Writing Welsh History: From the Early Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century 2021951951, 9780198746034, 0198746032

Table of contents :
Cover
Writing Welsh History: From the Early Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Maps and Figures
Maps
Figures
List of Abbreviations
Note on References
Introduction
PART I: DISTANT PASTS AND CONFLICTED PRESENTS: The Middle Ages
1: Prologue: Themes and Contexts
2: British Pasts: The Early Middle Ages
Gildas’s De Excidio Britanniae
The Harleian Collection of Historical Texts
The Harleian Chronicle
The Harleian Genealogies
The Historia Brittonum
3: Saints, Kings, and Princes: Welsh Pasts in an Age of Conquest, c.1070–1282
British Pasts
Sacred Histories: Hagiography and Ecclesiastical Politics
Geoffrey of Monmouth and His Reception in Wales
Gerald of Wales
Geoffrey in Welsh: Brut y Brenhinedd (‘The History of the Kings’)
Narrating Welsh Rulers
Royal Biography: Vita Griffini filii Conani (‘The Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan’)
Chronicles
Themes and Approaches
4: Curating the Past in a Conquered Land, 1282–1540
The Continuing Influence of Geoffrey of Monmouth
Gutun Owain
PART II: REAFFIRMATION AND ELABORATION, 1540–1770
5: ‘Our Ancestors the Ancient Britons’, 1540–1620
Introduction
Defending the British History
Sir John Prise and Humphrey Llwyd
David Powel and John Lewis of Llynwene
Early British Church History and Religious Apologetic
6: From the Universal to the Local: Framing the History of Wales, 1540–1620
Wales in the World: The Chronicle of Elis Gruffudd
Histories of Wales
Humphrey Llwyd, Cronica Walliae
David Powel, The Historie of Cambria
Family and Locality
7: Refurbishing the Past: Antiquarianism and Historical Writing, 1620–1707
Old Pasts, New Contexts
History, Genealogy, and Gentry: Robert Vaughan of Hengwrt and His World
Percy Enderbie: Wales, Britain, and the Deep Roots of Monarchy
Powel Revised: William Wynne’s History of Wales
‘Fabulous Relations’ and ‘Genuine Histories’: Edward Lhuyd and the Recovery of the Past
8: From Druids to the Last Bard, 1707–70
Contexts and Themes
Celtic Origins and Divine Providence
Henry Rowlands
Theophilus Evans
Britons, Princes, and Bards in the Mid-EighteenthCentury
PART III: ROMANTICISM AND ENLIGHTENMENT, 1770–1880
9: Civilization, Liberty, and Dissent, 1770–1820
Iolo Morganwg and the Romantic Reinvention of the Welsh Past
Topographical History: From Thomas Pennant to Theophilus Jones
Thomas Pennant
County Histories
William Warrington: ‘The First Regular Historian of Wales’
Nonconformist Pasts
10: Cultural Revival and Romantic History: The World of Thomas Price (Carnhuanawc), 1820–48
Contexts
Welsh History Writing, c.1820–c.1840
Thomas Price (Carnhuanawc) and the History of Wales
11: ‘Living in the Past’ and the Challenges of Modernity, 1848–80
The Present and the Past in Mid-VictorianWales
Legend and History
Thomas Stephens
R. J. Pryse (Gweirydd ap Rhys)
Nonconformity, Imperial Britain, and American Liberty: The Welsh in the Modern World
Nonconformity
Wales and Great Britain
Welsh America
PART IV: PROFESSIONALIZATION AND NATIONHOOD, 1880–2020
12: Scientific History and National Awakening, 1880–1920
From Medieval to Modern Wales
The Welsh People
O. M. Edwards
New Scholarly Approaches
John Edward Lloyd
13: Consolidation and Reappraisal, 1920–60
Contexts: The Academy and Beyond
Old Themes Revisited: Political and Ecclesiastical History
New Approaches: I. Landscapes, Cultures, and the Remote Past
New Approaches: II. The Economic Turn
14: A New Beginning?: Writing Welsh History, 1960–2020
Changing Approaches
Locating Wales and The Welsh
Conclusion
Bibliography of Works Cited
Manuscript Sources
Published Works and Unpublished Theses
Index

Citation preview

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Writing Welsh History

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Writing Welsh History From the Early Middle Ages to the Twenty-­First Century H U W P RYC E

1

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1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Huw Pryce 2022 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2022 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2021951951 ISBN 978–0–19–874603–4 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198746034.001.0001 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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I Iestyn

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Preface The immediate origins of this book lie in my work for an intellectual biography of John Edward Lloyd (1861–1947), a pioneering historian of medieval Wales who played a seminal role in the development of Welsh history as an academic subject. Comparison of Lloyd’s interpretations with those of his predecessors and contemporaries helped to convince me of the need for a much more wide-­ranging study of Welsh history writing, a conviction reinforced by preparing my R. Allen Brown Lecture for the 2007 Battle Conference, which examined how Norman con­ querors and settlers had been accommodated in the narratives written by early modern and later historians of Wales. Unsurprisingly, the task I set myself has proved larger and thus taken longer than originally anticipated. Although Wales is a small nation whose history has been the subject of a relatively modest quantity of writing, any attempt to survey that writing and assess its significance over some fifteen hundred years from Gildas to the present day is necessarily a challenging enterprise, albeit one easier to accomplish than previously thanks to the ever-­increasing and free availability of digitized versions of manuscripts and printed materials. I am very grateful to all those who have provided help and advice during my work on this book without, of course, seeking to implicate them in the errors and misunderstandings that remain. Henry Gough-­Cooper, Ben Guy, Daniel Huws, Brendan Kane, Barry Lewis, Paul O’Leary, Paolo Pellegrini, Paul Russell, Rebecca Thomas, Alessandra Tramontana, and Patrick Wadden provided help with particular sources and questions, in several cases by supplying copies of publications. I have benefited from presenting some of the material in the book to various audiences and from the feedback on those occasions, including a lecture to the Historical Association in Cardiff; seminar papers at Exeter and York; papers at the ‘Identity, Ethnicity, and Nationhood Before Modernity’ conference at the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities and at the Research Centre Wales (Bangor University) conference ‘Wales: In Search of Heritage’; keynote lectures at the 40th UC Celtic Studies Conference/Annual Meeting of the Celtic Studies Association of North America (CSANA), UCLA, and at the XII Biennial Conference of the North American Association for the Study of Welsh Culture and History (NAASWCH), Bangor University; and my 2019 O’Donnell Lecture at Bangor, Cardiff, and Lampeter. My thanks also go to Philip Schwyzer for asking me to be a co-­investigator on the AHRC project ‘Inventor of Britain: The Complete Works of Humphrey Llwyd’, and the ensuing opportunities to talk about Llwyd as a historian at the Society for Renaissance Studies conference at Sheffield, the ‘Inventor

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viii Preface of Britain’ conference at the British Library, the conference on ‘Humphrey Llwyd a’i Gyfoeswyr’ (‘Humphrey Llwyd and His Contemporaries’) at the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, Aberystwyth, and in public lectures at the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, and the ‘Gŵyl Arall’ literary festival, Caernarfon. Substantial progress was made with the research and writing of the earlier parts of the book, including drafts of Chapters 5 and 6, while I was a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University, in January–April 2017, and I am extremely grateful to Catherine McKenna for facilitating my visit and, together with her colleagues and the department’s graduate students, for making me so welcome. I also wish to thank the staff of the Bangor University Library and Archives Service for their help in gaining access to books and journals, especially when I was finishing the book during the restrictions imposed in response to the Covid-­19 pandemic. For assistance with the illustrations I am indebted to Owen McKnight and Robin Darwall-­Smith, librarian and archivist respectively of Jesus College, Oxford; Emyr Evans, The National Library Wales; and Shan Robinson and Elen Wyn Simpson, Bangor University Archives and Special Collections. Special thanks are due to Lloyd Bowen, Bill Jones, Owain Wyn Jones, Ceridwen Lloyd-­Morgan, and Marion Löffler for taking the time to read and comment on one or more chapters. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Neil Evans, who has not only read and commented on the entire book but encouraged my work on the subject and provided numerous suggestions and references over many years. In making final revisions to the text I have also benefited greatly from the observations and suggestions of OUP’s anonymous reader. My greatest debt is to Nancy Edwards, who has read several chapters and discussed the book with me on countless occasions. As ever, her advice and support have been invaluable.

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Acknowledgements Maps 1 and 2 prepared by J Chadwick Illustration Ltd. Fig. 1.1 from Oxford, Jesus College MS 111, fol. 58r, https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/9bf187bf-­ f862-­4453-­bc4f-­851f6d3948af/surfaces/b704febf-­c9c4-­4f23-­8312-­cb7cd67ef6c6, is reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-­BY 4.0) licence. Figs. 5.1 and 6.1 are reproduced by permission of Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/The National Library of Wales. Fig. 9.1 is reproduced by permission of Archives and Special Collections, Bangor University.

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Contents List of Maps and Figures List of Abbreviations Note on References

Introduction

xv xvii xxi

1

PA RT  I .  D I S TA N T PA S T S A N D C O N F L IC T E D P R E SE N T S : T H E M I D D L E AG E S 1. Prologue: Themes and Contexts

11

2. British Pasts: The Early Middle Ages 18 Gildas’s De Excidio Britanniae19 The Harleian Collection of Historical Texts 22 3. Saints, Kings, and Princes: Welsh Pasts in an Age of Conquest, c.1070–128235 British Pasts 36 Narrating Welsh Rulers 53 4. Curating the Past in a Conquered Land, 1282–1540 The Continuing Influence of Geoffrey of Monmouth Gutun Owain

73 75 84

PA RT I I .  R E A F F I R M AT IO N A N D E L A B O R AT IO N , 1 5 4 0 – 1 7 7 0 5. ‘Our Ancestors the Ancient Britons’, 1540–1620 91 Introduction91 Defending the British History 95 Early British Church History and Religious Apologetic 112 6. From the Universal to the Local: Framing the History of Wales, 1540–1620121 Wales in the World: The Chronicle of Elis Gruffudd 122 Histories of Wales 128 Family and Locality 148 7. Refurbishing the Past: Antiquarianism and Historical Writing, 1620–1707155 Old Pasts, New Contexts 156 History, Genealogy, and Gentry: Robert Vaughan of Hengwrt and His World 161

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xii Contents Percy Enderbie: Wales, Britain, and the Deep Roots of Monarchy 167 Powel Revised: William Wynne’s History of Wales170 ‘Fabulous Relations’ and ‘Genuine Histories’: Edward Lhuyd and the Recovery of the Past 175

8. From Druids to the Last Bard, 1707–70 Contexts and Themes Celtic Origins and Divine Providence Britons, Princes, and Bards in the Mid-­Eighteenth Century

186 186 191 201

PA RT I I I .  R OM A N T IC I SM A N D E N L IG H T E N M E N T, 1 7 7 0 – 1 8 8 0 9. Civilization, Liberty, and Dissent, 1770–1820 Iolo Morganwg and the Romantic Reinvention of the Welsh Past Topographical History: From Thomas Pennant to Theophilus Jones William Warrington: ‘The First Regular Historian of Wales’ Nonconformist Pasts

207 209 215 225 232

10. Cultural Revival and Romantic History: The World of Thomas Price (Carnhuanawc), 1820–48 239 Contexts240 Welsh History Writing, c.1820–c.1840243 Thomas Price (Carnhuanawc) and the History of Wales 251 11. ‘Living in the Past’ and the Challenges of Modernity, 1848–80 The Present and the Past in Mid-­Victorian Wales Legend and History Nonconformity, Imperial Britain, and American Liberty: The Welsh in the Modern World

265 267 273 289

PA RT I V.  P R O F E S SIO NA L I Z AT IO N A N D NAT IO N HO O D, 1 8 8 0 – 2 0 2 0 12. Scientific History and National Awakening, 1880–1920 From Medieval to Modern Wales New Scholarly Approaches John Edward Lloyd

303 306 319 329

13. Consolidation and Reappraisal, 1920–60 Contexts: The Academy and Beyond Old Themes Revisited: Political and Ecclesiastical History New Approaches: I. Landscapes, Cultures, and the Remote Past New Approaches: II. The Economic Turn

339 341 345 353 356

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Contents  xiii

14. A New Beginning? Writing Welsh History, 1960–2020 Changing Approaches Locating Wales and The Welsh

362 363 374

Conclusion

383

Bibliography of Works Cited Index

393 463

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List of Maps and Figures Maps 1. Medieval Wales, showing territorial divisions and selected places mentioned in the text

xxii

2. Early modern and modern Wales and the border, showing historic counties and selected places mentioned in the text

xxiii

Figures 1.1. Oxford, Jesus College MS 111 (the Red Book of Hergest), fol. 58r

13

5.1. George Owen Harry, The Genealogy of the High and Mighty Monarch, James (London, 1604), title page and facing table

100

6.1. David Powel, The Historie of Cambria, Now Called Wales (London, 1584), pp. 46–7

140

9.1. The Cambrian Register, for the Year 1795 (London, 1796), frontispiece

212

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List of Abbreviations AC

Annales Cambriae, ed. John Williams Ab Ithel (London, 1860). References to page and year Bede, HE Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R.  A.  B.  Mynors, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Oxford, 1969). References to book and chapter Britannia (1695) Camden’s Britannia, Newly Translated into English: with Large Additions and Improvements, ed. Edmund Gibson (London, 1695) BS Brenhinedd y Saesson, or, The Kings of the Saxons, ed. and trans. Thomas Jones (Cardiff, 1971). References to page and corrected year BT, Pen20 Brut y Tywysogyon, Peniarth MS. 20 Version, ed. Thomas Jones (Cardiff, 1941). References to page and column of Peniarth MS 20 transcribed there BT, Pen20Tr Brut y Tywysogyon, or, The Chronicle of the Princes, Peniarth MS. 20 Version, trans. Thomas Jones (Cardiff, 1952). References to page and corrected year BT, RBH Brut y Tywysogyon, or, The Chronicle of the Princes, Red Book of Hergest Version, ed. and trans. Thomas Jones (Cardiff, 1955). References to page and corrected year CW Cronica de Wallia, ed. Thomas Jones, ‘ “Cronica de Wallia” and Other Documents from Exeter Cathedral Library MS. 3514’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, 12 (1946–8), 29–41. References to page and year DEB Gildas, De Excidio Britanniae, ed. and trans. Michael Winterbottom, Gildas: The Ruin of Britain and Other Sources (Chichester, 1978). References to chapter and sub-­section DGB Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain: An Edition and Translation of De gestis Britonum [Historia Regum Britanniae], ed. Michael  D.  Reeve and trans. Neil Wright (Woodbridge, 2007). References to page followed by book and section DK Gerald of Wales, ‘Descriptio Kambriae’, ed. James F. Dimock, Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, vol. 6 (Rolls Series, London, 1868), 155–227; trans. Lewis Thorpe, Gerald of Wales: The Journey through Wales and the Description of Wales (London, 1978), 211–74. References to book and chapter DPO (1716) Theophilus Evans, Drych y Prif Oesoedd. Yn ôl Argraffiad Cyntaf: 1716, ed. Garfield H. Hughes (Cardiff, 1961) DPO (1740) Theophilus Evans, Drych y Prif Oesoedd (Second or 1740 Edition), ed. Samuel J. Evans (Bangor, 1902) HB Historia Brittonum, ed. Edmond Faral, La légende Arthurienne: Études et documents, vol. 3 (Paris, 1929), 5–44, 57–62. References to chapter

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xviii  List of Abbreviations HBC HBD HC

HG

IK

Jones, HWMW Lhuyd, Glossography

Lhwyd, Archæologia Lloyd, HW Llwyd, Breviary

Llwyd, CW MA Parochialia

Pennant, Tour Powel, HC

Powel, PV

Gweirydd ap Rhys [R. J. Pryse], Hanes y Brytaniaid a’r Cymry, 2 vols. (London, 1872–4) John Prise, Historiae Britannicae Defensio: A Defence of the British History, ed. and trans. Ceri Davies (Toronto, 2015) Harleian Chronicle (Annales Cambriae, A-­text), ed. Egerton Phillimore, ‘The Annales Cambriae and Old-­ Welsh Genealogies from Harleian MS. 3859’, Y Cymmrodor, 9 (1888), 152–69. References to year supplied by the editor Harleian Genealogies, ed. Ben Guy, Medieval Welsh Genealogy: An Introduction and Textual Study (Woodbridge, 2020), 333–7. References to section number Gerald of Wales, ‘Itinerarium Kambriae’, ed. James F. Dimock, Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, vol. 6 (Rolls Series, London, 1868), 3–152; trans. Lewis Thorpe, Gerald of Wales: The Journey through Wales and the Description of Wales (London, 1978), 63–209. References to book and chapter Owain Wyn Jones, ‘Historical Writing in Medieval Wales’ (PhD Thesis, Bangor University, 2013) Edward Lhuyd, Archæologia Britannica, Giving Some Account Additional to What Has Hitherto Been Publish’d, of the Languages, Histories, and Customs of the Original Inhabitants of Great Britain. Vol. I: Glossography (Oxford, 1707) Edward Lhwyd, Archæologia Britannica: Texts and Translations, ed. Dewi W. Evans and Brynley F. Roberts (Aberystwyth, 2009) John Edward Lloyd, A History of Wales from the Earliest Times to the Edwardian Conquest, 2 vols. (London, 1911) Humphrey Llwyd, The Breviary of Britain, with Selections from The History of Cambria, ed. Philip Schwyzer, MHRA Tudor & Stuart Translations, 5 (London, 2011) Humphrey Llwyd, Cronica Walliae, ed. Ieuan  M.  Williams (Cardiff, 2002) Owen Jones, Edward Williams, and William Owen, The Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales, 3 vols. (London, 1801–7) Parochialia, being a Summary of Answers to “Parochial Queries in order to a Geographical Dictionary, etc. of Wales”, issued by Edward Lhwyd, ed. Rupert  H.  Morris, Archaeologia Cambrensis Supplements, 3 parts (April 1909, April 1910, July 1911). References to part and page Thomas Pennant, A Tour in Wales, 2nd edn., 2 vols. (London, 1784; repr. Wrexham, 1991) David Powel, The Historie of Cambria, Now Called Wales (London, 1584). References to sigla of introductory matter and pages of main text; references to pages of separately paginated ‘Description of Wales’ preceded by ‘D’ (e.g. D15) Pontici Virunnii Viri Doctissimi Britannicæ Historiæ Libri Sex: magna et fide et diligentia conscripti: ad Britannici codicis fidem correcti, & ab

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List of Abbreviations  xix

Price, HC

Pryce, Lloyd RMWL

VGC

VSB W. WP Wynne, History

infinitis mendis liberati: quibus præfixus est catalogus regum Britanniæ. Itinerarium Cambriæ, seu Laboriosæ Balduini Cantuar. archiepiscopi per Walliam legationis, accurata descriptio. Cambriae Descriptio: Avctore Sil. Giraldo Cambrense, ed. David Powel (London, 1585) Thomas Price (Carnhuanawc), Hanes Cymru, a Chenedl y Cymry, o’r Cynoesoedd hyd at Farwolaeth Llewelyn ap Gruffydd; ynghyd a Rhai Cofiaint Perthynol i’r Amseroedd o’r Pryd Hynny i Waered (Crickhowell, 1842) Huw Pryce, J. E. Lloyd and the Creation of Welsh History: Renewing a Nation’s Past (Cardiff, 2011) J.  Gwenogvryn Evans, Report on Manuscripts in the Welsh Language, 2 vols. in 7, Historical Manuscripts Commission, 48 (London, 1898–1910) Vita Griffini filii Conani: The Medieval Latin Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan, ed. and trans. Paul Russell (Cardiff, 2005). References to page number and chapter Vitae Sanctorum Britanniae et Genealogiae, ed. and trans. A. W. Wade-­ Evans (Cardiff, 1944) Welsh John Rhys and David Brynmor-­Jones, The Welsh People (London, 1900) William Wynne, The History of Wales Comprehending the Lives and Succession of the Princes of Wales from Cadwalader the Last King, to Lhewelyn the last Prince, of British Blood, with a Short Account of the Affairs of Wales, under the Kings of England (London, 1697)

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Note on References References in the footnotes are given in a shortened form (including the ­ab­bre­vi­ations listed above): details of all works cited may be found in the Bibliography.

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Map 1  Medieval Wales, showing territorial divisions and selected places mentioned in the text

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Map 2  Early modern and modern Wales and the border, showing historic counties and selected places mentioned in the text

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Introduction In November 2020 members of the Senedd (Welsh Parliament) in Cardiff Bay debated the history of Wales. Their wide-­ranging contributions evoked aspects of the Welsh past from the Iron Age to the twentieth century in response to two petitions focused on the teaching of history in Welsh schools, one calling for the inclusion of a common body of knowledge about Welsh history, the other for the compulsory teaching of Black UK histories. In their emphasis on the debatable and provisional nature of historical understanding, on plurality and diversity, and on the importance of history in helping to inculcate a sense of belonging, the contributions reflected highly contemporary concerns by no means unique to Wales; indeed, the second petition was a direct response to the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis earlier that year and the ensuing Black Lives Matter protests in the United States and across the world.1 However, the petitions and the politicians who debated them proceeded from a very old assumption: that Wales had a history of its own which was vital to understanding who its people were. As the first substantial survey of writing on the history of Wales from the early Middle Ages to the early twenty-­first century, this book explores a fundamental aspect of how that history has been interpreted and transmitted.2 Most of this writing is familiar only to specialists in Welsh history and literature and rarely features in wider studies of historiography in Britain or Europe (Geoffrey of Monmouth is a spectacular exception). First and foremost, then, the book aims to make Welsh history writing more accessible and comprehensible by delineating its contours more clearly than before. In addition, though, I argue that it merits attention on account of its interest and significance, both as a particular instance of ‘the rich and complex diversity of European historical writing’ and for the light it sheds on the cultural and intellectual history of Wales and on understandings of  Wales and the Welsh.3 More specifically, the writing discussed in this book  illuminates the extent to which a small nation conquered by a powerful 1  Senedd Cymru/Welsh Parliament, ‘Record of Proceedings: Plenary 04/11/2020: 9’. The Co-­operation Agreement between the Welsh Government and Plaid Cymru announced in November 2021 included a commitment ‘to the teaching of Welsh history – in all of its diversity and complexity – being mandatory in the Curriculum for Wales’: Llywodraeth Cymru/Welsh Government, ‘The Co-­ operation Agreement’, section 35. 2  Previous surveys have been brief and focused mainly on academic Welsh history writing from the late nineteenth century onwards: Dodd, ‘Welsh History and Historians’; Glanmor Williams, ‘Local and National History in Wales’, 45–66; Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘Clio and Wales’. 3  Quotation: Baár, Historians and Nationalism, 2. Writing Welsh History: From the Early Middle Ages to the Twenty-­First Century. Huw Pryce, Oxford University Press. © Huw Pryce 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198746034.003.0001

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2  WRITING WELSH HISTORY neighbour in the late thirteenth century and subsequently assimilated into a multinational state has been regarded as having a particular history of its own, a question given contemporary salience by debates not only about the teaching of the history of Wales but also about the constitutional future of the United Kingdom. And the book’s broad chronological range provides ample opportunity to assess the extent and significance of long-­term continuities in a historical culture. I start from two premises. The first, now widely accepted, is that historical writing tells us not only, or even mainly, about the past it narrates but throws revealing light on the assumptions of those who produced it. The second is that the wide variety of works considered have enough in common for it to make sense to treat them together as examples of what may be labelled Welsh history writing, by which I mean written accounts of the history of the Welsh and Wales. This is not to imply that all their authors thought in those terms, still less to deny that the works I discuss could be analysed from other perspectives—as instances of, say, medieval Cistercian chronicling, early modern historiography and chorography, Romantic interpretations of the past, religious histories, or the ever-­ expanding range of topics, from economic history to gender history, that have engaged the interest of historians since the beginning of the twentieth century. Indeed, many of the works I discuss responded in varying ways, both imitative and reactive, to other history writing, especially in England. Nevertheless, a fundamental contention of this book is that there is much to be gained by viewing these works as part of a long continuum of efforts to interpret the Welsh past. Nor is the notion of a body of Welsh history writing originating in the early Middle Ages merely a convenient analytical construct. There were major con­tinu­ ities in what may be termed the master narrative of Welsh history influentially created or, perhaps more accurately, consolidated by the Elizabethan scholars Humphrey Llwyd (1559) and David Powel (1584) on the basis of medieval sources and assumptions that presented that history as falling into two main epochs, the first extending from the ancient origins of the Britons from whom the Welsh were descended to their loss of sovereignty over the island of Britain to the English, placed in the late seventh century, the second continuing thereafter to the death of Prince Llywelyn ap Gruffudd in 1282 and Edward I’s conquest of Wales. In addition, writers from Powel down to the early twentieth century welcomed the Acts of Union (1536–43) incorporating Wales with the kingdom of England as bringing legal equality, peace, and Protestantism, changes interpreted by evoking fundamental elements of Welsh historical thinking, as Henry Tudor’s accession to the English throne in 1485 was portrayed as the long-­anticipated restoration of Welsh sovereignty in Britain and the Reformation as restoring an ancient British Church independent of Rome. As previous scholars have noted, the persistence of this master narrative raises important questions about how the history of Wales was understood over most of

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INTRODUCTION  3 the period covered in this book. Some distinguished modern historians of Wales have diagnosed it as a symptom of arrested historiographical development and drawn unflattering comparisons with English historical writing from the sixteenth century onwards to suggest a ‘prolonged time-­lag in the writing of Welsh history’, explicable, they suggest, by a variety of adverse circumstances, including loss of interest by an increasingly Anglicized gentry, the inaccessibility of sources,4 and the lack before the late Victorian period of ‘major urban centres, literary clubs and . . . especially a national university to train young scholars in the craft of writing history and sustaining the memory of the nation’.5 Notwithstanding their sympathetic treatment of aspects of pre-­modern historiography,6 it is understandable that, as scholars who had contributed to the creation and consolidation of Welsh history as a modern academic subject, they sought to highlight its achievements by effectively dismissing their predecessors’ efforts as an amateur prelude to the ‘serious’ work that came with professionalization, a prelude occasionally redeemed by heroic individuals whose critical treatment of sources foreshadowed modern approaches but all too often embarrassing in its propensity to peddle mythical views of the past.7 The literary scholar Dafydd Glyn Jones has raised different concerns, focused on the interpretations of the master narrative and their implications for Welsh self-­understanding. Jones adopts a longer chronological framework than the modern historians just mentioned (who largely ignore medieval history writing), emphasizing that fundamental tenets of Welsh historical thinking originated with Gildas in the sixth century and continued, with various permutations, down to the early twentieth century.8 ‘There is such a thing as the historical tradition of the Welsh, and it is as old as the Welsh themselves’, its ‘central idea’ being that ‘the Welsh, or the Britons, were the true possessors of the whole of the Island of Britain’.9 Moreover, while acknowledging that aspects of this tradition encouraged resignation to defeat and conquest (after all, Gildas declared that God had deprived the Britons of rule over the island as punishment for their sins), Jones insists that the idea of the Welsh enjoying a special relationship with Britain ­merits serious attention, not only in order to understand their past but also as a key to their future—a conviction also held by the historian Rees Davies, as discussed in Chapter  14.10 Rather than viewing Welsh historiography before the

4  Dodd, ‘Welsh History and Historians’, 49–54, quotation at 50. 5  Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘Clio and Wales’, 120–3, quotation at 120. See also Glanmor Williams, ‘Local and National History’, 45–6. 6  E.g. Glanmor Williams, ‘Some Protestant Views’; Geraint  H.  Jenkins, ‘Historical Writing in the Eighteenth Century’; Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘ “The Taffy-­land historians” ’. 7  Dodd, ‘Welsh History’, 49; Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘Clio and Wales’, 120. 8  Dafydd Glyn Jones, Un o Wŷr y Medra, 300–9; Dafydd Glyn Jones, Agoriad yr Oes, chs. 1, 3–4, 7, 12. See also Prys Morgan, ‘Iolo Morganwg’, 252–6. 9  Dafydd Glyn Jones, Agoriad yr Oes, 33. 10  Dafydd Glyn Jones, Agoriad yr Oes, 41, 89, 101.

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4  WRITING WELSH HISTORY twentieth century as ‘backward’, then, Jones presents it as an adaptable ideological construct of enduring power.11 As indicated earlier, this book also emphasizes the significance of continuities. However, it is attentive to their differing forms and purposes and, more im­port­ ant­ly, demonstrates that they formed only part of a much larger and more diverse historiographical landscape. In trying to map that landscape I have not only taken my cue from the brief general surveys already mentioned but benefited from numerous studies of individual texts, authors, and genres. As the following chapters show, recent examples include fresh interpretations of the construction and significance of medieval Welsh chronicles, analyses of the sources and assumptions of Welsh historical writing in the sixteenth century, renewed interest in the antiquarian endeavours and connections of the naturalist and Celtic scholar Edward Lhuyd (1659–1709), the fruits of a major project on Edward Williams (Iolo Morganwg; 1747–1826) which paid close attention to his vision of the Welsh past and its legacy and set these in the context of European Romanticism, and a growing number of assessments both of individual historians and of approaches to modern Welsh history in the era of professionalization. Nevertheless, some parts of the terrain have been mapped in far more detail than others. In addition, although this book is not a comparative study, I have tried to set the works discussed in wider contexts, both by indicating some of the ways that historians of Wales have borrowed from, reacted to, or otherwise engaged with other kinds of history writing and by pointing up contrasts and similarities with the latter. I hope that the book will facilitate and encourage further such comparisons in the future, for example with respect to the use of the Middle Ages—the period on which most Welsh history writing focused until the twentieth century—to foster a sense of modern nationhood.12 One fundamental aspect of Welsh history writing is its enduring preoccupation with the place of Wales and the Welsh in Britain. Although the relationship with England or Britain has also been an important concern of Irish and Scottish historiography, for many historians of Wales it has been fundamental since the Welsh were seen as the true heirs of the Britons who had once held sovereignty over the island of Britain, an idea that originated, as we have seen, in the early Middle Ages. One of its effects was to engender hopes of the recovery of that sovereignty, hopes eventually fulfilled, so Welsh poets declared, by the partly Welsh Henry Tudor’s accession to the throne of England in 1485, a view seized upon by historians of Wales from the Elizabethan period onwards who sought to le­git­im­ ate political union with England. Yet if their conceptualization of Wales as part of Britain allowed these historians to devise what might seem like a face-­saving act 11  Cf. Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘Clio and Wales’, 123. 12  Cf. Geary, The Myth of Nations, 1–40; The Uses of the Middle Ages, ed. Evans and Marchal; Wood, The Modern Origins of the Early Middle Ages.

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INTRODUCTION  5 of surrender, it also enabled them to mount acts of resistance to ethnic assimilation, as their celebration of the union with England vied with expressions of pride in the deep ancestry and brave leadership of the medieval princes of Wales, to whose deeds they devoted most of their coverage, and hostility to the English for regarding the Welsh as inferior. Any attempt to assess the character and significance of Welsh history writing has to recognize that, for many of its practitioners (and consumers), its Welshness was inseparable from a British dimension that served to sustain not only ardent loyalty to the monarchy and the British state but also unbridled Anglophobia.13 However, if the British dimension, with its two-­stage sequence of conquests, first of the Britons, then of the Welsh, underpinned continuities in Welsh history writing, it also contributed to the variety of that writing. To begin with, while most authors I discuss were Welsh by birth and/or ancestry, there were plenty of exceptions. In particular, English writers included coverage of the Britons or Welsh in works focused on England or Britain. Bede was the first in a long line of medieval and early modern historians who made the history of the Britons, as related by Gildas and, much more influentially, Geoffrey of Monmouth, a prequel to English history, and since the late eighteenth century several English authors have written standalone histories of Wales. In addition, the marcher lordships created by conquest left their mark in generally Anglocentric medieval chronicles and early modern county histories that placed English, Norman, and other foreign settlers centre stage. These works belonged in turn to a larger body of local (including urban), regional, and family histories from the Middle Ages onwards, which, together with religious histories, merit attention alongside works spe­cif­ic­ al­ly designated as histories of Wales. A common thread connecting these different strands of Welsh history writing is that their authors, in common with their counterparts in other fields of history writing, claimed to be attempting to provide truthful accounts of the past based on trustworthy evidence, even if these accounts may seem hopelessly far-­fetched today. Admittedly, this definition of history writing is fundamentally a pragmatic choice intended to help keep the book within manageable limits, and it could be objected that it is difficult to draw firm boundaries between the historical texts considered here and genres such as medieval romance, folklore, and poems and plays on historical topics.14 Nor is this true only of notoriously inventive writers such as Geoffrey of Monmouth and Iolo Morganwg: even the most empirically rigorous study is in some degree an imaginative reconstruction of the past. Conversely, authors of ‘literary’ texts might claim to convey true pictures of the

13  Dafydd Glyn Jones, Agoriad yr Oes, 35, 100. 14  Cf. Kewes, ‘History and Its Uses’, which argues (at 3) that studies of early modern history writing need to transcend ‘disciplinary divisions between history and literary studies’ and encompass a wide range of genres.

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6  WRITING WELSH HISTORY past and make use of ‘historical’ works.15 Yet a concern with evidence, even if its admissibility was contested, was sufficiently accepted for critics to complain that writers of what purported to be historical works lacked reliable evidence for their assertions, as is clear, say, from the heated controversies surrounding Geoffrey’s British History in the sixteenth century or nineteenth-­century denigration of some historical works as ‘novels’.16 It is also true, of course, that, as in other so­ci­ eties, written narratives were only one, and for many only a minor, aspect of how people in Wales have understood and used the past.17 That wider historical culture is a fascinating and important topic which merits detailed investigation.18 However, it is not the main focus of this book. Accordingly, while I touch on some other expressions of it, from medieval political prophecy to modern heritage sites, this is merely in order to help contextualize the particular aspect of it represented by Welsh history writing.19 Nor, on the other hand, is the book intended as a history of scholarship, although it necessarily considers differing interpretations of particular periods or topics as part of its broader aim of elucidating how the history of Wales and the Welsh has been understood. I have tried throughout not only to indicate major themes and developments in Welsh history writing but to bring individual instances of these into sharper focus by analysing texts and writers that seem to me especially significant. Given the number of works produced over the centuries covered, my treatment is necessarily selective, increasingly so from the nineteenth century and especially in discussing the ever more diverse historiographical landscape since 1960. In short, the book offers my particular interpretation and is the product of a particular time. Thus, while I have written it partly in reaction against the presentist perspectives of some previous scholars who have viewed most of what it covers as ‘prefatory and antiquarian addenda to the “real” disciplinary story that follows’, I, too, have unavoidably interpreted the texts discussed through the assumptions and categories of the present, which include previous interpretations.20 And I have written as a scholar not only committed to the critical analysis of evidence fundamental to the procedures of modern academic historiography but closely

15  See e.g. Raymond Williams, People of the Black Mountains, with sources used to research the novel’s historical background at 326–30. 16  For the latter see HBC, 2: [iii]; Emrys ap Iwan, Breuddwyd Pabydd wrth ei Ewyllys, ed. Jones, 72. 17  Rees Davies, Owain Glyn Dŵr, 7–12; R. R. Davies, The Revolt, 338–42. 18 Cf. Lambert and Weiler, ‘Introduction’, esp. 1–16; Vandrei, Queen Boudica and Historical Culture, 12–15. 19  For a similar approach on a vastly broader canvas see Iggers and Wang, A Global History of Modern Historiography, 4–5; Woolf, A Global History of History, 4–7. 20  Cf. Livingstone, ‘British Geography, 1500–1900’, 11–12, quotation at 12. While acknowledging the dangers of presentism pointed out by Quentin Skinner, this endorses Hans-­Georg Gadamer’s theory that the past can only be understood through a dynamic dialogue between it and the perspectives of the present-­day interpreter. See further Charles Taylor, ‘Gadamer on the Human Sciences’; Paul, ‘Gadamer and Philosophy of History’, esp. 159ff.; and the reflections on presentism in Walsham, ‘Introduction’, and the articles introduced there.

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INTRODUCTION  7 involved in the story I tell, being a historian of Wales who, like most (though by no means all) other writers on the subject, is himself Welsh.21 Others with different backgrounds and interests from mine will offer different perspectives, and I hope this book will help to encourage further work that builds on and challenges both the particular readings and the broader interpretations offered here. The discussion is structured chronologically, in four parts. Part I explores medieval writing on the history of the Welsh and their British ancestors, highlighting the fundamental importance of the idea of Britain as a lost homeland but also exploring a variety of chronicles and other works focused primarily on Wales. Part II assesses how this medieval legacy was adapted in the early modern period to create the first works conceived as histories of Wales as well as the elaboration of new theories of Welsh origins and the composition of new kinds of regional, family, and religious histories that both complemented and challenged the thematic and chronological priorities of a range of master narratives indebted to medieval sources. A similar pattern, albeit more varied and on a larger scale, is evident in the Welsh history writing examined in Part III, which covers the period from the late eighteenth to late nineteenth centuries. One key theme is the impact on approaches to the Welsh past of the major social and intellectual changes of this period, evident in tensions between continuing adherence to legendary interpretations and increasing aspirations to a demythologizing ‘scientific’ history. Part IV surveys aspects of Welsh history writing since 1880 in the twin contexts of the professionalization of history and the changing face of Wales, both of which have contributed to the increasing diversity of that writing, especially since the 1960s.

21  Cf. the comments on the compatibility of a commitment to truthfulness based on a critical interpretation of evidence and particular interests as motives for studying the past in Bloxham, Why History?, 311–12, 355.

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PART I

DISTA N T PAST S A ND C ON F L IC T E D PR E SE NT S The Middle Ages

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1 Prologue Themes and Contexts

Towards the end of the fourteenth century Hopcyn ap Tomas of Ynysforgan, near Swansea, commissioned the single most comprehensive surviving collection of medieval Welsh prose and poetry, a manuscript now known as the Red Book of Hergest.1 A highly cultured member of the Welsh gentry praised by poets for his interest in literature and history, Hopcyn became caught up in the last armed rising of the Welsh against English rule, led by Owain Glyndŵr (d. 1415), being consulted as a ‘maister of brut’ (political prophecy) on the prince’s prospects in 1403; two years later he was captured after fighting for Owain near Usk.2 Viewed in this context, the Red Book may be seen as a project of cultural affirmation. Central to its purpose was the conservation of what had become a canonical interpretation of the Welsh past, understood as no less integral to Welsh literary culture than the prose tales and poetry which occupy much of the manuscript.3 This opens with three texts, comprising about a quarter of the volume as a whole, which take us to the heart of historical writing in medieval Wales by supplying a narrative sequence extending from the Trojan War almost to the end of native rule in Wales in 1282: Ystorya Dared (‘The History of Dares’), Brut y Brenhinedd (‘The History of the Kings’), and Brut y Tywysogyon (‘The Chronicle of the Princes’). All were Welsh translations of Latin works: the sixth-­century Historia de Excidio Troiae (‘History of the Fall of Troy’) attributed to Dares the Phrygian; Geoffrey of Monmouth’s De Gestis Britonum (‘On the Deeds of the Britons’)— better known as Historia Regum Britanniae (‘History of the Kings of Britain’)— completed c.1138; and a chronicle configured as a continuation of Geoffrey which focused on events in Wales from the late seventh century to 1282. The connecting thread between the three texts was the making of the Welsh as a people who could claim descent from the Britons and, through them, the Trojans. Such an interpretation of the past meant that Welsh history was not only, or even primarily, a history of Wales, as crucial parts of the action had taken place

1  Daniel Huws, ‘Llyfr Coch Hergest’. 2  Prys Morgan, ‘Glamorgan and the Red Book’; Christine James, ‘ “Llwyr Wybodau, Llên a Llyfrau” ’, 17, 20–1; Gruffydd Aled Williams, ‘Gwrthryfel Glyndŵr’, 81–3. 3  Conversely, it has been suggested that the inclusion of the prose tales known as the Mabinogion reflected Hopcyn ap Tomas’s interest in history, as these presented a past in which British kings ruled over the island of Britain: Luft, ‘Commemorating the Past’, 80–4. Writing Welsh History: From the Early Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century. Huw Pryce, Oxford University Press. © Huw Pryce 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198746034.003.0002

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12  WRITING WELSH HISTORY in a remote past among ancestors of the Welsh on a European and, above all, British stage. This chronological and geographical emphasis was reflected in the space occupied by the three works at the beginning of the Red Book, all copied in the same highly regular hand, as the narrative down to the late seventh century provided by Ystoria Dared and Brut y Brenhinedd filled 230 columns of text compared to only 146 columns for the subsequent events over the following five centuries related in Brut y Tywysogyon.4 Nor was the emphasis new. Though the creation of this series of Welsh texts had been completed only in the early fourteenth century, their approach to the past originated in the early Middle Ages, as Geoffrey of Monmouth drew on Gildas and the early ninth-­century Historia Brittonum (‘History of the Britons’), while Brut y Tywysogyon continued a trad­ ition of Latin chronicle writing beginning in the eighth century. The historical works that open the Red Book attest, therefore, not only to the place of history in Welsh-­language literary culture but also to its Latin roots and its debt, in the case of Dares and especially Geoffrey, to texts that were widely influential in medieval Europe, often in the context of a similar shift from Latin to the vernacular.5 This in turn serves to highlight that historical writing in medieval Wales belonged to a wider European world. More particularly, its emphasis on the making of the Welsh reflected a widespread ambition to write the history of ­peoples and attribute to them distant, often Trojan, ancestry.6 Indeed, claims that the Britons were descended from the Trojans may have originally been influenced by seventh-­century Frankish example (see Chapter 2). However, what is striking about the canonical view of the Welsh past presented at the beginning of the Red Book is its expression in a sequence of three discrete texts (the break between the end of Brut y Brenhinedd and Brut y Tywysogyon is shown in Fig.  1.1).7 While their combination signalled a desire to create a narrative of the Welsh from their origins in Troy to the end of native rule in 1282, it also highlighted the lack of any single history of the Welsh comparable to the numerous histories of peoples from their beginnings to the time of composition which were written elsewhere in medieval Europe.8 This task was first attempted with respect to Wales by Gutun

4  Oxford, Jesus College MS 111, fos. 1r–8r (cols. 1–30, l. 12: Ystorya Dared); 8v–58r (cols. 31–230: Brut y Brenhinedd); 58r–89v (cols. 230–376: Brut y Tywysogyon): Digital Bodleian: The Red Book of Hergest, http://image.ox.ac.uk/show?collection=jesus&manuscript=ms111 (last accessed 13 September 2021); see also Daniel Huws, ‘Llyfr Coch Hergest’, 4–5. 5  See e.g. Alamichel, ‘Brutus et les Troyens’; Wolf, Troja, esp. 131–6, 175–87; Poppe, ‘The Matter of Troy’, 258–82. 6  Reynolds, ‘Medieval Origines Gentium’, 375–7; Waswo, ‘Our Ancestors, the Trojans’; Wolf, Troja, 64–123; Pizarro, ‘Ethnic and National History’; Kersken, ‘High and Late Medieval National Historiography’, 181–215. 7  The title of the latter work was added by an unidentified reader in 1788. I am grateful to Robin Darwall-­Smith, archivist of Jesus College, for the information that the reader’s hand occurs neither in the college’s borrowing register of 1775–98 nor among the entries written by each new Fellow and Scholar in the college register for the 1780s. 8  Cf. Kersken, Geschichtsschreibung, 9–11.

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PROLOGUE: THEMES AND CONTEXTS  13

Fig. 1.1  Oxford, Jesus College MS 111 (the Red Book of Hergest), fol. 58r

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14  WRITING WELSH HISTORY Owain in the late fifteenth century, though significantly he combined the history of the Welsh with that of the English, as shown in Chapter  4.9 Viewed from a European perspective, then, medieval Welsh historical writing exemplified what some scholars have termed ‘national history’ in the Middle Ages—focused on a people, country, dynasty, or polity—to only a limited and partial extent.10 In crucial respects the writing of history in medieval Wales was a response to conquest and loss: above all, the loss of much of Britain to the Anglo-­Saxons in the post-­Roman period, and the subsequent confinement of the Britons to kingdoms in the north and west of the island. The idea that the Welsh were the heirs of the Britons was fundamental to understandings of the past in Wales throughout the Middle Ages and indeed down to the nineteenth century. Welsh history was thus inextricably linked to the history of Britain. In large part, this was a matter of harking back to a glorious past and presenting the Welsh descendants of the Britons as the original proprietors of Britain. Such thinking offered not only solace but hope, as a prophetic tradition, attested from at least the tenth century, held out the promise that the Welsh would eventually recover the Britons’ sovereignty over the island, symbolized by ‘the crown of London’, a promise widely believed to have been fulfilled by the accession of the partly Welsh Henry Tudor to the throne of England in 1485.11 However, the need to place the history of Wales in a wider British framework also reflected the political realities of Anglo-­Welsh relations, as kings of England asserted their overlordship over Welsh r­ ulers, periodically by force, pressure intensified from the late eleventh century by piecemeal conquests—especially in southern Wales and along the English border—which led to the creation of marcher lordships and culminated in Edward I’s defeat of the remaining Welsh princes in 1282–3.12 It is no coincidence that a narrative tracing the history of the Welsh from their alleged Trojan origins was elaborated most fully after that final conquest. If history writing in medieval Wales both appropriated and continued narratives of the Britons set on a pan-­British stage, it did so within a fragmented Welsh political landscape which helped to shape not only the content of history writing, dominated by struggles for power within and between Welsh dynasties and their 9 The Historia Brittonum comes closest to doing this, but its account essentially ends in the late seventh century. 10  For defences, albeit qualified, of the validity of applying the concept of ‘national history’ to works of the pre-­modern period, including the Middle Ages, see Kersken, Geschichtsschreibung, 4–11; Goetz, Geschichtsschreibung, 381–7; Woolf, ‘Of Nations, Nationalism, and National Identity’, 77–81; Berger with Conrad, The Past as History, 29–31. 11 Glanmor Williams, Religion, Language and Nationality, 71–86; Prophecies from the Book of Taliesin, ed. and trans. Haycock, 2–3, 5–14; Gruffydd Aled Williams, ‘The Bardic Road to Bosworth’; Lynch, Proffwydoliaeth, esp. 17–42. For the close ties between history and prophecy in the Middle Ages see Guenée, Politique et histoire, 253–4. 12  The fullest general accounts of medieval Wales are Charles-­Edwards, Wales, and R.  R.  Davies, Conquest. Shorter syntheses: Wendy Davies, Wales in the Early Middle Ages; A.  D.  Carr, Medieval Wales; Stephenson, Medieval Wales.

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PROLOGUE: THEMES AND CONTEXTS  15 interaction with foreign conquerors, but also the contexts in which it was produced. In his Life of King Alfred, composed in Wessex in the early 890s, Asser of St Davids clearly had a sense of Wales as a distinct geographical space, though tellingly he called it Britannia (‘Britain’), a usage followed by Welsh writers of Latin until the twelfth century which implied that Wales represented the greater Britain the Britons had lost.13 Wales was conceived, then, in essentially ethnic and cultural terms—as the land of the Britons rather than a political unit. Indeed, Asser refers to five different kingdoms, and related that their rulers had all accepted the overlordship, not of any Welsh ruler, but of his master King Alfred.14 True, some pre-­Norman Welsh rulers established extensive hegemonies, notably Hywel Dda (Hywel the Good; d. 950) and, above all, Gruffudd ap Llywelyn (d.  1064).15 Furthermore, the thirteenth-­century princes of Gwynedd (north-­ west Wales)—the most powerful Welsh kingdom for the majority of the period down to 1282—sought both to establish their domination over the other Welsh rulers and to identify that domination explicitly with Wales, an ambition sanctioned by the English crown’s recognition in 1267 of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd (d. 1282) as ‘Prince of Wales’, ruling a ‘Principality of Wales’. However, Llywelyn’s principality was demolished after Edward I’s first Welsh war of 1276–7.16 Likewise all previous hegemonies were short-­lived and failed to survive beyond the ruler’s lifetime; nor, apart from Gruffudd ap Llywelyn, did any Welsh ruler achieve dominance over the whole of Wales. Rather, regnal plurality remained the norm, while regions within individual kingdoms provided a further focus for identity that both qualified and complemented notions of belonging to the wider entities of Wales or Britain.17 This pattern was complicated, but not fundamentally altered, by the establishment of marcher lordships from the late eleventh century onwards, followed, after the Edwardian conquest, by the division of the defeated Welsh principalities into further marcher lordships in the north-­east and the royal Principality of Wales in the north-­west and south-­west.18 A plurality of polities was, of course, not in itself inimical to writing the history of a particular people. This was especially true of the early Middle Ages. The Goths and the English, whose histories were written by Jordanes and Bede re­spect­ive­ly in the mid-­sixth and early eighth centuries, were divided between different kingdoms and dynasties, and the same was true of the Irish whose

13  Asser’s Life of King Alfred, cc. 7, 14, 79–80, ed. Stevenson, 7, 12, 63–6; trans. Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great, 69, 71, 93–4, 96; Pryce, ‘British or Welsh?’, 777–8; Charles-­Edwards, Wales and the Britons, 1–4. 14  Asser’s Life of King Alfred, c. 80, ed. Stevenson, 66–7; trans. Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great, 96. 15  Charles-­Edwards, Wales, 508, 510–13, 561–7; Michael and Sean Davies, The Last King of Wales. 16  R. R. Davies, ‘The Identity of “Wales” ’, esp. 54–62. 17  Euryn Rhys Roberts, ‘A Surfeit of Identity?’. 18 Lieberman, The March of Wales.

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16  WRITING WELSH HISTORY origins were traced in the eleventh-­century Lebar Gabála (‘Book of Settlement’).19 The Historia Brittonum (‘History of the Britons’) composed in early ninth-­century Wales was thus but one instance of a common phenomenon. While these early medieval histories show an interest in kings and dynasties, the fusion of ethnic and dynastic history became more pronounced as kingdoms developed greater coherence from the twelfth century onwards.20 In these cases, the origin legend of a people also served to legitimate its rulers. Thus, to take two notable examples, from the thirteenth century onwards, historians of both England and France attributed Trojan origins to a succession of royal dynasties culminating in the kings ruling over the undivided kingdoms of the writers’ own day.21 By contrast, in Wales, as in Ireland, historical writing retained a primarily ethnic focus throughout the Middle Ages and—with the important exception of genealogical texts—was both less concerned with royal dynasties and less connected with royal or princely courts than in many other parts of Latin Christendom.22 This probably resulted primarily from continuing political fragmentation and dynastic instability, which in turn contributed to the fluctuating durability of the courts of even the most powerful ruling houses. Moreover, in Wales, unlike Ireland (or Scotland), the creation of a ‘national history’ in the Middle Ages was also inhibited by the emphasis on descent from the Britons and identification with the island of Britain coupled, crucially, with the rival claims to that British inheritance by the English.23 Although attempts were made to put the past to the service of individual dynasties, individual kingdoms and dynasties provided an unstable framework for the construction of historical narratives, as contested successions militated against the smooth transition of power, and attacks by other dynasties or foreign conquerors threatened a kingdom’s territorial integrity or even existence.24 As elsewhere in medieval Europe, churches provided a vital institutional context for historical writing, by supplying not only authors and scriptoria but also continuity in the face of political vicissitudes and networks for the transmission of texts. To judge by the surviving works, until the thirteenth century historical 19 Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History, 20, 62–8; Nicholas Brooks, Bede and the English, esp. 3–7, 10; Byrne, ‘Senchas’, 158–9; Carey, The Irish National Origin-­Legend; Ó Corráin, ‘The Church and Secular Society’. 20  Pizarro, ‘Ethnic and National History’, 52, 56–7, 60–4, 71–2, 74–5; Reynolds, ‘Medieval Origines Gentium’, 381–7, 389–90; Goetz, Geschichtsschreibung, 119–20. Further examples of histories of ­peoples focused on royal courts and dynasties in Bagge, ‘Scandinavian Historical Writing’, 418, 424–5; Berend, ‘Historical Writing in Central Europe’. 21 Barron, Le Saux, and Johnson, ‘Dynastic Chronicles’, 32–5; Kersken, Geschichtsschreibung, 252–80; The Oldest Anglo-­Norman Prose Brut Chronicle, ed. and trans. Marvin; Spiegel, The Past as Text, 106–7, 195, 201–2, 207–8. Anglo-­ Saxon royal dynasties avoided claiming Trojan origins: Elizabeth M. Tyler, ‘Trojans in Anglo-­Saxon England’. 22  For Ireland see Ó Corráin, ‘Creating the Past’. 23  Notions of Scottish identity emphasized separateness from the rest of Britain: Broun, ‘Britain and the Beginning of Scotland’, esp. 119–31. 24  Cf. J. Beverley Smith, ‘Dynastic Succession’.

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PROLOGUE: THEMES AND CONTEXTS  17 narratives were usually written in Latin by churchmen, who adopted widely used genres, notably chronicles, histories, and hagiography, to offer an ecclesiastical perspective on the past. Their works were produced both in early medieval foundations such as St Davids and also, from the twelfth century, Benedictine monasteries, including those of reformed religious orders, especially the Cistercians. From the thirteenth century, however, two related shifts occurred, which again had parallels in other European societies and also mirrored wider changes in Welsh written culture. The first was the production of an increasing number of historical (as of  other) works in Welsh. Some manuscripts of these works were produced in Cistercian scriptoria.25 Nevertheless, second, the adoption of the vernacular facilitated an increasing role for the laity as patrons, readers, scribes, and in a few cases authors of historical texts. Patrons were drawn from the gentry or squirearchy (W.  uchelwyr), the local leaders of Welsh society after the demise of the native princes in the wake of the Edwardian conquest, and their interest in the past was an essential stimulus to the copying and composition of historical texts in later medieval Wales, as demonstrated by Hopcyn ap Tomas of Ynysforgan.26 Although it is uncertain how far, if at all, the Latin and Welsh works discussed in the first part of this book reached audiences beyond the restricted circles of churchmen as well as, by the later Middle Ages, poets and gentry, there can be little doubt that the deep sense of loss which was fundamental to their view of the past resonated widely in Welsh society and fed into hopes for the recovery of former glory. It is with the earliest literary expression of that loss, Gildas’s De Excidio Britanniae (‘The Ruin of Britain’), that the following discussion of history writing in medieval Wales will begin.

25  Daniel Huws, Medieval Welsh Manuscripts, 12, 14–15, 29, 52–3. 26  Cf. R. R. Davies, The Age of Conquest, 415–18.

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2 British Pasts The Early Middle Ages

The interpretation of the past that was widely disseminated in Wales by the later Middle Ages had its origins in post-­Roman Britain, since medieval Welsh history writing began as the history of the Britons and embraced the island of Britain. However, the earliest texts, apart, perhaps, from Gildas’s De Excidio Britanniae (‘The Ruin of Britain’), were written by the Britons of what became Wales. One fundamental aspect of their understanding of the past was an identification with a wider Brittonic world that had been steadily curtailed as the result of Anglo-­ Saxon conquests. This helps to explain why the writing of historical texts in early medieval Wales formed part of a wider historiographical response to the major political changes of the post-­Roman period. Thus Gildas provided a common point of departure for subsequent historians of both the Britons and the English, being excerpted at length by Bede at the beginning of his Ecclesiastical History (731), which used the De Excidio to introduce a narrative of English domination, presented as a divinely ordained instrument of conversion to Christianity.1 One result, according to the late tenth-­century chronicler Æthelweard, was that ‘Britain [Brittannia] is now called England [Anglia], taking the name of the victors’—an elision with a long future.2 By contrast, Welsh historical writing followed Gildas by focusing on the other side of the story, namely the defeat of the Britons and their subsequent history in the Middle Ages within the much narrower boundaries of the remaining British kingdoms, especially in Wales. However, in order to achieve its aims, this writing looked beyond the Brittonic world and also drew on texts composed in continental Europe, Anglo-­Saxon England, and Ireland. Conversely, historical works composed in neighbouring lands referred to the Britons of Wales, mostly either by giving brief obits of Welsh kings or by describing attacks on Wales, especially by the English: for example, the account in the Annals of Æthelflæd (also known as the Mercian Register) of the burning in 916 of the royal fort on Llangorse Lake in Brycheiniog by a force sent by Æthelflæd ‘Lady of the Mercians’ and the coverage 1  HE, I. 1, 8, 12–16, 22. See further Miller, ‘Bede’s Use of Gildas’; Charles-­Edwards, ‘Bede, the Irish and the Britons’, esp. 45–9; Stancliffe, Bede and the Britons, esp. 4–6, 13, 18, 37–40; Murray, ‘Bede and the Unchosen Race’. 2  The Chronicle of Æthelweard, ed. and trans. Campbell, 9; but cf. 56, and Molyneaux, ‘Why Were Some Tenth-­Century English Kings Presented as Rulers of Britain?’.

Writing Welsh History: From the Early Middle Ages to the Twenty-­First Century. Huw Pryce, Oxford University Press. © Huw Pryce 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198746034.003.0003

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BRITISH PASTS: THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES  19 of campaigns by Harold and Tostig Godwineson against Gruffudd ap Llywelyn (d. 1064) in the Life of Edward the Confessor.3 (The latter work also denigrated the Welsh by evoking their claims to Trojan origins.)4 An Anglocentric perspective likewise appears in the longest work of history by an early medieval author from Wales, namely the Life of Alfred (893), composed in Wessex by the cleric Asser of St Davids (d. 908 × 909), who wrote approvingly of the submission of the Welsh kings to the man he hailed as ‘ruler of all the Christians of the island of Britain, king of the Angles and Saxons’.5 By contrast, the tenth-­century poem Armes Prydein Vawr (‘The Great Prophecy of Britain’), quite possibly responding to Asser, advocated Welsh resistance to the English, foretelling their defeat by a grand coalition that would lead to the Britons’ recovery of sovereignty over the island in the earliest known instance of a tradition of political prophecy that continued to the end of the Middle Ages and reflected Welsh poets’ cultivation of a Britain-­centric past.6

Gildas’s De Excidio Britanniae Any attempt to understand the historiography of medieval Wales must begin, then, with Gildas’s De Excidio.7 Both its date and place of composition are uncertain. However, there are persuasive grounds for assigning it to the period c.530–545, possibly c.540, and at least three of the five kings it addressed may be identified as rulers of kingdoms in what became Wales.8 In any case, irrespective of where precisely Gildas wrote, the crucial points for the present discussion are his status as a cleric and his focus on, and identification with, the Britons. True, his depiction of the Britons was far from flattering. Expressly passing over the island’s past in the period before Christ,9 the De Excidio opens with an account of Roman and post-­Roman Britain that emphasizes the pride of the Britons faced with the power of imperial Rome and relates how, faced with Irish and Pictish attacks after the Roman legions had departed, a ‘proud tyrant’ sought assistance from the Saxons, whose arrival led to extensive conquests and destruction. Like other Christian writers of this period, Gildas attributed such disasters to divine punishment for sin.10 The theme is developed in two further sections in which

3  The Anglo-­Saxon Chronicle, ed. Taylor, 50; The Life of King Edward, ed. and trans. Barlow, 42, 57–9. See also Stafford, ‘ “The Annals of Æthelflæd” ’. 4  Elizabeth M. Tyler, ‘Trojans in Anglo-­Saxon England’, 16–18. 5  Asser’s Life of King Alfred, dedication, c. 80, ed. Stevenson, 1, 66–7; trans. Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great, 67, 96. 6  Armes Prydein, ed. Williams and Bromwich; Charles-­Edwards, Wales, 519–35; Rebecca Thomas and David Callander, ‘Reading Asser’. See also Sims-­Williams, ‘Some Functions of Origin Stories’. 7  Recent assessment in Charles-­Edwards, Wales, 202–19. 8  Stancliffe, ‘The Thirteen Sermons’, 177–81; Charles-­Edwards, Wales, 210–11, 215–18. 9  DEB, c. 4. 2. 10  DEB, cc. 2–26.

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20  WRITING WELSH HISTORY Gildas, adopting the mantle of an Old Testament prophet and armed with a pan­oply of biblical quotations, condemns both the secular rulers, termed ‘tyrants’, and clergy of the Britons of his own day for a multitude of failings, and calls on them to repent.11 The form and polemical character of the De Excidio has led some modern scholars to question whether it should be understood as a work of history, as implied by Bede’s description of Gildas as the ‘historian’ (L.  historicus) of the Britons.12 It is true that Gildas introduces the work as an open letter (L. epistola) addressed to his fellow Britons and presents himself as a prophet denouncing the sins of his compatriots and urging them to mend their ways in order to avoid further divine judgement.13 However, if the De Excidio may seem to read like a sermon or polemic, Gildas relates historical events, both distant and con­tem­por­ ary, to make his case; moreover, at one point he explicitly calls it a history and implies that this was intrinsic to its condemnation of the Britons, referring to it as ‘this tearful history, this complaint against the evils of the age’.14 Above all, Gildas viewed the Britons as actors in a continued unfolding of the sacred history revealed in the Bible, especially God’s relationship with the people of Israel. Thus he declared that, in the onslaught of the Saxons on Britain, ‘comparable with that of the Assyrians on Judaea, there was fulfilled according to history for us also what the prophet said in his lament’, which was then illustrated by two passages from the Psalms.15 Even more explicitly, Gildas later described how, after the successes of Ambrosius Aurelianus, ‘victory went now to our countrymen, now to their enemies: so that in this people the Lord could make trial (as he tends to) of his latter-­day Israel (L. praesentem Israelem) to see whether it loves him or not’.16 For Gildas, as a latter-­day Old Testament prophet, the Britons, like Israel, were a people subject to the judgement of God. They were also a people to whom the Old Testament prophets continued to speak. A passage that introduces a lengthy series of biblical exempla to support his attack on the five ‘tyrants’ declares: Now, as before, therefore, let the holy prophets reply in my stead. So it was in the past. Favouring the good and forbidding men the bad, they were in a sense the 11  DEB, cc. 27–65 and 66–110. For Gildas’s use of the Bible see O’Loughlin, Gildas and the Scriptures. 12 Bede, HE, I.  22. For these issues see Charles-­Edwards, Wales, 203–5; Charles-­Edwards, ‘Celtic Britain and Ireland’, 147–52. For refutation of the recently revived argument that the De Excidio comprises two originally separate texts see Guy, Review of Llythyr Gildas a Dinistr Prydain. Note also descriptions of Gildas as a ‘historian’ (historiographus) in twelfth-­century Welsh Lives of St Teilo and St Oudoceus (Euddogwy), ed. Evans and Rhys, The Text of the Book of Llan Dâv, 100, 138, and St Illtud, c. 19, VSB, 222–3. 13  DEB, c. 1. 1 (epistola). 14  DEB, c. 37. 1. All translations of the De Excidio given here are those of Winterbottom in his edition. 15  DEB, c. 24. 2. 16  DEB, c. 26. 1.

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BRITISH PASTS: THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES  21 mouth of God and the instrument of the holy spirit. Let them reply to the proud and stubborn princes of this age . . .17

This passage is also significant as an example of another important feature of the De Excidio, namely its deployment of the techniques of classical rhetoric.18 The prophets ‘reply’ in the manner of expert witnesses called by a pleader to support his case, and it has been shown that not only the structure but ‘the entire conception and style of the work is rhetorical’, as it exemplified the type of demonstrative rhetoric that established blame and also, as in the passage just cited, drew on the conventions of judicial rhetoric, originally designed for accusing or defending individuals; the same is true of the way Gildas directly addresses the five ‘tyrants’, which bears resemblances to speeches Cicero delivered against his opponents.19 This use of rhetoric, along with the Latinity of the De Excidio, in turn show that Gildas, as well as being profoundly immersed in the Bible, had received a trad­ ition­al late Roman education which progressed from a training in Latin grammar to more advanced instruction in rhetoric.20 He thus takes his place among other late antique Christian authors whose writing was shaped by both classical and biblical models. He was also familiar with the Church Fathers and other early Christian authors, including the histories of Orosius and especially Eusebius (through the Latin translation of Rufinus),21 and his heavy reliance on the Bible to support a condemnation of his sinful contemporaries who suffered God’s ­punishment at the hands of barbarians has parallels with, and may even have been influenced by, Salvian of Marseilles’s De Gubernatione Dei (‘On the Government of God’), probably written in the early 440s.22 Nevertheless, while the De Excidio was conceived within a universal framework of Christian history and drew on the linguistic and rhetorical inheritance of the Roman Empire, in contrast to Salvian it did not target sinful Christian Romans in general or equate Old Testament Israel with the Roman Empire.23 Rather, its particular focus of attention was Britain, which Gildas referred to as his ‘fatherland’ (L. patria), and above all the Britons whom he described both as its ‘citizens’ (L. ciues) and as a ‘latter-­day Israel’ firmly located in a universal pattern of sacred history.24 Indeed, his call to repentance was so urgent precisely because 17  DEB, c. 37. 3. 18 Winterbottom, ‘The Preface’; Lapidge, ‘Gildas’s Education’, 43–7; Kempshall, Rhetoric, 161–3, 218; Charles-­Edwards, Wales, 213–15. 19  Lapidge, ‘Gildas’s Education’, 44–7. 20  Lapidge, ‘Gildas’s Education’, 33–49; for a different view of how Gildas may have received his education in grammar and rhetoric see Charles-­Edwards, Wales, 214–15. 21  Wright, ‘Gildas’s Prose Style’, 108–11. 22 Hanning, The Vision of History, 46–8, 58; Winterbottom, ‘The Preface’, 281–2. For Salvian’s criticism of his contemporaries see David Lambert, ‘The Uses of Decay’, 115–30; Brown, Salvian of Marseilles. 23  Cf. David Lambert, ‘The Uses of Decay’, 127–9. 24  DEB, cc. 1. 1, 18. 1, 30. 1, 64. 1 (patria); 19. 3, 26. 4, 32. 1 (ciues).

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22  WRITING WELSH HISTORY Gildas closely identified with the Britons as a Christian people, whom he showed to have enjoyed success in the past by obeying God, thereby implying that they might do so again if they repented.25 However great their failings, therefore, he expected better of the Britons than of the invading Irish, Picts, and, above all, Saxons, whose role as instruments of divine punishment was given all the more point by Gildas’s portrayal of them as savage barbarians.26 (The Romans, while presented in a positive light as having brought ‘the laws of obedience to the island’, established only a temporary presence there, and essentially serve as a foil for the failings of the Britons, whose response to imperial rule proved them to be ‘cowardly in war and faithless in peace’.)27 For Gildas, then, the Britons, despite their territorial losses, internal dissensions, treachery, tyranny, and immorality, occupied centre stage in the history of post-­Roman Britain.

The Harleian Collection of Historical Texts Over two centuries separate Gildas from the earliest historical texts found in a collection extant in British Library, Harleian MS 3859, copied c.1100 from an exemplar written in south-­west Wales, very probably St Davids, between 954 and 988. This comprises three works: the Historia Brittonum (‘History of the Britons’),28 composed in Gwynedd in 829/30 and ascribed in some manuscripts to Nennius, together with a chronicle and a set of genealogies which have been interpolated into it. The Harleian chronicle, commonly known as the A-­text of Annales Cambriae (‘The Annals of Wales’), records events down to the death of Rhodri ap Hywel in 954, while the first two entries of the genealogies extend to Owain ap Hywel Dda (d. 988).29 However, the Harleian chronicle comprises entries made contemporaneously at St Davids from the late eighth century onwards, which were combined with material from two other sources. One was a chronicle from Gwynedd, quite possibly written at the church of Abergele, covering the period from the mid-­fifth century to 858, which probably began to be written in the late eighth century and derived some of its entries down to the later seventh century from a northern British source also used by the Historia Brittonum. A revised version of the Gwynedd chronicle was then inserted as an appendix to the Historia Brittonum in the third quarter of the ninth century. The other source consisted of a version of the annals of Clonmacnoise in Ireland, datable to 911 × 954, which supplied retrospective entries back to the mid-­fifth 25  DEB, cc. 12. 1–2, 25. 2–3, 26. 2–3. For repentance and redemption see O’Loughlin, Gildas and the Scriptures, 119–20. 26  DEB, cc. 14, 19. 1, 23. Cf. Merrills, History and Geography, 277–8, 288. 27  DEB, cc. 5–6. 28  On the title see Dumville, ‘Historia Brittonum’, 415–17. 29  Although blank annals continue to 977, it is likely that the Harleian annals were not continued after c.954: Phillimore, ‘The Annales Cambriae’, 144.

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BRITISH PASTS: THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES  23 century as well as other additions.30 It has also been argued that the Harleian genealogies incorporated several earlier genealogical texts, mostly datable to the ninth century, the most substantial of which was composed in Gwynedd 844 × 872 as an illustrative supplement to the Historia Brittonum.31 The Harleian collection thus witnesses to a varied and evolving body of his­tor­ic­al writing in Wales from the late eighth to the mid-­tenth century as well as to a deliberate effort, very probably in the third quarter of the ninth century during the reign of Rhodri Mawr (Rhodri the Great), king of Gwynedd (r. 844–78), to combine in a single compilation three different genres of texts concerned with the British and Welsh past. Indeed, it contains most of the extant pre-­Norman his­tor­ic­al texts written in Wales, the major exception being the continuation of the St Davids chronicle after 954.32 As all three texts originated independently of the collection, each merits individual scrutiny, beginning with the Harleian chronicle and genealogies before moving on to the Historia Brittonum.

The Harleian Chronicle It is likely that an important stimulus for writing the Gwynedd chronicle was the adoption in 768 by the Britons of Wales of the Roman method of calculating the date of Easter followed by the other churches of western Europe, a change ascribed to Elfoddw, termed ‘archbishop of Gwynedd’ in his obituary notice in 809.33 This brought the Britons of Wales into line with the other churches of Britain and Ireland, which had adopted the Roman Easter at various stages between the early seventh century and its acceptance by the monastery of Iona in  716.34 Three notices in the Gwynedd chronicle completed c.858, which was in­corp­or­ated in the Harleian chronicle, indicate the significance attached to paschal orthodoxy: the changing of Easter to a Sunday by Pope Leo the Great in 453; the first celebration of Easter ‘by the Saxons’ in 665 (thus following the Synod of Whitby the previous year); and Elfoddw’s changing of Easter ‘among the Britons’ in 768.35 In addition, the chronological framework of the Harleian chronicle, again deriving from the Gwynedd chronicle it incorporates, is based on the nineteen-­year Victorian and Dionysian paschal cycle favoured by supporters of

30 Kathleen Hughes, Celtic Britain, 68–73; Guy, ‘The Origins’, 27–45; Grabowski and Dumville, Chronicles and Annals, 207–26. 31 Guy, Medieval Welsh Genealogy, 51–79, esp. 76–9. 32  As explained above, Gildas’s location is uncertain. 33  Phillimore, ‘The Annales Cambriae’, 162, 163. 34  Charles-­Edwards, Early Christian Ireland, ch. 9, esp. 408–10. 35  Phillimore, ‘The Annales Cambriae’, 152–3, 158–9, 162; Dumville, Celtic Essays, 2: 25–33; Guy, ‘The Origins’, 38–9, 42.

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24  WRITING WELSH HISTORY the Roman Easter.36 As noted above, annals were also recorded con­tem­por­an­eous­ly at St Davids from the late eighth century, though how far this was due to the adoption of the Roman Easter is unclear. The Harleian chronicle indicates, then, that the earliest known Welsh chron­icles date from the late eighth century onwards, and thus considerably later than their Irish and English counterparts: the Chronicle of Ireland originated in the later sixth century at the Hebridean monastery of Iona, while annals were composed in Northumbria from the early eighth century and in Wessex quite possibly from the mid-­seventh century.37 This contrast may, of course, simply be an op­tic­al illusion resulting from the loss of sources. At the very least, though, it appears that any earlier chronicles kept at Welsh churches were not available to the compilers of the Harleian chronicle and its antecedent texts. On the other hand, the structure of the Harleian chronicle, very probably deriving from the Gwynedd chronicle interpolated into the Historia Brittonum, was modelled on that of late antique Easter tables and chronicles. This is suggested by the Harleian chronicle’s chronological framework, which consists of a sequence of 533 years from 445 to 977 based on the great 532-­year cycle of the nineteen-­year Easter cycle, as well as by the system of giving a number every ten years that is also used in Prosper of Aquitaine’s Epitoma Chronicon, a history of the world down to 455, and ultimately derived from the chronicle of Jerome (c.380), which in turn was a translation and adaption of the early fourth-­century chronicle of Eusebius.38 The Harleian chronicle conformed, then, to a well-­established type of western European historical writing.39 Its contents were also typical of early medieval chronicles elsewhere. To begin with, it is important to stress that through its use of Dionysiac reckoning the chronicle recorded the passing of time within a Christian framework designed to facilitate the correct calculation of the date of Easter and correlated with Christ’s incarnation.40 From this perspective, arguably the most significant aspect of the Harleian chronicle, as it survives from the tenth century, is that over 70 per cent of its annals are blank: that is, they only record the passing of a year (L. annus).41 The events which are recorded in the remaining annals thus make only fitful appearances in the text as a whole. They are also usually brief, mainly concern the religious and secular elites or plagues and unusual

36 Dumville, Celtic Essays, 2: 28–30; Guy, ‘The Origins’, 39–42 (which suggests that the framework may indicate that the Gwynedd chronicle, here attributed to Abergele, was intended as a continuation of the 445 edition of Prosper of Aquitaine’s Epitoma chronicon). 37  The Chronicle of Ireland, trans. Charles-­Edwards, 1: 8–9; Yorke, Kings and Kingdoms, 73, 128; Kenneth Harrison, ‘Early Wessex Annals’, 530. 38  Annales Cambriae, A.D. 682–954, ed. and trans. Dumville, xiii; Guy, ‘The Origins’, 39–42. 39  Cf. McCormick, Les annales. 40  Dionysius Exiguus’s influential Easter cycle, which commenced in 532, calculated years from the supposed date of the birth of Christ: McCormick, Les annales, 14–15, and see also 22–4. 41  The blank annals are included in Phillimore’s edition of HC. Cf. Foot, ‘Finding the Meaning of Form’, 95–6.

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BRITISH PASTS: THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES  25 natural phenomena, and range across the Insular world.42 While their geo­graph­ic­al scope partly reflects the assimilation of sources from northern Britain and Ireland, especially for the period down to the mid-­eighth century, these notices were evidently considered appropriate for inclusion in the chronicle and thus throw light on their authors’ assumptions about what merited inclusion in Welsh churches’ records of the past. Unsurprisingly, in view of the text’s clerical authorship, one prominent theme is the progress of Christianity and the history of individual churches, witnessed not only by annals concerning the adoption of the Roman Easter, already mentioned, but by obits of numerous Irish and British religious figures, including Brigit, Patrick, Columba, Gildas, and David, by references to the conversion of the English and the death of Bede, and by notices of destruction suffered by the church of St Davids.43 The world of secular politics also receives considerable cover­age, with annals recording conflicts among the Britons and their neighbours and the deaths of secular rulers in the kingdoms not only of the Britons but also of the English, Irish, Picts, and, in one case, the Franks.44 The occasional appearance of terms in Old Welsh suggests that some of these entries derive from ma­ter­ ial transmitted in the vernacular, notably the use of gueit(h) or, in two instances, cat, rather than the more frequently used Latin bellum, for a ‘battle’, followed by an Old Welsh place-­name—as in ‘Gueith Cam lann (‘the battle of Camlan’), in which Arthur and Medrawd were killed’.45 Another example is the notice of Gueit Conguoy (‘the battle of Conwy’), followed by an explanatory phrase that uses another Welsh term to present this in terms of a feud: Digal Rotri a Deo (‘God’s revenge for Rhodri’).46 The appearance of such Welsh phrases, together with the frequent use of Welsh forms of proper nouns, not only show that the compilers of the Harleian chronicle were able to write in the vernacular as well as Latin but may also imply that they were open to the historical culture fostered by the native learned classes.

The Harleian Genealogies The genealogies in the Harleian collection provide further evidence of an interest in the history of royal dynasties, though both their purpose and their geo­graph­ ic­al horizons were narrower than those of the Harleian chronicle or the Historia

42  Plagues: HC, s.aa. 537, 547, 682, 683. Other natural phenomena: HC, s.aa. 624, 650, 676, 684, 689, 714, 721, 812, 814. 43  HC, s.aa. 454, 457, 562, 595, 601, 735, 810, 906. 44  E.g. HC, s.aa. 607, 617, 644, 714, 736, 887. 45  HC, s.a. 537. Examples of cat: HC, s.aa. 722, 869. 46  HC, s.a. 880. Other annals using gueith as the only word for ‘battle’: HC, s.aa. 613, 630, 722, 817, 848, 873, 876, 906, 921; and for its use as a gloss on bellum, HC, s.aa. 750, 760.

