Welsh Journals

the ethics of honour and vengeance. The situation was slowly brought under control by the recovery of the monarchy, the preaching of a different ethic by the reformed Kirk, and an increasing yearning for stability among the nobles themselves. Changes in attitudes to private violence during the next century ensured that the principle of the feud was itself eroded and died out. These are the main propositions of a long, complex, subtle, and rather difficult book. Despite the drama of the subject, it is definitely not for the general reader and even many professionals will probably quarry its constituent parts. It is drily and densely written, and the over-riding themes often vanish in a mass of detail of tangential, though considerable, interest, such as the long analysis of the leading courtiers of James VI. It is a shame that research supported by a firm of whisky distillers should not have been expressed with something of the conviviality of their usual product. The thoroughness with which feuding is investigated during this one reign, and the lack of information upon its history before and after, leave the reader unsure of how much its decline in the 1590s was due to a recurrent factor (a strong king) or a novel one (a change in social values). Ironically, while accepting the author's demonstrations of the caution exercised in many feuds, one is still struck by what a violent place early modem Scotland could be. When only four out of eleven principal murderers of the earl of Eglinton were killed in reprisal, it was 'not a particularly bloody record'. The Cunningham-Montgomery feud showed 'considerable restraint', but still resulted in 'intensive destruction' in the Irvine valley. Unmarried women were 'soft targets'. The Highlands seem every bit as terrifying as contemporary Lowlanders thought. The body count in the Gordon-Campbell feud in mid-1593 was in hundreds, and the 'internal squabbles' of the Macleods of Assynt killed off fourteen out of the twenty-eight male descendants of Angus Moir. When a man won a lawsuit against some Macfarlanes in 1619, they severed his tongue and entwined his entrails with those of a dog before cutting his throat. It is Dr. Brown's achievement to have made such a world comprehendable, without making it less repellent. RONALD HUTTON Bristol MASTERLESS MEN. THE VAGRANCY PROBLEM IN ENGLAND, 1560-1640. By A. L. Beier. Methuen, 1985. Pp. 233. £ 19.95. As a social threat, the vagrant had no equal in Elizabethan and early Stuart England. Sturdy rogues and idle vagabonds were defined in terms of negatives: they had no