Welsh Journals

on the administrative side, two so-called registers (in effect no more than rough assortments of miscellaneous office memoranda) and a scattered collection of privy council instructions distributed at irregular intervals over the period. As a result, the author's approach is perforce indirect, and he has had to scour English and Welsh local sources for his material. This cannot, of course, carry us much nearer to an understanding of how the Council went about its business, for we have more about the people under its jurisdiction than about the character of the jurisdiction itself. Where Mr. Williams has tried heroically to reconstruct the Council as an institution, he has all too often had to make his bricks without straw. But what clearly emerges, as we learned in another context from Mr. Ogwen Williams's Calendar of the Caernarvonshire Quarter Sessions is that Wales rapidly identified herself with the processes and habits of her English neighbours. When Sir William Gerard, vice-president of the Council, unkindly accused the Welsh of being maliciously litigious, he was forgetting that all England was afflicted with the same habit. Hence the whole string of Tudor statutes against this national sport. Nor was it always malice: it was in many cases prudent diversionary action to distract the plaintiff's attention from the original court in which he had begun his proceedings. That was why, as Mr. Williams well brings out, it was possible because of imperfectly defined jurisdiction for four different courts to be embroiled in the same (relatively) trifling issue, with prohibitions being flung backwards and forwards across the country. In the confusing matter of recusancy the Privy Council itself showed that it was not at all clear as to what exactly were the powers of the Council in the Marches. On the processes of law and administration, Mr. Williams has a good deal to tell us in a clear and effective manner, although he cannot wholly avoid a certain amount of repetition. (An observation by Lord Zouch loses some of its force when it is quoted for the third time in seventeen pages.) This itself derives from the fact that the author has not been able to adhere to the structure of his book. A certain amount of overlapping is inevitable, but Part IV-which is called 'Personality and Politics in the Council' — includes a good deal of administrative material which has somehow wandered out of Part II. The footnote on p. 181 is at pains to explain the two different approaches, but the division has, in fact, proved impracticable. There is an occasional tendency also to skate very thinly over major issues or to use expressions which strike a jarring note against the high scholarly quality of the rest of the book. It is surely misleading to say that 'the authority of the Exchequer was considerable since it derived from the very powerful court of Augmentations' (p. 218), or that Sir John Perrott 'had almost complete control over Haverfordwest, having bought up the borough council' (p. 232), or that 'Cecil hesitated for over a year before he appointed the next president' (p. 298).