Welsh Journals

be emulated throughout Wales in the years ahead; this achievement should certainly serve to encourage the Society to proceed to further undertakings of this nature with assurance. Aberystwyth J. BEVERLEY SMITH D. PRATT (ed.), A Calendar of the Flintshire Quarter Sessions Rolls 1747-1752 (Hawarden, Clwyd County Record Office, 1983) pp. 186. £ 3.75. This volume, most ably edited by Mr Pratt, cannot fail to be of great interest to Welsh historians. For those of us interested in local and family history, or the history of surnames, there are excellent lists of minor gentlemen and yeomen farmers who fill the ranks of the Grand Jury or high and petty constables, or overseers of the highways, showing us exactly who were the people of local importance during the years 1747 to 1751. Indeed, it is fascinating to see what a large proportion of the population of a small county like Flintshire could be involved in some aspect or other of local government, however humble. Other historians will be interested simply to look in general at the nature of life and administration in Flintshire on the eve of the great industrial changes. Miners, it is true, occasionally appear here, but only in rare cases of being bound over to keep the peace. The one event in this largely agrarian society which deserves to be called a crisis is the cattle plague of 1749 which required urgent preventative action (as did the Foot and Mouth Disease in a not dissimilar area of the borderland centuries later), and which showed, maybe for the first time, that the Quarter Sessions, which had for so long been used as a court of law, could be an executive government, thus foreshadowing its successor, the County Council after 1889. The action of the Quarter Sessions in general, however, was rarely urgent, and the editor shows in an admirably clear way how slow and cumbersome the machinery was, explaining also many difficult legal terms. But they did deal with all kinds of awkward social problems. We see them here coping with cases of begging and vagrancy I regret to say that virtually the only Southwalians to appear in these documents are Henry Lewis of Llandaff and John Jones of Fish- guard, vagrants and incorrigible rogues the removal of strangers and sending them back to their places of birth, ascertaining the fatherhood of bastard offspring, repairing Flint Gaol and the houses of correction at Flint and Hanmer, and caring for highways and bridges (this last question being very similar to the highways committee of the modem County Councils). 'The even tenor of our ways' was broken by many cases of assault, battery, even rape, but the fact that the Quarter Sessions had time to consider punishing people for uttering 'prophane oaths' shows that on the whole it was not a violent society. 'Nothing to report' is very often the reply of the local constables of Flintshire expected to report local crime. The poor and destitute were of course dealt with harshly, and there are several heart-rending cases mentioned here which remind