Welsh Journals

government, which they had dominated, was execrated and the party's evident reluctance to accept reconstruction policies did not pass unnoticed. So discredited were they that, as this author concludes: 'It is very difficult to believe that the Conservative Party would have won a general election at any point after 1940'. Nor could Churchill's prestige save the Conserva- tives. Uniquely regarded to the point of veneration as he was as a war leader, his social priorities too were at odds with those of the electors; in the election campaign 'homes came last on Churchill's list, first on the voters'. Despite many encouraging omens since 1943 (opinion polls and some by-election results), the Labour leaders did not expect to win in 1945. And some of them then misunderstood and exaggerated the significance of the victory they had achieved. The first world war ruined the Liberal Party beyond recall; in 1945, the Conservatives were beaten but not destroyed. A new political order had appeared that, initially certainly, favoured the Left. But Labour, despite some boasts to the contrary, were not to remain the masters for very long; for the Conservatives had helped to create the new consensus too, and with their unfailing instinct for moving quickly in pursuit of the sources of power, they were soon to be back powerfully in play. This is an absorbingly interesting and scholarly book that convincingly demolishes some legends, for example, that Labour's electoral machine was kept oiled and ready during the war while the Conservative organis- ation rusted away in patriotic neglect. There is little at which to cavil. A comparison with domestic politics during the 1914-18 war would have been interesting; and one suspects that despite the newspapers (which had their silly seasons even in wartime), Cripps does not quite merit the prominence accorded him. Here is a historian of quality who seems likely to make a substantial contribution to our understanding of the contemporary world. E. L. ELLIS Aberystwyth AGRARIAN LANDSCAPE TERMS: A GLOSSARY FOR HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY. By I. H. Adams. Institute of British Geographers, London, 1976. Pp. xii, 314. £ 4.60. Given the extraordinary proliferation over the past twenty years of books and articles concerned with historical geography and agrarian history, the publication of this useful volume by the Institute of British Geographers is long overdue. As a discipline, historical geography tends to attract students of widely differing academic persuasions and the literature abounds with contributions from geographers, agriculturists, legal hist- orians and sociologists to name but a few. The bewildering plethora of legal and technical terms are, of themselves, often sufficient to deter the faint-hearted from venturing into an area of study where source materials are frequently scanty, widely dispersed and, when located, often of questionable validity. Accordingly, there has long been a pressing need for a comprehensive glossary of careful definitions of the terminology used in