Welsh Journals

Cambrian Annals and contemporary inscriptions. But kings and bishops are a tiny fraction of the 1,200 witnesses, who sign over the centuries, father succeeding son, each only in his own ancestral area, without serious chronological inconsistency. So large and cohesive a list has not been 'certainly faked' by any known forger. There is room for argument about the interpretation of these and similar facts; understanding is not advanced by ignoring them. The 'charters' are a not very skilful attempt to scrape together a sufficient title to threatened estates; they were inadequate to their purpose, for the margins are full of notes put in by an irritated user who wished the Book were the bold forgery Brooke would make it. 'Note what robbers the bishops of St. David and Hereford are! 'Therefore Oudoceus was an archbishop'; 'Note that this proves that Llandaff used to be chief of all the churches of South Wales'; 'Reverend Bishop I hope you recover all properties unjustly alienated', and many like comments, are proof enough that the compiler had failed to forge the clear authority his chapter needed. It is distasteful to have to deal at length with the one bad article in a good book. It is necessary, not only because the quality of its company may blind the reader to its limitations, but because it is the only article which is not about the early British Church and which makes no attempt to trace the sources of the compiler. To colour a medieval picture, it appropriates a valuable record of the early Church, and does so well enough to persuade all but the few who know that record. The purposes to which the volume is dedicated are not thus well served. The Llandaff Book is a potentially important source for the centuries between the Romans and the Normans; but it will remain unusable until its matter and method have been thoroughly sifted. That arduous and meritorious labour needs to be encouraged, not to be lightly laughed away. JOHN MORRIS. London. THE COUNCIL IN THE MARCHES OF WALES UNDER ELIZABETH. By Penry Williams. University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1958. Pp. xiv, 385. 42s. It is more than half a century since Dr. Caroline Skeel published her Council in the Marches of Wales; and, in the intervening period, Tudor historiography has changed a good deal. New historical sources have become available and new techniques have been developed. How far are these developments reflected in the volume under review? In one respect Mr. Penry Williams has laboured under the same handicaps as his predecessor, for there has fallen to him the ambiguous task of writing the history of an institution whose records have ceased to exist. On the purely legal side of the Council there is virtually nothing;