Welsh Journals

Canon Davies argues that the provision of elementary education by successive religious trusts (the 'Welsh Trust' of 1672-81, the S.P.C.K., the Circulating Charity Schools movement from 1738) represented a 'religious revival. based on the sobre piety and strong moral emphasis of the Prayer Book and Church Catechism'. Denominational enthusiasm seems to get the better of him, however, when he describes Thomas Gouge, founder of the 'Welsh Trust' (and son of William Gouge, the Puritan theorist of the family) as an 'Anglican clergyman', in spite of his resignation in 1662. Except for the Circulating Schools, education was largely through the medium of English in what was still predominantly Welsh-speaking country; and that helps to explain the success of Howell Harris's Calvinistic Methodism, described, complete with the schisms inseparable from Methodist history, by the Rev. Gomer M. Roberts. Finally, there is a long, detailed, and fascinating account by Ceri Lewis of Glamorgan literature, fascinating, not only for the story in itself, the gradual decline of the bardic tradition with the anglicization of the gentry, followed by the eighteenth-century scholarly revival which was to bear such remark- able fruit in lolo Morganwg, but also for the sudden beams of light which the literature casts on the life of the people. The Glamorgan History has successfully integrated the various approaches to the past in a way more often recommended than attained. It is a valuable contribu- tion to British history generally. It is, of course, indispensable for the history of Wales. C. s. L. DAVIES Wadham College, Oxford FAMILY AND FORTUNE: STUDIES IN ARISTOCRATIC FINANCE IN THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES. By Lawrence Stone. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1973. Pp. xviii, 294. £ 4.50. The two most significant criticisms made of Stone's The Crisis of the Aristocracy were that the purely financial difficulties of the early-modern peers were not as convincingly demonstrated as their cultural and political troubles, and that the book's basic argument presupposed a uniqueness of the 'aristocracy' as a group which was not warranted in anything but the legal sense. We now have the chance to look again at these problems with the help of five case-histories of the Cecil earls of Salisbury, from 1590 to 1733 (occupying over half the present study), the Manners earls of Rutland, 1460-1660, the Wriothesley earls of Southampton, 1530-1667, the Berkeley lords Berkeley, 1500-1680 and the Howard earls of Suffolk, 1574-1745. The aim is to 'demonstrate the practical working of the general theories advanced in the earlier book' (p. xv) by chronologies of individual family incomes and expenditures which together illustrate all the variables of economic experience to which a great aristocratic patri- mony could be subjected. If this sounds dry the result is quite otherwise, although a comparatively lengthy (and reprinted) account of the building of Hatfield House sacrifices relevance for entertainment at many points. The book is not only economic history of the most attractive and easily