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590 REVIEWS OF BOOKS October contention of the single supreme executive was indeed shown to be ' expediens et necessarium experientia cunctis sensata '. But other thinkers less untrammelled by tradition had not his uncanny insight, to which and to so much else Dr. Poole introduced English scholars. C. W. Previte-Orton. The Yorkshire Woollen and Worsted Industries. By Herbert Heaton. Oxford Historical and Literary Studies, vol. x. (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1920.) Very appropriately, this admirable study of the industries named, ' from the earliest times up to the industrial revolution ', is the work of a former fellow of the university of Leeds and a present professor at Adelaide. But for the war and Mr. Heaton's migration to Australasia, it would no doubt have appeared much earlier. In previous publications (see biblio- graphy, pp. 439, 445) the author had shown his mastery of the subject, and had cleared up several important points in Yorkshire textile history. For his book, no relevant printed or manuscript source seems to have escaped him, and all are handled with judgement and restraint. There are not many historians who can move with equal ease, as Mr. Heaton does, among the ulnager's accounts of the fourteenth century, the Entry and Order Books of the Seventeenth, the Home Office Records, the manuscripts of the still existing worsted committee, now in charge of a firm of solicitors at Bradford, and the West Eiding Session Kecords, in the charge of the clerk of the peace to the Riding. The result is a book which will stand for a very long time. Mr. Heaton is working along a line already followed by others when, in his first chapter, he shows the extent and importance of the English, and with it the Yorkshire, woollen industry of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. He omits, perhaps for lack of evidence, to speculate on the question, when and why did men first take to weaving ? It is, however, a question not out of place in any history going back to ' the earliest times '. Possibly, too, more might have been made of the relation, right down to modern times, between the manufacture for home use and the manufacture for market. The medieval state took no interest in ' house- hold ' cloths, because it had no price ; nor even in ' cogware ' and ' Kendal cloths ', because, although sold, they were sold to ' poor and mean people ' (p. 127 : from 13 Rich. II, c. 10). Henry VIII's government (p. 133) made no attempt to regulate cheap goods, Kendals, Northern whites, friezes, and Devon cloths. The way in which the widespread practice of making such things unregulated may have affected municipal and national regula- tion of other things not always easily distinguishable from them, and may have provided a free rural working force upon which ' capitalism ' might draw, has, I think, not been fully appreciated. But it is, of course, a matter rather of speculation than of evidence, and Mr. Heaton does not care to go beyond his facts. In a very thorough discussion (pp. 15 ff.) Mr. Heaton presents the evidence against the view, recently again supported by Miss Sellers in the Victoria County History, that Flemings had much to do with the rise