Welsh Journals

ARTICLES RELATING TO WELSH HISTORY PUBLISHED MAINLY IN 1973 I. WELSH HISTORY BEFORE 1660 From his interpretation of the British evidence in the Notitia Dignitatum, J. Hester Ward doubts whether the migration of Cunedda to north Wales was connected with a Roman policy of 'stabilization' and would rather see it as occurring immediately after the final break with Rome, in Britannia, IV, 253-63. W. N. Yates summarizes what is known about the distribution and proportion of Celtic and non-Celtic church dedications in pre-Reformation Wales, in Journal of the Hist. Soc. of the Church in Wales, XXIII, 5-17; but he cautions against the unwarranted conclusions often drawn from such dedications and from place-name study by historians of 'The Age of the Saints’­this, together with a sixteenth-century copy of a life of St. Llawddog, is in The Carmarthenshire Antiquary, IX, 53-81. A correlation of known areas of Irish settlement with church dedications to St. Brigit-the most widespread and active of the Celtic cults-suggests to E. G. Bowen the dimensions of a post-Roman Celtic 'thalassocracy' in north-west Europe, in Studia Celtica, VIII/IX, 33-47; not surprisingly perhaps, he discovers that the Teifi valley proved to be much less of a religious frontier in the spread of the St. David cult than it was for the evangelical movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in Ceredigion, VII (1972), 1-13. Land grants copied into the Liber Landavensis provide Wendy Davies with evidence for the direct survival in south-west Wales from the sixth to the ninth centuries of late-Roman legal terminology, in Agricultural Hist. Rev., XXI, 111-21. The late Melville Richards argued that the eighth-century Lichfield (St. Chad) Gospels have no connection with Llandaff but were taken to the English monastery in 934 from their original home at Llandeilo Fawr under the auspices of Hywel Dda; he further speculated that this removal was deliberate revenge for a Welsh raid on that house way back in the mid-seventh century, in National Library of Wales Journal, XVIII, 135-46. In an important study, D. Howells goes behind a triad (Pedwar anghyfarch gwr) of the Welsh law-books (Llyfr Blegwryd) to cast some welcome, even if dim, light on pre-Norman Welsh society and, in particular, on lordship and vassalage, in Studia Celtica, VIII/IX, 48-67. The Latin (and not very memorable) verse composed by the sons of Bishop Sulien of St. David's (1011-91) is the subject of a study by M. Lapidge, in ibid., 68-106. A unique collection of early Welsh land grants was harnessed in the second and third decade of the twelfth century to the consolidation and expansion of the Norman bishopric of Llandaff, thereby producing that mine and minefield for Welsh ecclesiastical scholars-the Liber Landaven- sis. Wendy Davies, in a synopsis of her important Ph.D. thesis, does