nothing but a fabrication; he has also proved that the first Constable of the Castle, whose appointment as joint Warden of the Ports is beyond dispute, was William d'Avranche in 1226.

We have praised Mr. Statham's industry; he understands research; his list of authorities, from the Pipe Rolls and the MSS. in the British Museum, down to the latest article on the subject, is voluminous, and the result is a most delightful and readable book; but whether from haste or from carelessness he has made one or two slips, which we note for correction in a future edition. His statements with regard to the founding of the original Priory of St. Martin-le-Grand, whether " before 640" or "about 691," and whether by a "devoted band" of Benedictine "monks," or a body of "secular canons, "are most confusing and irreconcilable; and the dates of its removal from the Castle to the town under King Wihtroed vary between 691, 725, and 726, as may be seen by comparing pages 31, 173, 175 and 233.

He makes two disturbances to have occurred at Dover between Count Eustace of Boulogne and the citizens, in 1048 and 1052, whereas there was only one in 1051, though for this mistake Mr. T. Wright (Celt, Roman, and Saxon) is responsible; and he seems to labour under some inextricable confusion between the Archæological Societies of Great Britain referring to our Journal as that of "the Archæological Society of Great Britain and Ireland,” and speaking of the late Mr. Loftus Brock as Hon. Sec. of the Royal Archæological Institute!

The book is enriched with several plans of Dover Town, Harbour, and Castle at different periods, and with a number of beautiful illus. trations, and a copious index enhances its usefulness.

Hawkshead (The Northernmost Parish of Lancashire): its History, Archæology, Industries, Folk-lore, Dialect, &c. By HENRY SWAINSON COWPER, F.S.A. Illustrated. (London: Bemrose and Sons, Ltd. 30s. net). This sumptuous monograph is a credit, not only to the painstaking labours of the author, but also to the care and skill of the publishers. It is a model of what a parochial history should be, though few parishes possibly are so interesting from the various points of view indicated in the title as the ancient chapelry of Hawkshead, whose eastern boundary is Windermere, and its western Coniston Lake, while yet it lies wholly within the County of Lancashire. Notwithstanding that it takes the author nearly 600 pages, royal 8vo., in which to tell his story, we feel that he is not exaggerating when he says that he could fill a book almost as large on each of the departments treated of. The book was primarily written to serve as a permanent memorial of

etc.

their parish for the Dalesmen and "Statesmen" who inhabit it ; but such is the fascination of the author's style, that even the general reader cannot fail to be interested. In eleven chapters he gives us first, the account of the parish-the mise-en-scène, so to speak-then its history, its archæology, its inhabitants, their industries and occupations, their folk-lore and language, the parish accounts, the grammar-school, We have already indicated the boundaries of the parish, which was originally a chapelry-thirteen miles long by five miles in breadth —of the parish of Dalton-in-Furness. In 1570 it became an independent parish, and in 1676 was again divided into the two parishes of Hawkshead and Colton. It is of both of these that the book treats. As we noted in a review of the author's previous book: The Oldest Register Book of the Parish of Hawkshead, he derives the name from the Norse; and in one of the two maps with which the present book is embellished, he marks with their correct spelling all the place-names in the locality which he regards as Norse; and if it is so, there is no doubt that the district was at an early date occupied by " hardy Norsemen " of the same race as those who held the Hebrides and Western Isles and Coasts of Scotland, including the Isle of Man. The archæology of the district is described with accuracy of grasp, and at the same time with much poetic feeling and taste; and, indeed, this touch of romance it is that constitutes the great attraction of the author's style. Many curious survivals are noted under the head of "Folk-lore"; and in this connection it may not be amiss to remark the ingenious suggestion that cromlechs, barrows, dolmens, stone circles, &c., were due to the desire on the part of early man to prevent the buried dead from "walking"!

Edwin Sandys, Archbishop of York, temp. Eliz., was a native of the parish. He enlarged the church and founded the grammar school, which he endowed with houses and lands in the neighbourhood. Here the poet Wordsworth studied for nine years, from 1778. The biographies of local worthies, and the lists of incumbents, churchwardens, schoolmasters, and other public officers, together with many of the traditions and stories told, are of course of purely local interest, but they have been arranged with much skill, and will be of increasing value as time goes on; while we can well believe that the accumulation and assortment of the mass of material involved many years of careful preparation. Besides the map already referred to, there is also an excellent one of the parish as it is to-day; and the book is adorned with thirty-four illustrations, many of them from photos or drawings by the author.

We can heartily recommend this most interesting and instructive book to the attention of our members, and congratulate author and

publishers alike on the production of so handsome and so good an example of the best way of writing a parish history.

We have received from Mr. David Nutt, More Australian Legendary Tales, by Mrs. K. LANGLOH PARKER (3s. 6d.); and Popular Studies in Mythology, Romance, and Folk-lore; No. 1 Celtic and Mediaval Romance, by ALFRED NUTT; and No. 2 Folk-lore: What is it, and What is the Good of it? by E. S. HARTLAND, F.S.A., P.F.S. (6d. each).

