1. Walsingham has Wat Tyler of Maidstone.

2. So has Knighton, only he makes Wat Tyler and Jack Straw the same.

3. Knighton tells the same story as Stow as a general practice of the collectors, without name of place or person. This looks very much as if Stow (or whoever Stow followed) had dramatized and localized Knighton's tale, bringing in the best-known name.

...

TO DEAN HOOK.

Somerleaze, March 14, 1875

Re' Eastern Position.' I saw at Rome something of the western position. The bishop, as you know, fancies that he is in prison, and so lets his diocese go anyhow, while he sits in a corner and makes dogmas. So the sight (March 21) of him in his proper place is no longer to be had. But I saw one saying a mass in Sta Maria in Trastevere that way, and the bairns clomb up into the chair in the apse behind him, and played as they listed-all this on a Sunday before a biggish congregation.

TO MISS EDITH THOMPSON.

4 Beaumont Street, Weymouth Street, W., April 8, 1875.

My head-quarters are here in the empty nest of Johnny Green, who is gone to Venice with the Macmillan party. They saw some of the doings at the King of Hungary's coming, which are among the few doings of kings which I should care to see, as Victor Emmanuel and Francis Joseph meeting friendly at Venice is a piece of history. But I dodge about; I went to Rochester with James Parker on Monday to do Gundulf, and came back yesterday. To-morrow I have got to go down to Ellesmere to my sister's funeral.

... I was at Royal Society conversazione last night, but all philosophers and poets, hardly anybody to talk to but Greenwell.

... The swan-poor dear-found her way out into the millstream, where she was pitifully murthered of certain brutes with stones and a rake. But Edgar set catchpoles to work,

and they are to be had up next Monday at Petty Sessions. I believe there is an old statute about swans, matching Howel Dha's about cats, but the more modern law about malicious injuries to animals will serve our purpose. 'Twas a horrid shame from every point of view. She is stuffing, along with the old peacock who died of disease of the heart-I believe that to be the most worshipful way of dealing with a dead bird.

TO THE REV. R. E. BARTLETT.

4 Beaumont Street, Weymouth Street, London, W.,

April 22, 1875.

You have asked me the hardest of all questions, the answer to which I wish anybody would tell me. There is a book of Toulmin Smith's called The Parish, which suppose I ought to know; but I don't. And there is a queer pamphlet by Isaac Gregory's brother James, called The Parish in History, from which I picked up a thing or two.

Our local system is, to me at least, utterly dark. We must have started, like other folk, with the mark, village community, gemeinde, or commune. Then the lord, with his sac and soc and what not, creeps in at one end, and turns the commune into a manor; the parson creeps in at the other end, and turns it into a parish. The vestry clearly is the Mearcgemót-to use a most rare word-but the parson has somehow come to be alderman of it. There is the puzzle. Beyond sea men can never be made to understand that an English parish is a civil as well as ecclesiastical division.

Parochia, as you doubtless know, in my time' meant a diocese. But there must have been parishes much like ours, T. R. E. or sooner. Brihtheah, Bishop of Worcester, offers St. Wulfstan a rich living, much as a bishop might now, only Wulfstan will not take it. In Domesday you read of churches-that is, their advowsons-being inherited, divided, sold, &c., &c. So the system then must have been much what it is now; it clearly was under Henry II. Oh, long before this, Ethelstan's law

1 I. e. the time about which he had been writing in his history.

2 I.e. time of King Edward (the Confessor).

about the ceorl becoming a thegn makes one of the signs of thegnhood that he has a church, doubtless its advowson1. I wish I knew more about it; but I never worked it from the ecclesiastical side, only as a corruption-shall I say-of the mark.

TO MISS MACARTHUR.

Somerleaze, May 21, 1875.

If the post at Girton is what Bryce says, you should think twice before you run at it. I will fill the world with volumes witnessing to your powers of learning and teaching. But if it be a matter of pots and pans, wine, beer, and clothes, and washing linen, or being generally agreeable, why I don't know that I should crave the post for you any more than for myself. Either you or I will succeed better, I think, as Shebna the scribe than as Eliakim who was set over the household. But you must judge for yourself.

TO MISS EDITH THOMPSON,

Somerleaze, May 29, 1875.

