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prisoners of war." Mr. Abell's pages furnish abundant evidence in support of this conclusion.

Mr. Abell has satisfied himself, as he will satisfy his most critical readers, on the first point. With regard to the second aim he has certainly added a chapter of unusual interest to the history of England during the last half of the eighteenth and the first two decades of the nineteenth century. The wars with which the book is concerned extended over nearly twenty-seven years. Between 1803 and 1814, 122,000 prisoners of war were detained in England and Scotlandthousands of them for as long as ten or eleven years. At one period there were five thousand officers on parole, and sixty-seven thousand of the rank and file of the fighting forces of the enemy were in prisons or in hulks. The cost of maintaining prisoners in some years was as high as £3,000,000. Parole prisoners were domiciled in as many as fifty English and Scotch towns. There were hulks in the Medway and at Portsmouth and Plymouth. A great compound existed from 1797 to 1814 at Norman Cross, near Peterborough, at which as many as 3500 prisoners were in detention. There was another large prison at Portsmouth; and there were smaller prisons at Sissinghurst, Forton, Kergilliack, Shrewsbury, Perth, Yarmouth and Edinburgh.

Local trade was much dislocated in the neighborhood of the larger prison camps by the industries carried on by the prisoners. There were hundreds of duels fought by prisoners, many of them with fatal results. Forging of bank notes and coining were carried on at some of the prisons. Social life in the small provincial towns where officers were detained on parole was often much changed by the presence of the involuntary sojourners. Prisoners married and died in the parole towns. Hundreds of parole men became fathers without becoming husbands, and consequently made much work for the poor-law authorities and the local magistrates. Yet until Mr. Abell embodied the results of his documentary research and extensive field work in its present form there were not ten pages in print in England covering the entire aspects of this interesting episode in the life of the people of England and Scotland. Three or four monographs there were recounting the history of such prisons as Norman Cross, Dartmoor and Perth. Except for these exclusively local histories Mr. Abell, when he began his work, moved into a field in which no English writer had preceded him, and he has worked it so thoroughly that there can scarcely be an aspect of the life of the prisoners of war in Great Britain that has eluded him.

The history of the prison systems, and the description of prison conditions as they are unfolded by Mr. Abell are of exceeding interest.

They are, however, the reverse of agreeable; and it is difficult to say which is the more depressing, the description of the squalor and cruelty that characterized life on the hulks and in the prisons, or the exposure of the methods by which the helpless men and boys who were detained as prisoners were cheated and robbed by clothing and victualing contractors who waxed fat on their want and misery. The government was not niggard in its allowances for prisoners of war; but it had its hands full with the war and with political turmoil at home. Much had to be left to the officers who were in charge of the hulks and prisons; and graft was as rampant as it was in the days when even a small army or navy contract meant a fortune for the man who could command the political pull to obtain it.

HARTFORD, CONNECTICUT.

EDWARD PORRITT.

The Naval Mutinies of 1797. By CONRAD GILL. University Press, Manchester, 1913.-xxii, 412 pp.

An adequate history of the two mutinies at Spithead and the mutiny at the Nore in 1797 has long been desired; for but little attention has been given them in the general histories of England of the period of the wars with Revolutionary France and with Napoleon. Admiralty and Home Office papers necessary to the preparation of such a history have been available for some years, and Mr. Gill has made excellent use of them and of much other contemporary material in his admirably written history of these disturbing episodes in the great war of a hundred years ago.

At the time the war began, the wages of men in the navy were nineteen shillings a month—a rate at which they had stood since the days of Cromwell, notwithstanding the general increase in the price of commodities which was so marked a feature of the economic history of England in the eighteenth century. Thousands of the men of the navy of 1793-1814 had been pressed into the service, and discipline was so drastic that the men-volunteers or pressed men-were not permitted ashore from the time a ship went into commission until she was paid off and the crew disbanded. The pay of the men in the army was increased in 1795; but until the old men-of-war, built of wood, were superseded by modern vessels of steel it was the conviction of British governments and of the English governing class that the nation could not afford to pay a living wage to the men of the fleet, and that it was the duty of mariners to serve their country at the sacrifice of themselves and their families.

There is some survival of this old conviction in Mr. Gill's pages. He concedes that if the press gang were revived it would be met with a storm of indignation, but he suggests that it is difficult to realize that the press gang was less hateful to earlier generations of Englishmen. Yet its abominable harshness and its cruelty were adequately realized by the people of England of the days of Pitt, Nelson and Wellington; and a keen realization of what the press gang meant will surely come home to Mr. Gill if he will familiarize himself with the social history of England from the American Revolution to the beginning of the reign of Queen Victoria.

Mr. Gill's apology for the press gang is that in the eighteenth century impressment was an established fact, and the sailor from the time of his first adventure in a merchant ship knew that he was liable to be drafted into the navy. "Moreover," he adds, " in respect of danger and discomfort there was little to choose between the naval and the merchant services, and in some ways a naval career was preferable to life in trading vessels." It would be just about as appropriate to speak of a negro having a career on a cotton plantation in a southern state in the days of slavery as it is to describe the life of a man pressed into the royal navy as a career. It was a miserable existence; and much of what Mr. Gill has written in his most interesting pages would be of small value if he could persuade his readers that there was little to choose between the naval and merchant services of the eighteenth century. Another of Mr. Gill's pleas for the press gang is that impressment was essential to the continuance of the navy. "The Admiralty," he writes, "tried to encourage voluntary enlistment by offering enormous bounties, but those who might be attracted by the financial reward were repelled by the bad conditions of life in the navy. The attempt to attract volunteers met with so little success that at the height of the war only half of the men in the fleet had enlisted of their own accord. The other half had to be supplied by the press gang."

