Welsh Journals

THE CRISIS OF THE ARISTOCRACY, 1558-1641. By Lawrence Stone. Abridged edition, Oxford Paperbacks, 1967. Pp. 363. 17s. 6d. When Professor Stone first published this book in 1965 it was a bulky volume of 840 pages costing £ 5 5s. Od. Its aim was two-fold; to describe the total environment of an elite and to chart the course of a crisis in the affairs of this elite. This crisis, the author argued, was of decisive relevance to the breakdown of English government between 1640 and 1642. Added to the failure of the monarchy in the political arena and the impasse which the church had reached in the sphere of religion, it became the critical factor in explaining that loss of respect for the Establishment which emboldened malcontents to resort to arms against the Crown. The study, when first published, was accorded a mixed reception, compounded of scepticism about the validity of applying twentieth-century methods of sociological and statistical analysis to the necessarily incomplete material surviving from Tudor and Stuart times, and praise for the author's assiduity and ingenuity in his widely-ranging search for the evidence and the elegance with which he presented it. Even though its conclusions were far from commanding unanimity in their acceptance, Professor Stone's book was generally regarded as a fertile and provocative survey of a subject of first importance in a crucial period of British history. Its appearance in a paperback edition, slimmed down in bulk to 360 pages and deflated in price to 17s. 6d., will be welcomed by impoverished students and their hardly less penurious teachers. To achieve the reduction, much had to be sacrificed: the scholarly apparatus has gone, so has a mass of illustrative examples and quotations, together with some whole sections regarded as diversions or by-paths. But it was done by expert surgery, not mutilation, and the argument survives alive and vigorous. Students of Welsh history will find this book to be of unusual value and interest. Professor Stone-all credit to him for it !-is not one of that too-numerous body of English historians tempted to pass off as 'British history' work confined almost exclusively to the south-eastern counties of England. He draws his evidence from all parts of the kingdom and has made use of a considerable number of Welsh sources. Not that his handling of them is always impeccable; it was the earl of Essex not the earl of Pembroke who had a 'fastness in Pembrokeshire' (p. 101), and the sweep- ing generalization that it was the 'gross corruption and tyranny' of the second earl of Worcester and his 'Herbert henchmen' which led to the setting up of the Council of the Marches in the 1530s (p. 123) must raise some highly quizzical eyebrows. But he often has some extraordinarily interesting points to make about Wales, as for instance that 15 per cent of the Star Chamber suits emanated from Wales during Elizabeth's reign (p. 107). Much more important, however, than any specific reference to Wales itself is the absorbing fascination of his technique of the structural analysis of contemporary society. Whatever its limitations and short-