Welsh Journals

thirty books. It is an attractive mix, spanning the centuries, but a reviewer is hard put to it to avoid a catalogue of names. The opening piece by Helen Miller rather belies its title, for it is not a constitutional study of the 'relations between the two Houses of Parliament, 1509-1558': it shows that the great majority of new peers now were former M.Ps., and explores peerage power in the constituencies. Mary Keeler describes the work of the Committee of Privileges, then a select committee, in Elizabeth I's reign. Geoffrey Holmes and Clyve Jones relate Scottish antipathy towards a new malt tax to the government defeat over the French Trade Treaty of 1713. J. V. Beckett charts the chequered career of a man, Sir James Lowther (d. 1755), who was a back-bench M.P. for half a century. Philip Lawson examines the first and little-known parliamentary inquiry into India, in 1767. John A. Phillips utilises computer-based research to challenge the deferential theory of politics before and after the 1832 Reform Act, taking as his sample the three boroughs of Lewes, Maidstone and Northampton. Norman Gash demonstrates his incomparable knowledge of the Peel era to illustrate the growth of the parliamentary organisation of the Conservative Party between 1832 and 1846. The most fascinating contribution to the volume, however, is not one of these research papers but the historiographical survey by J. H. Hexter of 'the early Stuarts and Parliament'. Never a man to pull his punches, he scrutinises in vigorous and amusing fashion the vast literature on this subject from S. R. Gardiner to Conrad Russell and beyond, establishing, at least to his own satisfaction, that the contemporary constitutional clash was over the liberties of the subject, not the royal power. Three 'notes and documents' and generous space for reviews, over 60 pages, round off a splendidly balanced volume. All institutions of higher learning should subscribe, even in these hard times. PETER D. G. THOMAS Aberystwyth THE WELSH IN THEIR HISTORY. By Gwyn A. Williams. Croom Helm, London, 1982. Pp. 206. £ 11.95. This is a lovely book to read. It takes but a few hours to be swept along through the introduction and eight essays, three of which are here published for the first time. The range is amazing, from the Romans to the Referendum, but such is the author's total sense of Wales that we never feel that we have wandered away from the main story-line into an irrelevant sub-plot or into a meaningless factual or speculative cul-de-sac. The broad sweep of interpretation holds and excites because it rests on a mastery of detail. Professor Williams never gives any impression of trespassing on to the property of others; he is always sure of his period, of his geography (he is as much at home in Anglesey as in Monmouthshire) and of his religious denominations and sub-sects. He is confident of his panoramic thesis because he has mastered the telling detail. He is