Welsh Journals

Humphreys justifies this bold claim, sharing with us his reading of The Four Branches, and he gives us a portrait of the author which reveals more of the unique qualities of his writing and the depths of his commentary on human life than a score of academics treatises have managed to do. Emyr Humphreys is not so concerned with the Island of Britain as Dafydd Glyn Jones. Not unexpectedly, therefore, it is the latter who raises questions that have a particularly Welsh relevance. Emyr Humphreys has taken the medieval myths of the constrained little stage of Wales, and has set them before us in the broader terms of human life so that we can seek to find in them their significance for us: such is the nature of myths for both lecturers. BRYNLEY F. ROBERTS Aberystwyth PATTERNS OF POWER IN EARLY WALES. By Wendy Davies. O'Donnell Lectures delivered in the University of Oxford, 1983. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1990. Pp. xii, 103. £ 16.95. Wendy Davies is concerned here, as in her earlier work on the Book of Llandaff and the development of Wales and Brittany in the early middle ages, to approach the reality of political power and to move debate away from pasteboard generalizations that only too easily force explanation of events into nineteenth- or twentieth-century national or sub-national concepts. She resists strongly the idea that Wales was defined in any clear territorial sense in the very early middle ages, and that it was cut off from the English midlands in the later eighth century. She accepts David Hill's new interpretation of Offa's dyke in all its complexity, rejecting the evidence of Asser that it was indeed built 'from sea to sea'. Her general picture is one of fluidity, with English aggression as the dominant motif from the mid-seventh to the mid-eleventh century. The Viking presence added to the brew: their military activity, their bases. their probable control of parts of Gwynedd, c. 960-1025, helped to make effective continuation of a true Welsh polity impossible. Lordship depended on the ability of landed aristocrats with their own private military followers to establish themselves as kings. Wendy Davies finds little or no evidence in the Welsh scene of the existence of a notion of over-kingship with regular tribute and hosting. Even so, by the early eleventh century the tendency was well marked for two larger units to be formed, one in the north, the other in the south. The ultimate failure, notably of Gruffudd ap Llywelyn, brought the situation on the eve of the Norman Conquest of England to a point where it could well be described as political chaos. Behind all this political comment is a valiant attempt to inject a little reality into our interpretation of how communities develop, to escape the curse of inevitability, the air of fore-ordained move towards the creation of historic England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Problems have to be re-cast. Group-identities, to use a convenient and not too jargon-ridden term, need to be recognised as small. Language change and