588 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION F. 
The time would fail me to single out the numerous particular topics on which 
Dr. Cunningham has enlightened us; what is a far greater service is that by 
his masterly and encyclopzedic grasp of the whole vast field he has kept before 
our minds the fundamental idea of the continuity of our national development. 
About the same date the book of Mr. Seebohm on ‘The English Village Com- 
munity ’ (1883) gave us, for the first time, the right starting-point for our study of 
medieval (and therefore of modern) agrarian history. Itis an example of the way 
in which even the largest facts of national life are apt to drift out of the minds of 
the next generation that the ‘open-field’ system of husbandry should have been 
entirely forgotten in hardly more than fifty years from the time when the thing 
itself finally passed away. The manorial economy, as Mr. Seebohm reconstructed 
it, may possibly be a little more symmetrical than the facts; but, without an under- 
standing of its main features, medizval agricultural conditions must have remained 
unknown to us. Let anyone who fails to appreciate Mr. Seebohm’s incomparable 
services try to find in any modern writer before him a clear explanation of the 
yardland—the pivot of the agricultural organisation of every old English village. 
Of subsequent workers in this field of economic history it is only possible to 
give a bare list. Professor Maitland, whose untimely loss we all deplore, has 
enabled us to get truer notions of medizval law: he has confirmed the impression 
that there were certain underlying conditions common to the whole of Western 
Europe by his proof of the acceptance of the canon law in England; and to his 
example and influence we owe a great increase in the printed materials for 
manorial and municipal history. Mr. Powell has added exactness to our know- 
ledge of the great peasant rising; Mr. Leadam has printed the official evidence 
concerning the enclosures of the sixteenth century; Mr. Stevens, Sir George 
Birdwood, and others have given like assistance for the beginnings of our East 
India trade ; Miss Leonard has explained the part played by the earlier Stuarts 
in establishing the English poor law; Mr. Galton and Mr. Unwin have helped 
to bridge over the gulf between the medieval guild and the modern trade-union ; 
Mr. and Mrs. Webb have laid bare the local government of the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries, a period more obscure in some ways than the age of the 
Plantagenets ; Mr. Gray has written the annals of philanthropy; and Mr. Slater has 
taken up the thread of agrarian history and systematically examined the later 
enclosures. The beginnings of Scotch manufactures have been explored by 
Mr. Scott; the troublesome story of the relation of English policy to Irish in- 
dustry has been told by Miss Murray; the history of nineteenth-century factory 
legislation has for the first time been written in perspective by Miss Hutchins and 
Miss Harrison conjointly ; the movement of wages during the same period has 
been traced by Mr. Bowley ; and while the modern combination of labour has 
found its first serious historians in Mr. and Mrs. Webb, the even more recent 
tendency towards capitalist combination has been portrayed by Mr. Macrosty. 
For particular industries we have now the works of Mr. Ellison and Professor 
Chapman on the cotton trade, and Mr. Jeans’ reports on the iron trade; while 
Dr. Creighton has dealt with a subject of the utmost economic interest in his 
history of epidemics, This is a recital of which we may well be proud. 
And meanwhile we have been receiving assistance equally valuable from 
foreign scholars. Two American students trained in Germany—Messrs. Page and 
Gay—have thrown a strong light on the commutation of labour services in the 
fourteenth century and on the enclosures of the sixteenth and seventeenth. Two 
German scholars, Professor Ehrenberg and Dr. Lohmann, have greatly added to 
our knowledge of the place occupied in our history by the woollen industry, 
the one explaining the struggle for the admission of English cloth to the Con- 
tinent, the other the methods of governmental regulation. Two others, Pro- 
fessor Hasbach and Dr. Levy, have turned their attention to our agrarian 
development; and, while the former has investigated the fortunes of the agri- 
cultural labourer, the latter has traced the rise and decline of capitalist cereal 
farming. And it is a sign of the recent revival of solid historical studies in the 
land of M. Fustel de Coulanges that a French scholar, M. Mantoux, has just 
given us by far the most complete account of the industrial revolution of the 
