EARLY TUDOR GOVERNMENT By Keneth Pickthorn These two volumes (Cambridge
University Press, 10s. 6d. and 25s.) are complementary rather than consecutive. Taken by itself the first provides an analysis of the Institutions of Government as Henry VII found them at the close of the Wars of the Roses, together with an examination of the changes he wrought in them before handing them over to his son. From the purely constitutional and- legal point of view the analysis is complete : the great mass of knowledge accu- mulated by Tout and the legal historians is here to be found in a well-organized study which should be of the greater value since it forms almost the only general description of England's Institutional structure at this crucial period. This first volume on Henry VII is, however, intended chiefly as an introduction to Mr. Pickthorn's detailed history of Henry. VIII. This is treated almost entirely chronologically, which fact, since the author's mind clearly works along constitutional lines, pro- duces a rather bewildering effect. As a history the- book's importance lies perhaps in the painstaking manner in which the author has made a cdtnpllation of the vast quantity of printed but uncoordinated material that exists for this period. On points of detail the book is all that scholarship can make it—events are described more frequently in the words of contemporaries than in those of the author : the effect is that of a chronicle. Nor do Mr. Piekthorn's own views where given enlarge the scale of the work. His generalizations attempt little ; there is, for instance, no sustained effort to draw out the significance of the dissolution of the monasteries, which is seen rather in the light of the extent to which it affected the power of the Crown than as perhaps the most important single factor in the destruction of feudalism. For purposes of reference Mr. Pickthorn's book should be in- valuable ; it is therefore necessary to say that the habit of giving references in the form of abbreviations to which there is no key in the bibliography is, even if titles of books are at first mention given in full, not very convenient.
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