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26  WRITING WELSH HISTORY Brittonum, being designed to furnish political legitimacy for British dynasties in northern Britain and, above all, Wales.47 The genealogical collection, parts of which very probably derived from a ninth-­ century ‘Gwynedd collection of ge­neal­ogies’, reached its present form c.954 and contains thirty-­two pedigrees.48 These consist of lists of varying length that go backwards from the subject to his ancestors; the names are mostly written in Old Welsh orthography and linked by the patronymic map (‘son [of]’), although some of the pedigrees add explanatory glosses, usually in Latin. Gerald of Wales observed that Welsh poets recorded and memorized genealogies in the twelfth century (see Chapter 3), and these may well have played an important role in the compilation and transmission of pedigrees in the pre-­Norman period. However, like the other texts in the Harleian collection, the genealogies in their extant form were almost certainly written by clerics, who must have collaborated with poets who, as in early medieval Ireland, may themselves have been experts in native learning.49 This was surely the case with respect to passages in Latin that aimed to synchronize dynastic figures with episodes in Christian history. Thus, the first pedigree traces Owain ap Hywel (d. 988) through his paternal ancestors in the dynasty of Gwynedd back to Amalech ‘the son of Beli the Great and Anna his mother, whom they say was the cousin of the Virgin Mary, mother of Our Lord Jesus Christ’, and the second traces him through his maternal ancestors in Dyfed to Constantine the Great and Helen, who ‘departed from Britain to seek the cross of Christ as far as Jerusalem, and brought it with her from there to Constantinople, and it is there until the present day’.50 Likewise the pedigree of Rhun ap Neithon includes a lengthy list of Roman emperors, which inserts references to the persecution of the Christians by the Emperor Diocletian, including the martyrs Alban, Julius, and Aaron in Britain, as well as to the martyrdom of the apostles Peter and Paul under Nero and the birth and passion of Christ.51 The pedigrees of the Dyfed kings and of Rhun ap Neithon are among the few in the Harleian genealogies that sought to legitimate dynasties by endowing them with Roman ancestry. A further instance of this in the Dyfed genealogy is the inclusion of Macsim Guletic (Mod. W. Macsen Wledig, ‘the ruler Macsen’), who is

47  The geographical affiliations of 11 of the 31 pedigrees in the Harleian genealogies were probably connected with Strathclyde, the Isle of Man, and the ‘Old North’, the rest with kingdoms in Wales: Guy, Medieval Welsh Genealogy, 60–3. 48  See n. 31 above. Since the version of the story of the conquest of Gwynedd by Cunedda and his sons at the end of the Harleian genealogies appears to treat the two dynasties descended from Cunedda (the Maelgyning descended from Maelgwn Gwynedd and the lineage of Rhos) as more or less equal, it is possible that the ‘Gwynedd collection’ drew on an earlier text composed in the late eighth or early ninth century, when the two dynasties probably shared the kingship of Gwynedd, and thus before the taking of the kingdom by Merfyn Frych: cf. Charles-­Edwards, Wales, 180–1, 333, 359–62, 476–7; for Merfyn see also the discussion of the Historia Brittonum below. 49  Cf. Ó Corráin, ‘Creating the Past’, esp. 187–9. 50  HG 1–2. 51  HG 16.

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BRITISH PASTS: THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES  27 also named as the progenitor of the dynasty of the Isle of Man.52 The inclusion of Macsen reflected the legends that developed around Magnus Maximus, the Spaniard who was proclaimed emperor in Britain in 383 and, after invading Gaul and then Italy, was executed near Aquilea in 388.53 Gildas presented Maximus as a tyrannical usurper from Britain who left the island prey to foreign invasion after removing all its troops in his bid for imperial power.54 The more positive view of Maximus implied by the genealogies is closer, however, to the version of the story in the Historia Brittonum, which, while agreeing that the removal of troops had left Britain defenceless, lacks any explicit condemnation of Maximianus (as he is called there) but rather stresses his power, stating that he had ‘killed Gratian, king of the Romans, and held the empire of all Europe’ before establishing the British colony in Armorica (Brittany).55 However, most of the Harleian genealogies lack any reference to Roman emperors and instead trace the descent of dynasties from British ancestors, a preference in line with the widely attested notion of the Britons as the oldest people of Britain who had formerly enjoyed sovereignty over the whole island. Thus the legendary Beli Mawr (Beli the Great) is named as the ultimate ancestor of the dynasties of both northern Britain (the ‘Old North’) and Gwynedd,56 though these are differentiated by emphasizing their descent from more proximate ancestors, namely Coel Hen (Coel the Old) for most of the northern British dynasties and Cunedda for that of Gwynedd and other ter­ri­tor­ ies in north and west Wales which were conceived as its dependencies.57

The Historia Brittonum The origins of the Britons and the history of their rulers in the post-­Roman period are central preoccupations of the Historia Brittonum, the longest and most ambitious of the texts contained in the Harleian collection.58 Different versions of this survive in about thirty-­five medieval manuscripts;59 the discussion here will 52  HG 2, 4. 53  Dumville, ‘Sub-­Roman Britain’, 179–81; Breudwyt Maxen Wledic, ed. Roberts, xliii–lii. 54  DEB, c. 13. 55  HB, c. 27. The Manx pedigree (HG 4) refers to the killing of Gratian in the same words as the Historia Brittonum. Similarly the inscription, only parts of which are now extant in early modern transcripts, on the ninth-­century Pillar of Eliseg near Llangollen erected by Cyngen (d. 854), king of Powys, refers to ‘Maximus the king, who killed the king of the Romans’: Nancy Edwards, A Corpus, 322–36, text and translation at 325–6; Charles-­Edwards, Wales, 447–51. 56 HG 1, 10; Trioedd Ynys Prydein, ed. and trans. Bromwich, 281–3. Cf. Rebecca Thomas, ‘Remembering the “Old North” ’. 57  Coel Hen: HG 8–12, 19. Cunedda: HG 1, 3, 17–18, 26, 32–3; HB, c. 62; Charles-­Edwards, Wales, 180–1, 328–9, 360–2. Two of the northern dynasties are said to be descended from Dyfnwal Hen: HG 6–7. 58  Dumville, ‘The Historical Value’; Dumville, ‘Historia Brittonum’; Charles-­Edwards, Wales, 437–52. 59  Dumville, ‘ “Nennius” and the Historia Brittonum’, 78. Manuscripts described in Dumville, ‘The Textual History’, 1: 124–50; 2: 301–5, 352–72, 510–86, 593–601.

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28  WRITING WELSH HISTORY focus on the Harleian recension, the version closest to the original work composed in 829/30. The contents of the Historia Brittonum may be summarized as follows.60 After briefly describing the ages of the world and the island of Britain, the text relates origin legends for the Britons, Picts, and Irish. It then continues the narrative through Roman Britain to the arrival of the English and their acquisition of kingdoms at the expense of the Britons, led by Gwrtheyrn (Vortigern), whose sins led to his condemnation and pursuit by St Germanus and his eventual death. The hagiographical theme is continued by a summary of the Life of St Patrick, after which the focus shifts back to the increasing power of the English, its temporary arrest by King Arthur, and the history of English dynasties and their relations with the Britons, especially in northern Britain, down to the Picts’ defeat of King Ecgfrith of Northumbria at the battle of Nechtansmere in 685. The final sections of the work return to descriptions of the island, with a list of its twenty-­eight ciuitates and a series of marvels and miracles, mainly located in Wales and its borders with England but including two in Ireland. Internal evidence in the text shows that the work was written by a scholarly cleric with access to a diverse range of sources. The case for dating it to 829/30 rests on a passage which calculates the period that had elapsed from the arrival of the Saxons in Britain down to ‘the fourth year of King Merfyn’ (Merfyn Frych, king of Gwynedd, r. 825–44), presumably referring to the time of writing.61 This also indicates that the text was composed in Gwynedd. Whether the author can be identified more precisely is a matter of debate. A prologue extant only in manu­scripts of the mid-­eleventh-­century ‘Nennian recension’ names the author as Ninnius (rendered Nennius and Nemnius later in the text) and a pupil of Elfoddw, almost certainly the ‘archbishop of Gwynedd’ whose death in 809 is recorded in the Harleian chronicle.62 The association with Elfoddw is chrono­ logic­al­ly plausible, as is the similarity of the author’s name with a Nemniuus stated in a Welsh manuscript written in 817 to have composed a Welsh adaptation of the Old English runic alphabet; moreover, the latter text bears some striking verbal similarities with the prologue in the ‘Nennian recension’. However, differing interpretations of the work’s textual history have resulted in disagreement as to whether that prologue formed an authentic part of the original version of the Historia Brittonum composed in 829/30, or was rather a later interpolation introduced in the ‘Nennian recension’.63 The prologue also explains the author’s purpose, namely as an attempt to remedy previous neglect by writing down ‘some extracts that the stupidity of the ­people of 60  Fuller summary in Charles-­Edwards, Wales, 438–45. 61  HB, c. 16. 62  HC, s.a. 809. 63  Dumville, ‘ “Nennius” and the Historia Brittonum’; Guy, ‘The Origins’, 47–53.

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BRITISH PASTS: THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES  29 Britain cast out; for the scholars of this island of Britain had no wisdom, nor did they set down any records in books’. The author had therefore gathered together all he could find from various Roman, patristic, Irish, and English written sources ‘and from the tradition of our elders’.64 Even if it was a retrospective invention, the prologue raises important questions about the sources available to the author of the Historia Brittonum as well as his aims and methods. How far his reliance on non-­Brittonic sources reflected the paucity of Brittonic sources available to him, as the prologue suggests, can only be guessed. The latter certainly included Gildas, as we shall see. The author was also receptive to the wider his­tor­ic­al culture in the vernacular transmitted by the native learned classes, both orally and quite possibly also in writing: thus he probably derived his account of the battles of King Arthur—the first reference to this figure in medieval Wales—from a Welsh poem and later listed Brittonic poets, including Aneirin and Taliesin, whom he synchronized with rulers of the sixth century.65 Nevertheless, he clearly considered Brittonic sources insufficient for his task, and was ready to use a diverse range of texts in order to construct a work that conformed to conventions of Latin history writing in his day. His access to English sources, in particular, implies connections with churches in England that may have been facilitated by Elfoddw’s adoption of the Roman Easter in 768.66 The reliance on a range of Insular texts in turn implies an assumption that history writing should be based primarily on written sources, even if attributions of origin legends to ‘the traditions of the elders’ and ‘the most learned of the Irish’ suggest mediation by authoritative individuals.67 In common with other early medieval historians, the author confronted the challenge of harmonizing different chronological frameworks and accounts from different sources; more spe­cif­ic­al­ly, he has been seen as attempting to synchronize the disparate materials at his disposal in a manner comparable to synthesizing historians in early medieval Ireland.68 Though his success in this respect was limited, the ambition that underpinned his efforts is notable. So too is his readiness to record conflicting in­ter­pret­ations. Particularly striking is the citing of a ‘twofold explanation’ of the origin legend of the settlement of Britain by Britto or Brutus. The first of these

64  Full text of prologue in Dumville, ‘ “Nennius” and the Historia Brittonum’, 79–80; translation partly adapted from Guy, ‘The Origins’, 50. The work is more coherent than this description implies through its use of thematic parallels, including the foreshadowing of one event by another: Sims-­Williams, ‘The Death of Urien’, 35–7. 65  HB, cc. 56, 62; cf. Dumville, ‘The Historical Value’, 13, 16–19. 66 Dumville, ‘The Historical Value’, 24. Connections may have been similarly facilitated with churches in Ireland, all of which had adopted the Roman Easter by 716: cf. Charles-­Edwards, Early Christian Ireland, 408–10. 67  HB, c. 15. For authoritative human witnesses see Kempshall, Rhetoric, 218–19, 284–5. 68  Dumville, ‘The Historical Value’, 5–7; Dumville, ‘Historia Brittonum’, 419–25, 432.

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30  WRITING WELSH HISTORY was attributed to unidentified Annales Romanorum (‘Annals of the Romans’), and made Britto a descendant of Aeneas who had fled to Italy after the Trojan War; the second, introduced as a digression and said to come ‘from the old books of our elders’ (and ultimately derived from the early sixth-­century Frankish ‘Table of Nations’), proposed a descent from Japhet son of Noah via Alanus, portrayed as the ancestor of all European peoples; that in turn is followed by a different genealogy for Brutus that sought to reconcile the two previous accounts by combining a classical and biblical pedigree traced back through Aeneas and thence to his purported great-­grandfather Japhet.69 The author later observed: ‘In the ancient trad­ition of our elders there were seven emperors of the Romans in Britain; however, the Romans say there were nine.’70 Likewise, after attributing his account of the conflict between St Germanus and the British ruler Gwrtheyrn (Vortigern) to a Liber Beati Germani (‘Book of the Blessed Germanus’), he noted that ‘others say differently’, and proceeded to give two alternative accounts of Vortigern’s end.71 The author may also reveal an awareness of the special status given to eyewitness testimony by classical and early medieval writers in explicitly claiming to have seen two of the marvels described at the end of the work.72 How did the Historia Brittonum view the past and what does this imply about its purpose? One striking characteristic is its focus on the ancient past. Origins— of peoples, kingdoms, and conversion to Christianity—formed one central pre­ occu­pa­tion: a widespread preoccupation among medieval historians that would dominate much Welsh history writing over the following millennium.73 Above all, the work focused on major political changes in Britain from the fifth to the later seventh century and thus to a point about 150 years before it was composed.74 Therefore, though written in Gwynedd by an author familiar with other Welsh kingdoms, it was clearly intended to be much more than a history of the Britons in Wales. Rather, the significance of the work lies precisely in its premise that the history that mattered embraced the island of Britain as a whole (as well as, to some extent, Ireland and, briefly, Brittany) and should privilege the Britons as its original inhabitants. These are presented not only as the earliest occupants of Britain—whose name, like theirs, derived from the first settler, Brutus (or Britto), who had arrived in the third age of the world—but as having ‘formerly filled’ the

69  HB, cc. 10, 17–18; detailed discussion in Rebecca Thomas, History and Identity, 89–103. See also Dumville, ‘Historia Brittonum’, 408–10; Waswo, ‘Our Ancestors, the Trojans’, 274–7; Charles-­Edwards, Wales, 438, 441; Wadden, ‘The Frankish Table of Nations’, esp. 3–7. 70  HB, c. 27; Rebecca Thomas, History and Identity, 112–14. 71  HB, cc. 47–8. 72  HB, cc. 72, 73. For the superiority of eyewitness testimony see Kempshall, Rhetoric, 51, 63, 123 (quoting the influential view of Isidore, Etymologiae, I.xli.1), 183–7. 73  Cf. Sims-­Williams, ‘Some Functions of Origin Stories’; Goetz, ‘The “Methodology” of Medieval Chronicles’, 28. 74  Charles-­Edwards, Wales, 438. However, as well as the reference to Merfyn Frych, the text contains a few allusions to individuals in England down to c.800: Dumville, ‘Historia Brittonum’, 434, n. 182.

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BRITISH PASTS: THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES  31 island and ‘ruled it from sea to sea’.75 However, they failed to maintain this exclusive possession owing to conquests, in the fourth age, by the Picts and Irish, eventually followed by the English. The history of the Britons was thus inextricably linked to that of the other peoples who had subsequently settled in Britain. Moreover, since the author held that the English, specifically, had ‘occupied Britain, not by their own strength, but by the will of God’, against which it was futile to resist,76 the work implied that their rule was legitimate (as was also, presumably, that of the Irish in Dál Riata and the Picts). True, an earlier passage seems more equivocal. This explains that the Emperor Maximianus had taken British soldiers to the Continent to support his bid for imperial power and then settled them in Brittany, whence they had never returned to Britain. ‘Because of this, Britain has been occupied by foreign peoples and the citizens (cives) have been expelled, until God will have given them help.’77 Yet one implication of making any future change contingent on divine aid was that, in the meantime, the present state of Britain enjoyed God’s approval.78 It appears, then, that the Historia Brittonum accepted that other peoples shared the island of Britain with the Britons who had been its original inhabitants and rulers, and thus com­mem­or­ated a decisive period in the definition of territorial boundaries between the Britons and the English. The author aimed, then, to record, and thereby appropriate, a Brittonic inheritance that had extended over much of northern Britain as well as including kingdoms in what became Wales. We can only speculate about his reasons for writing, and especially about why he did so when he did. Clearly the author believed that the distant past he commemorated was relevant to the present. This was partly because past and present were linked in an overarching framework of sacred universal history that continued to the author’s own time, a point encapsulated in the statement that the ‘miracle’ of two waves of the Severn Bore fighting each other had occurred ‘from the beginning of the world to the present day’.79 More spe­cif­ ic­al­ly, though, the past held the key to understanding the position of the Britons and their neighbours in the early ninth century: the settlements of peoples in different parts of Britain, as well as in Ireland and Brittany, were said to have lasted ‘until today’, as did a great monastery founded by St Germanus.80 This may have been all the more salient for a writer in what, by the early ninth century, was the most powerful of the remaining British kingdoms, which had recently been subject to a new ruler, Merfyn Frych, very likely an intruder from a British dynasty on the Isle of Man who had legitimated his position in Gwynedd through a maternal or marital connection with its previous line of kings.81 True, it is difficult to see the Historia Brittonum as propaganda primarily intended to glorify 75  HB, c. 9. See also c. 10. 76  HB, c. 45. 77  HB, c. 27. 78  Cf. Dumville, ‘Historia Brittonum’, 414. 79  HB, c. 68. See also Dumville, ‘Historia Brittonum’, 411–12. 80  HB, cc. 10, 12, 13, 14, 27, 48. 81  Sims-­Williams, ‘Historical Need’, 11–20; Charles-­Edwards, Wales, 467–79.

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32  WRITING WELSH HISTORY Merfyn and his dynasty. The legitimacy of several other British kingdoms in Wales is taken for granted, and Merfyn makes only a fleeting appearance.82 On the other hand, the accession of a king connected to another British dynasty, and who was, moreover, a patron of scholars, may have provided an impetus for the composition of a scholarly work devoted to the history of the Britons.83 More specifically, Merfyn’s Manx origin may have helped to stimulate the author’s interest in the ‘Old North’, as its location in the Irish Sea made the Isle of Man ‘crucial for the continuing links between the Britons of the north and those of Wales’.84 Two other aspects of the text may also have been of particular interest to Merfyn and his court. One is its material on earlier rulers of Gwynedd who claimed descent from the sixth-­century king, Maelgwn, especially those who fought the Northumbrian kings in the earlier seventh century, since these rulers appear via his mother among Merfyn’s ancestors in the Harleian genealogies, which thus took pains to connect Merfyn with previous kings of Gwynedd.85 On the other hand, an origin legend for the kingdom of Gwynedd relating how Cunedda and his sons came from Manaw Gododdin (the region around Falkirk) and expelled the Irish could have been seen as a legitimizing precedent for the arrival of Merfyn from another Manaw, namely the Isle of Man, even if it is unlikely to have been concocted by the author of the Historia Brittonum especially on the king’s behalf.86 Irrespective of the precise motives for its composition, the work largely portrays the Britons in a positive light, and one of its aims has been described as providing an apologia pro gente sua.87 This is clear when the Historia Brittonum is compared with the earlier works of Gildas and Bede. The author was indebted for central elements of his view of the past to Gildas, whose De Excidio he evidently knew, quite possibly at first hand rather than through the extensive excerpts in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History (731).88 This is particularly true of the focus on the Roman conquest of Britain and the subsequent invasions of the Irish, Picts, and English, together with the Britons’ responses to these events. Yet there are obvious differences in form and tone. Although, like the De Excidio, the Historia Brittonum held that God ‘rules and governs all peoples himself ’, and that the English conquests resulted from the workings of divine providence,89 unlike the earlier work it did not attribute the Britons’ territorial losses to the sins of the secular and ecclesiastical elites or call upon the latter to repent for their sins. Instead, God’s will appears inscrutable, and British sinfulness was deflected on to one leader,

82  HB, cc. 35 (Powys), 48–9 (Buellt and Gwrtheyrnion), 61–2, 64–5 (Gwynedd). 83  Nora K. Chadwick, ‘Early Culture and Learning’, 93–110. 84  Charles-­Edwards, Wales, 14. 85  HB, cc. 61, 62, 64–5; HG 1. 86  Dumville, ‘Sub-­Roman Britain’, 182; Charles-­Edwards, Wales, 4–6, 180–1; Guy, Medieval Welsh Genealogy, 72–6. 87  Charles-­Edwards, Wales, 447. 88  Dumville, ‘Historia Brittonum’, 432–3. 89  HB, c. 45.

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BRITISH PASTS: THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES  33 Vortigern, based on the ‘proud tyrant’ whom Gildas had accused of inviting the Saxons to Britain.90 This also meant a rejection of Bede, who had explicitly followed Gildas and cited the refusal of the Britons to preach Christianity to the Anglo-­Saxons, and to adopt the Roman Easter, as further evidence of their sinfulness.91 The Historia Brittonum may therefore be seen as offering an alternative perspective on British history not only to Gildas but also, more especially, to that of Bede. Indeed, it has been aptly suggested that ‘[t]he Historia Brittonum reads almost like a reply to Bede’.92 Most famously, whereas Bede states that King Edwin of Northumbria and his followers had been converted by the Roman missionary Paulinus, the Historia Brittonum attributes his conversion to a British bishop, Rhun son of Urien, ruler of the northern kingdom of Rheged (possibly situated around Carlisle).93 The account of St Patrick’s missionary work in Ireland, not known to Bede, further demonstrated the Britons’ role in the conversion of other peoples.94 If the De Excidio, followed by Bede, accused the Britons of being woefully defective Christians, the Historia Brittonum emphasized the antiquity of their Christian credentials. It was their king, Lucius, who had initiated their conversion ‘167 years after the coming of Christ’, while their faith contrasted with the paganism of the invading Saxons: the god from whom Hengist and Horsa claimed to be descended was ‘not the God of gods . . . but one of their idols’, while in one of his battles King Arthur, bearing an image of the Virgin Mary, drove ‘the pagans’ to flight in ‘a great massacre through the power of our Lord Jesus Christ and through the power of the holy Virgin Mary his mother’.95 The Historia Brittonum further demonstrates, then, that the origins of what became Welsh history writing are to be found in attempts to explain the past of Britain and the Britons, although its portrait of the latter was considerably more flattering than that drawn by Gildas. As its textual history demonstrates, the Historia Brittonum also circulated more widely than the De Excidio, which remained a rare work in the Middle Ages,96 and continued to evolve until the early thirteenth century. As we have seen, the original version of 829/30 was augmented in the later ninth century by the insertion of the chronicle and ge­neal­ ogies, which were subsequently expanded after it was transmitted from Gwynedd to south-­west Wales by c.954; this in turn was copied c.1100 in Harleian 3859, the earliest surviving manuscript containing the Harleian recension.97 In addition, a revised version is attested in Gwynedd in 912. It is uncertain whether that was transmitted together with the chronicle and genealogies to which it had become 90  Charles-­Edwards, Wales, 447. 91  HE, I. 22, II. 2, V. 23. 92  Sims-­Williams, ‘Some Functions of Origin Stories’, 117. 93  HB, c. 63; HE, II. 9. For Rheged see Charles-­Edwards, Wales, 10–12. 94  HB, cc. 50–5. 95  HB, cc. 22, 31, 56. The conversion of Kent by missionaries sent by Pope Gregory is mentioned in HB, c. 63. 96  Chronica Minora, ed. Mommsen, [2], 13–15, 21–4; Dumville, ‘Historia Brittonum’, 416–17. 97  The text may have already reached St Davids by the late ninth century as it was probably used by Asser in his Life of King Alfred (893): cf. Alfred the Great, trans. Keynes and Lapidge, 54, 229, 232.

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34  WRITING WELSH HISTORY attached, but three later versions attest to its transmission as an independent text: the ‘Vatican recension’, made in England in 944, the ‘Chartres recension’, probably composed in tenth-­century Brittany, and the ‘Nennian recension’, datable to the mid-­eleventh century and known principally through an Irish translation (Lebor Bretnach), which may well have been produced in Scotland, perhaps at Abernethy, though a north Welsh provenance has also been suggested.98 The dynamic nature of the work’s transmission is illustrated by the Nennian recension’s preference for the biblical origin of Britto, which it places before a brief reference to the alternative account of the Trojan Brutus prioritized in the Harleian recension.99 Moreover, the text continued to influence historical writing thereafter, both in Britain and Ireland and on the Continent, mainly through a widely copied Anglo-­ Norman version of the Harleian recension of c.1100 wrongly ascribed to Gildas— an ascription that helped to fuel historiographical debate in the sixteenth century (see Chapter  5).100 In addition, a composite version comprising a text of the Gildasian recension heavily glossed with material taken from the Nennian recension and other sources was produced between 1164 and 1214 at the Cistercian abbey of Sawley, Lancashire.101 However, though copied until the end of the Middle Ages, from the mid-­twelfth century, in Wales as elsewhere, the Historia Brittonum lost its authoritative status as an account of the early history of the Britons to a much fuller and more coherent narrative which it helped to inform: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (‘History of the Kings of Britain’) or De Gestis Britonum (‘On the Deeds of the Britons’), completed c.1138. This was by far the most influential of the Welsh historical works composed during the two centuries down to the Edwardian conquest, although it was not alone in continuing and adapting the legacy of pre-­Norman texts, as we shall see in Chapter 3.

98 Dumville, ‘ “Nennius” and the Historia Brittonum’, 86–9, 93; Clancy, ‘Scotland’; Guy, ‘The Origins’, 45–50; Wadden, ‘The Frankish Table of Nations’, 7–12. 99  Dumville, ‘Historia Brittonum’, 410; Wadden, ‘The Frankish Table of Nations’, 11. 100  Dumville, ‘Historical Value’, 20; Guy, ‘The Origins’, 45. 101  Dumville, ‘Celtic-­Latin Texts’.

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3 Saints, Kings, and Princes Welsh Pasts in an Age of Conquest, c.1070–1282

In the period from the earliest Norman incursions of the late eleventh century to Edward I’s conquest of Wales in 1282, Welsh history writing expanded greatly in both quantity and scope. However, its assumptions and approach largely built on the legacy of the early Middle Ages. On the one hand, Geoffrey of Monmouth was the most conspicuous example of an enduring preoccupation with the distant Brittonic past; on the other, chronicles continued to narrate recent and contemporary events. In both cases, two broad phases may be distinguished, extending respectively from the late eleventh to the mid-­twelfth century and from then down to the Edwardian conquest. In the first phase a burst of writing about the British and Welsh past coincided with, and to a considerable extent responded to, the conquest of substantial areas of Wales by the Normans and their allies. Unlike earlier conquests by the Irish in the post-­Roman period and the English in north-­ east Wales in the ninth and tenth centuries,1 the conquests from the late eleventh century onwards, though fluctuating in their extent, led to the enduring settlement of people from England, northern France, and Flanders which ensured that, henceforth, Wales would be a land of plural cultures. Conquest also stimulated changes in the Church, notably the definition of territorial dioceses and the introduction of Benedictine monasticism, including reformed religious orders of continental origin. These changes had a significant impact on history writing. Not only did narratives of contemporary events have to take account of a new intrusive presence on an already fragmented political scene, but ecclesiastical reorganization led both Welsh and Norman clergy to take an interest in the history of Welsh churches and their saints. More generally, conquest stimulated attempts— in England as well as Wales—to conserve and elaborate pre-­Norman accounts of the Britons in the era down to their loss of most of the island to the Anglo-­Saxons, a subject whose potential was seized upon with astounding success by Geoffrey of Monmouth. His work was a crucial influence on Welsh history writing in the second phase, from the mid-­twelfth century to 1282. However, another stimulus was provided by the exploits of the most powerful Welsh rulers, patrons of a network of Cistercian monasteries which became the main centres of history writing from 1  Wendy Davies, Wales in the Early Middle Ages, 87–9; Wendy Davies, Patterns of Power, 69–73; Charles-­Edwards, Wales, 174–81.

Writing Welsh History: From the Early Middle Ages to the Twenty-­First Century. Huw Pryce, Oxford University Press. © Huw Pryce 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198746034.003.0004

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36  WRITING WELSH HISTORY the late twelfth century onwards. The same period also saw the construction of historical narratives from the perspective of settlers of Anglo-­French origin in the March of Wales. In addition, the often turbulent relations between the Welsh, the marcher lords, and the English crown left their mark on the increasing number of historical works written in England from the Anglo-­Norman period onwards, which take a greater interest in Wales than had their Anglo-­Saxon predecessors. One aspect of this is the recording of miracles and wonders said to have occurred in Wales.2 More typical was coverage of military and political affairs, such as royal campaigns in Wales and diplomatic relations with Welsh rulers, but extending, for example, to detailed accounts of the Welsh risings early in King Stephen’s reign and of political developments in mid-­ thirteenth-­ century Gwynedd, news of which was probably passed to Matthew Paris by the bishop of Bangor on visits to St Albans.3 Though Paris showed sympathy for the Welsh, even commending their exemplary readiness to fight ‘in the fashion of the Trojans from whom they were descended for their ancient laws and liberties’,4 many English historians were hostile. Indeed, one influential view, increasingly evident from the mid-­ twelfth century onwards, held that the Welsh were barbarians.5 The following discussion begins with works that focused on the distant past, namely saints’ Lives and related texts, followed by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s pseudo-­history of the kings of Britain and its reception in Wales. Attention then turns to accounts of recent and contemporary history in which Welsh rulers were central actors, namely the Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan and Welsh chronicles, and also touches briefly on marcher chronicle writing.

British Pasts The warm welcome extended to Geoffrey of Monmouth in Wales reflected a continuing sense of the Welsh as descendants of the Britons that is widely attested in this period. Gerald of Wales thought it remarkable that, during the late twelfth-­ century resurgence in Welsh princely power, ‘the whole people’ believed that the prophecies of Merlin would be fulfilled and ‘the Britons will exult in their old

2  For examples in Ralph of Coggeshall’s Chronicon Anglicanum see Elizabeth Freeman, Narratives of a New Order, 191, 194. 3  A. D. Carr, ‘Anglo-­Welsh Relations’; Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century, 83–4; Gesta Stephani, cc. 8–11, ed. and trans. Potter, revd. Davis, 14–23; Gwyn  A.  Williams, ‘The Succession to Gwynedd’, esp. 406. 4 Carpenter, The Struggle for Mastery, 17–18 (quotation), 21. 5 Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century, 7–18, 26–9. For a different emphasis, focused on Anglo-­Norman historians’ treatment of Roman and post-­Roman Britain, see Winkler, ‘William of Malmesbury and the Britons’.

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WELSH PASTS IN AN AGE OF CONQUEST, c.1070–1282  37 name and fortune in the island’.6 Court poetry in praise or memory of Welsh princes evoked both the struggles between the Britons and English in the post-­ Roman era and more recent events in Wales as well as elements of the historical mythology summarized in the index of bardic learning known as The Triads of the Island of Britain (W. Trioedd Ynys Prydain).7 This is consistent with the evidence of later medieval bardic grammars, which declare that poets were required to master not only early poetry (W.  hengerdd), including works attributed to Aneirin and Taliesin that focused on sixth-­century northern Britain, and poetic art (W. barddoniaeth), but also ‘stories’ (W. ystoryaeu; sing.: ystorya), a term which probably encompassed the Britain-­centred Welsh historical mythology, and perhaps especially ‘the History of the notable Acts of the kings & princes of this land of Bruttaen and Cambria’, listed in early modern texts as one of the ‘three memories’ of poets.8 In addition, poets and reciters memorized genealogies which were not only transmitted orally but preserved in books in Welsh according to Gerald of Wales (he also noted that ‘even the lowliest of the people have regard for their genealogy’, being able to recite their pedigrees back for six or seven generations, or even further).9 On the other hand, there is no evidence for the production of verse histories in the vernacular comparable, for example, to the French-­language works of Wace and Benoît de Sainte-­Maure in the twelfth century.10 Welsh poets thus cultivated a broader historical culture and political myth­ ology comprising a repertoire of people, places, and events that evoked the past of the Welsh and their Brittonic ancestors.11 However, that culture and mythology could accommodate different emphases. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it was deployed on the one hand by poets in courtly contexts, whether as a rhet­ oric­al tool for praising princes or through singing ‘The Sovereignty of Britain’ (W. Unbeiniaeth Prydain) before a princely war band; and on the other as a means of legitimizing the liberties (W. breintiau, sing. braint) which leading kin groups in the regions of Powys and Arfon, faced with intrusive princely power, claimed to have been bestowed on their ancestors as rewards for heroic military service during struggles between kingdoms in Britain over half a millennium earlier.12 In addition, lawyers in thirteenth-­century Gwynedd, some of whom were related to poets, sought to give added historical depth to Welsh law by including stories 6  DK, II. 7. 7  Trioedd Ynys Prydein, ed. and trans. Bromwich. Examples in the poetry in Bromwich, ‘Cyfeiriadau Traddodiadol’; Andrews and Stephenson, ‘Draig Argoed: Iorwerth Goch ap Maredudd’, esp. 77–89; Gruffydd Aled Williams, ‘Welsh Raiding’. 8  Gramadegau’r Penceirddiaid, ed. Williams and Jones, xlii, 37; G.  J.  Williams, ‘Tri Chof Ynys Brydain’, quotation at 235; Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Ystoria’. 9  DK, I. 3, 17; Guy, ‘Gerald and Welsh Genealogical Learning’. 10  Cf. Ainsworth, ‘Legendary History’, esp. 403–12. 11  For comparison of the court poetry and historical writing of this period see McKenna, ‘Court Poetry’. 12  Dafydd Jenkins, ‘Bardd Teulu’, 149–50; Charles-­Edwards and Jones, ‘Breintiau Gwŷr Powys’; J. Beverley Smith, ‘Gwlad ac Arglwydd’, 251–2; Morfydd E. Owen, ‘Royal Propaganda’, 238–45.

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38  WRITING WELSH HISTORY about the sixth-­century king Maelgwn Gwynedd and by drawing on Geoffrey of Monmouth or his sources to assert that Welsh law, attributed to a royal reform by Hywel Dda, had in turn superseded the first laws established in Britain by its king Dyfnwal Moelmud (Geoffrey’s Dunuallo Moelmutius).13

Sacred Histories: Hagiography and Ecclesiastical Politics The late eleventh and twelfth centuries witnessed an efflorescence of writing about the early Church in Wales, focused above all on saints.14 This celebration of a sacred past reinforced a fundamental assumption, attested from Gildas onwards, that one defining characteristic of the Britons and their Welsh successors was their long-­established adherence to Christianity, originating in the Roman period but consolidated, mainly in the sixth century, by the foundation of churches by holy men (and occasionally women) who came to be regarded as saints. Saints thus provided a powerful focus for the notion that Welsh history was Christian history, a notion that continued to be influential until the nineteenth century. Some saints may have been the subject of Latin Lives from at least the eighth century, and it has been argued that ‘hagiography was widespread in Wales by ca800’ on the grounds that the Historia Brittonum drew on Lives of St Patrick and St Germanus, and also recorded a miracle involving St Illtud.15 It may be, too, that some of the extant complete Lives drew on earlier texts that have since been lost. Nevertheless, the Lives composed in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries marked a new beginning that formed part of a revival of saints’ cults linked to  ecclesiastical reorganization which resulted from Norman conquest and dom­in­ation in Wales. In particular, through providing narratives of those regarded as the founders of churches the sacred biographies discussed here sought to endow the ecclesiastical communities for whom they were written with the prestige and authority of an ancient Christian past. It is likely, moreover, that the stories recorded in such Latin texts as well as in twelfth-­century

13  Morfydd E. Owen, ‘Royal Propaganda’, 229–38. 14 Saints’ Lives are listed with references to manuscripts, editions, and studies in Lapidge and Sharpe, A Bibliography, 14–17, 33–8. See also John Reuben Davies, ‘The Saints of South Wales’, esp. 370–91; John Reuben Davies, ‘Cathedrals and the Cult of Saints’; John Reuben Davies, ‘The Cult of Saints in the Early Welsh March’, esp. 47–51. 15  Dumville, ‘The Historical Value’, 22 (quotation); Wendy Davies, ‘Property Rights’, 517–18; John Reuben Davies, ‘The Saints of South Wales’, 382–3; ‘Rhygyfarch’s Life of St David’, ed. and trans. Davies and Sharpe, 117, n. 33; Guy, ‘The Life of St Dyfrig’, esp. 2–6, 14–17, 36–7. According to the Historia Brittonum, St Germanus, after coming from Gaul to preach in Britain, blessed Cadell and made him king of Powys, promising that he would be succeeded by his descendants; he also condemned the evil Vortigern, and subsequently urged the pope to send Patrick to convert the Irish: HB, cc. 32–5, 39, 47–9, 51; Charles-­Edwards, Wales, 442–3 and n. 24.

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WELSH PASTS IN AN AGE OF CONQUEST, c.1070–1282  39 vernacular poems to saints had an impact beyond the ecclesiastical communities which promoted them.16 The most important collections of the extant Lives from this period occur in two manuscripts.17 One, the Book of Llandaf (Liber Landavensis), whose significance is assessed below, includes Lives of St Dyfrig (Dubricius), St Teilo, and St Euddogwy (Oudoceus), patron saints of the church of Llandaf, together with Lives of St Elgar, a hermit buried on Bardsey Island, and St Samson as well as hagiographical material relating to St Clydog.18 The other, BL Cotton Vespasian A.XIV, written probably in the last third of the twelfth century at Monmouth Priory, contains a calendar of mainly Welsh saints, a Latin–Old Cornish glossary, and a tract on the saintly progenitor Brychan, followed by fourteen Lives of Welsh and two of Irish saints.19 The collection provides valuable evidence of several stages of hagiographical activity which extended over a century and involved both the Norman foundations and monastic communities Welsh clergy of major pre-­ established by the Normans and their allies. First, the individual Lives were ori­ gin­al­ly composed at different times from the late eleventh century onwards by the clergy of churches that sought to promote the cult of the saint commemorated. Second, it is likely that these were collected in the second quarter of the twelfth century, perhaps in the 1130s, either at Gloucester Abbey—which could have gained access to the texts through its acquisition of several of the Welsh churches, including Llanbadarn Fawr and Llancarfan, for whom Lives had originally been written—or by the professional hagiographer Caradog of Llancarfan.20 Finally, the collection was copied in the Vespasian manuscript. Although their subjects and contents differ, the Lives all follow the conventions of sacred biography developed since late antiquity; they thus seek to demonstrate, notably through accounts of miracles, that their subjects conformed with the norms of sanctity represented by Christ and other figures in the Bible as well as by earlier hagiographical works.21 On the whole, Lives concentrate on miracles achieved by the saint during his or her lifetime, but a few report miracles that 16 Henken, The Welsh Saints, 1–15; Nerys Ann Jones and Morfydd  E.  Owen, ‘Twelfth-­Century Welsh Hagiography’. 17  For two Lives, possibly of Norman authorship, which survive only in other manuscripts see Winward, ‘The Lives of St Wenefred’. These draw on a lost Cambro-­Latin Life of St Beuno, also used by the Middle Welsh Life of that saint, whose principal cult site was the church of Clynnog Fawr in Gwynedd: Buchedd Beuno, ed. Sims-­Williams, 17–32. 18  The Text of the Book of Llan Dâv, ed. Evans and Rhys, 1–24, 78–86, 97–117, 130–9, 193–7; John Reuben Davies, The Book of Llandaf, 109–31; Guy, ‘The Life of St Dyfrig’. 19  Barry J. Lewis, ‘A Possible Provenance’, 3–7, following Harris, ‘The Kalendar’. Date of the manuscript: Guy, ‘The Life of St Dyfrig’, 6 and n. 17. See also Kathleen Hughes, Celtic Britain, 53–66. The Lives and associated texts occur in the first of the three separate manuscripts bound together in Cotton Vespasian A.XIV (fols. 1–105). 20  Kathleen Hughes, Celtic Britain, 57–64 and n. 54; Joshua Byron Smith, Walter Map, 107–17; Guy, Medieval Welsh Genealogy, 81–5, 98–9. 21  For a survey of medieval writing about saints see Bartlett, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things?, ch. 13.

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40  WRITING WELSH HISTORY occurred after the saint’s death. The largest collection, probably written for the Norman monks of Basingwerk Abbey and appended to a Life of St Winefride associated with her shrine at Holywell in modern Flintshire, demonstrated the saint’s posthumous power over Normans as well as Welsh.22 Many of the saints are situated in a Christian world that extended beyond Wales to Ireland, other parts of Britain, the Continent (especially Brittany and Italy), and Jerusalem. Yet if the Lives exemplify an immensely widespread literary phenomenon in Latin Christendom, like their counterparts elsewhere in Europe they also exhibit distinctive characteristics deriving from a particular historical culture. The authors of most Lives reveal a familiarity with earlier accounts of the British and Welsh past and attempt to situate their subjects in plausible historical contexts in the post-­Roman period, especially by connecting them with early Insular saints such as St Germanus, credited with the defeat of the Pelagian heresy in Britain, and St Patrick or by staging confrontations between the saint and King Arthur, Maelgwn Gwynedd, or other secular rulers.23 Lives also often emphasize the royal ancestry of the saint, sometimes expressed in one or more genealogies, thereby adapting a genre already well established with respect to secular dynasties, and a practice greatly extended by the later twelfth or early thirteenth century through the composition of the vernacular genealogical collection Bonedd y Saint (‘The Genealogy of the Saints’).24 In other words, hagiography was informed by a wider body of historical writing to which it in turn contributed. These characteristics are revealed clearly in the two earliest surviving Lives with named authors, composed by members of hereditary clerical families associated with churches in south Wales and renowned for their learning.25 Probably the earlier of these is the Life of St David (Vita Sancti David) by Rhygyfarch (1056–99), son of Sulien (d. 1091), whose family was based at the church of Llanbadarn Fawr in Ceredigion (west Wales).26 However, the family was also closely connected 22 ‘Vita Sancte Wenefrede’, cc. 21–48, VSB, 294–309; Julia  M.  H.  Smith, ‘Oral and Written’, 341; Winward, ‘The Lives of St Wenefred’, 115–18. 23  ‘Vita Prima Sancti Carantoci’, cc. 1, 4, in VSB, 142–7; ‘Vita Sancti Iltuti’, c. 2, in VSB, 196–7; and discussion of the Lives of St David and St Cadog below. For St Germanus, see n. 15 above and n. 49 below. 24  ‘Rhygyfarch’s Life of St David’, c. 68, ed. and trans. Davies and Sharpe, 152–5; ‘Vita Sancti Cadoci’, cc. 45–7, in VSB, 116–19; ‘Vita Secundi Sancti Carantoci’, c. 1, in VSB, 148–9; ‘Vita Sancti Kebii’, c. 1, in VSB, 234–5. Bonedd y Saint: Early Welsh Genealogical Tracts, ed. P. C. Bartrum (Cardiff, 1966), 51–67; date discussed in Barry J. Lewis, ‘Bonedd y Saint’, 139–40, n. 2. 25  The late eleventh-­century Life of St Padarn—whose author is not identified in the text—extant in Vespasian A.XIV may be the hystoria of St Padarn referred to in the Life of St David and thus pre-­date the latter; indeed, its most recent editors have argued that it was written by Ieuan ap Sulien at the same time and in the same place as his brother Rhygyfarch’s Life of St David, though the identification with Ieuan specifically has been questioned: ‘ “Vita Sancti Paterni” ’, ed. and trans. Thomas and Howlett, 67–8, 75–7; Guy, ‘Rheinwg’, 101 and n. 18. See also ‘Rhygyfarch’s Life of St David’, c. 44, ed. and trans. Davies and Sharpe, 138–9 and n. 85; Russell, ‘The Englyn to St Padarn Revisited’, 12–14; Zeiser, ‘Latinity, Manuscripts, and the Rhetoric of Conquest’, 237–50. 26  ‘Rhygyfarch’s Life of St David’, ed. and trans. Davies and Sharpe, 107–55. For the family of Sulien and their writings and manuscripts see Nora K. Chadwick, ‘Intellectual Life in West Wales’, esp. 162–73; Zeiser, ‘Latinity, Manuscripts, and the Rhetoric of Conquest’, esp. chs. 1, 3, and 4.

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WELSH PASTS IN AN AGE OF CONQUEST, c.1070–1282  41 with St Davids, as Sulien served two terms as its bishop (1073–8 and 1080–5).27 This was probably much less secure than Llanbadarn Fawr: Sulien returned in 1080 after the intervening bishop had been killed in a Hiberno-­Scandinavian raid, while a decade later the shrine of St David was stolen from the cathedral, being despoiled of its gold and silver, and the church was destroyed by another attack in 1091.28 The Life of St David may well have been written in response to the disasters that befell the cathedral in the early 1090s.29 Rhygyfarch certainly presented it as an act of recovery, asserting that he had accounts of the saint ‘scattered in the most ancient writings of our country, and especially of his own monastery’, and that although the books were eaten away along the edges and the spines by the constant devouring of grubs and the ravages of the passing years, and written in the handwriting of our forefathers, they have survived until now. For fear that they should perish, I have collected and gathered them together . . .30

On the other hand, the Life probably pre-­ dates the Norman invasion of Ceredigion and Dyfed in the early summer of 1093, as the work lacks any echo of the event’s calamitous significance voiced by Rhygyfarch in his verse ‘Lament’ (Planctus) on that event,31 portrayed in Gildasian terms as the destruction of an established order by foreign oppressors visited upon the Britons as divine punishment for their sins.32 The poem reflects the wider interest taken by Sulien’s family in history, both sacred and secular. Another poem was composed by Rhygyfarch’s brother Ieuan in honour of their father Sulien that set the latter’s biography against the backdrop of the ancient British past. This celebrated not only the author’s descent from ‘the famous race of the Britons (which) once withstood the Roman army energetically’ but also the ‘homeland’ (L.  patria) of Ceredigion, location of the ‘city’ (L. metropolis) of Llanbadarn, where St Padarn had lived and Sulien was born.33 In addition, as argued below, it is very likely that members of the family wrote the late eleventh- and early twelfth-­century sections of the Latin chronicle underlying Brut y Tywysogyon.

27  BT, Pen20Tr, 16, 17 (1073, 1078, 1080, 1085). 28  BT, Pen20Tr, 16–18 (1073, 1078, 1080, 1085, 1091); AC, 26–9 (1071 = 1073, 1076 = 1078, 1078 = 1080, 1083 = 1085, 1089 = 1091); J. Wyn Evans, ‘Bishops of St Davids’, 271. 29  Cf. John Reuben Davies, ‘Cathedrals and the Cult of Saints’, 102. 30  ‘Rhygyfarch’s Life of St David’, c. 66, ed. and trans. Davies and Sharpe, 152–3. 31  John Reuben Davies, ‘Some Observations’, 159–60; John Reuben Davies, ‘Cathedrals and the Cult of Saints’, 102. 32  ‘Planctus Ricemarch’, ed. and trans. Lapidge, ‘The Welsh-­Latin Poetry’, 88–93; also ed. and trans. Zeiser, ‘Latinity, Manuscripts, and the Rhetoric of Conquest’, 334–6, with discussion at 209–20, 304–6. 33 ‘Carmen Iohannis de uita et familia Sulgeni’, ed. and trans. Lapidge, ‘The Welsh-­Latin Poetry’, 80–9 (quotations from lines 55, 57, 69); also ed. and trans. Zeiser, ‘Latinity, Manuscripts, and the Rhetoric of Conquest’, 326–31, with discussion at 34–49, 262–3.

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42  WRITING WELSH HISTORY The Life of St David was shortly followed by—and probably also helped to inspire—the composition of the Life of St Cadog (Vita Sancti Cadoci) by Lifris, master (L. magister) of the powerful ecclesiastical community of Llancarfan and, like Rhygyfarch, the son of a bishop—in this case, Herewald of Glamorgan (1056–1104), whose see was located at Llandaf.34 Like Rhygyfarch, Lifris was acquainted with other native Welsh literary and historical traditions, which continued to be cultivated at Llancarfan after he completed the Life to judge by later additions to his text. These include pedigrees which suggest that the community had probably acquired a version of the Harleian genealogies by the second quarter of the twelfth century, while Llancarfan’s continuing importance as a centre of ecclesiastical learning in that period is also attested by the work of the professional hagiographer Caradog of Llancarfan (who was possibly also the author of the Book of Llandaf).35 In general terms, the Lives of St David and St Cadog share a common aim of promoting the cult of their respective saints by means of staple hagiographical conventions, especially through their emphasis on the saint’s miraculous powers. In addition, the Lives reflect the privileged social status of their authors by making both saints the sons of kings and depicting them as moving among the secular and ecclesiastical elite.36 Yet in significant respects the authors adopted different approaches to their task. Although Lifris was an accomplished Latinist whose style bears some similarities to that of Rhygyfarch, the latter was distinctive in his use of a learned hermeneutic Latin, marked by the use of obscure words, whose high literary register was intended to elevate the saint and showcase the ec­cle­si­as­ tic­al learning of the author and his intended readership.37 Likewise he was far less ready than Lifris to locate his saint in a secular milieu. True, St David is affiliated to the royal dynasty of Ceredigion that had lost its power by the end of the ninth century (thereby making him in turn a descendant of Cunedda, legendary founder of the kingdom of Gwynedd), and described as getting the better of an Irish tyrant who resented the new monastic community founded at St Davids.38 Later, though, rulers are drawn to the exemplary religious life practised by the saint, ‘as kings and princes of the world would abandon their kingdoms and seek his monastery’, including ‘Constantine, king of Cornwall’, probably identifiable 34  The text extant in Vespasian A.XIV (‘Vita Sancti Cadoci’, in VSB, 24–141) is a composite work embodying substantial additions to Lifris’s original text, which was probably completed c.1091 × c.1104: Emanuel, ‘An Analysis’. See also Brooke, The Church and the Welsh Border, 70–89; Wendy Davies, ‘Property Rights’, 518–23, 526–7, 528–9; John Reuben Davies, The Book of Llandaf, 15–16. 35  Emanuel, ‘An Analysis’, 220; John Reuben Davies, The Book of Llandaf, 132–42; Guy, Medieval Welsh Genealogy, 84–5, 98­–9. 36  Note also the contemptuous references to peasants in ‘Vita Sancti Cadoci’, cc. 7, 36, in VSB, 36–9, 100–1. 37  Emanuel, ‘The Latin Life of St. Cadoc’, lxiii, 152–9; John Reuben Davies, ‘Some Observations’, 156–9; Zeiser, ‘Bragmaticus omnibus brittonibus’, 309–14. 38 ‘Rhygyfarch’s Life of St David’, cc. 2, 4, 16–19, ed. and trans. Davies and Sharpe, 108–9, 112–13, 120–5.

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WELSH PASTS IN AN AGE OF CONQUEST, c.1070–1282  43 with one of the five ‘tyrants’ castigated by Gildas.39 Moreover, the historical context ascribed to the saint is primarily ecclesiastical. St Patrick is sent to Ireland after being compelled to relinquish St Davids to make way for its future patron saint, whose greatness is prophesied by Gildas while still in his mother’s womb, and who in turn extends his influence to Ireland and is associated with Irish saints; St David accompanies St Padarn and St Teilo to receive episcopal consecration from the patriarch of Jerusalem; and on his return he defeats the Pelagian heresy, which had revived ‘even after St Germanus [of Auxerre] had come to help a second time’, thereby gaining recognition as the leading bishop among the Britons.40 Although it is uncertain whether Rhygyfarch’s original text included the passages, found in all the surviving copies, explicitly stating that St David was made archbishop and that his monastery received metropolitan status, the Life clearly sought to proclaim the supremacy of the saint and thus of his cathedral church.41 But this claim rested on the saint’s exemplary religious life, demonstrated by asceticism, defence of Catholic orthodoxy, and decrees that set a pattern for all churches in Wales, including the saint’s numerous monastic foundations.42 Rhygyfarch’s depiction of St David may be seen, then, as part of an attempt to promote the cult of the saint and thus the prestige of his cathedral church which had recently been subjected to violence and destruction. Lifris’s St Cadog is also associated with clergy and churches.43 However, his sanctity is evidenced, not by outstanding piety, but by terrifying, and sometimes vengeful, acts of miraculous power that targeted disobedient clergy and servants as well as oppressive secular rulers such as King Arthur and Maelgwn Gwynedd.44 Lifris thus showed himself ready to deploy legendary material concerning the post-­Roman past that went well beyond the ecclesiastical, thereby pointing up the connections between churches and Welsh historical and literary culture transmitted in both Latin and the vernacular. Above all, the saint is depicted as a staunch upholder of his property and judicial rights, and the Life was clearly intended, not as an assertion of dominant episcopal status comparable to Rhygyfarch’s portrayal 39  ‘Rhygyfarch’s Life of St David’, c. 27, ed. and trans. Davies and Sharpe, 128–9 and n. 66. 40  ‘Rhygyfarch’s Life of St David’, cc. 3, 5, 36–54, ed. and trans. Davies and Sharpe, 110–15, 132–47, quotation at 143. 41  The Vespasian Life, the version convincingly argued to come closest to preserving Rhygyfarch’s work, states that David was first made archbishop by the patriarch of Jerusalem, but then continues to call him bishop until he is again made archbishop at the Synod of Brefi; the first passage, at least, may therefore be a later interpolation influenced by the campaigns to secure metropolitan status for St Davids independent of Canterbury: ‘Rhygyfarch’s Life of St David’, cc. 46, 53, ed. and trans. Davies and Sharpe, 140–1, 146–7; Nora  K.  Chadwick, ‘Intellectual Life’, 143–4; Pryce, ‘Gerald of Wales and the Welsh Past’, 24 (but cf. Sharpe, ‘Which Text is Rhygyfarch’s “Life” of St David?’, 100–1). See also Richter, ‘Canterbury’s Primacy’. Although Rhygyfarch could have known that the title of archbishop was used in ninth-­century Wales, including at St Davids (cf. Charles-­Edwards, Wales, 593–4), the Life’s inconsistent application of the term to St David is nevertheless striking. 42  ‘Rhygyfarch’s Life of St David’, cc. 21–31, 49–56, ed. and trans. Davies and Sharpe, 124–9, 142–7. 43  ‘Vita Sancti Cadoci’, cc. 9–11, 22, 26, 34–6, in VSB, 44–9, 68–73, 80–3, 96–101. 44  ‘Vita Sancti Cadoci’, cc. 7, 12, 15–16, 19, 22–5, 29, in VSB, 36–41, 52–3, 56–65, 68–81, 90–3.

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44  WRITING WELSH HISTORY of St David, but rather as a vindication of the interests of Cadog’s community at Llancarfan against the threats posed by both the Welsh and Normans of Lifris’s day.45 The continuing power of the saint was further emphasized in additions to Lifris’s original text reporting miracles after his death.46 The most ambitious attempt in the early twelfth century to construct an ec­cle­ si­as­tic­al history that served contemporary purposes was Liber Landavensis (‘The Book of Llandaf ’), a Gospel Book containing saints’ Lives, charters, papal bulls, and other documents.47 This was commissioned by Urban, bishop of Llandaf (1107–34) in order to provide historical support for his campaign to gain recognition of his see’s extensive diocesan boundaries and episcopal estates in south Wales against the rival claims of the neighbouring bishops of St Davids and Hereford. In projecting a vision of the see’s history from its alleged foundation by Bishop Dyfrig (Dubricius) to the early twelfth century, the Book of Llandaf was thus the product of a wider movement to establish fixed territorial dioceses stimu­lated by Norman conquest and Canterbury’s assertion of authority over the Welsh dioceses. As well as the composition of Lives of the see’s three patron saints, Dyfrig, Teilo, and Euddogwy (Oudoceus), the compiler of the Book of Llandaf edited charters in order to claim that estates had been granted to the see’s bishops over half a millennium.48 He also related a version of the legend, first attested in Britain in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, that King Lucius of Britain had sought missionaries from Pope Eleutherius in order to bring Christianity to the pagan Britons, descendants of Brutus, which asserted that Dubricius had been established as archbishop of all the Britons of south Wales by none other than St  Germanus and St Lupus following their eradication of the Pelagian heresy.49 Although the Book of Llandaf was not intended as a work of history, but sought rather to provide a documentary justification for Urban’s claims, its approach was deeply historical, as the work drew on hagiography, charters, and other sources in order to frame its case in historical terms. Its author is unknown, but may have been the professional hagiographer Caradog of Llancarfan, named as the author of revised versions of the Lives of St Cadog and St Gildas, and who may also have composed or revised Lives of St Cyngar, St Illtud, St Gwynllyw, and St Tatheus.50 Such was his reputation that Geoffrey of Monmouth named him as the one to

45  Wendy Davies, ‘Property Rights’, 520–2, 526–7. 46  ‘Vita Sancti Cadoci’, cc. 40–4, in VSB, 110–17; Emanuel, ‘An Analysis’, 219–20. 47  The Text of the Book of Llan Dâv, ed. Evans and Rhys; John Reuben Davies, The Book of Llandaf. 48  The derivation of most of the charters from authentic pre-­Norman records was established by Wendy Davies, The Llandaff Charters. Her case is confirmed, with some important modifications, by Sims-­Williams, The Book of Llandaf. See also Charles-­Edwards, Wales, 245–67. 49  The Text of the Book of Llan Dâv, ed. Evans and Rhys, 68–9; John Reuben Davies, The Book of Llandaf, 110–11. 50  John Reuben Davies, The Book of Llandaf, 105, 132–42.

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WELSH PASTS IN AN AGE OF CONQUEST, c.1070–1282  45 whom he would leave the history of the kings of Wales after the death of Cadwaladr in the late seventh century.51

Geoffrey of Monmouth and His Reception in Wales Geoffrey of Monmouth (d. 1154/5) has been rightly described as ‘the most influential writer of Welsh history in the Middle Ages’.52 He not only played a fundamental role in shaping Welsh understandings of the past until the nineteenth century but was arguably the first to articulate the notion of a history of Wales, as distinct from a history of Britain or the Britons. However, his relationship with and contribution to the writing of Welsh history were complex. In order to assess his significance, it is important to distinguish between the context and purpose of  the original Latin work—Historia Regum Britanniae (‘History of the Kings of  Britain’) or De Gestis Britonum (‘On the Deeds of the Britons’), completed c.1138—and its subsequent reception in Wales.53 The latter took two main forms: the Welsh translations known as Brut y Brenhinedd (‘The History of the Kings’), probably first made in the early thirteenth century, and the creation of chron­icles— represented by Brut y Tywysogyon (‘The Chronicle of the Princes’) and Brenhinedd y Saesson (‘The Kings of the English’)—which were explicitly designed as continuations of Geoffrey. In addition, Geoffrey influenced the interpretation of the Welsh past by Gerald of Wales.54 The discussion in this section will begin, then, by focusing on the De Gestis Britonum before turning to consider, first, Gerald of Wales, and, second, the Welsh translations of Geoffrey’s History. Geoffrey was a learned cleric, associated with Oxford from 1129, including its archdeacon Walter, and probably a canon of the collegiate church of St George in the town’s castle; referred to as a magister by 1139, he was elected bishop of St Asaph in 1151, although it is uncertain whether he was able to take up residence in his see before his death in 1154 or 1155.55 However, his origins and ethnic identity are uncertain. According to some manuscripts of his History, Geoffrey once described himself as ‘an abashed Briton’ (L. pudibundus Brito), which, taken with the epithet ‘of Monmouth’ (L. Monemutensis) could suggest either Welsh or Breton ethnicity.56 Proponents of the latter have cited the History’s marked sympathy for the Bretons, important allies of the Normans in the conquest of England and subsequently prominent among settlers in Monmouth; this would also be

51  DGB, 281 (XI.208). 52  Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Ystoriaeu Brenhinedd’, 220. 53  For the date see The Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth, I, ed. Wright, xii–xvi. 54  For recent discussions of Geoffrey’s relationship to, and place in, medieval Welsh historical writing see Guy, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Welsh Sources’, and Owain Wyn Jones, ‘The Most Excellent Princes’. 55  Crick, ‘Monmouth, Geoffrey of (d. 1154/5)’; Joshua Byron Smith, ‘Introduction and Biography’. 56  The Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth, I, ed. Wright, ix–x; DGB, ix, 4–5, 143, 248–9 (I.3, VII.110 n., XI.277).

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46  WRITING WELSH HISTORY consistent with Geoffrey’s seeking patronage among the Anglo-­Norman elite, including the powerful marcher lord, Robert (d. 1147), earl of Gloucester and lord of Glamorgan. His association with Oxford likewise placed Geoffrey firmly in an Anglo-­Norman milieu.57 Yet, as has recently been argued, these con­sid­er­ations do not necessarily preclude Geoffrey from having been Welsh.58 Irrespective of his ethnic identity, the crucial point in the context of the present discussion is that, while his hugely popular history of the British kings may have been aimed primarily at an Anglo-­Norman audience, the work was heavily indebted to Welsh sources, reflects the author’s knowledge of the Welsh language, and proved highly popular in Wales, where it provided the first extended narrative of early British history since the Historia Brittonum, on which it drew in part, notably as the earliest source to endow the Britons with Trojan origins.59 The content and character of the History may be briefly summarized as follows. Ostensibly translated into Latin from ‘a very old book in the British tongue’ given to Geoffrey by Walter, archdeacon of Oxford,60 the work offers a detailed and dramatic account of the Britons from their origins after the fall of Troy to the death of King Cadwaladr in Rome in 689 and the ensuing ‘passage of dominion’ over the island of Britain to the Saxons.61 Its fast-­moving narrative, focused on Britain but ranging across Europe, was filled with battles, conquests, slaughter, lust, civil discord, betrayal, prophecy, and magic. The Britons are cast as flawed heroes: a once great people who had not only populated Britain but successfully defied the Romans and indeed, under Brennius and Belinus, captured Rome, while their greatest leader, King Arthur, ‘decided to conquer all Europe’, taking Norway, Denmark, and Gaul before assembling a huge force which eventually defeated the Romans and killed their emperor.62 However, like many of his predecessors, Arthur was betrayed, being mortally wounded at the battle of Camlan in 542,63 and his successors proved unable to stem the conquering Saxons who deprived the Britons of their lordship of the island and became kings of England (L. Loegria). By contrast, ‘[t]he Welsh, unworthy successors to the noble Britons, never again recovered mastery over the whole island, but, squabbling pettily

57  See e.g. Tatlock, The Legendary History, 396–402, 438–46; Farrell, ‘History, Prophecy and the Arthur of the Normans’. 58 Joshua Byron Smith, ‘Introduction and Biography’, 11–21, which reviews the scholarship on Geoffrey’s ethnicity and argues he was Welsh, a view advanced previously by Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century, 19–39. See also Owain Wyn Jones, ‘The Most Excellent Princes’, 258–9, 268–70. 59 Jankulak, Geoffrey of Monmouth, 39–40; Guy, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Welsh Sources’, 39–42. 60  DGB, 4 (Prologue, 2). 61 Leckie, Jr., The Passage of Dominion, esp. 57–71. Geoffrey arrived at the date by merging two seventh-­century kings, Cadwaladr, king of Gwynedd and Cædwalla, king of the West Saxons: Guy, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Welsh Sources’, 52. 62  DGB, 56–8, 204–8, 246 (III.42–3; IX.154–5; X.175). 63  DGB, 248–52 (X.176, XI.177–8).

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WELSH PASTS IN AN AGE OF CONQUEST, c.1070–1282  47 amongst themselves and sometimes with the Saxons, kept constantly massacring the foreigners or each other’.64 Two related issues merit attention in considering the relationship of Geoffrey’s History to historical writing in, and about, Wales. One is the nature of the sources at the author’s disposal. It is generally agreed that Geoffrey’s claim to have translated ‘a very ancient British book’, given him by Walter, archdeacon of Oxford, was no more than a literary device designed to conceal a fiction.65 That he drew on written sources about the Britons is, nevertheless, clear: in particular, the debt to Gildas, Bede, and the Historia Brittonum is unmistakable, and the overall interpretation of the history of Britain as a transfer of sovereignty from the Britons to the English was a fundamental tenet of historical writing in pre-­Norman Wales.66 Geoffrey also had access to a version of the Harleian genealogies, quite possibly at Llancarfan, which could explain some of the names used in the History, especially for those attending King Arthur’s court at Caerleon.67 He was certainly aware of historical arguments that arose from early twelfth-­century disputes between the sees of Llandaf and St Davids in south Wales, and his choice of Caerleon as the seat of Archbishop Dubricius and of King Arthur’s court may have been influenced by the local Welsh dynasty’s recovery in 1136 of the site of this former Roman legionary fortress, whose former glory was evoked by ruins which, then as now, were still visible.68 In important respects, then, Geoffrey resembled the Welsh and Norman churchmen discussed above who responded to contemporary developments by composing Latin accounts of early Welsh saints, churches, and rulers that drew in varying degrees on earlier sources. It does not follow, however, that Geoffrey aimed his History particularly at the Welsh or intended it to redound to their glory. This brings us to the second issue requiring consideration, namely the context in which Geoffrey wrote and his ­reasons for writing. The latter are difficult to pin down and have been the subject of differing interpretations.69 Whatever his precise aims, though, it is clear that Geoffrey wanted his book to read like a work of history, and that he exploited fully the rhetorical conventions of plausibility and verisimilitude to depict events as they could have happened, including set-­piece speeches advocating particular

64  DGB, 280 (XI. 207). 65  The Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth, I, ed. Wright, xvii–xviii; Brooke, The Church and the Welsh Border, 97, 100; Jankulak, Geoffrey of Monmouth, 13–14; Joshua Byron Smith, ‘Introduction and Biography’, 21–4. 66 Jankulak, Geoffrey of Monmouth, 14–17. See further Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth’; Wright, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth and Gildas’; Wright, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth and Gildas Revisited’; Wright, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth and Bede’; Guy, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Welsh Sources’. 67 Faral, La légende Arthurienne, 2: 137–9; Guy, Medieval Welsh Genealogy, 90–2. 68 Brooke, The Church and the Welsh Border, 16–24, 97–9; Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century, 32–7. 69  See e.g. Rees Davies, The Matter of Britain, 5–8; Farrell, ‘History, Prophecy and the Arthur of the Normans’.

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48  WRITING WELSH HISTORY courses of action.70 And, particularly relevant to the present discussion, he responded to an interest in the history of the Britons shared by writers in both Wales and England, including the Anglo-­Norman historians of his own day, by seizing on the opportunities presented by the sparse coverage of the Britons in early medieval sources in order to place them centre stage and thereby challenge Anglocentric interpretations.71 That Geoffrey thought the history of the Britons could appeal to the powerful in the Anglo-­Norman realm is suggested by the surviving prefaces to his History, which were dedicated to Robert, earl of Gloucester and lord of Glamorgan and Waleran, count of Meulan, and by the presentation of  its book of prophecies to Alexander, bishop of Lincoln, who had allegedly encouraged its composition.72 Conversely, at the end of the work Geoffrey was dis­mis­sive of the Welsh and undermined any notion that they had special ownership of the history of the Britons. Now called, for the first time in Geoffrey’s text, Gualenses rather than Britones, a ‘name which owes its origin to their leader Gualo, to queen Galaes or to their decline’, the Welsh were presented as a bar­bar­ ous people, ‘unworthy successors to the noble Britons’ given over to constant civil and external wars, who never recovered their dominion over the island from the Saxons.73 Thereafter, the Welsh survived under their own kings, whose history Geoffrey left to Caradog of Llancarfan. But they were clearly the losers by comparison to the Saxons, who, ‘acting more wisely’, lived together peacefully and established their rule over all England, and, in leaving the subsequent history of their kings to William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon, Geoffrey made clear that the English—and thus by implication their Norman conquerors—were also the Britons’ successors.74 The closing section of Geoffrey’s History provides the first known explicit acknowledgement that the Welsh had their own history from the late seventh century onwards. The context in which he does so, however, suggests that he saw this as a pitiful epilogue to the dramatic narrative he had previously related. Not only had the Britons of Wales lost their original name; so too had their country, which was now called Gualia (or its plural Gualiae), a variant of Wallia, sharing the pejorative connotations of Gualenses, rather than Kambria.75 At the beginning of Book II, Geoffrey elaborated the origin legends reported in the Historia Brittonum that Britain had been named after Britto or Brutus by maintaining that his three sons—Locrinus, Albanactus, and Kamber—had divided the ‘kingdom of 70  Cf. Kempshall, Rhetoric, 319–21, 325–41, 348–9. William of Newburgh famously declared that Geoffrey had overstepped the mark here and produced lies: Kempshall, Rhetoric, 365–6. See also Henley, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth’. 71 Leckie, Jr., The Passage of Dominion, 38–42; Owain Wyn Jones, ‘The Most Excellent Princes’, 260–1, 268–9; cf. Wright, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth and Bede’, 30–1; Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century, 26–31. 72  DGB, 4–5, 142–3 (Prologue; Preface to Prophecies of Merlin). 73  DGB, 280–1 (XI.207–8). 74  DGB, 280–1 (XI.207–8), with translation slightly adapted. 75  DGB, 281 (XI.208); also e.g. 31, 89, 259, 279 (II.23, IV.72, XI.186, 204).

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WELSH PASTS IN AN AGE OF CONQUEST, c.1070–1282  49 Britain’ (regnum Britanniae) after their father’s death, and given their names respectively to Loegria (England), Albania (Scotland), and Kambria (Wales).76 Wales thus had a separate territorial identity going back almost to the beginning of the Trojan settlement of Britain. It is also described as an ecclesiastical province under a metropolitan at Caerleon.77 However, though endowed with his own territory, Kamber shared rule with his brothers within a single kingdom of Britain, and a ‘king of Wales’ (rex Kambriae) appears only once in the text, and then only briefly, being defeated and killed by Dunuallo Moelmutius, who then establishes rule over the whole of Britain.78 Thus, though presented as an ancient territorial entity, Wales is portrayed as an integral part of the kingdom of Britain until the late seventh century: it is only after the final fracturing of the kingdom following the English conquests that Wales is attributed with a history separate from that of Britain as a whole. Yet the negative view of the Welsh kings that followed cannot be understood simply as an attempt to denigrate the Welsh by an author anxious to please Anglo-­Norman patrons, who, as a result of the conquest of England, could in turn be regarded as successors of the Britons. Rather, Geoffrey of Monmouth drew on, and made more explicit, long-­ established understandings of their past by writers in Wales whose gaze was fixed above all on the Britons’ struggles to maintain their power on a wider British stage. His work thus throws into sharp relief the difficulty of conceiving of a separate history of Wales—or, perhaps more accurately, the reasons why Welsh history writing was above all concerned with the Britons and the British past.

Gerald of Wales One writer who accepted Geoffrey’s contention that Welsh history was a continuation of British history was Gerald of Wales (c.1146–c.1223), a cleric, royal ser­ vant, and prolific writer of mixed Norman and Welsh ancestry born at Manorbier in Pembrokeshire.79 Several of his works contain substantial treatment of the Welsh past and became a staple source for later historians.80 His earliest prose works reveal a strong interest in history, as the Topographia Hibernica (‘The Topography of Ireland’, 1188) drew on a version of the Irish Lebor Gabála (‘The Book of Settlement’) to provide an account of the settlement of Ireland by a succession of ancient peoples, as well as on Geoffrey of Monmouth to justify Henry II’s overlordship of the island, while the Expugnatio Hibernica (‘The Conquest of Ireland’, 1189) offers a lively history of the English invasion of Ireland which 76  DGB, 30–1 (II.23). 77  DGB, 88–9 (IV.72). 78  DGB, 30–1, 46–7 (II.23, 34); Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth’, 37. 79 Bartlett, Gerald of Wales. 80 Assessments of Gerald as a historian include F.  X.  Martin, ‘Giraldus as Historian’; Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Gerald of Wales’, 134–8.

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50  WRITING WELSH HISTORY places Gerald’s marcher kinsmen centre stage and covers events in Wales that had a bearing on his narrative.81 However, the Welsh past—both ancient and recent— received much greater attention in Gerald’s extensive writings about Wales. This is especially true of two works: the Itinerarium Kambriae (‘Journey round Wales’, 1191) and the Descriptio Kambriae (‘Description of Wales’, 1194).82 These were the first books written specifically about Wales and offer valuable insights into their author’s view of the Welsh past. In addition, his family connections and ecclesiastical ambitions led Gerald to take a strong interest in the history and hagiography of St Davids. This is already evident in the Itinerarium but moves to the forefront in his autobiography and related books concerning his unsuccessful attempt from 1198 to 1203 to be elected bishop of St Davids and to achieve recognition of that see as a metropolitan see for Wales independent of Canterbury.83 At one level, the Itinerarium was, like the Expugnatio Hibernica, a work of contemporary history, being structured as an account of the preaching tour led by Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury to recruit Welsh troops for the Third Crusade in Lent 1188. However, it is also much more than that, since its account of places through or near which the party travelled is enlivened with flashbacks to episodes in Anglo-­Welsh relations from the late eleventh century onwards as well as with stories about saints and churches—an instance of the wider engagement with Welsh ecclesiastical traditions in the twelfth century discussed above.84 The Descriptio Kambriae also has a strong historical dimension; indeed, Gerald describes it as a work of history.85 The work opens with an overview of the geography of Wales before distilling what Gerald regarded as the distinguishing characteristics of Welsh society, both praiseworthy and unpraiseworthy, the latter providing a cue for advice on how Wales might be conquered and the Welsh might resist.86 Here, much of the historical focus is on the distant past, interpreted through the lens of both Gildas—with whom Gerald explicitly compares himself in the preface—and Geoffrey, though attention is also given to the subjection of Wales by Anglo-­Saxon and Norman kings of England.87 Gerald’s interpretation of the Welsh past owed much to Geoffrey. However, his relationship with the earlier writer was complex. To begin with, Gerald did his best to disguise his debt to the earlier writer, whom he explicitly named only as the target of derogatory comments while borrowing from the De Gestis Britonum

81 Boivin, L’Irlande au moyen âge, 91–100; Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, 20–5. 82  Thomas Jones, ‘Gerald the Welshman’s “Itinerary through Wales” and “Description of Wales” ’. 83 Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, 46–57; Pryce, ‘Gerald of Wales and the Welsh Past’. 84  IK; Pryce, ‘Gerald’s Journey’; Pryce, ‘Giraldus and the Geraldines’, 63–6. The distinction Gerald drew between recent and distant events, and his reliance on orally transmitted information for the former and written sources for the latter, is paralleled in other twelfth-­century writers of history: Guenée, ‘Temps de l’histoire’, 29–32. 85  DK, ‘Praefatio Prima’; Pryce, ‘Gerald of Wales, Gildas and the Descriptio Kambriae’. 86  DK; Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, 181–210. 87  DK, ‘Praefatio Prima’, II. 7; Pryce, ‘Gerald of Wales, Gildas and the Descriptio Kambriae’.

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WELSH PASTS IN AN AGE OF CONQUEST, c.1070–1282  51 either without any acknowledgement or with vague attributions to ‘British histories’.88 In part this distancing may simply have been an exercise in one-­upmanship by an author always determined to establish his literary credentials and reap the rewards of patronage he considered his due. But it also reflected a difference in purpose, as Gerald placed greater emphasis than Geoffrey on the consequences of their Trojan and British origins for the Welsh of the present day—for instance, by ascribing their dark complexion to the hot climate of their ancestors’ homeland in Troy.89 Moreover, Gerald adapted Geoffrey to his own ends. This is shown by Gerald’s use of Kambria for Wales and Kambri or Kambrenses for the Welsh.90 These terms were clearly indebted to Geoffrey, who invented the noun Kambria and explained that it derived from the eponymous Kamber son of Brutus, and also asserted that this was why the inhabitants of Wales ‘still call themselves Cymry (Kambro) in British’.91 However, by adopting ‘Cambrian’ terminology for Wales and its inhabitants in his own day, he implicitly challenged Geoffrey’s assertions that Kambria had been later superseded by Gualia (a variant of Wallia) as the name for Wales, and that its people had become known as ‘Welsh’ (Gualenses, a variant of Walenses) rather than ‘Britons’ (Britones) as a result of their decline after the late seventh century.92 Indeed, Gerald highlighted the pejorative connotations of the terms Wallia and Walenses by correctly observing that they were derived from the English word for foreigner.93 By using Kambria and Kambri or Kambrenses, terms redolent of the Britons’ heyday as depicted by Geoffrey, Gerald was thus able to confer dignity on both Wales and the Welsh from whom he was partly descended. On the other hand, although Book I of the Descriptio describes a number of their praiseworthy qualities, the work as a whole offers a pessimistic view of the Welsh as Gerald explicitly identifies himself with Gildas and, like Rhygyfarch ap Sulien before him, extends the sixth-­century author’s explanation of the Britons’ loss of Britain as the result of divine punishment for sin to the later Norman conquests in Wales.94 Gerald also accepts Geoffrey’s view that the Britons would not recover their former glory until they had done penance for their sins, and turns this against the Welsh of his own day by arguing that their hopes of recovery are misplaced as they are still mired in similar sins to their ancestors and therefore their penance cannot have been completed.95

88  IK, I. 5, II. 1; DK, I. 7, II. 7; Crick, ‘The British Past’, 60–75. 89  DK, I. 15. 90 E.g., IK, II. 11; DK, I.  3, 7, 12. See also Pryce, ‘British or Welsh?’, 797–8. Gerald even seems to have adopted the name Giraldus Cambrensis at one stage in his career: Wada, ‘Gerald on Gerald’, 242. 91  DGB, 30–1 (II. 23). The History does not apply ‘Cambrian’ terminology to the Welsh, but they are referred to as Cambri in Geoffrey’s much less circulated verse Vita Merlini of 1148 × 1155: Life of Merlin, ed. and trans. Clarke, 104, 134 (lines 968–9, 1507), with discussion of the work’s authorship and date at 36–42. 92  DGB, 280–1 (XI. 207). 93  DK, I. 7. 94  DK, ‘Praefatio Prima’; Pryce, ‘Gerald of Wales, Gildas and the Descriptio Kambriae’; cf. Rhygyfarch ap Sulien, ‘Planctus’, lines 45–50, 68, 80–3, ed. and trans. Lapidge, 90–3. 95  DK, II. 7; Pryce, ‘Gerald of Wales, Gildas and the Descriptio Kambriae’, 121–3.

