The Library.

Historical Notes on the Use of the Great Seal. By Sir H. C. Maxwell-Lyte, K.C.B. (H.M. Stationery Office. 18s. net).

BOTH the substance of this volume and its

form and handling should give it rank among the most useful and important historical studies of recent years. We all agree now-a-days that the truth of history comes out only partially in war and high politics, revealing matters of deeper significance in social life and the development of domestic administration; and great service to this new insight has been done by the opening up of .. sources. The use of sources, in the immense abundance in which they are now available, presents, however, itself numerous knotty problems, which, if they are being admirably solved in many directions, still remain difficult enough to make a fresh instance of good solution, such as this is, in itself both welcome and instructive. The backbone, so to speak, of each chapter is a list of quotations from documents in the Public Record Office. The comments and explanations accompanying these have, it is obvious, been jealously confined within limits, but the limits have been laid down by a generous view of the student's requirements, and while they exclude generalisations and also account of the relation of the Great Seal to other institutions, they allow most copious facts and illustrations directly pertaining to the subject. Perhaps, the title might have been the King's Seals, for the Great Seal is directly the subject of little more than the first chapter, the Privy Seal with its warrants; the small royal seals; and warrants immediate, used by Regents or by the Council, or ministerial, occupying most of the first half of the book, the rest being devoted to Chancery Practice and the Records of Chancery, with some good Addenda and Tables and Indexes.

The method of the work brings out well, what is a fundamental, original point of interest about the development of the Chancery, that is its dependence, in the years which determined its traditions, on the circumstances of the King's life in early days his constant journeyings, his absences on the Continent, his position, towards his government and its departments, as of an owner and lord of a vast household. The researches on administrative history which we associate most readily with the name of Professor Tout both illuminate the history of the King's Seals and receive illumination from it. We may see here very clearly that curious mingling of easy adaptability to present conditions with an unyielding retention, in them, of old forms and principles which is a characteristic of English public life and customs. The moralist may find food for reflection in tracing the development of sinecures, and the incidence of a certain amount of oppression

and extortion, which would probably increase upon one's view if further detail were pursued.

The manner of life and the business of the clerks of the Chancery-in their different departments, and from one century to anotherbring up in description many topographical details and many curious incidents. There is a story of a certain Roger Leget laying caltrappes in the field where the clerks of the Chancery and the apprentices of the court were accustomed to play their games; who was confined a long time in the Fleet, and released upon payment of 20 marks, and then, in 1381, dragged by the mob from sanctuary at St. Martin's-le-Grand and beheaded in Cheapside. The early nineteenth century abolished many of the Chancery departments and among them the Cursitors the "clerici juvenes et pedites, quibus de gratia Cancellarii concessum est pro expeditione populi brevia facere cursoria," as they were described in Edward I's time, who prepared writs of fixed character. They were twenty-four in number in those days, and all unmarried-a point about clerks of the Chancery which was subject of rule and consideration and eventual change. Like almost every other Chancery appointment cursitorships admitted exercise by deputy, and at the end of the eighteenth century only three cursitors were performing their duties in person. Two of them, before they were all abolished, were deriving over £1,000 apiece from the office, but not all were so fortunate. The hall where they kept their commons stood at the north-west corner of the thoroughfare whose name is their principal memorial, Cursitor Street.

Another interesting line of development, partly evinced by the sinecures, is the rise in dignity of the several clerkships. Thus the first Keeper of the Privy Seal received the charge with power to appoint a deputy if he should thereafter rise to a dignity too high to allow of his acting. This was early in the thirteenth century; at the end of the fourteenth a Bishop was not too exalted a person to exercise the functions of Keeper of the Privy Seal. The records of the Privy Seal themselves have an extraordinary history, housed in many different places, and suffering depredation from that formidable collector of antiquities, Sir Robert Cotton. One section of them, rescued from the fire at Whitehall in 1619, stowed in the Pells' Office and there found and used by Rymer, placed in John Anstis's hands for arrangement, and upon his death forgotten for ten years, came back at last in 1770 in four large chests to Whitehall, to the Paper Office, whence they were transferred to the Public Record Office.

Account is given of the various sizes and designs of all the Privy Seals known. It is strange that the motto approved for the Privy Seal of the Protector should have included Franciae," seeing that the claim to France, such as it was, was purely dynastic. reipub. Angliae, Scotiae, Franciae. et Hiberniae also makes a curious expression.

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Memorabilia.

WE E have found the new Virginia Magazine of History and Biography unusually interesting. It starts off with an account of the origin of the rather small, but spirited and clever, breed of Virginian horses, introduced from England in the early seventeenth century, but reduced in size and modified in character within a few generations-by crossing, as the writer believes, with an infusion of Andalusian blood derived from the southern Indians. In the early eighteenth century racing and fox-hunting were started in Virginia, and with the arrival there of Bulle Rock, reputed descendant of the Byerly Turk, began an era of improvement in horsebreeding. The paper gives account of other blood-strains introduced, and the horses which brought them. By the third quarter of the eighteenth century thirty-six corner stone " horses had been imported, of which fourteen were Byerlys; eleven, Godolphins; two, Darleys; and the rest combinations of these. Biographies of the best individuals are given, with notes on owners and importers, and portraits. From horse-breeding we pass to a first instalment of a new series of letters of the Byrd family, which includes some curious, romantic, not explained effusions addressed to a lady called "Charmante," written by the second William Byrd (b. 1674; d. 1744), whose attractive portrait by Kneller (1702) is here, it seems, reproduced for the first time. We have a beautifully illustrated article on John White, the first English artist who visited America, accompanying Raleigh on his expedition of 1585; and following that a paper on the portrait of