Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/270

262 REVIEWS OF BOOKS April The Great Roll of the Pipe, for the Twenty-Sixth Year of the Reign of King Henry the Third, A.D. 1241-2. Prepared and edited by Henry Lewin Cannon, Ph.D., Associate Professor of History, Leland Stanford Junior University. (New Haven, Connecticut : .Yale University Press, 1918.) The death of Professor Cannon has deprived the world of one of the few scholars who possess the courage and energy needed by the man who would print a medieval Latin text, especially a text of a pipe roll, where names of men and places and technical terms occur in every line. Apart from these difficulties, indeed, an inexperienced editor might think the pipe roll likely to be an easy manuscript. The very reason of the roll's existence makes accuracy needful ; the method of its preparation is known ; and in the chancellor's roll an editor has at hand a contemporary and independent manuscript intended to correct and check any error that may insinuate itself into the formal judgement of the court of exchequer. All these reasons for confidence may have been solid in the reign of Henry II, when rolls were short and customs honoured. But by the reign of Henry III the pipe roll has come to be a larger and more complex roll than it was in the reign of Henry II, and the rules of Richard Fitz Neal are falling out of use, if, indeed, they were ever more than an ideal. We can no longer think of the scribes as coming to the sessions of the exchequer with nicely ruled sheets of sheepskin ready to receive the words dictated by the treasurer. The ruled membranes will be there, but the greater part of the writing will have been done already ; so that at the actual sitting of the court the main task of the scribes is to com- plete the roll by filling up the spaces left blank with the words needed to express the judgement of the court on each case. If no judgement is given and nothing is done in the matter, the gap remains unfilled and becomes a matter for the next session. In this way the textual history of the pipe and chancellors' rolls becomes a rather complicated one. Not much of either manuscript is an original manuscript : a more considerable part is copied from the same original manuscript ; while another portion consists of a text derived by successive copying from a remote original ; and in this portion the filiation of the two manuscripts is independent, though the possibility of consultation between the scribes cannot be excluded. It is not, indeed, possible to say in every case imder which of these three heads any particular line of the text should be classed. But a few instances from the present volume may be given. The corpus comitattis in any county will be copied from the preceding roll by the scribe, and will only be altered when the scribe knows or remembers that a tenant mentioned among the Terre date has died. In the same way the record of a debt may persist from one roll to another, and we thus find in the present volume (p. 4) a note that William Fitz Alan owes 10,000 marks for having his father's land, as contained in the roll of 16 John, with the note that he is not to be summoned until the king orders. A hasty reader might conclude that William Fitz Alan was still alive in 1242 ; and even a more careful reader might not understand that in a traditional entiy of this kind textual corruption might easily appear. We need not, indeed, go far to find instances of such corruption ;