Cylchgronau Cymru

the impending parliament at Harlech. One of these spies, David Whitmore, was, incidentally, quite possibly a double agent, for he was certainly fined for his rebellion later. The handful of letters relating to Wales in this volume reminds us how pitiably dependent we are for any clear insight into Glyndwr's revolt on the haphazard survival of a few letters from English observers. These letters are more revealing of motive and temperament than the mass of public records and accounts; but unless a new cache of correspondence comes to light, it is by the patient sifting of these public records alone that our knowledge of Glyndwr's revolt can hope to advance. That is why the publication of the present volume is an expensive non-event for Welsh historians. A literary curiosity the volume may be; it is little else. R. R. DAVIES University College, London THE AGRARIAN HISTORY OF ENGLAND AND WALES. Vol. IV, 1500-1640. Edited by Joan Thirsk. Cambridge University Press, 1967. Pp. xl, 919. 140s. The Cambridge Agrarian History was planned in 1956 as a detailed survey of social and economic development in rural England and Wales from the beginnings of systematic agriculture down to the twentieth century. The first volume-fourth in the chronological series-has appeared after eleven years. Apparently no other is anywhere near completion and the C.U.P. has wisely not invited subscriptions. It is a tribute to the assiduity and editorial tact of Mrs. Joan Thirsk that she has brought out ahead of the field this substantial tome of nearly 1,000 pages on roughly the Tudor period and the first forty years of 'Tawney's century', chronological limits unexplained and in fact difficult to justify. Mrs. Thirsk has herself written sections on the farming regions of England and about techniques, enclosing and engrossing. These are characteristically scholarly and informed, an aromatic blend of literary and record sources, taking in John Aubrey and probate inventories. Dr. Joyce Youings considers the church as landlord, carefully sum- marizing work on the early sixteenth century and particularly on monastic lands; much of this is, of course, the author's own. There is little here, however, about the Stuart or even the Elizabethan era. Dr. Youings has to admit that the agrarian historian is as yet unable to answer the very pertinent question, 'whether the dead hand of the Church over so con-