In a future edition, which we confidently expect will be called for, we think Mr. Fisher's explanatory and supplementary notes might usefully be enlarged a little; not very much, for his brevity is, in the main, highly laudable. F. P. English Society in the Eleventh Century: Essays in English Mediaeval History. By PAUL VINOGRADOFF, Corpus Professor of Jurisprudence in the University of Oxford. Oxford: at the Clarendon Press. 1908. 8vo. xii and 599 pp. (168. net.) WE had hardly expected another of Prof. Vinogradoff's illuminating treatises so close on the heels of 'The Growth of the Manor' (1905), and we are grateful accordingly. The author is here dealing with the same authorities as before-Domesday, and illustrative documents of earlier and later date-but they are approached from another side; in place of studying these records from the land side, we are now looking at them from the personal side. We still read of geld hides, carucates, and plough teams, of manors, berewicks and sokes, but it is in their relation to the person, whether in his individual or communistic capacity. A glance at the table of contents will make this clear. The work is divided into two essays'-(1) Government and Society,' and (2) Land and People,' each divided into three sections, and having a general survey at the end. The first of these consists of (1) Military Organization: Mercenaries and National Levies, Feudal Service; (2) Jurisdiction: The County and the Hundred, Franchises; (3) Taxation: The Geld, Fiscal Immunities. The second essay consists of (1) Land Tenure: The Legal Framework, Husbandry; (2) Rural Organization: Manors, The Demesne, The Land of the People; (3) Social Classes: Landowners and Free Tenants, Peasants. Thus we have the duties, rights and privileges of the individual in all his public and quasi-public functions, save in that of town life, which the author promises to treat of in a separate work. To quote the words of the preface, these essays are directed to the terminological and institutional side of the inquiry rather than to the statistical and topographical.' The The period dealt with, the eleventh century, is one of extraordinary importance to the student of English social history. Prof. Vinogradoff calls it the watershed in the development of English society.' phrase is not very happy. We would rather refer to it as the union of three distinct streams, Teutonic, Scandinavian and French, which were thenceforth to run a common course, intermingled, but each nevertheless preserving some of its distinctive features. It is the presence of these three elements which makes the study of this epoch at once so complicated and so fascinating. The skilful subdivision of the problems here dealt with will be best illustrated by a quotation from the Introduction. 'I should like to analyse the principal legal institutions of the age in their bearings on the constitution of society. . . . I shall try, firstly, to examine the decisive political factors of social life and to trace the influence of public law on society; secondly, to examine the economic factors of social life and to trace the influence of husbandry and of private law in as far as it regulates husbandry; thirdly, to examine the classes and groups produced by the combined working of political and economic causes, and to trace the main features of the laws as to personal status under which these classes live. . . . We shall have to speak of institutions to some extent, but let us chiefly look at the The section on military organization is excellent, and the intimate connexion of the fighting force with the system of hidation is particularly well brought out. Prof. Vinogradoff argues strongly for a normal knight's fee, notwithstanding the large amount of apparent variation which is found all over the country, and we find his arguments convincing. There is a capital suggestion as to the mysterious buscarls' at Malmesbury. These have been considered as sailors of some sort, from O.N. buza (buss) a boat, though on this interpretation it is difficult to see why the king should have 208. ad pascandos suos buzecarlos from an inland town like Malmesbury. The author suggests a derivation from O.N. boð,-order, command; bodscarls would thus be men under command. But is it quite certain after all that the word is not a ghost-word, due to a clerical error or misreading of b for h? We find other inland boroughs paying various sums ad opus huscarlium; the survey, as we know it, is but a copy, and not a few clerical errors can be clearly traced in place names; b and h are very much alike in the MS. The section on Feudal Service and the different kinds of military tenants, knights, sergeants, thanes, drengs, radknights, and liberi homines, will also be found most useful. was Perhaps the best of all these essays is that headed Fiscal Immunities. No aspect of the survey is more perplexing than the so-called beneficial hidation.' Why, for example, should the Archbishop of Canterbury's Kentish manor of Aldintone, with land for 100 ploughs, be rated only at 15 sulungs (and that reduced from 21), when its value T. R. W. not far from double that of T. R. E.? Most modern writers on Domesday have dealt with the question, with more or less success, but we are not ashamed to confess that we never fully grasped the scope and effect of these immunities as a whole until we read this chapter. It is a masterpiece of skilful analysis and lucid expression. The custom of granting land by feoffment and without charter was not confined to lands of military tenure, as might perhaps be inferred by a passage on p. 227. Even when charters were practically universal they were considered only as evidence recording the actual transfer by feoffment; the