Welsh Journals

judges are said to have been examined in it as a test of fitness for their office.) This Test Book usually comes fourth in the series of tractates comprised in the 'Venedotian' lawbooks. In the present edition it begins at p. 69 and extends to p. 91. Thereupon the manuscripts in question proceed to make a second statement about Iorwerth. At the end of the Test Book they say: 'Here Iorwerth ap Madog saw it to be useful to write the value of houses and furniture, and about joint ploughing, and [about] damage to corn, alongside the Test Book'. In other words, they credit Iorwerth with having appended three tractates alongside the Test Book. In the present edition these three tractates from the concluding stretch of its text, extending from p. 91 to p. 103. In short, therefore, the manuscripts which mention the matter at all assign to lorwerth the compilation only of the last four tractates in the lawbook, and these amount to no more than one-third of its whole text. The other two-thirds is taken up by the three tractates that come first in the lawbook-the 'Laws of Court', the 'Laws of Women', and the 'Laws of Country' — and no manuscript makes any suggestion that Iorwerth had a hand in compiling these. Of course-as the Editor remarks — 'it may well be' that lorwerth did have some share in them too, but this hypothesis is necessarily speculative, and is more than ordinarily risky when it relates, as in the present case, to a compilation which is so obviously a patchwork. If we attach the name 'Llyfr Iorwerth' to the whole lawbook, we shall be designating it by a title which is hypothetical in respect of two-thirds of the text, and which is not applied by the lawbooks themselves, even to the remaining one-third which some of them actually attribute to lorwerth. GORONWY EDWARDS. London. THREE TREATISES CONCERNING WALES. By John Penry, with an introduction by David Williams. University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1960. Pp. 168 + xxix. 25s. Professor David Williams has performed a valuable service in re- publishing these three tracts, with an admirably concise and judicious introduction which places their author in his right historical perspective and brings out clearly the steps in his spiritual pilgrimage. After a period of neglect lasting for two centuries after his death, Penry, as the editor points out, sprang into the limelight as a figure of controversy in the stormy politics and odium theologicum of nineteenth-century Wales, and that in roles which might have puzzled him: founder of Welsh Non- conformity, apostle of religious toleration, even a pioneer of Welsh nationalism. He remains today one of the few figures in Elizabethan Wales about whom every Welsh schoolboy, however ignorant of equally heroic characters like Richard Gwyn or Father William Davies, may, with some confidence, be expected to have at least a nodding acquaintance.