Welsh Journals

because he hounded them and hustled them and was sometimes ruthless, intolerant and authoritarian, but he made an immense contribution to the development of education in Wales and perhaps belated justice is done to him in Dr. Davies's very readable little book. GILLIAN SUTHERLAND Newnham College, Cambridge THE RELIGIOUS CENSUS OF 1851, A CALENDAR OF THE RETURNS RELATING TO WALES. VOLUME 1, SOUTH WALES. Edited by Ieuan Gwynedd Jones and David Williams, University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1976. Pp. xxxv, 698. £ 8.00. This essential historical source-book contains a transcription of the returns made for the Census of Religious Worship of 1851 for the counties of Monmouthshire, Glamorgan, Carmarthenshire, Pembrokeshire, Cardiganshire, Breconshire, and Radnorshire. The University of Wales Press has published these returns at a very low price in a handsomely produced volume, with large type and a great deal of white, though my copy needed cutting up at pp. xxx-xxxi and xxxiv-xxxv. A more compact volume, with smaller type, thinner paper and less space, might have been easier to use: but the format chosen does give plenty of room for annota- tion. The lack of a detailed contents, of any index other than place-names, and, above all, of a topographical map, are more serious deficiencies, which could usefully be remedied in the forthcoming second volume. Despite these criticisms, however, Professors Jones and Williams are to be congratulated on the dedication, care and sheer hard work that has gone into the preparation of this invaluable volume. As is pointed out in the helpful introduction to the book, the best measure of church attendance that can be constructed from the returns is the 'Index of Attendance' first used by Inglis. This measure is the sum of all attendances expressed as a percentage of total population: it is, there- fore, both crude and inaccurate, since it ignores differentials of age, sex and condition in the total population, as well as the duplication of atten- dances by individual attendants. But as these drawbacks are of limited significance, and as the index of attendance undoubtedly gives interesting results, this is the measure used in the discussion that follows, in order to indicate relative crude magnitudes of religiosity, and of church membership. The index of attendance for the whole of south Wales in 1851 was 80.1 per cent. Lower levels of attendance occurred chiefly in urban areas-such as Swansea, Cardiff and Newport-and in areas where the Church of England was relatively strong. Of course, these sometimes coincide: since already by 1851 industrialisation was bringing Englishmen into Wales from the midlands and the south west; and these migrants often settled in the urban areas. But there is also a broad band of territory-comprising the districts of Knighton, Presteigne, Hay, Monmouth and Chepstow- where the Church of England was the dominant church in 1851 and where, though urbanisation and industrialisation were not highly developed, the index of attendance was very low. In the Knighton district, for instance it was 36.0 per cent; and in Presteigne 49.0 per cent. Elsewhere, church