Cylchgronau Cymru

Chwiliwch trwy dros 450 o deitlau a 1.2 miliwn o dudalennau

Yorkshire violence was part of the trade-union armoury, especially in villages where peaceful collective bargaining was unlikely to yield the required results. In Nottinghamshire the position was different; here Luddism and constitutionalism ran side by side, and the former was condemned by the established working-class leaders. Ironically, some influential middle- and upper-class people held a more detached view of Luddite violence, and several newspaper editors risked unpopularity in order to give a fair account of the movement. Yet, in the final analysis, these people probably shared Dr. Thomis's 'economic realism'. Technological unemployment was, he maintains, a necessary evil in the early-nineteenth century, and the brave croppers and stockingers could not hope to prevent their ultimate demise. This is a view guaranteed to stir E. P. Thompson's admirers, as Thomis no doubt anticipates. 'When historians are in agreement about the Luddites', he writes, 'historical controversy will be at an end' (p. 28). DAVID J. V. JONES Swansea COLLIERY SETTLEMENTS IN THE SOUTH WALES COALFIELD, 1850 TO 1926. By Philip N. Jones. University of Hull (Occasional Papers in Geography, No. 14), 1970. Pp. 89. f 1 -25. It is only within the last decade, and largely in response to the so-called 'new urban history', that renewed attention has been given to the social, economic and physical characteristics of industrial towns. It is interesting to note, for example, that in such a work as F. R. Hiorns's Town Building in History there are some 106 pages devoted to the Renaissance and the immediately subsequent period, including twenty pages on the Vitruvian Cult. In contrast to this, there are only some forty pages on 'The Industrial Age'. To a large extent, the revival of interest in town growth and develop- ment in the nineteenth century has been related to the availability of the individual census forms derived from the decennial censuses. In particular, those for the 1851 and 1861 census have provided a vast new source of material. The problems involved in the interpretation and statistical analysis of these data have brought the historian into much closer association with those other social scientists who have been engaged in the analysis of the contemporary urban form. Themstrom and Sennett, in their volume of studies entitled Nineteenth Century Cities: Essays in the New Urban History, argue that there are three distinct facets to these developments: the linking of sociological theory to historical data; the use of quantitative materials and statistical techniques of description and analysis; the broadening of the scope of urban studies to embrace the social experience of ordinary people. The result has been a rapid develop- ment of the literature concerned with the nineteenth-century town both