fees or fractions of knights’ fees were only too glad to hold land in the more peaceful form of tenure wherever they could, and implies a rigidity in tenurial distinctions which did not exist; and the (now) surprising view that “by the time of the Black Death (1348) it appears that commutation of service had become fairly common” (p. 326), the footnote to which seems to neglect the criticism effectively brought against Mr. T. W. Page’s statistics in his End of Villeinage in England, and the work of economic scholars like Miss Levett. Such generalisations as those above are applicable only to certain districts, not to the country as a whole. To Chapter XIV. some account of the banking activities of the Temple in the thirteenth century and a fuller explanation of the system of loans, recovery, and book-keeping of the Sienese and Florentine merchants in the fourteenth, might have been added, and a little discussion of current negotiable instruments in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries would have been a useful prelude to the section on commerce. The recent work of scholars has shown that the credit system was far more developed in this period than was suspected at the time when Mr. Leadam wrote.
Of the new work, Mr. Lamborn’s chapter is both interesting and useful, especially for its account of the Parish Church. He is a little too concerned with purely structural, not enough with liturgical, factors in the development of constructional form; and his account of monastic buildings, somewhat slight and perfunctory, does not notice the differences between the Benedictine and Cistercian ground plans, or the peculiar characteristics of their respective styles, and is rather misleading on the subject of monastic cooking. It is a pity that Fig. 6 (tower of St. Michael’s, Oxford) is a photograph of a restoration which surely does not preserve the original Saxon window detail. The sections on Monasticism by Miss Rose Graham and on the Mendicant Orders by Mr. Little it would be impertinent to commend. The latter in particular is a model of vulgarisation, the best summary account of the subject yet written. Within the space allotted to them, Mr. Madan and Mr. Gibson have written useful contributions on Handwriting and Early Printed Books. On the topic of thirteenth-century hand something in between the slightly archaic, rather Johannine-looking charter of 1220 (Fig. 292), and the very Edwardian-looking grant to Merton College (Fig. 293, not a first-class negative) might have been chosen to illustrate mid-thirteenth-century chancery hand, and a section on writing materials, pens,
