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important information; the illustrations, from old photographs and prints, are most interesting. Despite the shortcomings referred to, the book is recognizably the product of much painstaking investigation at the County Record Office at Caernarvon, the Bodleian Library, and the National Library of Wales. We have not arrived at a history of this ancient town on a scale to do it justice; but Mr. Tucker is to be com- mended for drawing attention with such vigour and enthusiasm to a challenge which remains. GWILYM USHER. Bangor. VALE OF HISTORY. Edited by Stewart Williams (The Vale Series, Volume II). Cowbridge, 1960. Pp. 132. 18s. It is hard to know what standards to apply in criticizing this volume and the series to which it belongs. Some aspects of it are altogether praiseworthy. Interest in and affection for the Vale of Glamorgan are shown in every page, and each contributor has worked hard to assemble what are, at times, painfully jejune and unrewarding scraps of historical evidence. Photographs are good, the type is clear, and the individual essays are short-though not always compact. There should be a ready market for a volume which presents, in under 130 pages, material relating to Llantwit Major, to Merthyr Mawr, Cowbridge, Penmark, Llanmaes, and Llysworney, together with discussion of the Stradlings of St. Donat's, of Wesley in the Vale, of crime and punishment, of fine woodwork, and of travellers in the Vale in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet if strict, critical standards are applied-as they should be-it is necessary to sound a note of caution. The essays are not uniformly pleasing, nor are they uniformly useful. The professionals on the whole come out well. Professor W. H. Davies has written an attractive and coherent account of Llantwit Major; Professor Glanmor Williams has given a pleasant little sketch of the Stradlings, concentrating naturally on the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Both essays show a firm awareness of the general historical background. The setting of Llantwit in its proper chronological background and a precise reference to the squabbles of the gentry like the Stradlings as reflecting divisions among the aristocracy and at court are worth more than a multiplicity of allusion to the trivialities of the past. Awareness of the general historical problems of an age is essential before effective local history can be written, and this awareness is not conspicuous in some of the essays in this volume. The value of the volume is also diminished by faults which more astringent editing could correct. There is an excess of the first person, too many exclamation marks, too much flowery language, some unnecessary rhetorical questions, an occasional tendency to repetition even in limited