Welsh Journals

A MAP OF EDWARD LHUYD'S PAROCHIAL QUERIES IN ORDER TO A GEOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY, &C., OF WALES (1696) By F. V. EMERY, M.A., B.Litt. THE questionnaire, used as a guide by interviewers or sent to likely informants, is nowadays an accepted method of research with economists, geographers, sociologists and others. It is associated with a wide range of survey or field work. Moreover, in the form of printed sheets of "Queries" it has an interesting history since it came into its own in the seventeenth century. Such pages of "Enquiries" or "Quaeries", it could be claimed, were typical or symbolic of the study of natural history and antiquities, which then flourished in practically every country in Europe. The geographical art of describing the countryside and its regions was influenced, inevitably, by work of this kind, and (although by no means all of them were published) a large number of regional studies were attempted throughout the British Isles, notably between 1660 and 1730. Wales played no small part in this activity. Viewing it through the medium of the use of questionnaires, the strongest link with Wales was struck by Edward Lhuyd in the closing decade of the seventeenth century. It is not the purpose of this paper to review Lhuyd's predecessors in using the query method in Wales, or indeed even in the wider field of chorography and regional description. They include George Owen of Henllys in Pembrokeshire, Rice Merrick of Cottrell in Glamorgan, and Robert Vaughan of Hengwrt in Merionethshire; Nicholas Roberts in Pembrokeshire and Car- marthenshire, and Henry Vaughan in Brecknock. Rather is it intended to introduce Lhuyd's own set of Queries, to illustrate and show by means of the map (Fig. 1) and tables the response they evoked in Wales, and to revise the list of extant replies to them, as they were published fifty years ago. The introduction can begin conveniently with Dr. Robert Plot, "the English Pliny" and a central figure in regional studies after 1670, who put his name to two separate sets of queries. The first was a small double sheet printed on two-and-a-half sides, signed "R.P." it was entitled Quaeries to be propounded to the most ingenious of each County in my Travels through England, but to this is added (in the hand of Edward Lhuyd, who succeeded Plot as Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford) on the Bodleian copy "In order to its History of Nature and Arts, 1674".1 In compiling them Plot was helped by Robert Hooke, and the result was a set of twenty-one un-numbered, and very long, groups of questions that followed the classical divisions of air, water, earths and stones,