common form, which lasted as long as the charter of feoffment itself,-dedi, concessi, et per hanc cartam meam confirmavi— shows this very clearly. We cannot follow the author in his suggestion that the absence of charter evidence was one of the reasons for the speedy formation of regular Courts Baron. Were transfers of freehold land usually or ever completed at such Courts? There is considerable evidence that in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, and perhaps later, charters were executed at Hundred or County Courts, but that was probably due to the desire of having as witnesses a number of well-known persons, rather than to any legal necessity of using a Court of any kind for the purpose. The section dealing with the different types of settlement in England, the scattered farms, the clustered farms or hamlets, and the more condensed settlements or villages, is most instructive. It seems highly probable that the difference was due to racial or tribal custom. The subject is well worth further study, in combination with the ethnological and philological evidence. The author finds something new to tell us about manors, especially as to the curious way in which they were consolidated, ' made up,' divided, added and subtracted; and there are some most interesting notes on the maneriola, the small manors, many of which appear to have had no demesne. Some of these are also recorded as having no hall, and here we venture to differ somewhat. Unquestionably, as the author points out, aula frequently correlates manerium, just as curia sometimes equates aula, but we think that in many of the instances quoted aula refers to the actual building and not to the manor; as indeed manerium itself sometimes does. When we read of one hide in qua fuit haula T.R.E. pertinens ad istum manerium (p. 360), habuit in civitate XXX mansiones praeter suam hallam (p. 361), manerium sine halla (p. 362), and the like, surely an actual building is referred to; we cannot therefore agree with the author's comment on the Berkshire case quoted on p. 359. The text runs ipse quoque transportavit hallam et alias domos et pecuniam in alio manerio, and the comment is The abduction of the chattels . . . may perhaps be taken in the literal sense, but in regard to the buildings nothing worse than appropriation to another manor can be meant.' We see no reason to suppose that the actual building was not bodily removed. It would not be difficult to transport a house made of timber framing filled in with wattle and daub, and to re-erect it elsewhere. Several instances of this actually being done occur in the court rolls of the manor of Wakefield', in one of which damages were recovered because the defendant had removed [irradicavit] a house, and in two other cases, the re-erection on another site is expressly mentioned. There are ten appendices, containing extracts from illustrative documents, such as Hundred Rolls, Extents, and Court Rolls, and some very elaborate analyses of parts of the Survey itself, which are worthy of careful study. The book is a noteworthy addition to the literature of the Domesday epoch, and should be read by all students of that period of English history. It is dedicated to the memory of the late Prof. Maitland, and no one would have appreciated its learning more than he. W. P. B. The Government of England. By A. LAWRENCE LOWELL, Professor of the Science of Government in Harvard University. Macmillan Co. 1908. 8vo. Two vols. 570 and 563 pp. MR. LOWELL's treatment of that most difficult subject, the actual working of the government of England, is marked by breadth of view, by skilfulness of workmanship, and by unity of idea. Among the men who have attempted to portray the actual working of the English constitution at a given date Mr. Lowell stands pre-eminent by the broad way in which he regards his subject. Compare him with two among the most distinguished of his predecessors. Archdeacon Paley's description of the British constitution, hidden away as it is in a single chapter of his Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy', contains the best account we possess of the spirit, at any rate, of the government of 1 Yorkshire Archaeological Society, Record Series, vol. 36, pp. 12, 14, 15. England towards the end of the eighteenth century. Bagehot's English Constitution' gives the truest picture ever drawn of Cabinet government about the middle of the nineteenth century. But Paley and Bagehot are really preoccupied with little else than the relations between the Crown, the Houses of Parliament, and the electorate. They have written little, if anything, about the government of England, except in so far as it is directly connected with that parliamentary government which is to an Englishman the salient trait of a constitutional monarchy. For this they are not to be blamed. At the end of the eighteenth century the elaborate governmental system of to-day had not come into existence; in the middle of the nineteenth century the immense extension of the authority of the State which is now visible to every observer had only begun to arrest attention. But though contrast does not imply censure, the difference between the point of view assumed by Lowell and that occupied by Paley and Bagehot is noteworthy. Of the sixty-seven chapters which make up our author's Government of England, the greater number deal exhaustively with topics such as Party Organizations, Local Government, Municipal Trading, Education, the Church Establishments, the Colonies, and the Law Courts, as to which neither Paley nor Bagehot has a word to say. Of the six parts into which Lowell's treatise is divided, the first covers the whole of the ground occupied by the most distinguished among the writers