1920 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 277 monarchical bias. Their books, which were written in the vernacular, Historic der gravelike regeering in Holland by Pieter de la Court (1662) and Erfgravelihe hedieninge in Holland ende West-Vriesland by XJytenhage de Mist (1682), are certainly amongst the most remarkable which Dr. Kampinga has occasion to mention. De la Court is better known as the author of Het Interest van Holland, one of the most striking books on political economy and political philosophy which the seventeenth century produced. Dr. Kampinga quotes from the well-known work of Dr. Fueter {Geschichte der neueren Historiografhie, 1911) ^ the characteristics of the historiography of the Aufkldrung, of which Voltaire is claimed as the founder, and he shows that all are already to be found in the work of De la Court and De Mist. P. Geyl. Seventeenth-Century Life in the Country Parish with special reference to Local Government. By Eleanor Trotter, M.A. (Cambridge : University Press, 1919.) This useful and scholarly book fills a place hitherto vacant. Miss Trotter has worked with great care at the records of English local government in the seventeenth century, and she has produced a book which will be valuable to the historian as well as to the antiquary. The local government which is sketched here with a wealth of detail owed its form chiefly to Tudor legislation, and of that legislation Miss Trotter is "a competent critic. In its dealing with labour questions she suggests that it ' took, unknowingly perhaps, the surest way to produce rogues and vagabonds ' ; but she justly appreciates the act of 31 Eliz. cap. vii, which provided that every cottage must have four acres of land laid to it, to provide corn for the family, and she sees the beneficial results of the act of 39 & 40 Eliz. cap. iii, §iv, which provided for the apprenticing of pauper children. There is a very good, though short, account of the position of the agricultural labourer in this period, as well as of his subsequent social and economic downfall (p. 160). The book is well furnished with documents, there is a good index of places (not of persons), and the references are a model of thoroughness. Most of the material is supplied by the seven volumes of the Quarter Sessions Records of the North Riding of Yorkshire, edited for the North Eiding Kecord Society by the late Dr. J. C. Atkinson ; and Miss Trotter, here and there, is able to tell of survivals of the old system from her own local knowledge. With a few exceptions the contemporary authorities for the statements in the book are those for the North and East Hidings of Yorkshire. The obvious danger in a study of this kind is lest the details should obscure the main outlines and lest the antiquary should over- ride the historian. Miss Trotter is evidently well aware of it. She gives much varied information in her book : thus she notes a woman as a con- stable in 1695 (p. 104), she has some pertinent remarks to make on Shake- speare's constables and justices, she explains such terms as * toft ' and 'croft' (p. 186), 'grassmen' (p. 190), and the 'quorum' (p. 213); but she never loses sight of her purpose, which is to show the seventeenth- century system of local government at work. Very rarely a flash of humour
- See ante, xxvii. 124.
