Walter of Henley's Husbandry together with an Anonymous Husbandry, Seneschaucie and Robert Grosseteste's Rules. The Transcripts, Translations, and Glossary by Elizabeth Lamond. With an Introduction by W. Cunningham. London: Longmans, 1890, pp. xliv., 170.
The Royal Historical Society is beginning (would an 'at last' be impertinent?) to justify its existence. A few books of the kind to which this book belongs will make many students grateful to it, will advance its prosperity in the present, and will provide a handsome monument to its memory which will endure long after it has gone the way appointed for all bodies, ideal or natural. For some time past it has been matter of common knowledge that the law-book called F/eta, which otherwise would be little better than a poor epitome of Bracton's treatise, contains valuable materials for English economic history. Of late it has been a matter of knowledge, though of less common knowledge, that even these materials the prisoner in the Fleet borrowed from the works of others, from certain little treatises on 'Husbandry' which until now have lurked in manuscript. These treatises Miss Lamond has copied and translated with admirable skill, and Dr. Cunningham introduces them to us by an interesting preface. Walter of Henley, whoever he may have been—and his editors with all their pains have been able to discover no more about him than that he was a knight and became a Dominican friar was certainly a man worthy of being recalled to life, one who has a great deal to tell us about the manorial affairs and agricultural arrangements of the thirteenth century. There can be no doubt that this book must find a place in the library of everyone who has any care for the history of English rural economy. Add tot his that Walter's treatise is a fine and early specimen of Anglo-French prose exercised on the things of every-day life, that to all seeming Miss Lamond has reproduced her chosen manuscript the Luffield manuscript, one of the many legal treasures of our Cambridge Public Library with all fidelity, and that she has made a very good and very useful glossary.
It is so obvious that this volume must soon come to the notice, and if to the notice then to the hands, of all who are likely to make a good use of it, that no worthy purpose would be served by describing or by praising it at any length. Thanks to Dr. Cunningham, Mr. Thorold Rogers, Mr. Ashley, and other economic historians or historical economists, the chapters which the imprisoned lawyer devoted to rustic life have been working their way into modern literature and controlling and suggesting modern theories about medieval affairs. But now we have something better, two books that the Fleeted one ruthlessly pillaged; and we find, as we might expect, that with all his acquisitiveness he did not take nearly all that he should have taken had he wished to give the nineteenth century all the information that was within his power. One example of this may suffice. In Fleta we have long been reading that in a three-course system of agriculture nine score acres