who have tried to deal with the constitution of England as a living organism. Our author reveals for the first time to many English readers the open secret that the government of England at the beginning of the twentieth century has become a far more complicated matter than what is generally known as the English constitution. Mr. Lowell's literary workmanship displays, to any one who studies it with care, a skill which is likely enough to escape notice. Every page of his book can be easily understood by intelligent readers, and there is not one reader in a hundred who reflects that the reason why he understands some political or constitutional doctrine which, as usually put forward, perplexes even an acute pupil is that his instructor has with infinite labour reduced to a clear form propositions which in the hands of an ordinary teacher remain obscure. One consideration is enough to prove the possession by Mr. Lowell of the gift of luminous exposition. He has solved the problem which invariably perplexes any man whose duty it is to expound the mysteries of English constitutionalism. The puzzle is how to explain the law and the customs of an historical constitution without wandering into a treatise on constitutional history. Mr. Lowell, guided by the rarest literary tact, has introduced into his analysis of the government of England as it actually exists just so much of history, and no more, as is really required to explain the way in which the power of the State is in fact exercised. We are made almost unconsciously to see that, while no one principle or body of principle will account for all the phenomena presented by the modern constitution of England, yet the people of England are in fact governed in accordance with certain ideas not always quite consistent with each other, which originate in and are controlled by historical facts. Mr. Lowell's treatise lastly presents, in spite of the diversity of the topics with which it deals, a singular unity of idea or purpose. He did not indeed come to the study of our institutions with the desire to establish some preconceived theory. His attitude towards England is in this respect the exact opposite of Tocqueville's position in reference to the United States. This eminent Frenchman, when he came as quite a youth to America, brought with him from France a body of doctrine about democratic society which colours every page of his 'Democracy in America,' and this unity of idea which gave to Tocqueville's great work its impressiveness lies in the tenacity with which he draws from the supposed experience of popular government in the United States inferences as to democracy in France. Professor Lowell came to England, as his book proves, as a student rather than a teacher. He was not tied to any doctrine. Yet a critic can perceive (what is perhaps not equally visible to our author himself) that Lowell's investigations into the working of the government of England have more and more led him to one definite conclusion, namely, that Party Government, operating on the whole in favourable circumstances, is the leading characteristic of our political institutions, and that this characteristic reappears and makes itself felt under all the various forms of State action. The elaboration of this idea gives to Lowell's Government of England its essential unity. A. V. D. [It may be useful to call attention to one or two special matters on which Mr. Lowell gives information not to be found in other books of the same kind, or not easily to be found elsewhere at all. A most important one is the steady growth of the power of the leading parliamentary groups in directing policy, which is one direct cause of the Cabinet's increasing autocracy not only in the executive but in the legislative work of government. Mr. Lowell shows at length how both the National Liberal Federation and the National Union of Conservative Associations endeavoured in late years to set up a popular control of their respective parties outside parliamentary rule, and how in both cases the attempt broke down. In what may be called the general jurisprudence of government he points out that the distinction between 'rigid' and 'flexible' constitutions is tending to lose its practical importance, as in many cases the special process of constitutional amendment is not much more troublesome than that of ordinary legislation. Then Mr. Lowell has some excellent remarks on the difficulties of reforming the House of Lords; and we do not know where else to find so good an account of our modern local government system in its practical operation.-F. P.] International Law applied to the Russo-Japanese War, with the decisions of the Japanese Prize Courts. By SAKUÉ TAKAHASHI. New York : The Banks Law Publishing Company; London: Stevens & Sons, Lim. 1908. 8vo. xviii and 805 pp. (328. net.) THE Preface to this interesting and useful work is dated on the 325th anniversary of Hugo Grotius' birthday". The author has long taken rank as one of the foremost Japanese authorities upon International law. In the war with China (1894-5) he was already sufficiently well known in that capacity to be sent out as legal adviser to the commander-in-chief of the Japanese fleet. He subsequently passed a couple of years, first at Oxford and then at Cambridge, while occupied in writing his Cases on International Law during the Chino-Japanese War, published in 1899, and on his return to Japan was appointed Professor in the University of Tokio. During the Russo-Japanese War he had ample opportunities, as a member of the legal committee in the Department for Foreign Affairs, for closely following the course of events, and for collecting the material of which he has made such good use in the volume now before us. |