Welsh Journals

that area. It would be interesting, too, to know what basis there is for the name Maes Esyllt for the commote of that area. Is it genuine, or a late fabrication ? I One or two of the articles, such as that of the late Arthur Richard on the religious houses of Glamorgan, or Mr. Fenn's on the pre-Norman church, make available material tucked away in less accessible journals or books. The same task is performed with charm in an article about Glamorgan canals (canals by now can be the subject of as much nostalgia as can monasteries) by Thomas Bevan. A number of the articles draw the historian's eye to materials he might easily miss: on the beginnings of a county police force (by E. R. Baker), on the Rhondda before industrialization (by the Rev. T. J. Pritchard), on Cardiff slums before 1849 (by Miss Patricia Moore). The photographs accompanying Miss Moore's article were taken around 1891, and one feels that the slums have been carefully swept clean before the photographer arrived! Many extracts of eighteenth-century Welsh tours have recently appeared, and one would have been grateful if Mr. T. J. Hopkins (who edits a short tour of Glamorgan in 1789) could have given this literary genre some general attention too, for some of the most valuable features of this volume are the general remarks, such as those in Gwyn A. Williams's lively account of south Wales radicals about 1800, or those on Tudor gentry and Tudor justice by Gareth E. Jones. One or two general points might be added. Possibly there have been in the past too many articles on Swansea and Nantgarw porcelain tending to repeat each other, without original research, and without really advancing knowledge. Kildare Meager's most interesting observations are about collecting the porcelain. Secondly, one is struck here, as in all Stewart Williams's volumes, by the great advance in detailed knowledge in local history, and by how shameful it is that the traveller and historian still need to use the early nineteenth-century Topographical Dictionary of Wales (excluding Monmouthshire) of Samuel Lewis. Is it not high time for Glamorgan, at least, to have a modern topographical dictionary? But who will pay for it, let alone compile it? PRYS MORGAN Swansea INDUSTRIAL AND SociAL HISTORY OF SEVEN SISTERS. By Chris Evans. Cymric Federation Press, Cardiff, 1964. Pp. 182. This modest book is no unconsidered trifle to be casually picked up and as easily put down and forgotten. Lacking the refined structures of scholarship and the impedimenta of the academic historian-character-