A History of Nottinghamshire. By Cornelius Brown. "Popular County Histories."
(Elliot Stock.)—If all the books of the " Popular County Histories Series " are to be entrusted to writers of the calibre of Mr. Cornelius Brown, we shall be sorry for the history and popularity of the series. Mr. Brown reveals himself, almost wherever the book is opened, as thoroughly unequipped for the task he has undertaken. The second page of his preface is quite enough :—" The coming of the friars' gave an additional impetus to the erection of stately buildings. The Benedictines
built for themselves houses at Blyth and Walling-wells : the Cluniacs erected their great house at Lenten : the Carthusians settled at Beauvale : the Cistercians at Rufford," &c., going through a whole list of monasteries, without mentioning a single friary amongst them. To place the Carthusians, who were not invented till the fourteenth century, before the Cistercians, whose nativity took place in the first half of the twelfth century, and to include alike the Benedictines, whose order existed seven hundred years at least before the friars were heard of, the Augustinian Canons, whose creation was one hundred years before, and the Carthusians, who came one hundred years after the friars, as alike moved by the coming of the friars to build houses erected a century or two before or after that coming, shows such a total ignorance of history as to condemn him at once. After this, we are not sur- prised to find him stating that Richard III. sallied forth from Nottingham Castle to the fatal field of Bosworth, when all the world, except himself, knows that he marched from Leicester, being some ten miles distant, to Bosworth, and not from Nottingham.
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