Welsh Journals

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to expect of the technical staff of the Commission. The illustrations are an essential part of the publication; they figure on every page and make it easy for even the layman to follow the descriptions and arguments set out in the text. This consists of four unnum- bered parts. Part One gives a short account of the history of the church from the time of its foundation as a Benedictine priory to 1923, when it was selected as the cathedral centre for the newly formed diocese of Swansea and Brecon. Part Two provides a detailed account of the architectural development of the church and Part Three examines the more complex history of the buildings within the precinct wall. The final section takes the reader on a systematic tour of the exterior and interior of the church and the precinct buildings. There is a very full bibliography which includes works by a new generation of architectural historians, and a useful glossary of architectural terms. The scale and quality of the buildings were determined largely by the income avail- able to the priory but also by the interest of a succession of powerful patrons and the enthusiasm of the townsmen who used the nave as their parish church. However, the taxation figures of 1291, used by the authors, are not a good index to the priory's real resources and it would have been better had they quoted Bishop Guy de Mone's 1401 estimate that the priory was worth annually in excess of 400 marks ( £ 266 13s. 4d.), putting it next to Goldcliff as the second richest Benedictine house in Wales and among the richest of the Cistercian houses. The authors head their second part, 'The Finest Ecclesiastical Edifice in Wales', but the quotation is not identified as coming from E. Foord, St. David's, Llandajf and Brecon, p. 127, with the qualifying phrase 'with the exception of St. David's and Llandaff'. The east, monastic end remains the chief glory of the church and the careful dating of its fabric is of some importance in establishing a more precise chronology for the progress of the Early English style in Wales. A strong case can be made that it dates from the period when William de Breos was lord of Brecon (d. 1211); William expressed in one of his charters a particular devotion to the church of Brecon and its patron saint. Furthermore, everyone agrees that there is a stylistic affinity between the Lady Chapel at Hereford with its five graduated lancets and the east end of Brecon with its similar agree- ment, and William's brother, Giles, was bishop of Hereford between 1200 and 1215. However, the detail at Brecon, though not ornate, seems to be too detailed to belong to this early date and William de Breos's own personal preoccupations and the papal Inter- dict (1208-13) would probably have inhibited building activity at this time. The authors are almost certainly correct in preferring a later date of around 1230 (cf. Pevsner's dating of Hereford's Lady Chapel, 1220-40). George Gilbert Scott left his impress on this eastern arm of the church by removing the wooden ceiling and by providng the stone vaulting which the original builders seem to have intended. His successful restoration of the church in the years 1860-62 and 1873 gave it the look of a potential cathedral and an architectural edge over Arthur Blomfield's new church of St. Mary's, Swansea (completed 1898-99), when it came to selecting the cathedral centre for the new diocese. The authors provide a convincing reconstruction of what the famous rood at Brecon might have looked like at various periods in the later Middle Ages. The Friends of the Cathedral would perform a useful service if they could persuade a Welsh scholar to produce the text and translation of the medieval poems on the rood. As a guide to what