Welsh Journals

Margam Abbey, 1147-1349 F. G. Cowley Next year (1997)' is the 850th anniversary of the foundation of Margam Abbey. It is also the centenary of the publication of Walter de Gray Birch's History of Margam Abbey, which revealed for the first time the riches of the Penrice and Margam collection of manuscripts. And it is almost the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Leslie Evans's Margam Abbey (1958), a fine work of scholarship which the Port Talbot Historical Society is planning to republish. Leslie Evans, the doyen of local historians in this area, has served for forty-two years as vice-chairman and chairman of the Port Talbot society, one of the most successful local history societies in Wales. Our speakers today (Professor Sir Glanmor Williams and Dr David Robinson) have made their own contributions to the study of the abbey over the years. But I want to pay a special tribute to three historians who have enlarged our knowledge of the abbey's history in recent years. Dr David Williams has put all historians of the Cistercian Order in his debt by a whole catalogue of publications and his Atlas (1990), which plots the outline of Welsh Cistercian estates, has laid secure foundations for future research and fieldwork. Robert Patterson, Professor of History at South Carolina University, has shamed Welsh historians by undertaking a detailed textual study of the Margam charters and has written a fine article on the palaeography and manuscript history of the Margam annals. William Griffiths, no longer with us, was on the staff of the Royal Commission Ancient Monuments Wales and contributed a splendid section on monastic granges to its 1982 volume. He had a poetic eye for the beauty of some of the grange sites but his impressions were rarely recorded in the published volume. Here he describes in a personal letter the site of St Theodoric's grange: 'about 2ft height of stone walling, covered with a mass of spring flowers, peeped above the lapping waves of the great reservoir; and as we approached, a pair of wild duck broke cover and went skimming away over the water'. So much by way of introduction.2