Page:Englishhistorica36londuoft.djvu/487

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1921 SHORT NOTICES 479 In Annales du Midi, nos. 121-2 (Toulouse : Privat, 1919), there is con- tained on pp. 1-24 an important account by M. Bemont of the municipal institutions of La Reole, ' La Mairie et la Jurande dans les Villes de la Guyenne Anglaise: La Reole'. This is a substantial contribution to the series of similar studies which will form a ' travail d'ensemble '. It ranges with two other instalments which have already been printed elsewhere under the same general title. One of these, referring to Bordeaux, has already seen the light in 1916 in torn, cxxiii of the Revue Historique. Another, a study of the four Dordogne towns, Bourg, Blaye, Saint-fimilion, and Libourne, was published in 1917 in the Revue Historique de Bordeaux et du Departement de la Gironde. In this M. Bemont shows how La Reole, which up to Richard I's time was a strict dependency of its priory of St. Peter, became a royal town and castle with a constitution of the com- munal type, with mayor and jurats, not later than the reign of John. By the middle oi. the thirteenth century it had lost its mayor and possessed but a very reduced survival of its earlier municipal institutions. La Reole, like Bordeaux, occupied then a place apart among the towns of the duchy of Guienne. In nos. 123-4, pp. 190-5 (1919), M. J. Calmette publishes a ' Note d'Histoire Anglo-franco-aragonaise ', centring round a letter of Edward IV of York to Peter of Portugal, whom the Catalans had called in as their sovereign on their revolt from John II of Aragon. The letter, dated Windsor, 20 June 1465, is preserved in a Catalan copy in the municipal archives of Barcelona. It shows Edward anxious for an alliance with the Aragonese pretender, and speaking in a cordial way of his messenger, a Catalan knight, Bartholomew Gari. Next year the same knight was employed to negotiate a marriage between the Catalan pre- tender and Edward's sister Elizabeth, a plan cut short by Peter's death. This early marriage proposal in favour of the future wife of Charles the Bold is described in M. Calmette's Louis XI, Jean II et la Revolution Catalane (Toulouse, 1903), but seems unknown to most English writers on the period and the lady. In nos. 121-2, pp. 68-73 (1919), M. Antoine Thomas calls attention to the fashion of beginning the year on 1 April which was confined to Toulouse, which M. Galabert had noted in the same periodical in torn, xxiii, pp. 45-56. He shows that in 1332 the 1 April style was already iuxta consuetudinem Tholose, and that it was used as early as 1305. M. Galabert adds new instances suggesting that the em- ployment of this special style was limited, even at Toulouse, to notaries instituted by the consuls, since papal and imperial notaries, established in the city, still changed the year at Christmas. In nos. 121-2 and 123-4, pp. 35-67 and 193-6, M. A. Arnaud completes an elaborate study of the functions and jurisdiction of the consuls at Montpellier during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. T. F. T. In the Anzeigerfur Schweizerische Geschichte, Neue Folge, vol. xvii, is a new edition of the late fourteenth-century chronicle of the Anonymus Friburgensis, an unjustly discredited author of whom M. A. Roulin has rediscovered a lost manuscript. He gives a small facsimile, and M. Pierre de Zurich appends a note on the date of the manuscript, which he ascribes to the fifteenth or sixteenth century. Another medieval text is given by