CURRENT LITERATURE.
THE " VICTORIA " HISTORY OF BEDFORDSHIRE.
A History of Bedfordshire, Vol. I. " The Victoria History of the Counties of England." (A. Constable and Co. 25s.)—The first volume dealing with Bedfordshire proceeds on the general plan adopted for the other counties, except that the order of time is broken by the omission of the Roman period. The illustrations are satisfactory, especially the frontispiece—an etching by Mr. Monk of Dunstable Priory—the flint implements of various periods, the Anglo-Saxon objects of jewellery, and the sketch-plans of ancient earthworks. There are no less than eight maps, which compensate for the absence of full-page plates of fine buildings or views, other than the frontispiece. A small and highly cultivated county, Bedfordshire affords less material for a first volume, mainly devoted to the facts of Nature, and to the early history of human occupation, than do such shires as Hants or Norfolk. Its history has never been completed in one volume before ; and yet the villages whose opulent churches and magnificent peals of bells are the delight of the contemplative traveller to-day, and which saw the religious and social changes that inspired John Bunyan at Elstow, and made a Bedfordshire tinker the greatest writer of English allegory, which lives to-day as vigorously as when the ink was wet, cannot but have engendered in its inhabi- tants a love of their county. It is a varied land. The " back " districts are the end of the Chilterns, and rise 800 ft. into the splendid chalk downs at Dunstable. The foot of the county merges into the great fen where the Ouse, in the catchment basin of which the whole county lies, is straightened out into the Bedford level. There is a quantity of boulder clay over the greater part of the county, which is smiling and prosperous, but scarcely pretty. The chalk downs are rich in earthworks (carefully considered in these pages, and mapped). They are also rich in the remains of prehistoric man, the very old, and the less old. In the graves of the former are found perhaps the earliest ornaments in the world. Small fossils from the chalk, having a natural perforation in them, s ometimes enlarged, the whole fossil being about the size of a cherry, are found with the flints and flakes, and were very possibly Palaeolithic decorations. One grave, with a woman and babies' skeletons, belonging to th. Neolithic period, is completely set round, like a child's garden, with a double row of fossil sea-urchins, a pathetic echo of affec- tion from the days between which and us an impassable gulf is fixed, except where bridged by some such evidence of common human feeling. Though there have been few Bedfordshire writers on natural history in the past, there is at least one interesting " document " as to its flora a century ago. It is the herbarium, carefully preserved at Turvey Abbey, made by the Rev. Charles Abbot, D.D., Vicar of Oakley and Goldington, who published in 1798 the " Flora Bedfordiensis." That was the golden age of local botany, pursued by great and learned men. The herbarium contains not only the flowers, but the mosses, liverworts, lichens, and algae of Bedfordshire at that time. Naturally many of the plants have disappeared since his day, especially the fen orchis, Lancashire asphodel, the black bog rush, and the cranberry. Others, like the maiden pink and star thistle, are very rare. The beautiful purple anemone, or pasque-flower, is still found upon the chalk hills. The present flora is thoroughly treated, under headings dividing up the county according to the river valleys. Mr. G. Claridge Druce, M.A., Mr. John Hampson, Mr. James Saunders, and Mr. E. M. Holmes have made this valuable contribution to the county history. The "Domesday," with its excellent introduction by Mr. J. Horace Round, is trans- lated by the Rev. F. W. Ragg, but presents no special features. It is "common form" of the great survey. "Sister Elspeth of the Community of All Saints " contributes a full and well-written account of the ecclesiastical history of the county, and of the numerous religious houses ; but it could have been wished that the illustrations of the religious buildings had not been post- poned, from a desire for uniformity, till the "local" volumes appear. The county is remarkable for the number of " lost" abbeys and priories, now only remembered by the names clinging to the mansions built by those who seized or bought them. There was an abbey at Elstow (for nuns), and two Cistercian abbeys, Warden and Woburn ; priories at Dunstable and Newnham, Caldwell and Harrold, Chicksands and Leighton Buzzard ; and a Preceptory of Hospitallers at Melchbourne. There were also eight hospitals, and some friaries, besides the dwellings from time to time of various genuine " hermits." By 1530 the Elstow nuns were living (though with great propriety) much in the same secular way as the modern daughters of the noble houses of Heck- lenburgh live (legally) in the confiscated abbeys of that duchy, as lady "Fellows," though not free, like them, to go away and marry. They wore scarlet stomachers, voyded shoes, low-necked dresses, " cornered crests " instead of veils, kept servants, and received their friends and entertained them. The history of Woburn Abbey closed in blood. The Abbot and two monks were executed (merely in terrorem) on a charge of high treason during the phase of Henry VIII.'s policy which took the form of frightening the Abbots into surrendering their houses.
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