Welsh Journals

section of chapter 4. Arguably, this is the best way of presenting Welsh agrarian and social history, allowing for the full distinctiveness of Welsh conditions and trends to emerge. For instance, only from a broad countrywide survey of livestock improvements can we appreciate the lack of improvement in Wales in the quality of cattle. The volume, if cumbersome to handle and sometimes (though perhaps unavoidably) indulging a degree of overlap between different chapters, is a remarkable achievement of scholarship, and all students of rural England and Wales in this crucial hundred years of development and change will find here a rich harvest of information and be able to garner insights and hypotheses which they can test in depth at a local level, perhaps the only level at which a true study of man in his economy and society can properly be undertaken. D. W. HOWELL Swansea GLAMORGAN COUNTY HISTORY, VOLUME VI: GLAMORGAN SOCIETY, 1780-1980. Edited by Prys Morgan. Glamorgan County History Trust, with the University of Wales Press, 1988. Pp. xv, 448, 47 plates. £ 39.95. This volume brings to completion the enterprise of the Glamorgan County History which was launched in the 1930s, interrupted by the War, and revived in the 1950s. It must be a source of considerable satisfaction and pride to the many editors and authors who have laboured in the cause, and to the Trust, that the concept of the county history has survived a chequered career and many problems and setbacks, and has become flesh. It is a handsome and challenging example of a mode of presenting the history of a county that contrasts sharply with the manner in which the history of the English counties is handled by the V.C.H. The history of Glamorgan is, in sum, a very large collection of individual thematic essays, each treating its subject on a county-wide footing. Individuality has little place in the V.C.H., whose core is a compilation, parish by parish and township by township, of information collected and presented in largely standardised and uniform fashion. Glamorgan is intended to be read, and individual authors have been encouraged to advance their own arguments and air their opinions. The V.C.H. is designed to be consulted as work of reference and guide to further research, opinions are rarely if ever expressed, in the cause of objectivity, and no one, apart from an exceptional reviewer, ever reads a volume from cover to cover. It might be tempting to read differences in national temperaments into this contrast-the Welsh flow of words, narrative, and ideas, the English adherence to facts, order, precedent, and deference-were not more prosaic explanations available. Changing intellectual and academic fashions, and above all differences in academic organization, are at the root of the matter. A group of independent, strong-minded, historians and scholars does not have the discipline or motivation to undertake the ard grind of collecting local data on a systematic plan simply for the sake of compiling an encyclopaedia; instead, each will concentrate on a particular problem