Welsh Journals

much of which he himself collected in the field. The book is in two parts. The first is an account of the folk customs associated with seasons- Christmas, Candlemas, May and Midsummer, Harvest, and Winter's Eve-and those concerning birth, marriage, and death, preceded by a most valuable introduction on folk lore. The second, and shorter, part is a catalogue of items in the Welsh Folk Museum. Of these 567 items there is, incidentally, a curious preponderance of valentines (230) and love spoons (171). The impression given that the Welsh people were interested in little apart from courtship is corrected by Mr. Owen's admirably balanced account. We are told that this is not an exhaustive study, but a 'descriptive account of the customs based on documentary evidence and seen against their social background'. References are made to some English parallels, but we wish the scope of the work could have allowed more references to Irish folk customs, for example. In his foreword, Dr. lorwerth Peate writes that this is the first of a series of books on Welsh folk life. If the remainder are up to the very high standard of this volume it will considerably enhance the already high standing of the Welsh Folk Museum. EMRYS JONES. London School of Economics. STUDIES IN THE EARLY BRITISH CHURCH. Edited by Nora K. Chadwick. Cambridge University Press, 1958. Pp. 375. 45s. It is not lack of record that makes the Dark Ages dark; on the contrary, the light of reason is obscured by a towering range of doubtful documents, that we can neither explore nor avoid until their fantastic outline has been accurately mapped. They are hard to understand, because we are used to a Roman tradition of straightforward narrative and description, transcribed by clerks trained to copy what they found; but we are faced with authors whose aim was to compose an elegant and useful tale, set down from diverse sources that they usually despised as old-fashioned, barbaric, and unedifying. We have to try and sort out these varied originals, and detect what was added, altered, or left out; and the modern rational historian is only just beginning to learn how to deal with funda- mentally irrational sources. It used to be legitimate, and indeed fashion- able, to dismiss almost the whole of most documents as worthless late invention, and accept or reject 'plausible' bits and pieces of the rest. But the obstinate evidence of archaic spellings, of verified events and circum- stance long forgotten when the authors wrote now enjoins greater caution; the Chadwicks and their associates are the pioneers of serious study, and their latest volume follows the laborious but unavoidable track to real understanding, the relentless worrying of the sources with little immediate reward for strenuous effort.