This book has been a long time in the making. As Professor Plucknett tells us in an introductory note, Bayne had completed the monograph on the early Star Chamber, which forms the introduction to the present volume, as early as 1937, and though he worked on for ten years more, the completion of the edition by Mr Dunham has occupied yet another decade. It would appear from internal evidence that Mr Dunham did not think it right to alter the study in any way by taking note of more recent work. In consequence the book was in some respects behind the times before ever it appeared; in such matters as the career of Reginald Bray, the making of the Privy Council, or the nature of Henry VII's policy it should be treated as belonging to 1947 rather than 1958. This necessarily detracts a little from its value, but Bayne's concerns were really so narrowly confined that the harm is not great. A second preliminary criticism, which can only be suggested here, concerns the value of publishing useful monographs as introductions to expensive collections of documents which tend to be difficult to obtain. Bayne's work originally consisted of a dissertation on Henry VH's Star Chamber, and essentially it has remained that. Yet he was persuaded to collect more of those cases of which Leadam had already published a selection, and the book was in the end called ‘ Cases in the Council’.