Welsh Journals

it is hardly necessary to say that no photograph at all can be obtained in Abergavenny itself. Another, and more serious, defect is that nowhere, from cover to cover, is there any indication of the year of the exhibition: the scholar of the future, wishing to fix the taste of the period in which the exhibition was held, will find himself baffled. The catalogue is, however, an attractive production. J. D. K. LLOYD. Montgomery. THE LAND OF DYFED IN EARLY Times. Edited by Donald Moore. Cambrian Archaeological Association, Cardiff, 1964. Pp. 47. 7s. 6d. At the ninth Easter Conference of the Cambrian Archaeological Association at Carmarthen in 1964, it was decided, for the first time, to publish summaries of the papers read on such occasions. Let it be said at once that this is a worthwhile venture. The Carmarthen meeting concerned itself with Dyfed, one of the ancient kingdoms of Wales, rather indeterminate in location but certainly incorporating modern Pembrokeshire and western Carmarthenshire. This record of its discussions contains eleven brisk essays, written by ten acknowledged authorities and grouped about sixteen handsome plates, not all of which have been reproduced elsewhere. Dyfed owed a great deal to its position astride the sea-route between Ireland and south-western England; with both her acquaintance was long and lasting. Ireland contributed Neolithic settlers, Bronze Age metal- workers, Celtic saints, and a ruling dynasty established by the piratical Deisi in the Dark Ages. With the opposite shore of the Bristol Channel contacts grew stronger from the days of the Presely 'blue stones' for Stonehenge: perhaps a military aristocracy advancing westwards in the Iron Age, a veneer of Romanization later on, and immigrant families with West Country connections in the Anglo-Norman period. Yet Dyfed was something more than a social sponge, for it gave David and Teilo to the Church, Asser to King Alfred, and Hywel Dda to Wales. With all these great phases in Dyfed's history and the role of archaeology in illuminating them, this short book deals admirably and clearly. Nor can the remarkable distinction between northern and southern Pembrokeshire be kept far from the reader's mind. Geological and physical differences have been projected into history by a peculiar pattern of settlement from at least the Norman period onwards, and are reflected in, for example, the types of houses in which medieval gentlemen lived and the voting habits of the nineteenth-century electorate. Yet, one would have wished at the beginning for a more resolute definition of Dyfed's origin, and an investigation of its relationship with the later kingdom of Deheubarth and, finally, with the county and