthur Sparrow.

(Privately printed.)

THE old manor of Church Preen, in Shropshire, so called from the fact of the church and the manor house forming one messuage, was happy in having a "lord "so judicious and public-spirited as the late Mr. Sparrow, who compiled a careful and, as far as he could make it, exhaustive history of the church and parish. He did not live to see it published, as he died within a week from the date of the preface; but his work has been revised and seen through the press by his friend Mr. E. A. Ebblewhite, and the result is this handsome-well-illustrated volume.

The origin of the name Preen has been a puzzle. Prof. Earle hazards the guess that it may stand for (cet) pirian, " (at the) pear (-tree)," which, notwith- standing the occasional old form Peryn, hardly commends itself. The earliest charter is a grant from King Eadgar conveying the land to his thegn Wulfric, and bearing date 963, which is given in full. Among the "worthies" of Preen, as Fuller would say, is the famous yew tree, one of the largest in England, which still lives, and is calcu- lated to be 1,400 years old. The ancient manor house was pulled down in 1870, and a picturesque new edifice erected on its site from a design by Mr. Norman Shaw. The Sparrow family, which is also found in Staffordshire and East Anglia, is thought to have taken its origin from one Sperri mentioned in the Domesday Book, intermediate forms of the name being Sparry and Sparrio. This pedigree, with those of Dickins and Hanbury, will be of interest to genealogists. The ' Ancien Rewle ' attri- buted to Bishop Poore (p. 138) is a printer's travesty of the well-known ' Ancren Riwle.

Researches into the Origin of the Primitive Constel- lations of the Greeks, Phoenicians, and Babylonians. By Robert Brown, Jun., F.S.A., M.R.A.S. Vol. I. (Williams & Norgate.)

THE author is already known to students of astro- nomical archaeology by several publications on that subject, and especially by his translation of Aratus, the poet quoted by St. Paul. A description is given in that work of the ancient constellations ; and Mr. Brown remarks that the time has now arrived when it is possible to commence scientific research into the origin of the classical constellation- figures. Hipparchus noticed the discrepancies between the descriptions of Eudoxus (which are versified by Aratus) and the appearances of the heavens in his own time. The true explanation of this is that the statements of the Greek poet, in- correct in reference to his own age, are quite applicable to the latitude of Babylon nearly two thousand years before ; so that astronomy unites with history and archaeology in pointing to the