This book presents the results of a successful project to establish the date and social context of some of the earliest houses in Snowdonia. This partnership project between the Dating Old Welsh Houses Group and the RCAHMW involved many householders and about 200 local people in an ambitious exercise in community archaeology.

This is the first book to critically examine the professional work of the pioneer of open-air museums in Britain and the self-proclaimed founder of the Welsh Folk Museum at St. Fagans, and a major figure in Welsh cultural life. This book places Peate’s life in the context of Welsh history and assesses his impact on helping to create a particular view of Welsh culture, placing great emphasis on the importance of the Welsh-speaking rural craftsman and ignoring the contribution of industry to Welsh life. It makes extensive use of quotation, synopsis and translation, for the first time giving non-Welsh speakers access to his Welsh-language publications about museums and folk life.

This collection investigates how the late-medieval household acted as a sorter, user and disseminator of different kinds of ready information, from the traditional and authoritative to the innovative and newly made. Building on work on the noble and bourgeois medieval household, it considers bourgeois, gentry and collegiate households on both sides of the English Channel. The book argues that there is a dynamic and reciprocal relationship between domestic experience and its forms of cultural expression. Contributors address a range of cultural productions, including conduct texts, romances and comic writing, estates-management literature, medical writing, household music and drama and manuscript anthologies. Their studies provide a fresh illustration of the late-medieval household's imaginative scope, its extensive internal and external connections and its fundamental centrality to late-medieval cultural production.

The untold history of Wales's rich gallery of magical specialists suspected of harmful witchcraft and how they were tracked down by a vengeful community. Witchcraft studies are central to the study of the history of religion, power, and community in early modern Europe. This book establishes that Wales was one of the peripheral areas of witch-hunting where prosecutions started relatively late. Nevertheless, Wales had a rich array of magical specialists--including prophets, cunning-men, and physicians--some of whom were suspected of harmful witchcraft. This book takes an inclusive approach to witchcraft and examines all types of magical specialists, including those regarded as beneficial as well as harmful.

The Wynn family of Wales between the early 1500s and the late 1800s. Some of the family intermarried with English people.

Cardiganshire County History Volume 2 is published by the University of Wales Press on behalf of the Ceredigion Historical Society, in association with the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales. This volume provides a comprehensive and authoritative account, written by distinguished authors in fifteen chapters, of the wide range of social, economic, political, religious and cultural forces that shaped the ethos and character of the county of Cardiganshire over a period of 600 years. This was a period of great turbulence and change. It witnessed conquest and castle-building, the impact of the Glyndŵr rebellion, the coming of the Protestant Reformation, and the turmoil of civil war. Over time, the inhabitants of the county developed a sense of themselves as a distinctive people who dwelt in a recognisable entity. From very early on, literate people took pride in their native patch; in the eyes of the learned Sulien (d. 1091) and his sons, the land of Ceredig was a sacred patria. Poets and scribes burnished the reputation of the county, and a vibrant poem by Siôn Morys in 1577 maintained that it was the best of shires and ‘the fold of the generous ones’.

No area of Wales is more rewarding to the architectural traveler than Gwynedd--the historic counties of Anglesey, Caernarfon and Merioneth, which are the setting for many of Wales's greatest buildings. This book examines the buildings of the region, from Beaumaris, Caernafon, Conwy, and Harlech castles and atmospheric medieval churches to Nonconformist chapels and houses in distinctive vernacular traditions.