Welsh Journals

EDITORIAL THOSE who are familiar with the existing publications in the field of Welsh history may possibly be surprised that it has been thought necessary to establish a new historical journal devoted to the subject. Already, most Welsh counties have their historical transactions. The Church in Wales and each of the Nonconformist denominations has its own appropriate periodical. Archaeologia Cambrensis, the Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, the Journal of the National Library of Wales, and the Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, not to mention distinguished English periodicals like the English Historical Review, History, or the Economic History Review, have all published important articles on various aspects of Welsh history, and Welsh historians have cause to be grateful for the hospitality of their pages. And yet it remains true to say that there is no journal whose primary function it is to publish articles of a general nature on the history of Wales. Nor is there one in which all books and periodicals of interest to students of Welsh history can be brought together for systematic review. It is these needs which it is hoped that the WELSH history REVIEW will specifically meet. In the half-century or so which has followed the publication of Sir John Lloyd's History of Wales, which laid the foundations for all subsequent study of the subject, considerable progress has been made. Welsh history is intensively taught and studied at all four constituent colleges of the University of Wales, and there are independent chairs of Welsh history at three of them. A great deal of research has been undertaken, much of it in the form of postgraduate theses, and not the least of the services of the WELSH HISTORY REVIEW might be to make available in the form of articles the conclusions of some of the more valuable theses which will not appear in the form of published monographs. Attention has also been paid by departments of Welsh language and literature to the borderland between literature and history, and the findings of scholars in these regions often have an important bearing for historians, as Professor Thomas Jones's article in the present number clearly shows. It seems very probable, too, that other kindred departments, like those of economics or geography, who have much concerned themselves with the facets of the Welsh past appropriate to their disciplines, will have a distinctive contribution to make to this review.