Welsh Journals

be churlish to complain too much on this score, since OS references are provided for the geographically-inclined. At a time when so many nonconformist churches are being closed down and sold off, it is a matter of some concern that their records should be adequately preserved for the future. It is to be hoped that the nonconformist denominations will follow the example of the Church in Wales and ensure that their registers are safeguarded in the National Library of Wales. ERYN WHITE Aberystwyth SOCIAL AND Political IDENTITIES IN WESTERN HISTORY. Edited. by Claus Bjorn, Alexander Grant and Keith J. Stringer. Academic Press, Copenhagen, 1994. Pp. 266. n.p. Human identity is a complex thing. Family and locality, work and class, religion, language and nationality all these and more help to shape the sense of belonging which seems for most people to be a necessary part of living. One of the themes of the present collection is the way in which different identities can coexist, often quite harmoniously, within the same person or community. In discussing Anglo-Scots border society in the thirteenth century, Keith Stringer shows how 'a great lord who saw himself as a loyal subject of the English crown in one situation could identify himself as primarily a leader of Scottish society in another, and as first and foremost a Border magnate in yet another' (p. 50). And similar points are made by later contributors. The statesman C. D. F. Reventlow (1748- 1827), whose life and opinions are interestingly traced by Claus Bjern, saw 'the whole territory' of the eighteenth-century Danish monarchy (Norway and Schleswig-Holstein as well as Denmark itself) as 'the nation to which he and his family belonged' (p. 183), while also recognizing and to some extent identifying with the several distinct countries that made up this conglomerate state. Nor was it only governing elites who sensed this multiple allegiance. As Eric Evans argues in one of the most useful chapters of the book, nineteenth-century British patriotism was fostered 'at least as much' by the ruled as by their rulers (p. 211), and it was a patriotism at once local and national. Industrialization strengthened regional bonds, prompting the writing of dialect poems such as 'In praise of O'Lancashire', while it also contributed to a sense of 'participation in a great British enterprise' (p. 195). And if war, empire and the glorification of