Welsh Journals

reader will have conveniently at hand six pages of Dean Swift's description of his tribulations en route to Ireland and further substantial portions from the letters of other travellers. Wages fixed by justices of the peace are given in extenso, as also a removal order under the act of 1662, letters from schoolboys to their parents and accounts relating to the building of Llynon Mill, Llanddeusant. The author's considerable knowledge of Anglesey genealogy allows her to identify various writers and we are the beneficiaries of her many pertinent asides. Lovers of Anglesey history everywhere will wish to return time and time again to this volume which will also encourage students of other counties engaged upon similar studies to derive pleasure and profit from these snapshots of 'the sea-girt Island', whose past Mrs Ramage has done so much to illumine. Bangor J. GWYNN WILLIAMS ARNOLD TAYLOR, Studies in Castles and Castle-Building (London, Hambledon Press, 315 pp.) £ 25. ARNOLD TAYLOR, The Welsh Castles of Edward I (London, Hambledon Press, 1986, 129 pp.) £ 4.95. Dr Arnold Taylor has long been recognised as the leading authority on the castles built by Edward I in north Wales after the wars of 1277 and 1282 to control his new territories. For many years these castles were in his care and the guide books he produced are works of scholarship in their own right. Cadw, the body which has taken over responsibility for the castles, may have altered the format of these guides but the text is still Dr Taylor's and any study of these massive monuments must begin with his work. His connection with Flintshire does not only stem from his work on Flint and Rhuddlan; at Oxford he was a pupil of Sir Goronwy Edwards and it was Sir Goronwy, of course, who laid the foundations for the study of the Edwardian castles in his 1944 British Academy lecture. The first of these volumes is a collection of some of Dr Taylor's most important papers. It is not limited to Wales; it includes discussions of the evidence for the pre-Norman Conquest origins of the chapels of Hastings and Pevensey castles, of the dating of Clifford's Tower at York and of Edward I's gifts to the shrine of St Thomas at Canterbury. But a reviewer in a Welsh journal may be forgiven for concentrating on those articles which relate to Wales. Pride of place should, perhaps, go to the first in the collection, Dr Taylor's lecture to the British Academy in 1977 on 'Castle-building in thirteenth-century Wales and Savoy', a record of what might be described as an architectural pilgrimage in quest of Edward I's master mason, Master James of St. George. It takes the author and the reader to Savoy and Switzerland in search of Master James's earlier work and illustrates how Chillon, Yverdon, Saxon, Saint-Georges-d'Esperanche and many other castles foreshadow Beaumaris, Harlech and Conwy; one cannot but suspect