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upon the personal rivalries of the kings and their greatest subjects. Mr. Cole writes clearly and racily and avoids the extravagances of much popular historical writing on the period. He has no axe to grind and, although his attitude to the chronicles and other sources which he has used can be rather uncritical and his judgements less cautious than those of the professional historian, the latter are usually sensible and would not seriously mislead the general reader with little knowledge of the period. Curiously enough the military side of the book is a little dis- appointing: the reader might hope for more on the raising and training of armies to add to the interesting pages on arms and armour. The text is accompanied by-in fact, may be regarded as ancillary to-numerous illustrations from contemporary and later sources, many of them in colour. A number of these are attractive and some unusual: they should stimulate the imagination even of those who find nothing new in the text. It is unfortunate that Mr. Cole does not provide fuller and, in one or two cases, more accurate ascriptions to the pictures and a list would have been useful. But, although not a work of scholarship, this is an attractive and readable book which the general reader may well find good value. ROGER VIRGOE East Anglia SHIPS AND SEAMEN OF ANGLESEY, 1558-1918: STUDIES IN MARITIME AND LOCAL HISTORY. By Aled Eames. The Anglesey Antiquarian Society, 1973. Pp. 674. £ 3.50. The former Anglesey County Council is to be congratulated on in- augurating and financing the publication of a series of specialist local studies. It is to be hoped that its successor will be equally generous and that other local authorities will follow suit, since this is a pioneer work and similar studies of Welsh coastal counties would prove valuable. The book, volume four in Studies in Anglesey History, is a splendid mine of information, providing a series of studies rather than a com- prehensive narrative, on a wide range of maritime history topics from Elizabethan merchants, wrecks, the regattas and yacht clubs of the nineteenth century, to an Amlwch shipbuilding firm and the fortunes of a Victorian ship-owning family. There is a lack of balance between the first four chapters, dealing with events between 1558 and 1815, and the remaining eight chapters, devoted to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Mr. Eames explains this on the grounds of the wealth and availability of oral and other material and the need to record it before it is too late. Certain points emerge clearly, among them the importance of Liverpool to Anglesey's maritime interests and the predominance of Liberal and Calvinistic Methodist principles among those concerned in such interests. Trade, and the ship-building industry to which it gave rise, was at first a local one, carried on in ships of small tonnage, financed by numbers of small shareholders drawn from all classes. Initially, the bulk of trade