Cylchgronau Cymru

The most successful chapters of Miss Otway-Ruthven's book are those which narrate the Norman conquest and analyse the character of the Anglo-Norman Irish state, with its mirrored reflection of Angevin govern- ment, adopted at the peak of its success and preserved more perfectly and more artificially than was possible in England. There are highly informative chapters on the structure of Norman-Irish society and the medieval Irish church. From chap. VII onward, however, the book becomes almost wholly narrative. The long-drawn-out and painful decline of the English 'colony', the endless tale of feuds, raids, pillage and destruction, the wearisome succession of lieutenants appointed by the English Crown with powers but never enough money or troops, and the relative poverty of the contemporary source material have all combined to exert a depressing effect upon the author, whose account of Ireland between Richard II and Poynings can hardly be rescued from tedium by her own clear and sober prose. Throughout the work we need all the help which Miss Otway- Ruthven (and only she) can give us with Irish feudal geography; but whereas there are excellent maps for the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, we have nothing for the period after the Bruce invasion. Nor does the author's idiosyncratic way with personal and place-names help the un- initiated (why 'the crannog of O'Reilly' on p. 90 but 'Cronoc Orauly' on p. 92 ?). And I am unable to understand what advantage there is in brief verbatim quotations, printed in the text in small type, from annals and chronicles (e.g. Marlborough and Mac Firbis) which survive only in seventeenth-century texts. But it is not minor irritants which will ensure that this book will never be easy reading, so much as one outstanding virtue: it is based on a lifetime of assiduous and pioneering research among the sources for the period, to which the author's sixteen articles listed in her bibliography bear witness. The book is crammed with in- formation, much of it important and valuable, and much unobtainable elsewhere. It will long be indispensable. G. W. S. BARROW Newcastle-upon-Tyne HISTORIC TOWNs. General Editor, Mrs. M. D. Lobel. Lovell Johns- Cook, Hammond and Kell Organization, 1969. Illustrated with maps and plans. £ 5 5s. Od. Urban history, a meeting-ground for the historian and the sociologist, is proving one of the most fruitful of the newer disciplines in British universities, as it has long been in those of the United States. Its study will be greatly stimulated by the appearance of this superb volume, pro- duced by the British section of the International Commission for the History of Towns. In fact, under the guidance of Mrs. Lobel, its secretary, the British section has been easily the first to begin publication. It aims to