15 NOVEMBER 1879, Page 21

Rental Book of the Cistercian Abbey of Cupar-Angus. Edited by

the Rev. Charles Rogers, LL.D. Vol. I. (Printed for the Grampian Club.)—This volume, though without any special interest, makes available for the student of history a.- quantity of matter illustrative

o f the social and economical life of the pre-Reformation period. Dr. Rogers has prefixed an interesting preface, in which he has gathered together such notices of the history of the Abbots of Cupar as are to be found. The last on the roll, Donald Campbell, was a typical speci- men of that Scottish ecclesiastical class which provoked the sweeping charges of the sixteenth century. Another curious detail illus- trative of the condition of the ecclesiastics of the same period, is that in a deed of the date of 1621, out of twenty-seven inmates of t

the abbey, three only, including the abbot, sign manu propria. In the preface, when we read that "in the year 1443 one tenant fed on his field eighteen score of hogs," is it not possible that the editor has .confused two meanings of the word "hog ?" What is the usage in Scotland we know not, but here a sheep, at a certain period of its growth, is called hog.e—We have also received the Chartulary

" of the Cistercian Priory of Coldstream, with Relative Documents, by the steno editor, and published under the auspices of the same society.