Welsh Journals

historians of a neglected Welsh historical source. While a bibliography could perhaps have provided a useful distillation of the secondary sources used, there are few omissions. The most important question is whether this guide could have been slimmed down by the omission of the class lists and produced in softback, in a size which would have made it much more portable for the travelling researcher. The size and price of a guide will determine whether it will be bought primarily by individuals or by other institutions for their reference shelves. At £ 40, this book falls into the second category, which is a pity for such an informative work. KIM COLLIS Swansea GOD SPEED THE PLOUGH: THE REPRESENTATION OF AGRARIAN ENGLAND, 1500-1660. By Andrew McRae. Past and Present Publications, 1996. Pp. 335. £ 40.00. Between the early-sixteenth and the mid-seventeenth centuries, the landscape and farmscape of England was undergoing profound change, and as technical developments permitted increases in agricultural productivity to satisfy the demands of a rapidly expanding population, so elements of regional specialization began to take root. Meanwhile, increases in the price of agricultural output outstripped advances in wage levels which, together with the social consequences of enclosure wherein the rights of individuals came to supersede those of the community, imposed severe stresses in the countryside. Against this background Dr McRae treats us to an exhaustive (if not exhausting) analysis of the enormous range of literature arising from the changing perceptions of the land and those who lived on it between 1500 and 1660. The extent to which the texts of agrarian complaint of the earlier period and the later works of such luminaries as Michael Drayton and Robert Herrick are a true 'Representation of Agrarian England' is a moot point and some scholars will take issue with several of Dr McRae's inferences and conclusions. Nevertheless, be they literary historians or historical geographers, they will universally applaud the author's unflagging energy in reading and reviewing the several hundred primary texts listed in the bibliography, and in introducing many new and half-remembered names. Much of the agrarian writings of the sixteenth century were concerned with a corporate conception of a social order held together by a seamless network of reciprocal rights in property beyond those of God himself, so