Welsh Journals

and hyperbolical, that it is dangerous to base any deductions about the state of medieval society on the 'facts' given in the poems. But, if this caveat is borne in mind, the social historian can use them to great advantage, for there are fascinating glimpses of the domestic life and customs of the society to be gleaned from them. There are descriptions of houses, furniture, food, drink, clothes, religious and social customs to be found, and they bear the added distinction of being contemporary accounts. Swansea NESTA JONES HANES ANNIBYNWYR CYMRU. By R. Tudur Jones. Ty John Penry, Swansea, 1966. Pp. 340. 30s. Among the activities of nineteenth-century Welsh nonconformity was the writing of innumerable cofiannau and the compiling of denominational histories. These histories reflected the growing strength of the chapels, and their value varies; they were polemical in tone, uncritical in method, and contain much of what would today be regarded as the apocrypha rather than the history of Welsh nonconformity. One of the best of such histories was completed in 1891 with the issue of the fifth and final volume of Hanes Eglwysi Annibynnol Cymru by Thomas Rees and John Thomas. Dr. Tudur Jones stands in the ecclesiastical tradition of his predecessors, but the similarity ends there. Since 1891 a great deal of work has been done on the history of the Welsh nonconformist denominations, especially through the historical societies founded since that date, and it was only to be expected that the twentieth-century historian should benefit from this. Even a cursory reading of Hanes Annibynwyr Cymru impresses the reader with the width and detail of Dr. Jones's research and reading; and even if the reader were not already aware of it, it would soon be made clear to him that this book has been written against a wider background of a general history of Congregationalism. But the importance of this present work lies largely in the fact that the author did not begin where his predecessors left off in 1891. He has broken away from the older tradition in at least two important respects. In the first place, the difference in the titles of the works shows that the aim is different; whereas the older work was a (valuable) history of separate congregations, the present book attempts the far more difficult task of giving a synoptic view of the varied activities and attitudes of a Welsh nonconformist denomination. The result is something more than a denominational history: it is nothing less than a description of one very important aspect of Welsh cultural life in the past two centuries or so. The author acknowledges that much of what he has here written of his own denomination could equally well be applied to all the Welsh nonconformist bodies in the same period. Historical perspective reveals what these bodies possibly did not realize at the time, viz., that what they had in common far exceeded what divided them, and this is shown