Welsh Journals

the puritan ethic that accompanied it, severely undermined the position of nonconformity. Indeed, the Welsh chapels were amongst the most notable of the war casualties. Their alienation from an increasingly industrial and urban society, so acutely analysed by Canon E. T. Davies recently for the period before 1914,1 became far more pronounced in the post-war years. The final attainment of disestablishment of the Church in 1920 seemed the most hollow of victories-not that the Church itself was able fully to exploit its new-found freedom. Old values came under fire; old and cherished institutions were challenged anew. The achieve- ments of the educational pioneers in the late Victorian period were now thrown into doubt. A Departmental Committee in 1920 strongly criticized the working of the Welsh Intermediate Education Act of 1889 and urged that it be repealed; the Haldane Commission of 1916-18 sparked off fifty years of debate concerning the federal structure of the University of Wales. The character and the quality of Welsh society were increasingly questioned in a manner unthinkable to O. M. Edwards or Tom Ellis; Caradog Evans now symbolized one kind of critique, Saunders Lewis another, George Maitland Lloyd Davies, a wartime martyr for his pacifist views, yet another. The Welsh League of Nations Union was one significant legacy of the first World War, Plaid Cymru a very different one, appealing to a new and heightened nationalism very different in tone from the more comfortable days of Cymru Fydd and the youth of the Welsh Baptist Premier. It becomes increasingly clear that the social and cultural upheavals of the war form a massive watershed in the evolution of Wales, perhaps a decisive one. It is greatly to be hoped, therefore, that research students in our national university will be encouraged to explore them. A hopeful sign is that university and school syllabuses no longer regard 1914, still less 1868, as the terminus ad quern of Welsh history. Already a massive range of official government publications is available for the war years. It may be anticipated that private archives such as the Lloyd George and Thomas Jones Papers will soon be released to the historian also. With their aid, some assessment can be made of the influence of the Great War in the making of modern Wales. Historians attempting this task need ask for no more lucid (or more readable) guide than Mr. Marwick's book, K.O.M. 1 E. T. Davies, Religion and the Industrial Revolution in South Wales (1965), esp. pp. 147 ff. THE LACY FAMILY IN ENGLAND AND NORMANDY, 1066-1194. By W. E. Wightman. Oxford University Press, 1966. Pp. xii, 274. 55s. Histories of families and their estates are all the rage, but it would be a mistake to class this book as just one of a fashionable range of