258 REVIEWS OF BOOKS April The Worcester Liber Albus : Glimpses of Life in a great Benedictine Monastery in the Fourteenth Century. By the Rev. J. M. Wilson, D.D. (London : Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1920.) An abstract of the first 16.8 leaves of the Liber Albus of the prior and convent of Worcester has already appeared in the Transactions of the Worcestershire Historical Society for 1919, and the first-fruits of Dr. Wilson's studies upon it have been printed among recent papers of the Worcestershire Archaeological Society. The present selection from its contents, in the form of a series of translations and summaries with running comment, full of the enthusiasm which Dr. Wilson displays for the records in his charge, is taken from the portion already calendared, covering a third part of the volume and the period from July 1301 to the beginning of 1336. The Liber Albus has been somewhat neglected hitherto by writers upon Worcester. Thomas, who made good use of the episcopal and Sede Vacante registers in the collection of instruments appended to his Survey of the Cathedral-Church of Worcester (1736), appears to have left it alone ; and Noake, whose excellent Monastery and Cathedral of Worcester (1866) contains a notice of it, was probably deterred by its bulk and the variety of its material from doing more than calling attention to its existence in his list of the muniments of the dean and chapter. Dr. Wilson practically has the field to himself, and enters upon it with all the zeal of a discoverer. Although exceptional among surviving monastic registers in the wealth of its contents and the length of the continuous period which it embraces, the Liber Albus is a typical example of the general class of volume to which it belongs. Such glimpses as we gain of the internal life of the monastery are thus in almost every case obtained through the contact of the prior and convent with some external influence. If data with regard to internal discipline and morals are scarce, we have some details of the financial depression from which the house suffered in the record of the inquisition held prior to the appropriation of the rectory of Dodderhill (pp. 124-6). Frequent grants of corrodies and pensions in return for cash down were, here as elsewhere, methods of temporary relief which brought the convent into debt and difficulty. Some interesting light is thrown upon the attitude of a convent which was also a cathedral chapter to other religious houses of the diocese. The abbeys of Gloucester (pp. 62-9) and Bristol (p. 113), and the priory of Great Malvern (pp. 275-6), a member, it should be recalled, of the exempt house of Westminster, resisted the claim of the prior of Worcester to hold visitations during vacancies of the see, with passive resistance or by subterfuge. There can be little doubt that the objection lodged by the prior and convent to the election of John Thoky as abbot of Gloucester in 1306 was due to the circumstance that it probably had been conducted without the consent or presence of representatives of the diocesan chapter. Such disputes, with their accompaniment of violent protestations and anathemas, had an element of formality and left little personal feeling behind. When Prior Wyke sent a quarrelsome monk to do penance among the monks of Gloucester, Abbot Thoky received his courteous '
