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BOOK REVIEWS MARGAM ABBEY by A. LESLIE Evans. With illustrations by the author. Published by the author at 13, Geifr Road, Port Talbot, 1958. 154 pp. 24 plates. Price 1os. 6d. The historian who approaches the task of writing the history of Margam Abbey has a rich but limited field from which to draw his information. The collection of deeds relating to the abbey is unrivalled by any other monastic house in Wales. This wealth of charter material is not supple- mented, however, by a good chronicle account of the fortunes of the house comparable to those which exist for English houses such as Meaux, St. Alban's or even Gloucester. Nor have monastic accounts and court rolls survived to throw light on the detailed workings of the abbey administra- tion and its relations with its tenantry. These deficiencies in the sources make the telling of the abbey's story a difficult one. The last mongraph on the abbey was Birch's History of Margam Abbey, published in 1897. This work was based almost exclusively on the original deeds then available at Margam and the British Museum. Though it will never be entirely superseded as a work of reference, it had a number of defects. Birch made little attempt to analyse or to give cohesion to the material he had gathered. Too many of his pages read like a catalogue, deed following deed with monotonous regularity. These defects have, to a large extent, been remedied by the author of the present work. Mr. Evans has digested the material so laboriously presented by Birch, added a good deal of new material from the royal and papal chanceries published during this century, and presented the whole in a far more readable form. Fully aware of the dearth of narrative sources, the author has wisely refrained from treating the abbey's history chrono- logically chapter by chapter. The main events in the abbey's history from the foundation to the dissolution are compressed into one chapter ("Historical notes"). The other chapters are self-contained studies dealing with the pre-Norman sculptured stones, the founding and growth of the abbey, its lay-out and its chapels and granges. The last two chapters on the parish church and the Mansel-Talbots take the abbey's story down to the present time. The most valuable part of the work is that which deals with the lay-out of the abbey and village and the fate of the monastic buildings after the dissolution. Here Mr. Evans, with his knowledge of unpublished material in the National Library of Wales and his thorough acquaintance with the site, breaks new ground. His skilful reconstructions of the appearance of the interior of the abbey church and the exterior of the abbey and its adjoining buildings in plates iv and xv are admirable. On p. 31 the author places on record for the first time the existence at Margam museum of a carved fertility figure. He might have pointed out that this piece of nth to 12th century Romanesque sculpture with its close affinity with work at Kilpeck and