126 REVIEWS OF BOOKS January their turning-points. Thus up to 1525 Luther was tolerant ; afterwards intolerant, but only in word ; for no Servetus was burnt in Germany. Toleration, however, was not the child of the reformers but of the refor- mation : men claimed for themselves a liberty which they denied to others, but events ultimately vindicated it for all, on the principles which the reformers were the first to proclaim. In Germany the reformation was authoritative, in England conservative, in Switzerland democratic ; and this because it was supported respectively by the princes, the middle classes, and the people in conflict with Austria. These differences are well known to historians, but they are well put by Dr. Murray ; and then there is thrown in a large amount of reflexion which makes his book well worth the attention of those who already have some knowledge of the subject. But it lacks concentration, and compares ill, in this respect, with such a book as Mr. C. Beard's Hibbert Lectures, which deal very much with the same ground. B. J. Kidd. The Chantry Certificates and the Edwardian Inventories of Church Goods. Edited by Miss Rose Graham. (Oxfordshire Eecord Society. Oxford : Issued for the Society, 1919.) This book is the first-fruits of the Oxfordshire Record Society and it sets a becoming standard of excellence. The book chiefly deals with the Edwardian Inventories for the county (pp. 57-137), but it includes also that part of the return made by the first of all university commissions (appointed in 1546) which concerns the chantry chapels in Oxford itself, the Chantry Certificate for Oxfordshire in 1548 (i. e. the returns made of all the endowments which came under the act 1 Ed. VI, cap. 14), and the abstract of the certificate which was made after that act had taken effect for the purpose of enrolling the pensions allotted to the chantry priests and money paid for schools and for assistant clergy. The docu- ments connected with the chantries are of great interest, though, as Miss Graham points out in her excellent introduction, there are curious discrepancies between the returns of the number of communicants (' houseling people ') in the certificate itself and in the abstract made two or three months later. As a rule the numbers of the communicants before Easter 1548 are much smaller than those given later, e.g. at Burford the figures are respectively 544 and 1,000, at Standlake 83 and 200. Miss Graham thinks that the earlier figures, supplied by the parsons and churchwardens, were given carelessly, and that when the endowments had passed to the Crown and there was still ' the chance of saving something out of the spoil for the parish ', they gave quite different figures. That is a plausible hypothesis, but it does not, as Miss Graham notes, meet all the cases, for in two instances the figures dropped, at Henley and at Rousham : whereas in the earlier return there were said to be 1,000 and 203 communicants in those respective parishes, in the later abstract they are reduced to 500 and 140. An explanation which accounts for all the divergencies is that at Easter 1548 the parish priests and church- wardens made a serious and successful effort to count the communicants and corrected their previous estimates accordingly.
