Welsh Journals

WEST GLAMORGAN FARMING, circa 1580-1620 I In the first part of a paper called 'Pembrokeshire Farming circa 1 580-1 620' Mr. B. E. Howells points out the scarcity of detailed local studies in Welsh agrarian history. Quite unknown to him the present writer was using much the same source material in studying historical geography in the Swansea region, particularly the probate records housed in the National Library of Wales.2 Wills and the inventories accompanying them are just as fruitful a source of information about farming in the Deanery of Gower as they are for Pembrokeshire. Fortunately wills from two dozen parishes in west Glamorgan, an outlier of St. David's in the hundreds of Swansea and Llangyfelach, found their way to the diocesan registry and now are available for study at Aberystwyth. They furnish a comparative account of agrarian conditions in this central region in South Wales, along lines set out by Mr. Howells for Pembrokeshire. But such an account demands one or two modifications in planning. First of all, west Glamorgan has to make do without the foundation-stone ol a George Owen. Mr. Howells acknowledges his debt to Owen, whose writings give such a graphic picture of Pembrokeshire in the sixteenth century. Unfortun- ately, the sort of keen observing done by Owen and his companion chorographers (such as Richard Carew in Cornwall, or Tristram Risdon in Devon) is not found in Rees Merrick, their Glamorgan counterpart. He was interested rather in the conventions of what Gough later called 'the progress of descents or revolutions of property'; the structure and practice of his county's economy took up very little space in his pages. Moreover, Merrick's notes for the western hundreds of Glamorgan have been masqueraded for nearly half a century as part of the replies to Edward Lhwyd's parochial queries, a hundred years out of context. So there is a real need to fill the descriptive gap resulting from Merrick's omissions-from the agrarian standpoint they make him a mere shadow of Owen. The first thing to be done, then, is to try and fill the gap in setting the scene of Elizabethan Gower, to recapture the nature of the land and provide a background for the farming story. National Library documents make this possible, especially estate collections like the Penrice and Margam MSS. Through them we get a fair idea of the oppor- tunities and limitations of the place before moving on to the second stage, where a farming community makes its entrance through wills and inventories. They were mainly self-sufficient, so what is more natural than to start studying their ways of living by seeing which crops Tudor and early Jacobean farmers grew in their Gower fields, in what proportion, and how? 1 The National Library of Wales Journal, Vol. IX, No. 2, Winter 1955, p. 239. 2 I gratefully acknowledge help from the Research Fund at University College, Swansea, enabling me to do this.