Welsh Journals

ACTS OF PARLIAMENT CONCERNING WALES, 1714-1901. Compiled and edited by T. I. Jeffreys Jones. University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1959. Pp. xiii, 343. 35s. This compilation is the seventeenth volume in the History and Law Series published by the Board of Celtic Studies of the University of Wales; the purpose of the Series is to open up record sources relevant to the history of Wales. When the late Judge Ivor Bowen published his Statutes of Wales in 1908 he was concerned with that class of legislation commonly known as public and general; he did not include those enact- ments which have come to be known as private and local Acts, although his Great Inclosures of Common Lands in Wales (1914) did publish a chron- logical list of Inclosure Acts relating to Wales and Monmouthshire. In the present volume Mr. Jeffreys Jones lists the long titles of the public and private Acts, passed between 1714 and 1901, which relate exclusively to Wales or to places and persons in Wales. The lack of precision in the distinction between public and private Acts means, inevitably, that there is some overlapping with Judge Bowen's material. It is to be regretted that considerations of space and size made it impossible to include in this volume the private Welsh legislation before 1714. But, for the periods covered, the work of Mr. Jeffreys Jones and Judge Ivor Bowen provides a very adequate index of legislation affecting Wales. In a brief introduction the editor deals mainly with the technicalities of public and private legislation. The main part of the volume consists of the long titles of 2,469 Acts, arranged chronologically in thirty-four categories, with the necessary cross-references between them. The categories have been designed to classify the mass of Acts in convenient groups according to their substance. But it is noteworthy that the bulk of the legislation listed falls into two very broad groups. Private Acts were a most convenient and effective means of providing legislative flexibility in an age of revolutionary and economic change. More than 1,400 of these Welsh Acts deal with developments in transport (roads, railways, harbours, etc.). Inclosure Acts account for a further 179, and Mr. Jeffreys Jones corrects a number of errors in Judge Bowen's list, referred to above. The other numerous class consists of those Acts which were concerned, in a broad sense, with local government. Holdsworth has emphasized that private bill legislation was the principal expedient whereby the semi-medieval system of local government inherited by the eighteenth century was adapted to the needs of a modem and industrialized state. In this broad category there are 166 Improvement Acts of various kinds, and the addition of such topics as streets, water, gas and electricity undertakings brings the total to over 900. Well represented, too, are those Estate Acts which, to quote Holdsworth again, did much to relax the strict rules of the law of real property which often fettered landowners in the free use of their possessions. Acts in this category can throw considerable light on the history of many Welsh landed estates in the