
OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY 9 
if it be the social condition of England under the later 
Plantagenets that interests us, nothing could serve our 
purpose better than the political poems and songs of 
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries from that same 
repository of national archives. The Year Books, 
too, containing the law reports from the eleventh cen- 
tury onward are an almost inexhaustible mine of 
material for studying the social growth of the people 
whose centres of national government are to-day at 
London and at Washington. 
It is the increased facility of access to the national 
archives that has contributed more than anything else 
to the deeper and more accurate knowledge of Eng- 
lish history which the past generation has witnessed. 
A few years ago it might have seemed that the seven- 
teenth century had been exhaustively treated. With 
Ranke’s masterly volumes and those of Guizot, with 
Carlyle’s edition of the letters and speeches of Cromwell, 
and with Macaulay’s fascinating narrative, one might 
have supposed that for some time to come there would 
be no further need for new books on that period. Yet, 
forthwith, came Mr. Rawson Gardiner, and began to 
rewrite the whole century. His first volume started 
with the year 1603, and his fourteenth arrives only at 
the year 1649; long life to the author! For the time 
which it covers, his book supersedes all others. The 
work was made necessary by the wholesale acquisition 
of fresh sources of information, settling vexed ques- 
tions, filling gaps in the chain of cause and effect, and 
throwing a bright light upon acts and motives hereto- 
fore obscure. This acquisition of new material is one 
among many instances of the results that have flowed 
from improved ways of keeping public archives; so 
