Welsh Journals

acquiescence on the part of the county communities before provincial independence was restored in 1660. While there may be mutterings in academic circles concerning excessive emphasis on the localities at the expense of the centre, no one has yet ventured a thorough critique of the Everitt approach, and neither has Dr. Morrill. He has sought, however, to concentrate our attention 'on the significance of neutralism, and it is this aspect of Dr. Morrill's excellent book which may attract most discussion for he seems to attribute a coherence and positiveness to neutralist activity which some may find difficult to accept. A. M. JOHNSON Cardiff Two CENTURIES OF ANGLESEY SCHOOLS. Studies in Anglesey History, Volume 5. By David A. Pretty. Anglesey Antiquarian Society, 1977. Pp. 383. £ 4.50. Mr. Pretty's book deals with the issues affecting the setting up of schools in Anglesey rather than with the quality of education, which is treated only in passing. His opening chapter analyses social change in eighteenth- and, in particular, nineteenth-century Anglesey. He argues that the provision of education was a function of those developments which brought forth a middle class of nonconformist clergy, of farming and commercial interests, into positions of leadership. Nonconformist griev- ances and ideology were the means by which these groups altered the schooling structure of the country. Although two centuries are covered, the book is concerned largely with the period between 1815 and 1902. Education for the lower orders before 1815 is treated cursorily. The Anglican charity schools are adjudged to have been too limited in scope, while the success of the Circulating Schools is accepted by the author perhaps too readily. The main emphasis is given to the progress of the Calvinistic Methodist Sunday schools and to the instruction provided by dissenting ministers late in the eighteenth century. The established Church could neither tolerate nor respond adequately to these developments until after the Napoleonic Wars. The Church in Anglesey after 1815 rapidly promoted National Society day schools with only variable support from the local gentry. Proselyt- ization was the strongest motivation in the clergy's educational work. Probably social control was also intended. Whether this massive effort occurred at the expense of other needs, for example new churches, Mr. Pretty does not say. For all that, the strength of the Sunday schools together with their general evangelical activity consolidated the dissenters' influence with the populace. Although there was sectarian unrest about catechising nonconformist children who attended Church schools, the desire for British Society schools with undenominational religious education grew only slowly in the county. Huw Owen and John Phillips, in promoting the British schools, faced considerable apathy among the denominations, particularly the Methodists. This, more than Anglican hostility or lack of funds, delayed