Welsh Journals

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the matter of legacies. Several testators revealed an anxiety about the future upbringing of the children they left behind, girls as well as boys, and one feels that the editor's point about educational provision could have been strengthened. Although the acts of union may have been a spur to such provision, as Mrs Jones asserts, the evidence there indicates that the concern about education came later in the century, in the last two decades, and may well coincide more with the change in religion. With commend- able caution, Mrs Jones tackles the preambles to wills as an indication of religious sentiment and quite rightly notes the Catholic character of the earliest wills. The point about the Protestant, indeed as she says, Puritan, tone of later wills is thrown away rather. It is quite striking how many of the preambles after 1586 are starkly Calvinist in feeling-and this in so suspect a recusant area as Monmouthshire. It is with the material and economic life of the county that Mrs Jones is at her best. The prosperity of the county, as reflected in house rebuilding and household contents, is well depicted, as is the contrast in terms of livestock, grain and timber production between the lowland and valley regions of the east and the upland areas of the north. A goodly range of trades appears as well, located mostly in the towns, especially Abergavenny. But whether in trade, farming or money lending, what also comes out very well indeed is the network of the county's associations with towns further afield, in the Cotswolds and along the borders, as well as with London. Here was a society, or at least a significant group in society, which was advancing significantly by the turn of the sixteenth century. The author readily concedes that there are many more features to these wills which deserve attention. She touches on, but does not develop, the theme of the frequency of Welsh and non-Welsh personal and family names. Her excellent index shows clearly how far Monmouthshire remained a culturally Welsh county, where the patronymic still had force. Equally interesting is the detail revealed about place-names, the contrast between the Welsh upland and the old Norman lowland, and the struggle the London scribes of these wills had to produce intelligible approxima- tions of such delightful names as Llanfihangel-tor-y-mynydd. W. P. GRIFFITH Bangor