Welsh Journals

following a decision of the Board of Celtic Studies some years ago. In my view, this decision makes it unnecessarily difficult for editors to produce clear summaries which catch the flavour of the original, and I hope that the Board will be prepared at least to consider a change of policy. But this is only a small point of criticism to set against a great deal of scholarly and interesting material. PENRY WILLIAMS New College, Oxford SIR RALPH HOPTON: THE KING'S MAN IN THE WEST (1642-52). A study in character and command. By F. T. R. Edgar. Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1968. Pp. xvii, 248. 55s. Ralph Hopton was born into a Somerset family which had done well out of monastic lands in Somerset and Berkshire. (His mother, inciden- tally, was a Monmouthshire heiress and widow of Sir Henry Jones, and his sister's second husband was David Kemeys of Cefnmabli.) Like many young gentlemen who later fought in the Civil War, Hopton saw service on the continent during the early years of the Thirty Years' War. In 1625 he returned home to settle down as a country squire. When the Long Parliament met he was undoubtedly a reformer, voting for Strafford's attainder and heading the delegation which presented Charles with the Grand Remonstrance. But, basically, he was one of Dr. Wormald's 'non-violent' parliamentarians, and between the Remonstrance and the Militia Bill he had positively ranged himself on the royalist side. By mid-July 1642 he had left the House to execute the commission of array in Somerset, where his position as local magnate and deputy-lieutenant was the basis of his social and military pre-eminence in the west. In writing this biography, Mr. F. T. R. Edgar has the advantage of following in the footsteps of Professor T. G. Barnes for the Somerset background, Mary Coate for the Civil War in Cornwall, and Brigadier Peter Young and others for purely military affairs. But he has evidently explored all the manuscript and printed sources in central and local repositories with exemplary thoroughness and it is unlikely that any resounding new facts relating to Hopton will again be discovered. Some- times he is obliged to make bricks with very little straw: the chapter on 'The Cornish Army in Review' is a disappointment, while, through no fault of his own, he has little to tell us concerning the detailed structure and organization of the Cornish army. He cannot, for example, draw upon the rich material available for the main Oxford army nor upon the petitions of maimed soldiers which, when they have survived, as in Denbighshire, give added depth to a study of regiments and of individual companies. In a later section he says that Hopton himself had on occasions to pay the expenses of recruiting and victualling. 'This burden was