Welsh Journals

errata, and hitherto those who were anxious to know the contents of Hingeston's second volume had to consult one of the eight copies which were preserved, as if they were rare pieces of erotic literature, in the British Museum or the Bodleian. The story of the suppression and the consequent resurrection of the volume is told with characteristic official reticence and brevity in a memorandum at the beginning of the present edition; it is far more amusingly and comprehensively covered, with all its personal innuendoes admirably evoked, in the splendid pages of Professor David Knowles's Great Historical Enterprises (pp. 112-14). The Rev. F. C. Hingeston's downfall as editor was quite as much due to his cavalier attitude to affairs of the heart-he foolishly jilted the daughter of Joseph Stevenson, one of the founding fathers of the Rolls Series- as to his slapdash methods of editing; if anything, his reputation as editor is salvaged a little by the publication of the present volume. Many of his errors were minor in character and others are easily detectable: he was a paragon of virtue when compared with his colleague best known to Welsh scholars, John Williams ab Ithel. Indeed, this volume reproduces Hingeston's original text with amendments provided from contemporary lists of errata at the Public Record Office. The format and layout of the volume and the calligraphic execution of the corrections are all vintage Victoriana; the price is painfully contemporary. It is not a price which, frankly, many historians will find worth paying. Some of the letters are certainly interesting: the unmistakeable accents of Scots English are conveyed by no. 186; occasional dispatches (such as no. 267) provide an interesting piece of gossip on the domestic politics of foreign countries; and it is certainly useful to have the diplomatic correspondence readily accessible in print. But there is little here which is not already well known to the specialist, and not all of Hingeston's errors have been corrected: for example, his blatant mistranslation of 'terroir du Franc' (pp. 302, 314) as 'territory of France' instead of 'the land of the franc of Bruges' has gone uncorrected. The letters relating to Wales are known already and some of them have been published in part elsewhere. All are taken from B.M., Cotton, Cleopatra F. Ill, except for one from B.M., Vespasian F. XIII which is published in Edward Owen (ed.),. Catalogue of Manuscripts relating to Wales in the British Museum, I, 25-26. The letters were, and are, dated with a confidence for which there is no contemporary basis in the original manuscript; and, in fact, Sir John Lloyd has already suggested revised dates for two of the letters (nos. 161 and 165). The two most interesting letters now published in full for the first time are no. 161, which describes the capture of the deputy-sheriff of Anglesey and his men in an ambush laid by Glyndwr's supporters, and no. 187 (published in part in H. Ellis (ed.), Original Letters illustrative of the Kings of England, second series, I, 43), which supplies information brought by two Flintshire spies about