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52  WRITING WELSH HISTORY

Geoffrey in Welsh: Brut y Brenhinedd (‘The History of the Kings’) While Geoffrey’s History was widely copied in medieval Europe and vernacular versions of it were also produced in Old French, Middle English, and Old Norse,96 the work had a special significance for Welsh literati, who took its author’s claim to have translated it from ‘a very old book in the British tongue’ at face value and thus regarded it as belonging to a Welsh tradition of historical writing. That Geoffrey’s Latin text circulated in Wales is shown by the Welsh associations of several thirteenth- or early fourteenth-­century manuscripts containing versions of it, most notably that produced by c.1250 by ‘the Welsh brother Madog of Edeirnion’ (Frater Walensis Madocus Edeirnianensis), thus named in a Latin poem prefacing the work that extolled the military deeds of the Britons related by Geoffrey, and a writer quite possibly identifiable with the Franciscan Madog ap  Gwallter who composed religious poetry in Welsh.97 Above all, though, the History’s appeal in Wales is shown by the Middle Welsh translations of the work known as Brut y Brenhinedd (‘The History of the Kings’), which became a cornerstone of Welsh literary culture, surviving in some twenty-­five medieval copies (including one containing numerous illustrations), a number surpassed among Welsh texts only by compilations of native law.98 The impact of Geoffrey’s work in Wales is further highlighted by the production of different versions of Brut y Brenhinedd, including possibly four early independent translations, of which two appear in manuscripts of the mid-­thirteenth century. When the early versions were first translated is uncertain, as is their relationship to each other.99 That they were related is suggested by their shared use of very similar Welsh name-­forms for the Latin forms given by Geoffrey, which may indicate that those versions all ultimately derived from a common exemplar, perhaps a glossed copy of the Latin text.100 Moreover, since one of the name-­forms used in Brut y Brenhinedd occurs in Welsh poetry at the end of the twelfth century, it has been suggested that the

96 Jones, HWMW, ch. 3; A Companion to Geoffrey of Monmouth, ed. Henley and Smith, Part  4 (‘Reception’). 97 Hammer, Geoffrey of Monmouth, 18–19; Dumville, ‘The Origin of the C-Text’; The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth, II, ed. Wright, lxxvi, lxxix–lxxx, lxxxii–lxxxiii; Crick, The Historia Regum Britanniae, 197, 205, 214; Gruffydd Aled Williams, ‘The Literary Tradition’, 532–6. For a suggestion that Madog may have been a Cistercian monk at Valle Crucis see Owain Wyn Jones, ‘The Most Excellent Princes’, 278–9. 98  Listed in Jones, HWMW, 431; for over 40 further copies of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries see Jones, HWMW, 432–3. Illustrations in NLW, Peniarth MS 23 (c.1500): Liber Coronacionis Britanorum, ed. Sims-­Williams. Cf. Charles-­Edwards, The Welsh Laws, 100–2. 99  Brut y Brenhinedd, ed. Roberts, xxiv–xxxvi; Brynley  F.  Roberts, ‘The Red Book of Hergest Version’. Sims-­Williams, Rhai Addasiadau, suggests (at 48–55) that the version in NLW Peniarth 24 (copied in 1477) may be a fourth early independent translation, in addition to those in NLW 5266 (Dingestow MS), Llanstephan 1, and Peniarth 44. (Shorter version of this study in Sims-­Williams, ‘The Welsh Versions’.) 100  Brynley F. Roberts, ‘The Treatment of Personal Names’, esp. 289; Sims-­Williams, Rhai Addasiadau, 6–8.

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WELSH PASTS IN AN AGE OF CONQUEST, c.1070–1282  53 work, ‘in some form or other’, was known by then in the courts of Gwynedd and Powys.101 In any case, it is likely that one or more of the early versions had been produced by the early thirteenth century.102 If so, Geoffrey’s work may well have been the first Latin historical text to be translated into Welsh, preceding the cre­ ation of Brut y Tywysogyon and the Welsh version of Dares the Phrygian, the translations with which it later came to be associated, by about a century.103 On the whole, the early translations adhere closely to Geoffrey’s text. However, they also needed to ensure consistency with Welsh tradition and meet the ex­pect­ ations of Welsh readers.104 In other words, translation involved a process of adaptation designed to assimilate the work into Welsh literary and historical culture. This was achieved in part by substituting Welsh forms of personal and place-­ names for the Latinate forms given by Geoffrey, as well as by linking some passages to Welsh tradition: for example, by placing Maelgwn Gwynedd’s death ‘in the church of Rhos near Degannwy’.105 Most strikingly, one of the early versions (Llanstephan 1) inserted a tale, derived from native story-­telling, narrating how Lludd (Geoffrey’s Lud) and his brother Llefelys (the latter inserted by the translator as a fourth son of Beli Mawr) rid the island of Britain of ‘three oppressions’ that afflicted it.106 However, the process of adaptation was taken further in ‘an enhanced translation of the Historia’ first extant in a fourteenth-­century manuscript, though arguably deriving from a text composed in the thirteenth century, which added material from a variety of Latin and Welsh sources.107 For example, Geoffrey’s account of Cymbeline (W. Cynfelyn) is expanded by inserting a summary of the life of Christ together with events in Roman history, while Latin verses on the supposed tomb of Arthur are cited, despite the text having previously translated Geoffrey’s account of how after the battle of Camlan the king had been taken to the isle of Avalon to be healed of his wounds.108

Narrating Welsh Rulers One major development, then, in Welsh history writing from the late eleventh to late thirteenth centuries was an intensified preoccupation with the history of 101  Sims-­Williams, Rhai Addasiadau, 6 (emphasis in original). 102  Brynley R. Roberts, ‘The Red Book of Hergest Version’, 147. 103  As noted below, however, the Welsh version of the Latin Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan may also have been produced in the early thirteenth century. 104  Brynley R. Roberts, ‘Ystoriaeu Brenhinedd’, 220–1. 105  Brut y Brenhinedd, ed. Roberts, xxxiii; cf. Brut Dingestow, ed. Lewis, 187. 106  Brut y Brenhinedd, ed. Roberts, xxix, xxxii–xxxiv; Cyfranc Lludd a Llefelys, ed. Roberts; Brynley R. Roberts, ‘The Treatment of Personal Names’. 107 Brynley  R.  Roberts, ‘Ystoriaeu Brenhinedd’, 221–7, quotation at 227; Sims-­ Williams, Rhai Addasiadau, 15–54. 108  Brut y Brenhinedd, ed. and trans. Parry, 79–82, 193. See also Brynley  R.  Roberts, ‘Ystoriaeu Brenhinedd’, 224–5.

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54  WRITING WELSH HISTORY the  Britons. Another was the expansion of narratives focused on recent and contemporary history, with a particular emphasis on Welsh rulers. These texts mainly comprise chronicles, but also include the only surviving medieval biography of a medieval Welsh ruler, the Latin Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan (Vita Griffini filii Conani), king of Gwynedd. Though none is explicitly presented as such, these narratives may be considered histories of Wales inasmuch as they frame the events they relate predominantly in a Welsh context and also, from the mid-­ twelfth century, rarely refer to the Welsh as Britons.109 True, these narratives were not immune to the allure of Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose work came to provide a backstory for several chronicles. However, apart from furnishing some of the names in the genealogies that open the Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan, and possibly also influencing the use of ‘Cambrian’ terminology for Wales and the Welsh both in that text and in the Cottonian chronicle, his influence on the contents of the texts considered here was minimal.110 The following discussion proceeds in two stages. First, it identifies the relevant works, considers their dating and textual history, and outlines their coverage and main characteristics. This leads, second, to an assessment of what the texts’ ­methods and themes reveal about their authors’ approach to history writing.

Royal Biography: Vita Griffini filii Conani (‘The Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan’) The popularity of Geoffrey’s History, in its Welsh guise as Brut y Brenhinedd, reflects the continuing interest taken in the British ancestors of the Welsh under a sequence of kings from Brutus to Cadwaladr. By contrast, only one medieval Welsh king was the subject of a near-­contemporary biography: Gruffudd ap Cynan (d. 1137), ruler of Gwynedd in north Wales.111 Like Geoffrey’s work, this was originally written in Latin and later translated into Welsh. The Latin Life, Vita Griffini filii Conani, extant in a version recovered from a later sixteenth-­century copy, was composed during the reign of his son and successor Owain Gwynedd (r. 1137–70).112 A striking feature is its emphasis on the king’s ancestry, early life, and struggles to establish himself in Gwynedd between c.1075 and c.1100; by contrast, his uncontested rule of Gwynedd thereafter until his death, aged

109  Pryce, ‘British or Welsh?’, 782–3. 110  Pryce, ‘British or Welsh?’, 797–8; Owain Wyn Jones, ‘The Most Excellent Princes’, 283–6. 111  For Lives of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth and his son Dafydd noted by the antiquary Robert Vaughan (1592?–1667) as being at Benet’s (i.e. Corpus Christi) College, Cambridge, see Edward Lhuyd to Thomas Tanner, 20 May 1698, in Lhwyd, ‘The Correspondence’, http://tinyurl.com/y7wzd99r (last accessed 13 September 2021). 112  Historia Gruffud, ed. Evans, ccxliii–ccxlix; VGC, 1–49. Assessment of the work’s structure and significance in J. Beverley Smith, ‘The Biography’.

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WELSH PASTS IN AN AGE OF CONQUEST, c.1070–1282  55 eighty-­two, in 1137 occupies only about the final sixth of the text.113 This em­phasis is at least partly explicable by the author’s desire to proclaim the le­git­im­acy of Gruffudd’s rule, which was by no means self-­evident, as his father Cynan had not been king of Gwynedd, and he himself was born and raised in Swords near Dublin and had to fight repeatedly against various Welsh and Norman rivals in order to establish authority over what he claimed to be his rightful patrimonial kingdom. Accordingly, the work opens with a series of detailed genealogies linking Gruffudd not only with his paternal ancestors in the dynasty of Gwynedd but, through his mother, with Irish and Scandinavian rulers, including Rollo and his descendants in Normandy.114 These are followed by prophecies of his future greatness.115 Then comes a narrative of his various attempts to wrest Gwynedd from Welsh and Norman rivals, punctuated by a series of setbacks attributed to acts of betrayal, one of which led to his lengthy imprisonment in Chester.116 After his escape Gruffudd resumes his attempts to secure his claim to Gwynedd, which is finally vindicated through the favour of God and an accommodation with King Henry I of England, and the work ends with his bequests, to both churches and members of his family, pious death, and burial in Bangor cathedral ‘with a gleaming monument erected to the left of the high altar’.117 Two considerations may allow us to narrow down the likely date-­range for the work’s composition. First, the Life was probably written no earlier than the 1140s, as its paternal genealogy of Gruffudd borrows from Geoffrey’s History, completed c.1138.118 Second, the author’s deft sidestepping of the question of succession— Gruffudd’s (unnamed) sons are present at his deathbed, where the king ‘blessed them and predicted what would eventually happen to them, like the patriarch Jacob who blessed his sons in Egypt’—may reflect a reluctance to take sides in the succession dispute between Owain Gwynedd and his younger brother Cadwaladr, and thus indicate composition in the period before Cadwaladr’s expulsion from Gwynedd in 1152 (and certainly no later than the brothers’ reconciliation five years later).119 If his position was unchallenged at the time of writing, it might be expected that Owain would be named as the successor, given the Life’s emphasis on the legitimacy of his father Gruffudd’s rule. It is likely, then, that the work was written at some point between c.1140 and 1152 (or, perhaps, 1157).

113  VGC, 85–91 (cc. 30–5). 114  VGC, 52–9 (cc. 2–7). For the significance of the Irish and Scandinavian elements in the Life see Duffy, ‘Ostmen, Irish and Welsh’, 381–2, 388–96; Jesch, ‘Norse Historical Traditions’; Winkler, ‘The Latin Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan’. See also Goetz, ‘Von der res gesta zur narratio rerum gestarum’, 706–7, for the close association of genealogies and medieval historical writing. 115  VGC, 58–61 (cc. 8, 11). 116  VGC, 60–73 (cc. 10–19). 117  VGC, 72–91 (cc. 22–35). 118  VGC, 52–5, c. 3; David E. Thornton, ‘The Genealogy of Gruffudd ap Cynan’, 86–7. 119  VGC, 88–9, c. 35; cf. Pryce, ‘Owain Gwynedd’. J. Beverley Smith, ‘The Biography’, 368, suggests that the Life was composed in response to ‘prolonged tension in the royal kindred of Gwynedd extending from 1143 to 1157’.

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56  WRITING WELSH HISTORY These considerations bring us to the identity, location, and purpose of the Life’s anonymous author. It has been suggested that the work was composed outside Gwynedd, about which the author seems rather vague in places, and possibly by a cleric at St Davids, since the text acknowledges that church’s claim to metro­pol­ itan status and uses ‘Cambrian’ terminology for Wales and the Welsh comparable to that deployed, under Geoffrey of Monmouth’s influence, in texts from St Davids.120 However, the contents of the Life strongly point to its author being a cleric in Gwynedd with access to those in Gruffudd’s circle familiar with accounts of the king’s life.121 The biblical, classical, and Welsh learning displayed may indicate that he belonged to a major ecclesiastical community in the kingdom, quite possibly Bangor or Clynnog Fawr.122 Whether he wrote of his own volition or at the behest of an ecclesiastical or secular patron can only be guessed, although he is unlikely to have been commissioned by Owain or Cadwaladr, since, as argued above, no attempt is made to vindicate the claims of either to the kingdom.123 On the other hand, the author may have been commissioned by, or at least sympathetic to, Gruffudd’s widow Angharad, who outlived her husband until 1162.124 She receives favourable treatment including a flattering description of her appearance and character, the naming of only her children with Gruffudd (followed by the terse statement that ‘he also had some children by concubines’), and her un­usual designation as ‘queen’ in an account of the bequests she received.125 A sensitivity to Angharad’s position may also explain why the Life says nothing about the killing in 1132 of her eldest son Cadwallon in a feud with her brothers and nephews as he sought to expand into their territory in north-­east Wales.126 As the Life was probably composed about seven decades after Gruffudd first left Ireland for Wales, its coverage of his struggles in the late eleventh century must rely on accounts transmitted over the subsequent decades, possibly as oral stories told in Gruffudd’s hall.127 If so, Gruffudd had already become a legend in his own lifetime, and the Life offers a valuable glimpse of the adaptation by Latin 120  VGC, 43–7 (which suggests the death in 1148 of Bishop Bernard of St Davids, a vigorous champion of his see’s metropolitan claim, as a possible terminus ad quem). 121  Historia Gruffud, ed. Evans, ccxxx; C. P. Lewis, ‘Gruffudd ap Cynan’, 48–50; J. Beverley Smith, ‘The Biography’, 366–7. The use of ‘Cambrian’ terminology could have been adapted directly from Geoffrey, whose work was known to the Life’s author, rather than via usage in south-­west Wales attested from the late twelfth century: cf. Pryce, ‘British or Welsh?’, 797–8. The demeaning portrayal of the southern king Rhys ap Tewdwr (d. 1093) in the context of the battle of Mynydd Carn (1081) also argues against composition at St Davids, as Rhys is given precedence over Gruffudd at the battle in chronicles deriving from the church and also apparently endowed St Davids with substantial lands: VGC, 68–71 (cc. 17–18); BT, RBH, 16–17 (1081); Pryce, ‘The Dynasty of Deheubarth’, 305. 122  Historia Gruffud, ed. Evans, ccxlviii–ccxlix; C. P. Lewis, ‘Gruffudd ap Cynan’, 48. 123  See also C. P. Lewis, ‘Gruffudd ap Cynan’, 50. 124  BT, Pen20Tr, 62 (1162). 125  VGC, 76–9, 88–9 (cc. 24, 35). 126  Cf. Charles-­Edwards, ‘The Three Columns of Law’, 36–7. 127  C. P. Lewis, ‘Gruffudd ap Cynan’, 43, 48–50. The holding by members of the Gwynedd dynasty of lands north of Dublin, near Swords, probably in the twelfth, and certainly by the early thirteenth, century, may have been a further reason why Gruffudd’s origins and early life were remembered: cf. Flanagan, ‘Historia Gruffud vab Kenan’.

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WELSH PASTS IN AN AGE OF CONQUEST, c.1070–1282  57 history writing of oral, and presumably vernacular, historical culture fostered in a secular milieu. One purpose of the Life, then, was to ensure that the memory of his lengthy struggle to become king of Gwynedd, marked by his overcoming of numerous setbacks, was perpetuated after his death in the high literary register of Latin prose in a composition influenced by classical models, especially the divisiones of classical biography exemplified by Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars.128 Accordingly, though it probably drew in part on earlier materials, the Life was the creation of a self-­conscious author, ready to mark his presence in the text through occasional interjections in the first person and to impose his own interpretation on the events described.129 In particular, he set Gruffudd’s achievements in a context of universal history that invested them with deeper significance. Thus the king is compared with classical and biblical figures, including Agamemnon, King David, and Judas Maccabeus; like the latter, he had liberated the people of Gwynedd from foreign rule—represented, for example, by Earl Hugh of Chester, aptly likened to Antiochus, king of Syria—but had also suffered betrayal, a fate shared also with Julius Caesar and ‘[e]ven Arthur, the outstandingly noble king of the kings of the whole of Britain’.130 Above all, the author attributes his successes to divine providence and portrays the people of Gwynedd as if they were latter-­ day Israelites under the protection of God, and whose kingdom, under Gruffudd’s rule ‘with an iron rod’, enjoyed peace and plenty accompanied by extensive church building.131 Irrespective of whether Angharad was the patron, the concluding depiction of a golden age may have served as an implicit warning against allowing dynastic strife to jeopardize what Gruffudd had achieved with so much effort.

Chronicles The number of surviving chronicles written in Wales increased significantly in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.132 In large part this resulted from ec­cle­si­as­tic­al changes precipitated by foreign conquest and domination from the late eleventh century onwards, namely the foundation of monastic houses by both Anglo-­ French settlers and Welsh rulers. This in turn meant that chronicle writing in Wales belonged to two overlapping contexts: on the one hand, the continuation of a pre-­Norman Welsh tradition best represented by the Harleian chronicle; on the other, the expansion of monastic chronicling in Britain and Ireland, especially 128  Malone, ‘ “There Has Been Treachery” ’; J. Beverley Smith, ‘The Biography’, esp. 341–7. 129  VGC, 58–9, 76–7 (cc. 7–8, 23). 130  VGC, 62–3, 64–5, 74–5, 78–9, 84–5 (cc. 12, 14, 22–5, 31); see also VGC, 58–9 (c. 6). The source of the reference to Arthur’s betrayal is uncertain. It is lacking in the Historia Brittonum, but was possibly influenced by Geoffrey of Monmouth: Historia Gruffud, ed. Evans, 70, referring to DGB, 196–201 (IX. 145–7). See also Malone ‘ “There Has Been Treachery” ’, 70–2. 131  See esp. VGC, 84–5, 86–7 (cc. 31, 33 (quotation)). 132  Survey of modern scholarship in Guy, ‘Historical Scholars’.

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58  WRITING WELSH HISTORY among the Cistercians.133 In other words, while the chronicles under con­sid­er­ation here may be regarded as examples of Welsh history writing, they also exemplify— and, in some cases, were closely connected with—wider historiographical trends extending beyond Wales. Moreover, in contrast to the pre-­Norman period, chronicles were composed in Wales by foreign settlers as well as by the Welsh. One aspect of this, as we shall see shortly, was the appropriation of chronicles that continued the annalistic tradition at St Davids. However, these continuations marked a significant change in interest and allegiance. Divergence from the native tradition was clearer still in new chronicles created in Glamorgan, which developed into a major marcher lordship after its conquest by the Normans in the late eleventh century, namely the annals down to 1235 written at Margam (a Cistercian abbey founded in 1147 whose library contained the histories of both William of  Malmesbury and Geoffrey of Monmouth) as well as adaptations of the Tewkesbury annals at the Cistercian abbey of Neath and the Benedictine priory of Cardiff at the end of the thirteenth century, discussed in Chapter  4.134 To a great extent, these adapted monastic chronicles in England and reflected the Anglocentric outlook of the communities where they were produced: thus their chronology is structured around the reigns of kings of England, and several begin with the death of Edward the Confessor and the Norman conquest of England in 1066.135 By contrast, there is only limited evidence of cross-­fertilization between these texts and native Welsh chronicle writing before the end of the thirteenth century.136 However, like monastic chronicles elsewhere, those in Glamorgan also recorded events in their localities, including Welsh attacks on the possessions of Margam and Neath.137 These events were in turn affected by developments ori­ gin­at­ing farther afield in Wales, especially the dominance achieved by Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, prince of Gwynedd, who receives considerable attention in the Margam Annals, most notably after he led forces into south Wales in the early 1230s.138 They therefore contributed to historical writing not only in, but also about, Wales. Nevertheless, the most substantial and geographically extensive body of chron­ icles written in Wales in this period were those which continued the St Davids tradition represented by the Harleian chronicle that ended in 954. These survive

133 Gransden, Historical Writing in England c. 550 to c. 1307, 143–8, 318–45, 395–438; Harrison, ‘Cistercian Chronicling’. 134  Kathleen Hughes, Celtic Britain, 81–2; J.  Beverley Smith, ‘Historical Writing’, 67–70; Cowley, The Monastic Order, 144; Patterson, ‘The Author of the “Margam Annals” ’; Colker, ‘The “Margam Chronicle” ’, 123–48. 135  ‘Annales de Margan’, ed. Luard, 3; Henley, ‘The Cardiff Chronicle’, 253. 136  J. Beverley Smith, ‘Historical Writing’, 67–71. 137  ‘Annales de Margan’, ed. Luard, 34–7 (s.aa. 1223–4, 1226–7, 1229). 138  ‘Annales de Margan’, ed. Luard, 31–2, 38–9 (s.aa. 1211–12, 1230–2). See also Henley, ‘The Cardiff Chronicle’, 257–8, 260–2, 264–5 (s.aa. 1211, 1228, 1230, 1231, 1232, 1240); ‘Chronicle of the Thirteenth Century’ [ed. Jones], 278 (s.a. 1231); J. Beverley Smith, ‘Historical Writing’, 69–70.

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WELSH PASTS IN AN AGE OF CONQUEST, c.1070–1282  59 in both Latin and Welsh texts generally known respectively as members of two related families, Annales Cambriae and Brut y Tywysogyon (‘The Chronicle of the Princes’), although modern scholarship has increasingly treated these texts, especially the former, as individual compilations rather than as variants of a single work.139 The two Latin texts are extant in manuscripts of the late thirteenth century: the Breviate chronicle (the B-­text of the Annales Cambriae), copied at the  Cistercian abbey of Neath, which contains annals down to 1286, and the Cottonian chronicle (the C-­text of the Annales Cambriae), copied at St Davids, the provenance of the chronicle as a whole, which ends in 1288.140 Both derive from a St Davids chronicle down to c.1202, but thereafter the Breviate chronicle drew its material from Welsh Cistercian houses, quite possibly Whitland (Dyfed) and (at least ultimately) Strata Florida (Ceredigion), and also almost certainly Cwm-­hir (Maelienydd in mid-­Wales) for the period 1257–63; the final section was composed c.1300 at Neath, when retrospective additions of English events recorded in annals from Waverley Abbey (Surrey) were also made.141 These differences are related to the changing political orientation of the churches at which the chronicles were written. From the 1160s the Cottonian chronicle offers an English perspective on events reflecting the marcher environment of St Davids and the integration of its bishops in the province of Canterbury, whereas the composite nature of the Breviate chronicle reveals shifting views: thus for the period 1189–1263, it ‘speaks with the voice of independent Wales’, as its narrative is largely derived from Welsh Cistercian houses, while its final part, written at Neath, an abbey patronized by the Briouze lords of Gower, supports Edward I.142 In one respect, however, the ancestors of both chronicles shared a common historical perspective after they diverged c.1202, as they combined their annals with universal histories extending from the creation of the world to the reign of the Emperor Heraclius (610–42) derived principally from Isidore of Seville’s Chronicon Epitome, to which was added material on early British history from Geoffrey of Monmouth and also, in the Breviate chronicle, the De Temporibus of Bede.143 In the case of the ancestor of the Cottonian chronicle, this involved extensive chronological restructuring of the text, probably in or shortly after 1216.144 The retrospective expansion of the chronicles was designed to give them greater chronological depth and to integrate them with universal Christian history. It is

139  For a similar approach to a much larger group of chronicles see Stafford, After Alfred, esp. comments at 33–7. 140  Unsatisfactory editions in AC, which is cited for convenience. For full and accurate transcriptions, see ‘Annales Cambriae: The B Text’, ed. Gough-­Cooper, and ‘Annales Cambriae: The C Text’, ed. Gough-­Cooper. 141  Here I follow Kathleen Hughes, Celtic Britain, 73–6, 79–84, with the modifications proposed by Stephenson, ‘Gerald of Wales’; Stephenson, ‘The Chronicler at Cwm-­hir Abbey’; and Stephenson, ‘In Search of a Welsh Chronicler’. 142  Kathleen Hughes, Celtic Britain, 76, 79 (quotation), 81–3. 143  Brett, ‘The Prefaces’. 144  Gough-­Cooper, ‘Decennovenal Reason’.

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60  WRITING WELSH HISTORY also significant as marking the earliest attempt to connect Geoffrey’s account of the kings of Britain with a chronicle that continued beyond the late seventh century and focused predominantly on events in Wales, albeit less ex­pli­cit­ly than in the case of Brut y Tywysogyon discussed in Chapter 4. Two other texts provide further evidence of chronicle writing by Welsh Cistercians in the thirteenth century. The Latin Cronica de Wallia, extant in a late thirteenth-­century manuscript, was probably written at Whitland Abbey (quite possibly in 1277) and covers the period 1190–1266, providing fairly full narratives of many years down to 1255.145 It bears close resemblances to the Welsh-­language Brut y Tywysogyon, discussed below, whose lost Latin sources were probably very similar, as well as to parts of the Breviate and Cottonian chron­icles.146 By contrast, the other work, O Oes Gwrtheyrn (‘From the Age of Vortigern’), a title derived from its opening words and whose earliest surviving copies were written c.1400, is unique among chronicles of this period. Rather than being a continuation of the St Davids tradition, it appears to be a new work, probably originally written in Welsh (rather than translated from Latin) at the Cistercian abbey of Aberconwy, patronized by the princes of Gwynedd, that ori­gin­al­ly ended in 1211/12 and was subsequently extended to c.1265.147 As its title indicates, the work fixed its dating with reference to the time since the reign of Vortigern, named in the Historia Brittonum as the British tyrant who had invited the Saxons into Britain, and also included calculations of the years that had elapsed since the coming of various peoples to Britain.148 This allowed the chron­icler to set recent events, however disastrous, against the backdrop of an ancient history which played on the long-­ established notion that the Welsh, as successors of the Britons, were the rightful proprietors of Britain. One example is the description of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth’s surrender of his son Gruffudd as one of the terms of the prince’s surrender to King John in 1211: ‘From when the Welsh first came to the island of Britain until King John came to Aber and until Gruffudd ap Llywelyn was taken hostage, two thousand five hundred and sixteen years.’149 Significantly, the chronicle shows a number of affinities with a substantial new genealogical compilation of similar date, datable to 1216 × c.1223, that reflected the hegemony of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth and was quite possibly also composed at Aberconwy. These affinities also strengthen

145  CW; J. Beverley Smith, ‘The “Cronica de Wallia” ’; Kathleen Hughes, Celtic Britain, 77–9; Crick, ‘The Power and the Glory’. 146  BT, Pen20, xi–xiii; BT, Pen20Tr, xl; J. Beverley Smith, ‘The “Cronica de Wallia” ’, 274–6. 147  Owain Wyn Jones, ‘O Oes Gwrtheyrn’. 148 A precedent for, and thus possible influence on, this formulation is the Historia Brittonum’s statement that 428 years had passed ‘from the first year in which the English came to Britain until the fourth year of King Merfyn’: HB, c. 16. This in turn seems to have been modelled on the work’s summary of the Six Ages of the World (sex aetates mundi), an influential periodization devised in late antiquity: HB, cc. 1–4. For a similar scheme, see e.g. Bede, De Temporum Ratione, c. 66: 1–6, ed. Jones, 463–4, and discussion in Bassett, ‘The Use of History’, 281–7. 149  Owain Wyn Jones, ‘O Oes Gwrtheyrn’, 222.

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WELSH PASTS IN AN AGE OF CONQUEST, c.1070–1282  61 the case that the chronicle was ori­gin­al­ly composed in Welsh, marking an innovative attempt at Aberconwy to extend the scope of historical writing in the vernacular.150 Just as the Harleian ge­neal­ogies had been composed as a supplement to the Historia Brittonum in the ninth century (see Chapter 2), so the chronicle and the genealogies were linked enterprises that drew on long-­established understandings of the Brittonic past to structure new historiographical writing in thirteenth-­century Gwynedd. The fullest evidence for chronicle writing in this period occurs in Brut y Tywysogyon (‘The Chronicle of the Princes’), the conventional title for chronicles extant in manuscripts from the mid-­fourteenth century onwards which covered the years from 682 to early 1282 and were intended as a continuation of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s De Gestis Britonum.151 These were also the most influential of the medieval Welsh chronicles, since they formed the basis for the earliest histories of Wales written in the Elizabethan period which in turn retained their authority as authoritative accounts of the Welsh past into the nineteenth century. The chron­ icles survive in two main versions, Peniarth 20 and the Red Book of Hergest, named after manuscripts containing copies of them. These are datable re­spect­ ive­ly to 1286 × c.1330 and 1307 × 1350; another chronicle, Brenhinedd y Saesson (‘The Kings of the English’), probably datable to 1282 × c.1330, is closely related.152 The extant texts are thus important evidence for Welsh history writing in the period after the Edwardian conquest, and their significance in that context is assessed in Chapter 4. However, they are also highly relevant to the present discussion, as it is generally agreed that the Welsh texts are translations of one or more sources in Latin on account of their preservation of Latin declensional forms, errors explicable as resulting from a misconstruing of Latin, and the close similarities of some sections with surviving Cambro-­Latin chronicles, especially the Cronica de Wallia.153 In other words, the vernacular chronicles are a palimpsest beneath which earlier stages of Latin chronicle writing remain visible, and thus provide evidence for chronicle writing in the period before the Edwardian conquest. Two issues need to be considered here: the composition after the Edwardian conquest of a chronicle in Latin, sometimes termed ‘the Latin Brut’,154 which provided a common archetype, now lost, for the vernacular chronicles; and the extent to which that lost Latin chronicle preserved the wording of the earlier Latin chronicles it used. First, it is mostly, though not universally, accepted that a lost Latin chronicle was probably composed at Strata Florida around the end of 150  Owain Wyn Jones, ‘O Oes Gwrtheyrn’, 191–5; Guy, Medieval Welsh Genealogy, 200–23. 151  Historical Texts, ed. Williams, xxv–xxxii; Jones, HWMW, ch. 4. 152  Brenhinoedd y Saeson, ed. and trans. Dumville, v–x; Guy, ‘Historical Scholars’, 83–4 and n. 55. 153 John Edward Lloyd, ‘The Welsh Chronicles’, 378–9; BT, Pen20Tr, xxxvi, lvi; BT, RBH, li–lii; J. Beverley Smith, ‘Historical Writing’, 57–8. 154  John Edward Lloyd, ‘The Welsh Chronicles’, 384; J. Beverley Smith, ‘Historical Writing’, 56.

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62  WRITING WELSH HISTORY the thirteenth century, quite possibly in response to the Edwardian conquest, in order to create a continuation of Geoffrey’s History.155 Derivation from a common Latin source (‘the Latin Brut’) is indicated by the close substantive simi­lar­ ities between the Peniarth and Red Book versions of Brut y Tywysogyon, and relevant parts of Brenhinedd y Saesson. However, it has also been argued that variations in content and especially phrasing between the Welsh texts suggest that the latter represent independent translations of three different copies or versions of the common Latin source.156 It is also widely agreed that, as J. E. Lloyd argued almost a century ago, this Latin source was based primarily on a sequence of annals written at St Davids, then at Llanbadarn Fawr (c.1100–c.1175), and finally at the Cistercian abbey of Strata Florida in Ceredigion (albeit drawing on material from other Welsh Cistercian houses).157 Second, however, the extent to which the translations keep to the wording of their Latin sources has been a matter of debate. J. E. Lloyd implied that the compiler of the lost Latin archetype of the vernacular chronicles had largely preserved the wording of his sources, his only major intervention being to omit annals for the years before 682 and to interpolate the annal for that year by referring to the end of Geoffrey’s History.158 On the other hand, Thomas Jones subsequently suggested that the late thirteenth-­century author of the lost Latin chronicle or ‘Latin Brut’ was ‘a conscious literary artist’, who, in some parts, significantly embellished what had originally been fairly terse Latin annals, comparable to those of the Breviate and Cottonian chronicles.159 According to this interpretation, therefore, the texts of Brut y Tywysogyon provide an unreliable guide to the precise wording of the earlier annals upon which it was ultimately based. However, recent textual studies have persuasively challenged this view, and have instead argued that Brut y Tywysogyon essentially reproduces, albeit in translation, the wording of Latin chronicles written at different stages from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries.160 (The extent to which events were recorded contemporaneously rather than 155  John Edward Lloyd, ‘The Welsh Chronicles’, 382, 386; BT, Pen20Tr, xxxv–xxxvi, xxxviii–xxxix and n. 3; J.  Beverley Smith, The Sense of History, 7. Review of the arguments in Guy, ‘Historical Scholars’, 97–100. The existence of ‘the Latin Brut’ is questioned, though, in Brenhinoedd y Saeson, ed. and trans. Dumville, vi; Harrison, ‘Cistercian Chronicling’, 27, n. 66. See also Jones, HWMW, 232–41. 156  BT, Pen20Tr, xxxvii. 157 John Edward Lloyd, ‘The Welsh Chronicles’, 382–6, followed, for example, by BT, Pen20Tr, xxxiv, xli. By contrast, Dumville, Review of Hughes, The Welsh Latin Chronicles, 465, argues that a version of the St Davids chronicle passed directly to Strata Florida, without an intervening period at Llanbadarn Fawr. However, the work cited in n. 160 has reinforced Lloyd’s case for the importance of the latter. 158  John Edward Lloyd, ‘The Welsh Chronicles’, 369–70, 382–6. 159  Thomas Jones, ‘Historical Writing’, 25–7, quotation at 26. See also BT, Pen20Tr, xliii; J. Beverley Smith, ‘Castell Gwyddgrug’; J.  Beverley Smith, The Sense of History, 8; J.  Beverley Smith, ‘Historical Writing’, 56–7; J. Beverley Smith, ‘Princes, Lords and English Monarchy’, 250–1, 253–4, 257–8. 160 Stephenson, Medieval Powys, 25–8; Stephenson, ‘The “Resurgence” of Powys’, 184–9; Stephenson, ‘Welsh Chronicles’ Accounts’, 51–7; Stephenson, ‘Entries Relating to Arwystli’, 47–9; Owain Wyn Jones, ‘Brut y Tywysogion’. For possible earlier Latin chronicles incorporated in the Breviate and Cottonian chronicles see Gough-­Cooper, ‘Meet the Ancestors?’.

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WELSH PASTS IN AN AGE OF CONQUEST, c.1070–1282  63 retrospectively merits further investigation.)161 That the compiler of the underlying ‘Latin Brut’ limited his editorial intervention essentially to beginning the chron­icle as a continuation of Geoffrey’s History is also suggested by its abrupt ter­min­ation (indicated by both the Red Book version and, in its original form, the Peniarth version of Brut y Tywysogyon) in March 1282, and thus before the momentous events precipitated by the Welsh uprising on Palm Sunday of that year, namely the Edwardian conquest and the death of Llywelyn.162 An interventionist compiler of the ‘Latin Brut’, writing shortly after the conquest, might be expected to have extended the coverage at least to the end of 1282 in order to round off the narrative and provide a conclusion in keeping with the emphasis on loss in the opening section based on Geoffrey of Monmouth. Those who argue that the vernacular chronicles consistently adhere closely to their underlying Latin sources thus allow for a more complex and sophisticated picture of Latin chronicle writing, especially in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, than the advocates of late thirteenth-­century literary elaboration by the author of ‘the Latin Brut’.163 To take a particularly significant example, it has been convincingly argued that the account of the years 1100–26, which occupies about a sixth of Brut y Tywysogyon and is notable for its lengthy rhetorical passages, essentially represents a Latin chronicle written in the early twelfth century by a cleric from Llanbadarn Fawr, quite possibly Daniel ap Sulien (d. 1127), a brother of Rhygyfarch ap Sulien (d. 1099) who wrote the Life of St David and may himself have contributed to chronicle writing in the late eleventh century.164 The following discussion will proceed on the assumption, then, that Brut y Tywysogyon opens a window on Latin chronicle writing in Wales down to 1282.

Themes and Approaches Viewed as an evolving text, Brut y Tywysogyon provides valuable evidence for the assumptions and approaches of Welsh chroniclers—that is, members of native ecclesiastical communities followed, from the late twelfth century, by Cistercian 161  The detailed account in BT, Pen20Tr, 12 (1022) may well have been composed in the late eleventh century: Stephenson, Medieval Powys, 27–8; also Owain Wyn Jones, ‘Brut y Tywysogion’, 13–14. 162 Thomas Jones, ‘Historical Writing in Medieval Welsh’, 23–4; Brynley  F.  Roberts, ‘Testunau Hanes’, 296; Owain Wyn Jones and Huw Pryce, ‘Historical Writing’, 215–17. For the subsequent extension of the narrative to 1332 in an early fourteenth-­century continuation of the Peniarth 20 version, in turn followed by Brenhinedd y Saesson, see Chapter 4. 163  J. Beverley Smith, ‘Historical Writing’, 57–8, argues that literary elaboration was restricted to the narrative from the early eleventh to late twelfth centuries. 164  BT, Pen20Tr, 21–50; BT, RBH, 38–111; BS, 92–143. See Stephenson, ‘The “Resurgence” of Powys’, 184–9; Owain Wyn Jones, ‘Brut y Tywysogion’, 215–27; Stephenson, Medieval Powys, 26–8. However, the author of the ‘Llanbadarn History’ may have relocated to the church of Meifod in Powys after monks from Gloucester Abbey occupied Llanbadarn Fawr c.1116 (and his successor was possibly based at Llandinam in Arwystli in 1128–32): Stephenson, ‘Entries Relating to Arwystli’, 47–9.

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64  WRITING WELSH HISTORY monks. The following discussion will focus primarily on the surviving versions of this source, but will also comment on aspects of the other chronicles considered above as well as the Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan. In some respects little changed between the eleventh and late thirteenth centuries. Like the Harleian chronicle down to 954, the Latin sources of Brut y Tywysogyon recorded the deaths of members of the ecclesiastical and secular elite, raids and battles, and unusual natural phenomena such as earthquakes.165 On the other hand, from the early eleventh century entries tend to be fuller than previously,166 though the amount of coverage remains uneven down to 1282, probably reflecting differences in the  amount of information available to, and in the approaches of, individual chron­ic­lers.167 For example, even the section for 1100–26 deriving from the Llanbadarn chronicle, notable for its many expansive and dramatic passages, includes a sizeable minority of entries consisting of only a few short, unembellished annals.168 Annals for the years 1177–84 and 1224–6 are likewise brief, while for the four years 1133–6 ‘there was nothing that might be placed on record’ and in 1161 ‘naught happened’.169 Nevertheless, the readiness of some chroniclers to go beyond brief notices and create detailed narratives is unmistakable. So too is an increased tendency to give precise dates for events, according to either the Roman or, more frequently, ecclesiastical calendar. Such dates are lacking in the Harleian chronicle and the Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan, as also in the Breviate and Cottonian chronicles until 1047 and 1093 respectively, and are very rare in Brut y Tywysogyon and Brenhinedd y Saesson until the 1090s.170 Moreover, while dates are given thereafter, they remain infrequent until the precisely dated account of Henry II’s journey through south Wales to Ireland and back in 1171–2, and become common only from 1200, which implies that Cistercian chroniclers were especially keen to record dates as far as they were known.171 Unlike some other late twelfth- and thirteenth-­century chronicles in Britain, however, those in Wales did not cite or draw on texts of documents issued by ecclesiastical or secular authorities.172

165 Mortality: BT, Pen20Tr, 57, 97, 101 (1148, 1219, 1230). Earthquakes: BT, Pen20Tr, 81, 107, 117 (1201, 1247, 1275). 166  A tendency already presaged in the slightly fuller annals for 987 and 992: BT, Pen20Tr, 9, 10. 167  BT, Pen20Tr, xlii–xliii. 168  BT, Pen20Tr, 22, 27, 36, 46, 47, 49 (1101, 1107, 1112, 1117, 1119, 1122–3, 1126). 169  BT, Pen20Tr, 51, 62 (1133–6, 1161); also BT, Pen20Tr, 72 (1180). 170  BT, Pen20Tr, 1, 3, 8, 10, 14, 18–19 (682, 810, 961, 993, 1047, 1091, 1093). BT, RBH, and BS are similar, apart from specifying the date of another lunar eclipse in 831. 171  Stephenson, ‘In Search of a Welsh Chronicler’, 80, suggests that ‘[m]aterials originating in Strata Florida seem frequently to give precise dates’. By contrast, the Annals of Margam give precise dates mainly for the deaths of ecclesiastics and kings of England and for natural phenomena, but usually assign events in Wales only to the year in which they occurred: ‘Annales de Margan’, ed. Luard, passim. 172  Cf. Gransden, Historical Writing in England c. 550 to c. 1307, 325, 337, 342, 396; Julian Harrison, ‘Cistercian Chronicling’, 25–6.

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WELSH PASTS IN AN AGE OF CONQUEST, c.1070–1282  65 A reluctance to give dates may in part have stemmed from a desire to avoid interrupting the flow of the narrative passages which become more common from the eleventh century onwards.173 Some of these are conspicuous for their adoption of literary conventions indebted to classical rhetoric which were intended to add dramatic effect.174 In part, this involved deploying techniques ultimately derived from oral forms of communication. One is the use of direct speech, which appears occasionally in the Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan and more frequently in annals for the years 1109–21 in the section of Brut y Tywysogyon derived from the early twelfth-­century Llanbadarn chronicler, beginning with the account of Owain ap Cadwgan’s rape and abduction of Nest, wife of Gerald of Windsor, and the ensuing repercussions.175 Another is the prefacing of a sudden turn of events with the exclamation ‘behold’ (Lat. ecce; W. nachaf, nychaf ), as in the detailed account of the ill-­ fated Welsh attack on the Normans holding Aberystwyth castle in 1116.176 Rhetorical conventions are particularly apparent in encomiastic descriptions of secular rulers which emphasize their martial prowess and other laudable qual­ities.177 Thus his biographer praised Gruffudd ap Cynan for his military feats, comparing him with Judas Machabaeus delivering his land from foreign dom­in­ation as well as with Agamemnon and King David, and also gave a flattering description of his physical appearance, educational accomplishments (including a mastery of languages), generosity, and bravery.178 Brut y Tywysogyon and other chronicles describe rulers in similar terms, though without reference to their physical appearance. For example, an assault by Gruffudd’s sons on the Normans in west Wales in 1136 prompted this exuberant outburst: And thereupon Owain and Cadwaladr, sons of Gruffudd ap Cynan, the splendour of all Britain and her defence and her strength and her freedom, like two kings, like two generous ones, two fearless ones, two brave ones, two fortunate ones, two pleasant ones, defenders of the churches, guardians of the poor, slayers of their enemies and tamers of warriors, surest help for all those who fled to them, while they surpassed all in strength of body and soul, held supremacy over all Wales and moved a mighty, fierce host to Ceredigion . . .179 173 For early examples see BT, Pen20Tr, 12, 14, 15 (1022, 1056, 1063, 1066). Cf. Given-­Wilson, Chronicles, 125–6. 174  Historical Texts, ed. Williams, xxxi; Henley, ‘Rhetoric’. 175  BT, Pen20Tr, 28–36, 38–46, 48 (1109–11, 1114–16, 1121). Cf. VGC, 68–73 (cc. 17–19). See also Kempshall, Rhetoric, 339–41; Johns, Gender, Nation and Conquest, 20–42. 176  BT, Pen20Tr, 43 (1116). See also BT, Pen20Tr, 100 (1223); VGC, 80–1, 84–5 (cc. 27, 30); and, for the interjection of ‘alas!’ (L. heu) in reporting a ruler’s death, CW, 31 (1197); AC, 89 (1255). 177  Historical Texts, ed. Williams, xxxi–xxxii; for parallels with rulers’ elegies in Welsh court poetry see Henley, ‘Rhetoric’, 95–6; McKenna, ‘Court Poetry’, 108. 178  VGC, 62–3, 64–5, 72–3, 74–5, 84–5 (cc. 12, 14, 20, 23, 31). 179  BT, Pen20Tr, 51 (1136). BT, RBH, 112–13 (1136), is similar, but the passage is highly compressed in BS, 144–5 (1136). Another example is the account of the defence of Llansteffan castle by Maredudd

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66  WRITING WELSH HISTORY Such praise occurs most frequently in obituary notices. An early example is the account of the killing in 1064 of Gruffudd ap Llywelyn after innumerable victories and taking of spoils and treasures of gold and silver and precious purple raiment, through the treachery of his own men, after his fame and glory had increased and after he had aforetimes been unconquered, but was not left in the waste valleys, and after he had been head and shield and defender to the Britons.180

However, the most fulsome commemoration of a Welsh ruler is that for Rhys ap  Gruffudd (the Lord Rhys; d. 1197), described as ‘prince of Deheubarth [south-­west Wales] and the unconquered head of all Wales’, whose qualities and achievements evoked those of classical heroes such as Hercules, Achilles, and Ulysses as well as the Old Testament figures Samson and Solomon.181 This is followed, moreover, in the Peniarth 20 version of the chronicle by the use of Latin verse for heightened rhetorical effect. These verses open by declaring that ‘[t]he noble crown of Welsh honour has fallen’ and proclaim Rhys to have been superior to the Galfridian kings Camber, Locrinus, and Albanactus, and equal to Caesar, Arthur, and Alexander the Great; Latin verses on his tomb are also quoted.182 Other obituary notices emphasize the ruler’s pious end, including taking the monastic habit on his deathbed. The earliest example relates that Gruffudd ap Cynan, prince of Gwynedd and head and king and defender and pacifier of all Wales, ended his temporal life in Christ . . . after building many churches and consecrating them to God and the saints—after receiving extreme unction and communion and confession and repentance for his sins, and becoming a monk and making a good end in his perfect old age.183

The passage seems to be derived from Gruffudd’s Life, which ends with a detailed account of his death and bequests,184 and similar obituaries are given for his son

ap Rhys, praised as a boy who acted like a man: BT, Pen20Tr, 54 (1146); BT, RBH, 122–3 (1146); compressed in BS, 150–1 (1146). 180  BT, Pen20Tr, 15 (1063). BT, RBH, 26–7, and BS, 72–3, are similar. Walter Map drew a far less flattering picture of Gruffudd with marked folkloric elements suggesting derivation from stories transmitted orally: Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium, ed. and trans. James, revd. Brooke and Mynors, 186–97; Michael and Sean Davies, The Last King of Wales, 23–9, 84–6; Joshua Byron Smith, Walter Map, 22–8. 181  BT, Pen20Tr, 76–7 (1197). 182  BT, Pen20Tr, 77–8 (1197); also edited and translated in Henley, ‘Rhetoric’, 100–3, quotation at 101. The closest parallel for the prose encomium appears in CW, 30–1 (1197). Only the first part occurs in BT, RBH, 178–9, and the encomium in BS, 192–3, is very brief. Discussion in Pryce, ‘Y Canu Lladin’, 212–15; Henley, ‘Rhetoric’, 79, 90–8; Russell, ‘ “Go and Look in the Latin Books” ’, 215–30. 183  BT, Pen20Tr, 52 (1137). 184  VGC, 88–91 (cc. 34–5).

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WELSH PASTS IN AN AGE OF CONQUEST, c.1070–1282  67 and successor Owain Gwynedd (d. 1170) as well as one of his grandsons, his namesake Gruffudd ap Cynan ab Owain (d. 1200).185 Both the latter and his cousin Llywelyn ap Iorwerth (d. 1240) are said to have taken ‘the habit of the Order’ at Aberconwy.186 Likewise, though the Lord Rhys was buried at St Davids, his elder brother Cadell had taken the habit at the Cistercian abbey of Strata Florida in Ceredigion before his death and burial there in 1175, and the same was true of several of Rhys’s descendants in the thirteenth century, when the abbey became the dynasty’s mausoleum, a connection that explains the emphasis on the dynasty in Brut y Tywysogyon.187 Obituaries expressed the conventional expectations of the ecclesiastical authors who commemorated the rulers and, as elsewhere in Europe, reflected the values shared by churchmen with the upper echelons of lay society, above all the em­phasis on martial qualities, occasionally refined by allusions to chivalry: Maelgwn ap Rhys (d. 1231) was ‘the best knight, a second Gawain’.188 Close attention was also given to rulers’ marital and other genealogical connections, including relations with multiple partners.189 However, while criticizing acts of sacrilege against churches, both chroniclers and the author of the Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan refrained from moral condemnation of rulers, though this is implicit in a report of the Lord Rhys’s fathering a son with his niece.190 As in the pre-­Norman period, the clearest indication of the texts’ fundamentally Christian character is their conventional interpretation of events as the workings of divine providence. The author of the Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan compared his subject’s repeated attempts to establish himself as ruler of Gwynedd with the struggles of Judas Maccabeus and other leaders on behalf of the people of Israel, and was clear that Gruffudd’s eventual success was divinely ordained.191 For chroniclers, too, God intervened on behalf of the Welsh and their rulers. After Owain Gwynedd was struck down by grief after the death of his son Rhun in 1146 God . . . in his accustomed goodness saw good to show mercy to the race of the Britons, so that it should not be wrecked completely like a ship when it has 185  BT, Pen20Tr, 65, 80 (1170, 1200). 186  BT, Pen20Tr, 105 (1240). 187  BT, Pen20Tr, 71, 81, 82, 84, 99 (1175, 1201, 1204, 1210, 1222). Likewise Owain Cyfeiliog of southern Powys took the habit at Strata Marcella: BT, Pen20Tr, 79 (1197). 188  BT, Pen20Tr, 74 (1189). The comparison is lacking in BT, RBH, 172–3 (1189), but BS, 186–7 (1189) calls Maelgwn ‘the flower of knights’, a description applied in the Breviate chronicle to his nephew Rhys Ieuanc ap Gruffudd: AC, 75 (1220 = 1222). The latter is called ‘the . . . unconquered bulwark of knights’ in BT, Pen20Tr, 99 (1222). 189  Pen 20Tr, 45–6, 70–1, 83 (1116, 1175, 1205); VGC, 52–9, 76–9 (cc. 2–7, 24). 190  BT, Pen20Tr, 30, 42, 69 (1109, 1116, 1173). The Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan mentions the king’s ‘concubines’ and their children only in a brief aside, without naming them: VGC, 78–9 (c. 24). If, as is likely, members of the family of Sulien at Llanbadarn composed the chronicle underlying Brut y Tywysogyon in the early to mid-­twelfth century, such condemnation may have been deemed imprudent, given the family’s role as mediators between kingdoms: cf. BT, Pen20Tr, 50, 54 (1124 = 1127, 1145 = 1146). 191  VGC, 62–5, 74–5, 80–5, 90–1 (cc. 12, 14, 22, 27–8, 31, 35).

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68  WRITING WELSH HISTORY lost its steersman, and be despoiled of its chief, and He preserved Owain for them as leader.

Accordingly ‘divine providence’ delivered a military victory that brought about the prince’s recovery.192 A section of the Breviate chronicle that probably derives from Cwm-­hir Abbey shows that Welsh Cistercian chroniclers took a similar line in the thirteenth century: thus the Welsh under Llywelyn ap Gruffudd won the battle of Cymerau in 1256 ‘with the help of God’.193 Christian defeats of the Saracens in the Middle East were likewise divinely ordained.194 Their treatment of rulers suggests that the authors of these historical narratives were ‘engaged insiders’ commenting on contemporary politics.195 However, establishing their precise relationship to the individuals and events described is difficult, as we have seen with respect to the Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan. From the late twelfth century it is likely that Brut y Tywysogyon reflects the perspectives of the Welsh Cistercian communities patronized by the native princes, perspectives influenced in part by their relationships with the latter: the sharp change in attitude towards the southern Welsh ruler Maelgwn ap Rhys after 1198 is a case in point.196 Significantly this change occurred in the context of a struggle for dynastic succession, which was frequently contested in twelfth- and thirteenth-­century Wales and may partly help to explain the failure of the Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan and most chronicles to name the successors of the deceased rulers they commemorated.197 By contrast, Brut y Tywysogyon consistently records royal succession in England from the death of Edward the Confessor in 1066 to the accession of Edward I in 1272, ignoring contested successions in 1087 and 1100–1, and acknowledging Stephen’s holding of the kingdom, albeit ‘by force’.198 This in turn implies that those kings were regarded as having authority over the Welsh,199 enjoying a status and power of a different order to that of even the most powerful rulers of a politically fragmented Wales. The Llanbadarn chronicler went further, in a providential interpretation that emphasized divine support for King Henry I, ‘the man against whom no one could be of avail save God himself, who had bestowed that authority upon him’. This affirmation of Henry’s power follows the condemnation of those who joined 192  Pen 20Tr, 55 (1146); similar passage, 62 (1162). See also J. Beverley Smith, ‘Castell Gwyddgrug’; Stephenson, ‘Welsh Chronicles’ Accounts’, 45–51. 193  AC, 94 (1257 = 1256). See also AC, 95 (1257 = 1256, 1258), and Stephenson, ‘The Chronicler at Cwm-­hir Abbey’. 194  Pen 20Tr, 97, 108 (1219, 1249); AC, 74, 88, n. 2 (1219, 1249). For an exception see Pen 20Tr, 98–9 (1221). Cf. Hurlock, Wales and the Crusades, 24–6, 28–9. 195  Cf. Stafford, After Alfred, 2. 196  Owain Wyn Jones and Huw Pryce, ‘Historical Writing’, 215–16. 197  Rare exception in BT, Pen20Tr, 105 (1240). 198  BT, Pen20Tr, 18, 21–2, 51, 58 (1087, 1100, 1135, 1153, 1154). 199 As stated explicitly in obituary notices of William I and Henry I: BT, Pen20Tr, 18 (1087), 51 (1135).

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WELSH PASTS IN AN AGE OF CONQUEST, c.1070–1282  69 Gruffudd ap Rhys (d. 1137) in attacks on the Normans in west Wales as ‘young hotheads’ who had no fear of the king.200 While it is unclear whether the writer, possibly the cleric Ieuan ap Sulien, was influenced by the verdict earlier in the chronicle that kingship had ended in Wales with the killing of Rhys ap Tewdwr in 1093 (discussed further below), his acceptance of Henry’s authority is consistent with a speech attributed to a leader from the Powys dynasty with which he sympathized: ‘ “God has placed us in the midst and in the hands of our enemies and has brought us so low that we cannot do aught according to our will.” ’201 Although there is no explicit mention of the Britons’ sins, it is tempting to see the influence here of Gildas’s interpretation of British history as a story of territorial loss resulting from divine punishment for sin, especially as the chronicler reveals his fa­mil­ iar­ity with the De Excidio in a report of Magnus Barelegs’s attack on Ulster in 1103 that compares the ‘Scots’ he faced to ‘ants rising from their caves when there is a shower of warm rain’, a phrase indebted to Gildas’s description of the Scots and Picts who took over northern Britain after the departure of the Romans.202 The idea of descent from Britons could inspire pride, even defiance; but, viewed from a providential perspective, magnified by the moralizing lens of Gildas, it could also encourage resignation in the face of conquest.203 Like the invocation of divine providence, the description of the Welsh as ‘Britons’ was part of the historiographical legacy of the early Middle Ages. However, this use of ‘British’ terminology was largely abandoned by historical (and other Cambro-­ Latin) texts in the mid-­twelfth century in favour of one that described Wales as Wallia or Cambria and its native inhabitants as ‘Welsh’ (Walenses, Cambrenses).204 The change is readily detectable in the Latin Breviate and Cottonian chronicles, and may be inferred in Brut y Tywysogyon from the replacement of Brytanyeit by Kymry, Welsh terms presumably translating Latin Britones and Walenses (or perhaps in some cases Cambrenses) in the chronicle’s Latin sources. (That compilers of Brut y Tywysogyon did not try to impose a uniform ethnic terminology is an important argument in favour of the view that they largely adhered to the wording of the earlier chronicles incorporated in the text.)205 Likewise the probably mid-­twelfth-­century Latin Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan only once calls the Welsh of

200  BT, Pen20Tr, 41–2 (1116). 201  BT, Pen20Tr, 32 (1110). 202  BT, Pen20Tr, 25 (1103), and notes at 161–2. Cf. DEB, 19, 1. The Latin chronicler who wrote the text underlying the Welsh chronicle must have been aware that ‘Scots’ were Irishmen both in Gildas and in 1103. 203  Later reference to divine support for the English against the Welsh: BT, Pen20Tr, 80 (1198); CW, 31 (1198). 204  Pryce, ‘British or Welsh?’. A late exception is the description of Gruffudd Maelor of northern Powys as ‘the most generous of all the princes of the Britons’: Pen20Tr, 74 (1191). Cf. BS, 188–9 (1191): ‘the most generous of the Welsh’. The description is lacking in BT, RBH and CW. 205  Pryce, ‘British or Welsh?’, 782–3; Owain Wyn Jones, ‘Brut y Tywysogion’, 212–14.

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70  WRITING WELSH HISTORY Gruffudd’s day ‘Britons’,206 and mainly refers to Wales and the Welsh as Cambria and Cambri, terms derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth.207 In some cases the use of ‘British’ terminology amounted to more than merely ethnic nomenclature; it could also have political, even existential, implications. In the later eleventh century Welsh kingship is sometimes linked to authority over the Britons of Wales: thus Bleddyn ap Cynfyn (d. 1075) ‘eminently held the kingdom of all the Britons after Gruffudd, his brother’.208 However, this did not survive the death in 1093 of Rhys ap Tewdwr, ‘with whom fell the kingdom of the Britons’.209 It appears, then, that a chronicler at St Davids articulated the notion of a ‘kingdom of the Britons’ embracing the whole of Wales.210 The Llanbadarn chronicle goes further and alludes to traditional learning about the island of Britain.211 Henry I’s first campaign against the northern Welsh kingdoms of Gwynedd and Powys in 1114 is interpreted as nothing less than attempted genocide, and evokes geographical descriptors for the extremities of Britain found in Welsh literary sources. And out of hate for them they [the Normans] set their minds upon exterminating all the Britons, so that the name of the Britons should never more be called to mind from that time forth. And king Henry gathered a host over all the island of Britain, from the promontory of Penwith in Cornwall to the promontory of Blathaon in Scotland, and all these combined together against the men of Gwynedd and Powys.212

Two years later Henry is described as ‘the man who had subdued under his authority all the island of Britain and its mighty ones’, language that echoed references to Britain as ‘the island of the mighty’ in the prose tale Branwen, one of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, which are set in a pre-­Roman Britain.213

206  VGC, 68–9 (c. 17). See also the description of Merlin: VGC, 58–9 (c. 8). 207 Cf. VGC, 45. 208  BT, Pen20Tr, 16 (1075). Gruffudd ap Llywelyn (d. 1064), earlier described as ‘king of the Britons’, was Bleddyn’s half-­brother: BT, Pen20Tr, 14, 40–1 (1058, 1116). 209  BT, Pen20Tr, 19 (1093). Cf. BT, RBH, 32–3: ‘And then fell the kingdom of the Britons.’ Similar comment, quite possibly derived from a St Davids source, in The Chronicle of John of Worcester, Vol. III, ed. and trans. McGurk, xxxii, 64–5. 210  The notion may also be attested by a reference to Gruffudd ap Cynan and Cadwgan ap Bleddyn receiving ‘a portion of the land and the kingdom’, i.e. Anglesey, and a portion of Powys and Ceredigion, a statement echoed by the annal for that year in the Cottonian chronicle: BT, Pen20Tr, 21 (1099); ‘Annales Cambriae: The C Text’, ed. Gough-­Cooper, 31 [c420.1] (inaccurately rendered in AC, 32, n. 3). See also Pryce, ‘Gerald of Wales and the Welsh Past’, 21. But note BT, Pen20Tr, 17 (1081), which refers to William the Conqueror as ‘king of England and Wales’. 211  Cf. Owain Wyn Jones, ‘Brut y Tywysogion’, 218–27. 212  BT, Pen20Tr, 36–7; cf. Trioedd Ynys Prydein, ed. and trans. Bromwich, 234; Llyfr Iorwerth, ed. Wiliam, 121 (§90); Dafydd Jenkins, The Law of Hywel Dda, 120. 213  BT, Pen20Tr, 42 (1116); Branwen uerch Lyr, ed. Thomson, 2; The Mabinogion, trans. Davies, 23. For a late association of a Welsh ruler with the island of Britain see BT, Pen20Tr, 80 (1200).

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WELSH PASTS IN AN AGE OF CONQUEST, c.1070–1282  71 It is notable that none of the Welsh leaders named in Brut y Tywysogyon from Rhys ap Tewdwr’s death in 1093 to the death of Henry I in 1135 are called kings (or given other titles): the only king active in Wales is the king of England.214 However, Welsh kingship reappears during the rising against Norman power in 1136–7, as the chronicler’s praise of Owain Gwynedd, his brother Cadwaladr, and their father Gruffudd ap Cynan quoted above makes clear. Moreover, in several cases these and later members of native dynasties are associated not only with individual Welsh territories but also with ‘Wales’. The emphasis on Gruffudd ap Cynan’s royal status and hereditary title to the kingdom of Gwynedd is a recurring theme in his Life.215 However, its author also took pains to associate Gruffudd with the Welsh as a whole. Thus he addresses his audience as ‘Welshmen most dear to me, whom I embrace with fraternal affection’, and describes the submission of Rhys ap Tewdwr, ‘king of the southern Welsh’ to Gruffudd, ‘king of the kings of the Welsh’.216 Likewise the obituary notice in Brut y Tywysogyon remembers him as ‘prince of Gwynedd and head and king and defender and pacifier of all Wales’.217 From the twelfth century, then, the most powerful rulers are associated with ‘Wales’ and ‘the Welsh’ rather than ‘(the kingdom of) the Britons’.218 True, this involved an adaptation rather than abandonment of previous thinking. Thus in 1198 Gwenwynwyn [ruler of southern Powys] gathered a mighty host to seek to win for the Welsh their original rights and to restore their bounds to their rightful owners, which they had lost through the multitude of their sins . . . with the help and support of all the princes of Wales.219

Yet, while the passage echoes Gildasian notions of territorial loss resulting from sin, its focus remains firmly on Wales without implying any rights more widely in Britain. Likewise from the later twelfth century chronicles frequently emphasize the unity of Wales in phrases such as ‘(all) the princes of Wales’, while the Cronica de Wallia even refers to ‘the monarchy of Wales’.220 This greater emphasis on

214  However, the dominance of Owain ab Edwin and Iorwerth ap Bleddyn is acknowledged in general terms: BT, Pen20Tr, 21, 24 (1098, 1102); also Owain Wyn Jones, ‘Brut y Tywysogion’, 219. 215  VGC, 58–63, 70–1, 74–7, 86–9 (cc. 9–12, 14, 18–19, 23, 33, 35). 216  VGC, 58–9, 68–9 (cc. 8, 17). 217  BT, Pen20Tr, 52 (1137). BT, RBH, 116–17 (1137) is similar. For the connotations of princeps, presumably the term translated as ‘tywyssawc’ in Brut y Tywysogyon, and its relationship to rex (‘king’), see Pryce, ‘Owain Gwynedd and Louis VII’, 20–4. 218  One later reference in BT, RBH, 114–15 (1136), describes Owain and Cadwaladr as ‘jointly upholding together the whole kingdom of the Britons’. The corresponding passages in the Peniarth 20 version and Brenhinedd y Saesson are less specific, respectively stating that the brothers ‘held supremacy over all Wales’ and were ‘leaders of Wales’: BT, Pen20Tr, 51 (1136); BS, 144–5 (1136). 219  BT, Pen20Tr, 79 (1198). CW, 31 (1198) is very similar. 220 E.g. AC, 50 (1165); BT, Pen20Tr, 70, 79, 85, 89, 91, 104, 105, 114, 117 (1175, 1198, 1211, 1215, 1238, 1240, 1264, 1275). ‘Monarchy of Wales’: CW, 32, 36 (1201, 1215 = 1216). Cf. BT, Pen20Tr, 81 (1201).

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72  WRITING WELSH HISTORY Wales as a political unit reflected wider changes, especially the ambitions of the expansionist thirteenth-­century princes of Gwynedd.221 It was also fostered by the network of Cistercian monasteries patronized by Welsh princes which were the main centres of chronicle writing.222 As we shall see in Chapter  4, these houses remained crucial to the development of Welsh history writing in the very different political circumstances following the Edwardian conquest.

221  R. R. Davies, ‘The Identity of “Wales” ’. 222  Kathleen Hughes, Celtic Britain, 67–85; Stephenson, ‘The Chronicler at Cwm-­hir Abbey’; Jones, HWMW, 317–31.

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4 Curating the Past in a Conquered Land, 1282–1540 The period from the Edwardian conquest of Wales to the Reformation and Acts of Union witnessed an unprecedented growth in Welsh historical writing, mostly in the Welsh language. However, this mainly took the form of curating and con­ solidating works produced earlier in the Middle Ages rather than the com­pos­ ition of new texts. For scribes and patrons, the history that mattered most concerned the Britons and their Welsh successors under the princes whose rule had ended in 1282. By contrast, narratives extending beyond the Edwardian con­ quest were few, brief, and focused on events in England more than those in Wales. If the Welsh gentry (W. uchelwyr) continued to hold power in their localities and in important respects were the successors of the princes, they viewed history as an inheritance to be conserved rather than a continuing process in which they succeeded the princes as the principal actors.1 The same is indicated by the copying of genealogies of earlier kings and princes; by contrast, it was not until the second half of the fifteenth century that ‘the pedigrees of the Welsh gentry were first recorded systematically’ by poet-­genealogists such as Gutun Owain.2 By the fifteenth century members of the Welsh gentry also read history with the poets they patronized.3 The appeal of the past extended beyond the gentry. This was true of genealogy, the most widespread and durable use of the past in medieval Wales, since a knowledge of both paternal and maternal descent mattered to all claiming free— and thus, according to Welsh law, noble—status in Welsh society.4 Such know­ledge was all the more valued by the later Middle Ages, when, owing to the expansion of free kindreds as the result of partible inheritance, many of those claiming noble descent were economically indistinguishable from peasants.5 The social and political circumstances of the period also help to explain the continuing popularity of Welsh historical or political mythology, centred on the loss of Britain and the

1  Cf. R. R. Davies, Conquest, 415–18; A. D. Carr, The Gentry of North Wales, chs. 2 and 7. 2 Guy, Medieval Welsh Genealogy, 44–6, 101–3, 159, 162–5, 170–5, quotation at 45; Francis Jones, ‘An Approach to Welsh Genealogy’, 344–6, 352–60. 3  Poems of the Cywyddwyr, ed. Rowlands, xvi–xvii. 4 R. R. Davies, Conquest, 115–18; Charles-­Edwards, Early Irish and Welsh Kinship, 172–5. 5 R. R. Davies, The Revolt, 49–50, 208; R. R. Davies, ‘The Peoples of Britain and Ireland, 1100–1400: IV’, 21–2.

Writing Welsh History: From the Early Middle Ages to the Twenty-­First Century. Huw Pryce, Oxford University Press. © Huw Pryce 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198746034.003.0005

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74  WRITING WELSH HISTORY prophetic hopes for its eventual recovery, which was especially potent at times of political tension and crisis.6 After the Edwardian conquest, Archbishop Pecham targeted the belief in Trojan origins that formed a cardinal element of Welsh political mythology, complaining that the Welsh were excessively given to ‘dreams and fantastic visions’, following the example of Brutus, who, after fleeing from Troy, had been told to come to Britain ‘by the whispering of Diana or rather the devil’. Moreover, he rejected the long established notion that Brutus and his fol­ lowers were the first inhabitants of Britain by asserting that the island, then called Albion, was ‘previously inhabited by a Germanic people . . . from which stock the Saxons are believed to derive’ (and thus not by giants, as Geoffrey of Monmouth maintained). The Welsh should therefore abandon their ‘dreams and prophecies’ and no longer ‘exult in the vanquished and exiled Trojans’.7 Nevertheless, despite the archbishop’s demand, such politically charged notions of the past continued to exert a wide appeal. Commenting on the rebellion of Llywelyn Bren in Glamorgan in 1316, the author of the Life of Edward II echoed Gerald of Wales in explaining that the ‘rebellious habit’ of the Welsh derived from their attempts to  fulfil the prophecy that the Britons would recover England.8 Over a century later, in 1443, the English authorities sought to apprehend a monk who ‘telleth Cronicles’ in gatherings around Wales, thereby al­leged­ly provoking the people to civil unrest—an intriguing report which points to the subversive potential of the Welsh past and also, perhaps, to the reading of his­tor­ic­al texts to a popular audience.9 Popular understandings of the past may also be reflected in a folk-­tale recorded c.1500 relating how Llywelyn ap Iorwerth (d. 1240) outwitted his enemies while visiting the king’s court in London thanks to magical help from Cynwrig Goch of Trefriw (eventually revealed to be an angel in disguise sent by the Virgin Mary).10 The following discussion falls into two parts. It begins by outlining the main Welsh historical texts composed from the late thirteenth to early sixteenth cen­ tur­ies, and especially efforts to give the history of the Welsh canonical form in a sequence of works which between them narrated events from the Trojan War to 1282. Attention will then turn to Gutun Owain, the most prolific writer of history in medieval Wales, and explore what his works reveal about Welsh understand­ ings of the past towards the end of the fifteenth century.

6 R.  R.  Davies, The Revolt, 159; R.  R.  Davies, ‘The Peoples of Britain and Ireland, 1100–1400: IV’, 21–3. 7  Registrum Epistolarum, ed. Martin, 2: 741–2 (28 June 1284); see also R.  R.  Davies, The First English Empire, 114, and cf. DGB, 26–9 (I.21). 8  Vita Edwardi Secondi, ed. and trans. Childs, 118–19. 9  Proceedings and Ordinances, vol. 5, ed. Nicholas, 233; cf. R.  R.  Davies, The Revolt, 91; Lynch, Proffwydoliaeth, 37. 10  Thomas Jones, ‘Pethau Nas Cyhoeddwyd’; trans. T. Gwynn Jones, Welsh Folk Lore, 223–5.

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CURATING THE PAST IN A CONQUERED LAND, 1282–1540  75

The Continuing Influence of Geoffrey of Monmouth The Edwardian conquest may well have helped to stimulate history writing in Wales. This is not to say that the conquest itself attracted significant attention from Welsh chroniclers, in contrast to historians in England. Brut y Tywysogyon (‘The Chronicle of the Princes’), here probably drawing on a Strata Florida chron­ icle, reported the war of 1276–7 and Llywelyn’s submission in some detail, but broke off before the outbreak of hostilities on Palm Sunday 1282, although subse­ quent events were covered in a later continuation, discussed below.11 The cover­ age of both wars in the Breviate and Cottonian chronicles, composed in the Welsh March respectively at Neath Abbey and St Davids, is brief and offers no comment on the conquest’s significance. The former text summarizes events in 1282–3 in four short sentences, which notice the killing of Llywelyn, Edward’s subjugation of Snowdonia, the building of Conwy castle, and the capture of the prince’s brother Dafydd. The slightly fuller account in the Cottonian chronicle focuses more on the dynasty of Gwynedd, supplying the date of Llywelyn’s death and also reporting the death of his wife in childbirth and the king’s subsequent removal of their daughter to England as well as details of Dafydd’s execution at Shrewsbury and the display of his head alongside his brother’s in London.12 By contrast, the conquest looms larger in several English chronicles, including those of Peterborough, Hagnaby, and Peter Langtoft, the last of which, spanning the period from Brutus to 1307, is notable for its use of Geoffrey of Monmouth to justify Edward I’s expansion in Britain, especially in Scotland but also in Wales, by depicting him ‘as a second Brutus and as Arthur returned’.13 Here, Langtoft was only following the precedent set by Edward I and his advisers of appropriating Welsh historical traditions in order to legitimize the conquest. Thus the king celebrated his success by holding a Round Table at Nefyn in July 1284 that cast him as the new Arthur, and the imperial eagles and differently coloured bands of masonry at Caernarfon castle, whose construction commenced the previous year, together with the alleged discovery of Magnus Maximus’s body, evoked the town’s legendary associations with the Roman Empire.14 Nevertheless, while sketchy on the course of the conquest, historical writing in late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-­century Wales may be seen as responding to its consequences. A likely case in point is the compendium of historical texts 11  BT, Pen20Tr, 118 (1276–7); BT, RBH, 264–7 (1276–7). 12  AC, 106–7 (1282–3). 13 Gransden, Historical Writing in England c. 550 to c. 1307, 441, 443, 452–3, 476–8, quotation at 478; Prestwich, Edward I, 120–2; J. Beverley Smith, Llywelyn, 465–7, 561–5; The Chronicle of Pierre de Langtoft, ed. Wright, 1: xv–xx; 2: 168–73, 176–83, 264–5. See further Summerfield, ‘Context and Genesis’, 322–3, and, for Langtoft’s use of history with respect to Edward I’s claims over Scotland, Summerfield, ‘The Testimony of Writing’. By contrast, Walter Bower included an account of Edward’s conquest of Wales in his mid-­fifteenth-­century Scotichronicon as a warning to the Scots of the dangers of disunity and English treachery: Dylan Foster Evans, ‘Welsh Traitors’, 148–52. 14 R. R. Davies, The First English Empire, 31–2; Wheatley, ‘Caernarfon Castle’.

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76  WRITING WELSH HISTORY contained in Exeter Cathedral Library MS 3514, very probably all written in a Welsh scriptorium, quite possibly at Whitland Abbey, and completed between 1285 and the early fourteenth century.15 The manuscript combines widely known texts—Pseudo-­Methodius, Dares the Phrygian, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and Henry of Huntingdon—with genealogies of Anglo-­Saxon, Norman, French, and Welsh dynasties, and concludes with the Cronica de Wallia and another short chronicle covering the period from the fall of Troy to 1285.16 It thus places Welsh views of the past, from Trojan origins to the age of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, against a back­ drop of universal history beginning with the creation of the world and embracing the island of Britain as well as, to some extent, France. Moreover, while some of the texts may have been copied before 1282, the collection was completed later in the thirteenth century and quite possibly marked a historiographical response to conquest that affirmed the special place of the Welsh in Britain after the extinc­ tion of princely rule.17 The same may be true of the short chronicle in Welsh, known from its opening words as Oed yr Arglwydd (‘The Age of the Lord’), that spans events from the death of Arthur to the accession of Edward II, and thus was compiled after 1307, possibly at Valle Crucis.18 Contemporary political events also stimulated the insertion c.1300 of historical texts into a copy of an abbreviated version of Domesday Book at Neath Abbey, namely the crown’s challenge to the marcher status claimed by the monastery’s patrons, the Briouze lords of Gower.19 The most substantial of these texts was the Breviate chronicle, discussed in Chapter  3. However, they also included a short chronicle also compiled at Neath Abbey, based on Tewkesbury, Waverley, and Winchester sources, which, after an annal for 600 recording Gregory the Great’s sending of Augustine to convert the English, covers the period 1066 to 1298, focusing mainly on England while including notices of events both farther afield in western Christendom and locally in Glamorgan.20 This drew in part on the Cardiff chronicle, covering the years 1066–1268, extant in an early fourteenth-­ century manuscript very probably copied at Tewkesbury Abbey’s priory of Cardiff and heavily indebted to the Annals of Tewkesbury and thence in turn to annals from Waverley and Worcester. In the final section from 1244 to 1268 the chron­ icle is strongly interested in, and sympathetic to, the Clare lords of Glamorgan, the priory’s patrons, and focuses on local events in south Wales, which may indi­ cate that it was written in order to ensure that the Clares’ memory was preserved

15  Crick, ‘The Power and the Glory’. 16  Contents listed in Crick, ‘The Power and the Glory’, 36–8. Last two chronicles also discussed in Henley, ‘The Use of English Annalistic Sources’, 240–2. 17  Crick, ‘The Power and the Glory’, 30–5. 18  Edited and translated in Guy, ‘A Lost Medieval Manuscript’, 101–4, discussed at 82, 84, 86–7; Jones, HWMW, 291, 293, 296–7. 19  J. Beverley Smith, ‘Historical Writing’, 72–7; Daniel Huws, ‘The Neath Abbey Breviate’. 20  ‘Chronicle of the Thirteenth Century’ [ed. Jones].

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CURATING THE PAST IN A CONQUERED LAND, 1282–1540  77 following the decline in their fortunes towards the end of the thirteenth century.21 Early modern antiquarian sources also attest to the existence of a register of ­charters recording grants of land to Neath, also probably compiled c.1300, that included a history of the Norman conquest of Gower.22 Historiographical efforts at Neath after the Edwardian conquest engaged the interest of early modern and later antiquarians who wrote about the history of Glamorgan, discussed in Chapter 6. However, the most influential post-­conquest development in the historiography of Wales was the consolidation of a master narrative extending from the Trojan origins of the Welsh to 1282. This was accom­ panied by a decisive shift from Latin to Welsh as the main language of his­tor­ic­al writing. The chronicle kept at Strata Florida perceptible in Brut y Tywysogyon petered out in early 1282 (though a continuation to 1290 may have been appended subsequently at the monastery), while the Breviate and Cottonian chronicles ended respectively in 1286 and 1288.23 True, translations of Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan were made in or by the early thirteenth century, an  important indication of the kinds of historical writing which appealed to (presumably lay) Welsh readers and listeners of that period who were unfamiliar with Latin. However, the use of the vernacular was extended significantly in the early fourteenth century with the creation of Ystorya Dared, a translation of the History of the Trojan War attributed to Dares the Phrygian,24 as well as of Brut y Tywysogyon and the related chronicle known as Brenhinedd y Saesson (‘The Kings of the English’). Welsh was likewise the language of almost all other historical texts composed in fourteenth- and fifteenth-­century Wales, a pattern replicated across a wide range of works, both original compositions and translations, and paralleled by vernacular history writing in England and elsewhere in Europe.25 Thus Welsh history writing in the later Middle Ages formed an integral part of a wider vernacular literary culture patronized by the gentry.26 Texts continued to be produced mainly in Cistercian monasteries—several of which, not­ably Strata Florida and Valle Crucis, contained the tombs of native ­rulers that provided visible reminders of the old order—until the late fourteenth century, after which lay scribes and patrons were largely responsible for book production

21  Henley, ‘The Cardiff Chronicle’. 22  Frank R. Lewis, ‘A History’; J. Beverley Smith, ‘Historical Writing’, 76. Two chronicles were also probably written at Tintern Abbey in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, one of which extended to 1323 and included notices of events in the lordship of Strigoil and elsewhere in Gwent: Julian Harrison, ‘The Tintern Abbey Chronicles’. 23  For the possible continuation at Strata Florida compare G.  and T.  M.  Charles-­Edwards, ‘The Continuation’, 302, with Jones, HWMW, 242–4, and Stephenson, ‘The Continuation’. 24  Fulton, ‘Troy Story’. 25  Cf. Morfydd  E.  Owen, ‘The Prose of the Cywydd Period’; Fisher, ‘Vernacular Historiography’; Kersken, ‘High and Late Medieval National Historiography’, 209–11. 26 See Chapter  1; Fulton, ‘Literary Networks’. For English parallels see Radulescu, ‘Literature’, esp. 113–15.

