Welsh Journals

[Prys Morgan reviews here the tenth volume of Cof Cenedl edited by Professor Geraint H. Jenkins. The first of the six contributors is Dr Huw Pryce, who analyses the conventional view that there was no love lost in medieval Wales between churchmen (such as Archbishop Pecham) and the native Welsh law, showing that the position was in fact full of ironies, ambiguities and subtleties, that the native law depended a good deal on the Church and that churchmen often copied, admired and studied the native law. In the second chapter Sir Glanmor Williams shows how the 'Acts of Union' were variously viewed even in Tudor times, and why they were lavishly praised by the gentry and by Protestant reformers, but that they were criticized for their treatment of Welsh by Romantic scholars and modem nationalists. At the end of a comprehensive conspectus of the various viewpoints of modern historians, Sir Glanmor takes a gradualist or evolutionary view of the changes in Tudor policy in the sixteenth century. Dr Branwen Jarvis, in her pen-portrait of Lewis Morris, emphasizes not just his great range of interests in literature and the sciences, but also the way they fitted into the concerns of the Enlightenment, opening up a field which should prove remarkably fruitful. Professor Hywel Teifi Edwards contributes a chapter on the heroic cultural image of the Welsh miner, from the time of Ieuan Gwynedd in 1852 up to 1950, showing how the image of the miner was part of a set of heroes invented in order to raise the morale of the Welsh people in the wake of the damning criticisms of the Blue Books of 1847. One of the results of the educational and social furore of 1847 was the campaign to improve Welsh education, and Professor Geraint H. Jenkins here studies the supposed jewel in the crown of Welsh education, the University of Wales, over its first hundred years, 1893 to 1993, finding it to be a curiously ambiguous institution, Welsh and non- Welsh at one and the same time. The sixth and final chapter here is by Dr Gwynfor Evans, on the history of Plaid Cymru from 1925 to 1995, reminding us of its difficulties and failures as well as its successes, its successes often as a pressure group to protect the land and language of Wales, but also more and more as a political party on the British parliamentary scene. The editor, in his introduction to this excellent volume, rightly takes the opportunity to survey the Welsh history scene after ten years of publishing this remarkable series, by showing that it confounds the critics of the 1980s who said that Welsh history would, and indeed could only, be studied in English.]