Welsh Journals

knowledge of the literature of eastern and western monasticism, which is, as she observes, surprisingly copious, and was once even more so. 'The last place from which one would look for a heavy mail bag is the top of a pillar'. The second lecture describes the age of the saints itself, and analyses the nature and practices of Celtic religious life. The third and last lecture describes the Easter controversy and the return of the Celtic churches to the Roman fold. The story is simply and clearly told; and she wisely subdues the drama. Although she keeps a wary eye on Bede, and reveals his omissions with some candour, she does not subscribe to the strange modern fashion for denigrating him as a historian. At the end, in a moving passage in which Irish poetry and John Cassian are neatly mingled, she evokes the atmosphere, the quality of Celtic monasticism. She quotes the famous poem in which the monk compares his work and his cat's: He is a master of the work Which every day he does: While I am at my own work To bring difficulty to clearness. The last line would be an excellent description of the value of this scholarly but attractive book. One hopes that it will be widely read; one hopes that the author will be called to give us a second edition, and that when she does, she will provide us with an index. C. N. L. BROOKE. University of Liverpool. THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY, 1399-1485. By E. F. Jacob. Oxford University Press, 1961. Pp. xvi + 775. 38s. The long delay in completing the Oxford History of England seemed to justify the pessimistic conviction (attributed to T. F. Tout) that the history of the fifteenth century would never be written because it was too difficult. Dr. E. F. Jacob's volume, promised in 1934 and published in 1961, provides at last a comprehensive history of fifteenth-century England. The author had the hardest task of all the contributors to this series, and much of the research on which this volume is based (especially the work of J. R. Lander, J. S. Roskell, and C. D. Ross) has only recently appeared. Political history takes up two-thirds of this book and the chapters where Dr. Jacob could be expected to excel (ch. vii on 'The Church' and ch. xiv, 'The Peaceful Arts') have been restricted to forty pages each. Far more about the late-fifteenth century church, and particularly the personnel of the episcopate, would have been welcome. There is no mention of such prelates as the reformer Bishop Thomas Spofford of Hereford (1422-48) or the humanist Bishop John Sherwood of Durham (1484-94), and even so notable an ecclesiastic as the saintly