Welsh Journals

the utmost probity who 'neither would or ever was concern'd in any private Gentleman's Estate that was in Trouble, or sequestred by Parliament', a claim that is hard to reconcile with Nathan's own renting of sequestered estates in Herefordshire.10 However that may be, Nathan seems to have qualified as a lawyer, for he was steward of the manor of Caldicot in the 1670s and was chosen by the local gentry to be their solicitor in the Wentwood Case with which this article deals." That he continued his family's puritan tradition is clear: a conventicle was reported at his Llanvaches house in 1669.12 But he cannot have been too stern and unbending, for he owned a pub in Chepstow. He married a lady of some fortune from Berkshire and had two known children.13 The Memoirs consist of a Dedication, an Introduction, three chapters of history, and an Appendix with a Proem. The book is dedicated to twenty-two people, headed by Lord Wharton as guardian of Sir Charles Kemeys Bart. of Cefn Mably, then aged twenty, and Sir Hopton Williams, also Bart., of Llangibby Castle. But the person for whom it was undoubtedly written and who comes first on the list of those without titles is John Morgan of Tredegar. He and Sir Hopton were the sitting M.Ps. for Monmouthshire in 1708, the year of publication. The remaining dedicatees include familiar south Monmouthshire names. There are two other Kemeyses, a Lewis of St. Pierre, a Walter of Piercefield, a Blethin of Dinham, a Catchmay of Crick: all are addressed as 'Honoured and Worthy Sirs', and all were tenants of Wentwood Forest. Wentwood, it is believed, was once much larger that it is now, and acted as a great barrier between upper and lower Gwent from the Usk to the Wye. Medieval encroachments reduced it to the '8 Miles in Length, and 4 in Breadth' which Nathan Rogers describes. Since the Norman Conquest it had been part of the lordship of Striguil or Chepstow, and as Gwent was in the Marches, the forest never became royal like the Forest of Dean across the Wye. The first detailed references occur under the lordship of Roger Bigod, earl of Norfolk, who inherited in 1270. By that time the rights of the various tenants of the lordship in the manors round the forest were clearly established; Rogers's dedicatees were the inheritors of these.14 10 M. A. Faraday (ed.), 'Herefordshire Militia Assessments of 1663', Camden Society, Fourth Series, vol. X (1972). Gwent CRO, MAN/l/18/0001; Bradney, op. cit., vol. IV, part 1, p. 114. 12 Thomas Richards, Wales Under the Penal Code (London, 1925), p.97. 13 Bradney, op. cit., vol. IV, part I,. p. 14; and vol. IV, part II, pp. 187-88. 14 Versions of the Bigod survey of Wentwood occur in the Memoirs, p. 117; N.L.W., Badminton Papers 1788; David Williams, The History of Monmouthshire (London, 1796), pp. 187-91, and Bradney, op. cit., vol. IV, part I, p. 146, where it is dated 1271.