tower to Magdalen College. So little feeling for the treasures within our churches inspires Mr. Galton, that in pattering his list of them he ends with the characteristic remark that the boards painted with the royal arms which are generally found amongst church lumber are among the most interesting and satisfactory memorials in our national churches.' The account of monastic buildings calls for correction line by line. A general notion of the arrangements of monasteries can be obtained only, we are told, from disconnected accounts and from various ruins,' and Mr. Galton does not appear to have been aided in his general notion by the study of the arrangements of Canterbury, Westminster, Durham or Fountains. The old buildings of the Oxford colleges, although plainly founded upon the lines of private houses, follow, in Mr. Galton's opinion, the plan of the monastery. The list of the books which Mr. Galton has studied upon his subject is eloquent in its omissions, especially those of books embodying the results of modern research, and it is clear that Mr. Galton should have stayed longer at the bookshelves before helping to add to them.

For a contrast follows from Mr. J. A. Gotch's practised hand a history of Domestic Architecture, which should interest student and antiquary alike. Mr. Gotch's heart is too much in the English work of the renaissance to allow him to stay his pen short of the Jacobean period, but the small space at his command does not hinder him from giving in a lucid and connected story a workmanlike outline of the growth of the English house, and his illustrations and plans are well chosen and illuminating.

'Military Architecture and the Art of War' must inevitably bring Mr. Oman upon the stage, and Oman on the Art of War is naturally placed by him at the head of the works of reference upon his subject. His illustrations he draws for the most part from the useful M. Viollet le Duc, and the first sentences of his story of the castles show that he is still an obstinate believer in the legend of the burb, and that the exploded theories of Mr. G. T. Clark may still reckon one loyal supporter. Once clear however of the Norman keep, in whose shadow the antiquary to-day exchanges cut and thrust with a fierceness sympathetic to his surroundings, Mr. Oman tells his tale clearly, marking well the points of change during

the centuries.

When papers from The Companion to English History come, as its editor prophesies, to be set in the higher forms of public schools, the schoolboy, even though he be Macaulay's schoolboy, and with a pretty taste for drawing knights in armour on fly leaves, will set Mr. Albert Hartshorne's essay on Military and Civil Costume with the irregularities of the Greek verb and the like accursed things. For Mr. Hartshorne is less interested and indeed much less successful in describing the history of costume than in finding a Latin or French word to pin to each piece of stuff or steel plate. The feather-bush must be a panache, the knee-cop a genouillère, the belt a cingulum, and the strap a guige, until the page, powdered with italics, becomes most uncomfortable reading, and the wood is obscured by the trees.

The editor's own article upon Heraldry is manifestly the affair of one with heart and enthusiasm for the little art. It is to be regretted that doubtless by reason of over-generousness to his fellow-workers he has denied himself a sufficient body of illustration. With bad economy a great part of his plates are filled with diagrams showing how the ribs and bars and clamps of the fighting shield may have influenced the form of the early heraldic charges. Although interesting enough in themselves, we could have spared a few of them in exchange for illustrations of heraldry from original sources of the great period, the more especially as Mr. Barnard himself is too good a critic to attach too much importance to these coincidences of shield-stays with bars and cheverons, or to rank himself with those who will not credit our twelfth century ancestors with enough artistic initiative for the devising out of hand of a broad stripe of paint up and down or across the shield. The rest of the illustrations are not always well chosen, and the lack of original authority is marked. The two or three coats given as from rolls of arms are in each case from copies. In one case the sketch could have resembled no possible original of early date, and with hundreds of horseman seals in existence to choose from we ought not to be fobbed off with a picture of the seal of Sayer de Quenci from Spelman's ridiculously inaccurate engraving of 1654. How little a good library will supply the place of original work at headquarters is shown again by the four shields which Mr. Barnard takes from Camden to illustrate a case of arms derived from an over-lord. In this case Camden is followed to disaster, for three out of

four surnames are mis-spelt. Mr. Barnard sins with the nineteenth century novelists from Walter Scott onward in regarding the hobeler and archer as necessarily yeomen, and therefore ungentle. As a matter of practice the class which we may describe as that of the country gentleman served with the hobelers, and the mounted archer also must have been as a rule a gentleman. The statement that coat-armour was the preuve de noblesse might have been modified had Sir George Sitwell's now famous article been put forth earlier. From Mr. Barnard we look for better work, as we understand that from his hand we are to expect the long-needed modern editions of the medieval treatises on heraldry.

Mr. Oppenheim's account of English Shipping is well arranged and excellently illustrated. Mr. Rushforth's article on English Art is thin and unsatisfactory, and occasionally misleading. Learning and Education,' Town Life' and 'Country Life' are each good essays, although suffering from the narrowness of their space limits, Mr. Warner's story of the medieval games under 'Country Life' being especially delightful reading.

For the good essays then let us hope that they may encourage their readers to wider study of their themes. Their dulness should take from the bad ones their power for harm. We leave The Companion to English History with the feeling that although it may never reach the public schoolboy his form master at least might be allowed to benefit by many of its chapters.

HUCHOWN OF THE AWLE RYALE1

Mr.

When death, as William Dunbar laments, had taken 'out of this countrie' the good Sir Hew of Eglintoun, the good knight's fame as a maker soon followed him into silence, the single line of Dunbar standing for his only monument. Neilson in the present treatise asserts that Sir Hew was none other than Huchown of the Awle Ryale-Hugh of the Hall Royal-the first great master of Scottish verse and author of

1 Huchown of the Awle Ryale, the Alliterative Poet. A historical criticism of fourteenth century poems ascribed to Sir Hew of Eglintoun, by George Neilson (Glasgow: James MacLehose & Sons, 1902).

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the Morte Arthure, the Destruction of Troy, Wynnere and Wastoure, Gawayne and the Green Knight, and much more. To follow Mr. Neilson's careful and constructive criticism is hardly within the scope of such a review as The Ancestor, but the attention of our readers may be called to Huchown's heraldry, in which Mr. Neilson finds many a clue to hand. A useful work might be done were a student to collect all such passages from middle English work, for from sources such as Gawayne we can draw some knowledge of the English forms of those blazons which the early rolls of arms record only in the French tongue. Thus in Gawayne the

banere is upbrayde with a bende of grene With thre hedis whiteherede with howes on lofte; and the knight's scarf crossed from his shoulder is described

as

A bende, a-belef hym aboute, of a bright grene.

Needless to say, these English romances of chivalric days give us nothing of the ors and argents of the handbooks of heraldry. Our study of medieval costume also might gain were the middle English romances searched for words which should replace the late French vocabularies which are thrust upon us by the authors of the dictionaries of costume.

BURLEY-ON-THE-HILL'

The house of Burley-on-the-Hill is a great square-built mansion of grey stone with noble terraces before it. Standing on a plain 500 feet above sea level, there are few places in Rutland from which one may not see the heavy mass of this grim Italian palace, which Lord Nottingham reared to be his seat in the place of Kensington House which he had sold to his master King William.

Before it came to the hands of the grave son of a grave Lord Chancellor, Burley had been a dwelling of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, and it was here, during the revels played before King Charles and Queen Henrietta, that Jeffrey Hudson, 'the smallest man of the smallest county,'

1 History of Burley-on-the-Hill, Rutland, by Pearl Finch. London: John Bale, Sons & Danielsson, Limited, 1901.