Welsh Journals

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A GUIDE TO PARLIAMENTARY ENCLOSURES IN WALES. By John Chapman. University of Wales Press, 1992. Pp. 200. £ 12.95. John Chapman's handlist, the end-product of a painstaking compilation of Parliamentary Enclosure Acts and Awards relating to Wales, will be of great value to local historians concerned to trace the development of landscape and settlement in their own districts. In addition, its instructive introduction presents the reader with an outline survey of the enclosure legislation and movement as it affected the principality, and important contrasts are drawn with the parallel enclosure movement in English counties. Thus, the lateness of Welsh enclosures is explained by the rarity of open arable fields in Wales by 1750, by the lack of familiarity with the parliamentary processes and crucially by the lack of a pool of local expertise from which enclosure officials could be drawn. Contrasting with the English pattern, too, is the relatively long interval between Act and award in so far as Wales is concerned, which Dr. Chapman partly explains on the grounds of the 'exceptional complexity' of a significant number of Welsh enclosures, involving as they did multiple claims by many persons for lands and rights dispersed over a number of townships. Again, the lack of expertise of Welsh commissioners is seen as a retardative factor. Finally, many Welsh commissioners, unlike their English counterparts, proceeded piecemeal, tackling each township separately, which resulted in allotments being released to the new owners in stages. Dr. Chapman suggests that such an approach took some of the pressure of finishing the task off the commissioners' shoulders, for many of the big landowners would have been able to effect the planned improvements over a drawn-out period. Indeed this would have eased the problem of their lack of capital. Dr. Chapman's discussion of the 'Enclosure Process and its Records' is also valuable. The gloomy news emerges that the proportion of Welsh awards missing is considerably greater than in England. Again, we learn that a lot of luck is involved, in so far as surviving awards provide widely differing amounts and quality of information about the specific situation on the ground. We owe the author a big debt for ferreting out the details concerning the location of records about each enclosure, the extent of area enclosed, the principal allottees, and the names of the commissioners. One reservation remains, however, namely, concerning Dr. Chapman's procedure of presenting enclosure or enclosures alphabetically by parish within each county. His justification is that the parish was 'the unit most likely to be familiar to local researchers', but arguably he would have done better to organize his enclosure awards chronologically by manor and then by parish within each manor; for essentially enclosures took place by manor. DAVID W. HOWELL Swansea