Welsh Journals

seaports which formed the key to the rise of such commercial and industrial magnates as the Mackworths and Mansells. Through such interests the Glamorgan gentry had close commercial and financial links with Bristol, while the growth of the county's industrial enterprises and labouring population provided a spur to early interest in agricultural improvement and, subsequently, to the modernization of communications. A consequence of economic expansion, together with the growth of absenteeism among the landowners, was the rapid rise in the wealth and status of upstart newcomers, especially from among the ranks of the estate stewards and lawyers. Much of Dr. Jenkins's thoughtful analysis of social and cultural trends, as of other developments, hinges on the demographic crisis which occurred in the late seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth centuries. A tendency for families to die out in the male line accounted for the change of ownership of 19 of 31 greater gentry estates in the hundred years after 1670. The average number of children born to the heads of greater gentry families fell from an average of five before 1640 to only 2.26 between 1641 and 1680, and saw only a small recovery, to 2.58, in the period 1681-1739; a third of the greater squires either failed to marry, married late, or produced no male offspring who survived to succeed them. In consequence, old Glamorgan family names disappeared and were replaced by new, often English, ones. Twelve of the greatest Glamorgan estates of the 1760s were owned by families which had no discernible Welsh links before 1680, seven of them with none before 1735. To this remarkable transformation Dr. Jenkins ascribes fundamental changes in wealth and power in Glamorgan society, a reduction in the number of estates, and a decline in local affiliations, which from about 1710 had its part in the increasing inability of Glamorgan's leading families to speak the Welsh language. A substantial part of the volume is taken up by an examination in depth of the gentry's politics. Here there are certain persistent themes which help clarify the shifting complex of unstable alliances, notably the influence of family tradition and maintenance of loyalty to certain political ideals, as embodied in such great figures as the Catholic marquises of Worcester and the Puritan earls of Pembroke. And the gentry had before them the constant object of defending local independence from the interference of central government, as expressed by sanctity of 'religion, liberty, property': the 'country' opposition to any government. There were also the long-term drift towards the established Church and a succumbing to the temptations of whiggism-influence and patronage- after 1714. And despite the Welsh reputation for Tory aims and prejudices, it was noteworthy that neither Glamorgan, nor yet Wales, did anything substantial in aid of the Jacobite cause of 1745. Although such trends, and others, can be observed, Dr. Jenkins's minute investigation of the changing political groupings indicates how many families were influenced by constantly revised perceptions of what was meant by 'Royalist' and 'Roundhead', 'Tory', and 'Whig'; and how personal, religious,