Welsh Journals

Search over 450 titles and 1.2 million pages

AND SHALL THESE MUTE STONES SPEAK? POST-ROMAN INSCRIPTIONS IN WESTERN BRITAIN. By Charles Thomas. University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1994. Pp. xxiv, 353. £ 35.00. The origins of this book lie in the Dalrymple lectures for 1991 at the University of Glasgow. Although extensively reworked for publication, the book still retains a discur- sive, serial form. Attention is principally focused on the post-Roman kingdoms of Demetia-the modern Dyfed-and Dumnonia-Cornwall-with additional sections on Brycheiniog and Lundy Island. The 'Mute Stones' of the title are the Early Christian Monuments (ECMs) of fifth-to seventh-century date. It is Professor Thomas's principal thesis that they can be made to speak and that they can be used as historical documents to reconstruct Irish settlement in west Wales, the foundation of the kingdom of Dyfed, the adoption of Christianity, the establishment of a small Irish kingdom in Brycheiniog and the settlement of Demetian notables of Irish descent in Cornwall leading to wider dissemination of Christian beliefs. All this is prefaced by the prehistoric and Roman background to the Irish innovation (by means of the ogam script) of 'personalizing the ubiquitous stone pillars with writing'. Recent work on the invention and purpose of ogam and the impact of the Roman world on fifth- and sixth-century Ireland is summarized and evaluated. These are stimulating chapters touching on the anthropological and religious functions of stone monuments and the origins and nature of literacy in proto-historic societies. Professor Thomas emphasizes the dependence of Christianity on spoken and written Latin. In what is the core of the book, he advances a new typological sequence for Nash- Williams's Group I ECMs. The earliest are those inscribed only in ogam; next are the bi-lingual ogam and Latin, thirdly those where ogam is used only for the name of the deceased and finally those with 'Hic lacit' or other explicitly Christian formulae. Using this typology, he plots the distribution of the different types in Dyfed to show the origin, spread and assimilation of the Irish in Dyfed as raiders, settlers and rulers. The same technique is also used with the Brycheiniog and Cornish stones. More controversial is his use of historical sources-principally the 'king-lists' in the mid-eighth-century Irish text The Expulsion of the Deisi and the related list of kings of Dyfed in the twelfth-century Welsh genealogies preserved in British Library MS. Harleian 3839. He suggests that Clotri of the regnal lists is commemorated as 'Cluto- rigi' in the Llandysilio west stone (ECMW no. 315) and in the 'Maglocuni' stone from Nevern (ECMW 353). These two key stones commemorate a native Demetian notable still within a sub-Roman cultural world and his wholly Irish descendant through marriage. The distribution of those stones late in the sequence proposed above and of those with explicitly Christian formulae suggests a shift of power to the south and east of Dyfed, to an area where Christianity may have survived within the sub-Roman ambit of Moridunum (Carmarthen) and which was open to evangelization from south-east Wales Recent archaeological work at Longbury Bank, near Penally, and at Carew Castle, and the re-examination of earlier finds, have yielded more of the fifth- and sixth-century imported eastern Mediterranean and southern Gaulish wares and fine glass that support