Welsh Journals

Elsewhere he goes beyond the evidence in his generalization. The Rodd family is shown to have been settled in the Hindwell valley certainly by the middle of the thirteenth century. Then, with no authority, the extravagent claims are made that they were 'well known in the reign of John' (p. 153) and that they 'remained in continuous occupation perhaps since Domesday' (p. 162). Neither can I follow him when he claims that, in the reign of Edward the Confessor, Earl Harold 'for years dominated the Middle March and perhaps the whole country from an almost unknown and disregarded base at Old Radnor' (p. 33). The book is provided with a critical apparatus which is often more impressive than useful. A long list of documents set out on p. 211 contains an alarming number of errors. Despite these and similar flaws the book remains an interesting, though not an authoritative, work. Landholders who are also historical- geographers are rare, and their contributions to local history are the more welcome. DAVID WALKER. Swansea. HISTORY ON My DOORSTEP. Edited by Stewart Williams. Published by the Editor, Barry, 1959. Pp. 96. 15s. The somewhat grandiloquent title of this small volume suggests a book on History at large, but it is in fact a collection of eleven papers on various aspects of 'the beautiful Vale of Glamorgan' with the addition of a number of poems by A. G. Prys-Jones reprinted from his book Green Places. As is inevitable in a book of this kind, the papers are of unequal value. Any subsequent volumes of the series should receive a more drastic editing than that accorded to this volume. Bertram's 200-year-old forgery of the name VIA JULIA MARITIMA is here reproduced without question and extracts from the romances of the lives of the Saints are treated as facts, but these are small blemishes. It would be inelegant to turn this notice into a mere catalogue of the papers, but some of those worthy of special mention are Dr. H. N. Savory's excellent account of the 'Vale of Glamorgan in Archaeology', a pleasant paper by Glyn Daniel on his childhood in the Vale, with an appreciative and deserved eulogy of Edgar Jones as headmaster of Barry County School, and a good and needed account of Fonmon Castle by the editor. Cowbridge naturally comes into the volume prominently. Mr. lolo Davies writes a scholarly account of the grammar school, and is said to be preparing a comprehensive history of it. Mr. John Richards talks of Cowbridge in the 1860s and does not make unfortunate excursions into