Welsh Journals

somewhat mechanical nature of the approach which makes it difficult to to acquire a rounded and coherent picture of the overall development of each abbey. The careful and wide-ranging compilation of the scattered minutiae of monastic history is a tedious and thankless task. All those who are inter- ested in medieval monastic history will have cause to thank the author for his unremitting labour. I hesitate to appear ungrateful or churlish to a scholar who works so diligently; yet I have to confess to a sense of mild dissatisfaction with this book. The author rightly reminds us of the dis- parate and haphazard nature of the fragmentary evidence at his disposal; but when all allowances have been made, I cannot help feeling that more attempt ought to have been made to give this study a greater measure of unity and cohesion than at present it has. As it stands the book gives us four discrete chapters with little or nothing in common. The author would have done well to consider at least one further chapter in which he tried to pull the strands together and to answer questions which one would have thought related to all the monasteries. Did their position in the Welsh March give their history any special characteristics as compared with the development of Cistercian houses elsewhere? What did the 'Welsh' house have in common with the 'Anglo-Welsh' houses and how did it differ? Did the attitude (and possibly the nationality) of the prominent laity in the neighbourhood change significantly over the centuries ? How did the crises of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries affect these houses as compared with other monastic establishments ? There are other queries of the same kind which readily present themselves. No doubt it would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to give a completely satisfying answer; but if history is to be more than antiquarianism this is the sort of inquiry which has to be pursued. Moreover, David Williams has before now given clear proof that he has the insight as well as the knowledge needed to undertake it. He is potentially too good a monastic historian to rest with anything less. GLANMOR WILLIAMS Swansea THE GooD PARLIAMENT. By George Holmes. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1975. Pp. 198. £ 7.25. The 1370s were unhappy years in English history and, despite some recent helpful comment by Dr. Tuck, the decade remains arguably the least understood of the fourteenth century. A sense of failure prevailed. There was disaster in war as well as recurrent disputes in politics and a growing feeling, repeatedly expressed in parliament, of financial oppres- sion. It is interesting that, apart from characteristically perceptive comment by Miss McKisack in 1959, there has been no general survey of the parlia- ment of 1376 since Tout wrote in 1928. Many of us, of course, know some- thing about the so-called Good Parliament, recalling that Walsingham wrote de parliamento facto Londoniis quod bonum a pluribus vocabatur; unprecedented events took place and the assembly lasted longer than any of its predecessors. Dr. Holmes is not greatly concerned with the 'goodness'