to counteract the pollution arising from intramural burials, the Hue and Cry raised by the Constables on which all residents had to turn out on horseback or on foot; the Ducking of Scolds, the Godspenny or earnest money given at hiring, the permission to play cards at Christmas time. An unfortunate woman is accused of “exercising certain most wicked arts in English enchantments and charms on a black cow, by which the cow was sorely damaged, and the calf in her totally wasted and consumed.” She was convicted and sentenced to be imprisoned for a year, and once in each quarter to stand in the pillory of some market town on fair day or market day. The book is provided with an index of place-names, to which in a second edition it might be well to add one of subjects.
The publisher’s puff on the paper wrapper of this volume announces that “This profound and far-reaching contribution to English Archaeology is an application of the jig-saw system to problems of the prehistoric period which under the ordinary methods of specialisation have proved insoluble.” Whatever the meaning of the jig-saw system in this application may be (and it is quoted from the author’s own description of his method in the first sentence of his book) the claim made here is beyond question a very “large order.” On opening the book the prodigality of illustrations, both figures in the text and plates, from all sorts of sources, good, bad, and indifferent, is the most obvious characteristic. But on reading it one finds that the chief weight of its argument, such as it is, is thrown on philological considerations. Of the quality of the author’s philology we may take one or two examples. “I treat John as the same word as Jane or Jean, and it is radically the same word as giant, old English jeyantt, French geante, Cornish geon. Jean is also the same word as chien, a dog,
