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the History of Wales and its supplements and the commentary on the sources provided by R. Ian Jack in Medieval Wales serve as sufficient guides. A full-length bibliography of Irish history is being prepared by Irish scholars No attempt has been made to include Scottish history.' Practice here is a little less rigorously devolutionist than the principle so stated-but only a little. Nonetheless, let us be grateful for what we have. Technically the work has the great merit of beautifully clear typographical lay-out; we must also be thankful that someone had second thoughts about producing it in two volumes (to judge from the words 'Volume Two' in the table of contents and elsewhere, the decision was taken only in the nick of time). The 167-page index is well done; among other functions it allows the less initiated of us to ascertain that, for instance, R. R. Davies, R. Rees Davies, and Robert Rees Davies (though thankfully not Robert R. Davies as would be the volume's usual style, in line with John G. Edwards, Thomas B. Pugh .) are one and the same animal. Coverage is of publications up to 1969-70 (though some items as late as 1973 squeeze in); it is deliberately fuller for the post-1066 period (pp. 386-933) than for the pre-1066 period (pp. 256-385), again on the ground that other works (i.e. Bonser) provide more adequate treatment. No division into sections can be altogether satisfactory, but the only grouping your reviewer found difficult to accept was the curious allocation to a subsection 'Miscellaneous Studies on Society', tucked away at the end of the section 'Urban Society', of such works as the Cambridge Economic History, vol. II, and R. H. Hilton's A Medieval Society. Maybe future reissues will in this respect depart a little further from the arrangement of 'Gross'. They will, of course, rectify incidental errors such as the ascription of item 4963/5457 both to R. H. Hilton (wrongly) and to Edward Miller (rightly), or the classification of Sir Thomas Kendrick's British Antiquity as a 'collected work'. Even without them this is a work containing much food for thought about the course of English historiography, and calculated to make us all a good deal wiser. D. A. L. MORGAN University College, London EUROPEAN TOWNS: Their Archaeology and Early History. Edited by M. W. Barley. Academic Press for Council of British Archaeology, 1977. Pp. xxvii, 523. £ 24. This impressive volume was born out of the activities of European Architectural Heritage Year and the efflorescence of interest in the origins and development of towns in Europe. It is, to some extent-too large an extent-the child of 1975. The conference which this book commemorates was very properly concerned with conservation, with the accelerating pace of the destruction of the material evidence for the growth of urban centres; it was conceived on a grand scale to improve international co-operation and understanding, to show the different responses to common problems, to attempt something of a synthesis of the relevant disciplines such as geography, architecture and archaeology as well as history.