It is rather more than thirty years since Dr G. G. Coulton inaugurated the series of ‘Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought’. In the interval between the two great wars a number of notable books appeared, including Eileen Power’s Medieval English Nunneries and Coulton’s own monumental Five Centuries of Religion, of which the recently-published posthumous volume appropriately terminated the series. It is now revived, under the general editorship of the Professor of Medieval History at Cambridge, ‘to present as a single collection some of the work submitted for higher degrees or fellowships by young Cambridge medievalists’. Thus it will provide in some sense a parallel to the Oxford Historical Series.

The first two volumes to appear in the new series are both studies of ecclesiastical estates, and so carry on the tradition established by the late R. A. L. Smith in his Canterbury Cathedral Priory. Mr Edward Miller’s subject is the abbey and bishopric of Ely; while Mr H. P. R. Finberg writes on Tavistock Abbey. In both cases, however, the ecclesiastical is strictly subordinate to the ‘social’ interest.

Mr Miller makes no excursions into the field of diocesan administration, but defines his aim as ‘to draw out of the records of the Church of Ely some deductions about the progress of the lordship exercised by the abbots and bishops of Ely, and about the influence they exercised upon those fragments of medieval society which they had some real power to shape’. Mr Finberg, as he tells us in his preface, is concerned with Tavistock less as a community of men dedicated to the religious life than as ‘an economic unit, a property-owning organisation, a producer and consumer’, seen against the background of that part of Devon in which the estates of the abbey lay.