All this might have been altered if the Admiralty had realized that service with the war fleet must be paid for like any other service-paid for in cash in the same way as ships and war equipment had to be paid for; and if, moreover, the government had offered to the wives and dependents of seamen some other alternative than the workhouse or outrelief from the parish. As Mr. Gill unfolds his detailed story of conditions in the navy before the mutinies at Spithead and the Nore, surprise is not that the men mutinied in 1797, but that the mutinies did not come much earlier in the war with France. The histories of the three distinct mutinies are necessarily a little difficult to work out.

So are the histories of the organization for mutiny in the different fleets. But Mr. Gill has acquitted himself of a difficult and complicated task with singular success and given us a book that is more than a contribution to the history of the British navy. It is a distinctly serviceable contribution to the political and social history of England of the period of England's last great war with France.

HARTFORD, CONNECTICUT.

EDWARD PORRITT.

Studies and Notes Supplementary to Stubbs's Constitutional History. Two volumes. By CHARLES PETIT-DUTAILLIS. Manchester, The University Press, 1911 and 1914.-xiv, 152 pp.; 316 pp.

Ever since the appearance of Stubbs's Constitutional History of England its indispensableness has been steadily recognized. Whatever else one reads on the English constitution, he must also read Stubbs. An American historian who has explored a portion of the master's field very diligently does not hesitate to say that "in the study of the constitution as a whole, Bishop Stubbs's work does form an epoch from which all later work must date." The translation of the Constitutional History into French, two volumes of which have already been published, affords sufficient evidence that, despite the activity of British and foreign historical scholarship during the past generation, it has not as a whole been superseded. However, recent research has been by no means barren. Fresh light has been thrown upon obscure subjects; sources of information unused by and even unknown to Stubbs have been effectively exploited; conclusions resting upon insecure foundations have been modified; former opinions and interpretations have been revised. Much has been done to connect the English constitution with continental and especially with Norman-French institutions. In a word, the Constitutional History needed to be supplemented, revised and put abreast of the latest historical scholarship.

This need has been met by M. Petit-Dutaillis, the editor of the French translation of Stubbs, a distinguished medievalist and authority upon certain periods of English history. The "notes " which he has appended to the text treat of topics dealt with by Stubbs, respecting which recent investigation has made necessary some modification or restatement of the latter's views. Some of these notes are merely convenient summaries of the conclusions of other scholars; others are genuine contributions by the writer to historical knowledge. They seemed to satisfy so well a long-felt want that they have been translated into English and published in the Historical Series of the University of Manchester.

Perhaps the most interesting of the twelve essays which comprise the first volume is that on the Great Charter. M. Petit-Dutaillis speaks with authority upon this subject. He was one of the first to question the classical theory of the Charter held by Stubbs, Freeman, Green and Hallam, and to point out its essentially feudal character. In his Etude sur la vie et le règne de Louis VIII, published in 1894, he said: "The barons had no suspicion that they would one day be called the founders of English liberty. The patriotism of writers on the other side of the Channel has singularly misrepresented the nature of this crisis." Since he wrote this his views have in the main been corroborated by the writings of Pollock and Maitland, Jenks, Miss Norgate, and especially by McKechnie's masterly commentary on the Charter. M. Petit-Dutaillis gives a very pertinent extract from a document written about 1220, of which he had made use in his work on Louis VIII, to show the light in which the Charter appeared to a contemporary of King John. It is strange that he makes no reference to Mr. G. B. Adams's articles in the American Historical Review touching on Magna Charta. Clause 61 of that document, which he regards as an attempt to set up a "most naïf" and "most barbarous " procedure, is viewed by Mr. Adams as the germ of the limited monarchy and, indeed, of the English constitution!

The editor has found it necessary to add only two studies to the second volume of the Constitutional History covering the period from 1215 to 1399. One of these deals with the history of the Forest and the other is on the "Causes and General Characteristics of the Rising of 1381." They are both substantial monographs which are worthy contributions to English historical science. Stubbs's treatment of the Forest was superficial and fragmentary and not at all commensurate with the importance of the subject in constitutional history. M. PetitDutaillis's essay is doubtless the best brief but comprehensive account of the Forest to be had. Its origin as an institution he traces to Normandy, holding that it was introduced into England by the Norman Conquest. The abuses of forest law and administration, of which noble and peasant alike complained, are clearly set forth, as is the financial importance of the Forest to the kings as a source of royal revenue. The long struggle for disafforestment is related in some detail, and interesting comparisons are instituted between the history of the Forest in England and France.

M. Petit-Dutaillis writes with exceptional authority upon the Rising of 1381, which he considers one of the most interesting and significant events in the whole history of the Middle Ages. His knowledge of the

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