In his study of Les Droits des Marchés et des Foires, M. Huvelin discusses the question whether markets owed their origin to grants made by the king, direct or through authority delegated to a lord, or to grants made by a lord and confirmed by the king. His decision that they were entirely of royal origin would have met with the approval of Edward I, whose attorneys during the Quo Waranto inquest constantly asserted that, “to no one in the realm is it permitted to have a market without the licence and goodwill of the lord king or his predecessors.” In the delegated regality of the Palatinate of Durham it had been definitely stated in 1228 that, “no one has toll save the Bishop, because no one has market or fair in the Haliwarifolc save he alone.” Yet it is legitimate to wonder how this particular apple got into the royal dumpling. The majority of the regalia are obviously such by nature; but there are some about which we feel that, while we hear much of baronial usurpations from the king, we might well hear something of royal encroachments upon domanial rights. If a market is regarded simply as a regularly recurrent assembly for the sale of local products, it is surely a matter that concerns the local community or its lord rather than the king. A phrase in the so-called “Laws of William the Conqueror”—“There shall not be any market or fair save in cities of our realm and in boroughs enclosed by a wall and in castles and very safe places, where the customs of our realm and our common right and the royalties of our crown … may not be defrauded”—sounds more like an attempt to bring an existing, independent market system under the control of the Crown than the assertion of an acknowledged regality; and it may be noted that a previous attempt, made by Athelstan in 925, to confine markets to towns had had to be abandoned.

The history of Thomas Becket has been a fruitful subject of controversy for centuries. The murder and its results have also been continually expounded, so that it would seem presumptuous to claim to say anything new on such a well-worn theme. But attention has been focussed almost entirely on the question of criminous clerks, and rightly, if the quarrel of Henry II and Becket is the theme; for this was the issue that affected the archbishop most closely—the prestige of the archiepiscopal court was at stake. The Constitutions of Clarendon, however, affected the prestige of a greater than Becket, and the issues involved were correspondingly more important, and a decision on them carried with it the settlement of the minor question. I am only concerned with Becket because his murder brought about a decision of the main issue between Henry and the Pope. When Henry was reconciled with the Pope at Avranches in 1172 he made two concessions: (1) he renounced those customs that had been introduced in his own time to the harm of the Church; and (2) he allowed appeals to Rome. Now it is doubtless true to say that, as Henry insisted that the Constitutions were all “old” customs, the first concession meant little or nothing. But it is also usual to say that as, by a saving clause, he was allowed to get security from appellants that they were meditating no harm to king or country, the effect on his authority of the second clause was also slight. So the general opinion seems to be that, while Henry gave way over the question of the criminous clergy, on other questions of principle he was successful in maintaining his position.

I propose in the present article to mention the additions which have been made during recent years to our knowledge of the medieval, Turkish and modern periods of Greek history, especially by the Greeks themselves. In the fifth edition of Paparregopoulos' standard History of the Greek Nation, edited and continued by Professor P. Karolides, we have an account of the whole history of the Greeks from prehistoric times down to the annexation of Thessaly and Arta in 1881. The editor, who sat in the Turkish parliament and is particularly strong in all that regards the Moslem world, has, by large additions to the text and by footnotes, brought the classic masterpiece of his author up to date, while for the first time this work is illustrated and indexed. In the general field of medieval Greek history the Annual of the Society of Byzantine Studies, which first appeared in 1924, has published a number of articles by Greek specialists, while the Byzantinisch-Neugriechische Jahrbücher of Professor Nikos A. Bees, started at Berlin in 1920, has been published since 1926 in Athens, where a similar periodical, Helleniká, edited by Professors Amantos and Kougeas, is announced. The local medieval and modern history of Epeiros is being collected in the Epeirote Chronicles, of which two volumes and a biographical supplement have appeared; that of Thrace in the similar periodical, Thrakiká, of which one complete volume has been issued. Dr Franz Dölger has produced two instalments of the Corpus der griechischen Urkunden des Mittelalters und der neueren Zeit, planned by Krumbacher, and giving German summaries of documents from 565 to 1204, and Beiträge zur Geschichte der byzantinischen Finanzverwaltung besonders des 10. und 11. Fahrhunderts. Messrs A. E. R. Boak and James E. Dunlap have contributed Two Studies in Later Roman and Byzantine Administration on “The Master of the Offices” and “The Office of the Grand Chamberlain” respectively to The University of Michigan Studies, Humanistic Series (vol. XIV, New York, 1924).

No system of self-government at all resembling the practice of the mother country was possible in the British colonies so long as the heads of the colonial departments and the members of Governors' councils held their offices nominally during His Majesty's pleasure, but actually for life. Hence it has been generally recognised that Lord John Russell's despatch of October 16, 1839, to Governor-General Poulett Thomson, which put an end to this state of affairs, marks a stage of immense importance in the transition to Responsible Government. The Colonial Office papers in the Public Record Office show that the pronouncement of the new principle, made at a turning-point of Canadian history, originated in a decision on a minor incident in a remote and lately colonised part of the empire.

Mid-nineteenth century Imperial trade policy has been discussed mainly from the standpoint of the constitutional historian. It is probably for this reason that the economic events with which the policy is connected have received very little critical analysis, and are usually expounded on lines laid down by contemporary partisans. The orthodox view that the Canadian corn-exporting trade was encouraged by the English grant of increased preference in 1843, and in the midst of consequent expansion was injured by the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, and later revived in some measure by the compensating repeal of the Navigation Laws in 1849, was the view normally held by Canadian writers in 1850. Having its origin in past politics, it characteristically exalts the influence of legislation. It is hoped to show in this article that when disturbing factors besides English tariff policy are taken into account—speculation, harvest fluctuation, and the policies of foreign states, to name no others—the interpretation which has proved so seductive is in the main a legend. A legend, it is true, whose acceptance in the late “forties” is not difficult to understand.