303 



PREBENDARY HINGESTON-KANDOLPH'S REGISTERS OF 



THE BISHOPS OF EXETER, FROM WALTER BRONES- 



COMBE, 1257-IJ80, TO EDMUND STAFFORD, 1395-1419. 



There is some fear that in the hurrying days in which our 

 lot is cast, we may fail to do justice to the less crowded but not 

 uneventful times of our predecessors. A word or two of commend- 

 ation and recommendation of the labours of Prebendary 

 Hingeston-Eandolph will fall upon sympathetic ears in an 

 assembly,of Cornishmen. I desire to affirm that nowhere is there 

 so vivid a view, so many-sided a view, from a point of observation 

 so commanding and so revealing, of the life of Cornwall from 

 the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, as in the seven-fold series 

 of Episcopal Registers which attest the diligence, the scholarship, 

 and the public spirit of their venerable editor, Prebendary 

 Hingeston-Eandolph. It is in some degree less necessary than 

 it was to call attention to the value as foundations for a sound 

 knowledge of English Church history of the Episcopal Registers, 

 for Mr. Capes in his very interesting conti-ibution to the series of 

 volumes on the History of the English Church, of which the 

 Dean of Winchester is joint editor, has already done so. It is 

 true, indeed, that his volume covers the fourteenth and fifteenth 

 centuries only, and that he merely mentions these Registers in a 

 footnote (p. 242) as amongst his authorities, but his picture of 

 the mediaeval Bishop and his officials is largely based upon these 

 Exeter Registers, and it is one of the most vivid and illuminating 

 descriptions that we have at all. 



Of these documents the old diocese of Exeter possesses a 

 long and precious series, and it has the good fortune to contain 

 a scholar who has made seven voluraes of them available for 

 study and reference. The series of Registers of the Bishops of 

 Exeter from Bronescombe to Stafford, which for many years 

 Prebendary Hingeston-Randolph has been publishing, do not 

 seem as yet to have met with a recognition as full and appreciative 

 as their great value warrants. They are not, indeed, everybody's 

 books, but it is hardly too much to say that no trustworthy history 

 of the centuries with which they are concerned can be written 



