Finance and Trade under Edward III. Edited by G. Unwin.
(Manchester University Press, and Longmans and Co. 15s. net.)— Professor Unwin has edited some valuable essays by students of the Manchester History School on various economic aspects of Edward M.'s reign, and has added an admirable paper on the Estate of Merchants, which Edward tried to establish as a foil to the Commons. Mr. Sergeant's study of the wine trade with Gascony is of special interest. Our fourteenth-century ancestors liked good and cheap claret ; but the London vintners were a very powerful Guild, and there was a great outcry against their " profiteering " in 1353, when the price of wine rose to sixpence a gallon. Mr. F. R. Barnes deals with the taxation of wool, showing how Edward
tried to finance the Hundred Years' War by a monopoly of the export of wool to Flanders, and how he ruined both the Italian and the English capitalists who took part in his ingenious but imprac- ticable dealings with the staple trade of England. The essays testify anew to the very admirable work done in the History School of Manchester University under the guidance and inspiration of Professor Tout.
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