Welsh Journals

in judgement and well-based on primary evidence, of the Conqueror at work. h. r. loyn Cardiff ENGLISH HISTORICAL DOCUMENTS. Vol. V, 1485-1558. Edited by C. H. Williams. Eyre and Spottiswoode, London, 1967. Pp. 1082. 147s. Professor Williams has compiled an exhaustive and ambitious collection of materials relating to early Tudor history. He provides representative sources in diplomatic as well as documents recording important historical events and decisions. He has done so in accordance with the exacting standards prescribed for this series by its general editor. The commission seems to have been commentary without commitment. ('Full account has been taken of modern textual criticism to compile a reliable collection of authentic testimony, but the reader has in general been left to pass his own judgement upon it, and to appraise for himself the value of current historical verdicts.') The editor's task has been the more difficult (and yet surely the more stimulating) as a result of the proliferation of materials thrown up in the wake of the increased activity of the state and the new articulateness of the subject. The multifarious interests of most classes of Englishmen are caught and reflected in the records of this period to an unprecedented extent. At a time when so many pocket-size compendia are being published, with the expressed purpose of beguiling students along convenient short-cuts to the documents, it is particularly salutary to have a magisterial work of traditional scholarship which refuses to align itself with the prevailing fashions in the study and teaching of history. In this context John Leland's lament of 1546, which is printed here, is nicely relevant. Many episodes of English history, Leland wrote, have been hitherto 'sore obscured both for lack of printing of such works as lay secretly in corners, and also because men of eloquence have not enterprised to set them forth in a flourishing style, in some times past not commonly used in England of writers, otherwise well learned, and now in such estimation that except truth be delicately clothed in purple her written verities can scant find a reader'. Professor Williams has remedied a similar lack in the historiography of Leland's own times without deigning to satisfy the condition of tendentious rhetoric that might have earned him a wider readership. And, unlike poor Leland, he has succeeded in completing his enterprise by adhering to principles of selection that are both rational and disciplined. Despite Leland's failure, the period saw some remarkable advances in historiography, and it is appropriate that this volume should begin with a selection of writings on history. In making a valid distinction between the acknowledged historical methods of the writers and their undeclared