Welsh Journals

repetitive; and individual sentences are often obscure. Both books have a rather narrow approach. Concepts of Order only occasionally looks beyond the bounds of Welsh poetry to consider the wider context of English and, indeed, European literature. How far were the ideas about gentility and order expressed in bardic eulogies common to or different from those in Renaissance culture generally? The question is hinted at but not examined at any depth. Similarly, in the discussion of local government there is little reference to comparable English institutions or to recent writing upon them. Dr Jones must be aware of the work of Joan Kent on village constables, J. S. Cockburn on assizes, and J. A. Sharpe on crime; but if he is, he does not show it. Nor, I think, does he always understand the legal and institutional matters with which he deals. For instance, in Law, Order and Government (p. 151), he writes that in Quarter Sessions, 'cases of felony were heard frequently and often ranged from petty larceny and affrays to swearing and common assult and battery.' Now, cases of felony were seldom heard in Quarter Sessions: they would have gone to the Great Sessions, which get little mention here. Rather more important, the offences mentioned were not in fact felonies at all. While there is some mention of the role of faction within Caernarfonshire society, there is no serious analysis of it. I do not see how the workings of county government can be properly understood or its agents assessed unless we know something of the frequent and serious feuds between the local magnates. We are told (p. 97) that Sir John Wynn's electoral defeat in 1620 was critical to the decline of the house of Gwydir. But we are not told why that should be so. The part played by the earl of Leicester in Caernarfonshire politics is mentioned but passed over lightly. The nature and course of the dispute are not explained; nor is Leicester's recruitment of his tenants from north Wales described. Such faults and omissions mar the author's commendable ambition of linking literary evidence to studies of political authority. PENRYWILLIAMS New College, Oxford THE Crisis OF COMMUNITY: MONTGOMERYSHIRE, 1680-1815. By Melvin Humphreys. University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1996. Pp. xvi, 293. £ 30.00. This is an important contribution to a growing body of research on eighteenth-century Wales which has no English counterpart. Philip Jenkins led the way more than a decade ago with his study of the Glamorgan gentry; David Howell followed with his work on south-west Wales; and now