Welsh Journals

was prompted to venture across the seas and to what extent popular radicalism influenced this movement. The transatlantic dimension is clearly important, but there are also invaluable parallels here with the English Revolution and the author might well have probed these points of contact. Just as the upheaval of civil war threw up intellectuals of the calibre of Fox, Walwyn and Winstanley, so did the campaign for popular sovereignty and equality which came in the wake of late-eighteenth- century revolution bring their Welsh counterparts, Richard Price, Iolo Morganwg and Morgan John Rhees, in from the wings of history. Moreover, the bones of contention were the same: tithes, the legal system, economic privations, a restricted franchise and religious disability, all of which were invariably voiced in millenarian and apocalyptic tones. As Professor Williams shows, their voices were sometimes discordant, but they were united in their desire to awaken Welshmen from their slumbers, to teach them to think in political terms and to create a new nation with radical values. In his anxiety to erode the influence of nonconformist historiography and to communicate the impact of political propaganda on Welshmen, the author sometimes mars his case by exaggeration, claiming, for instance, that Jac Glan-y-Gors's translations of Paine 'convulsed literate Wales'. His contempt for the politically inert--especially the Cymmrodorion and the Methodists-is barely concealed, and he tends to play down the stifling influence not only of 'the Papal government of 3ala' but also of other Churchmen and Inde- pendents. Even so, his thesis is an important and timely corrective. Both books reveal the author's gifts as a historian: a strong sense of location, an ability to recreate the past imaginatively, a proper sympathy for the plight and aspirations of the underdog, and a sharp eye for the improbable and the humorous. Above all, perhaps, Professor Williams loves an adventure. His works are always alive with incidents and charac- ters. The pace is unrelenting and the overall effect is often heightened by the author's penchant for meteorological metaphors (gales, especially, abound). Some of his writing (particularly the last chapter of Madoc) makes Frederick Forsyth look like an honest journeyman, and there are some of us who would warmly welcome the first-rate historical novel which surely lurks somewhere in Professor Williams's mind. Instinct suggests that the man in the street (on both sides of the Atlantic) will buy Madoc, but that staider professional historians will opt for Beulah. My advice would be to buy and read both. GERAINT H. JENKINS Aberystwyth ARISTOCRACY AND PEOPLE. BRITAIN 1815-1865. By Norman Gash (The New History of England, 8). Edward Arnold, London, 1979. Pp. 375. £ 12.00 boards; £ 5.25 paper. The word 'verdict' occurs frequently in this volume, the tone of which is unashamedly judicial. Professor Gash is not blind to the follies and foibles of the governing classes during the first half of the nineteenth century, but he passes a decisively favourable verdict on an aristocracy which helped to transform Britain from a place of brutality, disaffection,