Welsh Journals

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particular the knitting-gatherings held in farm kitchens. Out of this grew the small chapels, spiritually and physically linked with the little neighbourhood groups and continuing to cater for small-scale social needs. Here, as in Tregaron, kin really counts more than conviction or I doctrine, for blood relationship rules chapel membership. Mr. Owen concludes by fitting his findings to sociological theories and making comparisons with a Hebridean community which represents an archaic stage of Nonconformity. This is a fascinating collection of essays. Individually and collectively they raise as many questions as they answer. One feels that they would have gone better together and made comparison easier if the surveys had been conducted on the same general lines in each case; but they mark a massive break-through in Welsh studies and point the way to a wide field of research which should be fully explored while there is time. The book has a brief index, too brief to be useful. I have a feeling that too many cooks have somewhat spoiled the finish of this Welsh broth. There are several misprints, including a reference (p. 132) to milk 'pasturizing depots'. E. ESTYN EVANS. Belfast. CONWAY AND ITS STORY. By Norman Tucker. Gee and Son, Denbigh, 1960. Pp. 148. 15s. The author of this book is well-known in North Wales as novelist, journalist, and historian. In undertaking a history of Conway from the thirteenth century to the present day, he is attempting an important and long overdue task, for no connected account has been published since The History and Antiquities of the Town of Aberconwy by Robert Williams, a distinguished son of the town, appeared in 1835. Mr. Tucker has both local knowledge and enthusiasm: the former quality gives him a feeling for topography; the latter sometimes leads him into a hearty antiquarianism. When this happens, the book declines into a breathless catalogue of insignificant events. On the other hand, the author also succeeds in isolating moments of real significance in the town's history: thus, while the road improvements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought the romantic tourists, whose wide-eyed journals brighten one chapter, it was the coming of the railway which made all the difference to the pace and character of the town's government: 'Conway, at a stride, became linked with the metropolis mentally as well as by shining rails'. The book is at its weakest in its early chapters, for here the medieval traps of Latinity and common form occasionally engulf the author. The translations of the charters are sometimes faulty, and their interpretation misleading: for instance, it is obviously nonsense to conclude from the foundation charter that the burgesses were 'exempt from all jurisdiction'. There is no index, and the bibliography omits much