Page:Englishhistorica36londuoft.djvu/312

304 SHORT NOTICES April Mr. V. H. Galbraith has made public twenty-two new charters from two chartularies in the British Museum which had not previously been made use of ; * but they throw no fresh light upon Henry's itinerary, and the docu- ment which mentions some of the attendants at the Whitsuntide court of 1110 is not in its present form free from suspicion. The materials calendared by Dr. Farrer have been collected with immense industry, and will, no doubt, be found of great service by Mr. H. W. C. Davis when he resumes the publication of his larger enterprise, the Regesta Regum Anglo- Normannorum. Dr. Farrer has done nearly all that is possible in dealing with charters in which the date of time is normally, and the place frequently, absent. To establish the itinerary more exactly can only be accomplished by means of a critical examination of the sequence of the title-deeds of a multitude of religious houses, and this will need the co-opera- tion of local students in all parts of England and Normandy. L. The First Norse National History (reprint from Edda, xii. 90-121), by Professor Halvdan Koht, is a new study of the Latin Historia Norvegiae, which was discovered and first published by Munch in 1850. There has been considerable diversity of opinion as to the date and provenance of this work. Dr. Koht's conclusion is that it must have been written in or about 1170, that the author was a Norwegian living in western Norway, and that there are strong grounds for identifying him with Magister Arnulv of the monastery of Munkeliv in Bergen. The Agnellus at whose instigation the work was written was no doubt Thomas Agnellus, arch- deacon of Wells, whose sermon on the death of Prince Henry of England in 1183 has been preserved. W. A. C. With the sixth volume 2 of his Geschichte des deutschen Volkes vom dreizehnten Jahrhundert bis zum Ausgang des Mittelalters (Freiburg im Breisgau : Herder, 1915) Professor Emil Michael, S.J., turns from the social, literary, and artistic history of Germany in the thirteenth century to the study of political events. This first volume of the politi- cal history deals with the period between the death of the Emperor Henry VI and the death of Pope Honorius III (1227). Father Michael's method reminds one of Sir James Ramsay's, and his book meets a need similar to that felt in this country before Sir James Ramsay's careful and detailed survey of our mediaeval history was available. Innumerable works have been written on the careers of Otto of Brunswick and Philip of Swabia, on the recognition of Frederick of Sicily as emperor and the rule of his young son Henry in Germany ; and several excellent short surveys of the period are accessible, notably Luchaire's little volume on the papacy and the empire during the pontificate of Innocent III (Paris, 1906) and Hampe's Deutsche Kaiser geschichte in der Zeit der Salier und Staufer (2nd edition, Leipzig, 1912). Father Michael's plan is more ambitious than Hampe's. After studying for many years German civiliza- tion in the thirteenth century in all its aspects, he is admirably qualified to act as guide among the intricate mazes of German political history. He is a pedestrian writer, without the mental range or grip of a Giesebrecht, 1 Ante, xxxv. (1920), 389-94. 2 See ante, xxi. 782.