Welsh Journals

observations derive from his concern for the security of the Pembroke coast and his desire for the accurate depiction of the features of his area, and were later used by William Camden. His Description of Pembroke- shire, though sadly uncompleted, was a major achievement. Mr. Charles provides a balanced and careful survey of Owen's works which will be most useful to all who prepare to read them. The volume is well written and well set out, and the inclusion of colour plates, particularly of Owen's map of his native county, makes its study even more worthwhile. W. GRIFFITH Bangor THE ULSTER QUESTION, 1603-1973. By T. W. Moody, The Mercier Press, Dublin, 1974. Pp. 134. £ 1.50. This book is a revised and extended version of a paper delivered at a course on the teaching of history in Great Britain and Ireland, arranged by the Department of Education in the Irish Republic, and held in Dublin in July 1973. Another such conference, organized by the British Department of Education and Science, has since been held in Bath, and both gatherings have been attended mainly by teachers from secondary schools. These conferences have been characterized by the willingness of the participants to discuss, sympathetically and dispassionately, key problems in Anglo-Irish history. These qualities are embodied in the published version of Professor Moody's lecture. Although the book is entitled The Ulster Question, 1603-1973, two- thirds of it are concerned with the current political crisis which broke in the autumn of 1968. However, the reader would be well advised to study carefully the earlier part which, though brief, provides a useful summary of the origins and development of Ulster since the English and Scottish settlements of the seventeenth century. In discussing the Ulster colony of the seventeenth century, Professor Moody emphasizes the significance of the influx of Scottish settlers who 'had the right qualities for mastering their new environment', including 'the peculiar cohesion and discipline that they owed to their presbyterianism'. His verdict that 'from the beginnings of the Colony, religious categories were absolutely basic and inescapable, and this continues to be true', is irrefutable; the importance of religion lay not only in matters of dogma, but in the fact that it was a differentiation of cultures and communities, between the conquered Gaelic inhabitants on the one hand and the dominant colonists on the other. And yet, as Professor Moody points out, these Ulster settlers soon came to develop an identity of their own, to think of themselves, not as mere colonists, but as a special kind of Irishmen, who formed the backbone of the eighteenth-century Volunteer movement, and who were prepared to defy the British government in order to get their rights. Ulster Presbyterians were in the van of the United Irishmen, who pressed for