Welsh Journals

ARTICLES RELATING TO WELSH HISTORY PUBLISHED MAINLY IN 1974 I. WELSH HISTORY BEFORE 1660 Reciting the evidence for native political organisation in Roman Britain, T. M. Charles-Edwards seeks the origin of the special Welsh use of the word 'brenhin', in Antiquitates Indo-Germanicae (Innsbruck, 1974), pp. 35-45. F. A. Patterson, from the fragmentary evidence provided by the distri- bution of Roman sites in north Wales, argues for a Venedotian settlement in the first third of the fifth century A.D., the result of deliberate policy by the post-Roman regime, ante, VII, 213-22. Discussing the keeping of genealogies in Brittany and their relation to early British practice, L. Fleurit has some interesting remarks on the survival of Roman tradition on the Celtic fringes of Dark Age Europe, in Bull. Board of Celtic Studies, XXVI, 1-6. A detailed study by D. N. Dumville of certain passages in the Historia Brittonum leads to a clearer understanding of the medieval compiler's methods of chronological computation, Bull. Board of Celtic Studies, XXV, 439-45. The Liber Landavensis continues to provide Wendy Davies with evidence about the early Welsh church: a similarity in charter formulae in use at Llandaff and post-conquest Worcester is explained by Bishop Urban's presence at Worcester c. 1090-1107 (Journal of the Society of Archivists, IV, 459-85); episcopal consecration lists drawn up in the twelfth century draw on earlier Welsh data and suggest the presence of bishops in south- east Wales in the preceding two centuries, Bull. Board of Celtic Studies, XXVI, 53-73. Students of St. Asaph are less fortunate: D. M. Smith can only hazard the suggestion that Richard (consecrated in 1141), and not Gilbert, was the first Norman bishop of the see, in Journal of the Hist. Soc. of the Church in Wales, XXIV, 9-12. St. David's, of course, bred Gerald of Wales: D. G. Walker considers the wider issues for the historian of the Welsh church raised by Michael Richter's work on the archdeacon of Brecon, in ibid., 13-26. An examination of a passage relating to Castell Gwyddgrug in the twelfth-century Welsh annals suggests to J. B. Smith a topographical error in the Latin version and he ponders on the textual considerations of this discovery, in Bull. Board of Celtic Studies, XXVI, 74-77. Periodic levelling has not destroyed all evidence of earlier sites at Cardiff castle and town, where J. and P. Webster, with J. M. Lewis have uncovered a substantial medieval ditch near the only surviving sub- terranean length of town wall, in Morgannwg, XVIII, 74-77; at Llan- stephan, excavations by G. C. Guilbert revealed a section of the upper ward earthwork, and evidence that the castle hill had been defended by a system of earthworks of the seventh to the fifth centuries B.C., in The Carmarthen- shire Antiquary, X, 37-48.