Middlesex. By Norman G. Brett-James. (Hale. iss.)
MIDDLESEX is the most difficult of all EngliSh counties to write about. The smallest county Of all, except Rutland, it consists of a kind of semi-circular fringe round the County of London, which was carved out of it in 1888. A large part of that, moreover, is made up of industrial aggregations, along Western Avenue, on the Great West Road or in localities like Park Royal and Edmonton. The regional treatment usually and rightly practised in this well-known series of County Books would clearly be out of place here, iind Major Brett-James has been driven Instead to the historical method—Roman Middlesex, Saxon Middlesex, Middlesex under Normans and Plantagenets, &c.—and to fill out his volume with chapters on Famous Houses (dealt with individually, not In their setting), Famous Worthies, the Middlesex Regiment and the Middlesex Cricket Club. But that this method is Inevitable does not mean that it ir satis- factory. What most readers are likely to need in this well-established series is a picture of a particular county as it is, with frequent reference no doubt to its place, and the place of different localities in it, in history. The trouble about the historical method is that towns and villages keep recurring, often in
the form of a mere mention, throughout the volume, and the index gives no indication of where a description of them as they are today is to be found. Take, for example, the village of Harefield. The index gives no fewer than 35 references to it. One, or possibly two, passages contain what the average reader may be assumed to want to know about Harefield, and he has no means of discovering where these are. But all this, it must be recognised, is more Middlesex's fault than Major Brett-James'. H. W. H.
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