Welsh Journals

THE MONASTIC ORDER IN SOUTH WALES,. 1066-1349. By F. G. Cowley, University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1977. Pp. xii, 317. £ 9.50. Anyone attempting to write the history of monasticism in the medieval dioceses of St. David's and Llandaff faces formidable difficulties in comparison with the person who does the same this side of Offa's Dyke. There are no great collections of estate records, nor any great body of writing by monastic authors which for so many English houses can make a many-sided history possible. The explanation of this contrast lies largely in the fact that monasticism in Wales remained largely an Anglo-Norman import which failed to put down strong roots into the soil. By the eleventh century, although a native eremetic tradition survived, the old monasticism was practically dead. Wales had had no tenth-century Reformation, probably because its political situation was so disturbed, and so the new alien lords found no native tradition to build on. Their first foundations of priories dependent on French or English houses only developed conventual life in a minority of cases, and until the second half of the twelfth century the Cistercians remained under the care of incomers. When Rhys ap Gruffydd took over the patronage of Whitland and Strata Florida conditions were created which, for the first time, attracted native Welshmen into the order, and brought about a second period of new foundations. Dr. Cowley has, however, made the most of the fragmentary sources and built a most impressive book. He writes with clarity; dealing in a masterly way, for example, with the main contrasts between the estates accumulated by the Cistercians and those of the other monks and canons. He has good chapters on the standard of life maintained within the monasteries, their literary culture and relations with the world outside- their patrons and the wider church. He impresses by the honesty with which he reveals the gaps in the evidence, and the problems raised by the Taxatio Nicholai of 1291, which have not always been realised by others. Parts of the book could have benefited by revision to take full account of work published since his thesis was accepted for a higher degree in 1965, and it would have strengthened his argument enormously if he could have provided some detailed maps. These points, apart, his book must be warmly welcomed. It makes an impressive start to the new series of monographs, Studies in Welsh History, being published by the History and Law Committee of the Board of Celtic Studies. CHRISTOPHER HOLDSWORTH Exeter A HISTORY OF ENGLAND FROM EDWARD II TO JAMES I. By Anthony Good- man. Longman, London and New York, 1977. Pp. xii, 468. £ 4.95. To the writing of good introductory textbooks there should of course be no end; but perhaps only a courageous historian would have embarked upon a general survey of English history between the 1320s and 1620s so soon after Dr. Keen's justifiably acclaimed England in the Later Middle Ages: A Political History, and at a time when Professor Elton's own very distinctive sixteenth-century star is still much in the ascendant. It is