Welsh Journals

connected with clause 18. But he is on more questionable ground (on p. 62) in his interpretation of Magna Carta's references to the crusader's respite. On Henry Ill's minority itself, however, Carpenter is almost unfailingly convincing. Chapter 2, for example, is a plausible reconstruction of the events ending the civil war, and incorporates a shrewd assessment of the motives of the participants which pays much attention to their private ambitions as landowners. Later in the book, the attitude of the greatest of the aliens in England at this time, Peter des Roches, is perceptively analysed. One constantly recurring theme is the English government's relationship with Wales. Both 'Wales' and 'Wales, south' appear in the index, but a more analytically arranged entry is to be found under 'Llewelyn, prince of North Wales'. However, there are probably fewer insights into this theme than into most others. Carpenter naturally relies considerably on the work of Dr. R. F. Walker, Professor R. R. Davies, and others. The book is lucidly written, despite a few lapses in style and occasional misspellings and misprints, none of them as confusing as the fact that two pages of the list of contents are transposed. After reading this book, all historians of thirteenth-century Britain will look forward eagerly to the author's promised biography of Henry III. R. MALCOLM HOGG Lampeter TREDEGAR; THE HISTORY OF AN AGRICULTURAL ESTATE, 1300-1956. By Roger Phillips. The Self-Publishing Association Ltd. for The Tredegar Memorial Trust. Newport, 1990. Pp. 315. £ 15.95. When Godfrey Charles Morgan finally expired in 1913 he bequeathed to his heirs one of the finest patrimonies in the realm. Including ground rents in Cardiff, which alone exceeded £ 55,000 annually, the Tredegar estate and its various offshoots embraced more than a thousand farms whose capital value amounted to LIO,000,000, and yielded a yearly income of some £ 500,000. Within the course of half a century the property was progressively alienated and upon the passing of the childless John Morgan, the last Lord Tredegar, in 1962, the rump of the agricultural estate of 55,000 acres was acquired by the Eagle Star Assurance Company. In common with so many Welsh gentry families, the Morgans rose to prominence after Bosworth Field, and as time went by a succession of prudent marriages and careful husbandry enabled them to accumulate extensive real estate in Monmouthshire and Brecknockshire so that by the mid-eighteenth century the estate rental stood at some £ 6,000. This was to rise dramatically over the next fifty years as the family invested in the development of urban property and the burgeoning industrial activities of south Wales to such an extent that by the second half of the nineteenth century, a virtually static agricultural rental was subsidised by a princely income from the urban and industrial sectors. Under the stewardship of a succession of agents of varying quality (including the rich attorney Thomas Protheroe, the bete noir of John