Welsh Journals

permanent survival, and this led Richard de Clare to demand an acknowledgment of the comitatus of Glamorgan as the centrepiece of judicial and administrative control. Consequently, a new territorial pattern emerged, whereby feudal bureaucracy replaced feudal dependency at a time when outside pressures from Gwynedd in the north and the perennial conflict of laws exacerbated Anglo-Welsh relations. One of the main reasons for the study of local history is to enable the historian ultimately to fit his evidence into broader settlement patterns and established trends within a specific period. This constitutes its chief contribution to our national heritage and consequently makes it a primary source of historical evolution and growth. Bearing this in mind, a balance of scholarly achievement is the basic problem confronting the editor of a volume of wide-ranging articles compiled according to the individual approach of the contributors concerned. Furthermore, more coherence in a miscellany of this nature would have appeared if it had been planned chronologically rather than in the haphazard form it has assumed. These criticisms, however, should not deter the reader from enjoying the considerable amount of good material provided or detract from its permanent value as a major contribution to the history of Glamorgan. J. GWYNFOR JONES. Cardiff. THE GOLDEN HIVE. By Eleanor Fairburn. Heinemann, 1966. Pp. 294. 30s. History has dealt in rather niggardly fashion with Nest, daughter of the last prince of Deheubarth, Rhys ap Tewdwr Fawr. There are the incontestable facts of her birth, her alliance or, more precisely, her dalliance with King Henry I of England, her marriage to Gerald of Windsor, and a number of extra-marital and merry widow adventures. And there is, of course, her romantic abduction by the reckless Owain ap Cadwgan of Powys under the nose of her husband. Her physical charms were undoubtedly attractive to men. Her predilection for promiscuity was another feature which some of them obviously found pleasing and rewarding. Since Owain ap Cadwgan and other susceptible contemporaries took liberties with Nest, there is no reason why later admirers of her personality should not do likewise. With so little known of the vagaries of her life, a wide field offers itself to the fertile imagination, the romantic sensibilities, and, failing these qualities, the clinical observations of novelists. This being so, it is somewhat surprising that so few have written about Nest, whose abduction even Sir J. E. Lloyd described as a 'story of passion and daring, which breathes the spirit of the early heroic age, and which Homer might well have told'.