Page:Englishhistorica36londuoft.djvu/484

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476 SHORT NOTICES July the author of the History of the Ukraine (Istoriya Ukrayini), of which he had by 1914 written eight volumes, bringing the work down to the year 1650. Of this monumental history abridged and illustrated editions have also been produced both in Russian and in ' Ukrainian ' (or Little Russian) and have had large sales. The same author's Abrege de VHistoire de V Ukraine (Prague : Librairie Ouvriere, 1920) is a concise history of 240 pages written especially to prove the case for the complete political independence of the Ukraine. The name was given first in the fifteenth century by the Poles to the region between the lower Dnieper and the Dniester which formed the borderland between Poland, Muscovy, and Turkey. Ukraina in Polish means ' march ' from Kraj, Kraina, ' country ', ' land ', as in Krain or Carinthia, and numerous parts of Croatia and Serbia called Krajina. The book is produced by the Institut Sociologique Ukrainien, whose home seems to be at Kiev, and whose branch office for foreign countries is at Prague. N. F. In The Local Government of Peterborough, part i, section i (Peterborough : Caster and Jelley, 1919) Mr. W. T. Mellows, LL.B., gives from printed and unprinted sources a much-needed and upon the whole excellent account of the feudal administration of the great estates of the abbey down to the dissolution of the monasteries. The soke, honour, liberty, and vill (divided into inner vill or town and the manors of Boroughbury, Eyebury, &c.) are carefully discriminated. Attention is drawn to the fact that the court of the honour was held not at Peterborough but at Castor, but Mr. Mellows wisely abstains from fully committing himself to an explana- tion which would trace this to the surviving influence of the Roman Durobrivae. He quotes from Maitland the existence of a parallel court of the abbot of Ramsey at Broughton without noticing that this too was not held at the abbey itself. The abbey documents are most full on the agricultural economy of the manor of Boroughbury, the suffix in whose name is very doubtfully explained, after White Kennet, as meaning ' # open plain ', but (like Eyebury) seems better referred to the comparatively late use of the word in the sense of house or hall which has been noted, for instance, in such London place-names as Bucklersbury. The mona- steries are usually supposed to have been very conservative in their rural economy, and it is therefore interesting to find commutation of labour services well advanced at Peterborough by 1334. Mr. Mellows seems to accept Thorold Rogers's view that one of the causes of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 was an attempt of the lords of manors to enforce again the personal services of their villeins, though it has been strongly questioned by Ashley and Petit-Dutaillis. There does not appear to be any evidence that such an attempt was made at Peterborough. For the inner vill or town there is unfortunately no such satisfactory material as the Borough- bury compoti afford for the rural organization. All that we know prac- tically is that it had a market and a portmanmoot by 1322. The suggestion that the latter was ' a form of market court or court of pie powder ■ (p. 34) is made on insufficient grounds and unlikely in itself. Nor need the hundred be called in to explain such modest privileges as the towns- men enjoyed. The alternative suggested that it was a case of a market town, with some burghal privileges granted by the lord, but not a borough