Welsh Journals

footnotes, his pupils would perhaps have been kind to have adopted a somewhat bolder way with his text. He finds the growth of freehold estates 'reasonably advanced' when the acts of Union 'gave a new legal direction to the business of estate building without impinging, at least directly and in the short term, on the continuity in organic growth of these estates'. This seems oddly put, but no doubt in this as in other matters 1536-42 was no more crucial than, say, 1500. Too much of Professor Jones Pierce's text considers developments before 1500 and is thin on the century after the acts. But where he is dark and complicated on the laity, Professor Glanmor Williams is lucid, brief, and indeed entertaining on the Church. His essay is a model synthesis that covers the whole period. It reminds us that if Laud stood for the 'Church Triumphant', it was not one where clerics nodded in the sun but rather one in which, like the Laudian bishop of Bangor, they worked hard and lived frugally even in a harsh task-master's eye. Uneven in quality, patchy in coverage, somewhat incoherent in struc- ture, this fourth volume of the Agrarian History is a tour de force. It should inspire the student to go out into the fields and get some mud on his boots. But best to leave the book itself behind-it weighs 5 lb.! IVAN ROOTS Exeter JAMES USSHER, ARCHBISHOP OF ARMAGH. By R. Buick Knox. University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1967. Pp. 205. 35s. James Ussher, archbishop of Armagh, is one of those whom posterity has not ranked as high as did his contemporaries: though the man who dated the creation of the world in 4004 B.C. still lives in some editions of the Bible. Ussher was an important figure in the near-Calvinist tradition of Archbishops Grindal and Abbott, though by the second quarter of the seventeenth century such men were employed only in outlying and papist areas. Ussher had a great contemporary reputation, among men who took different sides in the civil war, for his anti-popish scholarship. Indeed his theory of royal sovereignty, on which he wrote a book, is based on old- fashioned Foxean and Jacobean anti-papal postulates: 'there being nothing so contrary to the nature of sovereignty, as to have another superior power to over-rule' (p. 148). Mr. Knox's biography reveals Ussher as an unattractive, harsh, limited character, a scholar rather than an admini- strator, incapable of coping with the problems of Ireland. He became a little testy when his fellow-Cavlinist bishop, William Bedell, wished to preach to the Irish in their own language. Ussher realised that the English