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78  WRITING WELSH HISTORY (although some maintained close links with religious houses, as in the case of Gutun Owain, discussed below).27 The creation of Brut y Tywysogyon affords further evidence of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s continuing, indeed growing, influence on medieval Welsh historiog­ raphy. As explained in Chapter 3, it is generally held that the conception of the chronicle as a continuation of Geoffrey of Monmouth went back to a lost ‘Latin Brut’ completed shortly after the Edwardian conquest and that copies of this were translated in the surviving chronicles in Welsh. The author of ‘the Latin Brut’ was evidently familiar with one or more Welsh versions of Geoffrey’s History (Brut y Brenhinedd) as well as earlier Welsh chronicles. Both the Peniarth 20 and Red Book of Hergest versions of Brut y Tywysogyon open with an annal which adapts the notice in the Harleian chronicle of Cadwaladr ap Cadwallon’s death in ‘a great plague’ in 682 and draws on the conclusion of Geoffrey’s work, faithfully trans­ lated in the earliest versions of Brut y Brenhinedd, to relate that Cadwaladr died in Rome ‘on the twelfth day from the Calends of May’, before declaring, to quote the Peniarth 20 version, that ‘thenceforth the Britons lost the crown of kingship, and the Saxons obtained it, as Myrddin [Merlin] had prophesied to Gwrtheyrn Wrthenau [Vortigern the Very Thin].’28 The passage continues by relating how Cadwaladr was succeeded by ‘Ifor son of Alan, king of Brittany, not as king but as leader’ (W. nid megys brenin namyn megys tywyssawc), who ‘held dominion over the Britons for forty-­eight years’, before being succeeded in turn by Rhodri Molwynog.29 The reference to prophecy echoes the passage in Geoffrey which states that God did not wish the Britons to rule any longer in Britain ‘until the time came which Merlin had foretold to Arthur’.30 However, rather than reproduce that passage, with its hope of ultimate deliverance, Brut y Tywysogyon (presumably following its Latin source) emphasizes the finality of the Britons’ loss of sover­ eignty and, instead of naming Arthur, alludes to Geoffrey’s account of Merlin’s prophecies to Vortigern, the king blamed in medieval Welsh literary and historical texts as the traitor responsible for inviting the English to Britain.31 The description of Cadwaladr’s successor as ‘leader’ or ‘prince’ rather than ‘king’ likewise underlines the Britons’ defeat, albeit by developing a distinction between Welsh ‘leaders’ and English ‘kings’ drawn in Brut y Brenhinedd but lacking in Geoffrey’s History,

27 Daniel Huws, Medieval Welsh Manuscripts, 14–17; Abram, ‘Monastic Burial’, 104, 109; Jones, HWMW, ch. 2, esp. 89–95. 28  Texts in Pen. 20 and RBH, with English translation, in Brenhinoedd y Saeson, ed. and trans. Dumville, 4–5. See also BT, Pen20Tr, 1, and notes at 129–30; and cf. Annales Cambriae, ed. and trans. Dumville, 2; DGB, 280–1 (XI. 206). 29  BT, Pen20Tr, 1 (682); BT, Pen20, 65a–b. Brut y Brenhinedd follows Geoffrey of Monmouth in making Ifor Cadwaladr’s son: DGB, 280–1 (XI. 206); Brut Dingestow, ed. Lewis, 207. 30  DGB, 279 (XI. 205); Brut Dingestow, ed. Lewis, 206. However, Gwrtheyrn is substituted for Arthur in an early fourteenth-­century Welsh version of Geoffrey: Brut y Brenhinedd, ed. and trans. Parry, 216. This could, perhaps, have influenced the adaptation of the passage in Brut y Tywysogyon. 31  DGB, 144–59 ([VII]. 111–17). Cf. Bromwich, Trioedd Ynys Prydein, 392–6.

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CURATING THE PAST IN A CONQUERED LAND, 1282–1540  79 which states that both peoples were ruled by ‘kings’ (L.  reges) after the English conquest.32 The clear implication, then, was that the events related thereafter in Brut y Tywysogyon concerned the Britons, or Welsh, after their loss of sovereignty over the island of Britain; the chronicle was thus ex­pli­cit­ly linked to a cardinal tenet of historical thinking in Wales from the time of Gildas onwards. The Welsh translations of Geoffrey’s History were by far the most popular and influential historical works in later medieval Wales.33 It is quite likely that Dares the Phrygian was translated specifically in order to provide a prequel to Geoffrey of Monmouth, just as Brut y Tywysogyon was conceived as its sequel, and that the  three vernacular works—Ystorya Dared, Brut y Brenhinedd, and Brut y Tywysogyon—were a cultural response to conquest that emphasized the deep roots and distinctive history of the Welsh people. Archbishop Pecham’s call for the Welsh to be weaned from their belief in their Trojan origins evidently fell on deaf ears. Moreover, some scribes and patrons understood the three works as forming a historical continuum that narrated the making of the Welsh from Troy to the end of the age of the princes, since they follow each other in several manu­scripts from the mid-­fourteenth century onwards such as the Red Book of Hergest (see Chapter 1), or else combine Brut y Brenhinedd with just one of the other works.34 Despite being first attested as preceding Ystorya Dared in a late fifteenth-­century manuscript (Jesus 141, discussed below), it is also possible that Y Bibyl Ynghymraec, the Welsh translation datable to c.1300 of the Compendium Historiae in Genealogia Christi attributed to Peter of Poitiers which provides an account of biblical history beginning with the Creation, was conceived from the outset as forming part of the historical continuum, as it adds a passage making Aeneas a descendant of Japhet son of Noah and refers to both Brut y Brenhinedd and Ystorya Dared.35 One indication of the central position occupied by the Welsh versions of Geoffrey in the later Middle Ages is the survival of manuscripts copied by mem­ bers of the laity, apparently for their own use. Thus in 1444 Dafydd ap Maredudd Glais copied a text of Brut y Brenhinedd, to which he appended his own Welsh translation of a Latin version of the chronicle Brenhinedd y Saesson, tasks quite possibly undertaken while banished from Aberystwyth following his murder of two members of a rival family, and it is likely that an Anglesey landowner pro­ duced the extensively illustrated copy of Brut y Brenhinedd in Peniarth MS 23 datable to c.1500.36 The continuing appeal of Geoffrey’s History was probably both aesthetic and ideological, as its fast-­paced narrative of the Britons’ triumphs, 32  Brut Dingestow, ed. Lewis, 208; Brut y Brenhinedd, ed. Parry, 217–18; DGB, 280–1 (XI. 208). 33 At least four versions of Brut y Brenhinedd have been identified, extant in about twenty-­five medieval manuscripts: see p. 52. 34  Earliest examples listed in Jones, HWMW, 431. 35  Y Bibyl Ynghymraec, ed. Jones, esp. xlvi–xlvii, 63; Moore, The Works of Peter of Poitiers, ch. 4; Thomas Jones, ‘Historical Writing’, 17–18; Jones, HWMW, 49–50. 36 Himsworth, ‘Dafydd ap Maredudd Glais’; Himsworth, ‘A Fifteenth-­ Century Brenhinedd y Saesson’; Liber Coronacionis Britanorum, ed. Sims-­Williams, 2: 5–6.

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80  WRITING WELSH HISTORY betrayals, and eventual loss of the sovereignty of Britain provided not only entertainment but an explanation for the position of the Welsh in the present. Further evidence of an attempt to connect Geoffrey’s History to later history is provided by Brenhinedd y Saesson (‘The Kings of the English’).37 This may be seen as a variant of Brut y Tywysogyon which sought to combine the histories of the Welsh and English kings, thereby combining in one text the two separate tasks Geoffrey left respectively to Caradog of Llancarfan and to Henry of Huntingdon and William of Malmesbury.38 The work survives in several versions. The earliest occurs in BL Cotton Cleopatra B.V, a manuscript written c.1330 at Valle Crucis Abbey, where it follows a version of Brut y Brenhinedd by the same translator and in the same hand.39 This version covers events from 682 to 1198, but originally continued further, quite possibly into the early fourteenth century, as the manu­ script is incomplete and breaks off at that point.40 A later version, which con­ tinues to 1461, is found in the Black Book of Basingwerk, and will be considered, along with another version in Oxford, Jesus College MS 141, in the discussion below of Gutun Owain’s historical writings.41 As we have seen, a Latin version was translated into Welsh in 1444 by Dafydd ap Maredudd Glais.42 The Cotton Cleopatra version of Brut y Brenhinedd was clearly intended to precede Brenhinedd y Saesson, as it alters Geoffrey’s conclusion, accurately reproduced in other Welsh translations, by naming Caradog of Llancarfan as the writer to whom was left the history, not only of the Welsh princes but also of the kings of the English, thereby removing the reference to Henry of Huntingdon and William of Malmesbury as  the preferred authors of the latter. Likewise the allusions to Geoffrey at the beginning of Brenhinedd y Saesson are much fuller than those that provide a link with him in Brut y Tywysogyon, mainly by providing details of the Saxon conquests of Britain.43 Brenhinedd y Saesson resembled Brut y Tywysogyon, then, by conceiving of the history of the Welsh after the late seventh century as a continuation of the history of the Britons related by Geoffrey of Monmouth. In its earliest, Cotton Cleopatra version, Brenhinedd y Saesson falls into two main sections. The first covers events in Wales and England from 682 to 1095, and draws on three principal sources: a Welsh Latin chronicle similar to that underlying Brut y Tywysogyon, Winchester annals, and William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum Anglorum (‘Deeds of the Kings of the English’). This section preserves the entries from the Latin sources of Brut y Tywysogyon virtually intact, in contrast to the following section from 1096 onwards that focuses mainly on Wales, where they are condensed and the attempt 37  BS; J. Beverley Smith, ‘Historical Writing’. 38  DGB, 280–1 (XI. 208). 39  BS, xvi–xviii. 40  Guy, ‘Historical Scholars’, 85–6. 41  BS, xiv, 329. 42  Himsworth, ‘Fifteenth-­Century Brenhinedd y Saesson’. The text in Dafydd’s manuscript is incom­ plete, breaking off in the reign of Edward the Confessor. 43  Brut y Brenhinedd, ed. Parry, 217–18; BS, 2–5.

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CURATING THE PAST IN A CONQUERED LAND, 1282–1540  81 to combine Welsh and English history is largely abandoned, though some entries concerning events in the March of Wales, England, and the Continent are derived from the Breviate chronicle (B-­text of the Annales Cambriae), which reached its final form at the monastery of Neath.44 It has been argued that the different Latin sources had already been combined in a Latin chronicle, possibly at Neath or Whitland, Cistercian houses in south Wales, whence a copy reached Valle Crucis by c.1330, where it was translated into Welsh as Brenhinedd y Saesson.45 That Geoffrey’s History spoke to contemporary concerns in Wales after the Edwardian conquest is also revealed by complaints in some manuscripts about the oppression of the Welsh. The most anti-­English in sentiment appear in a mid-­ fourteenth-­century copy of the Dingestow version of Brut y Brenhinedd, which declared that Hengist and Horsa ‘are in hell’; nor were their descendants any better, since, just as Hengist sought to deceive the Britons, ‘so always do the ever accursed pagan English’.46 By contrast, a generation or so later, around 1400, Hywel Fychan, a layman employed as a professional scribe on several major manu­scripts, wrote two short texts that attributed the woes of the Welsh to their own failings. One is a colophon in a copy of Brut y Brenhinedd in Philadelphia MS 8680.47 After a pious preamble requesting all readers of the book to pray for the souls of Hywel and his patron Hopcyn ap Tomas of Ynysforgan, near Swansea, the scribe draws lessons for his own day from the text he has copied by condemning Gwrtheyrn (Vortigern) and Medrawd (Modred) as the least praiseworthy of the princes whose history has been related, and continues: ‘For because of their betrayal and their deceit and their counsel the most excellent princes were ruined, which their heirs after them lamented from then until today—those who suffer pain and want and exile in the land of their birth.’48 The subordinate position of the Welsh a century after the Edwardian conquest was thus situated in a narrative of betrayal and loss that went back to the post-­Roman period. The second text occurs in the Red Book of Hergest, and was inserted by Hywel after the sequence of historical works (Ystorya Dared, Brut y Brenhinedd, and Brut y Tywysogyon) copied by the other main scribe of the manuscript.49 This is the earliest surviving copy of the text, which was composed in the fourteenth 44  J. Beverley Smith, ‘Historical Writing’, 60–5, 67–72; BS, xiv. 45  J. Beverley Smith, ‘Historical Writing’, 77, 80–6. 46  Brut Dingestow, ed. Lewis, 236–7 (quotations in notes to 91.4, 94.26); Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Fersiwn Dingestow’, 350; Daniel Huws, Medieval Welsh Manuscripts, 59 (for date of the manuscript, Cardiff 1.362 (Havod 1)). Strong Anglophobia also appears in fifteenth-­century Welsh poetry: E.  D.  Jones, Beirdd y Bymthegfed Ganrif, 12–19; Gruffydd Aled Williams, ‘The Later Welsh Poetry’, 523­–30­. 47  Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Un o Lawysgrifau’; Guy, ‘A Welsh Manuscript in America’ (colophon repro­ duced at 25). 48  Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Un o Lawysgrifau’, 227. 49 Jesus College, Oxford, MS 111, cols. 376, l. 10–377, l. 18; transcription in ‘Welsh Prose 1300–1425’, http://www.rhyddiaithganoloesol.caerdydd.ac.uk/en/ms-­page.php?ms=Jesus111&page=8 9v&l=c376l10 (last accessed 13 September 2021); edited by Melville Richards, ‘Gildas a’r Brytaniaid’; discussed in Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Gildas a’r Brytaniaid’.

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82  WRITING WELSH HISTORY century to judge by some of its vocabulary.50 Whether Hywel was its author is unknown, but he must at least have thought the text pertinent to the historical narrative that precedes it. It opens with the words ‘Gyldas hen broffwyt y Brytaniaid’ (‘Gildas the old prophet of the Britons’), and lists what purport to be the four reasons given by Gildas, in what are described as ‘the old histories of the Britons’ (W. hen ystoryaeu y brytanyeit), for why ‘the Britons lost their honour in the large fertile island that is called Britain’. First, their leaders were blamed for each wanting to be lord and king, so that God decided to deprive them of their lordship and honour. The second target of divine punishment were the clergy, who had failed to perform their pastoral duties and, afraid of losing their tem­ poral wealth, had allowed the powerful to sin. Third came legal and other officials who had failed to administer impartial justice, preferring to take bribes. Fourth, the common people were condemned for their immorality, on account of their thieving, rape, violence, and so on. The text finishes by drawing a comparison with Ecclesiastes 10:8, which it explains as stating that ‘a kingdom is taken from its indigenous people, and given to a people unrelated to it, on account of vio­ lence, betrayal, wickedness, and falsehood’. The point is then reinforced by citing the verse from Ecclesiastes from the Latin Vulgate.51 Although both the general moralizing tone and providential explanation for the Britons’ woes echo the con­ demnations of the Britons in the De Excidio Britanniae, the text is not simply a summary of Gildas’s work. In particular, the first reason may allude to the con­ flicts between British and then Welsh rulers depicted both in Geoffrey’s work and in Brut y Tywysogyon, and has some similarities with Gerald of Wales’s condem­ nation of the failure of the Welsh to unite under one ruler.52 Above all, by invok­ ing Gildas Hywel Fychan looked back to the Britons’ loss of sovereignty over Britain in the post-­Roman period for the key to understanding the con­tem­por­an­ eous significance of the preceding narrative from the fall of Troy to 1282. Accounts of events after the Edwardian conquest provide further evidence of the continuing salience of the framework provided by Geoffrey’s History. Most of these are set against the backdrop of the ancient history of the Britons, either as continuations of chronicles in turn conceived as continuations of the Welsh ver­ sions of Geoffrey (Brut y Brenhinedd) or as short independent texts. The former occur in the Peniarth 20 version of Brut y Tywysogyon, composed at Valle Crucis, and the versions of Brenhinedd y Saesson written by Gutun Owain, discussed below. The Peniarth 20 continuation narrates events from the outbreak of war on Palm Sunday 1282 to Edward Balliol’s attempt to gain the throne of Scotland 50  ‘bikarieit’ and ‘raglofyeit’ (col. 376, lines 29, 40): Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, s.vv. bicar, bicer1 and rhaglaw. 51  Col. 377, lines 10–18. 52 Cf. DK, II. 9. The last three reasons may echo criticisms in later medieval sermons, which also influenced Welsh religious poetry: cf. Owst, Literature and Pulpit, 242–86, 338–49, 361–70; Glanmor Williams, The Welsh Church (2nd edn.), 184–5, 238–41.

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CURATING THE PAST IN A CONQUERED LAND, 1282–1540  83 in 1332.53 The most recent analysis argues that the continuation falls into two main parts, one extending to 1319, whose early entries may have originated as an extension of a Latin chronicle at Strata Florida, followed by annals for 1320–9 indebted to information provided by Madog ap Llywelyn (d. 1332), a prominent Welsh magnate and office-­holder, who also contributed to subsequent entries made for 1330–1; the last entries were written in 1332 after Madog’s death.54 Irrespective of its precise textual history, though, the section covering 1282–1332 throws significant light on historical thinking at Valle Crucis c.1330 in its insistence that the history of the Britons and Welsh that originated in Troy had con­tinued beyond the Edwardian conquest to the scribe’s own day.55 In addition, three independent chronicles set post-­ conquest events in a Galfridian framework. Brut y Saeson (‘The History of the English’), versions of which are extant in three related manuscripts of the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century, gives an account of the kings of England from the death of Cadwaladr to the reign of Richard II (1377–99), and provides a striking witness to how long-­ established notions in Wales of the Britons’ loss of sovereignty over Britain could sustain an interest in English as well as Welsh history.56 Two other short chronicles adopt an even longer timeframe. One, a Latin text composed in Glamorgan, and also extant in an abridged version datable to 1404, extends from the coming of Brutus to Britain in 1230 bc to 1375.57 The other, in Welsh, extant only in several versions in manuscripts from c.1400 onwards, sets the history of the Britons in the context of Christian history, opening with the statement that ‘There were 5200 years but one from the time that Adam was made until Christ came in man’s flesh’ before recording Brutus’s arrival, likewise placed ‘1230 years before the birth of Christ’.58 Known as Blwydyn Eiseu (‘But one year’, after its opening words), this survives in two versions, of which the earlier continued to 1321, while another version, extant in early modern copies and attributed to a ‘book of William Llŷn’ (presumably the poet of that name who died in 1580), extends the narrative to the coronation of Henry VI in 1422, including an account of the rising of Owain Glyndŵr.59 However, the fullest contemporary narrative of the rising by a Welsh author appears in the chronicle of Adam Usk (c.1350–1430). A cleric and lawyer whose career included service to the archbishop of Canterbury, King Henry IV, 53  BT, Pen20Tr, lxii–lxiii, 120–7. 54  Stephenson, ‘The Continuation’. 55  G. and T. M. Charles-­Edwards, ‘The Continuation’, 300–4. 56  ‘Brut y Saeson’, in The Text of the Bruts, ed. Rhŷs and Evans, 2: 385–403. The other complete ver­ sion, in NLW Peniarth MS 32, fols. 125v–132v, is transcribed in ‘Welsh Prose 1300–1425’, http://www. rhyddiaithganoloesol.caerdydd.ac.uk/en/ms-­ page.php?ms=Pen32&page=251 (last accessed 13 September 2021). The version in NLW Peniarth MS 19 breaks off in 979. See Jones, HWMW, 43–4, 282; Daniel Huws, Medieval Welsh Manuscripts, 60. 57  ‘Epitome Historiæ Britanniæ’; Luft, ‘The NLW Peniarth 32 Latin Chronicle’. 58  Try, ‘A Forgotten Welsh Chronology’, 359. 59  Try, ‘A Forgotten Welsh Chronology’; ‘Appendix: List of the Chronicles’, 425, 426 (nos. 14, 21). Editions and translations of the annals for 1400–15: J.  E.  Lloyd, Owen Glendower, 149–54; Owain Glyndŵr, ed. Livingston and Bollard, 172–5, 371–9.

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84  WRITING WELSH HISTORY and the papacy in Rome, Usk was ‘drenched in Welsh history and genealogy’ but ‘also a man of equivocal allegiance’, who, in order to advance his prospects, appears to have supported Glyndŵr while the prince’s power was at its height but later agreed to spy on him on behalf of the English authorities.60 In addition, three short chronicles open in the thirteenth century without ref­ erence to Galfridian origins: notices of events focused on south-­east Wales from 1294 to 1348 composed in Latin at Abergavenny Priory, extant in a manuscript copied c.1400;61 brief Latin annals copied by the antiquary Robert Vaughan of Hengwrt (1591/2–1667) covering the period from the death of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd in 1282 to 1448;62 and an eighteenth-­century copy of annals in Welsh from 1251 to 1501.63 Also relevant in this context is a collection of historical notices written in various fifteenth-­century hands in or near Oswestry. These mostly record events between 1400 and 1461 (among them the rising and death of Owain Glyndŵr) but also include references to the deaths of Thomas Becket in 1170 and ‘Llywelyn Prince of Wales’ in 1282.64

Gutun Owain The continuing vigour in late medieval Wales of the master narrative of the Britons and Welsh and its use as a framework for the history of recent events is vividly attested by the work of Gutun Owain (fl. c.1451–1499).65 A member of a Welsh gentry family from the Welsh-­speaking border with Shropshire who held land in the lordship of Oswestry and enjoyed close links with the abbey of Valle Crucis, Gutun was a poet and a prolific scribe whose manuscripts, written over more than four decades, included works of medicine, astrology, hagiography, and grammar as well as genealogy, heraldry, and history. Moreover, since a significant number of his manuscripts were produced for Welsh gentry patrons, both laymen and Cistercian abbots in north-­east Wales, they attest to a wider interest in the learning they contained among contemporaries of a similar social background.66

60  The Chronicle of Adam Usk, ed. and trans. Given-­Wilson, xxiii–xxiv, xxix–xxxiii, lxxx–lxxxiii, 100–1, 128–9, 134–5, 144–53, 158–61, 168–73, 176–7, 212–13, 218–19, 238­–43, 262–3, quotations at xxiii. 61  St. John Brooks, ‘The Piers Plowman Manuscripts’, 141, 144–51; Stephenson, ‘The Continuation’, 157–61. 62  NLW MS 9092D: https://archives.library.wales/index.php/brut-­y-­tywysogion-­10 (last accessed 13 September 2021). 63  NLW Panton MS 40: RMWL, 2: 849–50. 64  J.  R.  S.  Phillips, ‘When Did Owain Glyndŵr Die?’, 67–9, 73–6, quotation at 74; Gruffydd Aled Williams, The Last Days, 46–8. 65  Gruffydd Aled Williams, ‘Owain, Gutun’; J. E. Caerwyn Williams, ‘Gutun Owain’; Daniel Huws, Medieval Welsh Manuscripts, 62; Matonis, ‘A Case Study’; Matonis, ‘Gutun Owain’; Morfydd E. Owen, ‘Prolegomena’; Jones, HWMW, 47–51, 59–60, 76–7, 108, 114–18, 121. 66  For Gutun’s patrons see Glanmor Williams, The Welsh Church (2nd edn.), 263, 284; D. J. Bowen, ‘Guto’r Glyn’, 158–60; Morfydd E. Owen, ‘Prolegomena’, 351–2, 372–4.

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CURATING THE PAST IN A CONQUERED LAND, 1282–1540  85 The same is true, on a more limited scale, of Gutun’s south Walian contemporary, the poet Ieuan Brechfa (fl. c.1490–c.1520), whose works included genealogical manuscripts and a chronicle based on the Red Book of Hergest version of Brut y Tywysogyon for 720–1079 supplemented by other sources.67 Gutun is particularly significant in the context of the present discussion as a representative of Welsh bardic learning and culture who sought to preserve and transmit medieval inter­ pretations of the past. Thus, while deeply conservative, he developed a dynamic approach based on an increasing mastery of the texts he read and brought his own editorial imprint to bear on the manuscripts he copied. In addition, Gutun expanded the boundaries of Welsh-­language learning by assimilating historical writing and other material, notably medical texts, from England. Genealogy was central to Gutun’s understanding of the past and his four ge­nea­ logic­al manuscripts, written between the 1480s and 1497, reveal his increasing skill and sophistication as an editor who adapted existing accounts to serve the needs of his day.68 As well as rearranging material from earlier collections, these manuscripts contain numerous innovations, especially new sections on the pedi­ grees of the gentry as well as the earliest copies of the lists of the ‘Five Kingly Tribes of Wales’ and ‘Fifteen Tribes of Gwynedd’, schemes attributing earlier medieval founders to the dynasties and families concerned.69 Furthermore, his latest genealogical collection, Rylands Welsh 1 (1497), explicitly linked the pedi­ grees extending from Brutus ‘to the old kin-­groups which were prior to this age’, extant in a collection originating in the age of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, to the gentry pedigrees of contemporaneous kin-­groups (‘the noble descent of this age’) that followed in the text.70 His work on Welsh genealogy work proved extremely influ­ ential in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Gutun also wrote at least three manuscripts containing historical narratives. The best known, already mentioned, is the Black Book of Basingwerk (NLW MS 7006), written at Valle Crucis Abbey, and completed by Gutun probably as a pres­ entation copy for Thomas Pennant on the latter’s appointment as abbot of Basingwerk, an office he held from c.1481 to c.1523. This contains texts of Dares the Phrygian (Ystorya Dared), Brut y Brenhinedd, and Brenhinedd y Saesson (‘The Kings of the English’), exemplifying the historical continuum from Troy to medi­eval Wales.71 The version of Brenhinedd y Saesson largely reproduced the material down to 1198 found in the earlier Cotton Cleopatra version of Brenhinedd y Saesson, 67  Guy, ‘Brut Ieuan Brechfa’. 68  Guy, ‘Writing Genealogy’, 105–12. See also Francis Jones, ‘An Approach to Welsh Genealogy’, 352–6; Morfydd E. Owen, ‘Prolegomena’, 352–4. 69 Francis Jones, ‘An Approach to Welsh Genealogy’, 353; Siddons, The Development of Welsh Heraldry: Volume I, 381. 70 Guy, Medieval Welsh Genealogy, 172 and cf. 413. 71  BS, xviii–xx; Jones, HWMW, 47, 59–60, 75–6, 114. Gutun copied about 75 per cent of the manu­ script, the texts of Ystorya Dared and the first part of Brut y Brenhinedd being in the hand of an older contemporary.

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86  WRITING WELSH HISTORY which Gutun very probably copied. However, it is uncertain whether Gutun added a section covering 1198–1332 derived from the Peniarth 20 and Red Book versions of Brut y Tywysogyon, as this may originally have been contained in the original complete Cotton Cleopatra manuscript that now breaks off in 1198. If the latter, Gutun was responsible only for briefly extending the narrative from 1346 to the accession of Edward IV in 1461; he also added further details to the account of the period down to (at least) 1198.72 The lost paper folio manuscript held at Llannerch (Denbighshire) in the eighteenth century contained a similar combination of texts, namely Ystorya Dared followed by versions of both Brenhinedd y Saesson and Brut y Tywysogyon.73 Most ambitious in scope is a paper volume (Oxford, Jesus College MS 141), written 1471 × c.1500, probably for Gutun’s personal use.74 Now misbound and incomplete, this assembled a compendium of historical texts in Welsh comprising a world chronicle beginning with Adam (including part of Y Bibyl Ynghymraec, the Welsh translation of the Compendium Historiae in Genealogia Christi attributed to Peter of Poitiers), followed by Ystorya Dared, an expanded version of Brut y Brenhinedd, and a version of Brenhinedd y Saesson that continued to 1461.75 The manuscript also contains a description of Britain (Disgrifiad o Ynys Brydain) originally translated into Welsh in 1471 from Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon together with other material on early British history as well as the oldest surviving copy of the fifteenth-­century heraldic treatise Llyfr Dysgread Arfau.76 The versions of Brenhinedd y Saesson in the Black Book of Basingwerk and Jesus 141 throw valuable light on Gutun’s approach to history writing. Comparison of the former version with that in the now incomplete Cotton Cleopatra B.V shows that Gutun engaged critically with the text, as he not only rephrased passages but also provided further details concerning both English and Welsh ­ rulers.77 Particular attention was paid to kinship ties. For example, the annal recording the death of Rhodri Mawr in 878 adds the names of his parents, traces his mother’s 72  BS, xiv, 272–7; Jones, HWMW, 48. 73  Jarman, ‘Lewis Morris’, 174–8. 74  RWML, 2: 35–8. For the date see Daniel Huws, A Repertory, s.n. Jesus 141. See also Y Bibyl Ynghymraec, ed. Jones, lix–lxi; J.  R.  S.  Phillips, ‘When Did Owain Glyndŵr Die?’, 69, 73; Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Ystoriaeu Brenhinedd’, 223; Jones, HWMW, 49–51. 75 References to digitized images of Jesus College MS 141 at ‘Welsh Chronicles’, https://digital. bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/4371cece-­efdb-­4b6c-­b90c-­a434e0a44304 (last accessed 13 September 2021). Although the continuation of Brenhinedd y Saesson in Jesus 141 breaks off in 1459 (fol. 123v), a stray folio now bound in NLW MS 1585, fol. 132r–v, shows that it originally continued at least to Edward IV’s accession in 1461: Owens, ‘Llawysgrifau N.L.W. 1585 a J.C. 141’. 76  Jesus MS 141, fols. 124v–150v; Siddons, Development of Welsh Heraldry: Volume I, 31–3; Thomas Jones, ‘Syr Thomas’, 46–9. The ‘Description of Britain’ is preceded by a statement that the work had been translated in 1471 for the benefit of those lacking books. The date therefore does not refer, as implied in RMWL, 2: 35, to the last year of the continuation of Brenhinedd y Saesson (which ended in 1461): Thomas Jones, ‘Syr Thomas’, 48. It is unknown whether Gutun was the translator. 77 For differences between the texts of the chronicle down to 1197 in NLW 7006 and Cotton Cleopatra  B.V see the textual notes in BS, 2–195. To judge by its legible portions, the version of Brenhinedd y Saesson in Jesus 141 was a different adaptation of the Cotton Cleopatra text from that in NLW 7006: Jesus MS 141, fols. 48v–58v, 102r–103v.

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CURATING THE PAST IN A CONQUERED LAND, 1282–1540  87 pedigree back to Cadwaladr the Blessed, and corrects the identification of the kinsman killed with Rhodri as his son (rather than brother).78 Likewise, in observing that the West Saxon dynasty ended with Edward the Confessor, Gutun traced Edward’s pedigree back to Ecgberht, ‘the first king of the English who brought the kingdoms of England under one rule’, while, most strikingly, the ver­ sion of Brenhinedd y Saesson in the lost Llannerch manuscript reportedly included ‘Pedigrees of the Kings beautifully drawn’.79 These examples suggest that, for Gutun, genealogy was not simply a discrete branch of learning but offered a struc­ ture for apprehending the past applicable to chronicle writing too. In addition, Gutun continued the narratives in both versions of Brenhinedd y Saesson to the accession of Edward IV in 1461. True, much of the material he recorded for the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries focused on kings of England. Moreover, the much fuller continuation from the accession of Richard II in 1377 onwards in Jesus 141 derives in large measure from the Middle English prose Brut chronicle. This originated as a translation of the Anglo-­Norman Brut towards the end of the fourteenth century, but Gutun appears to have used the first printed edition, which continued to Edward IV’s accession in 1461 and was published in 1480 by William Caxton, who almost certainly compiled the work’s continuation beyond 1419 as this is not attested before his edition.80 The debt to the Brut is clear, for example, in Gutun’s accounts of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, Jack Cade’s rising in 1450, and the invention of printing in Mainz (placed around 1456) and its subsequent dissemination ‘throughout the world’.81 Yet Gutun, in common with the authors of other Welsh chronicles covering the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, did not present the Welsh as having been com­ pletely subsumed in the history of England after the Edwardian conquest. While the English Brut seems to have provided a framework for his account of events from 1377 to 1461, Gutun was both highly selective in the passages he translated and supplemented its narrative by drawing on other sources, including material concerning events in Wales. As in his versions of the earlier part of Brenhinedd y Saesson, this was largely a matter of supplying additional details such as the names of the Welshmen who captured the Lollard leader Sir John Oldcastle in Powys.82 78  BS, 24 and n. 13 (trans. BS, 25 and n. 1). For other examples of additional genealogical detail see BS, 78 and n. 19 (trans. BS, 79 and n. 1); 162 and n. 17 (trans. BS, 163 and n. 2); BS, 168 and n. 19 (trans. BS, 169 and n. 2). Although such additions seem to be mostly accurate, Gutun misidentified two notables in south-­east Wales as members of the dynasty of Gwynedd: BS, 158 and nn. 22–3. 79  BS, 72–5 (also Jesus MS 141, fol. 57r–v); Jarman, ‘Lewis Morris’, 175. 80  Jesus MS 141, fols. 109r–123v; NLW MS 1585, fol. 132r–v; Caxton, The Cronicles. For the English Brut see Matheson, ‘Printer and Scribe’; Matheson, The Prose Brut, 47–9, 157–9, 164–6; Wakelin, ‘Caxton’s Exemplar’. The conclusion in 1461 of the short continuation in the Black Book of Basingwerk may indicate that Gutun was acquainted with Caxton’s edition by c.1481; however, the verbal parallels with the latter are too few to establish a direct debt and the common terminal date may be coincidental. 81  Jesus MS 141, fols. 109r–v, 120v–121v, 122v (quotation); NLW, MS 1585D, fol. 132v; Caxton, The Cronicles, sig. r5v–r6v, x6v–x7v, y1v, 5v; cf. Matheson, ‘Printer and Scribe’, 599–600. 82  Jesus MS 141, fols. 113v–114r; Caxton, The Cronicles, sig. u1v–u2r.

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88  WRITING WELSH HISTORY However, Gutun went further with respect to Owain Glyndŵr’s rising, as he declined to follow the Brut’s hostile treatment and instead reproduced the short account he had already included in the Black Book of Basingwerk.83 Even so, like the Welsh annals charting the rising composed earlier in the fifteenth century, Gutun’s account is circumspect and avoids conferring legitimacy on Glyndŵr by referring to him as Prince of Wales.84 Gutun Owain thus exemplified a wider assumption among late medieval Welsh writers of history that the canonical narratives of the Welsh past, extending from Troy to the age of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, should be both conserved and con­ tinued. That accounts of events beyond the Edwardian conquest focused mainly on the kings and kingdom of England does not weaken the case for their having been regarded as continuations of an ancient story. To begin with, as we have seen, those accounts still paid some attention to Wales. More fundamentally, though, their Anglocentric emphasis was itself consistent with aspects of Welsh historical writing earlier in the Middle Ages, especially understandings of the past that situated the history of the Welsh and their British ancestors within the orbit of Britain. Indeed, kings of England were arguably an integral component of medieval Welsh historiography. After all, Brenhinedd y Saesson had been designed as a continuation of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History that combined both Welsh and English history, while, more generally, Welsh chroniclers had long been con­ cerned with the kings of England and their deeds, especially but not exclusively in relation to Wales. After the Edwardian conquest English political and military history was all the more relevant to readers of Welsh historical texts, as many of the Welsh gentry served the crown as administrators or soldiers: the episodes in the Hundred Years War with France narrated by Gutun Owain could be seen as pertaining to the history of the Welsh not merely because they were subjects of the king of England but because they fought in royal armies.85 For Gutun Owain, then, the history of the Welsh in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was inextricably linked to the kingdom of England and predicated on loyalty to its monarch, but nevertheless retained a distinctively Welsh inflection—a balance encapsulated in his description of Henry V as ‘king of England and Wales’.86 Much Welsh historical writing in the following centuries sought to strike a similar balance. 83  BS, 274–5; Jesus MS 141, fols. 114v–115r; cf. Caxton, The Cronicles, sig. s8v. The passages in BS and the Brut are edited and translated in Owain Glyndŵr, ed. Livingston and Bollard, 174–7, 212–13. See also J. R. S. Phillips, ‘When Did Owain Glyndŵr Die?’, 69, 76–7. 84  See n. 59 above. Fifteenth-­century Welsh poetry, by contrast, is more fulsome in its praise of Glyndŵr, indicating that poets and their gentry patrons continued to celebrate him as a legitimate political leader seeking to liberate the Welsh: Gruffydd Aled Williams, ‘Later Welsh Poetry’, 519–31, 549. 85  BS, 272–5; Jesus MS 141, fols. 115r–116v. Cf. Ralph  A.  Griffiths, The Principality; Stansfield, ‘Prosopography’, esp. 28–31; A.  D.  Carr, ‘Welshmen and the Hundred Years’ War’; A.  D.  Carr, The Gentry of North Wales, ch. 2. 86  BS, 274–5.

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PART II

R E A F F IR MAT ION A ND EL A B OR AT ION , 1 5 4 0 – 1 7 7 0

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5 ‘Our Ancestors the Ancient Britons’, 1540–1620 Introduction From the 1540s to the early seventeenth century, Welsh writers produced a diverse range of new historical works, in Latin, English, and Welsh, including the first book to be called a history of Wales. Those writers were drawn from Welsh gentry families, including clergy and professional poets. Although the gentry had con­ tributed significantly to history writing in the later Middle Ages as both patrons and authors, they moved centre stage in the new landscape created by the dis­sol­ ution of the monasteries, which had been the most important institutions for the production of historical works in Wales since the twelfth century. In some cases, indeed, the dissolution contributed to history writing as scholars laid their hands on the contents of monastic libraries: Sir John Prise is a notable example.1 Prise also exemplifies how history writing largely depended on the initiative of indi­ vidual authors. David Powel was exceptional in being commissioned to prod­uce historical works by a high-­ranking patron, Sir Henry Sidney, President of the Council in the Marches of Wales, which helps to explain why these, unusually, were immediately published as printed books. Nevertheless, though mostly lacking direct patronage, the historical writing discussed in the following two chapters owed much to the opportunities provided by service to the English crown, nobil­ ity, and gentry; it also responded to the challenges posed by Renaissance learning, the Protestant Reformation, and the political incorporation of Wales in the kingdom of England through Henry VIII’s Acts of Union (1536–43).2 One consequence of these opportunities and challenges was that Welsh his­tor­ ic­al writing was shaped by contact with England to a more significant extent than had been the case in the Middle Ages. True, history writing in medieval Wales had drawn on English sources and, especially after the Edwardian conquest, devoted considerable attention to English history. However, from the early sixteenth century not only did the foundations of Welsh historiography come under unprecedented critical scrutiny as a result of attacks on Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History but the interpretation of the Welsh past had to come to terms with the 1 Ker, Books, 471–96; HBD, xxv–xxx. 2  For the historical background see Glanmor Williams, Recovery, part II. Writing Welsh History: From the Early Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century. Huw Pryce, Oxford University Press. © Huw Pryce 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198746034.003.0006

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92  WRITING WELSH HISTORY legal and administrative changes introduced by Henry VIII and the imposition of a new ecclesiastical order headed by the king. Small wonder, then, that much Welsh history writing of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries marked a response to changes originating outside Wales, changes, moreover, in which sev­ eral authors were closely involved through service to the English crown and nobility. The present chapter focuses on one aspect of this, namely the defence and reaffirmation of ancient British origins and their refashioning as instruments for legitimizing both religious and—with the accession of James I in 1603— dynastic change. In these cases, new contexts helped to sharpen the salience of long-­established preoccupations, especially the belief in the unique antiquity— and thus unique status—of the Welsh as descendants of the Britons. No less re­act­ive was a determination to counter the perceived misrepresentation and marginaliza­ tion of Wales by historians of England, a vital motivation for the cre­ation in the Elizabethan period of the first works conceived as histories of Wales, discussed in Chapter 6. Admittedly, new kinds of English historical works covering the island of Britain accommodated Wales, notably John Bale’s mid-­sixteenth-­century catalogues of British authors and, above all, William Camden’s Britannia, first published in 1586 and followed by five increasingly expanded editions down to 1607, the last translated into English in 1610.3 On the whole, however, Wales attracted the attention of English historians only to the extent that it affected the kingdom of England, of which they considered it to have been a part since the Edwardian conquest. Thus, while Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577; revised edition 1587) included histories of Scotland and Ireland as well as England, they lacked a sep­ar­ ate history of Wales, although the coverage of medieval Welsh history was fuller than that of other works of English historiography over the previous century.4 Moreover, ‘British’ nomenclature could be deployed for Anglocentric ends: thus John Clapham (1566–1619) responded to Anglo-­Scottish union in his Historie of Great Britannie (1606) by giving an account of the island from Julius Caesar to King Ecgberht, ‘the first English monarch’ who ‘changed the name of Britannie into England’, by which time the ‘VValshmen (the posterity of the antient Britans) were for the most part slaine in battell, and those that survived were vtterly dis­ armed, and thrust into a corner of the Ile’.5 Another change in this period was the use of print as a medium for publishing books by Welsh authors in Latin, Welsh, and English. However, while the advent

3  Cf. Greengrass and Philpott, ‘John Bale’, 278–82; Vine, In Defiance of Time, 86–90. 4  Cf. Ralph Griffiths, ‘Wales’, esp. 679–81; Tim Thornton, ‘Wales’, esp. 696–7. 5 Clapham, The Historie of Great Britannie, title page, sig. A4r, 296. Likewise John Speed, while devoting a book to Wales in his chorographical The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain, 97–124, focused on the kings of England following the ‘down-­fall of Britaine’ in the post-­Roman period (described in a chapter heavily dependent on Gildas) in his The History of Great Britaine, 281–3. Cf. Woolf, The Idea of History, 56–8, 70–1.

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‘ Our Ancestors the Ancient Britons ’ , 1540–1620  93 of the printed book marked a significant change that facilitated the dissemination of historical texts, its impact remained limited, both in terms of the numbers of works published and because most writing in this period, including history, was produced in manuscript form. Only about sixty printed items in Welsh or relating to Wales appeared between 1546 and 1604, and the printing of books was restricted to London in 1557 (though Oxford and Cambridge were later exempted); printers were established in Wales only from 1718.6 In part, this was a matter of preserving the old, as copies continued to be made of the principal medieval Welsh historical texts (Brut y Brenhinedd and Brut y Tywysogyon).7 But new works were also written and circulated in manuscript, with only a few being pub­ lished in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.8 Moreover, as elsewhere, boundaries between manuscript and printed books were blurred, as shown, for example, by handwritten annotations on, and copies of, the latter.9 Above all, it is important to distinguish between the form of publication and its content. The adoption of the new medium of print did not necessarily accompany, let alone engender, new approaches to history writing, any more than manu­script writing signalled a conservative commitment to reproducing the old. Printed books of Welsh history were deeply indebted to medieval understandings of the past found in manuscripts; indeed, a privileging of native, especially vernacular, sources lay at the heart of defences of the legendary history associated with Geoffrey of Monmouth which appeared in print in the 1570s. Conversely, by far the longest and most innovative Welsh historical work of this period, the chronicle of Elis Gruffudd, survives in four manuscript volumes, and remains mostly unpublished nearly five centuries after its completion in 1552. As we shall see, much Welsh history writing of the mid-­sixteenth to early seven­teenth century was deeply conservative, echoing the preoccupation of medi­ eval sources with glorious distant origins and the era of native rule extinguished by the Edwardian conquest. As such, it reflected the priorities of a historical cul­ ture sustained by professional poets and their gentry patrons. Although in decline in this period, the poets continued to evoke traditional learning about the past in their praise poetry and also devoted considerable energy to genealogy and her­ aldry, interests assiduously cultivated by the gentry, as numerous visitations by the herald poet Lewys Dwnn (c.1545–c.1616), appointed deputy herald for Wales in 1586, made clear. Indeed, from the early seventeenth century the gentry replaced the poets as the prime custodians of Welsh genealogical and heraldic 6  Eiluned Rees, The Welsh Book-­Trade, v–vi; Graham  C.  G.  Thomas, ‘From Manuscript to Print’; Gruffydd, ‘The First Printed Books’. 7  Almost 30 manuscripts datable to c.1550–c.1625 containing one or both works are listed in Jones, HWMW, 432. See also Graham C. G. Thomas, ‘From Manuscript to Print’, 247–8. 8  As well as the books of David Powel (whose Historie of Cambria first published a treatise by Sir Edward Stradling), these publications comprised works by John Prise and Humphrey Llwyd (all pub­ lished posthumously) and by George Owen Harry. 9  Cf. McKitterick, Print, esp. 11–14, 47, 51–2, 102–6, 217–19; Woolf, Reading History, 87–94, 171–2.

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94  WRITING WELSH HISTORY learning.10 For Welsh poets and their patrons, then, the past was a source of status and legitimacy in the present. Indeed, the poets asserted that rules devised to reform the bardic order at eisteddfodau held at Caerwys (Flintshire) in 1523 and again in 1567 originated in a statute by the medieval king Gruffudd ap Cynan (d. 1137).11 The statute was widely copied and David Powel gave a summary of it at the end of his account of the king in The Historie of Cambria (1584).12 Of course, in many respects the focus on distant origins and the medieval past, expressed in historical narratives and treatises as well as through the cultivation of genealogy and heraldry and other visual commemorations of family history, was shared with the historical cultures of early modern England and other parts of Europe.13 This was certainly true of the persistent emphasis on the glorious descent of the Welsh.14 As the French jurist Jean Bodin (1529/30–96) observed in a discussion of the subject first published in 1566, ‘No question has exercised the writers of histories more than the origin of peoples’,15 while over four decades later John Selden disapprovingly noted ‘that universall desire, bewitching our Europe, to derive their bloud from the Trojans’.16 Such issues were especially acute in sixteenth-­century France, where the Trojan ancestry claimed for the royal dynasty since the early Middle Ages faced challenges from advocates of German and also Gaulish origins in interpretations variously used in support both of royal and aristocratic power and of popular sovereignty.17 Yet while the appeal of Trojan and other distant origins was widespread, its nature was far from uniform and elicited different responses in different contexts. The rest of this chapter assesses what is revealed of one such context by sixteenthand early seventeenth-­century works dealing with the origins of the Welsh. These works were essentially apologetic and defensive and fall into two main categories: attempts to vindicate the veracity of the early history of Britain related by Geoffrey of Monmouth from the criticism of Polydore Vergil (c.1470–1555) and others, and invocations of the early British Church as a legitimizing precursor of contem­ porary confessional allegiances.

10  J.  Gwynfor Jones, ‘The Welsh Poets’, esp. 247–54, 263–5; Francis Jones, ‘An Approach to Welsh Genealogy’, 348–51, 365–91; Graham C. G. Thomas, ‘From Manuscript to Print’, 242–3; Siddons, The Development of Welsh Heraldry, 35–8, 41–51, 304–6, 309–17; Siddons, ‘Dwnn, Lewys’. See also Ceri W. Lewis, ‘The Decline of Professional Poetry’. 11  For discussion, texts, and translations of the two versions of the statute see Wales, ed. Klausner, lxx–lxxi, cxvii–cxlix, 159–65, 172–6, 349–56, 360–4. 12  Wales, ed. Klausner, cxvii–cxix; Powel, HC, 191–2. 13 See e.g. Broadway, ‘No historie so meete’, 7, 150–68, 219–33; Broadway, ‘Symbolic and Self-­ Consciously Antiquarian’; Butaud and Piétri, Les enjeux de la généalogie, passim. 14  See e.g. Bietenholz, Historia and Fabula, 195–206. 15 Bodin, Method, trans. Reynolds, 334–64, quotation at 334. 16  Quoted from Selden’s notes to Michael Drayton’s Poly-­Olbion (1612) in Graham Parry, ‘Ancient Britons’, 163. For other criticism of claims to Trojan origins see Popper, Walter Ralegh’s History, 179, n. 29. 17 Kelley, Foundations, 139–40, 156–7, 212–13, 220–30, 236, 291–3; Nicklas, ‘Gallier’.

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‘ Our Ancestors the Ancient Britons ’ , 1540–1620  95

Defending the British History The idea that the Welsh were the descendants of the ancient Britons who had once held authority over the island of Britain was fundamental to historical writ­ ing in medieval Wales. As we have seen, this idea attained its fullest expression in the British History, the colourful narrative elaborated by Geoffrey of Monmouth that traced the ancient history of Britain from the arrival of the Trojan Brutus to the Britons’ loss of sovereignty over the island to the English with the death of Cadwaladr in the late seventh century. Nor was the British History embraced only by the Welsh. From the twelfth century onwards, an influential historiographical tradition in England had appropriated the British History by making it the first section of a longer English history—an interpretation emphasized visually on the title page of Richard Grafton’s Chronicle (1569), which depicted ‘Brute’, ‘Albana’, and ‘Camber’ alongside William the Conqueror, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, and three Old Testament rulers.18 Furthermore, precisely because it dealt with the whole island of Britain, the Galfridian History was deployed to support English claims to sovereignty over Scotland, featuring prominently in political rhetoric in the 1540s advocating dynastic union; this in turn engendered rebuttals from Scottish historians and other writers, who refused to accept the subordination of the English crown implied by Geoffrey’s account of Brutus allocating Scotland to his second son Albanactus, while his elder brother Locrinus was granted England and succeeded their father as king of Britain.19 Thus in his ‘History of the Scots’ (Scotorum Historia) of 1527, Hector Boece (c.1465–1536) followed John of Fordun (d. c.1363) in rejecting Geoffrey’s derivation from Albanactus and instead tracing the origins of the Scots to the Greek prince Gathelus and Scota daughter of Pharaoh.20 Likewise in the later sixteenth century several English historians and antiquaries followed the example of Gerald of Wales and drew on Geoffrey to assert Arthurian origins for the English crown’s title to Ireland, an interpretation in turn refuted by Geoffrey Keating (c.1569–1644) in his history of Ireland (Foras Feasa ar Éirinn), completed c.1634.21 However, the British History not only faced challenges from Scotland and Ireland but was subject to considerable scepticism from writers in England. Most famously, Polydore Vergil’s ‘History of England’ (Anglica Historia)—originally commissioned by Henry VII (1485–1509), extant in manuscript by 1512–13, and first published, with a dedication to Henry VIII, in 1534—gave a decidedly cool reception to the Galfridian narrative by raising doubts about the extent to which

18  Richard Grafton, A Chronicle; Kendrick, British Antiquity, 34–44; Ashe, ‘Holinshed’. 19 Roger  A.  Mason, ‘Scotching the Brut’; Armitage, The Ideological Origins, 36–46. See also MacColl, ‘The Meaning of “Britain” ’, 263–9. 20  Roger A. Mason, ‘Scotching the Brut’, 64–5. 21  Hadfield, ‘Briton and Scythian’; Cunningham, The World of Geoffrey Keating, 3, 146–7.

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96  WRITING WELSH HISTORY it was based on reliable sources.22 True, Polydore was prepared to draw on the British History, especially in his account of the kings of Britain before the coming of the Romans and also with respect to some of their successors, including King Arthur.23 However, this use of Geoffrey was complicated by warnings about his veracity. Not only did Polydore cite William of Newburgh’s condemnation of Geoffrey as a purveyor of fables about Arthur, but as a critical humanist scholar he also emphasized that this ‘new history’ contained ‘countless’ errors, noting in particular the implausibility of its accounts of the settlement of the island by Brutus and Brennius’s capture of Rome for which there was no corroboration in classical sources.24 Nor was Polydore alone in England, where scepticism about Geoffrey’s account was shared, for example, by John Rastell in his Pastyme of People (1529).25 Over half a century later William Camden, while not overtly criticizing Geoffrey, made clear in his Britannia (1586) that he had little faith in Brutus and Trojan origins, preferring to locate the origins of the Britons in Gaul and focusing on the history of Britain from the Roman period onwards.26 Such challenges provoked hostility from those who saw no reason to abandon a long-­cherished vision of a rich and consoling past. In the case of Polydore, moreover, hostility was exacerbated by his Italian birth and sympathy for Roman writers and imperial Rome, features made all the more sensitive by the publica­ tion of his history just after Henry VIII’s break with the papacy.27 As has been astutely observed, the objection to Polydore ‘was not so much that he attacked the Galfridian history but rather that he came close to airbrushing it out of existence’.28 In large measure, such sentiments were shared by both English and Welsh sup­ porters of the British History.29 The earliest defence of the British History came from the pen of Leland, in two tracts vindicating its depiction of King Arthur, the first composed c.1536, the second published in 1544.30 For Leland and likeminded compatriots, rejection of that History demeaned the English by depriving them of a pantheon of heroic predecessors. Welsh defenders of Geoffrey thought the same was true of the Welsh. Indeed, for Arthur Kelton (d. 1549/50), a verse chronicler from Shrewsbury who identified with the Welsh (probably by virtue of his descent), Polydore not only slandered the Welsh but thereby impugned the glorious lineage of the Tudor kings of England from Cadwaladr and Brutus (which Kelton made even more glorious by extending Brutus’s pedigree to Osiris and thence

22 Hay, Polydore Vergil, esp. ch. 4 (with discussion of the Anglica Historia’s textual development and editions at 79–85); Gransden, Historical Writing in England II, 430–43. 23  ‘Polydore Vergil, Anglica Historia’, ed. and trans. Sutton. 24  ‘Polydore Vergil, Anglica Historia’, ed. and trans. Sutton, I.19–20, 23. 25 Kendrick, British Antiquity, 41–4; McKisack, Medieval History, 97–8. 26 Camden, Britannia, sig. A6r, 4–19. On Camden’s aims and methods see Levy, ‘The Making of Camden’s Britannia’; Rockett, ‘The Structural Plan’. 27  Woolf, ‘Senses of the Past’, 409; Schwyzer, ‘Archipelagic History’, 599. 28  HBD, xxxviii. 29 Kendrick, British Antiquity, 38–9. Cf. Curran, Jr., Roman Invasions, 25–6. 30  Carley, ‘Polydore Vergil’.

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‘ Our Ancestors the Ancient Britons ’ , 1540–1620  97 Noah, an embellishment indebted to the fabricated history composed by Annius of Viterbo (Giovanni Nanni, 1432–1502) and published in 1498 as the work of the Babylonian author Berosus).31 Kelton’s verses also highlight that, whereas the Galfridian past possessed a patriotic appeal for its English adherents by offering a more splendid ancestry than one merely commencing with the Anglo-­Saxons,32 for the Welsh the stakes were even higher: to question the Galfridian history posed an existential threat to their identity as a people who believed themselves to be the descendants—rather than simply the successors—of glorious British forebears.33 Yet, despite their emotional investment in the British History, its English and Welsh defenders should not be seen merely as credulous conservatives obstinately pitted against an unflinchingly critical humanist historiography. In this case, each side in the debate was both critical and credulous. Polydore and other detractors of Geoffrey were selective in their rejection of legendary accounts of the past. For example, Polydore accepted that Christianity had been introduced to Britain by Joseph of Arimathea and subsequently reinforced, moreover, by the conversion of King Lucius and the measures he took as described by Geoffrey.34 In addition, both sides in the debate shared a fundamental assumption that knowledge about the distant past should be based on ancient authorities: disagreement turned on pre­ cisely which authorities were authoritative. This reflected much wider debates about what counted as acceptable historical evidence stimulated by Annius of Viterbo’s publication in 1498 of alleged works by ancient historians, notably the Babylonian Berosus and Persian Metasthenes, whose testimony was deployed to impugn the reliability of the Greek and Latin historians favoured by Renaissance humanists.35 Supporters of Geoffrey thus followed Annius’s example in arguing that uncorroborated sources, however dubious, might nevertheless contain testi­ mony that was true.36 Welsh defenders of the British History offered a variation on this theme in maintaining that the work’s detractors had disregarded sources written by the Britons and their Welsh descendants and were disqualified by their ignorance of the Welsh language. Yet a shared focus on the reliability of sources also helped to open up common ground between both sides of the debate. Thus, Polydore Vergil did not dismiss the British History outright, while, as we shall

31 Kelton, A Chronycle, esp. sig. iiiv–c.iiiiv (followed by ‘A Genelogie of the Brutes’ from Osiris to Edward VI). See also Dodd, ‘ “A Commendacion of Welshmen” ’; Ringler, ‘Arthur Kelton’s Contributions’. For Annius see Kendrick, British Antiquity, 71–6; Stephens, Giants, 101–11; Grafton, ‘Invention of Tradition’, esp. 11–24; Popper, Walter Ralegh’s History, 39–44. 32 Kendrick, British Antiquity, 38; but see also Curran, Jr., Roman Invasions, 25–6. 33  Cf. Levy, ‘The Making of Camden’s Britannia’, 79: ‘To a Welshman, the British History was much more sacred than it was to an Englishman . . .’ 34 ‘Polydore Vergil, Anglica Historia’, ed. and trans. Sutton, II. 7, 11. See also Cobban, ‘Polydore Vergil Reconsidered’, 371–4, 390–1. 35  Popper, ‘ “An Ocean of Lies” ’. 36 Popper, Walter Ralegh’s History, 43.

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98  WRITING WELSH HISTORY see, David Powel offered a qualified defence that acknowledged the force of some of the criticisms levelled against it. Before considering works that explicitly defended the British History, it is important to stress that one strand of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-­century Welsh historical writing demonstrated support for the British History, not through engaging with its critics, but by copying medieval Welsh versions of it (namely, Brut y Brenhinedd, ‘The History of the Kings’ and related texts) and also by composing new works that adopted its framework in various ways, thereby implying that their authors believed it remained serviceable and would meet the expectations of their intended readers.37 A partial exception is Elis Gruffudd’s chronicle (1548–52), discussed in Chapter 6, which translates John Rastell’s criti­ cism of Geoffrey of Monmouth and also diverges from the latter’s portrayal of events from the late sixth century onwards. Yet Gruffudd also praises Geoffrey and, above all, adheres to his fundamental vision of a succession of British kings beginning with Brutus.38 Other authors were unequivocal in their embrace of the British History. One was the antiquary Rice Merrick, to judge by passing observa­ tions in his account of the antiquities of Glamorgan, largely completed in 1578.39 The same is true of two late sixteenth-­century histories of the Britons written in Welsh. Roger Morris (c.1550–c.1600), an Oxford-­educated scholar from Coed-­y-­ talwrn, Llanfair Dyffryn Clwyd (Denbighshire), composed an account from Brutus to Bassianus and Geta in the third century ad heavily indebted to Geoffrey of Monmouth that also drew on John Prise and Humphrey Llwyd and, like them, privileged the testimony of Welsh-­language writers.40 Ifan Llwyd ap Dafydd (d. 1607 × 1609), a minor squire from Merioneth, produced a version of the Galfridian history based mainly on the late medieval adaptation Brut Tysilio.41 Ifan explained that he had been motivated by concern that his compatriots—‘the nation of the Britons of the eminent lineage of Troy’—were both ignorant of their own history and neglecting their native tongue; he had therefore tried to make ‘the stories of our country’ accessible and entertaining, while also emphasizing in time-­honoured fashion that their account of the Britons offered a morally edify­ ing example of God’s punishment of sin.42 The accession of James I in 1603 and the union of the Scottish and English crowns together with the project of creating a kingdom of ‘Great Britain’ gave a new stimulus to writing histories of Britain and also offered a golden opportunity 37 Eighteen copies, datable to c.1550–c.1625, of medieval Welsh versions listed in Jones, HWMW, 432. 38  NLW 5276iD, fols. 80v–83r; cf. Hunter, Soffestri’r Saeson, 61–5. 39 Merrick, Morganiae Archaiographia, ed. James, xxiii, 11, 12, 40. 40  R. I. D. Jones, ‘Astudiaeth Feirniadol’. 41  Nia Lewis, ‘Astudiaeth Destunol a Beirniadol’, which argues (at i–xxvii, lxvi) that at least three independent early modern copies were made of the work, composed in the last quarter of the six­ teenth century, possibly c.1580–5. 42  Rhagymadroddion 1547–1659, ed. Hughes, 103–4.

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‘ Our Ancestors the Ancient Britons ’ , 1540–1620  99 for some, in both Wales and England, to reaffirm the British History.43 The Pembrokeshire antiquary George Owen of Henllys (1552–1613), writing in 1603, celebrated James’s arrival on the English throne as a moment of joyous res­tor­ ation, since through his ‘happy and blessed coming to the imperial crown of this realm is joined together the whole Isle of Britain, never heard, or read of, since the death of Brutus, first king of the whole, being now 2710 years since’.44 The following year his friend and neighbour, George Owen Harry (c.1553–c.1614), vicar of Whitchurch, Pembrokeshire, elaborated extravagantly on that assertion by publishing a genealogy of James I that traced the king’s pedigree from Noah via Brutus and the British and Welsh rulers (see Fig.  5.1).45 While the biblical extension of the pedigree was indebted to the Pseudo-­Berosus, Harry—in contrast to his contemporary John Lewis of Llynwene, discussed below—unequivocally embraced the British History, which, so he believed, revealed a providential unfolding of events. Consider, in particular, the praise of the king for vniting and knitting together all the scattered members of the Brittish Monarchy, vnder the gouernment of him, as one sent of GOD, to fulfill his diuine pre­des­tin­ ate will, reuealed to KADWALADER, as our ancient Histories doe testify, fifteene hundred yeeres past, that the time should come, that the Heires descended of his loynes, should bee restored agayne to the Kingdome of BRITTAYNE, which was partly performed in King HENRY the seuenth; but now wholly f­ulfilled in his Maiesties owne person . . .46

Such readings of the union of crowns had their counterparts in England, too, in what has been called ‘the “Galfridian moment” shortly after James’s accession’: the Lyte genealogy, which traced the king’s pedigree back to Brutus through multiple lines of descent, is a conspicuous example. Indeed, James himself was ready to draw on the Brutus legend.47 Yet attempts to evoke the British History in support of the new monarch were controversial, not only because its veracity had been increasingly questioned but also because James’s adoption of the title of ‘king of Great Britain’ in 1604 was seen by prominent common lawyers and others as imposing an alien name on the kingdom of England that threatened its laws and, 43 Woolf, The Idea of History, 55–64; Peter Roberts, ‘Tudor Wales’, 37–42; J.  Gwynfor Jones, ‘The Welsh Gentry and the Image’. 44 Owen, The Description of Pembrokeshire, ed. Miles, 202. In a similar vein, Sir William Maurice of Clenennau assured the House of Commons that ‘the name [of Britain] was no[t] newe but a restitu­ cion of the old’ in a speech advocating James’s adoption of the title ‘king of Great Britain’ in which he appealed to ancient British history: J. Gwynfor Jones, ‘Welsh Poets’, 250–2, quotation at 252. 45 Harry, The Genealogy. This was based on Harry’s much lengthier and apparently unpublished genealogical work, ‘The Wellspringe of True Nobilitie’: E. D. Jones, ‘George Owen Harry’. The table in Fig. 5.1 shows descent from the medieval Welsh rulers regarded as founders of the ‘five royal tribes of Wales’. 46 Harry, The Genealogy, 39–40. 47  Hunt, Thornton, and Dalgleish, ‘A Jacobean Antiquary’, quotation at 182.

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Fig. 5.1  George Owen Harry, The Genealogy of the High and Mighty Monarch, James (London, 1604), title page and facing table

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‘ Our Ancestors the Ancient Britons ’ , 1540–1620  101 indeed, very existence.48 Francis Bacon, it is true, urged the writing of a history of Great Britain to mark what he regarded as a providential culmination of English history, and Camden emphasized the shared inheritance of the peoples of Britain since Roman times and interpreted the king’s new title as a fitting expression of the divinely ordained rule that James had achieved over the whole island.49 However, there were tensions between such rhetorical gestures of support for the creation of a unified British kingdom and their authors’ Anglocentric perspective. Thus, rather than portraying James’s accession as restoring the ancient kingdom of Brutus (whom he considered fictional),50 Camden compared it with King Ecgberht’s order, some eight centuries previously, that the territories under his authority be named England; and on other occasions he maintained that England, not Britain, remained the true name of the kingdom.51 Antiquaries in Wales were moved by different patriotic imperatives: as under the Tudors, the British History supplied a language of loyalty to the crown that also served to vindicate deep-­rooted notions of identity and thus the special place of the Welsh in a multi­nation­al polity. The rest of this chapter focuses on two aspects of Welsh attitudes to the British History: first, the defences of it mounted by Sir John Prise and Humphrey Llwyd in the middle decades of the sixteenth century, and by David Powel in the 1580s, together with the alternative interpretation of British antiquity offered by John Lewis of Llynwene in the early seventeenth century; second, the adherence to the British History in polemical writings designed to promote confessional agendas.

Sir John Prise and Humphrey Llwyd The two most prominent Welsh defenders of the British History were Sir John Prise (1501/2–55) and Humphrey Llwyd (1527–68). Their backgrounds, careers, and approaches had much in common, though there were also significant differ­ ences: in particular, Prise was closer to the heart of the Tudor state than Llwyd but lacked the latter’s direct connection with continental European scholarship. Both men were educated members of the Welsh gentry who served the English monarchy and aristocracy, welcomed the advent of the Tudor dynasty, and praised the ensuing political assimilation of Wales with England both for confer­ ring legal equality on the Welsh and for allowing them to enjoy greater wealth and civility.52 Their political loyalty was sustained by pride in the special status

48 Galloway, The Union, 20–2, 28–9, 35–8, 60–1; Parker, ‘Recasting England’; Kanemura, ‘Historical Perspectives’, 159–64. See also Wormald, ‘James VI’. 49 Camden, Britannia, 6th edn., 101, 680; Vine, ‘Copiousness’, 228–9; Woolf, The Idea of History, 55. 50 Camden, Britannia (1586 edn.), 5–6. 51 Camden, Britannia, 6th edn., 101; Parker, ‘Recasting England’, 397–8. 52  HBD, 260–5; Llwyd, Breviary, 107–9 (partly followed in ‘Cambria sive Wallia’, in Ortelius, Additamentum).

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102  WRITING WELSH HISTORY conferred on the Welsh by their British origins, combined with attempts to make these the foundations of a new British identity under the English crown, a fusion of past and present encapsulated in the self-­descriptions of Prise and Llwyd respectively as a ‘Briton’ and ‘Cambro-­Briton’.53 Both were provoked by Polydore Vergil (and, in Llwyd’s case, also by Hector Boece) into defending the truth of the British History through an appeal to a wide array of classical and medieval sources, including works composed in Welsh. However, they largely did so through the international medium of Latin prose aimed at educated readers beyond Wales. Just as their careers aligned them firmly with the Tudor dynasty and the kingdom of England, Prise and Llwyd sought to ensure that Welsh inter­ pretations of the past remained central to understandings of the ancient and medieval history of Britain as a whole. Trained as a lawyer, in 1530 Prise entered royal service under the patronage of Thomas Cromwell, and four years later married a niece of Cromwell’s deceased wife; from 1535 he was employed as a visitor and commissioner charged with overseeing the dissolution of the monasteries, which in turn allowed him to obtain possession of the Benedictine priories of St John, Brecon and St Guthlac, Hereford. The latter became his home, when, following Cromwell’s fall in 1540, Prise was appointed secretary of the Council in the Marches of Wales, revived four years previously by the first Act of Union; his continuing government service was rewarded with a knighthood in 1547. After settling at Hereford Prise had greater leisure to pursue the antiquarian and literary interests which became his predominant preoccupations during the rest of his life.54 His visitations of reli­ gious houses had already facilitated his antiquarian inclinations by giving him access to numerous medieval manuscripts, which he both preserved and studied, and his command of classical as well as medieval sources, including compilations of Welsh texts such as the Red Book of Hergest, is evident from his most im­port­ ant work, ‘A Defence of the British History’ (Historiae Britannicae Defensio).55 Though an early draft had been written by 1545, this only reached its final form shortly before his death ten years later, being eventually published posthumously in London by his son in 1573.56 Prise also mined medieval Welsh manuscripts in compiling the first printed book published in Welsh. Known by its opening words Yny lhyvyr hwnn (‘In this Book’; 1546), this assembled a collection of religious texts, including the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer, accompanied by a Welsh alphabet and instructions on how to read Welsh.57

53  HBD, 16–17, 24–5; Humphrey Llwyd, Commentarioli Britannicae Descriptionis Fragmentum, title page; Humphrey Llwyd, ‘Cambriae Typus’, in North, ‘Humphrey Llwyd’s Maps’, facing 28. Llwyd also referred to Gerald of Wales as a ‘Cambro-­Briton’: Humphrey Llwyd, ‘De Mona Insula Druidum’, sig. a.iiir. For Llwyd’s term see Schwyzer, ‘The Age of the Cambro-­Britons’. 54  Pryce, ‘Prise, Sir John’; HBD, xv–xxiv. 55 Ker, Books, 471–96; HBD, xxiv–xxxiv. 56  HBD, xxxix–xliii. 57  Gruffydd, ‘Yny Lhyvyr Hwnn’; Gruffydd, ‘Print yn Dwyn Ffrwyth’.

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‘ Our Ancestors the Ancient Britons ’ , 1540–1620  103 The preface to the ‘Defence’, addressed to Edward VI, presents the work as an act of both historiographical and national restoration. Its central aim was to refute Polydore Vergil, whom Prise accused of ignoring ‘the most ancient history of this island’ and of seeking ‘to bury in perpetual darkness and oblivion the course of more than a thousand years of governance here’.58 By contrast, Prise would base his defence on ‘British records’, including those in the Welsh language, a task made all the more urgent since these ‘were falling more and more into disuse and being consigned to oblivion’.59 However, by describing the British History as ‘the glory and adornment of all Britons’, he insisted that the beneficiaries of this res­ tor­ation were not only the Welsh descendants of the ancient Britons but all sub­ jects of the king, who, as Prise took pains to stress, was himself descended ‘from the most ancient and distinguished stock of British kings’ through the ‘ancient princes’ of Wales.60 Ever the lawyer, Prise explained that, just as Polydore ‘brought his charge’ against the British History before Henry VIII, so he sought to give equal weight to its ‘Defence’ by bringing it before the same tribunal, represented by Henry’s son and successor.61 The work is divided into thirteen chapters of varying length.62 The first begins by maintaining that the silence of Roman writers regarding the glorious ancient history of the Britons depicted by Geoffrey was explicable by the remoteness of Britain from the Mediterranean world that was their principal concern. Nevertheless the Britons had in fact produced their own written records from the earliest times, including accounts of their antiquities: therefore, ‘British authors . . . are no less worthy of our trust than the Romans’.63 Chapter II briefly outlines the work’s four main topics, which form the subject matter of most of what follows. After addressing the credibility of Geoffrey’s History, which Prise took at face value as a translation of a work originally written in ‘British’, in Chapter III, there follows a discussion of the significance of the words Britannia and Britanni, including a defence of their derivation from Brutus, the etymology of other names in the island, the relationship between the Britons of Britain and those of Armorica, and criticism of Polydore for his negative view of the Britons (Chapters IV–X). Prise then seeks to vindicate two specific aspects of Geoffrey’s History: the identification of Brennus son of Dunuuallo Moelmutius with the Brennus who sacked Rome in the fourth century bce (Chapter XI), and, in the longest chapter (XII), the portrayal of King Arthur. Finally, Chapter XIII returns to the issue of sources, and specifically the testimony of Gildas. Here, Prise chal­ lenged Polydore’s objection that the De Excidio Britanniae (‘Ruin of Britain’) lacked any reference to Brutus and Arthur by denying that Gildas was its author and ascribing to him instead the early ninth-­century Historia Brittonum (possibly 58  HBD, 26–7. 59  HBD, 30–3. 61  HBD, 30–1; cf. HBD, xlviii–xlix. 63  HBD, 58–9.

60  HBD, 28–31. 62  Summary in HBD, xliv–xlviii.

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104  WRITING WELSH HISTORY composed by Nennius), whose author Polydore had condemned as ‘a dreadful scoundrel’—a text which did refer to those figures (an incorrect deduction based on knowledge of the Gildasian redaction of the Historia, noticed in Chapter 2).64 Like Prise, Humphrey Llwyd was both an administrator and a Renaissance scholar. Educated at Oxford, from 1553 he served in the household of Henry Fitzalan, earl of Arundel (1512–80), through whose patronage he was elected MP for East Grinstead (Sussex) in Elizabeth I’s first parliament (1559), and became ‘a member of Arundel’s close circle’, marrying Barbara, the sister of the earl’s son-­in-­ law, the last Lord Lumley.65 Llwyd was mainly resident in Denbigh from 1563, when he was elected MP for Denbigh Boroughs and reportedly facilitated the passage through parliament of the bill authorizing the translation of the Bible and Book of Common Prayer into Welsh.66 His connections with Arundel and Lumley helped to foster an interest in books, evident from 1556 onwards, and, besides helping to assemble Arundel’s library, which testified to the earl’s keen interest in humanist learning, Llwyd possessed numerous volumes of continental scholarship of his own, including a printed edition of Froissart’s chronicles and other historical works.67 His service to Arundel also brought Llwyd into personal contact with that scholarship, since, on returning in the spring of 1567 from a visit to Italy with the earl, he was introduced to the Flemish cartographer Abraham Ortelius (1527–98).68 Thus the scholar whom the Welsh Renaissance humanist William Salesbury had already praised to Matthew Parker a year previously as ‘the most famous Antiquarius of all our countrey’ (of Wales) joined a network of friends and cor­res­ pond­ents across western Europe who provided Ortelius with information for his pioneering atlas, the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (‘Theatre of the World’), first published in Antwerp in 1570.69 As we shall see shortly, this friendship with Ortelius led to the reception of Llwyd’s work in European print culture and, through its inclusion in the atlas, secured a place for Wales on a global stage. Llwyd’s interests in the ancient and medieval history of Britain and Wales are attested by a variety of works, all published posthumously. The most substantial, discussed in Chapter 6, was Cronica Walliae, completed in July 1559: a history of Wales, in English, from the late seventh to the late thirteenth centuries, largely based on Brut y Tywysogyon and other medieval sources, and published in

64 See HBD, xlvi–xlviii. 65  Boyle, ‘Henry Fitzalan’, 137, 167–9, 174, 179–80, quotation at 179. 66 Ieuan  M.  Williams, ‘Ysgolheictod Hanesyddol’, 111–24, 209–14; R.  Brinley Jones, ‘Llwyd, Humphrey’; Gruffydd, ‘Humphrey Llwyd of Denbigh’; Gruffydd, ‘Humphrey Llwyd: Dyneiddiwr’, 57–74; Llwyd, CW, 1–3. 67  Ieuan M. Williams, ‘Ysgolheictod Hanesyddol’, 111–12, 116–17; Gruffydd, ‘Humphrey Llwyd of Denbigh’, 82–91; Boyle, ‘Henry Fitzalan’, 175–85. 68  Chotzen, ‘Some Sidelights’, 119. 69  Flower, ‘William Salesbury’, 9 (quotation); van den Broecke, Ortelius Atlas Maps, 9–23. See fur­ ther Karrow, Jr., et al., Abraham Ortelius; Abraham Ortelius and the First Atlas, ed. van den Broecke, van der Krogt, and Maurer.

