Welsh Journals

THE JUSTICES OF THE PEACE IN WALES AND MONMOUTHSHIRE, 1541 TO 1689. Lists compiled and edited by J. R. S. Phillips. University of Wales Press, 1975. Pp. xxviii, 441. £ 8.00. It is well known that the 1536 Act of Union provided for the introduc- tion of J.P.s on the English model into Wales. No convincing record exists, however, of any appointments made before 1541, and Dr. Phillips following much recent work, most notably that of Dr. P. R. Roberts, argues that the act was not in fact implemented until that year. Establish- ing an accurate list of J.P.s is not easy. It involves the conflation and cross-checking of several sources, each of which has its own deficiencies, lucidly described in the introduction; and even so the lists are not complete, especially for the earlier years. Nevertheless, they provide the framework for political and social history on a county level. They reflect wider political upheavals; they also chart the fortunes of county families and provide a valuable indicator of social standing. Dr. Phillips is to be congratulated on producing, under the aegis of the History and Law Committee of the Board of Celtic Studies, an invaluable and henceforth indispensable work of reference. C. s. L. DAVIES Wadham College, Oxford. LINKS WITH THE PAST: SWANSEA AND BRECON HISTORICAL ESSAYS. Edited by Owain W. Jones and David Walker. Christopher Davies, Llandybie, Dyfed, 1974. Pp. xii, 251 + 23. £ 2.00. The diocese of Swansea and Brecon was formed in 1923, and these essays have been written to mark its fiftieth anniversary. It was until that time part of the diocese of St. David's, the largest in Wales. Professor Glanmor Williams, in a typically penetrating and wide-ranging essay on the tradition of St. David in Wales, brings us at its close to the 'ageless and abiding appeal' of the great and simple man whose 'undying religious inspiration' has survived the varying claims of nationalists from earliest days. Dr. Walker's study of Brecon priory, the cathedral of the new diocese, is a detailed account of a small and undistinguished Benedictine community dependent on Battle abbey. The priory church, surviving the Dissolution to become the parish church of Brecon, is now again the centre of a round of worship, maintained in succession to the monks by the cathedral chapter. Margaret Walker describes the close and curious relationship between the borough of Swansea and St. Mary's church which gave the townsmen the appointment of two of the four churchwardens and control of church finances. The Tudor records, with their delightfully accented phonetic spelling, begin in 1558, and reveal at once the changes brought about by the Elizabethan Church Settlement, though it is curious to find a roodloft still in existence in 1586 unless its removal threatened the structure of the building; and the cross there at the same date would not have been acceptable in most English dioceses. (And might not, incidentally, the