Welsh Journals

series, for opening up the archaeology of Wales to the visitor, casual and professional alike. NANCY EDWARDS Bangor THE REVOLT OF OWAIN GLYN Dwr By R. R. Davies. Oxford University Press, 1995. Pp. 401. £ 20.00. Owain Glyn Dwr is Wales's most celebrated national hero. Given that we know so little about the man himself, and that the revolt which erupted like a thunderbolt in September 1400 eventually petered out some ten years later and has always borne his name, was 'a comprehensive failure' (p. 3 24), why should this be so? Partly, according to Professor Davies, because it was 'the first, and last, truly national revolt that Wales has experienced' (p. 220), and partly, of course, because Owain fulfilled a role the need for which was acutely felt in Welsh social memory. This is, then, a book about Wales as much as, indeed more than, it is a book about Glyn Dwr: it is, avowedly, not a biography, but a portrait of a society and the way in which that society 'responded to the experience of a prolonged revolt' (p.98). Sir John Edward Lloyd, whose splendidly elegant Owen Glendower/Owen Glyn Dior (1931) was the last substantial account of the revolt, was always going to be a hard act to follow. Yet Professor Davies does himself a disservice when he states that he hopes merely to have 'added a little in texture and historical depth' to our understanding of the revolt (p. vi). He has, in fact, done much more than that. This is a long book much longer than Lloyd's and its effect is cumulative. Reading Parts I ('Portrait of a Society: Wales in the 1390s') and II ('Revolt'), which between them occupy about a third of the book, one is tempted to agree with his modest self- assessment. By the time that the end of Part in ('The Anatomy of Revolt') is reached, however, it is impossible not to be aware of having been taken a great deal further than Lloyd ever went. This is a superb dissection of a society in agony, full of insights and based on intimate and comprehensive mastery of the sources. Much of the source-material is new: in particular, the extensive use of English government records in the Public Record Office and elsewhere to chart the chronological and geographical limits of revolt, the extent of 'Survival and Recrimination' (Chapter Ten), and the nature of the warfare in which each side engaged, is almost wholly novel. As a result, Professor Davies is able to point to the year 1403 as that in