Welsh Journals

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It cannot be said that this meritorious vision was fully realised at Oxford in 1975 and to read the contributions in 1978 is to suffer some continuing disappointment. Thirty speakers are here represented: all the papers, including their bibliography and abstracts in French and German, are between ten and twenty pages in length. This is an ideal length for a conference paper, but it is insufficient to do justice to most of the topics in the permanency of print. As a result, the comprehensiveness of the book both in the chronology and in the geography of Europe is an ironic disadvantage. It has all the defects of bittiness without the compensating advantages of authoritative synthesis or of a comprehensible over-view. That is not to say that the central section, of eight papers on the origins of towns, both those continuing from Roman times or, as in Scandinavia or Russia, those starting with no predecessor, will not be used widely for unfamiliar material; nor is it to say that the obiter dicta of Christopher Brooke on the medieval town as an ecclesiastical centre will not provoke comparative speculation of a fruitful sort; nor that the magnificient profusion of town plans and excavation drawings throughout the volume are, or should be, of the greatest utility to all urban historians. But against these major attractions of the volume, it cannot be ignored that more than half the text is devoted to surveys of the 'current' state of play in preservation, conservation and study of Europe's urban heritage and that these surveys, more than any other section of the book, have already become outdated in three years. This is too permanent a format for such papers, however necessary as a piece of historiography it may be to have this (preponderantly depressing) collection of 1975 data. The contribution on Scotland, by N. P. Brooks, alone has a note added at the proof stage pointing out how radically things had changed from the frustrations expressed in his paper. The generous and necessary acknowledgment of the better arrangements for rescue archaeology and the creation of archaeological units at Perth, Elgin and Aberdeen, is paralleled only in a final four lines added to C. J. Delaney's paper on Welsh urban archaeol- ogy. As a result of such restraint in correcting out-of-date information, no reader outside Wales would necessarily know of the work of the Archaeological Trusts, or of the excavations at Caernarvon, at Old Carmarthen or at Aberystwyth. It is sad that Wales is illustrated only by a distribution map of planted towns based on Professor Beresford, sadder still that it could take no account of Peter Smith's Houses of the Welsh Countryside (which does cast light on towns as well), or demonstrate in a wider context the interplay possible, and necessary, between the medieval documentation of towns such as Carmarthen or Ruthin and the evolution of the street plan and development of the critical landmarks of church, castle and market-place. The slight unease of this section on Wales betrays the continuing insufficiency of comprehension and sympathy between some historians and some archaeologists, which this volume set out partly to document but principally to mitigate. The mediation has progressed since 1975, not least in Wales, and it is good to reflect that this book is out-of-date: but the reflection does not improve one's appreciation of its price. R. IAN JACK Sydney, Australia