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WALES AND STAR CHAMBER: A REJOINDER BY drawing attention to the need to take into account the respective populations of England and Wales when comparing the number of Star Chamber suits emanating from either country during Elizabeth's reign, Mr. A. D. Howells has raised an important point.1 Following this suggestion, Dr. C. S. L. Davies has calculated, on the basis of Miss Skelton's figures for the last year of the reign and of Mr. Edwards's Catalogue, that Wales 'provided about 6'5 per cent of cases'. 'Wales', he continues, 'had about 250,000 inhabitants in the mid-sixteenth century and England about three and a half millions'. Therefore '6 per cent is about right. Welsh cases were neither exceptionally numerous nor exceptionally scarce'. The former of these judgements corrects an error of Professor Lawrence Stone's; the latter is a construction placed upon a remark of Dr. Davies's in his review of my book, The Gentry of South-West Wales, 1540-1640.2 That construction, and Dr. Davies's subsequent calculations, are somewhat misleading. In my book I repeatedly stressed that my conclusions applied only to the three shires of Cardigan, Carmarthen, and Pembroke; and I took issue with 'broad hypotheses taking insufficient account of the variations within that agglomeration of localities which in this period made up the kingdom of England'.3 A prominent feature of such hypotheses has been an excessive indulgence in over- generalised and under-refined numerical calculations. Most types of apparently quantifiable sixteenth-century evidence need to be handled with great caution, for sources are usually both suspect and incomplete. Evidence of Star Chamber suits and of estimates of population is certainly no exception to this rule. For Wales there is at least available, in Edwards's Catalogue, a schedule of Star Chamber suits which, despite its defects, does cover the whole of Elizabeth's reign; and, in Mr. Leonard Owen's analysis of mid- century returns by the bishops and by the subsidy commissioners, an estimate of the population of every shire calculated in accordance 1 Cited in C. S. L. Davies. 'Wales and Star Chamber: a Note', ante V. no. 1 (Jane 1970).71. 2 Ibid.. IV, no. 3 (June 1969), 307-8. 3 Howell A. Lloyd, The Gentry of South-West Wales, 1540-1640 (1968), pp. 210-11.