Welsh Journals

Professor Rees in South Wales and the March, though he admitted that they were unknown to the Welsh law-codes. On the other hand, a similar office in Ireland was certainly a Norman introduction. The English and Welsh county courts of Carmarthen can be parallelled in some of the lordships, as for instance in Gower, where in 1369 there was still a Welsh county held from month to month and worth 10 marks a year, and an English county worth £ 10 a year (G. T. Clark, Cartae et alia munimenta quae ad dominium de Glamorgan pertinent, IV, 1325). By far the greater part of the book consists of lists of officials with as full biographical details as possible. It is difficult to overestimate the value of work of this kind, and only those who have attempted it can fully appreciate the immense labour involved. Lists of this kind are the indis- pensable tools of the working historian, and though the local officials were predominantly Welshmen and did not serve outside their own areas, at the higher levels many were men employed in the service of the Crown not only in Wales but also in Ireland and elsewhere. For example, there is on pp. 216-18 a full account of the stormy career of Giles Thorndon, appointed treasurer of Ireland in 1437 (he was already constable of Dublin castle), who held the office of constable of Cardigan castle, and on pp. 317-18 an account of Robert Power, who had been chamberlain of north Wales and escheator of both north and south Wales when in 1327 he was appointed treasurer of Ireland, where he subsequently served in a wide variety of financial and judicial posts. The lists are thus of wide usefulness, and Dr. Griffiths has put a great many historians in his debt. JOCELYN OTWAY-RUTHVEN Trinity College, Dublin. GUERRE, ETAT ET Societe A LA FIN DU MOYEN AGE. fitudes sur les armees des rois de France, 1337-1494. By Philippe Contamine. Mouton, Paris and the Hague, 1972. Pp. xxxviii, 757. £ 6.60. M. Contamine's thesis has been long awaited by students of French (and Anglo-French) history during the period of the Hundred Years' War. They ought not to be disappointed by his massive and illuminating work. His purpose is to examine the institutional and organisational changes which took place in the armies of the kings of France between the beginning of the Hundred Years' War and the Italian wars. But his book is not only a study in the recruitment, payment and control of later medieval armies. It is a study in social history which seeks to examine the current notion that 'socio-professional groups' existed in later medieval France. One of these, it is argued, was the soldiery, who formed a société militaire within the social structure of the kingdom. M. Contamine argues that two societes militaires can be discerned during his chosen period- the first, a short-lived essay in monarchical control under Charles V (1364-80); the second, a more durable form of military organisation which was the seed-bed of the army of the ancien regime. This was the standing army of Charles VII, which became permanent merely because it was never disbanded after its institution in 1445. The book discusses the means by which a potentially, and actually, anarchic soldiery could