Welsh Journals

DAVID LLOYD, COLONIAL LAWMAKER. By Roy N. Lokken. University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1959. Pp. xii, 305.$5.00. From Seattle in the farthest west of the United States comes a book about the early history of the eastern state of Pennsylvania that will be of value to the student of Welsh emigration. David Lloyd was born in 1656 of minor gentry stock at Manafon, Montgomeryshire. Thirty years later, after an extensive legal training, he sailed to Philadelphia charged as attorney-general with the none-too-easy job of upholding the legal interests and character rights of William Penn, the colonial proprietor. Penn represented him to the inhabitants as 'a sober and ingenuous man, bred and of use to you'. Lloyd rather unexpectedly lived up to this encomium and soon was in conflict with both the proprietor and the crown, taking a leading part in the colonists' struggle for a charter of liberties. Chiefly through his efforts Pennsylvania acquired a unicameral representative. He became an able Speaker of the Assembly, shewing that flexibility of political manoeuvre which earned him, Mr. Lokken thinks, unfairly, the reputation of a demagogue. The account given here of his later activities as chief justice of the supreme court certainly justifies the book's title. Lloyd, who was also prominent as a Quaker, land-speculator, political thinker, and pioneer collector of Americana, must be regarded as a strong formative influence in a colony in which Welshmen were, if anyone was, thick upon the ground. Though he never went back, he did not forget his native land. Mr. Lokken's book is rather muddy and sometimes obscure, but it is an honest and convincing attempt to assess a remarkable career. It deserves to be known in Wales. IVAN ROOTS. Cardiff. THE WELSH IN AMERICA. Edited by Alan Conway. University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1961. Pp. 341. 35s. SAMUEL ROBERTS. A WELSH COLONIZER IN CIVIL WAR TENNESSEE. By Wilbur S. Shepperson. University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville. Pp. xi, 169.$5.00. Emigration is evocative of much emotion, witness the tearful scenes at the National Eisteddfod when the Welsh of the dispersion return annually to their mother land. This may be the reason why writers on the subject have often been amateurs, and why their work, though valuable, has been marred by deficiencies in scholarship. It is a relief to welcome three books from American university presses, all having reference to Wales, which comply with the most exacting standards, and whose authors, though not of Welsh descent, have thought it worth their while to acquire a working knowledge of the Welsh language. Two of them are under review; the third, although it appeared as long ago as 1953, is noticed here because it is insufficiently well-known in Wales. It is Rowland T.