Cylchgronau Cymru

other. His other livings, St Mary's, Swansea and Aberavon, were, with due dispensation, compatible benefices. Cowley makes another small slip in his reference to the 1549 Prayer Book and Canon XXI of 1604 (p. 16). Neither recommended a minimum of three celebrations of the Holy Communion in a year. The former required parishioners to communicate once a year at least, and the latter three times, Easter to be one. It was not the reformers' intention that this minimum should become the norm, though very often it did. A little more serious is his confusion of the old-fashioned High Churchmanship of Samuel Davies and David Secretan Jones, the perpetual curates for most of the nineteenth century, with Tractarianism and the Anglo- Catholic Revival. Theirs was clearly the 'high' churchmanship of the previous era, though Jones, through his friendship with J.A. Vivian, became progressively more sympathetic to the standpoint of the English Church Union. In the wider context of the Catholic Revival in south Wales, Oystermouth was something of a late-comer. It is in this matter of context that Cowley's essay, like that of Orrin, is at its weakest. More needed to be said on Oystermouth's place in the Catholic Revival in the Swansea area, and more on the social, economic, religious and cultural make-up of the parish, and the challenges thereby posed to the clergy and people of the parish church. There is much to welcome in this book, but, in its close concentration upon the Church rather than upon the church in its parish and community and on the symbiotic relationship between them, it is old-fashioned. The opportunity for a more broadly-based and wider ranging study has been lost. Nonetheless, carefully researched and written, well and thoughtfully illustrated, and accurately printed (apart from 'navy chap/in' [my italics] on page 83) it is a valuable contribution to our knowledge of aspects of the church life of the Swansea area, and certainly it puts many other 'church histories' in the shade. John R. Guy RICHARD AND MARY PENDRILL LLEWELYN. A Victorian Vicar of Llangynwydand his Wife, by D. R. L. Jones. Parochial Church Council of the Parish of Llangynwyd with Maesteg, 1991. 36pp. Illustrated. £ 2.50 Dr Lyn Jones, already well known to readers of Morgannwg as an authority on the history of the Maesteg area, has written a pamphlet to commemorate the centenary of the remarkable Victorian clergyman, R.P. Llewelyn, and his wife, Mary Catherine Rhys. Llewelyn was vicar of Llangynwyd from 1841 to 1891 and, as such, was one of those clergy who, with pitifully inadequate