Welsh Journals

Search over 450 titles and 1.2 million pages

WALES AND STAR CHAMBER: A NOTE MR. A. D. Howells1 has drawn attention to an interesting discrepancy in the review pages of the WELSH HISTORY REVIEW for June 1969. I remarked on p. 308, summarising an argument of H. A. Lloyd, The Gentry of South-West Wales, that 'few [Welsh] cases went to Star Chamber'. On the following page Professor Glanmor Williams quotes Professor Lawrence Stone for the assertion that '15 per cent of the Star Chamber suits emanated from Wales during Elizabeth's reign'. Mr. Lloyd used information derived by Penry Williams from figures supplied by Miss Skelton; according to these figures, in the last year of Elizabeth's reign, forty-eight Star Chamber cases originated from Wales, 684 from England. Wales thus provided about 6-5 per cent of cases.2 Professor Stone cites Mr. Edwards's Catalogue of Star Chamber Proceedings Relating to Wales, but he seems to have misread a figure. According to Mr. Edwards, 1,090 out of approximately 15,000 separate Star Chamber actions relate to Wales; that is, once again, about 6'5 per cent.3 Penry Williams compared the number of Star Chamber cases per county, producing an average of 4-0 per Welsh shire and 17-1 per English one for the last year of Elizabeth's reign.4 A more reasonable comparison, as Mr. Howells suggests, would take into account respective populations. On this basis (assuming that Wales had about 250,000 inhabitants in the mid-sixteenth century and England about three and a half millions5) 6 per cent is about right. Welsh cases were neither exceptionally numerous nor exceptionally scarce. C. S. L. DAVIES Wadham College, Oxford 1 Letter from Mr. A. D. Howells, Northmead County School for Boys, Guildford, Surrey, to the editor of the Welsh History Review, 14 July 1969. Penry Williams, The Council in the Marches of Wales under Elizabeth I (1959), p. 215; Miss Elfreda Skelton (Lady Neale), 'The Court of Star Chamber in the reign of Elizabeth' (University of London M.A. thesis, 1930). Lawrence Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy (1965), p. 240 (unabridged edition); Ifan ab Owen Edwards, A Catalogue of Star Chamber Proceedings Relating to Wales (Univ. of Wales, Board of Celtic Studies, History and Law series, no. 1, 1929), p. v; see also Penry Williams in Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, XVI (1956), 287-97. 4 Council in the Marches, pp. 215-16. Joan Thirsk (ed.), Agrarian History of England and Wales, 1500-1640 (1967), pp. 142-46, 531-32.