Welsh Journals

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of burghal origin, such as Holland or Bold or Thelwall. The sources which provide the materials are varied and Dr. Siddons provides an invaluable guide to their potential. Apart from the seals and the poetry, he draws a good deal from the sepulchral monu- ments. For those of north Wales up to 1400 he is able to refer to the corpus of material in Gresham's volume. Much valuable work in this field has been done by other scholars but an extension and consolidation of these studies for the whole of Wales and for the entire medieval and early modern periods is clearly among the desiderata of the coming years. On the heraldry of Wales, Dr. Siddons has completed a work of singular impor- tance, splendidly informative and conducive to a much fuller appreciation of the historical interest of the surviving evidence in its various forms. The illustrations in the volumes enhance this realization, those of the heraldic rolls or the manuscripts of the poetry, the Wynn monument at Dolwyddelan or the Stradling painting at St. Donat's joined now, from a manuscript at the Burgerbibliothek Bern, by the fine depictions of Owain of Wales bearing the arms of Gwynedd Wales upon his martial triumphs in Alsace and Switzerland. Dr. Michael Siddon's devotion to his field of study has been richly rewarding, and the publication of these volumes will ensure that he will hence- forth share his interest in Welsh heraldry with a host of appreciative readers. J. BEVERLEY SMITH Aberystwyth THE PLACE-NAMES OF EAST FLINTSHIRE. By Hywel Wyn Owen. University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1994. Pp. 388. £ 30.00. Wales has not so far been well served with books to put sound place-name scholarship before an anglophone popular readership. Vast though his collections of relevant mater- ial were, the publications of Professor Melville Richards were few and esoteric; Sir Ifor Williams's Enwau Lleoedd was in Welsh. Only the two volumes of Dr. B. G. Charles on Pembrokeshire have challenged comparison with the county volumes of the English Place-Name Society, and it is fair to say that like his 1938 book, Non-Celtic Place- names in Wales, it is the earlier volumes of that series, commenting mainly on major names, to which they are comparable. The volume under review, by one of the scholars charged with turning the Melville Richards archive into the basis for a Welsh county survey comparable to the English one, may not be quite the first treatment of a Welsh area in the detailed manner of more recent EPNS volumes; that honour belongs to Professor Gwynedd Pierce's survey of Dinas Powys hundred in Glamorgan. But it attains new minuteness of detail. The publishers claim indeed that this is the most detailed regional place-name survey ever published in Britain, that it 'lists every single place-name and field-name in East Flintshire recorded before 1900, and includes every river, bridge, hill, dale, wood. moor, town, village, hamlet, road, street, lane, castle and field in the area'. Dr. Owen is certainly exceptional among researchers in the thoroughness with which he relates local