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‘ Our Ancestors the Ancient Britons ’ , 1540–1620  105 expanded form by David Powel in 1584. This exhibits the strong commitment to the British History and criticism of Polydore Vergil also found in the author’s later works.70 Completion of those works seems to have been stimulated by the contact established with Ortelius, to whom they were all sent in the last sixteen months of Llwyd’s life. This connection also explains why the two treatises amongst them were written in Latin, rather than English, used for the earlier his­ tory of 1559.71 The shorter treatise, ‘A Letter Concerning Mona, Island of the Druids’ (De Mona druidum insula . . . epistola), was finished by April 1568 and first published in Antwerp in 1570 at the back of the first edition of Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, being reprinted in subsequent editions of the atlas and also as an appendix to Sir John Prise’s ‘Defence of the British History’ in 1573.72 This revealed in miniature the assumptions and approaches Llwyd brought to the early history of Britain: mainly a rebuttal of Polydore Vergil’s identification of the Mona of classical sources with the Isle of Man, rather than Anglesey, it combined the testimony of ancient and medieval Latin authorities, including Gildas and Gerald of Wales, with analysis of names in Welsh. An interest in place-­names is also apparent in two maps, one depicting England and Wales, entitled ‘A New Representation of England, a Most Flourishing Kingdom’, the other Wales alone, whose manuscripts Llwyd sent to Ortelius from his deathbed in Denbigh in August 1568; both were first published in the first Latin Additamentum (supple­ ment) to Ortelius’s atlas in 1573.73 The map of Wales gave visual expression to the  country’s separate identity from England, which was further underlined in the accompanying page of text, printed, following Ortelius’s usual practice, on the verso.74 This opened with key axioms of Galfridian history by declaring that Wales (Cambria) was the third part of Britain, separated from England (Lhoegria ‘or, if you prefer, Anglia’) by the rivers Severn and Dee and otherwise surrounded by the Irish Sea; that its name came ‘from Camber the third son of Brutus’; and that ‘only this part of the island of Britain rejoices in its most ancient inhabitants, who are the genuine Britons’.75 The map likewise highlighted the antiquity of Wales by giving Ptolemy’s name for two places and adding brief references, at least some of which were evidently taken from Bede and Gerald of Wales, to the legendary and medieval history of several of the places and regions depicted: thus 70  E.g. Llwyd, CW, 63, 64, 66, 88, 126, 222. 71  In his treatise on Anglesey Llwyd apologized to Ortelius for the standard of his Latin, claiming that he had had no opportunity to speak or write the language during his fifteen years’ service with Arundel: Llwyd, ‘De Mona Insula Druidum’, sig. a.ir. 72 Humphrey Llwyd, ‘De Mona Insula Druidum’; John Prise, Historiae Brytannicae Defensio (1573), sig. Aa.ir–Cc.iir. Discussion in Iolo and Menai Roberts, ‘De Mona Druidum Insula’; Deakin, ‘The Early County Historians’, 69–74. 73 Humphrey Llwyd, ‘Angliae Regni Florentissimi Nova Descriptio’ and ‘Cambriae Typus’, in Ortelius, Theatrum. Discussion in North, ‘Humphrey Llwyd’s Maps’; van den Broecke, Ortelius Atlas Maps, 23–42, 123–5, 128–31. 74  van den Broecke, Ortelius Atlas Maps, 43–4. 75  ‘Cambria sive Wallia’, in Ortelius, Theatrum.

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106  WRITING WELSH HISTORY Carmarthen was ‘the home of the famous Merlin’, Bangor Is-­coed (Bangor-­on-­Dee) was ‘once a monastery with 2,100 monks’, and the district of Rhos in southern Pembrokeshire had been settled by the Flemish sent there by Henry I after their homeland had been inundated by the sea.76 The text accompanying the map drew partly on the treatise on Anglesey but was based mainly on another work Llwyd sent from his deathbed to Ortelius, namely ‘A Fragment of a Little Commentary on the Description of Britain’ (Commentarioli Britannicae descriptionis fragmentum), completed in 1568 and published at Ortelius’s instigation in Cologne in 1572.77 The first attempt at a topographical account of Britain, the work became best known through Thomas Twyne’s English translation, The Breviary of Britayne (1573), intended to help the English reader without Latin ‘to know the state and description of his own country’.78 Like Prise, Llwyd wrote in response to Polydore Vergil, ‘who sought not only to obscure the glory of the British name, but also to defame the Britons themselves with slanderous lies’. A second target was the Scottish humanist his­ tor­ian Hector Boece, whom Llwyd accused of falsely appropriating for the Scots glorious deeds achieved by the Romans and Britons.79 Yet, unlike Prise’s ‘Defence’, the ‘Fragment’ is not structured as a rebuttal of Polydore Vergil’s attack on the British History; indeed, it makes no explicit reference either to that history or to Geoffrey of Monmouth. Rather, it affirms traditional views of the British past by offering an account of the geography and ancient and medieval history of Britain from ‘a privileged Welsh vantage point’.80 This is not simply because about half of the text is devoted to Wales. More significant was the contention, also central to the treatise on Anglesey, that the Welsh language provided an indispensable key to unlocking the ancient and medieval history of Britain as a whole (a view shared by Camden, who learned Welsh in order to try and recover ancient British place-­ names).81 This is evident from the opening section, which offers a brief ex­plan­ ation of the pronunciation and grammar of ‘the British tongue . . . [w]hereby the true name both of the whole island and of many places therein may be manifest’.82 Then, after a short description of Britain and discussion of its name, the work treats the island’s three constituent parts: England, Scotland, and Wales, referred to by their Galfridian names Lloegria, Albania, and Cambria, in that order. Each

76  Cf. Bede, HE, II.2; IK I.10, 11, II.8; DK I.5. 77  Ortelius explicitly states that he had prepared the text that accompanied the map of Wales from ‘the fragment of our friend Humphrey’ which he had recently given to Birckmann, the work’s pub­ lisher in Cologne: ‘Cambria sive Wallia’, in Ortelius, Theatrum. 78 Llwyd, Breviary, quotation at 43; discussion at 11–15. Citations from the ‘Fragment’ are given from this translation. 79 Llwyd, Breviary, 56. Boece’s ‘History of the Scots’ (Scotorum Historia) was published in 1527. For the work and its reception see Kendrick, British Antiquity, 65–9; Roger A. Mason, ‘Scotching the Brut’, 64–5; Roger A. Mason, Kingship and the Commonweal, 38–9, 50–1, 94–7, 181, 183, 248–9. 80 Llwyd, Breviary, 6. 81  Levy, ‘Making of Camden’s Britannia’, 95. 82 Llwyd, Breviary, 51–4.

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‘ Our Ancestors the Ancient Britons ’ , 1540–1620  107 of these sections identifies the names of regions and cities and the peoples who inhabited these in antiquity and summarizes their subsequent histories in the post-­Roman and medieval periods. Finally, he seeks to disprove the aspersions Polydore had cast on ‘the glory of the British name’ by citing an array of ancient authors and invoking the deeds of British rulers from King Arthur to Llywelyn the Great.83 Thus, in common with likeminded English antiquaries such as Leland, both Prise and Llwyd framed their vindication of the British History as an act of patri­ otic self-­defence aimed primarily at the scepticism of Polydore Vergil, whose Italian birth rendered his motives and authority suspect.84 For its Welsh and English defenders alike, the British History redounded to the glory of their ­peoples in the present and could not be lightly cast aside. Moreover, all supporters of the British History sought to demonstrate their ability to fight their case against Polydore on the same terrain as their opponent, both through their use of Latin, the universal language of educated discourse, and by placing the interpretation of ancient authorities at the heart of the debate. However, Prise and Llwyd went fur­ ther than English antiquaries in two important respects, the first being in the emphasis they placed on the special status of the Welsh as, in Llwyd’s words, ‘the genuine Britons’, by virtue of their uniquely being lineal descendants of the ancient Britons. Linked to this, second, was the importance they attached—in common with other Welsh Renaissance scholars such as William Salesbury—to the British or Welsh language, including its use in names of persons, places, and peoples, and also (especially in Prise’s case) its literature, which, they maintained, offered authentic testimony to British antiquity.85 Thus both the ‘Defence’ and the ‘Fragment’ open with explanations of the Welsh language, which, through numer­ ous comparisons with Greek and Latin (and also, in Llwyd’s case, Hebrew), point up how their authors not only targeted their work at a learned readership but placed Welsh on a par with the ancient languages whose cultivation was prized by members of the republic of letters.86 Indeed, Prise made the comparison explicit by maintaining ‘that, from the beginning, the Britons made use of letters and they derived them from Greece’ (citing Gerald of Wales in his support) and also that their regular orthography made them ‘hardly inferior to the writers of Greek and Latin’.87 In other words, the literacy of the Britons made them no less civilized than other ancient peoples. 83 Llwyd, Breviary, 130–40. 84  For attempts to discredit Polydore by emphasizing his Italian nationality see Hay, Polydore Vergil, 158–9; Ringler, ‘Arthur Kelton’s Contributions’, 354; HBD, 26–7; Llwyd, Breviary, 56, 59, 69, 138, 140. 85 For British names see HBD, 136–45; Llwyd, Breviary, 56–9, 99–105, 129. See also Ieuan M. Williams, ‘Ysgolheictod Hanesyddol’, 115; HBD, xlv–xlvii. 86  HBD, 36–43; Llwyd, Breviary, 51–4. Llwyd appears to have been influenced by the first part of Gruffydd Robert’s Welsh grammar, published in Milan on 1 March 1567 (when Llwyd was staying in the city with Arundel): Gruffydd, ‘Humphrey Llwyd: Dyneiddiwr’, 66, 68; Boyle, ‘Henry Fitzalan’, 169–74. 87  HBD, 38–9.

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108  WRITING WELSH HISTORY Prise took this line of argument further by counterposing the evidence of British sources to that of Roman authors: in his view, the Italian Polydore had produced a distorted account through his ignorance of the former and excessive reliance on the latter.88 Moreover, Prise maintained that this bias was deliberate, since Polydore could be shown to have disregarded passages in the classical authors he favoured that redounded to the honour of the Britons.89 To support his case for the existence of British sources, Prise drew on his wide acquaintance with medieval manuscripts from Wales both to offer an overview of the bardic tradition in Welsh, which he held had continued from the time of the ancient Britons, and to demonstrate that the Welsh—and thus, by inference, their British ancestors—had kept historical records including genealogies and chronicles.90 This in turn made it perfectly plausible that Geoffrey of Monmouth had, as he claimed, merely translated ‘an ancient British book’; his work, far from being his own invention, therefore preserved an authentic ancient history by the Britons themselves, elements of which, moreover, were attested independently in other Welsh sources—an interpretation that continued to find favour among some Welsh antiquaries and historians down to the nineteenth century.91 Llwyd also implicitly treats the Galfridian history as a Welsh or British source, for example by attributing content deriving from it to ‘our chronicles’.92 However, while hostile to Polydore, the ‘Fragment’ places little emphasis on the British History, presum­ ably in part at least because Llwyd had planned to defend it in a future work.93 In short, Prise and Llwyd insisted that the Welsh language and medieval Welsh sources were ancient authorities that deserved respect from Renaissance scholars.

David Powel and John Lewis of Llynwene Half a century after Polydore’s ‘History of England’ first appeared in print another Welsh scholar entered into the debate it had engendered. David Powel (1549 × 1552–1598), an Oxford-­ educated clergyman and doctor of theology (1583) with livings in north-­east Wales, wrote a series of historical works after he was asked by Sir Henry Sidney, Lord President of the Council in the Marches of Wales, whom he served as personal chaplain c.1584–6, to publish several manu­ scripts in his possession.94 This resulted in the printing of two books in London, one in English, the other in Latin: The Historie of Cambria, Now Called Wales (1584), an expanded edition of Llwyd’s Cronica Walliae (1559) discussed in Chapter  6, 88  HBD, 26–7, 270–1; cf. HBD, 22–3. 89  HBD, 146–75. Though less forensically than Prise, Llwyd likewise sought to counter Polydore’s derogatory view of the Britons: Llwyd, Breviary, 130–40. 90  HBD, 42–59. 91  HBD, 62–85, quotation at 79. 92 Llwyd, Breviary, 98. 93 Llwyd, Breviary, 5, 58. 94  Fritze, ‘Powel [Powell], David’; McKisack, Medieval History, 58–9.

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‘ Our Ancestors the Ancient Britons ’ , 1540–1620  109 and an omnibus volume containing editions of Pontico Virunio’s abridged version of Geoffrey’s History and of the two Welsh works of Gerald of Wales.95 The volume concluded with a letter from Powel to the lawyer and antiquary William Fleetwood (1525?–1594) entitled ‘On the Correct Understanding of the British History, and its Reconciliation with the Roman Writers’ (1585).96 Unsurprisingly, The Historie reproduced Llwyd’s adherence to key tenets of the British History and attacks on Polydore,97 and Powel’s own views on these matters receive their fullest expression in the preface to the edition of Pontico Virunio and the letter to Fleetwood. Pontico Virunio (1467?–1520) published his ‘Six Books of the British History’ (Historiae Britannicae Libri Sex) in Reggio Emilia in March 1508, shortly before the appearance of the first full edition of Geoffrey’s History in Paris in July of that year, and it was reprinted in Augsburg in 1534 (this being the version reissued in turn by Powel).98 Although Virunio seems to have had access to a complete text of the History, his edition was highly abridged, being based almost entirely on the first six of Geoffrey’s eleven books, and his conclusion explains that he had chosen to focus on what pertained to Rome while omitting various marvellous elements.99 Virunio also drew on a work attributed to ‘Gildas the poet’ and added material of his own, including an assertion that the Badoer family of Venice were descended from Arthur’s butler Bedevere (Beduerus).100 A lengthy preface, omitted by Powel, comprising a dialogue between the book and its dedicatee, the duke of Soligno, occupies about 40 per cent of the volume and may be considered a work in its own right.101 Although mainly showing off Virunio’s erudition through extensive commentary on cit­ations from Greek and Latin authors, this explains that the edition resulted from a desire to break new ground by tackling the history of foreign peoples, erroneously describes Geoffrey as a car­ dinal and governor general of Britain under ‘King Robert’ (presumably a garbled allusion to Robert, earl of Gloucester, one of the dedicatees of Geoffrey’s work), and affirms the truth of his History since, so Virunio held, western European rulers always employed writers to record their principal deeds for posterity.102 95  The volume has continuous pagination and a single index to the whole, but the first three works have separate title pages, each dated London, 1585: Powel, PV. 96  Powel, ‘De Britannica Historia’. For Fleetwood and his interest in early British history see Alsop, ‘Wading in “The Troublesome Seas” ’, esp. 128–31, 135–8. 97  E.g. Powel, HC, sig. A.ir–A.iir, A.ivr; cf. Llwyd, CW, 64–6, 68–9. 98  For the edition of Geoffrey’s History see Tramontana, Pontico Virunio, 32, 36–7, 51, 54, 73–4, 127, 129, 143, 150–2, 162, 182, 261–73; A. H. W. Smith, ‘Gildas the Poet’; DGB, lxii. I am very grateful to Alessandra Tramontana for sending me a copy of her book. 99  That Virunio was familiar with the work as a whole is indicated by his preface and brief excerpts from Book IX: Pontici Virvnnii Viri Doctissimi Britannicae Historiae (1534 edn.), sig. C[2]r–[3]r, G2v; DGB, lxii. Conclusion: Pontici Virvnnii Viri Doctissimi Historiae (1534 edn.), sig. G1v; Powel, PV, 43–4. 100  Pontici Virvnnii Viri Doctissimi Historiae (1534 edn.), sig. G2v (and preface, B[7]v); Powel, PV, 43. See also Tramontana, Pontico Virunio, 263, and, for Virunio’s early connection with Venice, 24–5. 101  Pontici Virvnnii Viri Doctissimi Historiae (1534 edn.), sig. A3v–C5r; detailed discussion in Tramontana, Pontico Virunio, 261–73. 102  Pontici Virvnnii Viri Doctissimi Historiae (1534 edn.), sig. C2r–C3r.

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110  WRITING WELSH HISTORY In a preface to his patron Sir Henry Sidney, Powel states that he had collated Virunio’s text with ‘the British book’, presumably a manuscript copy of Geoffrey’s History, in order to produce a more correct text.103 Although his success in this respect is questionable,104 the emphasis on textual accuracy was of a piece with Powel’s presentation of himself as a disinterested scholar seeking to rise above the controversy concerning the British History and committed only to uncovering the truth about the origins of the Britons. Thus in his letter to Fleetwood Powel distances himself from the polarized opinions of the diehard critics and defenders of the History, whom he accused of being more concerned to defeat their op­pon­ ents than ‘to inquire into the truth of history’, and urges that the matter be left to ‘wise and moderate men’.105 Accordingly, Powel positioned himself on the middle ground, forcefully condemning what he considered to be fabulous and miraculous elements in the British History (some of which, like Sir John Prise, he attributed to Geoffrey as translator),106 while insisting that it should not be dismissed as entirely bogus and unreliable. Yet, there can be little doubt on which side of the debate he stood, as his critical stance sought to decontaminate the British History in order to preserve its fundamental vision of an unbroken line of kings extending from Brutus to Cadwaladr, a list of whom Powel inserted before Virunio’s text.107 Powel made his apologetic purpose clear on the first page of the edition of Virunio, where he declares that ‘the history of the ancient Britons . . . the most ancient inhabitants of this island’ should be preserved for two reasons: to allow patriotic students of antiquity to perfect the history of their fatherland, and to compel those who condemned that history too hastily either to accept it or to produce a better alternative—adding that he was ready to abandon an opinion in the light of what was ‘either truer or more probable’.108 He also took pains to defend the British History. To begin with, he maintained that its coverage of the period from the arrival of the Romans to the Britons’ final loss of sovereignty under Cadwaladr was largely consistent with the testimony of other writers, which are listed at length; furthermore, even if the story of Arthur, ‘composed in imitation of Greek frivolity’, together with the prophecies of Merlin, contained much to give offence, there were ‘many ancient records’ indicating that a powerful 103 Powel, PV, sig. A2v–A3r; Rhagymadroddion a Chyflwyniadau Lladin, trans. Davies, 162, n. 4; Smith, ‘Gildas the Poet’, 11. 104  Marginal annotations include only a few emendations or queries: Powel, PV, 6, 7, 16, 17, 30, 36. See also Smith, ‘Gildas the Poet’, 11. 105  Powel, ‘De Britannica Historia’, 279–80, quotations at 280; translations from Ceri Davies, Latin Writers, 26. 106  Powel, ‘De Britannica Historia’, 280–1. Cf. Powel, PV, sig. A3r, A4r–v. Virunio also appears to have found the marvels related by Geoffrey distasteful, though he reported Irish marvels, including St Patrick’s Purgatory, told him by Blasio Biragio, the duke of Ferrara’s horse-­dealer who had lent him a copy of the work of ‘Gildas the Poet’ acquired in Ireland: Pontici Virvnnii . . . Historiae (1534 edn.), sig. B[6]r–[7]r. 107 Powel, PV, sig. 4v–6r. The year of accession and length of reign are noted besides each ruler. 108 Powel, PV, sig. A.ir.

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‘ Our Ancestors the Ancient Britons ’ , 1540–1620  111 warrior called Arthur had existed.109 The account of the pre-­Roman period was more tricky, as Powel acknowledged that this lacked corroboration by foreign writers and thus could not be proved to be correct.110 However, he argued that it was still plausible in its essentials, since ‘the most ancient writings of the Britons’ testified to a continuous series of rulers, evidence which merited weighty consid­ eration by virtue of the principle—cited from ‘Myrsilus Lesbius’, ostensibly an ancient Greek author but in fact another invention of Annius of Viterbo—that a people and its neighbours were more credible sources than distant foreigners for that people’s antiquity and origin.111 Furthermore, Powel echoed the arguments of Prise and Llwyd by maintaining that foreign authors such as Polydore tended to err in their interpretation of British sources and to ignore the evidence of British place-­names, while Roman writers focused on their own history and ignored that of outlying provinces. As for the charge that the British History was full of incredible fables, that was perfectly true, but no different from accounts of the origins of other peoples: so why should the history of the Britons be judged differ­ ently from theirs?112 More generally, Powel also emphasized the work’s durability and reception: ‘Although this History appears to be entirely invented in a number of things and completely stuffed with fabulous accounts, it nevertheless has the support of venerable antiquity and the approval and agreement of the most learned men of all ages.’113 The last point was, of course, exemplified by Virunio’s abridgement, and by publishing this Powel not only evinced his sym­pathy for Geoffrey’s History but implicitly enhanced its credentials by demonstrating that one Italian humanist—indeed, a contemporary of Polydore (though no compari­ son is made explicitly)—had deemed that history worthy of a place in Renaissance scholarship.114 In his History of Great-­Britain, completed c.1612 and dedicated to James I (though not published until 1729), the recusant lawyer John Lewis (c.1548?–1615) of Llynwene, Llanfihangel Nant Melan (Radnorshire) resembled Powel in declaring of the challenge posed by the distant past that ‘[w]e must depend upon Tradition when length of Time deprives us of the certain Evidences of things’.115 However, 109 Powel, PV, sig. A3r–v; cf. Powel, ‘De Britannica Historia’, 280. 110  Powel, ‘De Britannica Historia’, sig. A3v. 111 Powel, PV, sig. A3v, closely following ‘Myrsilus Lesbius’, sig. aiir–v. See further Asher, National Myths in Renaissance France, 191–2; Walter Stephens, ‘Complex Pseudonymity’, 699, 703. 112 Powel, PV, sig. A4r–5r. 113 Powel, PV, sig. A3r. For contemporaneous arguments that accounts of the origins of the Frisians and Babylonians, even if containing fables, might contain some truth and should not be dismissed out­ right, just as Livy had shown reverentia for ancient stories, see Grafton, ‘Invention of Tradition’, 31–2. 114 The Welsh Renaissance scholar Siôn Dafydd Rhys (John Davies; c.1534–c.1620) composed another treatise defending aspects of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History, which drew on the work of Prise and Llwyd, in 1597: NLW, Peniarth MS 118, pp. 731–864, edited by Ffransis, ‘Traethawd Siôn Dafydd Rhys’ (summarized in Gruffydd, ‘The Renaissance and Welsh Literature’, 34). 115  John Lewis, The History of Great-­Britain, 8. See further Payne, ‘John Lewis, Llynwene’ (1935); G. M. Griffiths, ‘John Lewis of Llynwene’s Defence’; Payne, ‘John Lewis, Llynwene’ (1960); Woolf, The Idea of History, 62, 282 (for the date).

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112  WRITING WELSH HISTORY unlike Powel, Lewis invoked this principle to voice reservations about the British History and to maintain that the Britons could boast far more ancient and glori­ ous origins than Trojan descent from Brutus. Instead, he drew on Annius of Viterbo’s Pseudo-­Berosus to argue that the Britons were ultimately descended from Noah’s grandson Gomer and also insisted, following William Camden, that their immediate forebears came from Gaul, observing that ‘it evidently appears much more honourable to be descended of the ancient victorious Gauls, than of the vanquish’d Trojans’.116 Nevertheless, rather than rejecting the British History outright, Lewis sought to accommodate it in a longer timeframe. Thus, while he complained of his compatriots that ‘their Descent from Troy will not out of their Heads’, Lewis was prepared to defend Geoffrey from his critics and, like Powel, held that the ‘powdring of the British History with Fables’ did not invalidate its fundamental veracity.117 This allowed him to preserve the Galfridian kings from Brutus to Cadwaladr, while repositioning them in a biblical line of succession originating with Gomer.118

Early British Church History and Religious Apologetic The debates about Geoffrey of Monmouth’s picture of early British history con­ sidered so far focused on the reliability of sources and compelled Welsh scholars to address questions of historical method. Those scholars addressed themselves in Latin to a learned readership, especially outside Wales, and sought to demonstrate the merits of the British History and its relevance for Britain as a whole. A differ­ ent, but no less revealing, indication of the continuing appeal of the British History in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-­century Wales is its deployment by both Protestants and Catholics, writing in Welsh and English, as a means of con­ ferring legitimacy on their confessional positions.119 As with the defences of Geoffrey of Monmouth discussed above, Welsh writers combined arguments used by their contemporaries in England with material in Welsh sources that gave their work a distinctive inflection. This in turn sounded a variation on a common theme, as Protestants (who largely set the agenda for their Catholic opponents) emphasized the need to adapt the Reformation to local and national contexts. Likewise both Welsh and English Protestant uses of early British church history fitted into a wider pattern of attempts to press the past into the service of religious

116  John Lewis, The History of Great-­Britain, 15–25, 33, quotation at 23. Siôn Dafydd Rhys likewise followed the pseudo-­Berosus, possibly via Bale, in maintaining that Britain had already been settled before Brutus, first by the Gomerians (sic) under Noah’s grandson Samothes, then by descendants of Noah’s son Ham led by the giant Albion: Ffransis, ‘Traethawd Siôn Dafydd Rhys’, 2. 117  John Lewis, The History of Great-­Britain, 33, 24. 118  John Lewis, The History of Great-­Britain, Books II–VI. 119  Saunders Lewis, Meistri’r Canrifoedd, 116–39; Lloyd Bowen, ‘The Battle of Britain’.

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‘ Our Ancestors the Ancient Britons ’ , 1540–1620  113 change, by highlighting, on the one hand, the corruption that befell the Church after the early Christian centuries, especially after the unleashing of Satan from 1000, and, on the other, the example of the few heroic witnesses to the true Church.120 Britain appears to have been unusual, though, in witnessing attempts to justify Protestantism in terms of national history focused on the distant past.121 As with the defence of the Galfridian history discussed above, those attempts reflected an assumption, widely shared across a range of confessional persuasions, that early Britain provided a common point of origin for the national histories of both Wales and England (the latter variously understood and sometimes encompass­ ing Britain and even also Ireland).122 Small wonder, then, that English and Welsh apologists, whether Protestant or Catholic, used this ancient past in broadly simi­ lar ways. For Protestant writers, it served to demonstrate that the Reformation was simply the restitution of the pure Christianity of the Britons, subsequently corrupted by superstitious practices introduced from Rome by Augustine of Canterbury.123 True, the precise means chosen to this end varied. William Tyndale (c.1494–1536) and William Salesbury maintained that God’s punishment of the Britons for their sins by the Anglo-­Saxons, as related by Gildas, had in turn led to the imposition of Roman Catholicism that dealt a final blow to the Britons’ ori­ gin­al­ly scriptural Christianity.124 John Bale (1495–1563) adopted a much longer timeframe: on the one hand, he drew on Annius of Viterbo to endow the Britons with biblical origins as descendants of Noah’s grandson Samothes, son of Japhet, while on the other he traced ‘a learned lineage’ of writers in Britain, including Wales, who had witnessed to the true faith from apostolic times to his own day.125 John Foxe (1516/17–87) similarly took a long view of ecclesiastical history in his best-­selling Acts and Monuments, first published in 1563, and significantly expanded in the second edition of 1570, which paid considerably greater atten­ tion to early British history.126 There were also differences of em­phasis, notably regarding the respective contributions of Joseph of Arimathea and King Lucius to the island’s conversion.127 Privileging the alleged mission of Joseph of Arimathea had the twin advantages of endowing the Church of England with origins that 120  Gordon, ‘The Changing Face of Protestant History’; Heal, ‘Appropriating History’; Greengrass and Pohlig, ‘Themenschwerpunkt / Focal Point’. 121  Heal, ‘What Can King Lucius Do for You?’, 596 and n. 17. Early Irish Christianity was similarly invoked with respect to Ireland: Lotz-­Heumann, ‘The Protestant Interpretation of History in Ireland’; Mary Ann Lyons, ‘Towards a Catholic History’, 3–19; Cunningham, The World of Geoffrey Keating, 110, 119–21. For the contrasting position in Scotland see Heal, Reformation in Britain and Ireland, 391–2. 122  MacColl, ‘The Construction of England’. 123  Glanmor Williams, ‘Some Protestant Views’, esp. 221–8; Heal, ‘What Can King Lucius Do for You?’; MacColl, ‘The Construction of England’; Cunningham, ‘ “A Little World without the World” ’; Curran, Jr., Roman Invasions, ch. 2. 124  Glanmor Williams, ‘Cipdrem Arall’. 125  Glyn Parry, ‘Berosus and the Protestants’; Heal, ‘Appropriating History’, 118 (quotation). 126  Loades, ‘Introduction: John Foxe and the Editors’, 1–5; Heal, ‘What Can King Lucius Do for You?’, 607–8; Oates, ‘Elizabethan Histories’, 171, 178–81. 127  Curran, Jr., Roman Invasions, 41, 43–53, 55–6.

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114  WRITING WELSH HISTORY were both apostolic—as Joseph was said to have arrived shortly after Christ’s Passion—and independent of Rome.128 On the other hand, Lucius, supposedly a second-­century king of Britain, located the origins of that Church in a royal initia­ tive to change the kingdom’s religious allegiance through Lucius’s request to Pope Eleutherius to send missionaries, who not only converted the king and his follow­ ers but proceeded to establish a diocesan system. Furthermore, the rediscovery of a purported letter from Eleutherius to Lucius, apparently concocted in the early thirteenth century, which called the latter ‘God’s vicar in your kingdom’ provided further grist to the polemicists’ mill, especially from the 1560s, furnishing a welcome precedent for a Protestant Church of England subject to the supreme authority of a royal ‘defender of the faith’. On the other hand, his appeal to the pope also commended Lucius to Roman Catholic apologists, although these tended to overlook the alleged letter from Eleutherius with its Erastian implications.129 Yet, while Welsh Protestant scholars belonged to a wider movement of his­tor­ ic­al justification attested much more extensively by their English counterparts, they adapted such argumentation to meet expectations in Wales and situated it in a narrative of specifically Welsh history. Their interpretation turned on the premise that the Welsh were the direct descendants of the Britons and thus had a special claim on the inheritance of the latter: above all, their pure, apostolic Christianity. According to the record of his trial for heresy in 1393, this argument had been anticipated by the Lollard preacher Walter Brut, a Herefordshire laymen of Welsh descent, who asserted that the Britons were God’s elect, as they had preserved their faith intact for over a millennium following their conversion under King Lucius, and, in Gildasian fashion, also attributed the subsequent defeats of the Britons to their own sedition and treachery.130 Although there is no evidence that Brut influenced sixteenth-­century advocates of the purity of the faith received by the Britons, his testimony raises the possibility that the latter’s arguments drew on earlier thinking that adapted aspects of Galfridian history in order to proclaim the privileged status of Welsh Christianity. The leading protagonists of a Welsh historical justification for Protestantism, William Salesbury (c.1520–c.1580) and Richard Davies (c.1505–1581), were members of Welsh gentry families and Oxford-­educated humanist scholars who collaborated in translating the New Testament and Book of Common Prayer into Welsh (1567); they also corresponded with Matthew Parker on matters concerning ecclesiastical history.131 Parker, though primarily interested in recovering Anglo-­ Saxon texts (since, so he believed, these showed that the Church of England 128  Cunningham, ‘ “A Little World without the World” ’, 201–2, 205–7. For the assimilation of the legend of Joseph of Arimathea with the Galfridian history see Curran, Jr., Roman Invasions, 38–9. 129  Heal, ‘What Can King Lucius Do for You?’. 130  The Register of John Trefnant, ed. Capes, 285, 293–6. See further Dodd, ‘ “Commendacion of Welshmen” ’, 246–7; Glanmor Williams, The Welsh Church (2nd edn.), 204–5. 131  Flower, ‘William Salesbury’.

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‘ Our Ancestors the Ancient Britons ’ , 1540–1620  115 had anticipated aspects of reformed practice before the Norman conquest), also recognized the place of the Britons in early Britain and turned to his Welsh cor­ res­pond­ents for their expertise in the literature and history of their own country.132 For Salesbury and Davies, this antiquarian knowledge inspired not only a desire to preserve the remains of the past but also a commitment to the revival of written culture in the Welsh language, a humanist endeavour made all the more urgent by their belief that it was essential to ensuring the salvation of their compatriots through the dissemination of Scripture and Protestant religion.133 In addition, though, the fusion of patriotic antiquarianism and Protestant zeal informed these scholars’ interpretation of British and Welsh ecclesiastical history and gave it a distinctive flavour.134 This was apparent in several works published by Salesbury in mid-­century, including a collection of Welsh proverbs (1547), an introduction to the Welsh language (1550), and a bilingual pamphlet which cited rules in medieval Welsh law as a historical precedent for the marriage of priests (1550), legalized by parliament two years previously.135 In the last case, Salesbury sought to link his source to the reigning monarch by noting that Hywel Dda (Hywel the Good), the tenth-­century king attributed with codifying Welsh law, was ‘the eightenth auncestor from king Edward the syxtt’: a particular instance of a funda­ mental loyalty to the (Protestant) monarchy shared with other Welsh scholars and gentry of this period, demonstrated also by the welcome Salesbury gave to Henry VIII’s Acts of Union and Davies’s gratitude to Elizabeth I for authorizing the translation of the Scriptures.136 However, unlike several of their English counter­ parts, neither Welsh scholar turned to historical precedent explicitly to justify royal authority over the Church.137 The fullest attempt to invoke British and Welsh history as a justification for Protestantism was a lengthy letter by Richard Davies, bishop of St Davids (to whose composition Salesbury also contributed) that prefaced the Welsh translation of the New Testament published in 1567.138 Addressed ‘to all the Welsh’ (ir Cembru

132 McKisack, Medieval History, 26–49; Robinson, ‘ “Dark Speeche” ’; Oates, ‘Elizabethan Histories’, 166, 176–8. 133  Cf. Gruffydd, ‘The Renaissance and Welsh Literature’. 134 Nice, Sacred History, 75, 79, 87, 93–4, suggests that a marginal note naming the sees of the seven British bishops, including Hereford and Worcester, who resisted Augustine of Canterbury sought to provide a legitimizing precedent for the jurisdiction over the English border counties of the Council in the Marches, of which Davies was a member. However, this was an isolated instance of implying an extensive British ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and defence of the Council was clearly not the principal motive for composing the letter. 135  William Salesbury, Oll Synnwyr Pen Kembero Ygyd, ed. Evans; William Salesbury, A Briefe and a Playne Introduction; William Salesbury, ‘Ban wedy i dynny’, in Yny lhyvyr hwnn, ed. Davies. See fur­ ther R. Brinley Jones, William Salesbury, 12–26, 29–36, 45–9; James, ‘Ban wedy i dynny’. 136  William Salesbury, ‘Ban wedy i dynny’, sig. Aiir, Aiiir. 137  Cf. Heal, ‘What Can King Lucius Do for You?’, 599–600, 603–7. 138  D. Myrddin Lloyd, ‘Appendix: William Salesbury and “Epistol E. M. at y Cembru” ’. On Davies see Glanmor Williams, ‘Richard Davies’; Glanmor Williams, Bywyd ac Amserau’r Esgob Richard Davies; Gruffydd Aled Williams, ‘ “Ail Dewi Menew” ’.

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116  WRITING WELSH HISTORY oll), this presented both the reformed religion and the translation of the Scriptures as restoring to the Welsh privileges enjoyed by ‘our ancestors the ancient Britons’.139 At its heart was a particularist interpretation of Welsh religious history that adapted the long-­established narrative of the fall of the Britons from their former glory and the concomitant hope of eventual deliverance and recovery. Davies thus recast a history of political loss, finally reversed by the coming of the Tudors and the attendant benefits of legal equality with the English, as a tale of providen­ tial redemption in which the Reformation and the translation of the Scriptures, supported by the monarchy, restored to the Welsh the religious birthright of their forefathers. True, this process of adaptation appropriated central elements of Protestant apologetic in England, notably the casting of Joseph of Arimathea and King Lucius as heroic purveyors of pure Christianity whose achievements were cor­ rupted by a villainous Augustine of Canterbury sent by the papacy (although Parker, in attributing reformed practices to the Anglo-­Saxon Church, saw this as less of a turning-­point than some of his English Protestant contemporaries).140 But, while implicitly claiming the legacy of British Christianity for the Church of England as a whole, Davies did not follow the example of English apologists by elid­ ing the distinction between British and English Christianity; rather, he invoked a distinctively Welsh historiographical framework and urged his compatriots to take pride in the privilege of uncorrupted faith which God had conferred on their ances­ tors long before their English neighbours (albeit adding that these ‘to-­day are in the right having through grace received the Gospel gladly’).141 The letter opens by explicitly identifying the Welsh with ‘the ancient Britons’ and emphasizes their glory and virtues, asserting that these were ‘more frequent and more abundant among the Britons of the old days than among the nations around them’.142 Davies then seeks to turn these commonplaces of Welsh his­tor­ ic­al thinking into a case for the reformed religion by declaring that all the other virtues of the Britons were outweighed by their reception of ‘incorrupt religion’ in the time of Joseph of Arimathea, consolidated by Lucius’s acceptance of Roman Christianity, still ‘healthy . . . at that time’, which they maintained by defeating the heretical teachings of Pelagius and shunning the corrupt faith introduced by Augustine.143 Eventually, though, the Britons were forced to submit to the su­per­ ior military force of the English and entered on a long period of both secular and religious decline. The latter was exacerbated by the loss of books, blamed on 139  Rhagymadroddion 1547–1659, ed. Hughes, 17–43, quotation at 27; trans. Albert Owen Evans, Memorandum, 83–124, quotation at 99. Discussion: Saunders Lewis, Meistri’r Canrifoedd, 120–2, 126–7; Glanmor Williams, ‘Some Protestant Views’, 226–8; Nice, Sacred History, 77–8, 92–4; Lloyd Bowen, ‘The Battle of Britain’, 139–42. 140  Oates, ‘Elizabethan Histories’. 141  Rhagymadroddion 1547–1659, ed. Hughes, 42, trans. Albert Owen Evans, Memorandum, 123. 142  Rhagymadroddion 1547–1659, ed. Hughes, 17–18 (quotation at 18), trans. Albert Owen Evans, Memorandum, 84. 143  Rhagymadroddion 1547–1659, ed. Hughes, 18–23, trans. Albert Owen Evans, Memorandum, 84–93.

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‘ Our Ancestors the Ancient Britons ’ , 1540–1620  117 both Edward I’s conquest of Wales and ‘the war of Owain Glyndŵr’, an argument previously outlined by Salesbury in 1550.144 Davies underlined the magnitude of these losses by locating them in the context of universal sacred history. This showed that, both before and since the time of Christ, God had periodically sent prophets and ministers to restore the true faith, including those sent ‘within the last sixty years’ to reform the Church across Europe. However, the Welsh had not benefited from these recent changes, ‘[b]ecause no one has written nor printed anything in thy language’.145 Davies continued in a passage that sums up his key message: Behold, I have shown to thee thy pre-­eminence and thy privilege of old, and thy humiliation and thy deprivation afterwards. Therefore . . . thou shouldest be glad, and frequent thy thanksgiving to God, to her grace the Queen, to the Lords and Commons of the Kingdom who are renewing thy privilege and honour (God grant them eternal honour for this). For by their authority and their command thy Bishops with the help of William Salesbury are bringing to thee in Welsh and in print the Holy Scriptures (thy old friend) . . .146

Davies developed this theme by a further appeal to history in the final section of the letter, in which, again picking up an earlier assertion by Salesbury, he argued with considerable ingenuity that the Welsh had originally possessed the Scriptures in their own vernacular, and thus not only Protestantism but the New Testament of 1567 restored to the Welsh benefits enjoyed by their forefathers.147 One striking feature of the letter is its references to sources, especially ‘­histories’.148 In addition, a passage citing biblical names of churchmen and rulers in early medieval Wales as evidence for the existence of the Scriptures in Welsh notes that these are found in ‘books of genealogies and chronicle(s), old records, registers, and charters’, and demonstrates Davies’s knowledge of the cathedral archives by adding that a king of Dyfed called Noe is named in an ancient charter belonging to the church of St Davids.149 On the other hand, it is notable that the appeal to ancient British glory, while fundamentally consistent with a Galfridian vision of the past, was cast in general terms and not framed as a defence of 144  Rhagymadroddion 1547–1659, ed. Hughes, 24, trans. Albert Owen Evans, Memorandum, 94–5; Salesbury, A Briefe and a Playne Introduction, sig. E.iir–v. See also Saunders Lewis, Meistri’r Canrifoedd, 127–30. Both Salisbury and Davies invoked the legend of the bard Ysgolan’s burning of the few remaining Welsh books preserved by Welsh leaders imprisoned in the Tower of London after Edward I’s conquest, on which see Schwyzer, Literature, Nationalism, and Memory, 81–4. 145  Rhagymadroddion 1547–1659, ed. Hughes, 26, trans. Albert Owen Evans, Memorandum, 97–8. 146  Rhagymadroddion 1547–1659, ed. Hughes, 26–7, trans. Albert Owen Evans, Memorandum, 98. 147  Rhagymadroddion 1547–1659, ed. Hughes, 30–41, trans. Albert Owen Evans, Memorandum, 103–22. 148  Rhagymadroddion 1547–1659, ed. Hughes, 17, 18, 21, 24, trans. Albert Owen Evans, Memorandum, 84, 90, 94. 149  Rhagymadroddion 1547–1659, ed. Hughes, 37, trans. Albert Owen Evans, Memorandum, 116. See also Glanmor Williams, ‘Bishop Sulien’; Brett, ‘John Leland, Wales, and Early British History’, 179–81.

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118  WRITING WELSH HISTORY Geoffrey of Monmouth, who is nowhere mentioned by name. Indeed, by giving the credit for the conversion of the British to Joseph of Arimathea, and according a secondary role to Lucius, Davies—like some Protestant apologists in England— differed significantly from Geoffrey, who attributed the conversion of the Britons and endowment of the Church to Lucius alone.150 In addition, Davies reinforced his argument with biblical quotations,151 and, like other Welsh humanists, turned to a variety of Welsh-­language sources. Thus he cited Welsh proverbs and poetry to infer that the Britons had once possessed the Scriptures in their own language, whose subsequent disappearance was attributed, as we have seen, to a general loss of books in Welsh. Davies, then, sought to exploit the pride of the Welsh in their distinctive history and identity, playing on anti-­English sentiment, in order to try and persuade his readers that they had a special claim to the reformed religion and its translated Scriptures. The letter’s view of Welsh ecclesiastical history was highly influential, being reiterated by the Puritan Charles Edwards in the later seventeenth century and by Thomas Burgess, bishop of St Davids (1803–25).152 More immediately, it was also taken on board by Welsh writers of the later sixteenth century, including Humphrey Llwyd, David Powel, and Ifan Llwyd ap Dafydd as well as both Roman Catholic and Puritan apologists.153 Thus Welsh Catholics, smarting from their recent loss of control of the English College in Rome following bitter disputes with its English members fuelled by ethnic animosity and disagreements over ecclesiastical policy, maintained that a tombstone discovered during repairs at St Peter’s basilica in the late 1570s was that of Cadwaladr the Blessed, said by Geoffrey of Monmouth to have died in Rome in 689, whereas their English col­ leagues (correctly) identified it as that of Cædwalla, king of the West Saxons, whom Geoffrey had conflated with Cadwaladr (see Chapter  3).154 Particularly notable in this regard is Robert Owen’s letter to the Vatican librarian Cardinal Sirleto in 1584, which maintained that ‘both ancient and recent writers’ agreed that Cadwaladr had travelled to Rome, appending supporting documents with quotations from a wealth of medieval and contemporary authors, thereby adopt­ ing a similar method to that deployed by previous defenders of Geoffrey’s history in the sixteenth century.155 ‘The Christian Mirror’ (Y Drych Cristnogawl), of which the first part was printed secretly in a cave near Llandudno in 1586–7, likewise appealed to history in an introduction reminiscent of Davies’s letter, albeit with 150  Rhagymadroddion 1547–1659, ed. Hughes, 19; trans. Albert Owen Evans, Memorandum, 87. The passage contains the letter’s only mention of ‘the history’ (yr hystorïa); if, as is likely, this refers to Geoffrey’s work, Davies directly challenged its veracity. 151 E.g. Rhagymadroddion 1547–1659, ed. Hughes, 20, 31–2, 33, 37, trans. Albert Owen Evans, Memorandum, 88, 105–6, 109, 115. 152  See Chapters 7 and 10; Saunders Lewis, Meistri’r Canrifoedd, 116–17. 153  Chapter 6; Nia Lewis, ‘Astudiaeth Destunol a Beirniadol’, lxxxiii, xc–xciii. 154  Geraint Bowen, ‘Apêl at y Pab’; Nice, ‘Being “British” in Rome’. 155  Geraint Bowen, ‘Apêl at y Pab’, 136–41.

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‘ Our Ancestors the Ancient Britons ’ , 1540–1620  119 the aim of invoking early Welsh Christianity in support of Roman Catholicism rather than Protestantism.156 Thus its author (‘R.  G.’, probably Robert Gwyn of Llŷn) addressed ‘his beloved Welsh’, and told them of the pain he felt ‘when think­ ing of the privilege and renown of the Welsh in time past, and their feebleness and insignificance now’.157 After briefly alluding to Geoffrey’s account of the period ‘from Brutus to the time of Christ’, he proceeded to extol the glorious Christian heritage of the Welsh, beginning with their conversion by Joseph of Arimathea and consolidated by the missionaries sent by Pope Eleutherius at the request of the Welsh king Lucius, and further distinguished by the exemplary roles of the Emperor Constantine and his mother Helen (both likewise identified as Welsh), together with the proliferation of Welsh saints, including 20,000 buried on Bardsey Island and the twenty-­four saintly children of King Brychan.158 The work also struck a patriotic note by blaming the Anglicized gentry for the loss of their faith and language by the Welsh.159 The polemical utility of Welsh sacred history was also recognized by the Puritan John Penry, executed for his beliefs in 1593, in a pamphlet published in 1587 urging Queen Elizabeth’s parliament to bring about religious reform in Wales (though its prescriptions may also have been tacitly aimed at England).160 True, Penry chiefly cited Old Testament examples and parallels in support of his case. However, this biblical emphasis was reinforced by asserting that the Welsh were especially entitled to the preaching of the gospel as this was ‘the inheritance which our fore-­fathers the Cymbrûbrittons many hundred years agoe possessed in this lande’; all Penry sought, therefore, was the restoration of that inheritance. In addition, he turned the subsequent contamination of the Welsh by Catholic heresy to double patriotic advantage by tracing its origins to England, where it had been ‘planted . . . by Augustine that proud friar’, while also maintaining that it had affected the Welsh less severely than their neighbours over the border.161 In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, then, belief in the ancient British origins of the Welsh faced new challenges and opportunities which stimu­ lated new kinds of historical writing. On the one hand, criticism of Geoffrey of Monmouth provoked defences of the British History that focused on questions of sources and method, while, on the other, both Protestants and Catholics adapted long-­established narratives of early British and Welsh history in order to confer

156  G. R., ‘Drych Cristianogawl’; Geraint Bowen, Y Drych Cristianogawl; Lloyd Bowen, ‘The Battle of Britain’, 145–6. 157 G.  R., ‘Drych Cristianogawl’, 49. For Gwyn and the work’s authorship see Bowen, Y Drych Cristianogawl, iv–v, 47–56; Geraint Bowen, Welsh Recusant Writings, 28–42. 158  G. R., ‘Drych Cristianogawl’, 49–52. 159  G. R., ‘Drych Cristianogawl’, 52–4. John Lewis of Llynwene also offered a Catholic reading of Welsh Christian origins: Nice, Sacred History, 79, 92–4. 160  Penry, ‘The Aequity of an Humble Supplication’. See further Glanmor Williams, ‘John Penry’, 372–80; Lloyd Bowen, ‘The Battle of Britain’, 147. 161  Penry, ‘The Aequity of an Humble Supplication’, 30.

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120  WRITING WELSH HISTORY legitimacy on their confessional standpoints. In addition, the subjection of the whole island of Britain to a single monarch through the union of crowns under James VI and I encouraged several Welsh antiquaries to reaffirm the Brutus le­gend, and some of these and others went even further by grafting on to it bib­ lical descent from Noah. Yet there was more to Welsh historical writing in this period than fixation on an ancient past. Works were also composed that dealt with the centuries from the early Middle Ages onwards, and it is to these we shall turn in Chapter 6.

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6 From the Universal to the Local Framing the History of Wales, 1540–1620

As well as defending long-­established accounts of early British history and using these to justify confessional allegiances in the wake of the Reformation, Welsh writers also produced new works that extended their narratives beyond the final loss of British sovereignty in the late seventh century. The most influential of these works, David Powel’s The Historie of Cambria, now Called Wales (1584), an edited and expanded version of Humphrey Llwyd’s unpublished Cronica Walliae (1559), followed the lead of the medieval Welsh chronicles and focused on the period down to the death of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd and the Edwardian conquest, widely regarded as marking the end of a distinctive history of Wales. However, as in the later Middle Ages, that still left space to integrate Wales within the history of the kingdom of England. One example of this approach is provided by Elis Gruffudd’s chronicle (1548–52), a world history in Welsh in which coverage of Wales is scattered among sections on Britain that increasingly focus on the kings of England. True, a few years later Humphrey Llwyd ended his history with the failure of the revolt of Madog ap Llywelyn in 1295, declaring that thereafter anything worth recording about Wales could be found ‘in the Englishe Chronicle’.1 By contrast, in publishing Llwyd’s work, Powel gave only qualified endorsement to this abrupt termination of Welsh history. Although he concluded his main narrative with Edward I’s conquest, which brought ‘all the countrie in subiection to the crowne of England to this daie’, Powel appended a history of the English princes of Wales down to the sixteenth century, which, while witnessing to English domination, also served to emphasize that Wales had maintained its separate status as a principality.2 A different perspective on the past was offered by new kinds of Welsh writing in the Elizabethan period, influenced by English models, that focused on particular localities and were less constrained than Llwyd and Powel by assumptions about the content and chronological parameters of Welsh history derived from medieval chronicles. This is reflected in the attention devoted by several of these works to the Norman settlers of Wales and the 1 Llwyd, CW, 224. This may well refer to Caxton’s Chronicles of England (1480), ‘reprinted . . . well into the sixteenth century’, as is clearly the case elsewhere in the work (e.g. Llwyd, CW, 76). Quotation: Gillespie and Harris, ‘Holinshed and the Native Chronicle Tradition’, 141. I am grateful to Ceridwen Lloyd-­Morgan for suggesting this identification. 2 Powel, HC, 375–401, quotation at 375.

Writing Welsh History: From the Early Middle Ages to the Twenty-­First Century. Huw Pryce, Oxford University Press. © Huw Pryce 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198746034.003.0007

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122  WRITING WELSH HISTORY establishment of marcher lordships, as well as by the readiness of all of them to include events from the later Middle Ages onwards. The second half of the sixteenth century thus witnessed a flowering of history writing by Welsh authors. In assessing the nature and significance of this writing the following discussion will proceed from the universal to the particular, beginning with Elis Gruffudd’s chronicle, before turning to the histories of Llwyd and Powel, and concluding with works on families and counties.

Wales in the World: The Chronicle of Elis Gruffudd In 1552 Elis Gruffudd (c.1490–c.1556) finished the most wide-­ranging and ambitious historical work ever composed by a Welsh author. Indeed, his chronicle remains probably the longest narrative text of any kind written in Welsh.3 Born in Gronant, Flintshire, Gruffudd belonged to an impoverished branch of a gentry family and left his native land in c.1510 to earn his living as a soldier and administrator in the service of the English crown and then, from perhaps 1514, of the diplomat Sir Robert Wingfield, whom he accompanied to state occasions in Henry VIII’s reign such as the Field of the Cloth of Gold (1520). From early 1524 he was keeper of Wingfield’s palace in London until he secured appointment in January 1530 to the English garrison of Calais, where he spent the rest of his days, describing himself as ‘the soldier of Calais’.4 Before embarking on his chronicle Gruffudd had compiled two other manuscript books: a miscellany of Welsh poetry and prose, including some historical material (1527), and a collection of his Welsh translations of five medical treatises in English (c.1548). The earlier compilation suggests that he had been deeply influenced by the vibrant literary culture of north-­east Wales, exemplified above all by Gutun Owain (fl. c.1451–1499), and this background is important to understanding the approach he took to the writing of history.5 Gruffudd completed the chronicle in 1552 and sent it to a kinsman in Flintshire.6 Presumably he began work on it before moving to Calais, as he states that it was after arriving there that he started to gather material for contemporary events during the reign of Henry VIII.7 It survives in the author’s holograph manuscript, comprising about 1,200 large folios (2,400 pages), most of which remains unpublished.8 3 Hunter, Soffestri’r Saeson, 7. 4  Thomas Jones, ‘A Welsh Chronicler’; Prys Morgan, ‘Elis Gruffudd’; Hunter, ‘The Chronicle of Elis Gruffydd’; Lloyd-­Morgan, ‘Elis Gruffudd’; Hunter, Soffestri’r Saeson. 5  Lloyd-­Morgan, ‘Elis Gruffudd’, 49–51. 6  Prys Morgan, ‘Elis Gruffudd’, 9, 10, 17. 7  NLW MS 3054D ii, fol. 487v, cited in Hunter, Soffestri’r Saeson, 51. 8  The manuscript was subsequently divided into two volumes (each now bound in two parts): NLW MSS 5276Di–ii and 3054Di–ii (formerly Mostyn MS 158), which respectively contain about 500  and 688 folios. Description of the latter in RMWL, 1: i–xii, 214–21. References here are to the ­digitized images available online at ‘Elis Gruffudd’s Chronicle’, https://www.llgc.org.uk/en/discover/

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FRAMING THE HISTORY OF WALES, 1540–1620  123 Modelled on medieval world chronicles, more particularly Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon, probably in John of Trevisa’s English translation, with their chronological structure of the six ages of the world, it offers a vast pano­rama of the past from the Creation to 1552. However, as with Higden and other universal chronicles, its chronological and geographical coverage is uneven.9 Whereas the first quarter of the work sweeps through the first five ages of the world from the Creation to the birth of Christ, the last quarter deals in detail with just over four decades, from the accession of Henry VIII (1509–47) to the sixth year of Edward VI, including many events witnessed by the author himself.10 This emphasis on contemporary events is consistent with Gruffudd’s declaration that, after arriving in Calais, he began ‘to note the course of the world and especially the kingdom of England, whose king was still continually pursuing his love for Ann Boleyn’.11 The Anglocentric assumptions of the work are also evident in its coverage of the centuries from the post-­Roman period onwards. Here, Gruffudd takes the narrative forward in a series of recurrent sections, each devoted to a particular country or polity, denoted by different letters (such as ‘F’ for France); he also tries to assist his readers to navigate their way through the work by occasionally including marginal notes summing up key points in the text and by providing genealogical and regnal diagrams.12 However, while systematically including sections on continental European polities, especially the papacy, the Holy Roman Empire, and France, he increasingly devotes most space to Britain and more particularly events connected with the kingdom of England, though he also gives detailed attention to instances where the Welsh played a prominent part in that story, notably the execution of Sir Rhys ap Gruffydd in 1531.13 Those assumptions likewise underpin the chronicle’s treatment of the Norman conquest of England in 1066 as a crucial turning-­point, following the example of medieval English historians: thus the first part concludes with a chronological summary of kings of Britain from Brutus to Harold, and the second, furnished with its own preface and chronological summary, opens its narrative of English history with William the Conqueror.14 This emphasis on England was facilitated by Elis Gruffudd’s adaptation of the framework of the medieval world chronicle to accommodate the different paradigm of digital-­gallery/manuscripts/early-­modern-­period/elis-­gruffudds-­chronicle (last accessed 13 September 2021). Published extracts from the chronicle are listed in Ystoria Taliesin, ed. Ford, x. 9 Hunter, Soffestri’r Saeson, 29–31. The focus on recent events is much greater than in Higden, the last of whose seven books covers the period from William I to Edward III: Given-­Wilson, Chronicles, 118. See also John Taylor, The Universal Chronicle, 39–45. 10  RMWL, 1: 214. 11  NLW 3054Dii, fol. 487v, cited in Hunter, Soffestri’r Saeson, 51, and, with translation followed here, Hunter, ‘The Chronicle of Elis Gruffydd’, 241. 12  E.g. NLW 3054Dii, fols. 379r–v, 407r; NLW 5276Dii, fols. 500r, 501r. See also Prys Morgan, ‘Elis Gruffudd’, 18; Hunter, ‘The Chronicle of Elis Gruffydd’, 212–14, 224, 228–9. 13 Hunter, Soffestri’r Saeson, 7–12, 28–35. 14 NLW 5276Dii, fols. 548v–549r (transcribed and translated in Hunter, ‘The Chronicle of Elis Gruffydd’, 255–7, 282–4); NLW MS 3054Di, fol. 5v. Cf. Given-­Wilson, Chronicles, 119–20.

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124  WRITING WELSH HISTORY national history writing provided by early sixteenth-­century English chronicles, several of which he relied upon extensively, including John Rastell’s Pastyme of People (1529), which in turn was heavily indebted to the chronicle of Robert Fabyan (d. 1513).15 Gruffudd comes closest to explaining why he undertook this mammoth task in the now acephalous preface to the post-­1066 half of his work addressed to a kinsman in Flintshire to whom he sent the completed work. There, he compares his role to that of a ‘simple . . . uneducated . . . man’ pretending to be a ‘chief mariner’ guiding a ship full of ‘men of fine linen and honour across a wide sea’ to a land they had never previously visited, and adds that he had tried ‘to take many not­able things from excellent illustrious stories (ysdoriay) of the regions of the east, which were never mentioned amongst the common people in Wales before’.16 It appears, then, that he sought to make material in English and other foreign languages accessible to readers of Welsh through a highly ambitious act of cultural translation and adaptation. This was a two-­way process. On the one hand, Gruffudd brought the world to Wales, whether by recounting tales of ancient and medieval heroes such as Hercules, Alexander the Great, and Charlemagne, or by translating letters by Columbus and Cortés that witnessed to European overseas expansion.17 However, Gruffudd fashioned the material he presented to meet the expectations of his target audience, not simply through writing in Welsh, but also by drawing on Welsh literary culture, including the use of names for English places derived from Welsh versions of Geoffrey of Monmouth, notably Caerludd (lit., ‘Lud’s Town’) for London, the citing of proverbs or lines of poetry to provide moralizing commentary on the events related, and extensive references to Welsh political prophecy (W. brud).18 The use of prophecy is but one aspect of the fundamental debt Gruffudd owed to long-­established Welsh understandings of the past. The clearest indication of that debt is the extensive coverage of the ancient kings of Britain from Brutus to Cadwaladr the Blessed, which is largely based on Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose History Gruffudd refused to dismiss outright while conceding that John Rastell and others had strong grounds for questioning the earlier writer’s veracity; he also undermined the History’s notion of a unified kingdom of the Britons surviving until 689 by portraying the most powerful British kings from the later sixth century onwards as rulers of only the northern Welsh kingdom of Gwynedd, which he treated on a par with the Anglo-­Saxon kingdoms whose histories increasingly

15 Hunter, Soffestri’r Saeson, 51–73. 16  NLW 3054Di, fol. 2r; transcribed in Hunter, ‘The Chronicle of Elis Gruffydd’, 258, with translation (adapted here) at 285. The first folio of the manuscript that contained the opening of the preface is missing. 17 ‘Ystorya Erkwlf ’, ed. Jones; NLW 5276Di, fols. 145r–153r; NLW 5276Dii, fols. 451r–455v; Prys Morgan, ‘Elis Gruffudd’, 18. 18 Hunter, Soffestri’r Saeson, 15–18, 20, 108–42.

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FRAMING THE HISTORY OF WALES, 1540–1620  125 dominate his narrative.19 Kings and princes of Wales continue to feature down to the late thirteenth century, and attention is also paid to Owain Glyndŵr, but cover­age of these is fairly thin and episodic. In part, this reflects the priorities of medieval Welsh historical writing, whereby Geoffrey’s kings overshadow their medieval Welsh successors, and also perhaps the sources to which Gruffudd had access: the deeds of King Arthur occupy over forty pages compared to the nine devoted to Llywelyn ap Gruffudd (d. 1282) in a garbled account that consistently misidentifies the prince with his grandfather Llywelyn ap Iorwerth (Llywelyn the Great).20 More fundamentally, however, Gruffudd’s treatment of medieval Welsh rulers reflects an assumption that these had lost the sovereignty of Britain enjoyed by their British predecessors and were therefore subject to the authority of the English, a subordination inscribed in the text by appending the history of the Welsh princes to the accounts of the kings of England that comprise the bulk of the sections on Britain.21 Viewed from this perspective, the increasingly Anglocentric focus of the chronicle, while facilitated by the use of English sources, was entirely consistent with a traditionalist Welsh interpretation of history ­centred on the island of Britain. In terms of its methods and use of sources, Gruffudd’s treatment of the British and Welsh past exemplifies his approach to history writing in the chronicle as a whole. He constructs his narrative from a wide range of sources in Welsh, English, French, and Latin, quite often naming them, albeit with varying degrees of precision (indeed, sometimes wholly misleadingly), and is ready to cite contradictory accounts, whose accuracy he tries to assess in order to harmonize their different interpretations.22 Furthermore, he ascribes equal evidential validity to different types of sources, drawing not only on historical writing but also on romances and other literary works as well as orally transmitted folk-­tales.23 Thus Gruffudd’s account of King Arthur, while largely indebted to Geoffrey of Monmouth, weaves together material from a wide range of other sources, including not only those derived from Geoffrey such as Wace’s Roman de Brut (1155) and William Caxton’s Chronicles of England (1480) but also the early thirteenth-­century Prose Lancelot and other French romances, medieval Welsh prose texts, and folklore from north-­ east Wales.24 Legendary and folkloric material, said to be commonly known among the people, is inserted into the chronicle’s account of early British history elsewhere, too: examples include the earliest extant version of the tale of the bard

19 Hunter, Soffestri’r Saeson, 61–7; Lloyd-­Morgan, ‘Welsh Tradition in Calais’, 90–1; NLW 5276Dii, fols. 378v–379r, 388r, 413r, 425r. 20  NLW 5276Dii, fols. 321r–342r; NLW 3054Di, fols. 108r–112r (transcribed in RMWL, 1: 215–19; partly transcribed, with translation, in Hunter, ‘The Chronicle of Elis Gruffydd’, 266–8, 292–5). 21  Hunter, ‘The Chronicle of Elis Gruffydd’, 216–25. 22  Lloyd-­Morgan, ‘Elis Gruffudd’, 42–4, 49–52; Lloyd-­Morgan, ‘Welsh Tradition in Calais’, 78–9; Hunter, ‘The Chronicle of Elis Gruffydd’, 191–7. 23  Lloyd-­Morgan, ‘Oral et écrit’. 24  Lloyd-­Morgan, ‘Welsh Tradition in Calais’, 79–88.

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126  WRITING WELSH HISTORY Taliesin (Ystorya Taliesin), whom Gruffudd apparently identified with Merlin, the subject of a variety of other stories and prophecies in the chronicle, as well as a folk-­tale concerning a ring lost by the wife of Maelgwn Gwynedd and then mi­racu­lous­ly recovered from a fish which had swallowed it.25 Folkloric elements also dominate the portrayal of Owain Glyndŵr, including the story of his being told by the abbot of Valle Crucis that he had ‘risen up too early by a hundred years’.26 A revealing instance of Gruffudd’s approach to sources is his account of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth (Llywelyn the Great; d. 1240).27 This is preceded by a brief, and highly inaccurate, section declaring that all the author knew of the prince’s father Iorwerth Drwyndwn was that he had relocated the abbey of Aberconwy to a new site at Maenan in the Conwy valley, endowed it generously, held his court nearby at Trefriw, and been buried in the abbey at one of the two locations named.28 Gruffudd then turns his attention to Llywelyn, stating that after his father’s death he ‘took the coronet (siapled) of the principality of Wales’, and in the fifth year of King John married one of the king’s daughters, identified by ‘the English chronicle’ as the second, Elizabeth, and by ‘the Welsh chronicle’ as the third, Sioned.29 Gruffudd rapidly dismissed this difference as insignificant, commenting that it ‘hardly matters which of the two, since all the books clearly show that he married one of King John’s daughters’.30 However, the discussion of his marriage serves merely as the prelude to a story that comprises most of what Gruffudd writes about Llywelyn.31 The story clearly originated as a folk-­tale, another version of which had been recorded by Gutun Owain, and relates how a spirit in the guise of his fool helped the prince to get his own back after an attempt by one of the king’s sorcerers to shame him during his wedding feast in London.32 Gruffudd offers no comment on the tale’s veracity, and implies that it is no less reliable than the preceding account of the prince’s marriage that introduces it. Nevertheless, it is striking that Gruffudd repeatedly attributes the story to one or more written texts (‘some of the books of Wales’, ‘the writing’, ‘my copy’), at least one of which seems to have provided a longer version, rather than to tales circulating orally among the people.33 Another term he uses for his source is ysdori, an

25  Ystoria Taliesin, ed. Ford; Thomas Jones, ‘The Story of Myrddin’; Patrick J. Ford, ‘The Death of Merlin’; Thomas Jones, ‘Gwraig Maelgwn a’r Fodrwy’. See also Slotkin, ‘Maelgwn Gwynedd’. 26  Owain Glyndŵr, ed. Livingston and Bollard, 228–31, quotation at 229. 27  NLW 3054Di, fols. 90r–91v; printed in Thomas Jones, ‘Pethau Nas Cyhoeddwyd’, 154–5. 28  The abbey was in fact relocated to Maenan by Edward I in 1284: Hays, The History of the Abbey of Aberconway, ch. 4. 29  Presumably denoting Joan, whom Llywelyn married in 1205: Wilkinson, ‘Joan’, 83. 30  Thomas Jones, ‘Pethau Nas Cyhoeddwyd’, 154. 31  Later the chronicle also briefly mentions the marriage of a daughter of Llywelyn to John of Scotland (heir of the earl of Chester), and the prince’s alliance with the French against the English crown: NLW 3054Di, fol. 104r. 32  NLW 3054Di, fols. 90r–91v, 104r; Thomas Jones, ‘Pethau Nas Cyhoeddwyd’. 33  Thomas Jones, ‘Pethau Nas Cyhoeddwyd’, 154–5. The reference to a longer version is implied in the phrase ‘as the writing shows at length’ (‘megis ac J mae’r ysgriuen yn dangos drwy hir brosses’).

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FRAMING THE HISTORY OF WALES, 1540–1620  127 English loan word often used by the sixteenth century as an alternative to Middle Welsh ystoria which also frequently occurs elsewhere in the chronicle.34 Like ystoria, ysdori (or ystori) often signified a written text and could mean both ‘story’—as related, say, in a Welsh prose tale or French romance—and ‘history’.35 Its implicit blurring of any sharp distinction between those genres points up how Gruffudd shared a fundamental assumption of the Welsh literary culture in which he was steeped. At the same time, he evidently felt a need to assure his readers that the folk-­tale already existed in written form, while making clear, through his choice of vocabulary, that the sources were different from—though not necessarily inferior to—the chronicles referred to as evidence for Llywelyn’s marriage. This contrast may in turn have served to indicate that the tale about the wedding feast furnished evidence about the past of a different order to the chronicles’ reports of the marriage. The account of Llywelyn the Great also exemplifies Gruffudd’s ability to bring pace and colour to his narrative through a vigorous, at times rather breathless, prose style, coupled with a focus on individuals, marvels, and dramatic deeds.36 Conversely, there is no attempt to assess the significance of political and constitutional developments; indeed, the chronicle disregards most of Llywelyn’s reign. Likewise, as we have seen, its treatment of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, though longer, confuses him with his grandfather and is shot through with other inaccuracies. To judge by those examples, then, Gruffudd set little store by trying to present a coherent narrative of the Welsh princes, based on the medieval Welsh chronicles, in contrast to Humphrey Llwyd less than a decade later. This is probably ex­plic­ able to a large extent by the subordinate role Gruffudd allotted to the princes by including their history as appendages to sections on the kings of England. Yet Gruffudd does sometimes attempt to convey the significance of the events he narrates. This is shown, for example, by his observations on key turning-­points in the history of the Britons and their Welsh descendants. Thus, the section covering Cadwaladr the Blessed, essentially based on Geoffrey of Monmouth, opens and closes with lengthy moralizing passages, ultimately indebted to Gildas, explaining that God had deprived the Britons of their sovereignty of the island as a punishment for their sins.37 Likewise, after relating the deaths of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd and his brother Dafydd he points up the transfer of political authority to the English crown by concluding his account of the conquest of Wales with the story of the birth of Edward I’s son at the newly built castle in Caernarfon and his proclamation as Prince of Wales, commenting in both the text and a marginal note that he was the first English Prince of Wales.38 On the other hand, unlike other 34 E.g. Ystoria Taliesin, ed. Ford, 173, s.v. ysdori (ystoria). 35  Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Ystoria’, esp. 18–20. 36  For Gruffudd’s prose style see Prys Morgan, ‘Elis Gruffudd’, 20; Lloyd-­Morgan, ‘Elis Gruffudd’, 52–3. 37  NLW MS 5276Dii, fols. 426r–431r, esp. fols. 426r–v, 429r–431r. 38  NLW MS 3054Di, fols. 111r–112r.

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128  WRITING WELSH HISTORY sixteenth-­century Welsh writers, such as Sir John Prise, William Salesbury, and Humphrey Llwyd, Gruffudd did not take the opportunity to celebrate Henry VIII’s Acts of Union as having given legal equality to the Welsh. Instead, his only reference to the legislation is confined to the 1543 act, which he portrays as an administrative measure that concluded a series of law enforcement initiatives in Wales and the Marches, commenting that the king also ‘passed another act to ordain and make the whole of Wales into counties’.39 Thus, although a work of Welsh historical writing, the chronicle was not a history of Wales. That its coverage from the Middle Ages to the mid-­sixteenth century devoted so much space to continental and, above all, English history is a telling indication of what Gruffudd considered interesting and significant, which in turn may have depended on the sources to which he had access, and pre­sum­ ably also what he thought would appeal to his potential readers. The same is suggested, on a far smaller scale, by two other Welsh-­language chronicles composed in the mid-­sixteenth century. One briefly records events in Wales and England between 1468 and 1551.40 More strikingly, the other, longer chronicle, composed apparently in 1568, adapts the English Brut tradition in a narrative opening with the sons of Noah that continues through Brutus, the British kings, the Anglo-­ Saxon heptarchy, and the monarchs of England to 1557. The work’s author, Hywel ap ‘Syr’ Mathew (d. 1581), was a Radnorshire poet and genealogist who served in Henry VIII’s forces at the siege of Boulogne (1544), and thus shared some of the same interests and experience as Elis Gruffudd.41 However, to an even greater extent than the latter, Hywel focused resolutely on England, and from the late eleventh century onwards Wales appears only fleetingly in his narrative at moments of subjugation and conquest, such as the killing of Rhys ap Tewdwr, ‘the last king of Wales’ and of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, ‘Prince of Wales’.42

Histories of Wales On 17 July 1559 Humphrey Llwyd completed, in English, the first Welsh account of the past conceived as a history of Wales. Conventionally known as Cronica 39  NLW 3054Di, fol. 509v; Peter R. Roberts, ‘Tudor Legislation’, 125. For a similar perception of the legislation by another mid-­sixteenth-­century Welsh writer see Olson, ‘Religion, Politics, and the Parish’, 531, 533. A uniform pattern of counties was established by the 1536 Act of Union and confirmed, with some adjustments, in the 1543 Act: Glanmor Williams, Recovery, 268–9, 271. 40  NLW, Peniarth MS 138 (c.1562): RMWL, 1: 872. 41  The chronicle is extant in a copy in NLW Peniarth MS 168 (1589–90): RMWL, 1: 960–2. For a transcription of the chronicle from the reign of William I onwards, comprising about two-­thirds of the whole, including references to the folios of the manuscript, see ‘Cronicl Hywel ap Syr Mathew’. See also Looker, ‘Hywel ap “Syr” Mathew’. 42 ‘Cronicl Hywel ap Syr Mathew’, fols. 199v, 207r; see also ibid., fols. 202r, 206v–207r, 207v. For another Welsh-­language chronicle, from Cadwaladr to 1565, perhaps written by Gruffudd Hiraethog, in NLW, MS Peniarth 212 (1565 × 1587) see RMWL, 1: 1034; Guy, ‘Historical Scholars’, 105–6.

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FRAMING THE HISTORY OF WALES, 1540–1620  129 Walliae (‘The Chronicle of Wales’), following a colophon added to one manuscript copy by Robert Cotton (1571–1631), Llwyd refers to his work as a ‘historie’ (though not a ‘historie of Wales’).43 He states that his aim was ‘to wrrite the lives and actes of the kinges and princes of Wales’ from Cadwaladr to Llywelyn ap Gruffudd (d. 1282), though in fact the narrative continues to the capture of Madog ap Llywelyn in 1295 after the defeat of his rising against English rule.44 Llwyd’s autograph copy is lost, but the Cronica circulated in manuscript by the 1570s, when two copies came into the hands of John Dee (1527–1609), and another copy, no longer extant, was acquired by Sir Henry Sidney (1529–86), president of the Council of the Marches in Wales from 1560 until his death.45 It was at Sidney’s instigation that the work was published, with additions and other changes, by Dr David Powel of Ruabon (1549 × 1552–1598) under the title The Historie of Cambria, Now Called Wales (1584). This remained the only edition until William Wynne published a revised version in 1697, of which various editions were produced until 1832.46 As the single most influential book on Welsh history until the early decades of the nineteenth century Powel’s work marked a significant turning-­point in Welsh historiography. Viewed in its contemporary context, however, its solitary distinction as the only printed history of Wales for over a century suggests that demand for such works was limited, and points up the unusual circumstances of its production as a work commissioned by a high-­ level patron to serve the needs of a particular moment—a crucial consideration given the expense of publication in a period when printed books in Welsh or relating to Wales were few and predominantly religious in focus.47 The following discussion will begin by assessing Llwyd’s Cronica before turning to consider its adaptation by Powel.

Humphrey Llwyd, Cronica Walliae As we have seen in Chapter 5, Llwyd completed the Cronica in London, pre­sum­ ably while serving Henry Fitzalan, earl of Arundel in Nonsuch Palace (Surrey), granted to Arundel by Queen Mary in 1556.48 It is likely, then, that Llwyd

43  Colophon: Llwyd, CW, 4: ‘Cronica Walliae a Rege Cadwalader ad an(num) 1294 Humfredo Floid authore’. ‘Historie’: Llwyd, CW, 79, 82, 86, 92, 103. 44 Llwyd, CW, 64 (quotation), 223–4. 45 Llwyd, CW, 4–10. 46  R. T. Jenkins, ‘William Wynne’; Llwyd, CW, 9–10. It is uncertain whether manuscript corrections and additions Powel made to a copy of the book signalled an intention to produce a revised edition: cf. Huws, Repertory, s.n. Peniarth Estate PB 4. 47 Jarvis, ‘Welsh Humanist Learning’, 128–30; Rheinallt Llwyd, ‘Printing and Publishing’, 93–5. Editions in England in this period normally ran to 1,000–1,500 copies and could remain available for decades after their publication: Woolf, Reading History, 207–8, 231. 48  Cf. Gruffydd, ‘Humphrey Llwyd: Dyneiddiwr’, 59–60.

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130  WRITING WELSH HISTORY intended his account for members of Arundel’s circle with antiquarian interests.49 This context helps to explain why Llwyd included material on previous earls of Arundel and their estates.50 In addition, Arundel’s moderate and flexible stance towards confessional differences, reflecting the overriding priority he attached to maintaining political stability, may account for Llwyd’s generally restrained treatment of the medieval Church.51 This probably reflects his conception of the Chronica as a history of secular rulers rather than any coolness towards the Protestant cause, an interpretation supported by a rare anti-­Catholic outburst following a report of Gruffudd ap Cynan ab Owain’s burial in a monk’s cowl at Aberconwy Abbey in 1200 that affirms the purity of the faith first received by the Britons, taught by Joseph of Arimathea at Glastonbury, ‘before the proude and bloodthursty monke Augustyn infected hit with his Romish doctryne’; by contrast, ‘the Britons, the first inhabitauntes of this Realme, dyd abhorre the Romishe doctryne taught in that tyme’, and the monastery of Bangor Is-­coed, destroyed in the early seventh century, ‘savered not of Romish dregges’.52 Here, Llwyd resembles William Salesbury and Richard Davies by recruiting the allegedly pristine faith of the Britons to the service of anti-­Catholicism, although unlike them he draws no explicit connection between that faith and Protestantism.53 But his comments on Catholicism indicate a commitment to Protestantism, further suggested by Llwyd’s apparent leading role in securing the passage through the House of Commons in 1563 of the act authorizing the translation into Welsh of the Bible and Book of Common Prayer.54 If the Cronica offered a somewhat muted apologia for Protestantism, it loudly defended the Welsh and the significance of their history. Indeed, this was the main message for its intended readers. Llwyd presents the work as an attempt to make the medieval Welsh past more widely known in Britain through writing about it in English: as in his later ‘Fragment’, his aim was to demonstrate that a Welsh perspective was essential to understanding the history of Britain and its peoples as a whole. Llwyd emphasizes the novelty and purpose of his enterprise at the conclusion of the ‘Description’ that precedes the main narrative: . . . I was the first that tocke the province [Wales] in hande to put thees thinges into the Englishe tonge. For that I wolde not have the inhabitantes of this Ile ignorant of the histories and cronicles of the same, wherein I am sure to offende manye because I have oppenede ther ignorance and blindenes thereby and to please all goode men and honeste nature that be desirouse to knowe and 49 Llwyd, CW, 24; cf. Boyle, ‘Henry Fitzalan’, 180. 50 Llwyd, CW, 24. 51  Cf. Boyle, ‘Henry Fitzalan’, 64–5, 132–61. 52 Llwyd, CW, 184–5. 53  For the passage’s debt to Davies, and thence to Bale, see Gruffydd Aled Williams, ‘ “Ail Dewi Menew” ’, 100–1. 54 Llwyd, CW, 2; Gruffydd, ‘Humphrey Lhuyd a Deddf Cyfieithu’r Beibl’. See also Parkinson, ‘Humphrey Llwyd’.

