Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/129

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1922 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 121 whole this new work maintains that the government of Charles of France in Guienne was good and for the most part popular, the supposed opposi- tion of La Kochelle and other towns being explained as perfectly friendly negotiations regarding old privileges. The weakest point of the prince's rule was the financial organization, which M. Stein describes at some length, although less fully than he would wish, owing to the lack of complete documentary evidence. Besides this new material concerning Guienne, a good deal of original information is given on the establishment of the prince in Brittany, where he took refuge with the duke, on his relations with the university of Cahors, on the complicated diplomacy in reference to his marriage, and finally on the various accounts dealing with the causes of his death. One difficulty raised by M. Petit-Dutaillis 1 in regard to the treaty of Peronne, namely that no written record was made of the king's promise to cede Champagne and Brie to his brother, is not remarked upon by M. Stein, who accepts Commines's account of the transaction, of which he was a witness. All through the book, however, constant corrections and additions are made to the work of previous writers, whether of books or of articles in periodicals. The whole volume gives the impression of the most profound erudition and the most scrupulous care. There is little doubt that M. Stein has given us the definitive work on the life and times of Charles of France. E. C. LODGE. Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII. Vol. i, parts i-iii. Revised and greatly enlarged by R. H. BRODIE. (London : Stationery Office, 1920.) EXACTLY sixty years ago John Sherren Brewer began the publication of the Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, and, though he died before the fifth volume had appeared, his work was worthily continued by Dr. James Gairdner, who carried it to what seemed its conclusion in 1910. Now Gairdner, too, is dead, and it has fallen to the lot of his assistant, Mr. Brodie, to reissue, in a greatly enlarged form, the first volume of the series. In this volume, which has long been out of print, Brewer relied mainly on that mass of papers in the Record Office which are now collected and bound as the State Papers of Henry VIII, on the Patent Rolls, Signed Bills, and Privy Seals, and on the great collections in the British Museum, especially on the Royal MSS. and those of Sir Robert Cotton, though he also calendared other documents that had been already printed in the Foedera, or among the letters of Louis XII, Erasmus, and Peter Martyr. When one weighs the three portly volumes that Mr. Brodie has given us in place of Brewer's one, the two questions that spring to one's mind are : what new materials has he utilized, and what justification is there for their inclusion ? The official title of Brewer's volume was Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, preserved in the Public Record Office, the British Museum, and elsewhere in England ; even in this first volume, however, Brewer included letters that were not preserved in England, and interpreted the words ' Letters and Papers ' 1 Lavisse, Histoire de France, vol. iv, pt. 2, p. 359.