Gross: Sources and Literature of English History 543 of the past will eventually be constructed. In such documents, the per- sonal bias of the writer is at a minimum, for he had usually no ulterior motive, no intention of doing anything more than to preserve a record ; ignorance of the facts cannot be charged against the compilers for they describe what passed under their very eyes, or expressed what was in their own thoughts. Above all this kind of records extends into all the minute facts of daily life, all the realities of the normal life of the world of the time, all the personal doings of actual men and women. It is doubtful whether any one has ever realized the immense mass of this con- temporary material for the history of civilization in England in the medi- eval centuries, until it has been thus listed and described. For instance, of one kind of documents, those concerning the Church, in one class, the bishops' registers, there are some thirteen from nine different dioceses here recorded as being in print. The whole history of the Church has been surrounded with such a mist of ancient and modern polemics that if one turns to the reading of these plain records of the every-day routine, the normal, strenuous and mostly beneficent work of a medieval bishop, it is like breathing a new and fresher air. Similarly town and gild records, church-wardens' accounts, house- hold books and others which even the author after all his fullness of classification is obliged to group as "miscellaneous," exist in numbers that few special students even have known of, except indeed as in this particular class they were already indicated in Dr. Gross's earlier bibli- ography. It is in the extraction of titles of such works from the Transac- tions of local societies in which they have been buried, their discovery among the issues from obscure provincial publishing houses, and the brief indications of their contents, that some of the most original, most labor- ious and most useful of Dr. Gross's work has been done. Some four hundred secondary works on the history of the period from 1066 to 1485, is a much shorter list than that of works in German and French history during the same period, even including articles in journ- als. A series of appendices analyzing the Reports of the Historical Manuscripts Commission and iht Rolls Series, and regrouping the princi- pal narrative, ofificial, and legal sources in a chronological list, and an admirable index, completes the tale of acknowledgment of our various items of indebtedness to the author of this bibliography. Omissions will no doubt show themselves, though our search has so far not disclosed them except in cases where there was a sufficient reason ; differences of judgment of course exist ; some criticism might perhaps be made of the principle of subdivision of subjects ; but the one sentiment among students of English history will be one of grateful appreciation for this work, and of earnest hopefulness that an equally good scholar will some time perform the same service for the modern history of England. Edward P. Chevney.
