Welsh Journals

of controversy and finally war gathered. Dr Fincham shows how Owen's 1642 Articles differ significantly from those he issued only five years before. Gone are the controversial clauses asking about kneeling to receive holy communion and the use of the sign of the cross in baptism. The cold wind that very few years later was to blow down Laud and his church was already being felt along the north Wales coast. As if to emphasise this, Dr Fincham prints the 1641 Articles of the Conway-born bishop of Lincoln, John Williams, which, in defiance of Laud, attacked the placing of the communion table altar-wise, and enquired into "offensive rites and ceremonies" that may have been introduced. Williams was characteristically outspoken to the point of being offensive, but he, at least, knew which way the wind was blowing. Very soon after he issued these Articles, he was translated to the archbishopric of York. In this, as in the previous volume, Dr Fincham has revealed exact and painstaking scholarship. He has also rendered all students of the seventeenth century church a great service. As far as Wales is concerned, in this second volume he has clearly revealed the Laudian sympathies of at least three of the occupants of Welsh dioceses during these crucial years. JRG The Welsh Language before the Industrial Revolution, edited by Geraint H Jenkins [University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1998]. xiv + 415 pp. ISBN: 0 7083 1418 X. Price £ 15.95. This is the first volume in a major research programme on the social history of the Welsh language. When the series is complete it will mark the most wide-ranging research project in the humanities ever to have been undertaken in the University of Wales. It is important for two reasons in particular. Its subject-matter, the social history of language, is at the cutting edge of contemporary historical writing. A project of this kind asks for cooperation between scholars in a very wide range of disciplines. It demands not only the skills of social historians and literary historians, but also of demographers, linguists, anthropologists, geographers, and statisticians. The project also shows a fine commitment to the role of history as a critical discipline. The issue of language has often been a point of dispute within the contemporary political culture of Wales. It is salutary to have a dispassionate account of its complex and many-textured history such as this. All history is contemporary history, said Tawney. A social history of the Welsh language is an outstanding exemplar of that dictum. The present volume consists of twelve chapters, which fall roughly into three connected groups. The first chapter by Llinos Beverley Smith on the language during the Middle Ages, and the final chapter a comparative survey by Brynley F Roberts of the Celtic languages of the British Isles both implicitly ask