skins, etc., would not have been out of place. On the subject of early book production the licences granted by Henry VIII. ad imprimendum solum form an interesting little chapter on the connection between the Court and the Printing Press which it would have been pleasant to see noticed here. Mr. Brooke’s remarks on coinage, one of the best pieces of work in the book, combine history with archæology in the happiest blending. Of the re-written articles Mr. Rushforth’s was the most difficult to do adequately, and it has been done with great skill. One cannot too much admire his choice of illustrations. Dr. Barnard’s admirable chapter on Heraldry needs no commendation; but I feel a little sorry that the only treatment of the seal in mediæval England should be a purely heraldic or artistic one. Its administrative importance is so great that a section on it might have been fitted in somewhere.
Omissions, of course, there are in plenty. Music (alas!), the craft of the leather worker and the goldsmith, the construction, apart from the upkeep, of public works like bridges, dykes, etc., agricultural implements, tools in general, and a number more. But it would be ungenerous to grumble; one can only be grateful to Professor Davis and the Clarendon Press for what they have given us here.
E. F. Jacob.
Manuscript decoration is not the only important branch of English mediæval art, but it is, as must have been felt by all who visited the little exhibition of English Primitives last winter, the only branch, apart from architecture, of which there remain to us adequate materials for study. And for this reason the exhibition, excellently though the MSS. shown were chosen, was disappointing, because you cannot study MSS. in a glass case, where you may not turn over the leaves. And of the artists in this field whose work survives and may in some degree be identified, Matthew Paris is, we may say, the only one whose name can at all be called a household word. Nor
