Welsh Journals

of the Liber Landavensis through the fables of Geoffrey of Monmouth and the legend of Blegywryd ab Einion to the powerfully mischievous fantasy-spinning of Iolo Morganwg, one asks if there is any other small region of Europe where the art of lying has been brought to such a pitch of literary perfection. But it is not all forgery and fable; even a non-Welsh speaker may appreciate something of the richness of Glamorgan's poetic tradition as he reads Mr. Lewis's densely packed pages. After this lengthy and fascinating excursion into a largely unpolitical Welsh society, we are finally brought down to earth by Mr. T. B. Pugh's sober account of the ending of the middle ages and the enactment in 1536 of an Act of Union which might have been expected of Edward I in the 1280s, had he been a younger and less pre-occupied man. Altogether, this is a notable volume, worthy of its large and important subject. G. W. S. BARROW Newcastle upon Tyne. THE PRINCIPALITY OF WALES IN THE LATER MIDDLE AGES: THE STRUCTURE AND PERSONNEL OF GOVERNMENT. I. SOUTH WALES, 1277-1536. By Ralph A. Griffiths. Pp. xix, 634. University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1972. £ 6.50. The piecemeal nature of the conquest of Wales left the country with a remarkable variety of governmental institutions. There were the great marcher lordships of the south coast which had a degree of independence of royal control unparallelled elsewhere in the British Isles; there were a host of minor lordships, each with its own institutions; and the principality itself was divided into north Wales, conquered by Edward I and governed from Caernarvon (though Flintshire was associated with Cheshire, not with the principality), and the shires of Carmarthen and Cardigan, developed piecemeal during the thirteenth century, which (under the title of west rather than of south Wales for a while during the middle ages) were governed separately from Carmarthen. It is with these two counties that this book is concerned. It opens with a valuable survey of the structure of government, and of the officials concerned, at all levels. It is perhaps misleading to say that 'the southern counties of the principality of Wales after 1277 illustrate some of the lessons in government that had already been learned in England, Ireland and Chester' (p. xvi): Chester had, after all, always been part of the kingdom of England, and was not, as one might suppose from this, a conquered country; and to the historian of Norman Ireland the surprising thing is that in spite of the strong Welsh marcher influence in the conquest of Ireland the patterns of Wales were not followed there. The institutions of west Wales do not seem to have differed very greatly from those of the marcher lordships, and, particularly at the local level, there was much that was common to the whole country. The ceisiaid- serjeants or keepers of the peace-were indeed common to the whole of north-western England, including Cheshire, that is, the areas where there was no frank pledge. Dr. Griffiths holds that 'there can be little doubt that they were of pre-Conquest origin', and this was the view held by