Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/63

 Local history and minute archaeology have been of use in the same way: the Harleian Society has published heraldic visitations; the local societies have printed subsidy rolls and old legal memoranda; old county histories have been republished; little popular county histories are found in every farm-house in the country, where the editors or compilers have contrived, by mingling the utile of the directory with the dulce of historic memoranda, to stimulate the curiosity of every class.

I have called this a revival, and so it is; these pursuits do not seem to admit of much development, one flourishes and another languishes, as may be traced very clearly in the pages of the Archæologia; twenty years ago architectural antiquities were the great object of local study, now through a genealogical period we are perhaps working our way to a constitutional one, which I shall be most happy to welcome. I think that just now, when so many of our most ancient institutions, the manorial system and the ecclesiastical and civil judicature of old times, are either falling into desuetude or being ruthlessly abolished, it would be a good work for local zeal to put on record what memory and custom can still supply as to the working of these old institutions. I wish to see a manorial map of England as it exists now or as it existed twenty years ago, reflecting as it must do the condition of territorial power at the time when it became impossible to create new manors, in the reign of Edward I; reflecting, as it could easily be made to do, the local and dynastic arrangements of parties and families during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and seventeenth centuries, arrangements which still survive but are destined, by the operation of legal changes most of them intended to facilitate the alienation of land and to amend the administration of justice, to speedy extinction.

Well, I only adduce these as feeders, so to speak, of the stream of historic interest. Here and there they add a really precious contribution, but chiefly they are valuable as drawing in students to the higher and nobler study. Without them I doubt not we should have our Macaulays and Froudes, our Maines and our Freemans, but without them those writers