Welsh Journals

ARTICLES RELATING TO THE HISTORY OF WALES PUBLISHED MAINLY IN 1992 I. WELSH HISTORY BEFORE 1660 A. G. Marvell and B. Heywood report on the excavations (intermittent from 1958 to 1989) of the Roman fort at Neath which suggest, unusually for Wales, a reoccupation of the site c. 140 170 AD, in Bull. Board of Celtic Studies, XXIX, 171-299; in addition to discussing the significance of the 1978-90 excavations of Roman Carmarthen, Heather James provides a valuable summary of its history, in The Carmarthenshire Antiquary, XXVIII, 5-34. Radio-carbon evidence hinting at a late Roman or Dark Age date for the outer enclosure at Caergwrle Castle is in John Manley's report of excavations there in 1988, in Flintshire Hist. Soc. Journal, XXX, 13 20. In tracing Romano-British Christianity in the West Country, G. C. Boon draws on parallels and finds from Caerleon and Caerwent, in Trans. Bristol and Glos. Archaeol. Soc., 110, 37-52. P. B. Russell analyses place-name evidence for the survival of British (Welsh) settlers in West Derby Hundred (Lancs.) after the Anglian invasions, in Northern History, XXVIII, 25-41. In his study of the origins of Mercian 'overkingship', N. J. Higham comments on that kingdom's dealings with Gwynedd and Powys in the seventh century, in Midland History, XVII, 1-15, whilst the same author examines the evidence for the existence of a British 'overkingship' based on Gwynedd as an aspect of the relations between Britons and Saxons in the sixth and seventh centuries, ante, XVI, 145-59. An eighth-century Mercian manuscript containing the Cambro-Latin 'Orationes Moucani', prayers composed by a Welsh cleric, Moucan, is discussed by D. R. Howlett as evidence for contemporary assimilation of Biblical knowledge, in Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies, XXIV, 55-74. Although allowing for a considerable degree of Celtic survival, C. M. Taylor argues that the British (Welsh) kingdom of Elmet was losing its identity to English culture by the eighth century, in Medieval History, II, 1, 111-29. The nature and function of the model for the organization of royal rights and administration in Llyfr Iorwerth suggests to G. R. Jones a late tenth-century date for its introduction-replacing an earlier model set out in Llyfr Cyfran, in Bull. Board of Celtic Studies, XXIX, 95-118. D. G. Walker argues for an early date for the development of the borough of Brecon on the present site on the east bank of the Honddu river, in Brycheiniog, XXV, 7-14. Arthur's hunt for the Twrch Trwyth (in Culhwch and Olwen) may be an allegory of the Welsh reaction to the Anglo-Norman conquests in south Wales in the early twelfth century, speculates Armel Diverres, in Trans. Honourable Soc. of Cymmrodorion, 1992, pp. 9-17. The reception of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Prophecies of Merlin by twelfth-century