The English Civil Service in the Fourteenth Century. By T.
F. Tout. (Longmans and Co. ls. net.)—This reprint of a lecture at the John Rylands Library, Manchester, deserves notice for the light that it throws on the way in which England was governed under the Plantagenets. Professor Tout, our most accomplished mediaevalist, knows more about the officials of Edward II. than many of us know about the Departments of to-day, and his sketch of the Civil Service, as it was then, is vivid and interesting. Chaucer and Hoccleve were both Civil Servants, and Hoccleve in his dull verse describes his official career. Professor Tout reminds us that up to 1340 the Chancellor was always a priest, and suggests that " the ' chancellor's livings' still coveted in some clerical circles go back to the time when the chancellor was at the head of a corporation of clerical subordinates who saw that their easiest and most natural way of increasing their income was to obtain preferment to livings in the King's gift."
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