Welsh Journals

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Gandulf (sic) certainly leaves a lot to be desired. Finally, the Bibliography is indeed 'Selective' and the Index is inadequate. It is distressing to conclude that this volume is a shocking example of the modern plague of book-making, irrespective of public need or authorial and editorial competence. Antonia Fraser should clearly confine her manifold activities to whatever it is she knows, and for Mr. Chambers to write authoritively on the later eleventh and earlier twelfth centuries it is not enough, alas! to be (as the blurb assures us) a full-time writer living in London with his wife who is another, nor to be the author of The DeviVs Horsemen-nor even to have worked hard on The Norman Kings and conscientiously read some of the more obvious secondary sources before he started. B= is the charitable mark, at best, he gets from me; and that is not good enough for buying or reading, not even through a book club or a library. King's College, R. ALLEN BROWN London BARONS OF THE WELSH FRONTIER. By Janet Meisel. University of Nebraska Press, 1981. Pp. xix, 231. £ 12.00. The author of Barons of the Welsh Frontier deserved better advice than she has received from her guides and mentors. Her book, developed from a doctoral thesis, is a study of three substantial families from the Anglo- Norman earldom of Shrewsbury, the Corbets, Pantulfs and Fitz Warins. Dr. Meisel's purpose, as a study of local history, is a valuable one: to trace the fortunes and influence of these three families from 1066 to 1272. Her first intention was to study twenty families; that was reduced to these three sharply differentiated representatives of the honorial baronage. The Corbets flourished because of a persistent aggressiveness and because they held castles and lands in forward position on the March. The Pantulfs were less influential and declined steadily until the disappearance of the male line about 1233. The Fitz Warins, springing from obscure origins, were fortunate in their marriages and built up a substantial landed endowment. Dr. Meisel tries to respect the fact that, so far as genealogy and landed wealth are concerned, the evidence is patchy and conclusions must therefore be tentative. But a combination of hypothesis and enthusi- asm too often leads her onto dangerous ground. A casual aside demon- strates the underlying problem. She quotes a note in the records of King's Bench for 1249: Fulk fitz Warin acknowledged that he gave Lambourn to his daughter, Mabel, for homage and service to hold for herself and the heirs of her body. Despite the precise language, this is identified as the creation of a life interest in Lambourn. Then, unfortu- nately, Dr. Meisel adopts the view proposed by an expert whose explana- tion, at first offered as hypothetical, is allowed to harden into fact. Mabel was so grossly defective either in mind or body that no husband or nunnery would accept her: so, in his late seventies, her father 'seems to be trying to compensate his daughter for her suffering and to atone for what must have been a family tragedy'. Perhaps those who suggest such theories, especially when they are based on a simple misreading, should be left to publish them in their own names. The reality, as it is to