Welsh Journals

THE PENNARD MANOR COURT BOOK, 1673-1701, transcribed by Michael J. Edmunds, with an introduction by Joanna Martin. Cardiff, South Wales Record Society, No. 15, 2000. xxxvi+109pp. £ 19.50 ( £ 14.50 to members). This recent South Wales Record Society venture provides a transcript of a court book for the manor courts of Pennard in the lordship of Gower during the last quarter of the seventeenth century. The transcript is based on Michael Edmunds' painstaking 1993 local history diploma dissertation. The document itself lives in the West Glamorgan Record Office, but it is to be associated with the great bulk of the Badminton archive that is kept at the National Library of Wales. It is a paper volume of 130 pages, bound in vellum, and written, until 1693, in a single hand. Edmunds's transcript attempts to represent the whole text, in the original spelling, with the exception of some repetitive matter, and with contractions expanded where the sense is clear As Joanna Martin points out in her careful introduction, manor court records provide the core data for the history of the agrarian landscape of England and Wales, as well as valuable insights into the more general social history of rural communities. Well exploited as a source by English historians, the equivalent records for Wales have been little explored, and deserve to be better known. There is something of a mission behind this text the wish to draw attention to the possibilities inherent in the study of the largely early-modern/pre- industrial corpus of Welsh manorial records. The lordship of Gower has left a particularly rich deposit of these from the Restoration onwards. Martin provides a concise explanation of the nature of manorial records in general and how they relate to manorial administration as it developed after the Norman Conquest in England and in south Wales. Thousands of court rolls, accounts and surveys survive for English manors from the Middle Ages; relatively few for Welsh estates. In the case of Gower, of which lordship Pennard was a part, records survive only from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, by which time manorial organisation and the medieval pattern of cultivation were in decay.