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FRAMING THE HISTORY OF WALES, 1540–1620  131 understand all suche things as passed beetwitxt the inhabitantes of this lande from the first inhabiting therof to this daye.55

This reads very much like an attempt to counter the marginalization of Wales by historians of England noticed in Chapter 5. That Llwyd regarded his work as pertaining to the history of all the peoples of Britain is similarly shown by his complaint that Polydore Vergil had denigrated or denied ‘the martiall and noble actes aswell of Saxons, Danes and Normanes as of the Britons, all inhabiters of this Ile’.56 Nor was this simply a matter of rhetorical gestures, since, while focusing predominantly on Wales, the Cronica sets its history on a wider British (and sometimes European) stage by relating events in England and farther afield.57 Occasionally, moreover, he turned to England in order to counter some anti-­Welsh prejudices which his predominantly English readers might harbour. A prime example is a lengthy passage which opens by reciting the genealogy of King Æthelwulf (d. 858) of the West Saxons back to Adam as proof that the Welsh were not unique in their devotion to pedigrees, while nevertheless adding that they surpassed other peoples in their cultivation. ‘Therefore let suche disdaynfull heades as scant knowe ther owne grandfather leave ther scoffinge and tauntinge of Welshmen for that thinge that all the worthye nations in the worlde do glorie in.’58 The idea that Wales was an integral part of Britain was thus fundamental to Llwyd’s interpretation of its history and its presentation to an intended readership beyond the principality. Britain looms large in the Cronica as a point of reference or comparison. Moreover, Llwyd regarded the island not simply as a geographical space but also, following medieval Welsh and Galfridian tradition, as a political unit. In part, references to Britain served to flatter Wales, and especially Llwyd’s native north Wales, which he asserted was ‘the chieffest seat of the last kings of Britaine because hit was and is the strongest countrey within this Ile’.59 Local patriotism was even more evident in his description of the Clwyd valley as ‘one of the fayrest valleyes within this Ile’ and of the lordship of Denbigh as ‘one of the greatest and best lordships in Englande’.60 The latter reference is a rare instance in the Cronica of a slippage, also found in English authors of this period, between ‘Britain’ and ‘England’.61 True, Llwyd followed Brenhinedd y Saesson (‘The Kings of the English’), here drawing on the Annals of Winchester, to assert that the West Saxon king Ecgberht (d. 839) ‘was the first monarche of the Saxons . . . and changed the name of Britaine to Englande and called the people Englishmen and language

55 Llwyd, CW, 82. 56 Llwyd, CW, 65. 57 Llwyd, CW, 33–58. 58 Llwyd, CW, 89–90, quotation at 90. 59 Llwyd, CW, 77 (my emphasis). Similarly Snowdonia is ‘without contraversi the strongeste countrey within Britaine’, 70. 60 Llwyd, CW, 71. 61  Cf. MacColl, ‘The Construction of England’, 594–5, 599–602, 607–8.

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132  WRITING WELSH HISTORY Englishe’.62 Furthermore, in referring to the island as ‘this realme’ he tacitly equated it with the kingdom of England, which, though it incorporated Wales, remained separate from the kingdom of Scotland despite attempts to claim sovereignty over it in the 1540s (see Chapter 5). However, while his terminology regarding Britain is ambiguous, it did not signal an Anglocentric focus similar to that adopted by most English historians in relating events from the ninth century onwards. For one thing, Llwyd presented the change of nomenclature as a moment of insular, or at least Anglo-­Welsh, significance by dating it with reference to the coming of both Brutus and Hengist to Britain as well as the departure of Cadwaladr.63 And, in common with medieval Welsh history writing, he remained attached to the name of Britain, as shown, for example, by his enthusiastic comments that the extensive lands ruled by Cnut included ‘all the noble Ile of Bryttaine’ and that Henry I was ‘one of the worthiest and most victoriouse princes that ever reigned in the Ile of Britaine’.64 Likewise, in common with Sir John Prise, he applied the term ‘Britons’ not only to the ancient Britons from whom the Welsh were lineally descended but also to the island’s inhabitants in his own day, irrespective of their ethnic origin.65 Llwyd drew a connection between these two meanings in the account—which he insisted was essentially true while acknowledging its legendary accretions—of how Prince Madog, in order to escape the succession disputes between his brothers after the death of their father Owain Gwynedd in 1170, led an expedition across the sea to Florida: ‘And so hit was by Britons longe afore discovered before eyther Colonus or Americus lead any Hispaniardes thyther.’66 Here, the use of ‘Britons’ both alludes to the ancestry of the Welsh and makes them representatives of the people of Britain as a whole (or at least all those subject to the English crown). Some twenty years later one of Llwyd’s readers, Dr John Dee (1527–1609), drew out the political implications by influentially citing Madog’s alleged exploits as a le­git­im­ iz­ing precedent for English overseas expansion under Elizabeth I.67 However, Llwyd’s commitment to an overarching framework focused on the island of Britain, indebted to medieval Welsh (including Galfridian) historical thinking, was two-­edged. On the one hand, it glorified the Britons and Welsh in the distant past; but on the other, it asserted that their separate history was long over. Like the medieval Welsh chronicles Brut y Tywysogyon and Brenhinedd y Saesson, Llwyd presents the history of the Welsh kings and princes from the late seventh century onwards as successors of the kings of Britain who had lost their dominion over the island to the English. This is clear from the very beginning of 62 Llwyd, CW, 87. Cf. BS, 16–17 (828); Beech, ‘Did King Egbert of Wessex Rename Britain?’. 63 Llwyd, CW, 88; Schwyzer, ‘Archipelagic History’, 602. 64 Llwyd, CW, 112, 149. 65  E.g. Llwyd, CW, 63–6, 82, 89, 168. 66 Llwyd, CW, 167–8, quotation at 168. 67 Gwyn  A.  Williams, Madoc: The Making of a Myth, 39–46; MacMillan, ‘Discourse on History, Geography and Law’, esp. 8–9, 11, 14–15, 22–3; Glyn Parry, The Arch-­Conjuror of England, 94–6, 144–5. For Dee’s possession of a copy of Llwyd’s history, probably by 1575, see Llwyd, CW, 4, 9.

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FRAMING THE HISTORY OF WALES, 1540–1620  133 the work, which opens with a brief account of how, after an angelic vision, Cadwaladr, exiled with King Alan in Brittany, abandoned his plans to try and restore British rule in Britain and instead ended his life in Rome in 688. ‘And thus ended the rule of the Britons over the whole Ile.’68 However, the continuation of British rule within the restricted bounds of Wales marked only a temporary respite, since, in line with the emphasis of both medieval Welsh history writing and the example of sixteenth-­century (and earlier) historians of England,69 Llwyd believed that the distinctive history of Wales had ended with the extinction of native rule by Edward I: contingent as it was on a succession of Welsh kings and princes, the history of Wales he related was safely relegated to the past. As for some later medieval Welsh writers, this turning-­point was also viewed from a Galfridian perspective, as the rulers of Wales represented a coda to almost two and a half millennia of British sovereignty over Britain. Thus Llwyd declared that Llywelyn ap Gruffudd (d. 1282): was the last Prince of Britons bloode, which without interuption bare dominion and rule in Wales. So that rule and government of the Britons ever continued in some of Britaine from the first comminge of Brute, which was the yere before Christes incarnacioun 1136, to the yere after Christe 1282 by the space of 2418 yeres.70

That this marked an irreversible passage of dominion is subsequently emphasized by the bald statement that, through his conquest of Wales, Edward I ‘brought the whole countrey in subjection to the crowne of Englande to this daye’.71 The failure of Madog ap Llywelyn’s revolt in 1294–5 only served to underline the futility of resistance to absorption in the English realm, since ‘[a]fter this there was nothinge done in Wales worthy memory, but that is to bee redde in the Englishe Chronicle’.72 For Llwyd, then, the history of Wales under its kings and princes was ultimately a prelude to the political assimilation with England of which he was both beneficiary and eulogist; nevertheless, precisely because of that final outcome, he believed that it merited attention and respect as an essential component of the larger history of ‘the conjoined realm’ recently created by Henry VIII.73 Llwyd emphasizes that his focus will be restricted to Wales by prefacing the history with a topographical description of the country, in both the past and the present, so ‘that therby the readere may the more playnely and easely understande the woorke following’.74 This description, which David Powel erroneously ascribed 68 Llwyd, CW, 63. 69  Ralph Griffiths, ‘Wales’, 679–81. 70 Llwyd, CW, 222. Similarly, the Normans who conquered Glamorgan were ‘the first strangers that ever inhabited Wales sith the tyme of Camber’: Llwyd, CW, 126. 71 Llwyd, CW, 223 (my emphasis). 72 Llwyd, CW, 224. 73  Praise of union: Llwyd, Breviary, 108. ‘Conjoined realm’: Ralph Griffiths, ‘Wales’, 679. 74 Llwyd, CW, 64–82, quotation at 64.

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134  WRITING WELSH HISTORY to Sir John Prise, was thus intended as an integral part of the work as a whole.75 Indeed, it did more than simply provide a background to the events subsequently related in the Cronica; more importantly, perhaps, it also made the case for regarding Wales as a distinctive portion of the island of Britain on account of both its geography and its history—a case Llwyd presented visually almost a decade later in his map of Wales. In this, he may well have been influenced by Gerald of Wales’s Descriptio Kambriae (‘Description of Wales’).76 Thus, while attention is paid to physical features such as mountains and rivers, the description links the areas and places discussed to historical developments. A significant example is the River Severn. Llwyd describes this, along with the River Dee, as marking the historic border between England and Wales (a division represented visually on his later map of Wales). However, he explains that, unlike the Dee, the Severn had subsequently lost its status as a boundary after English settlers had crossed it as far as the Wye.77 The conceptualization of Wales as a historical creation, rather than simply a geographical expression, is further underlined by the structuring of the description according to medieval territorial units. At the regional level a broad division between north Wales and south Wales, attested in sources from the eleventh century onwards, is superimposed on a tripartite division between the three kingdoms of Gwynedd, Powys, and Deheubarth attributed (following Gerald of Wales and later writers) to Rhodri Mawr (d. 878).78 In addition, the description enumerates and describes the medieval subdivisions of each kingdom known as cantrefs and commotes, which he in turn relates to the more recent pattern of counties established by Henry VIII’s Acts of Union (1536–43).79 However, within this common framework coverage is uneven, as about half of the description is devoted to north Wales, comprising Gwynedd and Powys, the part of the country with which Llwyd was most familiar through birth and service to Arundel, whose estates included lands along the Welsh border with Shropshire.80 The ensuing history of Wales in the Cronica likewise bears the imprint of Llwyd’s choices and preoccupations as an author. This is worth stressing, as David Powel and subsequent commentators misleadingly described Llwyd’s work as a translation of a medieval Welsh chronicle rather than a new narrative based on a variety of sources.81 Admittedly, determining precisely which sources Llwyd had at his disposal is far from straightforward, and the Cronica could be seen to support Powel’s interpretation inasmuch as Llwyd seems to suggest at various points 75 Llwyd, CW, 12–15. 76  For Llwyd’s knowledge of Gerald see Llwyd, CW, 12, 65, 67, 69, 77, 81. 77 Llwyd, CW, 64, 67; Llwyd, Breviary, 98; Schwyzer, ‘A Map of Greater Cambria’. 78 Llwyd, CW, 67–8, 72, 77. 79 Llwyd, CW, 68, 70–4, 77–80. The likely source of Llwyd’s listing of cantrefs and commotes identified at 14. 80 Llwyd, CW, 24, 73. 81  Explicit in the full title of Powel, HC: ‘The Historie of Cambria . . . written in the Brytish language aboue two hundreth yeares past: translated into English by H. Lhoyd, Gentleman . . .’

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FRAMING THE HISTORY OF WALES, 1540–1620  135 that his history has mainly followed a Welsh work, which he variously describes as ‘the British Cronicle’, ‘the Britishe booke’, ‘the Welsh historie’, and, towards the end, ‘my Welshe author’ and ‘myne author’.82 The last two references, in particular, strongly imply that the ‘author’ was Llwyd’s principal source. The first seeks to vindicate its trustworthiness by invoking the testimony of Matthew Paris, ‘whose noble worke I wold desire to reade as doubte of the credite of my Welshe author’, while the second states that the source ends in 1270, at the height of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd’s power, and therefore the rest of the history will rely on Latin chron­ icles, especially that of Nicholas Trevet.83 In editing the Cronica for publication, David Powel identified this source as a version of the medieval Welsh chronicle now known as Brut y Tywysogyon (‘The Chronicle of the Princes’), which he attributed to Caradog of Llancarfan, presumably because at the end of his History Geoffrey of Monmouth had left to Caradog the task of writing the history of the  Welsh kings. Accordingly, Powel described Llwyd’s work as a translation of Caradog’s chronicle, albeit ‘partlie augmented’, especially from Matthew Paris and Trevet.84 However, while Llwyd evidently drew, directly or indirectly, on one or more versions of Brut y Tywysogyon, he also names ‘the Britishe Cronicle’ as his source for a triad in the collection Trioedd Ynys Prydain (‘The Triads of the Island of Britain’) absent from any extant copies of the Brut.85 It may be, therefore, that the references to a ‘British booke’, ‘Welsh historie’, ‘my Welshe author’, and so forth acknowledge a debt either simply to a source in Welsh (but not necessarily the same source in all cases) or, more specifically, to a single historical compilation, no longer extant, that included one or more versions of the Welsh chronicles together with other historical texts.86 The likelihood that Llwyd had access to more than one chronicle is strengthened by his later assertion that he had consulted ‘histories written in the British tongue, which of late so far as I suppose were by me first translated into English’.87 In any event, it is clear that Llwyd did not merely translate a Welsh chronicle, since, irrespective of whether he relied on one or several versions of Brut y Tywysogyon, he drew on other sources, both Welsh and English, some of which he named, including, besides Paris and Trevet, the laws of Hywel Dda, Henry of Huntingdon, and Gerald of Wales. Moreover, his 82 Llwyd, CW, 65, 74, 82, 121, 213, 218. 83 Llwyd, CW, 213, 218. As argued in Chapter 3, Brut y Tywysogyon originally ended in March 1282. The only copy known to have ended in 1270, down to the entry after the last one referred to by Llwyd as part of his Welsh source, is a transcript of 1577: Brut, Pen20Tr, li–lii; Huws, Repertory, s.n. NLW 13211E. 84 Powel, HC, sig. ¶vr–v. 85 Llwyd, CW, 26. 86  Cf. Llwyd, CW, 17–23; Charles, George Owen of Henllys, 102 (‘some lost composite Welsh chronicle’). One early copy of CW (c.1578) is followed by a collection of pedigrees in Welsh, Achau’r Mamau (‘The Pedigrees of the Mothers’), identified in a marginal note, perhaps by Robert Cotton (pers. comm. Paul Russell), as being ‘written out of the Bryttishe bok wher the History of Humfrey Lloid is in Welsh written’: BL, Cotton Caligula MS A.VI, fols. 225r–227r, quotation at fol. 227r. 87 Llwyd, Breviary, 56 (my emphasis), translating Humphrey Llwyd, Commentarioli Britannicae Descriptionis Fragmentum, 5–6.

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136  WRITING WELSH HISTORY use of these extended well beyond the passages where their authority is ex­pli­cit­ly cited.88 He also inserted observations of his own, whose status as authorial digressions from the main narrative is signalled by their conclusion with conventional phrases such as ‘But to the historie’.89 Such interjections in the text are the most conspicuous instances of how Llwyd sought to shape his history. Some, like the story of Madog’s sailing to America, insert additional material. However, many comment on the narrative of political events he mainly derived from medieval chronicles. One important theme is dynastic succession. This is linked to the chronological structure Llwyd adopted which constitutes his most significant authorial intervention. In constructing his work as a royal and princely history of Wales he modified the annalistic structure of his Welsh chronicle sources by dividing the text into a series of sections each headed by the name of a Welsh ruler.90 Moreover, most rulers are presented as having succeeded their predecessor, and sometimes the beginning of the new reign is given a date—a practice almost entirely absent from medieval Welsh chronicles, which usually only recorded the date of a ruler’s death (also supplied by Llwyd).91 Possibly influenced by the division of English history into reigns by Polydore Vergil, Edward Hall, and other sixteenth-­century writers, Llwyd thus sought to impose a chronological and conceptual framework on medieval Welsh history that would help to give it a comparable shape to regnally structured his­ tor­ies of other countries. True, this reconfiguring was fairly superficial, as the individual sections adhered closely to the annalistic structure of Llwyd’s chronicle sources and often contained a wide range of disconnected material; it could be argued, then, that the Cronica Walliae had closer affinities with the annalistic narratives that remained popular in England, as demonstrated, for example, by Holinshed’s Chronicles.92 Nevertheless, while the sections failed to provide coherent accounts of the rulers named in their headings, there is no mistaking the overall impression of regnal continuity those headings sought to convey. Likewise Llwyd presented the rulers whose deeds he related as being subject, at least in theory, to what may be termed constitutional norms. Thus he cites both the succession arrangements of Rhodri Mawr and the laws of Hywel Dda as establishing the predominance of the ruler of Gwynedd, with his seat at Aberffraw on Anglesey, over the rulers of the two other major medieval Welsh kingdoms of Deheubarth and Powys, and of prescribing the amount of tribute they owed to him as well as the sum he owed to the king of England.93 Above all, though, Llwyd 88 Llwyd, CW, 16, 39–59, 97. 89 Llwyd, CW, 86, 90, 103, 185. 90  Ieuan M. Williams, ‘Ysgolheictod Hanesyddol’, 120. A partial parallel is provided by the Annals of the Four Masters (1632–6), which named a king supposedly holding sovereignty over the whole of Ireland in the entry for each year, thereby adapting the annalistic structure of its medieval Irish sources in order to demonstrate the antiquity of the ‘kingdom of Ireland’: Cunningham, The Annals of the Four Masters, 80–6. 91  E.g. Llwyd, CW, 84, 89, 113, 151, 206. See Chapter 3 for the contrasting treatment of English and Welsh regnal succession in Brut y Tywysogyon. 92  Cf. Woolf, ‘Senses of the Past’, 419–20. 93 Llwyd, CW, 68, 97, 186.

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FRAMING THE HISTORY OF WALES, 1540–1620  137 emphasized that dynastic succession was governed—or at least normally ought to be governed—by legal rules. These are nowhere defined, but Llwyd appears to privilege male primogeniture, provided that, from the late ninth century onwards, this was coupled with direct descent from Rhodri Mawr.94 Thus, where possible, the headings that open each section describe a ruler as the son of the ruler named in the previous heading, while some kings and princes are described as ‘the right heire’, ‘right enheritour’, and so forth.95 For example, Llwyd stressed that both Gruffudd ap Cynan (d. 1137) of Gwynedd and Rhys ap Tewdwr (d. 1093) of Deheubarth were lawful heirs by virtue of their descent from Rhodri Mawr: accordingly, their victory at Mynydd Carn in 1081 ensured that ‘the kingdomes of Wales came under the rule of the righte heirs againe’.96 Only rarely was disruption of legitimate succession acceptable. Llwyd comes nearest to justifying it with reference to Hywel Dda’s seizure of Gwynedd after the death of Idwal Foel (942): ‘After the deathe of Idwall dyd Howell the Good take upon him the rule of all Wales althoughe the sonnes of Idwall dyd somewhat murmure against him, yet for his godly behaveor, discret and just rule he was beloved of all men.’97 Here, virtue trumped violent usurpation. By contrast, Llwyd had no sympathy for the disinheriting of Idwal’s eldest son by his two younger brothers after Hywel’s death in 950, and declared that their subsequent killing by Hywel’s grandson Maredudd ab Owain (d. 999) showed ‘howe God punished the wronge’.98 More ambiguous is the observation that, on the death of Dafydd ap Llywelyn (1246), ‘all the lordes and barrons of Wales . . . called for’ Llywelyn and Owain, sons of Dafydd’s (half-) brother Gruffudd, ‘as next inheritors (for they estemed not Roger Mortymer sonne to Gladus, sister to David, and righte enheritor by the order of lawe)’. Llwyd adds shortly afterwards that Roger Mortimer ‘shulde of right [have] bene Prince of Wales’.99 Yet, Llwyd did not explicitly condemn this choice or imply anywhere else that the Mortimers had been unlawfully barred from the succession. Llywelyn, on the other hand, enjoyed sufficient legitimacy to be commemorated as ‘the last Prince of Britons bloode’,100 and his fall was attributed, not to any breach of rules of succession, but rather to the ‘pride and discorde’ of the Welsh.101

David Powel, The Historie of Cambria As we have seen, the adaptation of Llwyd’s work for publication was the first of a series of historical works Powel completed in 1584–5 while chaplain to Sir Henry 94  Political disruption associated with the lack of a male heir in Llwyd, CW, 105. 95 Llwyd, CW, 87, 110, 111, 122, 123, 178, 186, 209, and cf. 27–31. 96 Llwyd, CW, 123. 97 Llwyd, CW, 98. 98  Llwyd, CW, 99, 103 (quotation). See also 106 for Llwyd’s criticism of Dafydd ap Gruffudd’s imprisonment of his half-­brother Gruffudd. 99 Llwyd, CW, 209 (my emphasis). 100 Llwyd, CW, 64, 222 (quotation). 101 Llwyd, CW, 218.

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138  WRITING WELSH HISTORY Sidney at Ludlow castle. Apart from the letter to William Fleetwood on the British History, all these works were editions of earlier texts, which Powel glossed in various ways—an approach that may have owed something to his familiarity with scriptural exegesis, a fundamental aspect of his theological studies at Oxford.102 Yet while Sidney’s commissions provided the crucial stimulus for the production of those works, the choice of Powel reflected an acknowledgement not only of his scholarly accomplishments in theology but also, in particular, of his expertise in the history of Wales—which, as we shall see shortly, he had started to research at least a decade before he was first approached by Sidney in September 1583.103 His attitude to Geoffrey’s History has been discussed in Chapter 5 with reference to his edition of Pontico Virunio and his letter to Fleetwood. Here, attention will focus on The Historie of Cambria, together with the extensive notes to Gerald of Wales’s Welsh works, which offer additional insights into Powel’s understanding and use of the past. The form of Powel’s historical writings was, of course, not simply a matter of authorial choice, but resulted above all from their originating as commissions by Sidney.104 Whereas Llwyd seems to have written the Cronica Walliae on his own initiative, Powel was asked to prepare it for publication by a powerful patron. As the recent dedicatee of the first printed history of Ireland in Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande (1577), Sidney may have intended Powel to do something similar for the history of Wales, denied separate treatment in the Chronicles—a possibility arguably strengthened by the repurposing in Powel’s Historie of blocks used in that earlier work to depict English and other kings.105 Sidney may also have hoped that publishing Llwyd’s manuscript would furnish valuable ideological support for his presidency of the Council in the Marches of Wales, subject to criticism from the mid-­1570s for its alleged laxity regarding the misdemeanours of the Welsh and for its financial insolvency, and perhaps that his sponsorship of a committed Protestant would help to counteract complaints that he was too lenient towards recusants.106 In particular, Llwyd’s history could be read as evidence that an emollient attitude towards the Welsh secured their loyalty more effectively than the kind of punitive regime favoured by Sidney’s op­pon­ents.107 Yet Powel sought to improve, rather than simply reproduce, Llwyd’s text by drawing on additional sources, a task facilitated by his being very well connected with figures in the antiquarian world, including members of Elizabeth I’s government and court. Thus materials were provided by Sidney 102  Cf. Greenslade, ‘The Faculty of Theology’, 296–7, 314–20. 103  Powel, HC, sig. ¶vv. 104 Powel, HC, sig. ¶iiiv, vv; Powel, PV, sig. A2v, p. 51. 105 John Edward Lloyd and Victor Sholderer, ‘Powel’s Historie (1584)’; Schwyzer, ‘Archipelagic History’, 606. Powel frequently refers to the Chronicles: e.g. Powel, HC, 4, 33, 57, 91, 225, 335, 372. For the Irish Chronicle, an expanded version of Edmund Campion’s Histories of Ireland by Holinshed supplemented by Richard Stanihurst, see Lennon, ‘Ireland’. 106  Cf. Penry Williams, The Council in the Marches, 127–32, 257–74. 107 Nice, Sacred History, 75, 87; Schwyzer, ‘ “A Happy Place of Government” ’.

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FRAMING THE HISTORY OF WALES, 1540–1620  139 himself, Robert Glover, Somerset Herald (1543/4–88), the London antiquary John Stow (1524/5–1605), and William Cecil, Lord Burghley (1520/1–98), treasurer of England, well known for his interest in history—including his own Welsh family origins in the Herefordshire borders—and collection of manuscripts, who also facilitated access to ‘the Records of this realme’.108 Blanche Parry, chief gentlewoman of the queen’s privy chamber, lent a copy of a treatise (discussed later in this chapter) on the conquest of Glamorgan by Sir Edward Stradling, in turn one of several who supplied information on families with estates in Wales.109 It is evident, too, that Powel drew on sources in his own possession, including ‘an ancient booke’ by the Westminster monk John Bever (d. 1311?) and a certified copy of a royal document establishing a commission of inquiry into Henry VII’s paternal pedigree.110 He also used transcripts of documents at Lambeth Palace that he had seen while these were in the custody of Thomas Yale as dean of the court of arches (1567–73).111 This shows that, while Powel undoubtedly drew on new materials when composing The Historie (from September 1583 to about April 1584), he did not start from scratch.112 Powel and his patron conceived of The Historie as a printed book. This was not simply a matter of maximizing its status and thereby its prospects of circulation as a work produced in London by the printers Ralph Newbury and Henry Denham, who held the official licence for publishing ‘chronicles’.113 More fundamentally, Powel seized on the opportunity the printed medium presented to display his erudition and editorial method by prescribing the use of marginal notes and ­different typefaces to represent his diverse sources. He explains that references in the other sources to matters covered in his copy of Llwyd’s history are given in the margin, while additional points on Wales in those sources—both those lacking in Llwyd and explanations of events noted only briefly in his work—are inserted in smaller type prefaced by an asterisk, ‘whereby it may be discerned from the copie it selfe’.114 Accordingly, as can be seen in Fig. 6.1, Powel produced a book whose typographic variety reflected his commitment to publishing Llwyd’s work, printed in large black letter type which dominates the page, while also demonstrating, through the use of marginal references and smaller typefaces, how he had expanded and 108 Powel, HC, sig. ¶iiiv, viir–viiv, quotation at viiv. For Cecil see Flower, ‘Richard Davies’; McKisack, Medieval History, 50–4; Rowse, ‘Alltyrynys and the Cecils’; Popper, Sir Walter Ralegh’s History, 62–3. 109 Powel, HC, sig. ¶viiir, 121, 141. Cf. Peter R. Roberts, ‘Parry, Blanche’. 110 Powel, HC, 11, 391; see also Powel, PV, 246, n. 2. 111 Powel, HC, 329, 338. Cf. Watkin, ‘Yale, Thomas’. 112  For the dates see Powel, HC, sig. ¶vv; below, n. 113. Powel’s annotations of a copy of The Historie provide further evidence of his familiarity with a range of English and Welsh sources: NLW, Peniarth Estate PB 4, Powel, HC, 23, 103, 111, 112, 121, 203 (Welsh genealogies); 304, 337, 383 (royal records). 113  The archbishop of Canterbury licensed Newbury and Denham to print ‘A historie or Cronicle of Walles’ on 1 April 1584: A Transcript of the Registers, ed. Arber, 2: 430; licence to print ‘chronicles’ at 438. For the printers see Kastan and Pratt, ‘Printers’, 32–4; and for the printing of Welsh books in sixteenth-­century London, Eiluned Rees, The Welsh Book-­Trade, iv, vii–ix, xiii–xiv. 114 Powel, HC, sig. ¶viir–viiir, quotation at viiir.

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Fig. 6.1  David Powel, The Historie of Cambria, Now Called Wales (London, 1584), pp. 46–7

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FRAMING THE HISTORY OF WALES, 1540–1620  141 amended his principal source by drawing on numerous additional authorities. True, Powel did not adhere consistently to the scheme he described, thereby making it difficult to establish exactly how far he reproduced Llwyd’s text.115 Nevertheless, his adoption of the scheme is significant for the understanding it reveals of how print could visually reinforce the authority of a work by highlighting the sources deployed in its construction. The Historie also underlined the regnal structure pioneered by Llwyd through opening the account of each Welsh ruler on a new page, headed by the name of the ruler in large type with an accompanying portrait taken from Holinshed.116 In presenting The Historie as a multi-­layered work Powel built on Llwyd’s strategy of combining a medieval Welsh base source with other sources which expanded its narrative. Some of these were Welsh vernacular and Latin texts not used by Llwyd, including copies of the laws and the early sixteenth-­century Statute of Gruffudd ap Cynan.117 However, the majority were English, thereby providing similar external corroboration to that already provided by Matthew Paris in Llwyd’s Cronica.118 Powel differed from his predecessor by explicitly identifying the Welsh source referred to by the latter with a version of the Welsh chronicles, begun, so he maintained (taking his lead from Geoffrey of Monmouth), by Caradog of Llancarfan. He added, citing Gutun Owain (fl. c.1451–1499), that after Caradog’s death in 1156, copies of his work were then updated annually to 1270 at the Cistercian monasteries of Strata Florida and Aberconwy, which normally combined their records every three years. Many copies were made of these ‘collections’, of which at least 100 survived, ‘whereof the most part were written two hundred yeares ago’—including, to judge by The Historie’s title, the history translated by Llwyd.119 Indeed, Powel possessed two copies of ‘the Brytishe booke’ and had collated Llwyd’s text with these.120 However, the nature of the copies held by Powel is uncertain. Later in The Historie, he noted that ‘the best and most perfect copie’ was written in the fifteenth century by Gutun Owain, which may indicate that Powel had seen it (and there is other evidence suggesting his familiarity with some of Gutun’s writings);121 but it need not follow that this was one of the two copies he owned. More fundamentally, as already mentioned, the identification of the Welsh chronicle(s) used by both Llwyd and Powel is problematic, as some of 115  Ieuan M. Williams, ‘Ysgolheictod Hanesyddol’, 215–16; further details of Powel’s adaptation of Cronica Walliae in notes to Llwyd, CW, 225–57. 116  E.g. Powel, HC, 1, 52, 115, 246. In Fig. 6.1 Idwal is depicted by the woodcut used in Holinshed’s Chronicles for Cædwalla, king of the West Saxons. The image of Ætheflæd does not correspond to any in Holinshed, and it is unknown whether the woodcut had previously been used to depict another female ruler. See Lloyd and Scholderer, ‘Powel’s Historie’, 16–17. 117 Powel, HC, 52–7, 191–2. See also citations from the Cambro-­Latin Life of St Melangell and the Welsh Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan: Powel, HC, 22–3; Powel, PV, 199–200, n. 3; cf. Pryce, ‘A New Edition’. 118  Powel also used Paris independently: e.g. Powel, HC, sig. ¶viir; 105–6, 284, 391. 119 Powel, HC, title page (‘The Historie of Cambria . . . written in the Brytish language aboue two hundreth yeares past’), sig. ¶vr, 206; see also Powel, PV, 185, n. 1. 120 Powel, HC, sig. ¶viir. 121 Powel, HC, 206 (quotation), 229, 391.

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142  WRITING WELSH HISTORY the material they attributed to the chronicle is absent from any of the surviving versions of Brut y Tywysogyon or Brenhinedd y Saesson. Moreover, Powel makes clear that the chronicle existed in different versions, albeit without indicating the extent of the differences. Thus, while he states that Llwyd had translated a single chronicle, apparently in a late fourteenth-­century copy, and also extant in the manuscripts he possessed (described as ‘the Brytishe booke’ and similar terms),122 Powel also acknowledges that the content of those copies varied: for example, in references to details given in ‘some Brytish copies of this historie’.123 Irrespective of the precise nature of his principal source, Powel clearly wished to give the impression that his work was essentially an edition of a medieval Welsh text, whose importance he emphasized both by consulting manuscripts of it and by providing a fuller account of its composition than had Llwyd. On one level, then, Powel made accessible a monument of Welsh antiquity, which provided, at least from the mid-­twelfth century onwards, a largely contemporaneous record of the events related. However, the authority of The Historie was enhanced both by citing the testimony of numerous other sources, from the Middle Ages to the author’s own day, including official documents (which Llwyd had not used), some of which are quoted extensively, and by a critical treatment of their evidence exemplifying the philological approach expected of a Renaissance historian.124 Powel also reflected, to a greater extent than Llwyd, on the value and purpose of history. Such reflections largely appear in piecemeal fashion, for example, in elaborating on the causes and significance of particular events, usually with reference to human agency, though he followed Llwyd (in turn borrowing from Henry of Huntingdon) in attributing the Norman conquest of England to divine ven­ geance on the English.125 In addition, while he followed Llwyd in attributing the coming of Christianity to Britain to Joseph of Arimathea,126 Powel, an ordained Church of England clergyman, was much readier than his predecessor to vent reformist and anti-­Catholic sentiments, being quick to point out how history demonstrated the greed of the Church of Rome and its promotion of superstitious beliefs and practices, which, moreover, he condemned as remaining all too prevalent in the Wales of his day.127 In this respect, his approach was animated by some of the same concerns that were fundamental to the historically oriented

122  E.g. Powel, HC, sig. ¶viir; see also ibid., D22, 8, 110, 249, 327. 123 Powel, HC, 42, and see also 34, 174. Likewise a reference to ‘The Brytish booke of the Abbeie of Stratflur [Strata Florida]’ may imply that copies from other abbeys differed in their content: Powel, HC, 270. 124  Documents: Powel, HC, sig. ¶viiv, D6, 271, 309, 324–5, 328–9, 338–71, 391. Critical analysis of sources: Powel, HC, 9–12, 74–5, 222; Powel, PV, 214–16, n. 4, 245–6, nn. 1–2, 254. Cf. Popper, Walter Ralegh’s History, 54–6. 125 Powel, HC, 21, 102, 116; cf. Henry, Archdeacon of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, ed. and trans. Greenway, 402–3; Llwyd, CW, 39–42. 126 Powel, HC, 12–13. 127 Powel, HC, 5, 194, 271, 309; Powel, PV, 74, 75, 84–8, 93, 96, 97, 99, 200–2, 208, 214–16, 276–7.

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FRAMING THE HISTORY OF WALES, 1540–1620  143 works of John Bale, Matthew Parker, or John Foxe.128 However, unlike those Protestant writers, Powel did not conceive of history primarily as an instrument for religious ends. This is clear when he comes closest to offering a coherent apologia for the value of history, in the dedication to Sir Philip Sidney, son of Sir Henry, which prefaces the edition of Gerald’s Itinerarium Kambriae. For what is more fitting for a noble than to unfold in his heart past memories of old times; to recall to mind the illustrious deeds of the most renowned men; to place before his eyes the forms, beginnings, growth, and condition of states; to discern the causes and consequences of events; to preserve famous histories and draw them out from darkness to light, and choose from those which are found to conform with virtue and apply them to ordering one’s life rightly?129

This defence of the value of history came in the conventional context of praising a patron.130 It was also conventional in its echoing of the classical emphasis on the exemplary value of history as a subject whose cultivation contributed to the moral improvement of its students and equipped them for public life as counsellors and servants of the state.131 Thus Powel proceeded to commend Sir Henry Sidney for exemplifying a devotion to history linked and also contributing to selfless public service in war and government; accordingly, his recovery of the past through sponsoring the publication of historical works was of a piece with his repair and restoration of castles, hospitals, roads, and ruined houses.132 Powel likewise relates the study of the past to the discharge of public responsibilities by urging Sir Philip Sidney, in his dedication of The Historie, to imitate his father in profiting from the example of ‘the acts of the famous men of elder times’, and notes that Sir Henry Sidney had devoted ‘great expenses and labour’ to obtain ‘the histories of Wales and Ireland (which countries for manie yeeres with great loue and commendation he gouerned)’.133 While clearly intended to flatter the Sidneys, such praises served a wider apologetic purpose, most evident in The Historie, namely an attempt to assert an ­honourable place for the Welsh in the new political order created by Henry VIII’s union legislation, which Powel unequivocally welcomed.134 For example, he concluded that, since the English had lost their former status under William the Conqueror, ‘all the ancient noble men, and gentlemen within this land, are descended either from the Normans and French, or from the Brytaines’.135 Powel 128  Cf. Robinson, ‘ “Dark Speeche” ’; Greengrass and Philpott, ‘John Bale’. 129 Powel, PV, 49. 130 Powel, HC, sig. ¶iiir, iiiv–iiiir, 400–1; Powel, PV, sig. A2r–v, pp. 49–52. Annotated translations of the Latin prefaces in Rhagymadroddion a Chyflwyniadau Lladin, trans. Davies, 48–57, 161–4. 131 Cf. Bodin, Method, 9, 12–14; Rhagymadroddion a Chyflwyniadau Lladin, trans. Davies, 9–10; Popper, Walter Ralegh’s History, 3–4, 36–9, 45–7, 53–59, 239–47. 132 Powel, PV, 51 [recte 50]–51. 133 Powel, HC, sig. ¶iiiv. 134 Powel, HC, sig. viiir–v; see also Powel, HC, 394–5; Powel, PV, 276. 135 Powel, HC, 117.

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144  WRITING WELSH HISTORY likewise sought to vindicate the honour of the Welsh in his edition of Gerald’s Descriptio Kambriae, not only by omitting, without explanation, the work’s second book, which criticized the Welsh and offered advice on how they might be conquered, but by praising ‘the remnants of the ancient Britons’ in the age of Elizabeth for their intelligence, study of civil law, and understanding of politics.136 Above all, Powel wished to demonstrate that the Welsh had a distinguished history which deserved respect. Sidney lent powerful support to this idea, since he had not only collected copies of works pertaining to the history of Wales but also commissioned and financed their publication. Notwithstanding conventional declarations of inadequacy for the task,137 Powel evidently welcomed Sidney’s commissions as opportunities to pursue his own historiographical agenda. This is particularly clear in the case of The Historie, which Powel undertook with the explicit aim of redressing Welsh history’s marginalization. First: I see the politike and martiall actes of all other inhabitants of this Island, in the time of their gouernment to be set out to the vttermost, and that by diuers and sundrie writers: and the whole doings and gouernment of the Brytaines the first inhabitants of the land, who continued their rule longer than anie other nation, to be nothing spoken of nor regarded of anie, especialie since the reigne of Cadwalader, hauing so manie monuments of antiquitie to declare and testifie the same, if anie would take the paines to open and discouer them to the vew [sic] of the world.138

The emphasis on a wider British context, encapsulated in the description of Wales as ‘a part of the most famous yland of Brytaine’ in The Historie’s title, is consistent with Llwyd’s thinking, and further emphasized by the synchronizing of the reigns of Welsh rulers with those of kings of England by including the names of both as headings at the top of each page (for example, Edward the Elder and Idwal Foel in Fig. 6.1).139 Second, Powel wrote in order to set the record straight. Here his target was ‘the slanderous report’ of writers who turned ‘euerie thing that is done by the Welshmen to their discredit, leauing out all the causes and circumstances of the same’. In particular, Powel condemned the tendency of ‘common Chronicles’ to relate how kings of England sent armies into Wales in order to subdue ‘the proud stomachs, the presumptuous pride, stirre, trouble, and rebellion of the fierce, vnquiet, craking, fickle and vnconstant Welshmen’, yet without offering any ‘open fact’ to justify these campaigns. By contrast, ‘this historie dooth shew the

136 Powel, PV, 261–2. 137 Powel, HC, sig. ¶iiiv; Powel, PV, sig. A2v. 138 Powel, HC, sig. vv–vir. 139  The first occurrence adds the name of Ecgberht besides those of Merfyn and Esyllt, and the practice is followed consistently from the reigns of Alfred and Rhodri Mawr: Powel, HC, 27, 33ff.

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FRAMING THE HISTORY OF WALES, 1540–1620  145 cause and circumstances of most of those warres, whereby the qualitie of the action may be iudged’.140 Powel developed his critique of English historians by maintaining that Welsh resistance to the Normans, far from constituting rebellion, was merely self-­ defence, since ‘by the law of Nature it is lawfull for all men to withstand force by force’—a maxim derived from Roman law.141 This exemplifies a preoccupation with the legal basis of authority also witnessed in his views on William the Conqueror’s claim to the throne of England, elements of which were based on ‘[v]erie weak titles of themselues’, and his assertion that the king had granted Norman lords the right to conquer lands in Wales in return for knight service.142 Likewise he significantly augments Llwyd’s account by tracing the succession of landed families and their estates, some to his own day.143 Conversely, an instance of fraternal conflict prompts Powel to expand on the damaging consequences of partible inheritance or gavelkind, ‘the cause . . . of the ouerthrow of all the ancient nobilitie of Wales’ as well as ‘much bludshead and vnnaturall strife and contention amongst brethren’.144 Above all, Powel reinforced Llwyd’s emphasis on lawful succession under the native princes, while also doing much more than his predecessor to connect the principality of Wales they created with its post-­conquest successor. Thus, whereas Llwyd alluded only briefly to the Mortimers being the rightful princes of Wales in succession to Llywelyn the Great, Powel asserted their title at length, citing in support both the laws of Hywel Dda and Welsh genealogies, and drew out a crucial implication: that Elizabeth I ‘by lineall descent is the right inheritrice of the Principalitie of Wales’. By contrast, ‘the title which Owen Glyndoure [Owain Glyndŵr] pretended to the principalitie of Wales was altogether friuolous’, as he was not descended from Llywelyn.145 However, Powel did not rely primarily on the Mortimer descent to justify the English crown’s right to Wales. There is no mention of that descent in the final part of The Historie he appended to Llwyd’s work, which relates the succession of English princes of Wales from the late thirteenth century to the author’s own day. Structured as a sequence of sections each headed by the name of a prince, this was clearly intended to present the post-­conquest princes as the legitimate successors of the 140 Powel, HC, sig. vir. The Welsh clergyman Meredith Hanmer (1543–1604) adapted this approach in his posthumously published Chronicle of Ireland (1633) in response to criticisms of the Welsh in Ireland, where he lived from 1591, by stressing their ancestors’ leading role in the conquest of the island: Rhys Morgan, The Welsh and the Shaping of Early Modern Ireland, 143–53. 141 Powel, HC, sig. viv, citing in the margin ‘vim vi repellere licet’. The rule in Roman law, ascribed to Gaius Cassius Longinus, added that ‘this right is conferred by nature’ and ‘arms may be repelled by arms’: The Digest of Justinian, 43,16,1,27, ed. Mommsen and Krueger, trans. Watson, 4: 584. 142 Powel, HC, 106, 151. Elsewhere Powel held that William had gained possession of the kingdom of England ‘by right of war’ (‘iure belli’): Powel, PV, 156, n. 1. 143 Powel, HC, 23, 141–8, 150, 211–18, 294–7, 312–13, 315–18, 378. 144 Powel, HC, 21. For an early seventeenth-­century identification of gavelkind with the ‘old Britons’ and Wales see Hiram Morgan, ‘ “Lawes of Ireland” ’, 311. 145 Powel, HC, 315–18 (quotations at 318). Other criticism of Glyndŵr at 386.

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146  WRITING WELSH HISTORY Welsh princes whose reigns had supplied the structure of the main part of The Historie. Indeed, it explicitly upholds their legitimacy by emphasizing how Edward I engineered the birth of his son Edward in Caernarfon castle, and, so Powel maintained, was thereby able to satisfy the demands of the Welsh to be governed by a Welsh prince.146 The story also reflects Powel’s association of the principality of Wales with the creation of stable government: Edward announced the birth of the prince to a gathering of Welsh notables whom he had summoned to discuss ‘the weale publike of their countrie’.147 Llwyd portrayed a Wales usually ruled by a plurality of kings and princes, though from the time of Rhodri Mawr a few of these had attained authority over the whole country, and in the thirteenth century Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, Dafydd ap Llywelyn, and Llywelyn ap Gruffudd were explicitly referred to by the title ‘Prince of Wales’.148 In his amendments and additions to Llwyd’s text Powel tried to superimpose greater constitutional coherence on this picture. True, he bestowed the title ‘Prince of Wales’ on a variety of rulers from the early ninth century onwards.149 Yet there is no mistaking his efforts to present an evolving pattern of government culminating in the establishment of the principality of Wales, which continued after the Edwardian conquest as an ap­pur­ten­ance of the English crown. Whereas the early ninth century ‘was a troublesome time, and as yet no staied gouernement established in Wales’,150 Rhodri Mawr (d. 878), ‘the vndoubted owner and possessor of all Wales’, had imposed regnal stability through defining the boundaries of the ‘three dominions’ of North Wales, South Wales, and Powys and establishing ‘a princelie house in euerie of them’, before leaving these territories to his sons, who thereby became ‘[t]he three crowned princes’.151 Although the allocation of North Wales to the eldest son may have implied the superiority of its prince over the other Welsh rulers, this was only explicitly acknowledged in allusions to legal rules introduced by Rhodri’s grandson, Hywel Dda (d. 950), which stipulated tribute payments from the princes of Dinefwr (South Wales) and Powys to the prince of Aberffraw (North Wales), and from the latter to the king of England.152 This formed part of a major legal reform by Hywel to ensure ‘the quiet gouernement of the people’, whose importance Powel underlined by adapting an account of the reform given in a compilation of medieval Welsh law and summarizing some of the law’s provisions.153 Yet Powel

146 Powel, HC, 376–7. Cf. J. R. S. Phillips, Edward II, 34–6. 147 Powel, HC, 377. 148 Llwyd, CW, 200, 206, 208, 209, 210, 217, 218. 149 Powel, HC, 21, 97, 148, 259, 278, 401. 150 Powel, HC, 20. 151  Powel, HC, 35–6, and see also 211. Powel, PV, 243–4, n. 1, emphasizes that the tripartite div­ision itself long antedated Rhodri. 152 Powel, HC, 50, 61, 315. For Aberffraw and Dinefwr as the chief courts respectively of Gwynedd and Deheubarth see DK, I. 4. 153 Powel, HC, 52–7 (the lawbook’s diagram of hearings of the royal court is reproduced at 56). See also Powel, PV, 138, n. 5. The account of Hywel’s legal reform appears to be based on the prologue to the version of Latin Redaction E written by John Dee: cf. The Latin Texts of the Welsh Laws, ed.

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FRAMING THE HISTORY OF WALES, 1540–1620  147 also held (correctly) that Owain Gwynedd (d. 1170) had been the first Welsh ruler to assume the title ‘Prince of Wales’, and, while adding that ‘the rest after him kept that title and stile’, acknowledged that practice had been inconsistent; indeed, he later implied that Llywelyn ap Gruffudd (d. 1282) was only the third to bear this title.154 In any case, the native princes had only laid the foundations of orderly government in Wales: its perfection fell to the Tudors. Henry VII had removed discriminatory laws, while Henry VIII’s Acts of Union had given the Welsh legal equality with the English and established a county-­based administrative structure throughout Wales.155 Indeed, in his edition of the Descriptio Kambriae, Powel maintained that, through God’s mercy, the union had given the Welsh precisely ‘the moderate government of a single good prince’ which Gerald deemed essential to their prosperity.156 In addition, special praise was given to the Council in the Marches of Wales. This is treated as essentially a Welsh institution, with scant notice given to its jurisdiction over the border counties of England (perhaps because this was only seriously challenged from the 1590s), though Powel concluded his work by celebrating Sidney’s repair of the Council’s seat at Ludlow castle in Shropshire.157 However, he also implied that Sidney embodied continuity with the pre-­conquest political order through tracing his maternal ancestry to both Gruffudd ap Cynan (d. 1137), ‘Prince of Northwales’, and Ednyfed Fychan (d. 1246),‘cheefe counseller and steward to Lhewelyn ap Iorwerth Prince of Wales’.158 Furthermore, Powel not only related the history of the Council from its origins under Edward IV159 but presented it as integral to Henry VIII’s policy in Wales: after describing the king’s union legislation, he added that ‘[f]urther for the keeping of the countrie in continuall obedience . . . there was ordeined a President and counsell to remaine within the dominion and Principalitie of Wales’.160 The history of the Council was set in the sections on the Princes of Wales that provide the framework for the period after the Edwardian conquest. However, since the Principality of Wales had been ‘incorporated to the crowne and kingdome of England’ by Henry VIII the status of Prince of Wales was no longer separate from the crown; this in turn probably enhanced the significance of the Council and its ‘Lord President of Emanuel, 410–11, 434–5; VGC, 18–19 and n. 83; Russell, ‘ “Divers Evidences Antient of Some Welsh Princes” ’, 410–11, 415–18. Powel’s interest in Welsh law and custom may have been influenced by William Lambarde (1536–1601), whose edition of Ine’s laws (presumably in his Archaionomia (1568)) is referred to, and who included a lengthy appendix on Kentish gavelkind in his Perambulation of Kent (1576), though the latter lacks any close parallels with Powel’s much shorter account of gavelkind in Wales: Powel, HC, 10; see also Powel, HC, sig. viiv; Powel, ‘De Britannica Historia’, 284; Lambarde, Perambulation of Kent, 388–427. 154 Powel, HC, 6; Powel, PV, 138, n. 5. 155 Powel, HC, 390, 394–5. 156 Powel, PV, 276 (note referring to end of DK I.18). 157 Powel, HC, 401. Cf. Penry Williams, The Council in the Marches, 197–204. For a different interpretation see Nice, Sacred History, 75, 82. 158 Powel, HC, 400–1. 159 Powel, HC, 389–90, 391–2, 393, 394, 395–401. 160 Powel, HC, 395.

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148  WRITING WELSH HISTORY Wales’ in the minds of Powel and his patron.161 The Council represented a devolution of jurisdictional authority that was essential, so Powel held, to the effective government of the principality, as it was this, with its ‘verie wise gouernors’, which had ‘reduced the countrie of Wales to quietnesse, obedience and ciuilitie’.162 By contrast, Powel criticized the English crown’s adoption of harsh measures against the Welsh in the past, such as the punitive legislation passed in response to the rising of Owain Glyndŵr.163

Family and Locality Powel shaped understandings of Welsh history until the nineteenth century. However, his was only one approach to the Welsh past adopted during his lifetime. Since the early Middle Ages, that past was most commonly mediated through stories, places, and families located in individual localities, perceptible through glimpses in poetry, genealogies, and narrative sources such as the Historia Brittonum (‘History of the Britons’), saints’ Lives, Gerald of Wales’s Itinerarium Kambriae (‘Journey round Wales’), and the writings of Gutun Owain. In addition, Gerald and others had written accounts that gave a starring role to marcher lords. From the 1560s, the place of the past in particular localities, especially in areas of south Wales conquered by the Normans, found expression in new kinds of texts. Like the histories of Llwyd and Powel, these were written in English by members of the Welsh gentry open to the culture of Wales as well as to antiquarian developments they pursued in common with their English counterparts.164 More particularly, much of it exemplified the new kind of chorographical writing developed in England from the later sixteenth century, wide-­ranging studies of counties or other localities that combined topography and history, an approach applied to the whole island in the county descriptions of Camden’s Britannia.165

161 Powel, HC, 396. For debates among sixteenth- and early seventeenth-­century historians and antiquaries about the lack of princes of Wales after Henry VIII’s accession see Peter R. Roberts, ‘Wales and England’, 117, 123, 127, n. 53, 133. Sidney and his five immediate predecessors from Edward VI’s reign onwards were called ‘Lord President of Wales’: Powel, HC, 397–401; the titles applied to earlier Presidents emphasized their connection with the Council, rather than Wales: Powel, HC, 391, 392, 393, 394. This variety is paralleled in official documents: Skeel, The Council in the Marches, 285–6. 162 Powel, HC, 396. The history of the Council was also related by the lawyer Sir John Dodderidge (1555–1628), in an account of the Principality of Wales written c.1604, who pointed up its role in assisting the Prince of Wales as part of an attempt to persuade James I to revive the Principality: Dodderidge, The History, 22, 24, 38–9, 52–5; see further Peter R. Roberts, ‘Wales and England’, 126–7; Lloyd Bowen, The Politics of the Principality, 70, n. 118. 163 Powel, HC, 387–8; see also 336–7, 390. 164  For valuable discussion and context see Deakin, ‘The Early County Historians’; Broadway, ‘No historie so meete’; Lloyd Bowen, ‘Fashioning Communities’. 165  Mendyk, ‘Early British Chorography’; Cormack, ‘ “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors” ’, 641–3, 655–61; cf. Broadway, ‘No historie so meete’, 31.

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FRAMING THE HISTORY OF WALES, 1540–1620  149 The works fall into two closely overlapping genres focused on the gentry and particular localities, namely family histories and chorographical descriptions of counties, which, as in England, mostly circulated in manuscript without being published.166 The one exception is the earliest, the ‘Winning of the Lordship of Glamorgan’, which exhibits features of both genres. It was written, probably between 1561 and 1566, by Sir Edward Stradling (1529–1609) of St Donat’s castle in Glamorgan in response to a request by Sir William Cecil (a good illustration of the networks connecting antiquarian-­minded gentry in England and Wales). A  wealthy landowner with a legal training and a prominent public figure in south Wales, Stradling exemplified the wide interests and accomplishments of a Renaissance gentleman: the possessor of a notable library at St Donat’s, he was famed both for his own scholarship and for his generosity to other scholars.167 His highly inaccurate account drew on a legend, attested in other versions, which may originally have been concocted in the later Middle Ages by herald poets in Glamorgan, partly in order to explain place-­names in the county. It related how Robert fitz Hamon and twelve other Norman knights took advantage of dissension among the Welsh to conquer the kingdom of Morgannwg (Glamorgan), and traced the subsequent fate of the families and their estates, taking particular care to emphasize the alleged origins and the achievements of the Stradlings.168 The work was influential, circulating fairly extensively in manuscript, and became even better known after its inclusion in Powel’s Historie of Cambria, being the only one of the texts considered here to be published in the author’s lifetime.169 It also served as one model for the unpublished ‘Historie of Brecon’ mainly written, it seems, by Thomas ap John of Llanfrynach (Breconshire). Possibly composed between c.1585 and c.1625, and extant in shorter and longer versions continuing respectively to the late eleventh and early seventeenth centuries, this celebrated the county’s status as ‘a countey palantyne or a lordshipp Marcher’ and, after a brief account of the early medieval period, traced the descent of estates founded by the twelve Norman knights who had allegedly conquered the Welsh kingdom of Brycheiniog.170 At about the same time, Sir John Wynn (1553–1627) of Gwydir in the Conwy valley, another recipient of legal training and a wealthy and influential figure in north Wales who patronized Welsh vernacular culture and learning, drafted three unfinished versions in English of his family history, the earliest datable to c.1595, 166 Broadway, ‘No historie so meete’, 8–9, 36–9. 167 Ceri  W.  Lewis, ‘Syr Edward Stradling’, esp. 153–88; Graham  C.  G.  Thomas, ‘The Stradling Library’; Ralph A. Griffiths, ‘Stradling, Sir Edward’; J. Gwynfor Jones, ‘Wynn, Sir John’. 168 ‘Sir Edward Stradling’s “Winning of the Lordship of Glamorgan” ’, in Merrick, Morganiae Archaiographia, ed. James, 150–64, with discussion at 147–50; G.  J.  Williams, Traddodiad Llenyddol Morgannwg, 184–90; G. J. Williams, ‘The Early Historians of Glamorgan’, 64–6, 69; Ralph A. Griffiths, Conquerors and Conquered, 19–29; Ceri W. Lewis, ‘Syr Edward Stradling’, 147–52, 184–203. 169 Powel, HC, 122–41; Ceri W. Lewis, ‘Syr Edward Stradling’, 148. 170  Deakin, ‘Early County Historians’, 178–91, quotation at 178.

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150  WRITING WELSH HISTORY which he traced from Gruffudd ap Cynan (d. 1137) to the end of the fifteenth century.171 Like Stradling, Wynn sought to enhance the status of his family by endowing it with a spurious antiquity.172 However, he also went further and attributed its success to divine favour, declaring that ‘by the goodness of God we are and continue in the reputation of gentlemen . . . unto this day’.173 A concern with ancestry and status is also apparent in an English-­language Life of Sir Rhys ap Thomas composed about a century after his death in 1525 by his descendant Henry Rice (c.1590–c.1651).174 However, this differs from Wynn’s work both in its humanist character, evident in its debt to Tacitus, Plutarch, and Erasmus, and its apologetic purpose, as Rice sought to restore the family’s reputation following the attainder for treason of Rhys ap Gruffydd in 1531 by emphasizing the loyal service his grandfather, the work’s ‘heroe’ Sir Rhys ap Thomas, had rendered to Henry VII—including the alleged killing of Richard III at the battle of Bosworth— and Henry VIII.175 The chorographical descriptions of counties extended from geography and agriculture to history, including gentry families and their genealogies. Morganiae Archaiologia (1578–84), written by Rice Merrick (Rhys Amheurig) (d. 1587), a landowner and lawyer from Cottrell in the Vale of Glamorgan, was inspired by William Lambarde’s Perambulation of Kent (1577); indeed, it may be the earliest response to Lambarde’s appeal for similar books to be written about other ­counties.176 Its first two books give a historical account of the county from the pre-­Norman period to Merrick’s own day, while the third (which is incomplete) provides a topographical description arranged by hundreds and their parishes. (By contrast, Rice Lewis organized his survey of the same county, A Breviat of Glamorgan (1596–1600), by estates and their owners, and included pedigrees of the latter—an arrangement more typical of local history writing in early modern England.)177 George Owen of Henllys (1552–1613), lord of Cemais in northern Pembrokeshire, attempted something similar to Merrick but on a more comprehensive scale in his Description of Penbrokshire (1603), of which only the first of two projected parts was completed.178 This may well have been influenced by

171 Wynn, The History of the Gwydir Family, ed. Ballinger; cited here from Wynn, History of the Gwydir Family, ed. Jones. See also Gresham, ‘Sir John Wynn’, 24, 25–6, 32, 69–70; Huws, ‘John Wynn’s History of the Gwydir Family’. 172 For the family’s claims of descent from Gruffudd ap Cynan see Gresham, ‘Sir John Wynn’, 34–40, 50–1. 173 Wynn, History of the Gwydir Family, ed. Jones, 15–16, 31, quotation at 16. 174 Ralph A. Griffiths, Sir Rhys ap Thomas, Part II; context, authorship, and likely date (1622 × 1627) discussed at 135–43. 175 Ralph A. Griffiths, Sir Rhys ap Thomas, 140, 143, 229–30, 268 (quotation). 176 Merrick, Morganiae Archaiographia, ed. James. 177  Rice Lewis, ‘A Breviat of Glamorgan’, ed. Rees; Deakin, ‘Early County Historians’, 163–77; cf. Broadway, ‘No historie so meete’, 168–71. 178  George Owen, ‘The Description of Penbrokshire’, ed. Owen; here cited from George Owen, The Description of Pembrokeshire, ed. Miles (text in modernized orthography). The best account of Owen’s

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FRAMING THE HISTORY OF WALES, 1540–1620  151 Richard Carew’s Survey of Cornwall (1602), whose structure it broadly resembles.179 Though like many gentry in England Owen completed his education by briefly attending one of the Inns of Chancery in London, which presumably en­abled him  to acquire some legal knowledge, Owen was both widely read and keenly observant and compiled numerous other antiquarian and topographical works, including genealogical collections and, in the mid-­1590s, treatises on the origins and legal status of marcher lordships and on the government of Wales; he was also asked by Camden to provide the map of Pembrokeshire for the 1607 edition of Britannia.180 In varying degrees, all the works considered here may be seen as extensions of their gentry authors’ interest in genealogy; indeed, Merrick and Owen began their antiquarian studies by making genealogical compilations and the latter had close connections with the College of Arms whose influence is evident on the armorials he compiled.181 For Stradling, Owen, and Wynn, this was linked to a strong sense of family pride. However, in the case of Owen, this was less pronounced than the pride he took in his native county of Pembrokeshire typical of chorography.182 As for Stradling and especially Merrick with respect to Glamorgan, as well as for Thomas ap John in his account of Breconshire, affection for the county was sustained by a keen sense of its representing a long-­established territorial entity, first as a Welsh kingdom, then, more importantly, as a marcher lordship. True, there were differences of interpretation and emphasis. Merrick is more sympathetic than Owen to the conquered Welsh, ‘defrauded’ of their kingdom by Normans, just as the treacherous Saxons had deprived the Britons of the sovereignty of England, concluding—again in Gildasian vein—that God had deprived the Welsh of the kingdom of Glamorgan as punishment for their sins.183 He also implies that, despite their subjugation, ‘the ancient Glamorganians’ had continued to shape the history of the county. Thus, the extensive regalian rights enjoyed by the Norman lords, though bestowed on fitz Hamon by William II (1087–1100), were granted ‘in as ample manner as the former lords enjoyed’, while, as a result of intermarriage, natives and newcomers were reconciled, ‘thereby secluding the difference between the victorious and the vanquished’. By contrast, very few direct descendants of the conquerors remained.184 Rice Lewis also life and works remains Charles, George Owen of Henllys. See also Charles, ‘George Owen of Henllys: Addenda’; Deakin, ‘Early County Historians’, 244–67; Miles, ‘ “An Exquisite Antiquary” ’. 179  Cf. George Owen, ‘The Description of Penbrokshire’, ed. Owen, vi, n. 1, xvii. 180 Charles, George Owen of Henllys, 28–9, 107–10, 131–5, 155–9; George Owen, ‘The Dialogue of the Government of Wales’, ed. Owen; The Dialogue of the Government of Wales, ed. Jones (text in modernized orthography); George Owen, ‘A Treatise of Lordshipps Marchers’, ed. Owen. Cf. Broadway, ‘No historie so meete’, 72–3. 181 Merrick, Morganiae Archaiographia, ed. James, xxiii–xxiv; Charles, George Owen of Henllys, 107–11, 118–19, 123. 182  Cf. Cormack, ‘ “Good Fences” ’, 643, 657, 658. 183 Merrick, Morganiae Archaiographia, ed. James, 21–5, 35. 184 Merrick, Morganiae Archaiographia, ed. James, 26, 34–5.

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152  WRITING WELSH HISTORY emphasized the pre-­ Norman origins of Glamorgan by asserting that Henry Herbert (c.1538–1601), earl of Pembroke, to whose household steward he dedicated his survey of the county, was a direct descendant of the Welsh lord Iestyn ap Gwrgant (fl.  c.1081–c.1120) and ‘the greatest Lord that ever owed landes in Glamorgan eyther before or after Justins [Iestyn’s] tyme’.185 Owen, on the other hand, attributed the distinction of Pembrokeshire to its deep-­rooted Englishness. While acknowledging that the county traced its origins to the early medieval Welsh kingdom of Dyfed, he celebrated the Norman conquest and asserted that Henry I (1100–35) had established Pembrokeshire as a county palatine, thereby effectively making it part of the kingdom of England; that it had been the first part of Wales to adopt English laws; and that it could boast a longer history of loyalty to the English crown than the rest of the Principality.186 He had also previously argued that elsewhere in Wales marcher lords had exercised regalian rights as a consequence of royally sanctioned conquests, without implying any continuity from the Welsh rulers: while holding their lands in chief from the crown, those lords were exempt from royal jurisdiction and thus ‘forced . . . to assume & take vnto themselues such prerogative and authoritye within the saied Lordshipps, as to themselves seemed best, and were fitte for the quiett governement of anie countrie’.187 Small wonder, then, that Owen took pride in Pembrokeshire’s appellation as ‘little England beyond Wales’, or that, for all his Welsh ancestry and connections, he identified himself with ‘our Englishe nation’.188 Like the other writers discussed in this and the previous chapter, Owen looked back at the past from the perspective of a Wales incorporated into the kingdom of  England by Henry VIII. This explains his emphasis on the Englishness of Pembrokeshire: the county had taken a lead over the rest of Wales by having already been united with England since the time of Henry  I.  Indeed, he complained of the 1536 Act of Union’s creation of a uniform pattern of counties in Wales ‘that to bring our neighbour shires more English we were forced to become more Welsh’.189 Another striking instance of Owen’s integration of Wales in the history of the kingdom of England is the implausible portrayal of Owain Glyndŵr as a defender of legitimate monarchy against Lancastrian usurpation: had the English likewise resisted Henry IV and restored Richard II ‘their lawful King’, the Wars of the Roses could have been prevented ‘and many thousands of good

185  Rice Lewis, ‘A Breviat of Glamorgan’, ed. Rees, 108, and see also 92, 94–5. Lewis’s support for the earl of Pembroke against the Stradling and Mansell families in Glamorgan is highlighted by Deakin, ‘Early County Historians’, 165–70. 186  George Owen, The Description of Pembrokeshire, ed. Miles, 10–12, 154, 177–82, 198–200. See also George Owen, ‘A Treatise of Lordshipps Marchers’, ed. Owen, 139. 187  George Owen, ‘A Treatise of Lordshipps Marchers’, ed. Owen, 137–40, 148–9, 155, 173–9, quota­ tion at 139. 188  George Owen, The Description of Pembrokeshire, ed. Miles, 37, 187. 189  George Owen, The Description of Pembrokeshire, ed. Miles, 154.

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FRAMING THE HISTORY OF WALES, 1540–1620  153 English subjects been saved’.190 Merrick also presented Norman conquest and Henrician union as crucial turning-­points, but without suggesting that the one anticipated the other; instead he conventionally celebrated the union as heralding a new era of legal equality, order, and peace.191 Wynn took a similar line, albeit largely by way of implicit contrast with the violent disorder he highlighted in the fifteenth century.192 Their support for the union with England in turn points up how, in significant respects, writers of family history and chorography proceeded from the same assumptions as Llwyd and Powel in their national histories. Likewise, different genres of Welsh historical writing in the Elizabethan period shared a common preoccupation not only with forms of government and le­git­im­ ate rule but with law and the descent of estates, the latter concerns being reflected, for example, in comments on partible inheritance or gavelkind, whose damaging consequences for landowners were lamented by Powel and Wynn.193 Writers of different kinds of histories also adopted similar methods, notably by deploying both documentary records and orally transmitted material, the latter sometimes reinforced by the author’s eyewitness testimony—Merrick had ‘seen a skull preserved in Peterston church which was reported to be Sir Matho Sor’s head cut off by Owain [Glyndŵr]’.194 There was cross-­ fertilization, too: Powel inserted Stradling’s account of fitz Hamon and the twelve knights of Glamorgan into his Historie, while Owen and Wynn used the works of Powel.195 Nevertheless, the family histories and chorographical descriptions considered here also point up how common assumptions and methods could sustain different ways of writing about the Welsh past. There was a fundamental contrast between the narrative priorities of Llwyd and Powel, writers from north Wales who focused predominantly on the actions of medieval Welsh princes, especially the dynasty of Gwynedd, and the emphasis of Stradling, Merrick, Lewis, Thomas ap John, and Owen on the Norman conquerors and their descendants who had established marcher lordships in the south. This of course reflected the piecemeal nature of the establishment of Norman lordships in Wales and the ensuing lack of medieval narratives of conquest encompassing the country as a whole com­par­able to Gerald of Wales’s Irish works, which provided a framework for early modern 190  The Dialogue of the Government of Wales, ed. Jones, 79–80, quotations at 80. 191 Merrick, Morganiae Archaiographia, ed. James, 5, 26, 67–8, and cf. 13. By contrast, Stradling has only a glancing reference to the Acts of Union: Merrick, Morganiae Archaiographia, ed. James, 151. 192 Wynn, History of the Gwydir Family, ed. Jones, xxxii–xxxv, 20–1, 28–30, 33–4, 36–46, 51–6. 193 Powel, HC, 21; Wynn, History of the Gwydir Family, ed. Jones, 15, 17, 21. See also Merrick, Morganiae Archaiographia, ed. James, 12, 15, 36; George Owen, The Description of Pembrokeshire, ed. Miles, 64–5. 194 Merrick, Morganiae Archaiographia, ed. James, 58, and see also 97, 100, 101, 106; George Owen, The Description of Pembrokeshire, ed. Miles, 194–6; Wynn, History of the Gwydir Family, ed. Jones, 10, 20–1, 27. For the readiness of sixteenth-­century chorographers to use oral sources see Woolf, ‘Senses of the Past’, 414. 195 Powel, HC, 122–41; George Owen, ‘The Description of Penbrokshire’, ed. Owen, 7, 8; Wynn, History of the Gwydir Family, ed. Jones, xxv, 81, 82.

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154  WRITING WELSH HISTORY histories of Ireland by the conquerors’ descendants.196 In addition, writers of chorography and family history (as also, albeit within a different framework, Elis Gruffudd) extended their chronological coverage well beyond the Edwardian conquest, in most cases down to their own day.197 This chronological range is exemplified by George Owen’s summary of Pembrokeshire writers, the first collection of Welsh biographies, which was indebted to John Bale and extended over a millennium from St Patrick in the fifth century to Richard Davies (d. 1581), bishop of St Davids and New Testament translator.198 Conversely, while Merrick and Owen alluded to aspects of the British History, the distant past mattered far less to the writers discussed in this section than it did for Elis Gruffudd, Llwyd, and Powel, for whom the end of British sovereignty in the late seventh century marked a fundamental transition. By contrast, both Merrick and Owen portray the key turning-­points in the history of their counties as the Norman conquests of the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries and the first Act of Union of 1536, and treat these as new beginnings in an ongoing story rather than terminal points inaugurating decline or extinction. The historical context Wynn encountered in north Wales was, of course, different. Yet, by focusing on family continuity he, too, sidestepped the barrier of 1282. Thus, although in tracing the origins of his family he drew on established interpretations of medieval Welsh history centred on the native princes, the Edwardian conquest and death of Llywelyn are mentioned only in passing and barely disrupt a narrative mainly concentrated on the following two centuries.199 As with his fellow antiquarian authors in south Wales, a focus on the local and the particular, influenced by chorographical writing in England, facilitated, indeed necessitated, different thematic and chronological approaches to the past from those of national histories whose narratives were substantially shaped by the assumptions and coverage of medieval Welsh chroniclers.

196  Cf. Lennon, ‘Ireland’. 197  Although Powel’s Historie appended an account of the English princes of Wales, this was clearly separated from the preceding ‘Historie of the Brytish Princes’ that ended in 1282: Powel, HC, 375–6. 198 Owen, The Description of Pembrokeshire, ed. Miles, 183–9. 199 Wynn, History of the Gwydir Family, ed. Jones, 7, 10, 13, 15.

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7 Refurbishing the Past Antiquarianism and Historical Writing, 1620–1707

From the 1620s to the early eighteenth century most writing about the Welsh past adhered to the paradigms established by Welsh Renaissance scholars of the Tudor period, and continued to be mainly preoccupied with the origins and early history of the Britons followed by the age of the Welsh kings and princes that ended with the death of Llywelyn in 1282.1 Historical inquiry remained primarily an antiquarian pursuit undertaken by and for the gentry and Anglican clergy, whose role became all the more important following the demise in this period of the professional poets who had played an important part since the later Middle Ages in the transmission of genealogical and historical learning.2 However, this was not simply a case of replicating the old. To begin with, the erudition applied to manuscript sources by some Welsh antiquaries—notably John Jones of Gellilyfdy, Robert Vaughan of Hengwrt, and William Maurice of Llansilin—helped to foster a more thorough and critical treatment of sources, reflecting a desire to establish understandings of British and Welsh history on a sounder basis than before.3 Moreover, at the end of the period Edward Lhuyd sought to adopt a systematic approach to the investigation of the Welsh past through a network of correspondents and appreciated the significance of archaeological and linguistic evidence as well as of manuscripts and documents. Nor was historical writing confined to the ranks of gentle-­born antiquaries, as popular understandings of the Welsh past, likewise focused on ancient origins and medieval rulers, found extensive expression in print for the first time thanks to the production of almanacs and other cheap publications from the late seventeenth century onwards. After outlining some important characteristics of Welsh history writing in this period, including the continuing preoccupation with the antiquity of the Welsh and their Christianity, the following discussion looks in turn at the work of Robert Vaughan of Hengwrt, Percy Enderbie, and William Wynne, with a particular focus on their reception and adaptation of Powel’s Historie. Finally, it assesses how far Edward Lhuyd adopted new approaches to Welsh history and 1  Assessments of Welsh history writing in this period in Geraint  H.  Jenkins, The Foundations of Modern Wales, 239–46; Philip Jenkins, ‘Seventeenth-­Century Wales’, 218–21, 230–1. 2  Suggett and White, ‘Language’, 63. Cf. the impact of the broadly contemporaneous decline of the Gaelic learned orders in Scotland: Martin MacGregor, ‘The Genealogical Histories’, esp. 197, 220–2. 3  For Jones (c.1578–c.1658) see Nesta Lloyd, ‘A History of Welsh Scholarship’. Writing Welsh History: From the Early Middle Ages to the Twenty-­First Century. Huw Pryce, Oxford University Press. © Huw Pryce 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198746034.003.0008

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156  WRITING WELSH HISTORY what he reveals of the Welsh historical culture of his day, including popular understandings of the past.

Old Pasts, New Contexts In many respects, of course, the predominantly antiquarian nature of inquiries into the Welsh past formed part of a wider pattern of historical writing in England and elsewhere.4 Likewise there were parallels for the profoundly genealogical character of Welsh history writing, both in its emphasis on the ancient origins of the Welsh people and in its preoccupation with the pedigrees of individual fam­ilies.5 Yet there were differences, too, reflecting the particular historical culture of Wales with its emphasis on the period down to the death of Llywelyn and the Edwardian conquest as well as the survival of a substantial body of medieval genealogical texts. Whereas for antiquaries such as Sir William Dugdale (1605–86) the Norman conquest marked a crucial moment in establishing the noble and gentry families of England, their Welsh counterparts tended to be traced from the royal dynasties of pre-­Norman Wales (apart from those claiming descent from Norman or English settlers).6 As well as sustaining family pride this focus on distant pedigrees allowed the seventeenth-­century Welsh gentry to assert their social status as descendants of an ancient political order, whose legacy had been transmitted to the English crown via Henry VII, within the wider polity of the kingdom of England which they accepted as the legitimate arena for the pursuit of their interests as landowners and office-­holders.7 The idea that Wales no longer had a fully-­fledged history of its own after the Edwardian conquest also helps to explain the paucity of Welsh narrative histories comparable to those composed in seventeenth-­century England, many of which dealt with recent events.8 Significantly, the works that came closest to narrative histories, Percy Enderbie’s Cambria Triumphans (1661) and William Wynne’s History of Wales (1697), largely revamped earlier accounts of the ancient and medieval past.9 By contrast, no narrative histories were written that focused 4  Cf. Shapiro, Probability and Certainty, 134–6; Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time, 14; Broadway, ‘No historie so meete’, esp. 4–6, 43–52. 5  Cf. Kidd, British Identities; Maclagan, ‘Genealogy and Heraldry’, esp. 43–8; Broadway, ‘No historie so meete’, 150–78; Allan, ‘ “What’s in a Name?” ’; Butaud and Piétri, Les enjeux de la généalogie, 23–4, 30, 33, 38–45, 50, 54, 57–8, 93–4, 145–6, 181–4. 6  For the paucity of pre-­Norman evidence and the impact of William the Conqueror see Dugdale, The Antiquities of Warwickshire, sig. [b1r–v]; Dugdale, The Baronage of England, 1: 1–22. See also Broadway, ‘No historie so meete’, 155; Graham Parry, ‘The Antiquities of Warwickshire’, 15. 7  J.  Gwynfor Jones, ‘The Welsh Gentry and the Image’; Geraint  H.  Jenkins, The Foundations of Modern Wales, 4–5; Morys, Y Rhyfel Cartrefol, ed. Jones, 45–6. 8  Cf. Woolf, ‘Narrative Historical Writing’. See also Allan, ‘ “What’s in a Name?” ’, 148, 150, 153–4. 9 In this respect they resembled Irish history writing: Cunningham, ‘Seventeenth-­ Century Reconstructions’.

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ANTIQUARIANISM AND HISTORICAL WRITING, 1620–1707  157 specifically on events in late medieval and early modern Wales. Admittedly the contrast should not be overstated: the distant past could take on new significance in the light of modern developments. Just as Dugdale’s labours to preserve know­ ledge of the great institutions of the Middle Ages gained urgency from the revolutionary events he decried, or Gildas’s savage portrayal of the ruin of the Britons offered a parallel that ‘allowed Milton to explore his misgivings about the progress of the revolution’ in his History of Britain,10 so too Percy Enderbie dedicated his Cambria Triumphans (1661) to Charles II as proof of the deep roots of mo­nar­chic­al government in Britain (the narrative begins with Brutus), declaring that the work ‘will lay open and unfold the manner of Great Brittains Government, which was ever Princely, (contrary to this Chymerical Anarchy)’.11 Robert Vaughan adopted a different royalist stance in his annotated text of Powel’s Historie of Cambria, also published after the Restoration, by emphasizing the loyalty to Charles I ‘in the recent troubles’ of Welsh gentry descended from the work’s medieval protagonists.12 The clergyman and antiquary William Williams (c.1625–1684) similarly deplored the impact of the Civil Wars on Beaumaris (Anglesey) in a history of the town he completed c.1669.13 The Civil Wars and Commonwealth were also remembered in ballads, strict-­ metre poems, and popular verse dialogues known as interludes (W. anterliwtiau), as well as in stories of losses of manuscripts recorded by Edward Lhuyd, including ‘[a] large British Manuscript History . . . which was burnt by ye Round Heads of  Pembrock-­shire’.14 In addition, the Denbighshire antiquary William Maurice (d. 1680) of Llansilin, best known for his collection and analysis of medieval sources relating to the centuries down to 1282, compiled a short but chrono­logic­al­ly precise account of events from 1638 to 1647 that resulted in parliamentary victories in north Wales.15 Probably intended for his private use, Maurice’s ‘Remembrances’ bear some affinities with memoirs of the Civil Wars written by some of his English contemporaries.16 However, it seems that no attempts were made to write extended narrative histories of the political upheavals of mid-­century 10  Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time, 217, 221–2, 224–8, 242; von Maltzahn, Milton’s History of Britain, ch. 5, quotation at 136. The conflicts of the 1640s also stimulated the reinterpretation of early Irish history in the following decade: Mark Williams, ‘History, the Interregnum and the Exiled Irish’. 11 Enderbie, Cambria Triumphans, sig. A2r–v (see also criticism of the Long Parliament (1641) at 269). For a much briefer and more eccentric invocation of early Welsh history in support of Charles Stuart’s restoration see Arise Evans, Rule from Heaven, esp. 23–6, and discussion in M. Wynn Thomas, ‘Morgan Llwyd’, 117–19. 12 Prise, A Description of Wales, 22, 26, 42, 51 (quotation), 71, 79, 87, 89. For Vaughan’s ambivalent political loyalties see Huws, Medieval Welsh Manuscripts, 289. 13  William Williams, ‘Historia Bellomarisei’, 295–301, date at 275. 14  Luned Mair Davies, ‘The Tregaer Manuscript’; Morys, Y Rhyfel Cartrefol, ed. Jones; Parochialia, 3: 59 (quotation). See also Lhuyd, Glossography, 225; Lhuyd to Thomas Tanner, 12 April 1698, in Gunther, Early Science, 369. Lhuyd’s letters also available online in Lhwyd, ‘The Correspondence’. 15  Robert Williams, ‘An Account of the Civil War’. See also Dafydd Jenkins, ‘Deddfgrawn William Maurice’; Huws, ‘Maurice, William’; Morys, Rhyfel Cartrefol, ed. Jones, 1, 5. 16  Cf. Woolf, ‘Narrative Historical Writing’, 218–19.

