1921 SHORT NOTICES 623 the only consistent legal expression of the principle of absolute monarchy in Europe. Careful research in the development both of political thought in Denmark and of constitutional and testamentary forms in the archives of Copenhagen and the closely related court of Dresden enables the author to solve most of the problems debated between former students of the Royal Law, such as the Danish Rigsarkivar 1 A. D. j0rgensen, in his study of its right of succession and his earlier biography of Griffenfeld (2 vols., 1893-4), and the chief librarian of the Royal Library at Copen- hagen, Chr. Bruun, in his book on Enevceldens Indforelse i Danmark i Kongelovens Tilblivelse (1887). Thus the book forms a most important contribution to general constitutional history. On the one hand it describes the slow growth of hereditary kingship, primogeniture, and the succession of female lines, out of the medieval mixture of election and dynastic right called regnum legitimum (in opposition to haereditarium) by the German and Danish lawyers of the seventeenth century (p. 151), and Geblutsrecht by the most recent German explorer of medieval monarchy, Dr. F. Kern, whose book on Gottesgnadentum und Wider stands recht (Leipzig, 1914) Dr. Fabricius might with advantage have compared. The influence of Hobbes on the theory of hereditary monarchy in Denmark, at least in the individual career of Schumacher, who imbibed the high church mys- ticism of Hobbes 's adversary, Dean Fell, at Christ Church, Oxford, turns out to have been less prominent than had been urged by J0rgensen. On the other hand, there is the dramatic picture of the concrete circumstances under which, in much the same way as in the monarchies of France and Central Europe, Danish absolutism arose from the quarrels and degenera- tion of representative government by estates (Standestaat) as a higher form of organization, backed by the inferior and progressive classes of society, such as the towns and the peasantry, against the feudal aristocracy. What embarrassed liberal historians like Fredericia and J0rgensen as a ' most dubious ' or ' quite superfluous ' document, is thus more justly recognized as a legal symbol of modern statecraft, born, it is true, like the Pragmatic Sanction of Emperor Charles VI or Frederick William I of Prussia's edict on the domain, of the conception of government as a private right handed down to successors in testaments and ' paternal dispositions ', but just for that reason the memorable foundation of a new and thorough political order. Excellent photographs introduce the reader to the manu- scripts of the chief preparatory stages of the Royal Law, from the first deliberations in the estates committee of 1660 to the Latin draft by which Fabricius could definitely identify Schumacher as the author of the final codification. C. B. The social and economic historian will find much to interest him in the Household Account Book of Sarah Fell ofSwarthmoor Hall, edited by Norman Penny (Cambridge : University Press, 1920). These accounts of the step- daughter of George Fox contain little new information about the founder of the Quakers, though the entry, ' by mother paid for tobacco pipes for father ld. shows that he had adopted a habit he had formerly denounced 1 [Dansk] Historish Tidskrift 5 R. vi, republished in his Historisk Afhandlinger, vol. iii.
