Welsh Journals

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Several periodicals have come in for review since our last issue' In another handsome number of Brycheiniog, X (1964), the major contribution is a lengthy description of the houses of the Hay and Talgarth district by S. R. Jones and J. T. Smith. As in a previous article in the 1963 volume, the main emphasis is on house plans rather than on architectural styles. Particular light is shed by the authors on long houses and on houses outside the long house tradition prior to 1750. The many illustrations and photographs are models of lucidity. Among the other contributions, John A. Vickers outlines the career of Thomas Coke of Brecon, a pioneer of Wesleyan Methodism and of overseas missionary activity. Robert E. Kay describes the main features of Castell Dinas, an Iron Age hill-fort near Talgarth; while Sir Anthony Wagner gives an account of the Powells of Devynock, mainly in the eighteenth century. Glenville Powell provides some delightful glimpses of education in the Cray district from 1851 to 1951; especially interesting are the biographical details of the members of the School Board down to 1902 and of the headmasters under the County Education Committee that followed it. Unfortunately, the decision to publish this article in Welsh means that the vast bulk of the Breconshire population will not be able to read it. In another substantial number of Ceredigion, V, no. 1 (1964), the major contribution is an important discussion of mid-nineteenth century Cardiganshire politics by Ieuan Gwynedd Jones. Basing his account mainly on the general elections of 1865 and 1868, Mr. Jones provides a mass of immensely valuable detail on the transition in these years from the politics of deference to the politics of democracy. Even more significant than his account of political activity is his analysis of the social structure of the county, the contrast being drawn between the squirearchical countryside and the more varied society of the towns, especially on the coast. In addition, Mr. Jones's discussion of Cardigan- shire nonconformity suggests some fundamental re-appraisals of the pattern of politics in this period. Far from the 1868 election being the high noon of radical nonconformity, the chapels were still in large measure a-political. E. M. Richards, the victorious nonconformist Liberal candidate in the county seat, owed at least as much to the patronage of the Pryses of Gogerddan as to the pressure of the Liberation Society. The 1868 election, says Mr. Jones, was merely 'the cracking of the ice'. Not until 1886, it may be suggested, with Bowen Rowlands's triumph over David Davies, did a more recognisably democratic phase of Cardiganshire politics begin to dawn. Some of Mr. Jones's conclusions will inevitably provoke further inquiry. Was the contrast really so marked between 'the closed society of the rural areas' and 'the open society of the towns'? Was the Toryism of Cardiganshire so negligible? After all,