In the first of these books Mrs. Parker continues her interesting collection of folk-tales from Australia, of which one cannot but say that if, as we have every reason to believe, they are reported as originally told, they are certainly very remarkable productions for a people so low in the scale of culture as never to have reached the very first stage of primitive man's material progress, viz., the manufacture of even the rudest pottery. They show us the Australian savage possessed of thought, feeling, humour and observation, and they have all the naiveté and spontaneousness of childhood. The legends and stories in this series, moreover, are rather more advanced than in the previous one; those were all such as are told to black piccaninnies; among the present are some they would not be allowed to hear, touching as they do, on sacred subjects, taboo to the young. The interest of these tales to the archæologist lies in the fact that they are the living expression of the ideas of people still in the Stone Age, and consequently bring before us, as nothing else can, the outlook upon life and nature of the Neolithic races of Europe. One thing is specially remarkable, and it is admirably brought out by Mr. Andrew Lang in his Introduction, viz., that it is to primitive savagery that we owe all our poetry. Had the human race been born into the world in its present advanced condition, there would never have been any poetry. This, it is well known, is Mr. Lang's theme in Myth, Ritual, and Religion, and other books. Barbarians did the dreaming for the world, poetry arose in their fancies, and this collection proves that among the world's dreamers the Australians, just escaping from the Paleolithic Age, were among the most distinguished.

The two little books by Mr. A. Nutt and Mr. Hartland are the first of a series of popular studies in mythology, romance, and folklore, which it is hoped to continue, and which we can heartily recommend as brief but lucid expositions of their subjects. They belong to the same cycle of ideas as those with which we have just been dealing; and it is most interesting to compare and contrast these notes on the folk-lore of Europe, and on the rise and progress of Celtic romance,

refined as they are by centuries of art and civilisation, with the ruder, though not less poetic, folk-tales of Australia.

Egyptian Chronology: an Attempt to Conciliate the Ancient Schemes and to Educe a Rational System. By F. G. FLEAY, M.A. (London: Nutt, 78. 6d.).--Disagreeing with the old sayings that "nothing is more deceptive than numbers," and that "anything can be made out of statistics" (at least as far as his own subject is concerned), Mr. Fleay boldly quotes from George Ebers' An Egyptian Princess the counter saying: "Numbers are the only certain things; they can be neither controlled nor perverted," and forthwith launches himself into the sea of controversy in which Egyptian chronology is involved—and certainly, to speak generally, the results justify the courageous venture. As all scholars know, Egyptologists have been long divided between what are known as the "long" and the "short" schemes of chronology; the former, based on Manetho, placing Menes, the first historical personage, somewhere about 5000 B.C.; the latter, based on the data furnished by the Turin Papyrus, and bringing Menes down to as late as 2429 B.C. The "long" chronology is fashionable at the present time, notwithstanding the proved unworthiness of Manetho, on account of its supposed agreement with the date assigned to Sargon, 3750 B.C.; but Mr. Fleay incidentally shows the probability that Sargon's true date is not earlier than 2470 B.C. It will be seen from this that the author's aim is to bring the shorter chronology back into vogue, and we may say at once that we think he has justified his attempt. The book, as may be supposed, is not easy reading; and indeed it demands concentrated attention to follow the wealth and variety of the arguments employed, but the main thesis is capable of being very briefly stated.

Of the thirty Egyptian dynasties Mr. Fleay argues that only twenty were successive, the others being contemporaneous. This conclusion the monuments support. The successive dynasties are I-VI; XII; XV; XVIII-XIX; XXI-XXX. There were among

the ancients, as there are now, the two schools of chronology, the long and the short. The differences are confined to Dynasties I-VI and Dynasties XII, XV. For the second of these periods the long Manethonic system is almost certainly right; for the first it is certainly wrong. The result is that the era of Menes is fixed by Mr. Fleay at 2929 B.C., or, allowing for a possible error of five years, 2924 B.C. The calculation is based upon a comparison of the data furnished by the monuments with those given by the Greek historians and the Turin Papyrus, and the Sed periods and Sothic epochs of the Egyptian

priests. With regard to the mythical dynasties of gods and demi-gods whose reigns extend over thirty millennia, Mr. Fleay proves almost to demonstration by taking "years" in the earlier dynasties as "lunar months," and in the later ones as "seasons" of four to a year, that they are not arbitrary inventions of the priests, but merely a replica of the political history of the country, setting forth the supremacy of the Memphite Ptah worshippers under I-VI; of the Ra worshippers of Heliopolis under XII; of the Osiris delta-god under the Hyksos, and of Amenra under the Thebans of XVIII.

The author claims that by thus reducing the commencement of Egyptian history within 3000 B.C., he abolishes huge gaps of many centuries during which the monuments are absolutely silent; he does away with incredible hypotheses as to the oscillation of Egyptian art from an ideal perfection to imbecility, and vice versa; as to sudden abnegation of pyramid building for centuries during dynasties VII-X, and a sudden resumption thereof, and the like; he explains the numbers in Herodotus, and vindicates the grand old traveller's accuracy, and incidentally shows the exact agreement of this revised chronology with that of the Babylonians and Hebrews. For the proof of all this, we must refer the reader to the book itself.

:

It is quite impossible to do justice to this remarkable work in the compass of a brief review; but meanwhile we note the author's emphatic disclaimer of any wish to lower the epoch of human civilisation for though he cannot trace the monarchic lists to an earlier date than 2924 B.C., he justly says that a civilisation which could produce such work as the early sculpture of Egypt before 2500 B.C., must have required many centuries to develop. We shall be interested to know the opinion of M. Maspero and Professor Flinders Petrie on this latest attempt to throw light on the thorny subject of Egyptian chronology, behind which lie the long ages of the Stone and Bronze periods of Egyptian archæology.

For the convenient printing of the tables of the dynasties, etc., on separate sheets, the author tells us we have to thank the liberality of the publisher; while we have to thank himself for this noticeable result of years of arduous study, in the course of which the book has been re-written no less than three times.

Lore and Legend of the English Church. By Rev. GEO. S. TYACK, B.A. (London: Wm. Andrews and Co., 7s. 6d.). Curious Epitaphs. By WILLIAM ANDREWS (London: Wm. Andrews and Co., 7s. 6d.).— These two books are the latest additions to the ever-growing number of works devoted to the "quaint and curious lore" of the English