Welsh Journals

described by Stuart Piggott on a national scale. The object of this article is to describe this little noticed generation of antiquaries and the social changes which account for their disappearance. It will also be shown how the study of the past revived in later years as a side-effect of the rise of new social groups. But the new scholarship failed to adopt the strict historical method pioneered before 1710, so that the new age was characterised by the Romantic mythologies associated with the name of Iolo Morganwg. In the period following Lhuyd's death any study of local antiquaries has to rely on other sources and the correspondence of other individuals, but there had been no change whatever in the circumstances which had initially stimulated historical interests. Notably South Wales was very richly endowed with the remains of antiquity, and it is for instance through reading a work on the superstitions surrounding megalithic monuments that one realises how frequent must have been the purely accidental discovery of early graves or treasure hoards. Often such finds were misunder- stood and the graves were recorded because their alien form implied that they marked the scene of a sinister event, like a murder or suicide [4]. Roman remains were very extensive in south-east Wales, and major finds were recorded in Monmouthshire in 1648, 1689, the 1690s, 1721 and in the 1760s[5]. Travellers remarked of the Vale of Glamorgan that the area was "remarkably prolific, and adorned with many castles, and seats on rising eminences", while many parishes retained their pre-Reformation cults centred around ancient crosses or healing wells. As a background to thriving anti- quarianism, it was also important that in a society both landowning and litigious disputes were often settled by "ancient evidences" of ownership. Many were thus accustomed to handling medieval or Tudor texts. Disputed elections were often accompanied by a ransacking of borough charters to establish the franchise, while a grant of 1340 was the central issue in a quarrel of 1750 about fishing rights in the Tawe[6]. Again, history was closely bound up with political debate, and rival interpretations of the Civil Wars were at the root of the bitter