132 REVIEWS OF BOOKS January might have been made to Mr. Nisbet Bain's article in this Review ^ on the siege of Belgrad in 1456. The volume is preceded by a biography of the author, from which we learn that his juvenile work, Geschichte der Bulgaren, which needs bringing up to date, was to have been published in a new edition. - William Miller. The Coucher Book o/Fumess Abbey. Vol. ii. Edited by John Brownbill. (Chetham Society. Vols. Ixxiv, Ixxvi, Ixxviii, 1915, 1916, 1919.) In the year 1412 William Dalton, abbot of Furness, employed one of his monks, John Stell by name, a good calligrapher, to enter the charters of his house in a coucher-book. The coucher-book consisted of two volumes, of which the first contained the charters relating to Furness and the vicinity, the latter contained those relating to the abbey lands in other parts of Lancashire, in Cumberland, in Yorkshire, and at Boston in Lincolnshire. Both volumes came to be preserved, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the office of the duchy of Lancaster, the first in the care of the chancellor, and the second in that of the auditor, of the duchy. Volume i still remains in the Public Record Office, and was edited by the Rev. J. C. Atkinson for the Chetham Society in 1886-8. Its companion had come into private ownership as early as 1747. Later it found its way into the library of the duke of Hamilton. That library was purchased in 1882 for the Berlin government, but was resold, and the Furness coucher-book was acquired in 1887 by the British Museum. There are two very good accounts of Furness Abbey in print. Beck's handsome Annales Fumesienses, published in 1844, and Professor Powicke's historical sketch in the Victoria County History of Lancashire. Neither has made direct use of this second part of the coucher-book which the Chetham Society has now made accessible to students. Still the volume had attracted the notice of various antiquaries before it left the office of the duchy. Mr. Brownbill, who edits it, makes mention of two early sets of excerpts, one a Cottonian and the other a Harleian manuscript. The latter was made in 1597, as Mr. Brownbill thinks, by Henry Lilly the herald. Lilly certainly owned the extracts, but there seems reason for thinking that they were actually made by Robert Treswell, Somerset herald. Treswell's prede- cessor in office, Robert Glover, one of the greatest of heralds, also made a series of extracts which are now in the Bodleian Library (MS. Tanner 12). The Bodleian also possesses a little anonymous volume of Yorkshire notes (MS. Add. A. 123), which appears to be in the handwriting of Richard Gascoigne. Gascoigne's notes from the second part of the coucher-book are dated 10 May 1620, and are purely genealogical. His friend and countryman, Roger Dodsworth, saw the coucher-book in the office of the duchy at Gray's Inn in 1637, and made a few notes from it (MS. Dodsworth 66, fo. 124^). For the next hundred and ten years the volume is lost to sight. Although Mr. Brownbill has not exhausted the history of the volume of which he writes, we have nothing but praise for his editing of it. If a monastic chartularj' is to be satisfactorily edited, more has to be done ' AiUe,vu. 236.
