COURT LIFE UNDER THE PLANTAGENETS.* Mn. HALL claims that this
is an exactly accurate historical novel, that "every personage acted and spoke almost precisely as represented in this narrative, and every event took place at the exact time and in the exact manner described here." In one sense we can concede, in another we cannot concede, this claim. That Mr. Hubert Hall's antiquarian knowledge is exact, we do not question for a moment ; but that any human beings ever talked as his characters are represented as talking, we do not believe. William, son of Nigel, an ecclesiastic, pays a visit during "the leisure of the Hilary vacation" to his friend Richard de Anesti. The morning after, William's host shows him over his domain, just as a host might do nowadays. One might perhaps object that in the "Hilary vacation" the two friends would scarcely find so much "glare and dust in the open fields," that the freshness of the meadows would be grateful. If they did, they must have been blest with a very different climate from ours. Let that, however, pass. But did ever host address to guest the long, unbroken discourses in which Richard de Anesti describes the economy of his farm ? Every one knows how a conversation of the • Court Life under the Plantegenets. By Hubert Hall, F.S.A. London Swan Sonnenschein and Co. MO.
kind is really carried on. Every fact in this long description may be correct, and yet it must be far from true that these personages "spoke almost precisely as represented in this narrative." The same mistake occurs again and again. Richard de Anesti, coming up to London, meets his kinsman, William de Glanvil. The two discourse about the Jews. William gives many interesting and doubtless exact details about them, details which we are glad to get. But he certainly would not have told his hearer what his hearer must have known as well as himself, that "the Jews in England were compelled to live apart from Christians, and to wear a badge of their race in their dress." Then Richard takes up the tale, and relates his own experiences as a borrower. For two whole pages he runs off a list of dealings with Jew money-lenders. There are seventeen separate transactions described. Here are two specimens :—" When I pleaded in the Archbishop's Court at Canterbury, Dieu-la-Cresse the Jew lent me forty shillings at the same rate [a groat a week for every pound], which I kept two months, and paid five shillings and fourpence." "Also Bruno the Jew lent me half-a-mark at three-halfpence a week, for which I paid fifteen-pence for ten weeks." That the Jews made a good thing of their business, sometimes making nearly 90 per cent., might have been told us in fax fewer words. A still more extravagant, and indeed impossible amount of detail, is to be found in Richard's narrative of his law-suit. There is not a single item, indeed, the accuracy of which we question. We do not even doubt that Richard suffered as many of the law's delays as he here describes. But no mortal man could have remembered them, or, remembering them, would have recounted them ; and it is wholly against art in our author to reproduce them. We have to struggle through pages and pages of this kind of thing :— " As soon as I had purchased the King's writ, I returned, and having found the Archbishop at Mortlake, I delivered the King's writ to him, and he gave me a day on the feast of St. Crispin and St. Crispianus, on which day I came to Canter- bury, and from thence he gave me a day in the octave of St. Martin, on which day I came to Canterbury. From thence my lord of Canterbury gave me a day on the feast of St. Lucia the Virgin and thence a day was given me on the feast of St. Fabian and St. Sebastian, on which day I came to London, where ray lord of Canterbury then was ; and from thence he gave me a day on the feast of St. Scholastica the Virgin, and I kept it at Canterbury ; and thence on Lretare Jerusalem, and I kept it at London; and thence on Misericordia Domini Sunday." If Mr. Hubert Hall had retrenched nine-tenths of these particulars, and brought his readers at once to the really vigorous scene in which the delivery of the Pope's final judgment is described, he would have vastly improved his story.
We have heard that merchants of port-wine keep in their cellars a liquid which is called the "doctor." Undrinkable in itself, it is used to give body to poor vintages. The story may be apocryphal, but it illustrates the character of Mr. Hall's book. Writers of historical novels may find in it plenty of flavour for their stories, and make them fit for consumption. But it is not itself fit. To drop the metaphor, it wants literary treatment in general, and the sense of proportion in particular.
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