Welsh Journals

his allotted themes of new settlement, farming techniques and social structure by copious illustration from a wealth of records such as charters, surveys, manorial accounts and taxation lists, thereby providing as it were a series of snapshots, many of them in close-up, of agrarian life in different Welsh localities. These are particularly illuminating in the lengthy section on farming techniques, which amasses a great deal of information on field systems, fertilizers, crop yields, and the ratio of cattle to sheep (underlining, for example, that it was the Cistercian abbeys of south Wales and Marcher lords such as the Fitzalans of Oswestry who concentrated on the commercial rearing of sheep). This section will be a valuable reference-point for historians seeking an overview of the local diversity which marked the rural economy of Wales in the later thirteenth and earlier fourteenth centuries. The discussion of social structure likewise assembles useful figures on the size of tenants' holdings, as revealed by fourteenth-century surveys from the lordships of Ruthin and Hay and the ecclesiastical estates of St. Asaph and St. David's. Yet by following the editor's narrow definition of social structure 'as the amount of land each family had to support it', Professor Jack offers only a very partial and static view of rural society, eschewing serious analysis of its class composition and of relations between lords and tenants. Despite the inadequacies of the evidence, it would have been possible to clarify the value of holdings to tenants by reference to surplus- extraction in the form of rent and tax-it was, after all, for the assessment of these that most of the sources cited were compiled-as well as of tithes, and by considering other means of economic support, such as seasonal labour in England or fishing. The extent to which surpluses were demanded in cash, implying the existence of markets for the sale of agricultural produce, together with the possibility of raising additional money for further exchanges, would also have been relevant here. Another topic which might have been examined in connection with social structure is slavery, especially since the chronology of its disappearance in Wales remains unclear: although there is no unequivocal evidence for enslavement after the mid- twelfth century, native Welsh law-texts of the first half of the thirteenth century seem to assume that domestic slaves were still to be found then in royal and aristocratic households. Slavery in England is discussed by several contributors, notably by Sally Harvey, who suggests that its demise may have been connected with the running down of demesne farming on royal estates in favour of rents after the Norman Conquest, although ecclesiastical disapproval and the end of the slave trade were significant too. Large demesnes were found especially in the south-west, and their heavy investment m plough-teams was apparently matched by high proportions of slaves, who presumably attended to the ploughing and associated duties. We can only guess whether similar factors operated in Wales, albeit at a somewhat later date, but it is surely not unreasonable to suppose that the decline of slavery was linked not only to the cessation of the slave trade across the Irish Sea but also to wider changes in agrarian exploitation-including, perhaps, a reduction in both the number and size of native royal (and ecclesiastical) lowland demesnes as the result of the Norman conquest and of grants by native rulers to laymen and churches, accompanied by a greater reliance on rents from bond and free tenants.