Welsh Journals

'the moral economy of the landed estate'. The concept refers to the habits and conventions of the landed society of landlords, tenant farmers, and labourers, which were essentially the same in Wales as in England, the most marked differences stemming from the differences in agricultural structure, there being proportionately far fewer labourers in Carmarthen and far more tenants who were peasant-like in their attitude to their holdings and in their dependence on family labour. In practice there were tensions and conflicts which disrupted the social harmony of the model in which privilege was balanced by duty and deference by protection, but Cragoe shows that the seriousness and prevalence of these breaks in the moral economy were grossly exaggerated by the Liberal and nonconformist press. Throughout the century the normal relations between the gentry and their tenants were amicable and harmonious, not bitter and hostile, and instances of intimidation, coercion or eviction were extremely rare, or rather existed only in the imaginings of observers who did not understand the conventions of legitimate landlord influence. It was indeed the noncon- formist ministers who flouted the customs of rural society and sought to exercise novel and illegitimate influence by interfering between owners and their tenantry, and by seeking to inflame anti-landlord feeling in order to bolster their own position as an alternative source of authority and power. Eventually, by the 1890s, the chapel did become dominant and the anti- landlord version of social relations became authoritative. Cragoe is perhaps more convincing in showing that the reality of the rural economy and rural society in the middle decades of the nineteenth century was quite other, than in providing explanations of the triumph of the liberal-nonconformist myth. The main clue seems to be there, in one of the most interesting and original sections of the book, which demonstrates the astonishing revival of the Anglican Church in Wales in the second half of the century. Church of England congregations doubled or trebled in size in the second half of the century; whereas in the 1851 religious census Anglicans are generally reckoned to have been only one-fifth of the religious attenders in Wales, by 1906 they amounted to more than a quarter. This vigorous revival was the fruit of reforming efforts in which the landowners, through church building and patronage of National schools, were as important as the clergy. This Anglican resurgence should have strengthened the position of the aristo- cracy, not weakened it. Many nonconformist parents chose to send their children to National schools because of the superior education and oppor- tunities of learning English which they offered, and the influence of Anglican values should thus have been expanding rather than declining. That the opposite happened, with aristocratic influence in decline from the 1860s, particularly after the Second Reform Act, and in a state of collapse