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names to exact localities where mappable, albeit in the nature of things that often does not work through to the published volume (e.g. p. 122). So if you are from east Flintshire, all human life is there. (It should perhaps be remarked that 'east Flintshire' here means not what it would to an innocent Englishman, the large detached portion of the old county next to Shropshire, but Hawarden and adjacent parts of the main portion [mapped p. xxvii]. As in England, place-name scholars, like cricketers and natural historians, keep to the counties as they existed for centuries before the administrative vandalism of 1974.) One of the interesting things about place-names in Welsh border counties is the inter- play of English and Welsh, a topic Dr. Owen has made rather his own in periodical articles. The brief introduction to this volume analyses the processes involved. What they come to in practice may be seen at a humble level in Pentrobin (p. 103), whose first element undoubtedly is Welsh pentre, 'hamlet', the second either an English personal-name Hobyn (one of many diminutives of Robert) or Welsh hobyn, 'pig'. Dr Owen prefers the former, on the grounds that 'there is a hamlet a few miles away called Pentre Moch ('pigs'); two forms for 'pig' are improbable in so small an area'. But he admits others dispute this (shades of the fourth branch of the Mabinogi!). Either way this choice gives a new twist to the place-name scholar's perennial problem of distin- guishing whether qualifiers denote human persons or otherwise. So does the Buckley Rat-Trap for catching the politically conscious (p. 177). Most fascinating is the discus- sion of Caergwrle (pp. 197-200), for which there is a long series of forms displaying both English and Welsh sound-processes. It is 'engulfed in conjecture and legend', involving Roman legions, giants, and others (and it is a strength of this book that it addresses local antiquarian traditions, even though they usually, as here, are false by strict scholarly historical criteria). Welsh consonant mutation in compounds implies underlying initial C- in the second element; Dr. Owen accounts neatly for all the phonetic variants by postulating English coma leah, 'cranes' lea', with a west midland metathesized form fairly common in place-names of OE cran, 'crane'. A further item in this book which breaks new ground for a Welsh survey is the comprehensive index and glossary of place-name elements. Unfortunately, it highlights a respect in which the publishers have not done their job. The letters ce, d, and p, frequent in Old English words, are never printed properly. For d is substituted consis- tently r3, which readers conversant with cursive Welsh may take in their stride, but which will confuse or irritate the vast majority outside the principality. The OE words are of course italicized, but ce and p in them never are; the p is not even from a type fount but a Letraset superimposition of b and p (without even proper symmetry); oe is replaced by V% several times on pp. 9-11. It appears from p. iv that the typesetting was subcontracted to a firm in Gloucester. There are enough founts on the market with these letters that one should be found compatible with whatever the exact mode of computer typesetting; satisfactory control of this should be written into any such contracts for comparable material in future. The present shoddiness is a disgrace to a reputable publisher, let alone one representing a national university., (Also inexcusable in a formal publication is complete non-use of full stops with people's initials and most other abbre- viations.)