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158  WRITING WELSH HISTORY with particular reference to Wales, presumably because its part in these upheavals was seen as belonging to a wider narrative embracing the kingdom of England as a whole.17 It is surely no coincidence that the Welsh authors who composed the fullest accounts of the Civil War period had careers in England and that their narratives paid little attention to the land of their birth. Wales appears only incidentally in John Davies’s The Civil Warres of Great Britain and Ireland (1661), one of the first histories of the conflict sanctioned by the Restoration regime, while ‘The Military Memoirs of John Gwyn’, probably written c.1679–82 and relating events in England, Scotland, and the Netherlands, tellingly restricts its Welsh cover­age to a heraldic and genealogical defence of its author’s status as a gentleman who traced his descent from Brochwel Ysgithrog, early medieval king of Powys.18 Although other accounts of English history paid more attention to Wales, these also subsumed the Welsh in the history of England. The ambivalent nature of such treatment was expressed by the Anglican clergyman Thomas Fuller (1607/8–61), who appended a separate section on Wales to his biographical dictionary The Worthies of England on the grounds that ‘England cannot be well described without Wales, such the Intimacy of Relation betwixt them’.19 Usually, moreover, the Welsh made an appearance only when they had an impact on the English: for example, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1582?–1648) and Robert Brady (c.1627–1700) respectively summarized Henry VIII’s Acts of Union and the Treaty of Montgomery (1267).20 Nor was Percy Enderbie alone in invoking the British ancestors of the Welsh as evidence of the English monarchy. Daniel Langhorne (c.1635–1681), partly drawing on Geoffrey of Monmouth, related ‘the most Ancient Affairs of Britain . . . to the coming in of our English Nation’, while the Breconshire-­born James Howell (1594?–1666), England’s first Historiographer Royal, recruited Dunuallo Moelmutius, Lucius, and Arthur to the cause of proving the king of England’s superiority to his counterparts in France and Spain.21 The British History also retained its hold on understandings of the past in seventeenth-­century Wales. Copies continued to be made of the Welsh versions of Geoffrey’s History, including a notable example in the hand of Morgan ap Humphrey which had multiple owners through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.22 In 1629, Rowland Vaughan (c.1590–1667) of Caer-­gai (Merioneth)

17  A possible exception was the ‘Account of the Rebellion in North and South Wales, in the last Century’ listed among volumes in the Mostyn library in Pennant, The History of the Parishes, 73–4. 18 J[ohn] D[avies], The Civil Warres; Gwyn, Military Memoirs [ed. Scott] (Edinburgh, 1822) (descent from Brochwel omitted in the abridged edition in The Civil War, ed. Young and Tucker, 39–106). See also Lord, ‘Davies, John’; Neufeld, The Civil Wars after 1660, 24–38. 19  Fuller, ‘The Principality of Wales’, quotation from preface. 20 Herbert, The Life and Raigne, 369–75, 496; Pryce, ‘Historians and the Treaty of Montgomery’, 10. 21  James Howell, Proedria Basilikē, ‘Analysis Totius Operis’ (unpaginated), 9–11; Langhorne, An Introduction, quotation from preface ‘To the Reader’; Woolf, ‘Narrative Historical Writing’, 213, 225. 22 NLW MS 13B. Other seventeenth-­century copies of Brut y Brenhinedd are listed in Jones, HWMW, 432–3.

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ANTIQUARIANISM AND HISTORICAL WRITING, 1620–1707  159 assured the readers of his highly influential Welsh translation of Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety that the Welsh had settled Britain before the English and condemned Camden and his disciples for falsely maintaining that Brutus was invented by Geoffrey of Monmouth.23 Likewise c.1700 the antiquary and herald Hugh Thomas (1673–1720), a descendant of a Breconshire family living in London, compiled a list of rulers (apparently of Brycheiniog) which began with Brutus in 2855 bcE and continued down to 1685.24 Moreover, from the late seventeenth century the British History made its mark on popular print culture, as we shall see  at the end of this chapter. Nevertheless, such unreserved acceptance of the British History was by no means universal (indeed, Rowland Vaughan had changed his mind by 1655).25 Even some of its most ardent supporters, notably Robert Vaughan of Hengwrt and Percy Enderbie, thought it necessary to cite evidence in its defence.26 Others followed the examples set by Sir John Prise and David Powel and conceded that elements of that history had probably been fabricated, while insisting that it should not be dismissed outright. This was the line taken by Dr John Davies (c.1567–1644) of Mallwyd in his dictionary of the Welsh language (1632), although this also argued, in a manner reminiscent of John Lewis of Llynwene, that Britain had already been settled by Noah’s son Japhet when Brutus arrived.27 William Wynne (1671?–1704) likewise sought to steer a middle course in the lengthy preface to his History of Wales (1697), discussed below.28 The idea that Protestantism was simply a restoration of a pristine British Christianity independent of Rome also remained powerful in this period, being refurbished and adapted to meet new needs. The most impressive restatements of the classic Anglican version of this theory came from the pen of James Ussher (1581–1656), archbishop of Armagh from 1625, who, above all in his Britannicarum Ecclesiarum Antiquitates (‘Antiquities of the British Churches’, 1639), brought his vast erudition to bear on the sources for the origins of the British and Irish churches, partly in order to establish their history more ac­cur­ate­ly than before but also to demonstrate their independence before they succumbed to the corrupting influence of Rome.29 While not agreeing with all the sources he cited—which included Geoffrey’s History, in the ‘hope that it is possible to stumble upon jewels in a dunghill’—Ussher was sympathetic to staple accounts of the introduction of 23  Yr Ymarfer o Dduwioldeb, trans. Vaughan, sig. a2r–v; E.  D.  Jones, ‘Rowland Fychan’. Cf. Nesta Lloyd, ‘ “Yr Ymarfer o Dduwioldeb” ’. 24  BL, Harleian MS, 6831, fol. 14v (though 1685 is the last date in the list, the last-­named ruler occurs beside the preceding date of 1646). For Thomas see Francis Jones, ‘An Approach to Welsh Genealogy’, 421–8; Francis Jones, ‘Hugh Thomas’. 25  E. D. Jones, ‘Rowland Fychan’. Cf. Kendrick, British Antiquity, 99–133. 26  E. D. Jones, ‘Rowland Fychan’; Enderbie, Cambria Triumphans. See also Graham C. G. Thomas, ‘From Manuscript to Print’, 258. 27 John Davies, Antiquae Linguae Britannicae . . . Dictionarium Duplex, 8–9; Ceri Davies, ‘Introduction’, 2. 28 Wynne, History, sig. A4r–**4v. 29  Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time, ch. 5; Alan Ford, James Ussher, chs. 6 and 9.

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160  WRITING WELSH HISTORY Christianity to Britain by Joseph of Arimathea and of King Lucius’s requesting missionaries from Pope Eleutherius.30 Welsh writers also looked afresh at the origins of British Christianity. Arise Evans went so far as to claim that the Britons had effectively adopted Christianity a thousand years before Christ and in­geni­ ous­ly sought to reconcile the stories of Joseph of Arimathea and Lucius.31 More conventionally, the Puritan John Lewis expressed the hope that ‘we may recover our ancient blessing, and become as famous for our Christianity, at the last, as at first’, quoting ‘that famous Wickliffian’ Walter Brut that the Britons were one of God’s chosen peoples and might be used to overthrow the Antichrist.32 In conventional but fiercely polemical vein the Oswestry-­born clergyman Thomas Jones frequently cited ‘the great Usher’, and also drew on the Welsh laws and Gerald of Wales to demonstrate the piety of the Welsh, in an anti-­Catholic tract published during the Popish Plot of 1678 asserting that the ‘Old Brittish Church’ was ‘much more Ancient and pure than that of Rome’, having originated with Joseph of Arimathea, and that it was restored by Henry VIII ‘of Brittish descent’ through ‘the lawful ejection of an old Intruder’.33 Shortly afterwards Edward Stillingfleet (1635–99) similarly sought to portray the Church of England as the true heir of ancient British Christianity, but with a greater critical rigour indebted to Mabillon’s De Re Diplomatica (1681) that led him to dismiss the story of Joseph of Arimathea as a legend concocted by the monks of Glastonbury and also to express grave doubts about ‘Monkish Traditions’ concerning King Lucius.34 Charles Edwards (c.1628–c.1691), an Oxford-­educated clergyman and writer from Denbighshire, produced a Puritan interpretation of religious history far more substantial than the brief appeals to the Welsh past by John Penry and John Lewis.35 Edwards’s Y Ffydd Ddi-­Ffuant (‘The Unfeigned Faith’) evolved over three editions published respectively in 1667, 1671, and 1677.36 Its use of history was strictly subordinated to religious priorities. Initially, this was essentially a matter of popularizing John Foxe’s Protestant interpretation of the past. However, in the second and third editions Edwards supplemented this with a lengthy section on ‘The History of the Faith among the Welsh’ (‘Hanes y ffydd ymmhlith y cymru’), which he evidently believed would increase the book’s appeal to its intended readers. The section was heavily indebted not only to 30  Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time, 139; Alan Ford, James Ussher, 212–14, quotation at 213. 31  Arise Evans, Rule from Heaven, 6–10. 32  [John Lewis], Contemplations upon these Times, 27–32, quotations at 30, 32. 33  T[homas] J[ones], Of the Heart, and its Right Soveraign, esp. preface ‘To the Reader’ and sections IV–XII; quotations at 129, 151, 187, 192. See also J. Gwynfor Jones, ‘Jones, Thomas’. Thanks to Lloyd Bowen for drawing this work to my attention. 34 Stillingfleet, Origines Britannicae, 6–14, 58–70, quotation at 62. See also Douglas, English Scholars, 253–5; Lurbe, ‘Entre histoire et mythistoire’. 35  The fullest study of Edwards remains D. L. Morgan, ‘A Critical Study’. See also M. Wynn Thomas, ‘Seventeenth-­Century Puritan Writers’; D. Densil Morgan, Theologia Cambrensis, 225–31. 36 References are given here to the third edition: Charles Edwards, Y Ffydd Ddi-­ ffuant, ed. Williams; discussion of the three editions at liv–lvii.

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ANTIQUARIANISM AND HISTORICAL WRITING, 1620–1707  161 Bishop Richard Davies’s letter to the Welsh (1567), which Edwards had reissued in 1671, but also to Gildas’s sixth-­century De Excidio Britanniae (‘Ruin of Britain’), parts of which Edwards translated into Welsh from Polydore Vergil’s edition.37 Indeed, Edwards saw himself as a latter-­day Gildas (he even entitled later admonitions addressed to his contemporaries ‘Gildas Minimus’), using history to further his wider prophetic purpose of bringing the Welsh—identified, like Gildas’s Britons, with the people of Israel—back to God, an identification reinforced by insisting on the Welsh language’s close derivation from Hebrew.38 Thus, while occasionally voicing patriotic, and even anti-­English, sentiment in his account of medieval Wales, Edwards had no doubt that the oppression suffered by the Welsh was the result of sin; resistance without repentance was useless.39 Ultimately, there was little heroic about a medieval past disfigured by violence and disorder. By contrast, the Acts of Union were welcomed as a liberation from legal discrimination that demonstrated the remission of divine anger against the Welsh.40 Likewise the high point of Welsh history came with the subsequent arrival of the Scriptures in Welsh through the agency of the English, neighbours providentially transformed from ‘rapacious wolves’ to ‘caring shepherds’.41 While the future of the Welsh was by no means guaranteed, since they were ‘today only a small part of the remnant of the Britons’ in danger of being dispatched to oblivion by their divine maker, they had nevertheless survived political conquest and union thanks to divine mercy and might continue to flourish ­provided they ensured the revival of the faith of their distant forefathers.42 For Edwards, then, the history of the Welsh was fundamentally that of their relationship with God.

History, Genealogy, and Gentry: Robert Vaughan of Hengwrt and His World Robert Vaughan (1592–1667) of Hengwrt (near Dolgellau, Merioneth) provides a link between the Welsh antiquaries of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean period and the Restoration.43 One of his earliest works, composed c.1620 but unpublished

37  Charles Edwards, Y Ffydd Ddi-­ffuant, ed. Williams, 162–85. 38 Charles Edwards, Y Ffydd Ddi-­ffuant, ed. Williams, 150, 394–421; Charles Edwards, Fatherly Instructions, 182–202. For the first systematic attempt to prove a close relationship between Welsh and Hebrew see Poppe, ‘John Davies and the Study of Grammar’, 124–30, 135–7, 145; and, for the wider European context, Kidd, British Identities, 30–2. 39  Charles Edwards, Y Ffydd Ddi-­ffuant, ed. Williams, 97–8, 194, 195. 40  Charles Edwards, Y Ffydd Ddi-­ffuant, ed. Williams, 197–8. 41  Charles Edwards, Y Ffydd Ddi-­ffuant, ed. Williams, 209–10, quotations at 210. 42  Charles Edwards, Y Ffydd Ddi-­ffuant, ed. Williams, 211–14, quotation at 211. 43  E. D. Jones, ‘Robert Vaughan’; Richard Morgan, ‘Robert Vaughan’; T. E. Parry, ‘Llythyrau Robert Vaughan’; Huws, Medieval Welsh Manuscripts, 287–302.

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162  WRITING WELSH HISTORY until 1662, was a response to a treatise composed c.1600 by the Pembrokeshire antiquary George Owen of Henllys, whose writings on the lordship of Cemais Vaughan also sought to acquire.44 A member of a gentry family in Merioneth which counted among its ancestors Bleddyn ap Cynfyn (d. 1075), king of Gwynedd, Vaughan had the means and leisure to pursue his antiquarian interests. He not only became the greatest collector of books in early modern Wales, amassing a library containing probably almost 3,000 printed books and over 550 manuscripts, the latter eventually becoming the foundational collection of the National Library of Wales in 1909,45 but, thanks to his familiarity with these and other sources, earned a high reputation in antiquarian circles both within and beyond Wales for his extensive knowledge of genealogy, heraldry, history, and literature. Vaughan’s social status not only facilitated his engagement with the Welsh past but significantly shaped its purpose. As with the first generation of gentleman antiquaries such as George Owen and George Owen Parry, antiquarian endeavour served to enhance gentry status in two related respects. On the one hand, it furnished Welsh gentry families with pedigrees and coats of arms that symbolized their descent from medieval Welsh royalty or nobility. Although the gentry’s pride in its pedigrees was condemned by the Puritan Morgan Llwyd (1619–59) of Wrexham, and by the Anglican reformer and satirist Ellis Wynne of Y Lasynys (Merioneth) in his Gweledigaethau y Bardd Cwsc (‘Visions of the Sleeping Bard’, 1703), such criticisms merely underline the ubiquity of such thinking.46 Equally, though, the antiquarian expertise that legitimated such families’ claims to ancient descent was in turn regarded, by both Vaughan and others, as an accomplishment that further enhanced his own status among both the Welsh gentry and the wider antiquarian world represented by correspondents including John Selden and Archbishop Ussher. Thus some gentry were better antiquaries than others: Rowland Vaughan’s doubts about the existence of Brutus elicited a dismissive put-­down from his kinsman Robert that ‘you shew your want of skill in Antiquitie’.47 Vaughan published very little during his lifetime. Much of his work survives as annotations of manuscripts he acquired and transcripts of others.48 He also composed a survey of his native county of Merioneth, probably intended as a revision of Camden, which included comment on historical events and antiquities from the age of Arthur to the Wars of the Roses, wrote a brief discussion of the chron­ology

44 Vaughan, British Antiquities Revived; Vaughan to Richard Herbert, 25 March 1656, in T. E. Parry, ‘Llythyrau Robert Vaughan’, 330. Owen’s authorship of the treatise to which Vaughan responded was established by Charles, George Owen, 140–3. 45 Huws, Medieval Welsh Manuscripts, 295–9. 46 Morgan Llwyd, Llyfr y Tri Aderyn, ed. Thomas, 56; Geraint  H.  Jenkins, The Foundations of Modern Wales, 235. For Llwyd this was part of a broader renunciation of the culture of his youth: M. Wynn Thomas, ‘Morgan Llwyd’, 115, 127. 47  E. D. Jones, ‘Rowland Fychan’. 48  See e.g. Thomas Jones, ‘Cyfieithiad Robert Vaughan’; O.  E.  Jones, ‘Llyfr Coch Asaph’, 1: ix–xiv; Trioedd Ynys Prydain, ed. and trans. Bromwich, xlviii–lvi.

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ANTIQUARIANISM AND HISTORICAL WRITING, 1620–1707  163 of events in medieval Wales and treatises on the ‘Fifteen Tribes of Gwynedd’ and the Welsh triads, and was quite possibly the author of an account of Owain Glyndŵr eventually published in 1775.49 However, two books were published late in his life which provide further testimony to his erudition as well as valuable insights into his assumptions and methods. The earlier, British Antiquities Revived (1662), consists mainly of a point-­by-­point response to the unpublished treatise by George Owen of Henllys already mentioned that sought (incorrectly) to demonstrate that the eldest son of Rhodri Mawr (d. 878), and thus his successor to the sovereignty of Wales, was Cadell (d. 910), who ruled south Wales after his father’s death. It followed, so the argument went, that the subsequent kings of south Wales—and thus their gentry successors—were superior to those of north Wales.50 Vaughan was asked to defend the honour of the north Wales gentry by proving that the eldest son was, in fact, Anarawd (d. 916). This may seem a trivial dispute generated, perhaps somewhat artificially, by regional rivalries. Yet the form it took is highly significant and illustrates how the vindication of gentry status provided a fundamental impetus to historical research in Vaughan’s day. The same is true of two further texts in the volume. First, a correction to the genealogy of Richard Vaughan (1600?–1686), earl of Carbery and Lord President of the Council in the Marches of Wales (1660–72), established his descent from a ‘far ancienter’ ancestor than the one of the same name given in earlier sources. Second, an elaborated account of the ‘5 Royal Tribes of Cambria’, a scheme devised in the late Middle Ages (quite possibly by Gutun Owain), not only ana­chron­is­tic­al­ly attributed each tribe with a coat of arms but asserted that the scheme and its associated heraldry had been established by the rulers Gruffudd ap Cynan (d. 1137), Rhys ap Tewdwr (d. 1093), and Bleddyn ap Cynfyn (d. 1075). These made diligent search after the Armes, Ensignes, and Pedegrees of their Ancestours, the Nobility and Kings of the Britains; what they discovered by their pains in any papers and records was afterwards by the Bards digested and put into books. And they ordained 5. royall Tribes (there being only 3 before) to whom their posterity to this day can derive themselves: and also 15 speciall Tribes, of whom the Gentry, especially of Northwales, are for the most part descended.51

The connection between medieval Welsh ‘tribes’ and early modern gentry fam­ ilies is emphasized even more sharply in Vaughan’s second publication, which appeared in 1663. This was an abortive edition of Powel’s Historie of Cambria, appended, with an explanatory preface but no title page, to the ‘Description of 49  E. D. Jones, ‘Camden, Vaughan, and Lhwyd’, 209, 222–7; Bartrum, ‘Hen Lwythau’, 204; Lhuyd to Richard Mostyn, 27 December 1696, in Gunther, Early Science, 318; Gruffydd Aled Williams, ‘Testun o Feirionnydd’, esp. 239–40 (and see also Gruffydd Aled Williams, The Last Days of Owain Glyndŵr, 37–40). 50 Vaughan, British Antiquities. 51 Vaughan, British Antiquities, 40–3.

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164  WRITING WELSH HISTORY Wales’ attributed to Sir John Prise.52 The work, printed in Oxford by William Hall, appears to have been published by Vaughan’s friend Thomas Ellis (1625–73), a fellow of Jesus College. It adapted the format of Powel’s original edition of 1584 by distinguishing typographically between not only Llwyd’s text and Powel’s add­ itions but also ‘some choyce notes’ which Vaughan, ‘out of his zeale to preserve the Antiquities of his Country’, had collected over the previous forty years.53 Production of this edition was abandoned about a quarter way through, and most copies were reportedly sold for waste paper, apparently after Ellis discovered that Vaughan’s notes had already been used, without permission, by Percy Enderbie in his Cambria Triumphans of 1661; hence copies of the work are extremely rare.54 The notes supplied by Vaughan witness not only to his extensive familiarity with medieval sources (as well as early modern histories) but also to his conservative approach to the Welsh past. The structure adopted is conservative in two respects. First, rather than writing a new history from scratch, Vaughan followed in Powel’s footsteps and added another layer of commentary to the text originally composed by Humphrey Llwyd which in turn was regarded as being largely based on medi­ eval Welsh chronicles. This allowed Vaughan both to preserve the work of his predecessors as published by Powel, thereby signalling his acceptance of that work as providing a canonical framework for understanding the history of Wales, and to position himself as a worthy successor in the tradition of Welsh historical writing that Powel represented. Just as Powel had augmented and revised Llwyd by citing additional sources relating to people and events mentioned, so Vaughan augmented and revised Powel. Thus Vaughan inserted material from the Peniarth 20 version of Brut y Tywysogyon (‘The Chronicle of the Princes’), which he had translated for Archbishop Ussher, as well as from other works not used by Llwyd or Powel. These included the early twelfth-­century Book of Llandaf, the fifteenth-­ century confirmation charter for the church of Clynnog Fawr (Caernarfonshire)— as further evidence for Cadwaladr, the early medieval king of Gwynedd presented in Geoffrey’s History as the last king of Britain—and ‘an old book of Records’ that referred to King Edgar’s foundation of a new church adjacent to Bangor cathedral.55 The most striking feature of Vaughan’s notes, however, and the second aspect of his conservative approach, is their use of the medieval past to uphold the status of Welsh gentry families. The means to this end was genealogy. For centuries the preserve of professional poets, genealogical learning was increasingly cultivated by the Welsh gentry from the late Elizabethan period as the bardic order declined; indeed, Vaughan had commenced his historical training with two of the last

52 Prise, A Description of Wales. 53  W[illiam] H[all], ‘The Printer to the Reader’, in Prise, A Description of Wales, unpaginated. 54  J. Beverley Smith, ‘Gruffudd Llwyd’, 469–70. 55 Prise, A Description of Wales, 7–8, 93; BT, Pen20Tr, xix–xx. Cf. Willis, A Survey of the Cathedral Church of Bangor, 56–7, 183.

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ANTIQUARIANISM AND HISTORICAL WRITING, 1620–1707  165 poet-­genealogists, Rhys Cain (d. 1614) and his son Siôn Cain (c.1575–c.1650).56 The centrality of genealogy to Vaughan’s antiquarian work, including his notes on Powel’s Historie, was conservative both in the sense that it relied on a long-­ standing traditional branch of Welsh learning and because it served to legitimize the social order of seventeenth-­century Wales. A large proportion of the notes synchronize the founders of individual ‘tribes’ with the kings in Powel’s text before proceeding to describe their arms and trace their descendants. Before the text breaks off in the later eleventh century, nine of the fifteen tribes of Gwynedd as well as the royal tribe of Elystan Glodrydd, along with their descendants, had been introduced to the reader in this way.57 Vaughan thus extended the work’s chronological coverage beyond the Edwardian conquest, not, as Powel had done, by casting the English princes of Wales as successors of the native rulers, but rather by emphasizing the continuities between the age of those rulers and the Welsh gentry of his own day. This is not to imply that Vaughan was hostile to the monarchy or to Wales’s union with the kingdom of England. Like the Welsh gentry historians and antiquaries of the Elizabeth period he celebrated the benefits of the union, and his preface to British Antiquities Revived indeed maintained that these were confirmed by a study of Welsh history: ‘by reflecting upon our former miseries and divisions while we contended for soveraignty, we may be induced to put the greater value upon our present happinesse’.58 Equally, though, study of the ancient and medieval Welsh past offered a consoling source of pride, especially for Welsh gentry families, safely devoid of any subversive political implications. That pride is evident in the comparisons with classical antiquity Vaughan drew in a passage immediately preceding the words just quoted: it is no small delight that redounds from the revolving and perusall of old records: though Troy hath for severall ages layn buried in its ashes, both its glory and government being quite dissolved, though the Athenian, Spartan, Theban, and other petit Grecian Estates have long since had their periods, yet we still take a great deale of satisfaction in reading their stories, how they began, grew up, flourished, strove, & decayed.59

Above all, the pride Vaughan took in the Welsh past is evident in a life-­long devotion to the study of Welsh antiquities marked by a determination to lay his hands on as many sources as possible, revealed, for example, in the efforts to persuade Sir John Vaughan of Trawscoed (Cardiganshire) to allow him access to the 56 Huws, Medieval Welsh Manuscripts, 289; Ceri W. Lewis, ‘The Decline of Professional Poetry’, 57; Guy, ‘Writing Genealogy in Wales’. See also Nesta Lloyd, ‘A History of Welsh Scholarship’, 1: 151–7. 57 Prise, A Description of Wales, 19 (bis), 32, 42, 50, 63, 85, 107, 111–12, 126. See also E. D. Jones, ‘Camden’, 223, 225. 58 Vaughan, British Antiquities, sig. A2v. 59 Vaughan, British Antiquities, sig. A2v.

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166  WRITING WELSH HISTORY twelfth-­century Book of Llandaf.60 The breadth of his knowledge of different kinds of sources, ranging from official records to poetry and genealogy, was unprecedented among Welsh historians and antiquaries (though it did not extend to recording church buildings and monuments, in contrast to his English contemporary Dugdale).61 Moreover, his deployment of these shows a capacity for crit­ic­al discrimination. For example, he argued that, in contrast to the late twelfth-­century testimony of Gerald of Wales, ‘a multitude of most ancient ­writers’, including ‘Ninnius the old British writer . . . who lived in the daies of Roderic and his children’ showed that Anarawd was Rhodri’s eldest son. Likewise he supported his contention that Wales had first been conquered by Edward I—rather than, as the gentry of south Wales maintained, by William Rufus following the death of Rhys ap Tewdwr (1093)—by quoting from Edward I’s Statute of Wales (1284), of which he claimed to have seen various parchment copies.62 His notes on Powel’s Historie cite some documents in full, notably the earliest known copies of letters exchanged between Sir Gruffudd Llwyd and Edward Bruce in 1316.63 But Vaughan also believed that Welsh literary genres, notably genealogy and poetry, had value as historical evidence, provided they were treated critically: he questioned the authenticity of poetry ascribed to Dafydd Nanmor on account of errors in the prosody.64 The debate about when Wales was conquered carried important implications for the nature of Welsh history writing. Vaughan seized upon these in a rare disquisition on what ‘a perfect History of Wales’ should aim to achieve.65 His comments rebutted George Owen’s suggestion that the history of Wales ended with the death of Rhys ap Tewdwr, that subsequent Welsh rulers down to Llywelyn ap Gruffudd had been usurpers, and that therefore ‘it seems not fit to register the acts of Wales for a great part of 200. years under Usurpers’.66 And whereas you think it not fit to register the acts of Wales under Usurpers, it seems you would deprive your readers of a perfect history, and conceale such passages which are as requisite to be known, as the lawfullest proceedings; in that a history (how rugged soever, the passages thereof may be) ought to testify the truth by consent of times, and immediate succession of Princes; otherwise that will appear like a broken chaine, wanting some necessary lincks to unite the 60 T.  E.  Parry, ‘Llythyrau Robert Vaughan’, 305–6, 309, 328–9, 330–1; Prise, A Description of Wales, 51. 61  Cf. Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time, 221, 225, 231–40. 62 Vaughan, British Antiquities, 16–20, 33–4. 63 Prise, A Description of Wales, 64–6; J. Beverley Smith, ‘Gruffudd Llwyd’, 469–70, 477–8. 64 Vaughan, British Antiquities, 34–5. 65  It is unclear how far Owen’s and Vaughan’s use of ‘perfect history’ with respect to an accurate narrative of legitimate princely succession echoed the elusive Renaissance and Baconian ideal of ‘perfect history’ as an extended explanatory narrative: cf. Shapiro, Probability and Certainty, 123–4, 130–4, 137–8, 144. See also Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. Kiernan, 65–6, for the contrasting of ‘parfite’ history, including chronicles, with ‘vnperfect’ ‘memorialls’ and ‘antiquities’. 66 Vaughan, British Antiquities, 35.

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ANTIQUARIANISM AND HISTORICAL WRITING, 1620–1707  167 whole; neither will man’s desire be satisfied, untill it receive instruction, who were, and who were not Usurpers, and how their government differed, or whether Usurpers being really possessed of the Crown did not use the same jurisdiction which belonged unto the right heir . . .67

For Vaughan, then, Welsh history was about the possession of political authority in the period before the Edwardian conquest, and especially about issues of le­git­ im­ ate succession and rule which had preoccupied historians since Llwyd and Powel. Annotated copies of Powel’s Historie show that Vaughan was not alone in treating the work as a canonical account of the history of Wales open to comment and correction. For example, in 1638 his younger contemporary William Maurice wrote extensive addenda to an interleaved copy of the work, which, as with Vaughan, witness to a wide-­ranging familiarity with relevant sources and a crit­ ic­al approach to their interpretation.68 Particularly interesting are comparisons between different versions of the Welsh chronicles, which, like his contemporary John Jones of Gellilyfdy, Maurice referred to as Brut y Tywysogyon (‘The Chronicle of the Princes’); he also demonstrated, contrary to Llwyd and Powel, that these had not ended in 1270.69 In addition, Maurice interjects observations on the text. Thus he complains about bias towards north Wales, but welcomes a passage that criticized William of Newburgh and Polydore Vergil: ‘The Anti Britannicall Hist. whipped’!70 However, Maurice did not use his annotations to advance his own historiographical interpretation in a comparable way to Vaughan’s insertion of material regarding the fifteen tribes of Gwynedd and their descendants. Nor did he influence subsequent Welsh history writing to the same extent as Vaughan, whose notes were not only printed in the abortive edition of The Historie of Cambria but also used in the first new accounts of Welsh history intended to supersede Powel: Percy Enderbie’s Cambria Triumphans (1661) and, a generation later, William Wynne’s History of Wales (1697).

Percy Enderbie: Wales, Britain, and the Deep Roots of Monarchy Percy Enderbie (c.1606–1670), a younger contemporary of Vaughan, wrote the first new history of Wales since Powel.71 Indeed, his Cambria Triumphans (1661)

67 Vaughan, British Antiquities, 36. 68  NLW MS 4760B. 69  For Maurice’s knowledge of manuscripts of the chronicles see BT, Pen20Tr, xxi–xxiii. The earliest known reference to the chronicle as Brut y Tywysogyon occurs in NLW MS Peniarth 19 (c.1400), which was copied by John Jones in 1634: Jones, HWMW, 186; Nesta Lloyd, ‘A History of Welsh Scholarship’, 1: 114–15. 70  NLW MS 4760B, p. 239. 71  D. Myrddin Lloyd, ‘Enderbie, Percy’; D. L. Morgan, ‘A Critical Study’, 156–63.

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168  WRITING WELSH HISTORY was the first work since the Middle Ages to relate that history straight through from the arrival of Brutus in Britain to the author’s own day.72 It was also the first written by an outsider who had made his home in Wales. In his address ‘[t]o the Gentle Reader Whether Welsh or English’ Enderbie declared that, though an Englishman, he had written his book on account of his marriage to a Welsh ‘person of quality’—namely, Winifred, sister of Sir Edward Morgan (d. 1653) of Llantarnam (Monmouthshire)—and his long residence in Wales, ‘which hath rendered me in a manner a Native’.73 His task had been facilitated, moreover, by the encouragement of the local gentry and access to the library of his late brother-­ in-­law, a Roman Catholic whose religious sympathies were reflected in several of the works used.74 Enderbie was able to position himself, therefore, between the Welsh and the English, closely connected with and deeply sympathetic to the former while maintaining a certain distance: after all, he was only ‘in a manner a Native’. That distance is reflected in his antiquarian scholarship, which, though wide ranging, lacked the detailed acquaintance with medieval and later sources, especially from Wales, characteristic of Vaughan and his sixteenth-­century Welsh predecessors. In both its construction and overall conception Cambria Triumphans was highly derivative. It drew on an extensive printed literature, supplemented by manuscript notes supplied by Vaughan as well as some local lore, in order to reaffirm long-­established understandings of the Welsh past.75 Thus the work provides a narrative from Brutus to the reign of Charles I comprising two principal components: the British History followed by Powel’s Historie of Cambria. These provide a framework for the insertion of material from other sources: for example, the period down to the death of Cadwaladr is supplemented by aspects of Roman history, while the final section of Powel’s Historie is expanded by borrowing from Dodderidge’s work on the Principality of Wales.76 Enderbie also resembles Dodderidge and other Jacobean writers such as George Owen Harry in emphasizing the contribution of the Britons and Welsh to the history of the kingdom of Great Britain. This emphasis is likely to have chimed with the outlook of the Welsh gentry families that supported his enterprise. But it was presumably reinforced by his strong family connections with England. Thus, while keen to advertise his commitment to his adopted homeland by praising the Welsh and their British ancestors, Enderbie insisted that the history of Wales formed an inextricable part of the history of England and Britain. This is signalled by the first part of the work’s lengthy title: Cambria Triumphans, or Britain in its

72  Elis Gruffudd included coverage from Brutus to his own day but in a much broader chrono­ logic­al and geographical framework than Enderbie (see Chapter 6). 73 Enderbie, Cambria Triumphans, sig. [A4r]. 74  E.g. Baronius: Enderbie, Cambria Triumphans, 45, 102–3, 142. 75  References to Llantarnam and other places in Monmouthshire in Enderbie, Cambria Triumphans, 91, 190, 196–7, 205, 207, 261, 287–8, 295. 76  E.g. Enderbie, Cambria Triumphans, 2–3, 80–5, 109–29, 332–6, 342–52.

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ANTIQUARIANISM AND HISTORICAL WRITING, 1620–1707  169 Perfect Lusture, Shevving the Origen and Antiquity of that Illustrious Nation. The Succession of their Kings and Princes, from the First, to King Charles of Happy Memory. By eliding any distinction between Wales and Britain, this implied that the full brilliance or glory of Britain derived from its origins among the ancient British and the Welsh, epitomized by the lineal succession of its monarchs from Brutus to Charles I. This allowed Enderbie to assume simultaneously the mantle of both a Welsh and a (modern) British patriot. On the one hand, the history of Britain was the triumph of Wales; on the other, the ancient and medieval history of the British and Welsh had been appropriated by the ‘Illustrious Nation’ of Britain and thus redounded to its glory, too. As for earlier writers, the adoption of ‘British’ terminology created a space for considerable rhetorical flexibility. For example, it allowed Enderbie to privilege the Welsh of his own day as ‘the very real offspring of the Brittains’ or simply ‘the very Brittains indeed’.77 The conflation of the two peoples is similarly explicit in the observation that Camden ‘never was Friend to the Brittains and Welsh’.78 Yet by referring to ‘our’ Britons (and similar expressions) he also implied that all his readers, English as well as Welsh, could identify with them and take pride in their legacy.79 This was particularly true of Christianity, whose early acceptance in Britain Enderbie celebrated by waxing eloquent on ‘the admirable sanctity, the constant faith, ardent charity, and pure and unfeigned zeal of our never to be forgotten pious Brittains’.80 Enderbie further highlighted the British dimension of his work not only by the well-­established means of tracing the Welsh ancestry of his royal dedicatee but also by interpolating between each of its books the pedigrees of ducal and other leading aristocratic families, mainly in England, with a particular emphasis on their British or Welsh origins.81 True, he also recorded the pedigrees and arms of Welsh gentry ­families.82 However, rather than restricting his attention to these as Vaughan tended to do, Enderbie deployed genealogy to support his broader aim of demonstrating the British and Welsh antecedents of the Stuart kingdom as a whole. In his interpretation of medieval Wales, Enderbie followed in the footsteps of his predecessors, in both his selection of material, presented in a distinctive ­colourful style, and his pithy marginal comments. For example, he observed of the hapless Gruffudd ap Llywelyn (d. 1244), transferred by his half-­brother Dafydd from custody in Gwynedd to the Tower of London: ‘From prison to prison, like a fish out of the frying pan into the fire.’83 While praising Llywelyn ap Gruffudd as ‘[a]n Heroick Prince’,84 he conventionally presented the prince’s 77 Enderbie, Cambria Triumphans, 205, 188. 78 Enderbie, Cambria Triumphans, 18. 79 Enderbie, Cambria Triumphans, 28, 85, 90, 92, 102, 160, 176; sig. Aa4v. 80 Enderbie, Cambria Triumphans, 104. 81  E.g., Enderbie, Cambria Triumphans, 49–55, 109, 149–50, 193–5, [221–32]. 82 See especially Enderbie, Cambria Triumphans, 250–1, including depictions of coats of arms inserted there. 83 Enderbie, Cambria Triumphans, 305. 84 Enderbie, Cambria Triumphans, 307; see also 299, 309, and cf. 106 (‘heroick’ Arthur).

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170  WRITING WELSH HISTORY death in 1282 as a crucial turning-­ point that ended ‘the glory of Wales’.85 Thereafter, the future of Wales lay in its integration with England: like Powel, Enderbie had little time for ‘the most wicked and Arch Rebel’ Owain Glyndŵr while also condemning Henry IV’s penal legislation against the Welsh as ‘more cruel than that of Julian the Apostate’.86 Writing of the period before 1282, he lauded the bravery of individual rulers, but was swift to condemn behaviour he considered immoral: Owain Gwynedd’s blinding and castration of his nephew Cunedda in 1152 was ‘[a]n act more fit for a Turk than a Christian’.87 Above all, his admiration for the Welsh was tempered by frustration at their internal divisions, a well-­worn sentiment first voiced almost five centuries earlier by Gerald of Wales, another writer who observed the Welsh at a certain remove. The partible inheritance of kingdoms elicited predictable condemnation, as did strife within and between Welsh dynasties, which Enderbie considered a fatal weakness that opened the door to foreign invasion: ‘An easy matter for the Normans to conquer when the Welsh murder and betray their own kindred and countreymen.’88 In a similar vein, he castigated those Welsh leaders who sided with the Normans or English against their compatriots.89 By contrast, Enderbie rarely ascribed agency to kings of England.90

Powel Revised: William Wynne’s History of Wales In 1697 William Wynne, a fellow of Jesus College, Oxford published The History of Wales.91 Explicitly intended as a revised version of Powel’s Historie, this was less ambitious in chronological scope but much more influential than Enderbie’s book, being reissued four times between 1702 and 1832 and published in a German edition in 1725.92 That Wynne presented himself as the latest of a series of editors rather than the author of an entirely new work is explicit in the concluding words of the book’s full title: written originally in British, by Caradoc of Lhancarvan; and formerly published in English by Dr. Powel; now newly augmented and improved by W. Wynne. Edward Lhuyd summed it up as Powel’s Historie ‘in modern language with an elaborate preface of his own, wherein he [Wynne] offers what may be sayd for the credit of Geofrey [sic] of Monmouth’.93 Although 85 Enderbie, Cambria Triumphans, 324. 86 Enderbie, Cambria Triumphans, 28, 336. 87 Enderbie, Cambria Triumphans, 270. Contrast Powel, HC, 203. 88 Enderbie, Cambria Triumphans, 262; cf. 311, apropos of the surrender to Edward I in 1277: ‘The jangling of the Welsh among themselves their utter overthrow.’ 89 Enderbie, Cambria Triumphans, 261, 269, 291. 90  For an exception see Enderbie, Cambria Triumphans, 342. 91 Wynne, History; R. T. Jenkins, ‘William Wynne’. Wynne had completed a draft of the work by 15 October 1696: Wynne, ‘Letter’, ed. Williams. 92  R. T. Jenkins, ‘William Wynne’, 158–9; Wynne, Die Historie von Walles [trans. Hübner]. 93  Lhuyd to Richard Mostyn, 27 December 1696, in Gunther, Early Science, 318. See also Lhuyd to Howel Vaughan, 4 November 1696, in Gunther, Early Science, 313.

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ANTIQUARIANISM AND HISTORICAL WRITING, 1620–1707  171 modern scholars have been unconvinced that the new edition was an improvement on its predecessor, complaining of its ‘dull gentility’ and ‘dry’ style, this may be to miss its significance as an attempt to update the received interpretation of Welsh history for a new age.94 Wynne’s most substantial addition was a lengthy and learned preface assessing the reliability of the British History related by Geoffrey of Monmouth.95 The pla­ cing of this assessment in a preface signalled that Geoffrey’s account of the Britons down to Cadwaladr, while connected to the history of Wales, was not essential to it. Indeed, Wynne stressed at the outset that the history of the Welsh princes derived from the ‘just and authentick’ author Caradog of Llancarfan, ‘so that there need no other Apology for the following Work, than that it is for the best part the genuine History of that Authour’.96 That Wynne felt compelled to include the preface also indicates a determination, however, to demonstrate his ability to intervene in a long-­running debate and thereby establish his credentials as a crit­ ic­al scholar. This in turn served to reinforce the authority of the ensuing history of Wales from Cadwaladr onwards. Like Prise and Powel in the sixteenth century, Wynne sought to steer a middle course between those who rejected everything in Geoffrey not corroborated by Roman writers and those who believed all aspects of his account, ‘be they never so ridiculous and extravagant’.97 It was perfectly plausible that Geoffrey could have used Welsh sources which preserved elements of ancient British history.98 For example, similarities between the British and Greek languages meant that ‘it is not unreasonable to suspect, that there is some real Foundation lodged in the Ruins of the Story of Brutus’.99 Nevertheless, such qualified support for the British History destabilized its authority by pointing up the difficulties of relying on its account, especially for the pre-­Roman period, and contrasted sharply with the enthusiastic embrace of Geoffrey by Vaughan and Enderbie. Writing a generation later than those authors, and associated in Oxford with the critically minded Edward Lhuyd (who took a similar line on Geoffrey and expressed approval of the preface), Wynne was at pains to show that he was no credulous purveyor of outdated legends.100 True, he reproduced ‘The Description of Wales’ with little alteration, including its account of the tripartite division of Britain between Brutus’s sons.101 However, Wynne distanced himself from that interpretation in a new opening section to the history itself, which ignores the Brutus legend and begins with the Roman occupation of Britain before sum­mar­ iz­ing the Saxon invasions and the reigns of the last British kings (here admittedly

94  R. T. Jenkins, ‘William Wynne’, 158–9; Dafydd Glyn Jones, Un o Wŷr y Medra, 305. 95 Wynne, History, sig. A4r–**4v. 96 Wynne, History, sig. A4r. 97 Wynne, History, sig. A4v. 98 Wynne, History, sig. *4r–6v. 99 Wynne, History, sig. **3v. 100 Wynne, History, sig. **4v. Wynne asked Lhuyd to read a draft of the latter part of the work prior to publication: Wynne, ‘Letter’, ed. Williams, 46. 101 Wynne, History, i–ii.

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172  WRITING WELSH HISTORY drawing on Geoffrey) by way of background to Cadwaladr, who opened the Welsh chronicles used by Llwyd and Powel. He thereby perhaps implied that this opening section provided a more reliable account of the ancient past than the full-­blown British History.102 And in concluding the main part of the history Wynne omits Humphrey Llwyd’s statement, reproduced by Powel, that 2,418 years had elapsed between the coming of Brutus and the death of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd in 1282.103 The additions to the History for the period down to 1282 consist largely of borrowings from Vaughan’s printed notes to Powel.104 Wynne also expanded the final part of the work on the English princes of Wales by adding, for example, further material on Owain Glyndŵr, some of it drawn from the account of the prince quite possibly written by Vaughan, as well as a report of William III’s abortive grant to the earl of Portland in 1696 of the lordships of Denbigh, Bromfield, and Yale.105 He also gave a contemporary twist to sixteenth-­century writers’ celebration of the establishment of the Reformation in Wales by insisting that the Welsh had been exceptionally strict in their adherence to the Church of England since the Bible and Book of Common Prayer had been translated into Welsh under Elizabeth and by accusing Thomas Gouge (1605–81), one of the ejected ministers of 1662 and a co-­founder of the Welsh Trust in 1674, a voluntary initiative to establish schools in Wales, of contributing to the rise of Presbyterianism ‘by the propagating of his Doctrine among the ignorant of that Country’.106 He thus reflected dominant High Church Tory opinion at the University of Oxford epit­ om­ized by his college principal Jonathan Edwards, marked by its hostility to William III’s measures granting toleration for nonconformists.107 Another add­ ition was an appendix comprising an English account of the commission of inquiry ordered by Henry VII into the pedigree of his paternal grandfather Owen Tudor, only briefly mentioned by Powel, and Latin texts of thirteenth-­century sources cited in English in the main body of the work.108 However, the most significant changes affected presentation rather than content. Thus Wynne declared that he had sought to prepare his edition ‘by a new modelling the Language, making the Body of the History intire, without troubling the Reader to see the same 102 Wynne, History, 1–7. Wynne explained to Humphreys that he had ‘prefixed . . . a brief account ye British affairs before Cadwalader, yt ye Reader might have a short view of ye chain of ye History’: Wynne, ‘Letter’, ed. Williams, 45. 103 Llwyd, CW, 222; Powel, HC, 374; Wynne, History, 299. 104  See e.g. Wynne, History, 11–12, 35, 54, 58, 59, 310–13. 105 Wynne, History, 302–4, 315–23; cf. Anon., ‘Memoirs of Owen Glendowr’, 64, 67–8, and n. 49 above. 106 Wynne, History, 326–8, quotation at 328. Wynne was responding to Tillotson, A Sermon, esp. 82–3. For Gouge see Suggett and White, ‘Language’, 68. 107  Cf. Dixon, ‘Edwards, Jonathan’. 108 Wynne, History, 331–98; cf. Powel, HC, 391; Anglo, ‘The British History’, 24–5. The sources used by Wynne included a copy of Archbishop Pecham’s register in All Souls College: ‘Letter’, ed. Williams, 46.

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ANTIQUARIANISM AND HISTORICAL WRITING, 1620–1707  173 thing by way of Annotation’.109 This involved both rephrasing, including the insertion of linking sentences in places,110 and simplifying the page layout by using a uniform typeface instead of the different typefaces that had demonstrated the composite nature of Powel’s text; marginal references are largely confined to dates, with primary sources integrated into the text or printed separately in an appendix. The result was an apparently seamless narrative that was probably more in tune with the expectations of late seventeenth-­century readers than Powel’s visually complex and chronicle-­like text.111 The form of the work reflected its author’s principal aim, namely to revive knowledge of the medieval princes of Wales. Addressing Humphrey Humphreys (1648–1712), bishop of Bangor and a scholar renowned for his knowledge of Welsh antiquities, Wynne declared: The History of our Country, my Lord, has been so much neglected, that there seems a very great Necessity of reviving, what to the generality of the Kingdom, is almost lost . . . if by the following History, I can revive the Memories of the several Princes therein contained, which in the English histories, are either totally omitted, or but partially interwoven, and make our History more generally Known, I have my Aim . . .112

Although Welsh historians since Humphrey Llwyd had expressed their de­ter­min­ ation to save the history of Wales from neglect and misrepresentation, it is unlikely that the sentiments expressed here were merely conventional. Wynne clearly gave careful thought to how he could repackage Powel’s work in order to demonstrate its continuing validity while endeavouring, above all, to make it more accessible. Thus, on the one hand, the preface demonstrated his scholarly and critical credentials, while the subsequent history, unencumbered by references and different typefaces, sought to engage the reader without parading its author’s learning in the manner of Powel, Vaughan, or Enderbie. That the history was reissued only five years after its original publication suggests, moreover, that Wynne met a demand. Nor was his patriotic sympathy for the medieval princes confined to the dedication; it is also evident in additions and amendments to Powel’s text. For example, whereas for his predecessor, in turn following Humphrey Llwyd, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd was ‘the last Prince of Brytaines blood’, Wynne explicitly praised him as ‘this worthy Prince, the greatest, though the last of the British Blood’, and emphasized that the grievances presented to Archbishop 109 Wynne, History, sig. **4v. 110  E.g. Wynne, History, 169, 207, 234, 255. 111  R. T. Jenkins, ‘William Wynne’, 159. Cf. Woolf, ‘Narrative Historical Writing’, 213–15. 112 Wynne, History, sig. A2v–A3v. See also Wynne, ‘Letter’, ed. Williams; Handley, ‘Humphreys, Humphrey’; Chadwick and Evans, ‘ “Ye Best Tast of Books” ’, 92–6; Gruffydd Aled Williams, ‘Testun o Feirionnydd’, 237–9; and, for a chronology by Humphreys of British and Welsh rulers, 446–960, NLW MS 2023B, pp. 117–29.

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174  WRITING WELSH HISTORY Pecham on the eve of the Edwardian conquest ‘vindicate the Welch Nation, from the unreasonable Aspersions which the English of these times cast upon it’.113 Here, Wynne resembled Enderbie, who had been warmer than Powel towards Llywelyn. Yet, also like Enderbie, Wynne bemoaned ‘unnatural’ divisions among the Welsh, occasionally drawing comparisons with Roman history, and condemned Owain Gwynedd’s violent treatment of his nephew Cunedda as ‘a very barbarous Action’.114 Wynne also complained that the Lord Rhys, by ingratiating himself with King Henry II, ‘was resolved to play the Politician so far, as to have regard to his own Interest, than to the Good of his native Country’.115 By attempting to make Powel’s Historie more readable Wynne sought, then, to give renewed life to the canonical account of medieval Welsh history. It does not follow, however, that he aimed at a popular readership in a comparable way to his older contemporary Nathaniel Crouch, the London publisher who wrote numerous historical works under the pseudonym ‘R. B.’ (Richard or Robert Burton).116 Among these was The History of the Principality of Wales (1695).117 Like Wynne’s History of Wales, this was avowedly derivative. However, rather than claiming to draw on an authoritative medieval chronicle, Crouch presented his book as a digest assembled ‘from Historians of the best Authority’ whose contents ‘I doubt not will be Novelties to many Readers, and diverting to all’.118 The book falls into three parts. The first, covering the history of the Britons and Welsh from Brutus to the death of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, is markedly Anglocentric and padded out with a considerable amount of English history,119 and the same is true of the second on the English princes of Wales down to the late seventeenth century; by contrast, the third offers ‘Remarkable Observations upon the most Memorable Persons and Places in Wales’, followed by a topographical account of the Welsh counties. Crouch drew on a variety of sources, including Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose History he used while declining to vouchsafe its reliability.120 What mattered most for him was to produce an engaging and entertaining narrative for his intended popular readership, probably mainly in London.121 Hence he characteristically prefaced the work with a full-­page illustration (depicting the French king being taken prisoner by the Black Prince at the battle of Poitiers) and enlivened it with sensationalist material such as King Edgar’s alleged sexual abuse of nuns and

113 Wynne, History, 290, 299 (and see also 171, 173); Powel, HC, 374. 114 Wynne, History, 27, 28, 36, 153, 170, 212, 271. 115 Wynne, History, 203. 116 Mayer, ‘Nathaniel Crouch’; Mc Elligott, ‘Crouch, Nathaniel’; Vandrei, Queen Boudica and Historical Culture, 62–7. 117 Crouch, The History. 118 Crouch, The History, [3]; cf. Mayer, ‘Nathaniel Crouch’, 395–6, 402, 408. 119  Almost 70 per cent of Part I consists of an account of the kings of England from Ecgberht to Harold Godwineson (Crouch, The History, 28–49), followed by a narrative of Anglo-­Welsh relations from William I to Edward I (at 49–65). 120 Crouch, The History, 5, 13–14. 121  Cf. Mayer, ‘Nathaniel Crouch’, 408.

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ANTIQUARIANISM AND HISTORICAL WRITING, 1620–1707  175 the barbarous appearance and customs of the ancient Britons.122 Whereas Wynne portrayed his task as an attempt to revive the patriotic sentiments of the Welsh and emphasized his scholarly credentials by including a dedication to a high-­ ranking patron, learned preface, and texts of Latin sources, Crouch eschewed such ornaments and presented himself as a successful commercial author, referring readers to several of his previous works and also printing a catalogue of twenty-­ two historical works he had published, many likewise under the pseudonym ‘R. B.’, competitively priced at 1s. each.123

‘Fabulous Relations’ and ‘Genuine Histories’: Edward Lhuyd and the Recovery of the Past Although he once contemplated writing ‘some part of the History of Wales’ and was encouraged to undertake this task by several contemporaries, Edward Lhuyd never completed such a work.124 However, by his untimely death aged forty-­nine in 1709 he had made a substantial and original contribution to the study of the Welsh—and by extension the British and the Irish—past.125 His achievement in this respect is all the more remarkable as it was only one manifestation of an ‘Itch of Curiosity’ that also resulted in pioneering work on natural history, palae­on­ tology, and the Celtic languages, and, as in those other fields, was notable for both its reliance on first-­hand observation and verification and its critical approach— fundamental characteristics of the experimental natural philosophy of his day.126 Two main aspects of his antiquarian and historical studies stand out: the recovery and recording of written and archaeological evidence on more systematic lines than before, and the use of comparative linguistic analysis in order to propose new interpretations of the settlement of the earliest peoples of Britain and Ireland. The first fruits of these investigations appeared in extensive additions to the cover­age of Wales in Edmund Gibson’s revised edition of Camden’s Britannia (1695).127 This in turn led to a much more ambitious project intended to comprise A British Dictionary, Historical and Geographical, A Natural History of 122 Crouch, The History, [1], 34–6, 123–5; cf. Mayer, ‘Nathaniel Crouch’, 399–400, 403–7. 123 Crouch, The History, 13, 120, [182–9]; cf. Mayer, ‘Nathaniel Crouch’, 397–8. 124  Lhuyd to John Jones, 3 March 1692, and Lhuyd to Martin Lister, ?17 April 1692, in Gunther, Early Science, 161, 249. Dating of the latter follows Lhwyd, ‘The Correspondence’, tinyurl.com/ y8ygl979 (last accessed 13 September 2021). 125 Emery, Edward Lhuyd; Graham Parry, ‘Edward Lhuyd’; Cramsie, British Travellers, 357–93; Emery, ‘ “The Best Naturalist” ’; Caryl Davies, Adfeilion Babel, 69–90; Cram, ‘Edward Lhuyd’s Archæologia Britannica’. 126  Lhuyd to Humphrey Foulkes, 28 July 1705, in Gunther, Early Science, 506; Emery, ‘ “The Best Naturalist” ’, 54. Cf. Anstey, ‘Experimental versus Speculative Natural Philosophy’. 127  Britannia (1695). The Welsh chapters of the 1722 edition are reprinted in Camden’s Wales, comp. James. See further Walters and Emery, ‘Edward Lhuyd’; Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time, 331–57, esp. 345–54; Cramsie, British Travellers, 361–7.

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176  WRITING WELSH HISTORY Wales, and a four-­part Archæologia Britannica, although of these only the first volume of the Archæologia was published, namely a pioneering work on the Celtic languages entitled Glossography (1707).128 In addition, Lhuyd illuminates wider understandings of the past in Welsh society. This final section of this chapter aims, therefore, to situate Lhuyd in the multi-­stranded historical culture of his day. For Lhuyd, engagement with the British and Welsh past drew emotional force from a sense of Welsh identity rooted in his family background. However, the nature of that engagement was significantly shaped by his experience in Oxford. As the son, albeit illegitimate, of Edward Lloyd of Llanforda near Oswestry, an outspoken royalist during the Civil Wars and Commonwealth, and Bridget Pryse, second daughter of Thomas Pryse of Gogerddan, northern Cardiganshire, Lhuyd belonged to the Welsh gentry through both his parents.129 This background explains his strong sense of self-­identification as ‘an old Briton’, descended, so he asserted in the Irish preface to his 1707 Glossography, from the northern British ruler Coel Godebog ‘in the Province of Reged in Scotland, in the Fourth Century, before the Saxons came into Great-­Britain’, thereby witnessing to a preoccupation with genealogy typical of his class which was already evident in the young Lhuyd, who, to quote his father, ‘eates drinkes & sleepes pedigrees’.130 This strong sense of Welsh identity was also expressed through his changing his surname from the Anglicized Lloyd to the Welsh Lhwyd or Lhuyd.131 He arrived at Jesus College, Oxford in 1682 to read for a degree in civil law, but never graduated as he was quickly drawn into the orbit of Robert Plot (1640–96), the naturalist, antiquary, and first keeper of the university’s Ashmolean Museum, whom Lhuyd succeeded in 1691, having served there in various ancillary roles since 1684.132 His association with Plot and the Ashmolean led to cor­res­pond­ ence with other scientists, notably the botanist John Ray (1627–1705) and the physician and naturalist Martin Lister (1639–1712). As the illegitimate son of a bankrupt father, his employment at the museum, though poorly paid, made Lhuyd the first professional Welsh scholar, in the sense that his scholarship provided his main source of income rather than being a leisure activity supported by the revenues of landed estates, as had been the case, say, for Robert Vaughan of Hengwrt and William Maurice of Llansilin earlier in the seventeenth century.133 Thus, while Lhuyd belonged to the Welsh gentry, his social origins are less

128 Lhuyd, Glossography; Lhwyd, A Design of a British Dictionary; repr. in Lhwyd, Archæologia, 35–9. 129  For Edward Lloyd’s royalism see Ward Clavier, ‘ “Horrid Rebellion” ’, 60, 63, 66. 130 Lhwyd, Archæologia, 198–9; Dodd, ‘The Early Days’, quotation at 305; see also Britannia (1695), col. 627. For Lhuyd’s Welsh connections and identity see Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Edward Lhuyd y Cymro’ (abridged in Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Edward Lhuyd—Welshman’). Note also Lhuyd’s pride in the material achievements of the ancient Britons: Britannia (1695), cols. 648, 658. 131  He changed the spelling of his name c.1688: Lhwyd, Archæologia, 2. 132  Arthur MacGregor, ‘Edward Lhuyd’. 133  For Lhuyd as a ‘professional scholar’, in contrast to his correspondents among the ‘amateur’ clergy and gentry, see Brynley R. Roberts, ‘Edward Lhuyd y Cymro’, 77.

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ANTIQUARIANISM AND HISTORICAL WRITING, 1620–1707  177 im­port­ant to understanding his achievements than they are for most of the other antiquaries and historians discussed in this chapter. Nevertheless, his family background did help him to realize his plans, as his kinship connections facilitated collaboration with antiquarian-­minded Welsh gentry, clergy, and school masters and opened doors to patrons in Wales willing to support his scholarly endeavours. Indeed, his Parochial Queries (1696) sought information on ‘Seats of the Gentry; with the Names and Quality of the present Proprietors, and their Arms and Descent’: a conventional but prudent acknowledgement of the status and pre­ occu­pa­tions of the largest group of potential subscribers.134 Lhuyd’s antiquarian interests developed rapidly from 1693, when he accepted Edmund Gibson’s commission to translate and update the Welsh counties in the revised edition of William Camden’s Britannia, first published over a century earl­ ier in 1586. Instrumental in Lhuyd’s acceptance was William Nicolson (1655–1727), archdeacon (and later bishop) of Carlisle who had formerly been lecturer in Anglo-­Saxon studies at the Queen’s College, one of several leading Anglo-­Saxonists in late seventeenth-­century Oxford.135 Their example may have provided a further impetus for Lhuyd to do something similar for the Britons and other Celtic inhabitants of Great Britain. He was also indebted to John Aubrey (1626–97), who corresponded with Lhuyd in the 1690s on the origins of place-­ names and the languages of Britain and provided a model for the careful surveying of archaeological sites.136 Encouragement to continue the work he had begun in revising Camden came from Welsh scholars in Oxford and some of the gentry of the principality, who urged Lhuyd to produce an account of both the natural history and the antiquities of Wales along the lines of Plot’s works on Oxfordshire and Staffordshire.137 Lhuyd issued ambitious proposals for this project in 1695 in which he sought financial support from ‘such Gentlemen as are . . . inclin’d to promote it’.138 Here, Lhuyd presented himself as a dedicated investigator eager to satisfy his patrons. However, this did not signal a readiness to compromise his academic freedom. Thus, while he acknowledged that the Glossography, with its demanding treatment of the Celtic languages, was ‘of little Use to many of those Gentlemen’ who had funded its research, he defended himself by asserting that these had contributed ‘out of their Inclination of promoting Learning in General’.139 Indeed, Lhuyd expected the gentry and clergy not only to fund but also to participate in the systematic scholarly enterprise he had devised, since, like Plot, he planned his work 134 Lhwyd, Parochial Queries, 1 (no. V); for the date see Lhwyd, Archæologia, 5 (text repr. at 41–7). See also Lhwyd, A Design of a British Dictionary, 1. 135  Walters and Emery, ‘Edward Lhuyd’, 114; Hayton, ‘Nicolson, William’. 136 Kelsey Jackson Williams, The Antiquary, 20–1, 30–1, 145–53; Hunter, John Aubrey, 192–3, 200–2; Nancy Edwards, ‘Edward Lhuyd and the Origins’, 167–8. 137  Cf. Lhwyd, Archæologia, 2–4; Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time, 300–7, 353, 363. 138 Lhwyd, A Design of a British Dictionary; repr. in Lhwyd, Archæologia, 35–9, quotation at 38. 139 Lhwyd, Archæologia, 51; cf. 53–4, 63–4.

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178  WRITING WELSH HISTORY as a co-­operative effort in which correspondents answered a detailed questionnaire concerning the geography, antiquities, and natural history of each parish covered; 4,000 copies of these Parochial Queries were printed, and three copies distributed to each parish in Wales, the following year.140 The use of questionnaires as a means of structuring such studies, inspired by Francis Bacon’s em­phasis on empirical research, had been developed since the mid-­seventeenth century by scholars including Robert Plot and Thomas Machell, the latter’s questionnaire (1677) seeking information on the northern counties of England probably being especially influential on Lhuyd as it was the first aimed at the parish level.141 Correspondents were an essential component of the ambitious programme of research that Lhuyd set himself, as their contributions offered the prospect of more comprehensive and detailed coverage than it would have been possible for him and his small band of assistants to achieve in their travels. Nevertheless, Lhuyd emphasized that the first-­hand investigations undertaken during those travels were fundamental to ensuring the accuracy of his work.142 The value of this combined approach had been demonstrated in gathering material for the Welsh additions to Gibson’s Britannia. However, as the Parochial Queries show, it was raised to a new level in preparing the Archæologia and associated works, preparations that also took Lhuyd and his assistants on an arduous four-­year tour of Wales, Ireland, Scotland, Cornwall, and Brittany between May 1697 and March 1701. Central to this work was the identification and recording of sources, which Lhuyd, like other antiquaries with whom he had contact, such as William Nicolson and John Aubrey, considered an essential prerequisite for the recovery of the past; indeed, he considered it to be all the more urgent with respect to Welsh manuscripts on account of previous losses, most recently in the Civil Wars, thereby echoing a long rehearsed concern about the destruction of Welsh books.143 Accordingly, Lhuyd, together with his assistants and correspondents, recorded inscriptions, manuscripts, and archaeological monuments; he also compiled a catalogue of manuscripts in Welsh—or, as he tellingly called it, the ‘Ancient Language of Britain’ (Antiqua Britanniæ Lingua)—giving brief descriptions of their content and their locations.144 Nor did he aim merely to recover the past: the orthography he devised for Welsh words in the Glossography sought to revive it visually by ‘restoring . . . the Letters anciently us’d by the Britains’ found on early medieval inscribed stones and medieval manuscripts from Wales and Cornwall.145 140 Lhwyd, Archæologia, 41–7. 141  Emery, ‘A Map’, 43–4; Adam Fox, ‘Printed Questionnaires’. 142 Lhwyd, A Design of a British Dictionary, 2. Lhuyd noted that his additions to Gibson’s edition of Britannia were ‘generally observations of my own’: Britannia (1695), col. 583. 143 Lhuyd, Glossography, 225. 144  Antiquities and monuments: Britannia (1695), cols. 603–4, 607, 613–15, 625, 663–4. Catalogue: Lhuyd, Glossography, 254–65. Cf. Lhwyd, Parochial Queries, 2 (nos. VI–XI). 145  Lhuyd, ‘At y Kymry’, 108–9.

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ANTIQUARIANISM AND HISTORICAL WRITING, 1620–1707  179 The emphasis on observation and accurate recording also reflected a commitment to rational explanation.146 Conversely, Lhuyd had little time for what he regarded as ‘fables’. True, Lhuyd followed Wynne and others in refusing to condemn Geoffrey of Monmouth outright. In describing the preface to Wynne’s History, with its detailed assessment of the veracity of alleged Trojan, biblical, or Phoenician ­origins, as ‘elaborate’ and ‘erudite’, Lhuyd appears to have been sympathetic to its argument.147 This impression is reinforced by a passage Lhuyd inserted in Gibson’s Britannia, where he attributes the ‘fabulous’ elements in Geoffrey’s History to the unenlightened Welsh of the Middle Ages: that the work ‘(as well as most other Writers of the Monkish times) abounds with Fables, is not deny’d by such as contend for some authority to that History: but that those Fables were of his own Invention, seems too severe a censure of our Author’s, and scarce a just accusation: since we find most or all of them, in that British History he translated’. (Like earlier scholars Lhuyd mistakenly believed that the medieval Welsh translations of Geoffrey, known as Brut y Brenhinedd, were in fact ‘the very old book in the British tongue’ which Geoffrey claimed to have been his source.)148 Lhuyd added, moreover, that many of the ‘fables’ were already found in the work of ‘Ninnius’: that is, in the early ninth-­century Historia Brittonum (‘History of the Britons’). Lhuyd concluded by directing ‘the judicious Reader’ to David Powel’s treatise on the subject of 1585 and the preface to John Davies’s Welsh dictionary of 1632, ‘and [to] balance them with the arguments and authority of those that wholly reject them’.149 While Lhuyd made clear that much in Geoffrey’s History merited scepticism, then, he appears to have sympathized with the nuanced assessment of its reliability offered by Powel, Davies, and Wynne. Respect for this earlier scholarship also helps to explain why Lhuyd showed little desire to revise the medieval history of Wales, since he believed that this had already been treated adequately by David Powel, supplemented by the notes of ‘the learned and judicious Antiquary Robert Vaughan’ (frequently cited in the additions to Gibson’s edition of Britannia) and by Wynne.150 Nevertheless, Lhuyd adopted a highly critical approach when it came to his major preoccupation: the origins and early history of the Britons and the other Celtic peoples of Britain and Ireland from the pre-­Roman to post-­Roman ­periods. As he put it in the Irish preface to the Glossography, ‘in these two last Centuries all learned Nations have expunged out of their true and genuine Histories, all those

146  See e.g. the rejection of explanations of natural phenomena as resulting from Noah’s deluge: Britannia (1695), col. 668; Lhuyd, Lithophilacii Britannici Ichnographia, 128–39. 147 Lhuyd to Richard Mostyn, 27 December 1696, in Gunther, Early Science, 318; Lhuyd, Glossography, 257. 148  DRG, 4–5. 149  Britannia (1695), col. 603. 150 Powel: Britannia (1695), cols. 635, 690–1, 695–6, quotation at 695; Vaughan: cols. 591–2, 593, 643, 657, 671–2, 689, 691, 693–4, quotation at 591. Wynne: Lhuyd, Glossography, 226, n. (b), 257; see also 214, 258, 263.

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180  WRITING WELSH HISTORY fabulous Relations, that were apt to bring the Truth of the whole in question’.151 Here, Lhuyd aligned himself firmly with a well-­established critical tradition: for example, Francis Bacon had maintained that the study of antiquities ‘deserves to come in the place of those fabulous and fictitious origins of nations we abound with’.152 Nor was Lhuyd alone in his attitude among the educated Welsh of his day. Thus in 1694 one of his Glamorgan correspondents, John Williams of Swansea, also echoing Bacon, confided his hope that Lhuyd would have the opportunity ‘to frame ye naturall History of Wales; and the Civil alsoe as far as it may be retrievd and purifid fro[m] ye fabulous traditions of our own Countryman [sic], or the dry partial accounts of the English writers’.153 In common with Camden and other antiquaries, Lhuyd accepted that ancient Greek and Roman authors provided the only reliable written accounts of the early history of Britain.154 However, he believed, again like Camden, that their testimony could be supplemented both by archaeological monuments and by linguistic evidence provided by place-­names and personal names. It is significant that Lhuyd began to learn Irish in 1692 on the grounds that comparisons with Welsh could help him write a history of Wales.155 Over the following decade or so he increased his knowledge of the Celtic languages and deployed his study of their etymology to advance novel theories about the settlement of peoples in Britain.156 The importance of linguistic evidence is underlined in the Archæologia’s dedication to Sir Thomas Mansel of Margam Abbey in Glamorgan, which refers to the hope that the book would lead ‘to a Clearer Notion than we have had hitherto of the most Ancient Languages, and Consequently of the Origin of the First Colonies of these Kingdoms’.157 In this respect, Lhuyd proceeded from similar assumptions to those of the Breton scholar Paul-­Yves Pezron (1639–1706) in L’Antiquité de la nation et la langue des Celtes (1703), a widely read work translated into English by David Jones, a Welshman from Cardiganshire, as The Antiquities of Nations (1706), which, as Lhuyd put it, aimed at ‘the tracing out by Language the Origin of Nations’.158 However, Lhuyd found its methods defective and, in private

151 Lhwyd, Archæologia, 180–1. 152 Bacon, ‘On the Dignity and Advancement of Learning’, ed. Devey, 87. Cf. Shapin, A Social History of Truth, 200–1; Grafton, What Was History?, 96–105. 153  Cited in Emery, ‘Edward Lhuyd and Some of his Glamorgan Correspondents’, 72. Cf. Bacon, ‘On the Dignity and Advancement of Learning’, ed. Devey, 79: ‘History is either natural or civil: the natural records the works and acts of nature; the civil, the works and acts of men.’ 154  Lhuyd, ‘At y Kymry’, 112–13. 155  Lhuyd to Lister, ?17 April 1692 (above, n. 124). 156  Use of place-­name and other linguistic evidence: Britannia (1695), cols. 603, 621–2, 626, 627, 635, 639, 649–50, 653, 658–9, 667, 670. 157 Lhuyd, Glossography, Dedication ‘To the Right Honourable Sr Thomas Mansel of Margam, Bart’ (repr. in Lhwyd, Archæologia, 54). 158 Lhuyd, Glossography, 266 (repr. in Lhwyd, Archæologia, 166). See also P. T. J. Morgan, ‘The Abbé Pezron’; Caryl Davies, Adfeilion Babel, 60–9, 85–90.

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ANTIQUARIANISM AND HISTORICAL WRITING, 1620–1707  181 cor­res­pond­ence, implied that Pezron’s grandiose claims for the ultimate descent of the Gauls from the Titans stemmed from excessive ‘national zeal’.159 An interest in etymology is already apparent in the additions to Camden in Gibson’s new edition of 1695, most significantly in the argument that British words cognate with Irish, or their common Celtic ancestor, could have been borrowed into—rather than from—Latin.160 However, the additions largely followed Camden’s original work in extending its historical horizons no further back than the British tribes named by Roman authors, and focused heavily on arch­aeo­ logic­al monuments and artefacts, including inscriptions, seen as pertaining to the Romans or the Britons.161 The piecemeal nature of his contributions also made it difficult for Lhuyd to develop a general synthesis. A rare exception is the introductory section on the Ordovices in north Wales, whom Lhuyd identified in particular with the people of Gwynedd, thereby highlighting continuity over the longue durée: thanks to their mountainous habitat, these had not only successfully resisted the Romans but also withstood conquest by the English until Edward I in the late thirteenth century.162 The Glossography of 1707, while likewise lacking a coherent account of the early history of Britain, included new hypotheses about the ‘First Planters’ of the island that Lhuyd had developed since completing his work for Gibson—an emphasis consistent with the reference to ‘the original inhabitants of Great Britain’ in the book’s subtitle.163 Interestingly, though, he confined the presentation of these ideas to the work’s Welsh-­language preface on account, he explained, of their novelty, adding that if they were approved by ‘some of the Learned Gentlemen of our Country’ (i.e. Wales) there would ‘be no Difficulty to write them more at large hereafter in a more general Language’ (i.e. English).164 Although Camden, the Dutch scholar Marcus Boxhorn (1612–53), and others had proposed Gaulish origins for the Britons,165 Lhuyd used comparative etymology to take this interpretation further and argue for two waves of settlement from Gaul. The first comprised Gwyddelians (referred to elsewhere as C Britons), who, to judge by place-­name evidence, occupied all of England and Wales. However, they were subsequently displaced by ‘our Ancestors’ (or P Britons), who drove them to northern England and Scotland, whence they crossed to Ireland. In add­ition, a 159 Lhuyd to John Lloyd, 29 September 1703, and cf. Lhuyd to Martin Lister, 5 June 1698, in Gunther, Early Science, 489–90, 400; dating of latter follows Lhwyd, ‘The Correspondence’, tinyurl. com/y6who7dg (last accessed 13 September 2021). For the wider context of attempts to privilege biblical, Noachic origins over medieval legends tracing the descent of peoples of Troy see Kidd, British Identities, ch. 3. 160  Britannia (1695), cols. 658–9; Lhuyd, Glossography, 32, 267–8 (repr. in Lhwyd, Archæologia, 167–71). 161  Nancy Edwards, ‘Edward Lhuyd: An Archaeologist’s View’. 162  Britannia (1695), cols. 649–50. 163  ‘First Planters’: Lhuyd, Glossography, sig. b2 (repr. in Lhwyd, Archæologia, 55). 164  Lhuyd, ‘At y Kymry’, 134–5. 165 Camden, Britannia (1586 edn.), 8–19; Prys Morgan, ‘Boxhorn, Leibniz, and the Welsh’, 222.

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182  WRITING WELSH HISTORY third people, the Scots, migrated from Spain to Ireland where they coexisted with the Gwyddelians.166 In the late nineteenth century these ideas were influentially adapted by John Rhys, first Professor of Celtic at Oxford. Lhuyd also maintained that ‘traditions’, like ‘fables’, were of dubious evidential value. As well as demonstrating his commitment to rational explanation his treatment of these throws valuable light on popular understandings of the past in his lifetime. One of Lhuyd’s Parochial Queries sought information on ‘the Customs, and peculiar Games and Feasts amongst the Vulgar’ as well as ‘the Vulgar Errors and Traditions; parallel with those treated of by the Learned and Judicious Author of Pseudodoxia Epidemica’.167 This is a telling reference to an influential work by Thomas Browne, first published in 1646, which argued that the common people were particularly susceptible to errors on account of their lack of education.168 For Lhuyd, too, the credibility of the ‘fabulous’ was further undermined by its association with ‘the vulgar’—the common people distinguished from the gentry by their lack of social status and learning.169 For example, Lhuyd dismissed ‘fabulous’ stories of drowned cities as ‘erroneous traditions of the Vulgar, from which few (if any) Nations are exempted’,170 and was similarly sceptical of ‘the tradition of the neighbours’ associating the stone cairn known as Gwely Taliesin (‘Taliesin’s Bed’) in Cardiganshire with the poet Taliesin.171 Also like Browne, Lhuyd was ready to derive erroneous beliefs from antiquity, maintaining, for example, that popular beliefs concerning glass beads known as ‘snake stones’ might represent a vestige of druidical ‘superstition’.172 The respondents to Lhuyd’s Parochial Queries followed the injunction to indicate when information they gave derived from ‘tradition’. Interestingly, some sought to provide corroborating testimony, thereby revealing both their ac­know­ ledge­ment of the dubious evidential status of ‘tradition’ and their reluctance to dismiss it entirely. For example, the respondent for the parish of Aberafan in Glamorgan reported: We have an immemoriall tradition that Aber Avan was formerly a citty & that it stood where the Sea & Sands are these many ages agoe & called by the name of y

166  Lhuyd, ‘At y Kymry’, esp. 116–21, 126–9, 132–5. C and P Britons: Lhuyd to Mr Babington, 14 October 1703, in Gunther, Early Science, 490–1. See further Caryl Davies, Adfeilion Babel, 72–9. 167 Lhwyd, Parochial Queries, 2 (no. 15). 168  Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica, I.3, ed. Robbins, 1: 15–21, with commentary at 2: 653–9; Cramsie, British Travellers, 369, 374; Harriet Phillips, ‘Hereditary Error’. Cf. Kelsey Jackson Williams, The Antiquary, 46, and, for assumptions that truthfulness was an attribute of gentlemen lacking in other social groups, including servants and the poor, Shapin, A Social History of Truth, ch. 3. 169 Lhwyd, Parochial Queries, 2 (nos. XV–XVI), 4. Lhuyd stressed that the Glossography was not intended for ‘the common People’: Lhuyd, ‘At y Kymry’, 116–17. 170  Britannia (1695), col. 592; see also col. 623. 171  Britannia (1695), col. 647; see also cols. 661–2, 675–7, 681–4. For Gwely Taliesin cf. Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Edward Lhwyd a Cheredigion’, 59–60. 172  Britannia (1695), cols. 683–4.

