We like the method the author of A Catholic History of Great Britain has proposed to herself of emphasizing, that is to say, “leading ideas” rather than “unimportant facts,” it is the only method for treating history on so compressed a scale. But we confess to some disappointment at the result. Perhaps we expected too much. The test of a general survey consists of its presentment of Constitutional and Social development and of Foreign Relations. Here the one strikes us, more particularly in the earlier part, as wanting in clearness of outline—it is crammed with small detail—and the other as lacking the essential elements of connection and continuity.

The Saxon ceorl, for example, described as a farmer, an agriculturist (p. 20), serves as a key to Anglo-Saxon society if his position as occupying the lowest rank of free landowner, midway between the noble class on the one hand and the slave class on the other, is clearly brought out. To trace the effect of growing feudalization on the status of the ceorlish man in the age immediately preceding the Conquest, and his subsequent identification with the unfree villein of Post-Conquest days following the introduction of the fully organized Feudal System into England by the Conqueror, is to grasp the successive stages through which Englishmen passed from an order where the middle-class man, in the person of the ceorl, was free, but had below him a slave class to a society where he himself had become debased and had lost his independence, but the community at large rested no longer on a substructure of slavery. The Saxon theow had gained where the Saxon ceorl had lost, and progress was justified of her children in the dying institution of slavery.