1921 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 249 Feudal Cambridgeshire. By William Farrer, D.fjit. (Cambridge : University Press, 1920.) Scholars are under so many obligations to Mr. William Farrer for his works and his indefatigable energy that he has led us to form high expecta- tions of any book that he may undertake. It is not, however, quite clear what purpose the volume before us is intended to fulfil. Mr. Farrer describes it, in his brief preface, as a ' Calendar of Feudal Records relat- ing to Cambridgeshire ', which he has ' compiled for students as a source of reference to the baronial, honorial and manorial history of the county '. He tells us that ' somewhat similar calendars are in course of preparation ' for other counties, and that they would enable students of local history ' to trace and identify all the scattered members of any barony or honor, wherever situated '. It is obvious that such a scheme should be carefully thought out, and be carried out, *so far as possible, on a uniform plan. The present writer, in a paper read before the London Congress of Historical Studies, ventured to suggest a consistent scheme for attaining the above object. From the time of the Domesday Survey the materials for local history suffered, above all, from that cross-division which was the inevitable consequence of the clash between the native system of county, hundred, and vill, and the superimposed feudal arrangement of the barony and the knight's fee. Even a century and a half after the great survey (i. e. in 1236) the king's clerks and ministers were still trying to reconcile the two systems and to make sure that the king's revenue did not suffer from their conflict. For the needs, in present days, of the topographer and the genealogist, what is chiefly wanted is to trace the history of the barony or honour as a self-contained unit, and of the knights' fees which composed it, or rather that portion of it which had been subject to enfeoffment. This, however, is not the plan that Mr. Farrer has devised ; he has arranged his material under hundreds, and subdivided it among the vills of which a hundred was composed. At the head of each hundred is an abstract of its Domesday information, to which is added a separate list of the honours or baronies which had lands therein. Each of the vills within it is then dealt with, the Domesday entries concerning it being taken as the starting-point, and the Hundred Rolls as the terminus ad quern. For the intervening period of more than two centuries, we are given, in strictly chronological order, the entries relating to the vill, collected from the printed Pipe Rolls, Fines, Rolls of the King's Court, Red Book of the Exchequer, cartularies, the calendars of rolls and docu- ments officially issued, and so forth. The Testa is not as helpful for Cambridgeshire as it is for most counties ; but the Liber Memorandorum of Barnwell makes amends for this, and has proved very useful. Part of the brief preface to this volume is devoted to correcting ' the date of the very valuable return of knights' fees preserved in the Liber ', which ought, we read, to be ' 1236-8 ', not 1236. This document, however, deals with more than knights' fees ; nor are we told what, if any, was its relation to the returns connected with the aid for the marriage of the king's sister. It will, therefore, be seen that the system here adopted differs from that of Domesday Book, for it reconstructs the hundreds and their vills, which were broken up in that record, in order to rearrange them under the names of the
