Welsh Journals

abbacy, as peculiarly Irish. The analogies with the family monasteries of eighth-century England are considerably closer than a brief footnote might suggest; and nearly all the characteristics of the Irish communities are found in continental houses in the ninth and tenth centuries (including an element of ancestor-worship), as recent German studies of Libri memoriales and similar texts have made clear. What was distinctive was the non-territorial paruchia and all that followed from it in the seventh century and subsequently. Early Ireland and its church are remarkable enough without our making them out to be odder than they were. D. A. BULLOUGH Nottingham THE NORMANS IN SOUTH WALES, 1070-1171. By Lynn H. Nelson. University of Texas Press, 1966. Pp. 217. 43s. Nowadays, the historian is under constant pressure to look to the wider world and to the sociological disciplines. Narrowness has become the unforgiveable vice, and all who work in relatively remote fields are exhorted to keep their eyes on wider horizons and to welcome freshness of ideas and novelty of outlook. Mr. Nelson's book will therefore rightly be applauded as an honest approach to a difficult tract of history, made by an historian whose training and principal interests are different from those of most who write about Wales. In essentials, the book represents an attempt to apply the Turner frontier thesis to Welsh medieval history. The author argues that the Normans were the first to establish a real frontier society (as opposed to a policy of containment) in eastern Wales and the march, that south Wales exhibited many of the characteristics of a frontier policy at work, that the frontier came to an end as the Welsh themselves learned from the new Norman masters of the south, and that the Cambro-Norman conquest of Ireland should be read as the last flicker of this frontier society. Behind this main thesis lies a further more traditional (and more obviously acceptable) analysis into highland and lowland, into predominantly pastoral and predominantly agricultural. Mr. Nelson has put forward some lively ideas about Norman-Welsh society; even if all of them cannot be accepted, the freshness of approach gives value to the work. The heart of the book is the third chapter, where Mr. Nelson deploys the evidence for the existence of a frontier society. The most substantial element in this evidence is the presence at the time of Domesday Book of three special classes of men in the western shires bordering Wales: riding-knights (radmanni or radchenistres), ox-men (bovarii) and hospites. Mr. Nelson holds that these classes represent men capable of benefitting