Many extravagant claims have been made in the Press for this book, none however as sweeping as that made by a writer in the Daily Telegraph of March 5, in which he gravely assures us that “the result of his [Mr. Baskerville’s] study of these sources [the contemporary documents in the Public Record Office] is a book which one must accept as the most authoritative account yet published of this curious chapter in English history” [namely the Suppression of the monasteries]. He also tells us that the “sob-stuff” writers, against whom, he requires us to believe, Mr. Baskerville tilts with complete success, are those who “have either not consulted contemporary documents or have ignored them.”

This is indeed devastating, for the most prominent twentieth-century “sob-stuff” writer (a “sob-stuff” writer being one who refuses to accept the religious houses as “corrupt, immoral, and obviously having outlived their usefulness”) was the late Dr. James Gairdner, a nonCatholic, who during his fifty-four years of work in the Record Office edited the twenty-one volumes divided into thirty-one parts (each part a great tome) which form the Calendar of Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, a work so much appreciated by Mr. Baskerville that he has liberally helped himself from it to the extent of no less than one hundred and eighty-eight quotations. At the period of Mr. Gairdner’s work another assiduous toiler in the Record Office was the late Father C. F. Raymund Palmer, O.P., busy between 1870 and 1890 compiling his many works on the history of the English Dominicans. His is a very honourable name amongst research students.