10 th S. I. MAY 7, 1904.]
NOTES AND QUERIES.
379
unequalled, is excluded in common with other
works. These two volumes will be welcome to
scholars, and will probably serve a useful purpose
in tuition.
Old West Surrey : Some Notes and Memories. By
Gertrude Jekyll. (Longmans & Co.) THE part of Surrey with which in her attractive volume Miss Jekyll deals is that south-western corner abutting on Hampshire and Sussex, and in- cluding all the lovely country between Guildford and Godalming. Of scenes and nooks in this favoured spot, of many-gabled cottages, mills, wells, gates, pumps, and the like, of men in smock-frocks and women in sun-bonnets, she gives innumerable well-executed photographs. Then follow views of farm implements, the furniture and paraphernalia of the house, and of implements common enough in the first half of the nineteenth century, but now accepted as antiquities. Here are tinder-boxes, warming-pans, smoothing-irons, butter-prints, rush- light holders, snuffers, pattens, pocket lanterns, and all sorts of familiar or unfamiliar objects to be found in the cottage, down even to clay pipes. Rustic crockery and ornaments, samplers, and the like abound, and there are grimmer souvenirs of the life of our ancestors in the shape of man-traps and spring guns. These things are varied by pictures of cottage gardens and hedgerows, the illustrations being no fewer than 330. To the antiquary a book which preserves the memory of things now difficult of access is delightful in all respects.
Book-plates. By Edward Almack, F.S.A. (Methuen
&Co.)
To the Methuen series of ' ' Little Books on Art," Mr. Almack has contributed a useful, popular, and well- illustrated treatise on book-plates. It has forty- two illustrations, an ecclesiastical book-plate it presents being probably the oldest in existence. It serves as a frontispiece to the volume. Many familiar and some modern plates are given, and there is a chapter on American plates.
Aids to Reflection, and Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit. By Samuel Taylor Coleridge. (Bell & Sons.)
THIS cheap, handsome, and legible reprint will do much to diffuse a knowledge of Coleridge's most prized contributions to religious philosophy. With the works mentioned are also given Coleridge's ' Essay on Faith ' and ' Notes on the Book of Common Prayer.'
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. New
Series, Vol. XVII. (Offices of the Society.) ALL the articles in this volume are of substantial value. If we do not accept every statement or deduction, they supply thoughts, and direct the reader to other sources of knowledge, which will assuredly extend the vision of those to whom the study of history is not a labour undertaken for purposes of mere utility.
Miss R. Graham's paper on ' The Intellectual In- fluence of the English Monasteries between the Tenth and the Twelfth Centuries' is valuable as throwing light on a complex subject, of which many people are content to be as uninformed as their forefathers were at a time when religious controversy furnished excuses which the present times do not. Dr. Firth is a hard worker. Nothing he has
hitherto published furnishes stronger evidence of
his plodding industry than his ' Royalist and Crom-
wellian Armies in Flanders, 1657-62.' The subject
has never been worked put in detail before. Future
biographers and historians will find the details he
gives of immense advantage to them, not only on
account of the direct instruction imparted, but also
because their attention cannot fail to be directed
to fresh avenues of knowledge.
Mr. Alexander Savine's ' Bondmen under the Tudors ' is excellent work, but we cannot unhesitat- ingly accept all his conclusions. He has not been able to solve the very difficult question as to when yillenage died out, or when merchet fines for marry- ing out of the manor came to an end. He quotes a heavy one five shillings inflicted on a woman of Scotter, in Lincolnshire, on this account, and refers to some others of later date; but in these sub- sequent cases the fine was less, only two shillings. So far as Mr. Savine's researches go (and they are confirmed by our own), it would seem that these fines had come to an end before the accession of James I., but we cannot be sure. We have seen a conveyance of property whereon there were coal- pits, dated late in this king's reign, by which the miners were conveyed with the estate ; but a ques- tion arises here. The extreme conservatism of the legal profession is of long standing. Can we there- fore be sure that the words were anything more than a mere transcript from an earlier document ?
The Right Rev. Dr. Gasquet furnishes a most useful account of the Premonstratensian Order in England, which every one should master who is interested in our raediteval religious history, or in- any one of the ancient houses of this once dis- tinguished order.
Mr. R. J. WhitwelPs paper on the relations; between Italian bankers and the English Crown, contains a tabulated list of advances of money made to the Court of Rome in the early years of the thirteenth century. We see no reason for thinking it exhaustive ; but even as it stands, it goes far towards explaining the sensitiveness of many Englishmen to the continued export of money to the Papal Court.
THE English Historical Review for the current quarter contains an article by Mrs. Armstrong, supporting by a detailed examination of sites the theory of Norman castles associated with the name of Mr. J. H. Round. Mr. Firth continues his valu- able examination of the sources of Clarendon's ' History.' Prof. Vinogradoff writes a note on ' Sulong and Hide.' The reviews are rather briefer than is usual. The first of any length is one by Mr. Figgis on Mr. Carlyle's ' Political Theories of the Middle Age' an interesting subject. Air. J. A. Doyle criticizes with severity, but justice, the pre- sentment of the American War of Independence by Sir George Trevelyan. Some noteworthy books on Napoleon are noticed.
THE 'Leaf of Olive' is the mystical title of a subtly metaphysical article which M. Maeterlinck contributes to the Fortnightly. Its gist is the basis of morality when that of religion is removed. Many startling paradoxes are maintained. Here is one which may be regarded as representative : " We should be better, nobler, more moral, in the midst of a universe proved to be without morality, but conceived on an infinite scale, than in a universe which attained the perfection of the human ideal, but which appeared to us circumscribed and devoid
