208THE ANTIQUARIES JOURNAL easily be imported. Thus mixed farming was the rule, virtually every farm having its corn barn as well as its cowshed. His statement that until recent times half the enclosed land in Wales was under the plough makes the point quite forcibly.Other themes covered include the growth of the great estates. By 1873 almost half the enclosed land in Wales was owned by 157 families. He also notes the small size of the tenant farms, though a process of merger and consolidation has steadily increased their size over recent centuries. The process of improvement, as in the case of the houses themselves, tended to originate in the richer eastern regions of Wales and move westwards, the rebuilding of the farm buildings tending to follow the rebuilding of the houses. As a result the buildings tend to be later than the house itself.It is Dr Wiliam's view that not enough survives of the pre-eighteenth-century buildings to make many generalizations about local variations in earlier times. However, he has managed to produce striking distribution maps of two types of building of greatly contrasting social status: the humble circular corbelled pigsty extending in a band across south Wales, and the lordly dovecot. This last has a peripheral distribution along the south coast, up through the borderland, and then along the north coast, bridging the Straits into eastern Anglesey, but hardly touching Cardigan Bay or the interior of Wales at all. The first pattern recalls the scatter of vaulted buildings-church, castle and house, much more marked in south Wales than in north, while the second has many similarities with the distribution of another aristocratic feature, the homestead moat.The author briefly outlines the main types of farmhouses and pays particular attention to the long-house where house and adjoining byre intercommunicate at the point of entry. He tends to take the common view .that the long-house was the earliest form of peasant house both in the British Isles and on the Continent, its present distribution reflecting a stage in a long process of abandonment. He does not take cognizance of recent German studies suggesting that the 'everything-under-one-roof-house' (Einheitshaus) may at least in alpine Germany be postmedieval, resulting from the amalgamation of formerly separated units into a single structure. The older pattern of separate house and buildings still survives in the remoter valleys of south Germany and Switzerland.Dr Wiliam, like many of his countrymen, tends to view Wales as a poor country. Poverty is, however, a relative situation. Compared with Kent and Essex Wales may be poor in its buildings, but compared with the rest of the Celtic world, even the north of England, much of Wales appears to have been reasonably affluent.One has pleasure in welcoming this pioneering study which provides the essential framework and points of reference for anyone wishing to explore and record the farm buildings of their own locality, while these still survive. The generous ration of illustrations, bo...
