Welsh Journals

ARTICLES RELATING TO THE HISTORY OF WALES PUBLISHED IN 1964 I. WELSH HISTORY BEFORE 1660 Nikolai Tolstoy examines, first, the De Excidio of Gildas as a source from which to establish the chronology of British history in the fifth century; secondly, the various dates suggested for the Adventus Saxonum; and thirdly, the composition of the earliest part of the Annates Cambriae, in The Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1964, part 2, 237-312. The late A. W. Wade-Evans submitted a tentative chronology (differing from that of Tolstoy above) of Anglo-Welsh history from A.D. 427 to 712, ibid., part 1, 128-9. G. R. J. Jones focuses attention on the bondmen of mediaeval North Wales, suggesting the early development of settled agriculture in parts of upland Wales, ante, II, no. 1, 19-36. Leslie Alcock presents some tentative archaeological evidence from six Welsh settlements, dated A.D. 400-700, indicating that these were poorly defended llysoedd of lords whose estates supported a mixed farming economy, ante, II, no. 1, 1-7. Dermot Fahy considers some indirect evidence which points to the decisive migrations from Britain to Brittany not taking place before the first half of the sixth century, ante, II, no. 2, 111-24. Arthur Clark follows Offa's Dyke from Dee to Wye, delimiting the eight-century frontier between the Mercian and British kingdoms, in Presenting Monmouthshire, no. 17, 16-18. Christopher Brooke suspects that Welsh princes and clergy near the English border were beginning to combat the Viking crisis before the Norman invasions, forming diocesan boundaries and reviving monastic life, in Flintshire Historical Society Publications, XXI, 32-45. G. Melville Richards attempts to correlate the terms is and uwch with the administrative centre of Welsh commotes and cantrefi, ante, II, no. 1, 9-18. K. E. Kissack provides a history of religious life in Monmouth, secular and conventual, from the Norman Conquest to the Dissolution, in Journal of the Historical Society of the Church in Wales, XIV, 25-57. G. Melville Richards notes some literary evidence for the siting of mediaeval gallows in Wales, in Archaeologia Cambrensis, CXIII, 159-65. John West uses the Forest Records to reconstruct forest jurisdiction in mediaeval Worcestershire, and presents a social classification of forest dwellers from gentry to landless colonisers, in Folk Life, II, 80-115.