806 SHORT NOTICES October at Charing, which was endowed with all the property of Roncesvalles in England. The site was bounded by the Strand on the north, the Thames on the south, Buckingham Street on the east, extending westward across Northumberland Avenue. The hospital was surrendered to the Wng in 1544, but is not mentioned in the Valor, and we have little information where its properties lay. Twice the author states without evidence that it had property in Oxford or Oxfordshire, but the former was certainly not the case, and the latter is very unlikely, seeing that there is no mention of it in the Hundred Rolls. The book has no index ; it has some nice illus- trations, especially of the Eleanor Crosses. ' 6. Downloaded from Students of English medieval society owe much to the cartularies of the religious houses of the Thames valley. The English Register of Oseney Abbey, edited by Andrew Clark (London: Kegan Paul, for the Early F.nglidh Text Society, Part 1,1907, Part II, 1913), shows that there is still important material to come from this quarter. The book is a curious http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ parallel to the English Register of Godstow Nunnery, which Dr. Clark edited for the same society. It is a translation, made about 1460, of part of a cartulary, begun between 1280 and 1284, preserved in Christ Church, Oxford. We learn from Dr. Clark that the latter is a recension of an earlier thirteenth-century register now in the British Museum; many original charters are also extant. The interest of the present translation is linguistic rather than historical, but the documents which are included in the English Register are enough to show that the Oseney records emphatically deserve at University of Sussex on August 24, 2015 publication in full. The Latin text of the remarkable charter of 1147, by which the citizens of Oxford, ' of the commune of the cite and the yelde of marchauntes' give to Oseney the island of Medley, would lend distinction to any cartulary. The activities of a medieval hundred are so obscure that the explicit record (No. 203) of the definition of a way by the view of this body is very welcome. Of the two volumes devoted to the register, the first consists exclusively of the text; the contents of the second are described as forewords, grammar notes, and indexes. The forewords really mean a singularly thorough introduction to the whole book: pp. xiv- xxiv are in effect an essay on the rural economy of Oxfordshire. The index is meticulous; but the Wyuelcote which occurs on p. 90 and is unindexed should have been identified with the modern Wilcote. F. M. H. The Royal Manor and Park of Shotwick, by Mr. R. Stewart-Brown (reprinted from the Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 1912), is an excellent piece of local history.' The author does not limit himself to his denned subject, and has sound-information to give on the whole parish of Shotwick and some neighbouring townships, but the chief interest of the paper lies in the castle and its surroundings. Shotwick Castle first appears in the middle of the thirteenth century, as belonging to the Crown and not to the earldom of Chester. It was a small structure, a pentagon of 51 feet on each side, built to guard a ford of the Dee on the English side, a few miles below Chester. It had no military history. It was surrounded by a township of about 1,000 acres,.