Welsh Journals

MARGAM ABBEY. By A. Leslie Evans. Published by the author at 13 Geifr Road, Port Talbot. Pp. 144. 10s. 6d. In so far as these studies touch on the history of Margam Abbey during the Middle Ages, this pleasant and attractively produced book does not claim to replace, even though it does on many points of detail usefully supplement, W. de Gray Birch's remarkable pioneer history published over sixty years ago. The author of this latest work on Margam introduces his theme with a chapter describing the early crosses and inscribed stones (many are now preserved in the Margam museum) which had for long occupied various sites in the abbey neighbourhood before a Cistercian monastery was established at Margam in 1147. But useful as this section may prove as a factual guide to the general reader, the reluctance of the author to tie up this material with what follows makes for an unsatisfying beginning to an otherwise very readable book which has about it a unity very rarely found in local histories conceived on semi-popular lines. Certainly everything points to a continuous religious tradition in Glamorgan going back to the early days of Celtic monasticism to which Cistercian origins at Margam, and Neath, are surely linked. Since there are also documentary traces dating from the eve of the abbey's foundation of the kind of eremetical revival often found associated with early Cister- cian foundations (and this revival evidently drew on native enthusiasm hitherto withheld from the older Norman priories in South Wales), there was abundant scope for some restrained speculation on the antecedents of Margam Abbey. There are some surprising gaps in a bibliography which on the whole is remarkably good. There is no mention, for example, of O'Sullivan's Cistercian Settlements in Wales, a not altogether satisfactory book, it is true, but the only attempt yet made to sketch the background of the Cistercian movement in Wales. It is surely as important to be told some- thing about that background as to be made familiar with the routine of the Cistercian monastery which the author does quite effectively. But the reader will be left barely aware that the advent of the Cistercians was the most significant of post-Norman monastic developments in its bearing on the growth of medieval society in Wales; or that Margam was one of a small group of houses in Norman Wales which stood apart from the larger association of Cistercian foundations which later came into existence in Welsh Wales. This is a counsel of perfection, however, calling for a plan which Mr. Leslie Evans, who modestly gives to his longest chapter the title 'Historical Notes', probably never for one moment contemplated. His has been a labour of love in which he has not only drawn on a wide range of external sources, but on an intimate personal knowledge of the landscape (the sections on boundaries and the distribution of granges will be of great