When you say that I carry all German dates in my head, you must be either mocking or else taking me for A. W. Ward. I wish I carried a few more. I cannot at this moment turn, though I have been looking in one or two places, to any full account of the Zollverein. But I see that in my own book I have put 1818 as the time of (May 30) its beginning. It began with Prussia, and most other states joined it gradually, Austria very late, not many years before 1866. Do you not remember the joke, or am I going back too far for you, when the Times solemnly announced that Prussia had joined the Zollverein, and discussed the matter in a leading article? The Hanse Towns, at least Hamburg, have joined, as I found in 1865. This also is fixed on my mind by the Murray's hand

1 See the law in Thorpe's Collection of Ancient Laws and Institutes, i. p. 191, though it is not placed there amongst the laws of Æthelstan, but in a collection of which the date is uncertain.

* A commercial union, of which Prussia was the centre, among the German States. No duties were levied on goods passing from one State to another, but only at the common frontier.

book, which said that because Hamburg was a free city, therefore no tolls were made. To the traveller a free port (which may be a free city or not) means that he is examined when he comes out of it, as Venice and Civita Vecchia.

To M. CHARILAOS TRIKOUPES.

July 19, 1875.

I can hardly express the surprise and pleasure with which I this morning opened the packet which bore the Athenian post-mark. Its contents were the more delightful, as they were, as you know, utterly unasked for, utterly unlooked for1. It is something indeed to find that whatever I have been able to do in the way of history, and specially in the way of Greek history and politics, has been so valued by the sovereign and people of Greece.

I am so utterly unversed in the ways of courts that I hardly know how properly to return my thanks to His Majesty for the honour which he has so graciously conferred upon me. I must ask you to take the task upon yourself, and to make His Majesty understand how deeply sensible I am of his goodness. Nor must I omit my thanks to you personally for a gift which I know must be mainly your doing.

If anything could increase my old goodwill towards Greece and her people, it would be to feel myself bound to them by so close a tie. It is something that the highest honour which I have ever received from any quarter should come from Greece.

I hope that I may some day be able to thank both His Majesty and yourself in my own person. It is just possible that I might be able to reach Athens this autumn, as I have settled with one or two friends for a visit to Dalmatia to see the remains of Spalato. But in this case I should not be able to see Greece as I should wish to when I do come.

Kalnynτns, I fancy, translates Professor, but that is no title of mine. I am M.A. and Hon. D.C.L. of Oxford, and Hon. LL.D. of Cambridge; but I have no official place in either University.

1 The Order of Knight Commander of the Greek Order of the Saviour conferred upon him by the King of Greece.

To F. H. DICKINSON, ESQ.

July 25, 1875.

.. I said I had something pretty to show you, which is none other than the cross of the Greek Order of the Saviour (βασιλικὸν τάγμα τοῦ Σωτῆρος'), of which King George has been pleased to make me raέiápɣns or Knight Commander. So everywhere extra iv. maria2, I shall hold myself greater than the C. B.3 though I shall not think it needful always to write ταξιάρχης after my name. It has a strangely military sound for a peaceful body like me.

TO SIR H. MAINE.

August 4, 1875.

I am not at Somerleaze, but in the Grand Jury Room, among the xxiii. yldestan þegnes-are we any use or not? I heartily wish you or anybody would drop down suddenly to-day or to-morrow, and deliver me from two or three dinners and such like. If I could only say that a distinguished stranger had turned up suddenly. Macmillan, Johnny Green, and others have only just gone. I am at home till the 10th. But I fear from what you say, that we shall not see you till after I come back from Spalato. Then you must bring Lady Maine also.

I am a sad dog never yet to have thanked you for your lecture. I wish it had been more distinctly on the unity of law. Still they all fit in together.

... If I read your question rightly, you want a case of a brother succeeding in preference to a son'. I don't know of any except those that you must know, as Alfred and Eadred. In these cases the son was young. I am not at this moment ready with a case of anybody being preferred to a son of full

1 'Royal Order of the Saviour.'

Beyond the four seas.'

Mr. J. H. Parker.

Extract from letter of Sir H. Maine, July 10, 1875. 'You will place me under considerable obligation if, at your leisure, and as they occur to you, you will put down any examples of royal or semi-royal succession of brother to brother, to the exclusion of a minor son, in Western communities not quite escaped from the tribal condition. I have collected a good many, but most of them are capable of a special explanation.'