Welsh Journals

These are only some of the points raised in a book which is a return to first principles; new questions are asked and new suggestions made and it may truly be said that our perception of thirteenth-century Wales will never be the same again. J. E. Lloyd's Llywelyn was a heroic and tragic figure, overwhelmed by the workings of an intractable fate; for Professor Smith he was, above all, a pragmatic prince who understood that politics is the art of the possible. The sources we have reveal little about Llywelyn the man but one cannot help feeling that he and Edward I were very similar in temperament. He certainly exercised considerable personal magnetism and could inspire loyalty; what we do not have are the personal insights that are revealed, for example, in the household accounts of medieval English kings. This book has been written in Welsh; it would be hard for a Welsh-speaking historian to do otherwise with this topic. If we will not read and write our own history in our own language, there is little hope for us. But for those who do not read Welsh an English version is in preparation and Professor Smith has put forward some of his arguments in articles, particularly in Brycheiniog (1982-3) and the Transactions of the Caernarvonshire Historical Society (1984). All in all, this is an important and stimulating work; in the Welsh historiographical tradition it stands firmly in the apostolic succession established by J. E. Lloyd and Professor Smith's own mentor, T. Jones Pierce. A. D. CARR Bangor ESSAYS ON THE NOBILITY OF MEDIEVAL SCOTLAND. Edited by K. J. Stringer. John Donald Publishers, Edinburgh. 1985. Pp. xiv. 290. £ 20.00. There has been, so it seems, an unresolved paradox in much recent Scottish medieval historical scholarship. On the one hand, it is readily recognised that medieval Scotland was a land of strong regional loyalties and powerful provincial earldoms and baronies; on the other hand, much of the effort of Scottish historical writing has concentrated on kings and kingship and on the growth of the regnum Scotie. The present valuable collection of thirteen essays (six of which have already appeared elsewhere, but now reappear in a modified form) sets out to resolve this paradox by studying the Scottish nobility 'from within its own milieu'. This shift in emphasis, to be fair, is not altogether new. Some years ago Jenny Wormald, in a seminal article republished as a tail piece to this present volume, launched an attack on the notion that fifteenth-century Scotland was dominated by power-hungry, overmighty nobles who had to be tamed by ruthless kings, while more recently Alexander Grant has written a series of notable articles which analyse the late- medieval Scottish nobility as a group. Furthermore, it can hardly be doubted that the shadow of the late K. B. McFarlane's pioneering reappraisal of the English nobility and its relations with the crown lies heavily over much of the work now being undertaken on Scotland.