118 REVIEWS OF BOOKS January the journals of 1297-1301, of the reign of Philip IV. These have been already printed, and others only less old are summarized in Mignon's inventory. We owe to M. Viard the integral publication of the two first substantial surviving examples of these journals. The earlier of these to see the light is the later and less comprehensive of the two. It is contained in Les Journaux du Tresor de Philippe VI de Valois, issued so far back as 1899 in the series of Documents Inedits. They cover the years 1348-9 and show how a period of war and pestilence attacked the economy of the treasury. To this volume is added another type of treasury record, a summary of ordinary payments of salaries and pensions called the ordinarium thesauri of 1338-9, discovered in the British Museum, where it was acquired by purchase after wonderfully surviving the general destruction of financial archives carried out by the Jacobins. The present volume, announced as imminent by Colonel Borelli as long ago as 1904, has been long delayed for obvious reasons, and is only now before us. It ranges from 1322 to 1328, and gives complete material for the study of the treasury transactions of the years 1322 to 1325. M. Viard has given an excellent edition of these documents. His texts leave nothing to be desired. His index is careful and, so far as we have been able to test it, complete. The only difficulty is that, following the traditions of the series, each personage is indexed under his Christian name, so that in the case of common names such as John we have to wade through a good many entries of people that we do not want before we can light upon the particular John with whom we happen to be concerned. Even as an index of subjects it seems singularly complete, as witness the entry ' Papagaut ', which refers us to no. 10212, which shows how the king's artilliator received £4 12s. 8d. parisis ' pro quadam cagia per eum facta pro quadam ave regis dicta Papegaut '. A parrot in 1326 seems to have been a rare and remarkable bird, and worthy of a costly cage ! M. Viard's introduction is an admirable piece of work. Combined with his introduction to his early volume it furnishes us with the most complete study of the operations of the treasury. The present intro- duction differs in scope from M. Viard's introduction to the journal of Philip VI, wherein his chief concern was to describe the nature, functions, and personnel of the royal treasury. In this volume the happy survival of the complete journals of four consecutive years has enabled him to draw up a complete view of the receipts and expenses of the treasury for the years 1322 to 1325. These amounted on an average, the receipts to about £555,000 parisis a year, and the expenses to about £534,000 parisis a year. The comparative totals suggest sound finance, but whether all the issues and expenses passed through the treasury or not, it was no part of M. Viard's business to say. Our natural desire is to compare these totals with their English equivalents, but the time has perhaps not yet come when an effective comparison can be made. Painful experience of corre- sponding figures in the England of Edward II convinces one of the rashness in laying down dogmatically totals of royal expenses and receipts, and there is no reason for believing that the problem in France was simpler. And even were general comparison practicable, there would be the difficulty of estimating the relative value of the pound sterling and the pound
