and rearranged by a writer of the next generation called Britton.  It may be studied in a modern edition in NICHOLLS’S Britton on the laws of England, while Fleta, an almost contemporary Latin law book, must be read in Selden’s seventeenth century edition.  Another thirteenth century law-book, Le Mirroir des Justices, has been edited by Maitland and W.J.  Whittaker for the Selden Society.  From Edward I.’s time onwards unofficial reports of trials called YEAR BOOKS, written in French, become valuable for their vividness and detail, and for the light which they throw on the more technical records of the plea rolls.  Many of them are printed in unsatisfactory seventeenth century editions, but the Year Books of five of Edward I.’s regnal years, between 1292 to 1307, together with the Year Book of 11-12 Edward III., are accessible in A.J.  Horwood’s editions in the Rolls Series.  L.O.  Pike has also edited in the Rolls Series the Year books of Edward III. from 1338 to 1345, and Maitland’s Year books of Edward II. for the Selden Society are the first two instalments of a scheme for publishing the Year Books of the reign.  Besides their legal value, the Year Books are an almost unworked mine for social and economic, and often even political and ecclesiastical, history.

Of literary aids to history T. WRIGHT’S Political Songs (Camden Soc.) illustrate this period to the reign of Edward II.  One of Wright’s pieces has been more elaborately edited in C.L.  KINGSFORD’S Song of Lewes (1890), and C. Hardwick published a Poem on the Times OF Edward II. for the Percy Soc. (1849).  With Edward III. such literature becomes copious.  Of special importance are T. Wright’s Political POEMS and SONGS FROM the accession of Edward III., vol. i. (Rolls Series, 1859), J. Hall’s Poems of LAURENCE MINOT, Skeat’s editions of CHAUCER and LANGLAND, and G.C.  Macaulay’s edition of GOWER.  The Latin works of Wycliffe, published by the Wycliffe Society, mainly belong to the succeeding period, but De Dominio Divino and De Civili Dominio, as well as some tracts printed in the appendix to LEWIS’S Life of Wiclif and in Shirley’s edition of Fasciculi Zizanioram (Rolls Series), were written before 1377.

Of modern works treating of this period, many monographs, dealing with particular points, have been mentioned in notes in the course of the narrative.  Of general guides to the period the best by far are Stubbs and Pauli.  STUBBS’S Constitutional History (vol. ii.) is as valuable for the chapters summarising the political history as for the more strictly constitutional matter.  R. PAULI’S Geschichte von England, iii., 489-896, and iv., 1-505, 716-741, remains, after half a century, the fullest and most satisfactory working up in detail of these reigns, though the great additions to our material make parts of it a somewhat unsafe guide.  It can be supplemented for particular