out of date in yet another way. Stubbs wrote history on lines on which it is no longer written by the great mediævalists of to-day. He belonged to the liberal generation which had seen and assisted in the attainment of electoral reforms in England and of revolutionary and nationalist movements on the Continent. He had formed himself, in his youth, under the discipline of the patriotic German scholars who saw in the primitive German institutions the source of all human dignity and of all political independence. He thought he saw in the development of the English Constitution the magnificent and unique expansion of these first germs of selfgovernment, and England was for him "the messenger of liberty to the world." The degree to which this optimistic and patriotic conception of English history could falsify, despite the author's scrupulous conscientiousness, his interpretation of the sources, is manifest in the pages which he devoted to the Great Charter. Nowadays when so many illusions have been dissipated, when parliamentary institutions, set up by almost every civilized nation, have more openly revealed, as they developed, their inevitable littlenesses and when the formation of nationalities has turned Europe into a camp, history is written with less enthusiasm. motives of the deeds accomplished by our forefathers are scrutinized with cold impartiality, minute care is taken to grasp the precise significance which they had at the time when they were done, and lastly the economic conception of history exercises a certain influence even over those who do not admit its principles. Open the "History of English Law" of Sir Frederick Pollock and Mr. Maitland, the masterpiece of contemporary English learning, written twenty years after the "Constitutional History and note the difference of tone. The This French edition being intended for the use of students and persons little versed in mediæval history, it was necessary to let them know that the work is not always abreast of the progress of research and we have thought it possible to furnish them, although in a very modest measure, with the means of acquiring supplementary information . . . 3 I have specially written for this publication a dozen studies and additional notes. Some of these lay claim to no originality, and their only purpose is to summarize celebrated controversies or to call attention to recent discoveries. In others a study of English history of some duration has allowed me to express a personal opinion on certain questions. The problems most discussed by the scholars who are now investigating the Anglo-Saxon, Norman, and Angevin periods have thus been restated with a bibliography which may be useful.. M. Bémont, the Frenchman who has the best knowledge of medieval England, has been good enough to read the proofs of the additional studies. CH. PETIT-DUTAILLIS. 3. M. Petit-Dutaillis proceeds to state that he has added to Stubbs' notes references to works and editions by French scholars "which he was unacquainted with, or at least treated as non-existent," and has referred the reader to better editions of English Chronicles and other sources where Stubbs was content to use inferior ones, or where critical editions have appeared since his death. VIII. The Origin of the Towns in England IX. London in the 12th Century X. The Two Trials of John Lackland ཇ.. THE EVOLUTION OF THE RURAL CLASSES IN ENGLAND AND THE ORIGIN OF THE MANOR. The manor at Ar the end of the Middle Ages, rural England was divided into estates, which were known by the Norman name of manors.1 The manor, a purely the end of the private division,2 a unit in the eyes of its Middle Ages. lord, did not necessarily coincide with the township or village, a legal division of the hundred and a unit in the eyes of the king; but, except in certain counties,3 the two areas were normally identical. In each of his manors, the lord of the manor retained some lands in demesne, which he cultivated with the aid of labour services, and he let the remainder in return for fixed dues, to the tenants, free or villein, who formed the " village community. Agriculture and cattle-rearing 1. The term is not absolutely general. At the end of the 12th century it is not used in the Boldon Book, the land-book of the Bishop of Durham; the rural unit, in this document, is the villa, though in reality the manorial organisation existed. (Lapsley, in Victoria History of the Counties of England, Durham, i, 1905, pp. 262, 268.) 2. Maitland, Select Pleas in Manorial Courts, 1889, i, p. xxxix. 3. In the counties of Cambridge, Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Lincoln, Nottingham and Derby, and in some parts of Yorkshire, the village was frequently divided between three or four Norman lords, at least at the date of Domesday Book (Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, 1897, pp. 22-23). The co-existence of several manors in the territory of one village sometimes brought about the partition of the village; or on the other hand it persisted, and was the cause of frequent disputes; see on this subject Vinogradoff, The Growth of the Manor, 1905, pp. 304 sqq.; Villainage in England, 1892, pp. 393 sqq.; Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, pp. 129 sqq. 4. See the description of the manorial organisation in Vinogradoff, Growth of the Manor, pp. 307 sqq., and Villainage, pp. 223 sqq. [Cf. also his English Society in the Eleventh Century, 1908, pp. 353 sqq.] Mr. Maitland has published an excellent monograph on the Manor of Wilburton in the English Historical Review, 1894, pp. 417 sqq. Numerous monographs of this kind would be very useful. A |