seventy years. Nevertheless, financial cutbacks delayed the appearance of the Pembrokeshire inventory, and the Commission itself did not meet formally for two and a half years. The fundamental nature of the inventories was bound to lead the Commission into other areas concerned with the historic sites and monuments it was recording, and this has characterised the Commission throughout its life. As early as 1916 Owen was allowed to make representations to the town clerk of Chepstow about the proposed destruction of a stretch of medieval town wall, and in 1926 the Commission was represented on the committees running the excavations at the Roman fort at Kanovium (Caerhun). Owen himself was in constant demand to give talks to national and local societies, and a steady stream of requests for information came in – for example on the Roman fort at Tomen-y-mur, Whitland Abbey, stone circles, place names and, especially, genealogy. During the mid-1920s developments in professional archaeology exerted growing pressure for change in the approaches, methodology and structure of the Royal Commission. While the Commission had fulfilled its role of identifying monuments worthy of preservation, the volume on Pembrokeshire (1925) attracted criticism for its dearth of original fieldwork and its failure to keep up with advances in architectural recording and interpretation. Edward Owen was prepared to defend the Commission's approach to its work, which had the merit of publishing lists of sites and monuments swiftly in the county inventories. But Owen also saw the need to keep abreast of scholarly advances, even though the financial climate of the post-war years made it difficult to find suitably qualified staff when they would be expected to work for practically nothing. A thorough review of the Commission's operations resulted in major revision of his original guidelines. The Commission had been fortunate in recruiting Cyril Fox, the new director of the National Museum of Wales, as a commissioner; supported by R. C. Bosanquet, he was largely responsible for the changes that were now made. What survived of Owen's guidelines were the county arrangement of inventories and the broad classification scheme he had devised. There was a shift in focus from the use of documents and antiquarian reports to fieldwork, and an insistence on a full record of each site, building or object, with original plans and descriptions made by the Commission itself. Categories or types of structures and objects were henceforward to be identified routinely,