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The Paladin History is designed 'to present a modern view of English History' and to 'portray history as a challenging, puzzling, controversial -and living--entity'. Finberg clearly intended his volume to meet these requirements, producing a book which, as he claimed, 'differs at a number of points from the orthodoxy of the textbooks', and his bibliography 'includes a number of books representing older opinions which not all scholars are as yet prepared to abandon'. His narrative of events has few startling reassessments. The ordering of Anglo-Saxon society and our understanding of the agrarian scene in pre-conquest England provides changes of some note. Professor Finberg deals with successive layers of material, and he refuses to interpret an early code of law by reference to a later, more sophisticated code. So, for example, in the seventh century he cannot justify the equation of ceorl and freeman, he searches in vain for independent and self-governing rural communities, and he sees a society which is dominated by a slave-owning aristocracy. Other historians have not discerned any lord having control over a rural community and have assumed that no lord existed. Finberg could not find such a lord but assumed that he must be somewhere in the background. The great practitioners of the past, Maitland and Stenton, for instance, have prepared us for divergent views on problems of Anglo-Saxon society for which evidence is limited and inconclusive. They were essentially modest scholars and neither of them would have been surprised to find that, in the process of reinterpretation, their own conclusions have been modified or discarded. Students using this book might have found it easier had Professor Finberg been able to show clearly where and why he differed from earlier scholars. The Paladin History does not use footnotes, and Finberg may have been handicapped by the conventions of the series. Students must work out for themselves where the author's views differ from 'the orthodoxy of the textbooks'. Undergraduates unfamiliar with the period will find The Formation of England, 550-1042, readable and informative. Serious and informed scholars will surely prefer the extended discussion of important issues in the Agrarian History. DAVID WALKER Swansea MEDIAEVAL Monmouth. By K. E. Kissack. The Monmouth Historical and Educational Trust, 1974. Pp. 80. £ 1.00. This short book recounts, within a fairly rigid chronological framework, most if not all that the author seems to have discovered in printed and manuscript sources about medieval Monmouth. It can easily be criticized for that very reason. Any number of 'facts', trivial in themselves, largely unconnected with each other, and probably of only incidental concern to the life and development of the community, have been found room in the narrative. Looming large in the story, too, are the obligatory accounts of the exploits or achievements of great men whose links with Monmouth were, as is rightly noted at one point, 'chiefly nominal'. A bolder thematic approach could, with advantage, have been adopted