H s. xii. AUG. 14, mo.] NOTES AND QUERIES.
131
Roads ' (.England and Wales), in which he
was assisted by W. Morgan, was published
in a folio volume in London in the same
year 1675, and was abridged as ' The Travel-
ler's Guide ' in 1699, after which it was
re-edited several times. A full account of
his life and works appears in the ' Dictionary
of National Biography.'
THOMAS WM. HUCK. 38, King's Road, Willesden Green, N.W.
' EXCEBPTA LEGATIONUM ' (11 S. xii. 30, 77). The preface to the Teubner edition of Dion Cassius, pp. xi-xiv, has useful in- formation on this subject, and in the first volume of Boissevain's edition of the text of Dion Cassius, Berlin, 1895, there is a complete survey of all codices.
H. Baldwin Foster's English edition of Dion Cassius (Pafraet's Book Co., Troy, New York, 1905) is a monumental work containing a very useful list of articles upon Dion. It is upon this edition of Dion that the Loeb edition (Heinemann, 1914) is based. A. L. HUMPHREYS.
0tt
English Court Hand, A.D. 1066 to 1500, illus-
trated chiefly from the Public Records. By
Charles Johnson and Hilary Jenkinson. Part I.
Text. Part II. Plates. (Oxford, Clarendon
Press, 11 5s.)
SCHOLARS are gradually providing the growing number of students of our public records with adequate aids to study, and armed with this much- needed monograph on ' English Court Hand ' and a working knowledge of Anglo-French and Law Latin, a learner should be able to attack a medi- aeval scrivener's work with less than ordinary heart- sinking and bewilderment. It is true that this " reasonable familiarity " with the languages in which legal documents are written is not easy to come by apart from practice, as helpful books on the subject are few and far between. Glossaries, it is true, exist, but a scientific and comprehensive modern dictionary is still to seek, while the publication par excellence on Anglo-French grammatical forms is somewhat inaccessible as an Introduction to one of the Year-Books edited for the Selden Society by the late F. W. Maitland. It is to be hoped that the recent quickening of interest in our historical records may have the result not only of furnishing students with helpful handbooks, but t also of procuring opportunity for printing transcriptions of the more valuable of our unexampled store of national documentary treasures.
This book on ' Court Hand ' has of set purpose not been made technical, the subject being treated, as the compilers say, rather empirically than scientifically, sineethede'signistomeetsomeof the real difficulties of the student of mediaeval docu- ments. It contains a list of abbreviations one could wish that a list of the most common
formularies that lie behind the puzzling &c. had'
been added, but one work cannot contain every-
thing a useful bibliography, and illustrations, on.
an ample scale, of the forms of letters an invalu-
able aid to the beginner amid all the confusing
resemblances assumed by certain forms, particu-
larly of capitals, and especially useful in the case
of proper names, where the form of the word
furnishes no clue to its identity. Further, there
is a section devoted to ' Practical Hints on
Transcription,' which contains a reference to
those distressing " minims," or collections of
similar strokes for " m," " n," and " u," which
make such words as " vinum," " vivum,"
" minimum," " nimium," and so on, pitfalls for
the unwary. The present reviewer was once
sadly tried by " finiente." No one who knows the
vagaries of the mediaeval scrivener will judge with
undue harshness those who in their haste have
printed " Lobulus de Langabulo " as a proper-
name, for " j. obulus de langabulo " (a halfpenny
of land-gavel), or the " New June " for the
" Newe Inne."
In tracing the development of Court Hand so called from the survival of some of its forms in legal engrossing the compilers warn students of the difficulty of allotting with absolute certainty the date to any particular MS. on the evidence of handwriting alone. There is a tendency of styles to overlap, since country scribes were apt to be more archaic than those of the Court, and older men, heedless of the newer modes, would" write in the fashion prevalent in their youth. The materials used tend to affect style and diction ;: thus a certain stiffness in early hands is accounted for by the use of a reed pen, before the goose- quill's advent ; and to the plentifulness of parch- ment owing to the growth of sheep-farming may- be due the comparative voluminousness of deeds of the fourteenth century. Writing was, of course, by no means such an uncommon accom- plishment as is often supposed, and from the thirteenth century onwards " hardly a village or township in England can have been without its, scribe."
The compilers of these volumes have included a useful conspectus of the classes of documents; of which facsimiles are given, and though these illustrative plates have been chosen with no regard to their historic significance, such a collection could" not fail to contain items of exceptional interest, e.g., as the addition of the words " Pater Sancte " which occur in the autograph of Edward III. at the end of a letter from the Vatican Archives, or an example of the signature of Richard, Duke of York, in tall angular Gothic script, which contrasts with the rounded and more current style used by his nephew, " R. Warrewyk," another of the sig-- natories to this Act of the Privy Council .
Journal of the Folk-Song Society. Edited by Lucy Broadwood. Vol. V. Part II. (Privately printed ,f or the Members of the Society.) THIS welcome instalment of the Journal of the Folk-Song Society proves how much may be gathered, even at this the eleventh hour, of ancient song from such repositories of bygone traditions as the old Hertfordshire straw-plaiter Mrs. Joiner, who rendered ballads with " great rhythmical feeling and purity of musical intervals," possibly the outcome of the " union of voice and delicate handicraft." There are songs of poachers