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ANTIQUARIANISM AND HISTORICAL WRITING, 1620–1707  183 dref hîr yn y wain, & that there was a court held in it, having power of life & death. It is certainly true that there is a field in it called Kae’r Grogwydd where condemned malefactors are said to be executed . . .173

Such traditions maintaining the former greatness of settlements were common in early modern England, too, and point up how, for many people, perceptions of the past were anchored in, and primarily relevant to, particular local communities.174 The criticism of ‘fables’ and ‘traditions’ by Lhuyd and previous scholars like Thomas Browne witnesses to a desire, then, to define and police acceptable understandings of the past. Unlike later Romantics who celebrated folk-­tales as expressions of a people’s deep-­rooted connection with their native land and thus as ancient testimony to the existence of its national identity, Lhuyd regarded popular beliefs as errant curiosities that stood in sharp contrast to the rational explanations he espoused.175 However, the evidence he collected is significant for an understanding not only of Lhuyd and his correspondents but also of those who held such beliefs. For example, he heard from north Wales that ‘Camden’s history displeases some of our people’, not only because Camden called Bala ‘a den of thieves’ but because he denied the arrival of Brutus in Britain.176 This is but one indication of the widespread adherence in Wales during Lhuyd’s lifetime to the British History popularized by Geoffrey of Monmouth. Moreover, for all Lhuyd’s association of legendary history with ‘the vulgar’, this adherence extended from erudite gentry antiquaries, like Robert Vaughan and Lhuyd’s cousin Thomas Sebastian Price, to the farmers and craftworkers who consumed ballads and other popular literature. One reason for the wide appeal of such notions was that, for many in Wales, they remained fundamental components of national identity. Indeed, the persistent popularity of the British History may be seen as part of what Lloyd Bowen has characterized as ‘the ideological matrix at the heart of early modern Welsh political culture’ that maintained Welsh distinctiveness along with loyalty to the monarchy in ‘a vision shared by elites and the people’.177 This interpretation finds support from the Welsh-­language almanacs aimed at a popular readership that were issued annually from 1680 to 1712 by the enterprising publisher Thomas Jones.178 Strongly supportive of the monarchy and the established Anglican Church, fiercely anti-­Catholic and hostile to Louis XIV of France, these contained astrological prognostications for the following year 173 Lhwyd, Parochialia, 3: 6. 174  Cf. Adam Fox, ‘Remembering the Past’; Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture, ch. 4. 175  For folklore see e.g. Thiesse, La création des identités nationales, part II. 176 William Rowlands to Lhuyd, 28 September [1695?], in Lhwyd, The Correspondence, tinyurl. com/y29aavbw (last accessed 13 September 2021). 177  Lloyd Bowen, ‘Information, Language and Political Culture’, 156. 178 Geraint H. Jenkins, Thomas Jones yr Almanaciwr, esp. 122–3; Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘ “The Sweating Astrologer” ’; Ffion Mair Jones, ‘[M]ae r Stori yn Wir iw Gweled’, 20–2; Kaminski-­Jones, ‘True Britons’, 45–51.

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184  WRITING WELSH HISTORY supplemented by a wide variety of other material, some of it historical in nature. One aspect of this was Jones’s interpretations of medieval Welsh prophecies. For ex­ample, readers were presented with a prophecy attributed to Gronw Ddu of Anglesey c.1400 that allegedly foretold the accession of William III to the throne of England in 1688, a reading supported by its apparent anticipation of the wearing of wigs by men and other late seventeenth-­century fashions!179 Jones also included chronologies of events in biblical, Roman, and British history. For ex­ample, the chron­ology in the almanac for 1685 extends from the Creation, placed 5,364 years ago (presumably reflecting the influence of the chronology proposed by Ussher a generation earlier), to the late seventeenth century.180 Particularly notable is its listing of key moments in medieval Welsh understandings of the past strongly indebted to Geoffrey of Monmouth: the destruction of Troy ‘where the Welsh lived before they came to this island’, the arrival of the Welsh in the island and the length of their rule ‘before the English came to oppress them’, the loss of England by the Welsh ‘through the persecution of the English’, and the submission of the Welsh to the government and laws of the English in 1282. Christian history also featured with notices of the arrival of the apostle Joseph of Arimathea in Britain and the death of Lucius, the island’s first Christian king, while, significantly, the only specifically Welsh reference after 1282 is to the printing of the Bible. The almanacs also lend a voice to Geoffrey’s history in poems, among them a ballad by the clergyman Ellis ab Ellis (fl. 1685–1726) entitled Hanes y Cymru (‘The History of the Welsh’). This celebrates the history related by Geoffrey down to King Arthur, defends it from the attacks of the Renaissance scholars Polydore Vergil and Hector Boece with reference to a range of medieval and sixteenth-­ century writers, and concludes in conventional fashion by blaming the defeat of the Welsh on their sins and urging them to repent and place their faith in God.181 Although the work of an educated, moralizing clergyman, the casting of the history in verse and its inclusion in the almanac strongly suggest that it sought to appeal to, and thus reflected, the tastes of a popular audience. The same was true of another earlier ballad bearing the same title by Matthew Owen (1631–79) of Llangar (Merioneth), possibly composed in 1656, that circulated only in manuscript.182 This summarizes Geoffrey’s History, from glorious Trojan origins to defeat at the hands of the English in the treachery of ‘the long knives’, with references to Brutus, 179 Thomas Jones, Newyddion Mawr oddiwrth y Ser. Neu Almanacc am y Flwyddyn . . . 1698 (Shrewsbury, 1697), [31], in ‘Welsh Almanac Collection’. 180  For Ussher’s chronology, which pinpointed the date of the Creation to 23 October 4004 bce, see Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time, 147–8. Jones’s chronology implied a date of 3679 bce. 181  Thomas Jones, Newydd oddiwrth y Ser . . . 1686 (Shrewsbury, ?1685), [17–20], in ‘Welsh Almanac Collection’. 182  ‘Hanes y Cymru’, ed. Parry-­Williams. Owen evoked similar themes in a carol published in 1656 and may also have been the author of Cronicl y Cymry, an interlude that dramatized aspects of the British History: Ffion Mair Jones, ‘[M]ae r Stori yn Wir iw Gweled’, 3–20.

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ANTIQUARIANISM AND HISTORICAL WRITING, 1620–1707  185 Vortigern, Hengist, and Horsa, and, like Ellis ab Ellis, declares that the disasters visited on the Welsh were divine punishment for sin. In many respects the evocation of the Welsh and British past aimed at popular readerships and audiences touched on briefly here was a world away from the scholarly antiquarianism of Edward Lhuyd. Thomas Jones’s almanacs were cheap ephemeral booklets in Welsh costing two or three pence, whereas Gibson’s Britannia and Lhuyd’s Glossography were weighty and expensive tomes, selling for at least 36s. and 16s. respectively and intended for the educated gentry and ­clergy.183 In his approach to the past, Lhuyd owed much to Camden and refused to follow the example of those who continued to recycle the early history of the Britons presented by Geoffrey of Monmouth. Thus he was more critical of what he considered to be mere ‘fables’ than some other Welsh antiquaries such as his cousin Thomas Sebastian Price of Llanfyllin, whose view of the British History he thought lacking in judgement; by contrast, one of Thomas Jones’s almanacs printed a chronology provided by Price of ‘kings of Britain’ from Noah to Queen Anne that included the succession of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s rulers from Brutus to Cadwaladr the Blessed.184 Nevertheless, Lhuyd was both indebted to and illuminated the wider Welsh historical culture of his contemporaries, with which he shared some common preoccupations. This is most evident in the field of antiquarian studies, where, thanks to his collaborative approach, he engaged with a wide spectrum of antiquarian endeavour. Such endeavour in turn influenced popular genres of writing: Ellis ab Ellis invoked Sir John Prise, Humphrey Llwyd, and David Powel in defence of Geoffrey of Monmouth.185 While relying on the analysis of languages rather than tales of Troy and Brutus, and apparently lacking the acute sense of loss and victimhood, often laced with bitter anti-­English feeling, found in popular writing about the Welsh past, Lhuyd shared the fundamental conviction underpinning such sentiment that the Welsh were different and special because of their ancient origins. His interpretation of those origins and approach to Welsh antiquities were informed, then, not only by the empirical, critical approach associated with Baconian natural history but also by the background, connections, and outlook of ‘an old Briton’. Nevertheless, his critical scholarship, while praised, proved no match in the eighteenth century for the beguiling glamour of distant origins in the biblical, Celtic, and Druidical past, as we shall see in Chapter 8.

183 Price of Glossography: Lhwyd, Archaeologia, 9 (bound 18s. 6d.; unbound 16s.). Gibson’s Britannia: Lhuyd to John Lloyd, 23 March 1695, in Gunther, Early Science, 259. 184  Lhuyd to John Lloyd, 8 September 1694, in Gunther, Early Science, 243; Thomas Jones, Y cyfreithlawn Almanacc Cymraeg . . . 1709 (Shrewsbury, ?1708), [22–5]; cf. Thomas Jones, Almanac am y Flwyddyn 1704 (Shrewsbury, 1703), [32–8] (both in ‘Welsh Almanac Collection’). 185  Thomas Jones, Newydd oddiwrth y Ser . . . 1686 (Shrewsbury, ?1685), [18], in ‘Welsh Almanac Collection’. Cf. Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture, 242–4.

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8 From Druids to the Last Bard, 1707–70 In the eighteenth century Welsh history writing continued to be predominantly antiquarian, consisting mainly of the consolidation and elaboration of established narratives rather than the production of new general accounts of the Welsh past.1 This was particularly true of the early and middle decades of the century which are the focus of the present chapter, although there was still a strong antiquarian dimension to the greater diversity of historical works produced from the 1770s onwards as we shall see in Chapter 9. The works considered in this chapter thus witness to the continuing appeal of a unique birthright conveyed by descent from the earliest people of Britain, coupled with a pristine British Christianity unsullied by Roman Catholicism and a native tradition of kingship under the medieval princes. Likewise the subsequent loyalty of the Welsh to the English monarchy and Protestant religion remained cornerstones of Welsh historical thinking. Yet these themes were articulated in new social, cultural, and intellectual contexts. The following discussion begins by identifying some of those contexts over the period as a whole before assessing, first, its two most significant works—Henry Rowlands’s Mona Antiqua Restaurata and Theophilus Evans’s Drych y Prif Oesoedd (‘Mirror of the Primitive Ages’)—and, second, some mid-­eighteenth-­ century developments, including the influence of Romantic Celticism.

Contexts and Themes The contexts in which historical writing was produced and consumed changed significantly in this period as a result of broader changes in literacy and print culture. During the eighteenth century more Welsh historical works were written and, crucially, published for a wider range of people than ever before, although, as with literary texts, many also continued to be composed and copied in manuscript.2 In part, the growth in the number of historical publications reflected a general increase in the numbers and print-­runs of books in Welsh and about Wales, especially after 1740. This was facilitated by the ending of restrictions on where books could be printed following the lapse of the Printing Act in 1695 and the 1 Prys Morgan, The Eighteenth Century Renaissance, 85–100; Geraint  H.  Jenkins, ‘Historical Writing’; Constantine, ‘Antiquarianism and Enlightenment’. 2  Cf. McKenna, ‘Aspects of Tradition Formation’, esp. 38–41.

Writing Welsh History: From the Early Middle Ages to the Twenty-­First Century. Huw Pryce, Oxford University Press. © Huw Pryce 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198746034.003.0009

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FROM DRUIDS TO THE LAST BARD, 1707–70  187 consequent establishment of publishers and printers of Welsh books, generally ­inexpensive in price, first in Shrewsbury and Chester, then, from 1718, in Wales.3 This helps to explain the dramatic increase in the number of books published in Welsh during the eighteenth century.4 However, underpinning these commercial developments were religious priorities that led to an increase in the numbers of Welsh people able to read, so that ‘by the mid-­eighteenth century Wales had been transformed into one of the most literate countries in Europe’.5 To a large extent this resulted from initiatives to extend educational opportunities, most notably the circulating schools established by Griffith Jones (1684–1761), parson of Llanddowror in Carmarthenshire, a scheme which continued from 1731 to 1779 that taught pupils to read the Scriptures in Welsh, the language of the overwhelming majority of the population.6 While expressing pride in the language’s an­tiquity, purity, and alleged descent from Hebrew, Jones was motivated above all by a desire to ensure the salvation of his compatriots and came to be regarded as one of the founding figures of the Methodist revival from the 1730s, part of a trans-­ European and transatlantic evangelical awakening that arose within the Anglican Church in Wales.7 Educational and commercial changes were thus favourable to an expansion of the number of printed historical works, reflected in a diversification in readers and authors. True, many historical works were still written by educated, antiquarian-­ minded gentry and Anglican clergy for likeminded readers of the same social class: these continued to finance the publication of expensive and learned volumes in English.8 However, cheaper books, especially in Welsh, attracted pur­chasers of lower social status: most of the twenty-­one subscribers to Thomas William’s Oes Lyfr (‘Chronicle’, 1724), a digest of biblical and historical chron­ology, were unidentified men.9 A weaver and Independent minister, Thomas William (1697–1778) was an early example of the authorship of Welsh books by members of the middling sorts, who were often also religious Dissenters; the same is true of the Presbyterian minister Simon Thomas, author of a popular encyclopaedic survey of biblical and Christian history down to William III’s Toleration Act (1689).10

3  Rheinallt Llwyd, ‘Printing and Publishing’, 93, 102–3; Eiluned Rees, ‘Developments in the Book Trade’, quotation at 33; Eiluned Rees, ‘The Welsh Book Trade from 1718 to 1820’. 4 Geraint H. Jenkins, Literature, Religion and Society, 34–9; Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘The Cultural Uses of the Welsh Language’, 371–2. 5  Suggett and White, ‘Language’, 54. 6 Geraint H. Jenkins, The Foundations of Modern Wales, 370–81, 397–9; White, ‘Popular Schooling’, 324–37. Benjamin Martin, The Natural History of England, 2: 339, noted Jones’s schools as contributing to the ‘Improvement’ of the Welsh. 7  White, ‘Popular Schooling’, 326–8; Geraint H. Jenkins, The Foundations of Modern Wales, 347–70; David Ceri Jones, ‘A Glorious Work in the World’; White, The Welsh Methodist Society. 8 Geraint H. Jenkins, Literature, Religion and Society, 259. 9 William, Oes Lyfr; Geraint H. Jenkins, Literature, Religion and Society, 259. 10 Evan Lewis Evans, ‘William, Thomas’; Geraint  H.  Jenkins, Literature, Religion and Society, 209–10; Simon Thomas, Hanes y Byd a’r Amseroedd.

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188  WRITING WELSH HISTORY The demand for historical writing in Welsh was also underpinned by the continuing appeal of the British History and other stories about the ancient and medieval Welsh past revealed, for example, by the observations of travellers to Wales and by popular genres of Welsh writing, including interludes (W.  anterliwtiau)—verse dialogues performed at markets and fairs, where printed copies were also for sale—and almanacs, which continued to supply their readers with a variety of historical material ranging from biblical chron­ology to accounts of medieval kings of England as well as canonical moments of the Welsh past from the arrival of Brutus to the defeat of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd.11 Another important factor in the expansion of Welsh historical writing was its connections with wider antiquarian endeavour in Britain.12 English antiquaries made significant contributions to the study of Wales, notably Thomas Rymer through the publication of medieval records in his Foedera (1704–35),13 Browne Willis in his volumes on the four Welsh cathedrals (1716–21), part of a much larger project embracing almost all the cathedrals of England,14 and the theo­logic­al scholar William Wotton (1666–1727). Wotton contributed to Willis’s volumes on St Davids and Llandaf, and in turn received help from the Anglican clergyman and scholar Moses Williams (1685–1742), a former assistant to Edward Lhuyd and a Fellow of the Royal Society, in completing the first printed edition of the Welsh laws.15 Moses Williams exemplified the continuity of the Welsh antiquarianism which Edward Lhuyd had drawn upon and further encouraged as his father, the Revd Samuel Williams (c.1660–c.1722), belonged to a circle of antiquarian-­ minded clergy and minor gentry in southern Cardiganshire.16 One significant institutional change that created new contexts for studies of the Welsh past was the establishment of Welsh societies in London which provided a forum for discussing Welsh culture and antiquities and encouraging the publication of scholarly works. The earliest of these, the Society of Antient Britons, was established in 1715 and held annual St David’s Day services and dinners which raised the profile of the Welsh in the capital, although its contribution to antiquarian study was minimal.17 More significant were the Honourable Society

11 Defoe, A Tour through the Whole Island, 2: Letter III, 80, 96; Letter IV, 102; Ffion Mair Jones, ‘[M]ae r Stori yn Wir iw Gweled’, esp. 2–3, 21–30; Y Brenin Llŷr, ed. Jones; cf. Dafydd Glyn Jones, ‘The Interludes’. Digitized copies of almanacs in ‘Welsh Almanac Collection’. See e.g. John Rhydderch, Newyddion oddi wrth y Sêr . . . 1725 (Shrewsbury [1724]), [6–16]; John Rhydderch, Newyddion . . . 1726 ([Shrewsbury, 1725]), [34–6]; John Rhydderch, Newyddion . . . 1729 (Shrewsbury [1728]), [30–9]; John Rhydderch, Newyddion . . . 1734 (Carmarthen [1733]), [9–12]. 12  Cf. Eiluned Rees, ‘An Introductory Survey’, 200–3, 214–16, 234–6. 13  Fœdera, ed. Rymer. 14  Doggett, ‘Willis, Browne’; J.  P.  Jenkins, ‘From Edward Lhuyd to Iolo Morganwg’, 32–7; Stoker, ‘Surveying Decrepit Welsh Cathedrals’. 15  Wotton, with Williams, Cyfreithjeu Hywel Dda. Discussion in Emanuel, ‘Studies in the Welsh Laws’, 74; Stoker, ‘William Wotton’s Exile and Redemption’. 16  Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Williams, Moses’; Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘ “I Will Tell You a Word or Two” ’. For such circles in Glamorgan see J. P. Jenkins, ‘From Edward Lhuyd to Iolo Morganwg’. 17 Prescott, Eighteenth-­Century Writing, 1–28; Kaminski-­Jones, ‘ “Where Cymry United” ’, esp. 63.

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FROM DRUIDS TO THE LAST BARD, 1707–70  189 of Cymmrodorion (meaning the ‘first inhabitants’ of Britain), established in 1751, and the Gwyneddigion Society, founded in 1770 in reaction to the Cymmrodorion’s perceived Anglicization and stuffiness.18 A commitment to pursuing the study of Welsh history and antiquities and to fostering the Welsh language is emphasized in the introduction to the constitutions drawn up for the Cymmrodorion in 1755 by Lewis Morris (1701–65), the surveyor, poet, antiquary, and literary scholar who, with his brothers Richard (1703–79), principal founder of the Cymmrodorion Society, and William (1705–63), played a vital role in the Welsh cultural life of their day.19 The constitutions announced the ambitious aim of cultivating the Welsh language as a key ‘to the Restoration and Improvement, not only of the History of Great Britain and Ireland, but likewise of several Countries upon the Continent’.20 These metropolitan societies, comprising Welsh entrepreneurs and professional men as well as members of the gentry and aristocracy, provided institutional support, lacking in Wales itself, for what has been termed an ‘eighteenth-­century renaissance’ that sought to affirm Welsh culture and national identity within the kingdom of Great Britain established in 1707.21 The London-­Welsh societies proclaimed a loyalty to the Hanoverian monarchy shared more widely by Welsh antiquaries and other literati of this period. Such loyalty of course continued a tradition of Welsh allegiance to the crown originating in the later Middle Ages, powerfully reinforced by Henry VII’s accession. However, it also marked a specific response to the advent of the Hanoverian dynasty in 1714. The Most Honourable and Loyal Society of Ancient Britons was founded in honour of Caroline of Ansbach, Princess of Wales, whose birthday conveniently fell on St David’s Day (1 March), while her husband, Prince George, was chosen as the society’s first president. The society thus not only unambiguously signalled its support for the Protestant succession and its rejection of Jacobitism but also implied that the Welsh had a special contribution to make to the new dynasty by associating it with the earliest inhabitants of Great Britain.22 The Cymmrodorion likewise declared their ‘firm attachment’ to King George II (the erstwhile president of the Ancient Britons), and ‘his mild and auspicious Government’.23

18  R. T. Jenkins and Helen M. Ramage, A History, 48–51, 91–2, 119–20; Geraint Phillips, Dyn Heb Ei Gyffelyb yn y Byd, 26–7. 19  Gosodedigaethau, esp. 13; R. T. Jenkins and Helen M. Ramage, A History, 16–44; Gerald Morgan, ‘The Morris Brothers’; R.  J.  W.  Evans, ‘Was There a Welsh Enlightenment?’, 147–8; Alun  R.  Jones, Lewis Morris. 20  Gosodedigaethau, 11; R. T. Jenkins and Helen M. Ramage, A History, 45–52; Alun R. Jones, Lewis Morris, 121–2. 21  Prys Morgan, The Eighteenth Century Renaissance. 22 Prescott, Eighteenth-­Century Writing, 2; Kaminski-­ Jones, ‘  “Where Cymry United”  ’, 61–2; Atherton, ‘Commemorating Conflict’, 381–4. See also Gerrard, ‘Queens-­in-­Waiting’; Lisa  L.  Ford, ‘Using Britain’s Past’. 23  Gosodedigaethau, 13.

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190  WRITING WELSH HISTORY Such thinking left its mark on historical writing. In 1743 John Owen commended the history of the Britons as ‘the most strenuous Defenders of Liberty’ and thus a highly suitable topic for his dedicatee, Augusta of Saxe-­Gotha, Princess of Wales, whose ancestors had protected Luther and the Reformation, and praised the Hanoverian succession to the throne of England, ‘the freest Nation in Being, and the chief Support of the Protestant Interest’.24 Over a decade earlier William Clarke adapted this theme to fit the renewed emphasis on the Saxon ancestry of the English after the Hanoverian succession by commending his father-­in-­law William Wotton’s edition of the medieval Welsh laws to Frederick, Prince of Wales on the tendentious grounds that the laws had been borrowed by the Welsh princes ‘from your Saxons’.25 More generally, the history, language, and literature of the Welsh could be promoted as exotic curiosities worthy of notice in the wider orbit of a united Great Britain, a view taken, for example, by Richard Rolt of Shrewsbury in his lengthy annotated poem Cambria (1749).26 Yet, while an emphasis on unity and assimilation implied support for the United Kingdom of Great Britain created by the parliamentary union of England and Scotland in 1707, this did not extend to explicit praise of that constitutional change as an affirmation of British unity, in contrast to the response of some Welsh antiquaries to the union of crowns a century earlier, presumably because the 1707 Union made no difference to the constitutional position of Wales.27 Indeed, writing on Welsh history is striking for its lack of engagement with the contemporary pol­it­ ical issues that did so much to shape the work of historians of England, Scotland, and Ireland in their respective responses to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the 1707 Union, and the penal laws against Roman Catholics. True, by taking their narratives down to the early modern period those historians covered controversial episodes such as the Civil Wars to a much greater extent than their Welsh counterparts, who continued to focus primarily on events down to 1282. However, the former also invoked the distant past to further their partisan ends, be it by reiterating the ancient origins of English liberties, by claiming unique antiquity and continuity for the Scottish monarchy in order to emphasize Scotland’s status as an autonomous kingdom after 1707, or by celebrating the literate culture of  pre-­Christian times or a golden age of saints and scholars in support of

24  John Owen, A Compleat and Impartial History, sig. A2r–A3r. The work appears to have been unfinished, as it ends with the confinement of the Britons to Wales following the Saxon invasion of Britain. Owen echoed wider approval of ‘Augusta’s impeccable Protestant credentials’: cf. Gerrard, ‘Queens-in-Waiting’, 152. 25  Wotton, with Williams, Cyfreithjeu Hywel Dda, dedication. Cf. Sweet, Antiquaries, 189–90. 26 Rolt, Cambria, esp. 25, n.*; Prescott, Eighteenth-Century Writing, 93–102. 27 The Wales and Berwick Act of 1746 was predicated on Wales’s relationship specifically to England, stipulating that all references to England in future acts of parliament would be taken to include Wales and Berwick-upon-Tweed: Statutes of Wales, ed. Bowen, 206. The act was abolished with respect to Wales in 1967.

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FROM DRUIDS TO THE LAST BARD, 1707–70  191 competing Catholic and Protestant agendas in Ireland.28 That Welsh history was rarely used in this way and then only, as with allusions to struggles for liberty, in contexts compatible with loyalty to Great Britain, was thus probably due less to its focus on events before the Edwardian conquest than to the assumption that that conquest had terminated Wales’s separate political and constitutional history.29 Patriotic Welsh writers nevertheless continued to turn to the past to negotiate an honourable place for the Welsh in Great Britain that upheld their distinctiveness as a people while respecting British unity. The tensions at play here are illustrated by a comparison of two St David’s Day sermons delivered by the editors of the medieval Welsh laws to the Society of Ancient Britons. In 1722 the English Cambrophile William Wotton took a Panglossian view. On the one hand, the Welsh had preserved their native language and ‘for near two and fifty Years been governed by Princes of Your Blood’, while, on the other, ‘[i]t was a mutual Happiness to both Nations, that after long and bloody Struggles we at last co­alesced into one People’ under ‘the same common Sovereigns’—a view also expressed shortly afterwards by the French Huguenot historian Paul de Rapin-­ Thoyras.30 Five years earlier, by contrast, Moses Williams had warned his London-­Welsh audience of the dangers of Anglicization, and urged the Welsh to take a greater pride in themselves and their country lest the English, ‘the progeny of the oppressive nation which has already stolen England from us’, also steal Wales and ‘in time destroy our name under the heavens’.31 For Williams, loyalty to the monarchy was compatible with anti-­English rhetoric fuelled by a sense of victimhood, predicated on a belief that the Welsh deserved greater respect owing to their special place as lineal descendants of the original inhabitants of Britain. In their different ways, both Wotton and Williams exemplified the continuation in the eighteenth century of the long-­established framing of Welsh history primarily in terms of ethnicity.32

Celtic Origins and Divine Providence Accounts of the Welsh past in the early decades of the eighteenth century gave fresh impetus to the long-­established quest for distant origins. In part, this was a

28  Cf. Sullivan, ‘Rapin’, 149–50; Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, ch. 5; O’Halloran, Golden Ages, 24, 73–96. 29  The position of Wales as part of the kingdom of England is implicit in a Welsh chronology of events from the Creation to 1720, which referred to the 1707 Union as ‘when England and Scotland were made one kingdom under the name Great Britain’: John Rhydderch, Newyddion . . . 1734 (Carmarthen [1733]), [12], in ‘Welsh Almanac Collection’. 30 Wotton, A Sermon, Dedication. Cf. Rapin Thoyras, The History of England. Volume IV, trans. Tindal, 16. 31  Moses Williams, Pregeth, 12–17, quotation at 15. 32  Bethan Jenkins, ‘ “No Rebellious Jarring Noise” ’.

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192  WRITING WELSH HISTORY matter of reaffirming the validity of the British History. For example, the London-­ Welsh genealogist Hugh Thomas (1673–1720) criticized John Lewis of Llynwene, whose work he published, for having been too ready to follow Camden in rejecting accounts of the Trojan Brutus.33 However, Thomas also drew on Pezron in order to push the origins of the Welsh back beyond Brutus and the Trojans to the Celts ultimately descended from the biblical Gomer son of Japhet.34 Pezron also left his mark on two of the most significant and influential Welsh historical works of the eighteenth century: Henry Rowlands’s Mona Antiqua Restaurata (1723; second edition 1766), an account of the history and antiquities of Anglesey, and the second edition of Theophilus Evans’s Drych y Prif Oesoedd (‘Mirror of the Primitive Ages’; 1740). In many respects, these works were very different from each other. Rowlands produced a substantial scholarly tome, written in English, focused on his island county, the fruit of decades of study that was published in Dublin a month after its author’s death and financed by 347 well-­to-­do sub­ scribers including many of the Anglesey gentry.35 Its geographical scope and intended readership were thus typical of studies by other antiquarian-­minded clergy of the period. Rowlands was, moreover, notable for the breadth of his erudition as well as his readiness to survey field monuments and to deploy their evidence, albeit mainly in support of interpretations based on written sources.36 By contrast, the first edition of Drych y Prif Oesoedd (1716) was the hurried outpouring of a twenty-­three-­year-­old aspiring clergyman, who put his antiquarian and religious learning to a reforming purpose and aimed at a much wider readership than Rowlands by writing in Welsh and finding a Shrewsbury publisher willing to print it without subscribers. Yet both works also shared important points in common beyond their publication within eight years of each other. Their authors were members of Welsh gentry families; both used the work of Edward Lhuyd (whom Rowlands had also met and corresponded with) as well as that of Pezron; and their writings followed well-­established precedents in their focus on the ancient past and emphasis on the antiquity of the Welsh language. Above all, both were Anglican clergy who presented the history of the Welsh as part of a bigger Christian story. Thus Rowlands situated Anglesey’s past against the backdrop of biblical history, while Evans linked the histories of the Welsh and the Church and highlighted the providential role of God in human affairs. I begin with Rowlands since, although published after Evans’s Drych y Prif Oesoedd, his Mona Antiqua existed in draft form by 1708 and was the fruit of work begun in the late seventeenth century.37

33  John Lewis, The History of Great-­Britain, 17, 31, 33. 34  John Lewis, The History of Great-­Britain, 8, 17, 27, 28, 29, 44–6, 54; Caryl Davies, Adfeilion Babel, 60–1. See also P. T. J. Morgan, ‘The Abbé Pezron’; Kidd, British Identities, 197–8. 35 Rowlands, Mona, i–viii. 36  Woolf, ‘Rowlands, Henry’. 37  For manuscript drafts of the work see Hutton, Blood and Mistletoe, 77, 434, n. 126.

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FROM DRUIDS TO THE LAST BARD, 1707–70  193

Henry Rowlands Henry Rowlands (1655–1723) descended from a gentry family in the parish of Llanidan in south-­east Anglesey, which he served as vicar for most of his life.38 Before completing Mona Antiqua Restaurata he had written a treatise on agriculture (1704) and an account of the parishes in the commote of Menai (c.1710), both published posthumously.39 His affirmation of the divine institution of monarchy and loyalty to the English crown reflected the conventionally conservative outlook of his class and profession.40 However, his treatment of the past broke new ground in three important respects. First, his novel assertion that Anglesey had been the principal seat of the Druids gave the island a central role in the ancient history of Britain.41 Second, he attempted to reconstruct the territorial organization that underpinned Welsh rule on Anglesey before the Edwardian conquest. And third, he reflected on the methodological challenges of writing history to a greater extent than any previous Welsh writer. It is true that Rowlands’s portrayal of Anglesey as ‘the Antient Seat of the British Druids’ was motivated by pride in his island county. So too was his dec­lar­ ation that ‘God’s singular providence’ had made ‘this island the only celebrated place of refuge to the distressed and persecuted, in the greatest calamities that ever happened to this kingdom’, from ‘the harassed Britons’ facing Roman conquest to Anglican clergy fleeing persecution in Ireland under James II.42 Above all, though, Rowlands’s pride in his county was reflected in his ambition to make it the vehicle for a broad historical vision. That vision was anchored in Christian assumptions. To begin with, he proposed an elaborate theory of biblical origins, including the alleged affinities of the Welsh and Hebrew languages (here drawing on the Puritan writer Charles Edwards).43 Likewise, although the account of the Druids relied on the staple classical sources,44 it was situated in a biblical and providential framework. Thus Rowlands followed previous scholars such as William Harrison and William Camden in praising the Druids for their pre-­eminent learning and also for their monotheism, regarded as anticipating Christianity; more spe­cif­ic­ al­ly, like John Selden, he held that their beliefs and knowledge were analogous to the Jewish Cabbala in preserving elements of knowledge pre-­dating Noah’s 38  The fullest study of Rowlands and his writings remains William Garel Jones, ‘The Life and Works’. See also Hulbert-­Powell, ‘Some Notes’; Caryl Davies, Adfeilion Babel, 110–23; Woolf, ‘Rowlands, Henry’. 39 Rowlands, Idea Agriculturae; Rowlands, ‘Antiquitates Parochiales’. 40 Rowlands, Mona, 41–4, 176–7. 41  William Garel Jones, ‘The Life and Works’, 122–3, 138–44; Hutton, Blood and Mistletoe, 76–8, 83. Cf. Kelsey Jackson Williams, The Antiquary, ch. 1. Humphrey Llwyd had called Anglesey ‘the island of the Druids’ in order to reject Polydore Vergil’s identification of Tacitus’ Mona with the Isle of Man but without elaborating on the island’s importance for the Druids (see Chapter 5); cf. Rowlands, Mona, 78. 42 Rowlands, Mona, 177–8. 43  E.g. Rowlands, Mona, 19–22, 39, 20, 214–15, 218, 275–317; debt to Edwards acknowledged at 287. See also Caryl Davies, Adfeilion Babel, 119–21. 44  For these see Hutton, Blood and Mistletoe, 1–22.

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194  WRITING WELSH HISTORY Flood.45 An etymological sleight of hand reinforced this religious convergence by making the Druids’ place of worship, the oak grove (W. llwyn), the precursor of the Christian church (W.  llan).46 Rowlands also cited the authority of Edward Lhuyd in maintaining that the earliest Welsh poetry probably derived from the transmission of Druidic moral instruction.47 Yet the place of the Druids in God’s plan was strictly time-­limited, as their eventual defeat by the Romans paved the way for the introduction of the Christian Gospel in Britain: having served their providential purpose, the previously ‘learned Druids’ were dismissed as ‘infatuated’, ‘Monkish’, ‘giddy’, and ‘superstitious’.48 Secondly, Rowlands broke new ground in his attempt to establish the territorial organization, land tenures, and fiscal basis of ‘the antient British Government’ on Anglesey from the pre-­Roman period to its ‘dissolution’ at the Edwardian conquest.49 He argued that the medieval divisions of townships (W. trefi) and cantrefs originated with ‘our Ancestors the Celtæ’, and described the system of land tenure in feudal terms, possibly implying that feudalism was no less immemorial among the Britons than among the Goths or Saxons, a view advanced explicitly by English writers later in the century.50 Rowlands was thus the first scholar to adopt the regressive method of working back from the extents of lands produced after the Edwardian conquest, a method fundamental to the modern study of medieval Welsh society usually seen as having been pioneered by Frederic Seebohm in the late nineteenth century.51 Also like later scholars he combined this documentary evidence with that of the Welsh laws and drew comparisons with Irish society.52 Characteristically, though, he emphasized the significance of this evidence for an understanding of distant origins, commenting that Irish parallels provided ‘a further Argument of the original Agreement between the Irish and old Britains, in their Forms of Government, as well as in their Language, and many other particulars, betokening their being once one People, or at least a great Intercourse and Communication between them’.53 The Irish parallels were adduced as part of ‘Conjectures’ on the meaning of the dues and renders owed to the princes in the post-­conquest extents.54 This brings us to the third aspect of Rowlands’s significance: his reflective response to the methodological challenges of writing about the past. Running through his text is an insistence on the validity of relying on inference and analogy, especially in dealing with the ‘deepest Obscurities of Time’ for which direct evidence was 45 Rowlands, Mona, 54–5, 61, 270–1; Hutton, Blood and Mistletoe, 51–60, 62, 78; Haycock, William Stukeley, 163–4, 168–9. 46 Rowlands, Mona, 68–9, 229. 47 Rowlands, Mona, 266–7, referring to Lhuyd, Glossography, 251. 48 Rowlands, Mona, 36, 97–8. Cf. Hutton, Blood and Mistletoe, 58–9, 78, 106. 49 Rowlands, Mona, 115–32. 50 Rowlands, Mona, 115 (quotation), 117 (‘feudatory’), 119 (‘Vassals’); Kidd, British Identities, 198–9. 51  Cf. Seebohm, The Tribal System, ch. 1. 52 Rowlands, Mona, 120, 129. 53 Rowlands, Mona, 129. 54 Rowlands, Mona, 127.

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FROM DRUIDS TO THE LAST BARD, 1707–70  195 lacking.55 While it was not uncommon for early modern writers to use conjecture when faced with a lack of evidence, notably with regard to the pre-­Roman period, the extent to which Rowlands sought to justify this approach is striking.56 Not only is this a central concern of his Preface, but Mona Antiqua’s ‘Second Essay’ explicitly addresses methodological issues, partly in response to criticisms of drafts of the first part of the work, and devotes much space to defending ‘a Conjectural Method within the Verge of History’ as being no less legitimate than its use in ‘Natural Theories and Physiology’.57 This is but one instance of an acquaintance with natural philosophy revealed elsewhere, for example, by Rowlands’s reference to ‘the new Notion of the Sphærodal Figure of the Earth’ proposed by Newton and others.58 More specifically, it echoed the well-­established premise among natural philosophers of the time of a crucial distinction between theory and hypothesis on the one hand and knowledge based on observation and experiment on the other. However, precise definitions of these two methods and their relationship to each other varied.59 Rowlands’s grasp of the debates is uncertain, but it appears that he sided with those who allowed a place for conjecture, including John Locke, who argued for the importance of probable reasoning on the grounds that certain knowledge was very limited.60 What seems clear, though, is that Rowlands’s repeated defence of his methods was a response to sceptical readers, who in turn may have been informed by contemporaneous criticisms of conjectural ex­plan­ ations. Moreover, while he defended the use of conjecture when evidence was lacking, Rowlands was careful to stress that this was a matter of proposing prob­ abil­ ities rather than cast-­ iron certainties, declaring that it was ‘the happiest Temper a Man can be Master of, not to be too tenacious of his Conjectures’, and, like some critics of speculative philosophy, he distanced himself from those who ‘are very indulgent to their own Fancies’.61 That Rowlands circulated drafts of his work for criticism in advance of publication suggests that his overall approach was cautious rather than dogmatic. In his ‘Second Essay’ Rowlands also acknowledged his debt to two con­tem­por­ ar­ies who, in their different ways, had sought to elucidate the origins of the Celts. 55 Rowlands, Mona, 205. 56  Cf. Shapiro, Probability and Certainty, 149–52; Shapiro, A Culture of Fact, 55. This use of conjecture differed from ‘conjectural history’, which aimed to establish the typical conditions of the most primitive state of societies and trace their progress from savagery to civilization: Hopfl, ‘From Savage to Scotsman’; Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact, 218–36. 57  E.g. Rowlands, Mona, ‘Preface’, 19, 32, 78, and esp. 201–9, quotation at 203. ‘Physiology’ prob­ably refers to natural philosophy here: cf. Anstey, ‘Experimental versus Speculative Natural Philosophy’, 221. 58 Rowlands, Mona, 2; Caryl Davies, Adfeilion Babel, 111–12. 59 Shapiro, Culture of Fact, 139–67; Anstey, ‘Experimental versus Speculative Natural Philosophy’; Ducheyne, ‘The Status of Theory and Hypotheses’. 60  Cf. David Owen, ‘Locke on Judgment’; Franklin, ‘Probable Opinion’, 364–6. For Locke’s influence on Rowlands’s understanding of language see Caryl Davies, Adfeilion Babel, 115–16, 120–1. 61  Rowlands to Edward Lhuyd, 20 December 1702, in Rowlands, Mona, 334. For the pejorative association of speculative philosophy with ‘fancies’ see Anstey, ‘Experimental versus Speculative Natural Philosophy’, 225, 233.

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196  WRITING WELSH HISTORY First, he praised ‘the great Learning, indefatigable Labour, and extraordinary Judgment’ of the Abbé Pezron, whose theories on the migration of Gomer’s descendants he largely accepted, including ‘that the Celtæ were the true Descendants of the Titans’.62 However, Rowlands maintained that, since Pezron presented the Titans as the conquerors of other peoples, he omitted to explain the origins of the ‘first Planters’ of Britain.63 Rowlands then declared that ‘we should be no less grateful to the Memory of the late exquisitely learn’d and judicious Mr. Edward Lhwyd’, especially for his work on comparative etymology which had established a sound basis for demonstrating how ‘our British Tongue’ ultimately derived from ‘one common Origin’.64 By contrast, he had little time for the theory of Phoenician settlement of Britain proposed by Samuel Bochart, followed by Aylett Sammes.65 While accepting Bochart’s argument for the affinities of the British and Gaulish languages, reproducing Sammes’s illustrations of ‘The Chief Druid’ and ‘Boadicea’, and asserting that ‘our Ancestors’ were in contact with the Egyptians and Phoenicians, Rowlands briskly dismissed the view that Phoenician tin traders had brought knowledge of Hebrew to Britain as ‘so ill grounded that I take it not worth confuting’.66 However, for all his praise of Lhuyd’s comparative etymology, Rowlands’s critical discrimination had its limits, and his own etymological the­or­ ies were highly fanciful.

Theophilus Evans Theophilus Evans (1693–1767) took pride in his ancestry as a member of a strongly royalist gentry family in southern Cardiganshire.67 His connections with other antiquarian-­minded squires in the area allowed him to indulge an interest in Welsh literature and history: in particular, he benefited from gaining access to manuscripts and printed books in the libraries of Samuel Williams (c.1660– c.1722), vicar of Llandyfrïog in Cardiganshire (and father of the antiquary Moses 62 Rowlands, Mona, 19, n.*, 41–3, 311–16, quotation at 311; Pezron, The Antiquities of Nations, trans. Jones, 92. 63 Rowlands, Mona, 311–14. 64 Rowlands, Mona, 316–17, quotations at 316. Hugh Thomas likewise seems to have considered the theories of Pezron and Lhuyd to be complementary, since, besides drawing extensively on the former, he reprinted Lhuyd’s Welsh-­language preface to the Glossography: above, n. 34; John Lewis, History of Great-­Britain, 59–71. See also Caryl Davies, Adfeilion Babel, 60–1, 121–2. Lhuyd and Pezron are paired as ‘prodigies’ in John Walters, A Dissertation on the Welsh Language, 19–20. 65  Pace Hulbert-­ Powell, ‘Some Notes’, 31; Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time, 329; Woolf, ‘Rowlands, Henry’. 66 Rowlands, Mona, 94, 289 (quotation), illustrations facing 65, 259. Cf. Bochart, Geographia Sacra, 719–20; Sammes, Britannia Antiqua Illustrata, 39–43, 101, 228; Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time, 310–25. 67 Geraint H. Jenkins, Theophilus Evans (1693–1767); Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘Historical Writing’, 27–9; Geraint  H.  Jenkins, ‘ “I Will Tell You a Word or Two” ’, 306–9; Glanmor Williams, ‘Romantic and Realist’, 17–22, 26.

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FROM DRUIDS TO THE LAST BARD, 1707–70  197 Williams) and the genealogist William Lewes (1652–1722) of Llwynderw, some four miles away in neighbouring Carmarthenshire. His proficiency in Latin suggests that he received a formal education, possibly at the grammar school in Carmarthen; there is no evidence that he attended university.68 Ordained a priest in the Church of England in 1718, Evans was first appointed as a curate in Breconshire and, after holding the living of Llandyfrïog from 1722 to 1728, was the vicar of several parishes in that county for the rest of his life. A dedicated minister and preacher, Evans wrote numerous religious works, mainly in Welsh, and remained a committed Anglican intolerant of both old Dissent and Methodism, an outlook sharply exemplified in his History of Modern Enthusiasm (1752). However, his support of the Church of England and the monarchy was reinforced by a warm, and at times vitriolic, Welsh patriotism, a conventional blend of allegiances in which the Welsh were portrayed as an ancient people, who, thanks to divine providence, had both uniquely preserved their original language and been granted the restoration of their pristine religion as a result of the Protestant Reformation. For Evans, ‘our Anglican Church’ was fundamentally Welsh, not English.69 These ideas are fundamental to Evans’s interpretation of the past in Drych y Prif Oesoedd (‘Mirror of the Primitive Ages’), first published in 1716.70 Essentially, they combined two principal strands of Welsh historical thinking, each conceptualized in providential terms: the glorious origins of the Welsh as descendants of the ancient Britons who eventually lost their sovereignty over the island of Britain as a result of their sins, and the interpretation of the Protestant Reformation as a divinely sanctioned restoration of the ancient British Church originally independent of Rome.71 The content of the work was highly derivative, even to the extent of lifting many of the references cited from the sources used.72 What was new was the way in which Evans pieced together his various sources to create a powerful interpretation of the past in a newly minted language. The result was much more ambitious, in both its conception and expression, than the Welsh-­ language chronologies published since the late seventeenth century in almanacs and elsewhere. This was not simply because Evans treated his sources more crit­ic­ al­ly than these,73 but also, as we shall see, because he used his sources selectively in pursuit of his overarching vision. But his choice of language is significant too. Evans had only recently come to appreciate the expressive possibilities of Welsh, and there is something experimental about the work’s lively, idiomatic style, 68  David Thomas, ‘Cysylltiadau Hanesyddol a Llenyddol’, 46–7; Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘ “I Will Tell You a Word or Two” ’, 308. 69  Quotation translated from Latin dedication to Bishop Adam of St Davids: DPO (1716), sig. A2v. 70  The present discussion focuses mainly on this edition, and refers to the 1740 edition only when it throws further light on its author’s aims and methods. 71  Saunders Lewis, Meistri’r Canrifoedd, 246–7. 72  For Evans’s sources see DPO (1716), xxv–xl; D.  Ellis Evans, ‘Theophilus Evans’, 102–3; David Thomas, ‘Testun, Arddull a Chymeriad’, 33–90 (referring to the 1740 edition). 73  See e.g. DPO (1716), 22, 81, n. (k), 92, 191, 207, 236.

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198  WRITING WELSH HISTORY indebted both to the colloquial language and to aspects of the literary culture in which he had been brought up.74 Writing in Welsh was also central to Evans’s patriotic purpose, as the language is celebrated for having maintained its purity for over a millennium;75 its appearance on the pages of Drych y Prif Oesoedd thus represented a direct link between past and present. The 1716 edition falls into two parts, though arguably the second comprises two sections that give the book a tripartite structure.76 The first part, occupying about 40 per cent of the whole, traces the history of the Welsh from their alleged origins as descendants of Noah’s grandson Gomer to the death of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd in 1282, and incorporates elements of the British History popularized by Geoffrey of Monmouth.77 However, the narrative focuses primarily on the period from the Roman conquest of Britain to the death of King Arthur, and the era of the medieval princes is passed over in just seven pages.78 The longer second part of the book begins by relating the early history of Christianity in Britain (chapters 1–4) and then seeks to demonstrate that the Anglican Church’s or­gan­ iza­tion and forms of worship were based on the ‘evangelical order’ attested in the Gospels and thus established before Roman Catholicism had corrupted the Church (chapters 5–9).79 In part II, then, ‘the primitive ages’ referred to the early Church, as portrayed by ‘Holy Scripture, the only certain history’.80 Evans revised the work in a second edition published in 1740. This was about 10,000 words longer than its predecessor, most of the additional material appearing in an expanded first part on the history of the Britons and Welsh, while the final section on the Church of England was condensed; the number of footnotes was also reduced.81 Substantive additions were few, the best known being the story of Prince Madog’s alleged discovery of America, given fresh political relevance by Great Britain’s war with Spain and influentially embellished with a late seventeenth-­ century account of a purported encounter with Welsh-­speaking ‘Indians’, portrayed by Evans as a mixed-­race people descended from the medi­eval Welsh settlers and ‘the ancient inhabitants of America’, just as the Britons were created by a fusion of Brutus’s followers and the original Gomerian settlers of Britain.82 What changed most was the work’s style. By 1740 Evans had become more experienced and confident as a writer and felt that the Drych of his youth required a thorough stylistic overhaul in order to make its narrative clearer and more lively

74  DPO (1716), vi, xxxi. 75  DPO (1716), 116–22. 76  Bedwyr Lewis Jones, ‘Theophilus Evans’, 266. 77  DPO (1716), 17–102. 78  DPO (1716), 95–102. 79  DPO (1716), 124–305; ‘trefn Efangylaidd’ (‘evangelical order’): DPO (1716), 218, 249, 268. 80  DPO (1716), 125. 81  DPO (1740); DPO (1716), xl–xli; Bedwyr Lewis Jones, ‘Theophilus Evans’, 267. 82  DPO (1740), 7a–8a, 19–21, quotation at 19. See also Theophilus Evans, ‘The Crown of England’s Title’; Gwyn A. Williams, Madoc: The Making of a Myth, 75–80; Hunter, ‘Myth and Historiography’, 49–55.

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FROM DRUIDS TO THE LAST BARD, 1707–70  199 and colourful, an aim achieved in part through an increased use of extended similes influenced by Virgil’s Aeneid.83 William Lewes of Llwynderw’s endorsement of the 1716 edition gets to the heart of its didactic purpose. Lewes praised Evans for being the first for five or six centuries to write a book in the Welsh language tracing the origins of the Welsh people, apart from the brief account given by Charles Edwards, and stressed that he had ‘contributed not a little to elevating knowledge and to instructing men in the true faith, and the Christian religion’.84 In other words, the historical content of the book formed part of its wider religious priorities, priorities evident in Evans’s numerous other writings. Drych y Prif Oesoedd was above all the work of ‘a moral and religious reformer’ who sought the salvation of his readers.85 This is implied by its title, which presents the book as holding up the distant past as a mirror with lessons for the present, a message reinforced by the biblical verse on the title page (‘I have considered the days of old, the years of ancient times’), in which the psalmist seeks comfort for the calamities of the present by recalling God’s good deeds in the past.86 Evans made his exemplary purpose explicit by telling his readers that its first part provided ‘a clear portrait of the fruits of sin, and the different consequences of a good life and a wicked life . . . Here you will see, while our ancestors did the will of the Lord, no enemy’s campaign availed against them. But when they went according to the counsels and obstinacy of their evil heart, The stranger that was in their midst ascended above them very high, and they came down very low.’87 The religious intentions of the work help to explain why Evans’s use of Geoffrey of Monmouth, though extensive and enthusiastic, was nevertheless highly selective, and thus fell short of a full-­blown attempt to rehabilitate the British History from its critics.88 Firstly, Evans followed Camden and others by insisting that the Britons and Welsh were descended from the biblical Gomer.89 Accordingly, he modified Geoffrey’s account by portraying Brutus, not as the first conqueror of Britain, but rather as an influential latecomer who gave his name to the island and was probably accepted as king by the Britons for introducing literacy, building,

83  Bedwyr Lewis Jones, ‘Theophilus Evans’, 267–75; D. Ellis Evans, ‘Theophilus Evans’, 96–7, 108–12. 84  DPO (1716), sig. [A4v–A5r], quotation at sig. A5r. Edwards’s Y Ffydd Ddi-­Ffuant (‘The Unfeigned Faith’) was reprinted shortly afterwards, in 1722: Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘Historical Writing’, 39. 85 David Thomas, ‘Testun, Arddull a Chymeriad’, 31. Similar assessments in Saunders Lewis, Meistri’r Canrifoedd, 243; Bedwyr Lewis Jones, ‘Theophilus Evans’, 265. 86  Psalm 77:5. 87  DPO (1716), sig. A3v (italicized words adapted from Deuteronomy 28:43), and see also 59, 65, 95, 186. 88  Cf. Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘Historical Writing’, 28. 89  DPO (1716), 18–21 and nn. (b) and (d), evidently referring to Camden, Britain, trans. Holland, 10, 11. Evans added references to Pezron, nowhere mentioned in the 1716 edition, in his revised version of this section in DPO (1740), 7, n. (e), 9, n. (h). Cf. P.  T.  J.  Morgan, ‘The Abbé Pezron’, 286–7, 290–2, and Rapin Thoyras, The History of England. Volume I, trans. Tindal, xvi, for general agreement ‘[t]hat Great-­Britain was peopled by the Celtæ or Gauls the Descendants of Gomer the Son of Japhet’.

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200  WRITING WELSH HISTORY and agriculture; he was also identified as the source of the Greek elements in the Welsh language.90 Secondly, the narrative then jumps forward to the Roman conquest of Britain on the grounds that the British History’s account of the intervening kings after Brutus was doubted by ‘many learned men’ (a line taken by William Wynne in his 1697 History of Wales) and, even if true, its contents were largely insignificant; in any case, ‘[t]his is not the purpose and aim of this little book’.91 Moreover, while he continued to follow Geoffrey in relating events from the Roman period to the English conquest, Evans supplemented his narrative by drawing on Gildas, Bede, and other sources. Indeed, like Charles Edwards and others before him, Evans was heavily indebted to Gildas, ‘that incomparable Briton, and accurate historian if ever there was one’, and his providential reading of the British past.92 After establishing their ancient origins, part I of the work was concerned above all with the Britons of the Roman and especially the post-­Roman eras, and thus with the period after their adoption of Christianity, an important theme in part II.93 This focus also meant that the history of the Britons and Welsh could be interpreted in terms of the providential dispensation of the Christian God. Here, Evans followed Gildas and attributed the Britons’ loss of what became England to their sins: ‘chiefly because of God’s anger towards us on account of our sins, our ancestors were driven to the poorest corners of the island, namely Wales and Cornwall’.94 There is a tension, though, in his attitude towards the English instruments of God’s punishment. On the one hand, Evans (like Charles Edwards) acknowledged that, thanks to divine providence, the English of modern times were a marked improvement on their pagan ancestors, being the equal of any nation since they had become Christians, especially after the Reformation, and ‘though at first they had been severely oppressive and cruel, for a long time they have been kind and gentle’.95 Yet Evans also seized on opportunities to indulge in Anglophobic invective. For example, since most of the Britons had fled to Brittany to escape the ‘Yellow Plague’, the English had conquered England ‘neither through strength of arms, nor through cunning either (though their evil cunning was great) . . . but rather by accident, namely because the country was empty of inhabitants’—an interpretation which, while compatible with divine punishment, never­the­less denied the English any glory.96 Conversely Evans had no doubts that King Arthur had bravely defended the Britons and that he had ‘sincerely hated’ the English, which explained why the latter ‘sought to kill his name, after they had failed to kill his person’.97 In addition, the conquest of Wales by Edward I led to ‘our ancestors’ 90  DPO (1716), 22–4. Here Evans parted company from Camden, who had cast doubt on the existence of Brutus and the naming of Britain after him, an interpretation rejected in DPO (1716), 111–12. 91  DPO (1716), 25. 92  DPO (1716), 160, and see also 59, 65, 137–8, 186–7, 283. 93  DPO (1716), 136–81. 94  DPO (1716), 95, and see also 84, 186. 95  DPO (1716), 84–5, 95, and see also 209. 96  DPO (1716), 194. 97  DPO (1716), 92–3.

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FROM DRUIDS TO THE LAST BARD, 1707–70  201 being first subjected to the law of England ‘through deceit and falsehood’.98 If Evans’s providential view of history attributed the misfortunes of the Welsh to their sins, it also portrayed them as a people whom God had preserved despite oppression by a powerful neighbour.

Britons, Princes, and Bards in the Mid-­Eighteenth Century One indication of the continued appetite for Welsh history in the mid-­eighteenth century was the reissue or publication of old works, including Rowlands’s Mona Antiqua (1766), with additional notes by Lewis Morris, Thomas William’s Oes Lyfr (1768),99 and Sir John Wynn’s History of the Gwydir Family (1770), published by Daines Barrington (1727–1800), an antiquarian-­minded judge on the north Wales circuit who also helped Evan Evans publish his major anthology of Welsh poetry, discussed below.100 These works reflected a greater readiness to bring antiquarian studies into print already evident earlier in the century.101 Thus in 1729 Hugh Thomas had published his fellow-­Catholic John Lewis of Llynwene’s History of Great-­Britain, extant only in manuscript since its completion c.1604,102 while two years later Moses Williams reprinted two Latin works of Humphrey Llwyd, supplemented by a version of the medieval chronicle O Oes Gwrtheyrn (‘From the Age of Vortigern’) copied and annotated by Robert Vaughan of Hengwrt, to which Williams added his own Latin translation and notes.103 New works were few and limited in scope. In 1743 John Owen, rector of Pickworth (Lincolnshire), published a popularizing history of the Britons down to the Saxon conquests, referred to above, with the support of 123 subscribers drawn mainly from the aristocracy, gentry, and Anglican clergy, the majority of whom lived in Wales. This mostly followed Pezron on the Britons’ descent from Gomer, although, like Theophilus Evans, it accepted the subsequent coming of Brutus; Owen was also indebted to Rowlands and adapted John Lewis of Llynwene’s account of the Saxon conquests.104 Three years later a self-­professed ‘true History of the Brittish

98  DPO (1716), 100–1, quotation at 100. 99 Rowlands, Mona, 2nd edn., with reference to Morris’s contribution in the ‘Advertisement’; Hulbert-­Powell, ‘Some Notes’, 28–30; William, Oes Lyfr, 2nd edn. 100 Wynn, The History of the Gwedir Family [ed. Barrington]; Charlotte Johnston, ‘Evan Evans: Dissertatio De Bardis’, 66. 101  Eiluned Rees, ‘An Introductory Survey’, 201. 102  John Lewis, The History of Great-­Britain. For Thomas’s preparation of the edition see Payne, ‘John Lewis, Llynwene’ (1935), 174; Francis Jones, ‘Hugh Thomas’, 49. 103  Humphrey Llwyd, Britannicæ Descriptionis Commentariolum, ed. Williams; Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Williams, Moses’. Another republished work was Dodridge, An Historical Account, 2nd edn. Wynne’s History received further recognition and dissemination through its translation into German: Wynne, Die Historie von Walles [trans. Hübner]. 104  John Owen, Compleat and Impartial History, Book I, 1–4, 12, n.*, 14–15; Book II, 40, n.*, 53, n.*, 85, n. *, 157, n.*, 105–28. Cf. John Lewis, History of Great-­Britain, 161–3.

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202  WRITING WELSH HISTORY Isles’, a crudely printed volume possibly by Simon Thomas, the Presbyterian minister in Hereford whose biblical history was mentioned above, likewise insisted on the descent of the Welsh from Gomer and condemned Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History as ‘a meer Romance from end to end’.105 The work also praised the Romans’ civilizing role, ‘[s]o that the Brittains, disgarding [sic] their Rudeness and Barbarity, were brought to conform to the Roman a la mode’, just as the French had brought polish to the English of his own day.106 Historians of England also continued to notice Wales to the extent that its history was deemed relevant to their task. Rapin was a popular case in point, his Whig History of England, first published in English in 1725–31, appearing in numerous editions and adaptations thereafter.107 For example, while supporting Edward I’s conquest of Wales Rapin also showed sympathy for the conquered, criticizing the execution of Dafydd ap Gruffudd for treason in 1283 and praising ‘the Welsh, those small Remains of the antient Britons’ for having survived as ‘a distinct Nation’ until then through ‘their Valour’ and ‘their Politicks’.108 More attention and sympathy was lavished on the Welsh by the English High Church clergyman and Jacobite sympathizer Thomas Carte (1686–1754) in the first volume of his History of England (1747), which enthusiastically followed Pezron on the Britons’ descent from Gomer and the Celts and also depicted the Druids as proto-­Christian philosopher rulers, a glowing portrayal indebted in part to Henry Rowlands.109 Although, like some previous Welsh historians and antiquaries, he lamented the internal divisions, exacerbated by the practice of partible inheritance, which fatally undermined the capacity of both the Britons and their Welsh descendants to withstand English conquest, Carte resembled Rapin in declaring that Wales had ‘contended bravely for her liberty . . . for above 800 years’ before its  subjugation by Edward  I.110 However, his coverage of Wales was fuller than Rapin’s, partly because he sought the advice of Lewis Morris and went to considerable lengths to consult Welsh sources,111 partly because he deployed English record sources more extensively than any previous historian of Wales in narrating the relations of kings of England with the medieval Welsh princes.112 105 Anon., The History of the Cymbri, 17–24, 127–40, 149–53, quotation at 129. For the work’s authorship see Phillipps, ‘To the Editor’; R. T. Jenkins, ‘Thomas, Simon’; Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘Historical Writing’, 29. 106 Anon., The History of the Cymbri, 55–8, 77–9, 121–3, 208–10, quotations at 79, 209. 107  Sullivan, ‘Rapin’, 149–51. 108  Rapin Thoyras, The History of England. Volume IV, trans. Tindal, 15–16. 109 Carte, A General History of England, 1: 7–8, 11–15, 20–2, 27–35, 37–9, 41–54; Pocock, Barbarism and Religion. Volume Four, ch. 4; Monod, ‘Thomas Carte’. 110 Carte, A General History of England, 1: 186–7, 210, 213, 217, 286–7, 638; 2: 195 (quotation). 111 Carte, A General History of England, 1: 33; Jarman, ‘Lewis Morris a Brut Tysilio’, 165–70; Monod, ‘Thomas Carte’, 138; Kaminski-­Jones, ‘True Britons’, 64–5. 112 E.g. Carte, A General History of England, 2: 72–3, 82–3, 184–7; cf. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion. Volume Four, 66, 76; Monod, ‘Thomas Carte’, 134. For coverage of Wales in a county-­based topographical work dealing mainly with England see Benjamin Martin, The Natural History of England, 2: 337–86.

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FROM DRUIDS TO THE LAST BARD, 1707–70  203 However, from the later 1740s to the early 1770s antiquarian-­minded scholars’ treatment of the Welsh past mainly appeared in editions of medieval poetry and poems on historical themes. This literary turn reflected an increasing emphasis, which continued into the nineteenth century, on the fundamental importance of medieval Welsh poetry as a unique legacy requiring preservation that not only demonstrated the high degree of civilization attained by the Welsh but also provided an indispensable tool for the study of the antiquities of Britain. Such arguments may be traced back to Renaissance scholars such as Sir John Prise and  Humphrey Llwyd and were supported by Lewis Morris, who wrote of his short anthology of medieval Welsh poetry that ‘this Collection of our British Antiquities . . . will clear up clear up several disputed Points in our History and Antiquities, and preserve the Memory of the Worthy Actions of those brave People, who maintain’d their Rights in Britain, for above two Thousand Years’.113 Morris further elaborated these ideas in his Celtic Remains, written in the 1750s and 1760s but unpublished in his lifetime. This comprised an annotated list of persons and places preceded by a lengthy introduction intended to provide ‘a Biographical, Critical, Historical, Etymological, Chronological, and Geographical Collection of Celtic Materials towards a British History of Ancient Times’, thereby seeking to demonstrate that the majority of the people of England and Scotland as well as Wales were descended from the ancient Britons.114 Such thinking gained new prominence from the 1760s thanks to the emergence of Celticism as a facet of Romantic sensibility that celebrated poets as privileged witnesses to a people’s ancient past.115 An early instance was Thomas Gray’s The Bard (1757), a verse rendition of the story of Edward I’s massacre of the Welsh bards warmly welcomed by Welsh writers, one of whom went so far as to assert that, with Drayton’s Poly-­Olbion (1612–22), it helped to compensate for the decline in Welsh poetry following Edward I’s assault on the bards.116 The poem was given dramatic visual expression by the Welsh artist Thomas Jones of Pencerrig in 1774.117 The success of James Macpherson’s Ossian poems (1760 onwards), ostensibly translations of poems by a third-­century Scottish bard, not only fostered a new  interest in the Gaelic culture of Scotland and Ireland but, together with Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), helped to raise the  stock of early Welsh poetry too.118 Indeed, suspicions about Ossian’s

113  Lewis Morris, Tlysau yr Hen Oesoedd, 2. 114  Lewis Morris, Celtic Remains, quotation from Preface, 3. Assessment of the work’s context and significance in Kaminski-­Jones, ‘True Britons’, ch. 1. 115 Pittock, Celtic Identity, 34–7; Ffion Llywelyn Jenkins, ‘Celticism’. Eighteenth-­century interest in the Celts was one aspect of a wider early modern linguistic antiquarianism: Stewart, ‘The Mother Tongue’. 116 Prescott, Eighteenth-­Century Writing, 75–6. By contrast, English responses to Gray’s poem were initially cool: Hinnant, ‘Changing Perspectives’. 117  Thomas Jones, ed. Sumner and Smith, 39, 142–3. 118 Pittock, Celtic Identity, 36; O’Halloran, Golden Ages, 111–15. For responses to the Ossian poems in Britain and Ireland see Stewart, ‘Mother Tongue’, 99–104.

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204  WRITING WELSH HISTORY authenticity were seized upon as underlining that Wales, in fact, had the strongest claims to bardic antiquity in Britain.119 An ardent advocate of this view was the Revd Evan Evans (Ieuan Fardd or Ieuan Brydydd Hir; 1731–88), an impoverished and increasingly embittered Anglican clergyman aptly described as ‘the greatest Welsh scholar since Edward Lhuyd’.120 Indefatigable in seeking out and copying Welsh manuscripts, Evans compiled a substantial anthology, Some Specimens of the Poetry of the Antient Welsh Bards (1764), whose historical notes and commentary made it a pioneering example of literary history as a vehicle for writing about the Welsh past, albeit one indebted in significant respects to Edward Lhuyd.121 Indeed, a Latin account of the Welsh poets included in the work noted that some of these had also composed ‘histories and family trees’, leading Evans to declare that ‘[t]he works of those Bards who were historians are our sole means of tracing the genuine, the authentic history of Britain . . .’ .122 Likewise Evans offered a verse rendition, again annotated, of conventional themes in Welsh history in The Love of Our Country (1772), written in response to the unflattering portrayal of the Welsh, based on Gerald of Wales, in Lord Lyttelton’s History of the Life of King Henry the Second (1767–71).123 Evans drew on Welsh antiquarian thinking since the mid-­sixteenth century to portray English attacks on the British History as attempts to deprive the Welsh of a prized possession and to insist that sources in the Welsh language were essential to unlocking the British past, a patriotic stance sharpened by his resentment of the tendency of absentee ‘Anglo-­bishops’ (W.  Esgyb Eingl) to appoint monoglot English-­speaking clergy to livings in Wales.124 Thus in his elegy for Lewis Morris in 1765, Evans lamented the passing of ‘a judicious and candid defender of the Ancient British History’ and fosterer of ‘the old British language’, who had exposed the faults of Camden’s Britannia and sought to prevent ‘the malice of the Englishman . . . from stealing our honour’.125 Yet if Evans harked back to controversies originating in the sixteenth century, his privileging of poets as conservers of the Welsh past anticipated the elaboration in the following decades of a much more extravagant bardic vision by his admirer Iolo Morganwg, one of several developments that opened a new phase in Welsh history writing from the 1770s, assessed in the next chapter.

119 Prescott, Eighteenth-­Century Writing, 60–3; Bethan M. Jenkins, Between Wales and England, 186–8. 120  Geraint  H.  Jenkins, ‘Evans, Evan’ (quotation); Ffion Llywelyn Jenkins, ‘Celticism’, esp. 117–18, 120–4; Prescott, Eighteenth-­Century Writing, 57–83, 105–14; Bethan  M.  Jenkins, Between Wales and England, 72–103, 182–9; Lichtenwalter, Claiming Cambria, ch. 2. 121  Evan Evans, Some Specimens; Bethan M. Jenkins, Between Wales and England, 185–8. 122  Charlotte Johnston, ‘Evan Evans: Dissertatio De Bardis’, quotations at 90. 123  [Evan Evans], ‘The Love of Our Country’; criticism of Lyttelton and Gerald at 131–2. See further Prescott, Eighteenth-­Century Writing, 105–14; Bethan M. Jenkins, Between Wales and England, 87–96. 124 Bethan M. Jenkins, Between Wales and England, 73–9. 125  Evan Evans, ‘Cywydd Marwnad’, 87, 90. Morris held that Geoffrey’s History was a Latin translation of a chronicle originally written in Welsh by St Tysilio: Jarman, ‘Lewis Morris a Brut Tysilio’.

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PART III

ROMA N T IC ISM A ND EN L IGHT E N ME NT, 1 7 7 0 – 1 8 8 0

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9 Civilization, Liberty, and Dissent, 1770–1820 In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries more Welsh history writing appeared in print than ever before, reflecting the growing momentum of the wider increase in the numbers of publications, especially works published in Welsh, that had begun in previous decades (see Chapter  8). That writing also became ever more diverse. Old favourites were given new life, including the canonical histories of Powel and Wynne and above all Theophilus Evans’s Drych y Prif Oesoedd (‘Mirror of the Primitive Ages’), which began its meteoric rise to become the most popular work of Welsh history since Geoffrey of Monmouth, being reissued six times between 1794 and 1822.1 But the historiographical landscape changed significantly too, as writers turned their attention to new topics and approached old themes in new ways. Four main strands stand out, setting the agenda for the following discussion: the further development by Iolo Morganwg and others of antiquarian approaches that portrayed the Welsh as heirs to an ancient civilization whose glories were uniquely accessible through Welsh texts; historically informed topographical writing, including Thomas Pennant’s Tour in Wales and the first Welsh county histories (as distinct from early modern chorographical accounts of counties); William Warrington’s refurbishment of Wynne’s history of Wales as a struggle for liberty; and the emergence of Nonconformist histories that emphasized the making of a modern Welsh people defined by its adherence to Puritanism and Dissent. True, the picture was more complex than this characterization may suggest, not least because the strands were intertwined in important respects: for example, some county and Nonconformist historians were deeply influenced by Iolo’s vision of the Welsh past. The widespread, though by no means universal, appeal of that Romantic vision may help to explain why historians of Wales made no substantial attempt to reframe their subject as philosophical history of a sociological bent on the lines of David Hume, William Robertson, or Edward Gibbon.2 As we shall see, Warrington came closest to this

1 Wynne, The History of Wales, new edn. (1774); Powel, HC, repr. (1811); Wynne, The History, new edn. (1812); DPO (1740), xxxvi; Chapman, ‘ “Yr Ysbryd Athrylithgar” ’. 2  For Welsh interest in Robertson and Gibbon see G. Walters, ‘The Eighteenth-­Century Pembroke Society’, 296; H. P. Roberts, ‘Nonconformist Academies’, 27. Writing Welsh History: From the Early Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century. Huw Pryce, Oxford University Press. © Huw Pryce 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198746034.003.0010

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208  WRITING WELSH HISTORY approach, aspects of which also influenced Pennant.3 However, no Welsh his­tor­ ian engaged with philosophical history to the same extent as Sylvester O’Halloran or Thomas Leland in the 1770s, who both criticized Hume’s scepticism regarding an ancient Irish civilization, the former reasserting traditional interpretations of Irish origins, the latter attempting to write the first philosophical history of Ireland, albeit one flawed by its failure to transcend sectarian divisions.4 While some his­ tor­ians of Wales also sought to vindicate a glorious ancient past, there was less at stake for them than their Irish counterparts whose interpretations were coloured by political and religious differences deriving from the early modern wars and colonial settlements that featured prominently in their narratives, in marked contrast to a strongly Protestant Wales politically assimilated with England. The expansion of historical writing reflected and partly resulted from wider changes that made this period a major turning-­point in the history of Wales: above all, rapid demographic and industrial growth that would continue apace into the twentieth century. Between 1801 and 1881 the population of Wales increased by almost a million, from 587,000 to 1,572,000, changes accompanied by substantial increases in both life expectancy and urbanization.5 During the half-­century covered by this chapter, demographic growth was sustained by an industrial revolution at whose heart lay the production of copper and iron fuelled by the ready availability of coal and the export of these and other goods to an imperial market.6 These changes, together with improvements in agriculture and communications, notably the expansion of turnpike roads and canals, caught the eye of historically informed travel writers and county and parish historians.7 Another related development was the further increase in the number of people able to read and in the demand for books: by 1800 most towns had a printing press and ‘bookselling was big business in its own right’.8 While the circulating schools established by Griffith Jones ceased after the 1770s, the continuing growth of Nonconformity created new educational opportunities both in Sunday schools, important for teaching both adults and children to read Welsh, and at a more advanced level in Dissenting academies which mainly taught in English.9 As we shall see, writers of Welsh history also responded to wider political debates

3  On this theme more generally see R.  J.  W.  Evans, ‘Was There a Welsh Enlightenment?’; Kidd, ‘Wales, the Enlightenment and the New British History’. 4 O’Halloran, Golden Ages, 38–40, 130–1, 142, 147–9; Kidd, ‘Gaelic Antiquity and National Identity’, esp. 1208–9. 5 Gwyn A. Williams, When Was Wales?, ch. 8; Philip Jenkins, A History of Modern Wales, 236–9; John Williams, Digest of Welsh Historical Statistics, 1: 7, 62–5. 6  Philip Jenkins, A History of Modern Wales, 215–24. 7  E.g. Edmund Jones, A Geographical, Historical, and Religious Account, 20, 44; Nicholas Owen, Caernarvonshire, 96–100; Meyrick, The History and Antiquities, cciii–cclxxxiii. 8  Eiluned Rees, ‘Developments in the Book Trade’, quotation at 33; Eiluned Rees, ‘The Welsh Book Trade from 1718 to 1820’. 9  R. Tudur Jones, ‘Nonconformity and the Welsh Language’, 246–8, 251–2.

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CIVILIZATION, LIBERTY, AND DISSENT, 1770–1820  209 engendered by the American and the French revolutions as well as to overseas missions that began in the late eighteenth century.

Iolo Morganwg and the Romantic Reinvention of the Welsh Past Initially condemned by modern critics as an embarrassingly successful forger, rehabilitated more recently as a political radical, emblematic figure of Welsh Romanticism, and ‘one of the most remarkable, if maimed, geniuses Wales has ever produced’, Edward Williams (Iolo Morganwg; 1747–1826) has attracted more scholarly attention than any other writer about the Welsh past except for that ‘grand Romancer Geoffrey of Monmouth’, from whose ‘fables’ Iolo was all too eager to distance himself.10 This is not the place to rehearse his multifaceted interests and eventful life as stonemason, autodidact, poet, Jacobin sympathizer, and Unitarian, a life spent mainly in Glamorgan but punctuated by frequent travels, including an extended period in London (1791–5).11 The following discussion focuses rather on one—arguably the—major aspect of those interests, namely Iolo’s extensive and complex preoccupation with antiquities and history.12 In part, this preoccupation was reflected in the conventional antiquarian pursuits of copying manuscripts and recording ancient monuments; he also collected oral traditions about the past and emphasized the importance of their testimony, reflecting his broader interest in folklore and other aspects of rural life.13 What was dis­tinct­ive and significant about Iolo’s approach, however, was his imaginative refashioning of such materials in order to promote a unique vision of the Welsh past. True, much of his work remained unpublished at his death in 1826, including an uncompleted ‘History of the Bards’ planned from 1791, and his projected multi-­volume history of Wales came to nothing.14 However, while never committed to print in a comprehensive form, his interpretation of Welsh history, and especially Welsh literary and cultural history, proved seductively influential. This was largely thanks to several works he and his fellow believer William Owen Pughe (1759–1835) 10  For changing views of Iolo in modern scholarship see Löffler, The Literary and Historical Legacy, 139–50; Geraint  H.  Jenkins, ‘On the Trail of a “Rattleskull Genius” ’. Quotation: Gwyn  A.  Williams, The Search for Beulah Land, 31. Iolo on Geoffrey: Edward Williams, Poems, 1: 195; 2: 2; Constantine, The Truth against the World, 135–6. 11 Geraint  H.  Jenkins, Y Digymar Iolo Morganwg is the most recent biography. See also G.  J.  Williams, Iolo Morganwg: Y Gyfrol Gyntaf; Charnell-­White, Bardic Circles; Bethan  M.  Jenkins, Between Wales and England; and works cited in n. 10 above. 12 G.  J.  Williams, Iolo Morganwg: Y Gyfrol Gyntaf, 305–29, which maintains (at 307) that Iolo ‘thought of himself as a historian, and especially as a man learned in the entire history of the cultural life of the nation’. See also Prys Morgan, ‘Iolo Morganwg’; Geraint  H.  Jenkins, ‘ “The Taffy-­Land Historians” ’; Geraint H. Jenkins, Bard of Liberty, 182–5. 13 G.  J.  Williams, Iolo Morganwg (1963), 6; Suggett, ‘Iolo Morganwg’, 216–26; Löffler, ‘ “Bordering on the Region of the Marvellous” ’, esp. 31–3. 14 Waring, Recollections and Anecdotes of Edward Williams, 170, 177–85; Charnell-­White, Bardic Circles, 15, 26–30, 169–250. See also Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘ “The Taffy-­Land Historians” ’, 22–3.

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210  WRITING WELSH HISTORY published during his lifetime, notably the latter’s edition of the poetry of the early medieval Welsh poet Llywarch Hen (1792) and Cambrian Biography (1803), a collection of Iolo’s poems with extensive annotations (1794), and Iolo’s contributions to The Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales (1801–7), a major collection of medieval Welsh literary and historical sources named in honour of Owain Myfyr (Owen Jones; 1741–1814), the wealthy London-­Welsh businessman who financed its production.15 Further dissemination of his interpretation of the past by other writers as well as posthumous publications, above all a work on bardic learning, first drafted while imprisoned for debt in Cardiff gaol in 1786–7 but only sent to press at the end of his life, and a volume of his other bardic writings, ensured that Iolo remained influential, if increasingly controversial, for the rest of the nineteenth century.16 In terms of both genre and content Iolo provides a further example of the literary turn in approaches to the Welsh past exemplified earlier in the eighteenth century by Evan Evans, whom Iolo knew and admired.17 Indeed, his view of the Welsh past incorporated key elements of previous interpretations: the special status of the Welsh as the original inhabitants of Britain; the antiquity, purity, and unchanging character of the Welsh language; the unique longevity of a bardic tradition indebted to the Druids; and the value of poetry as a historical source. What made that view singular was Iolo’s adaptation of these elements to elevate the bards, and the Welsh language and literature they cultivated, as the central unifying element in a comprehensive nativist vision that privileged the Welsh, not merely as the ‘aborigines’ of Britain, but as the descendants of a uniquely civilized people among the nations of Europe in antiquity and the Middle Ages thanks to their transmission of a distinctive and diverse body of learning, essentially derived from the Druids, which he termed bardism (W. barddas).18 Moreover, in attempting to celebrate the ancient glories of the Welsh and rescue them from neglect and disparagement, again favourite themes of patriotic Welsh writers since the Renaissance, Iolo aimed to lay the foundations for cultural renewal that would restore the self-­esteem of the Welsh and earn the respect of their neighbours while at the same time establishing legitimizing precedents for his own radical political ideals and commitment to Rational Dissent.19 (The importance 15  William Owen, The Heroic Elegies, xxi–lxxx; William Owen, The Cambrian Biography; Edward Williams, Poems; MA (discussed in Constantine, ‘Welsh Literary History’). Peter Roberts and Sharon Turner also published works in 1803 that Iolo saw as vindicating his theories: Geraint H. Jenkins, Bard of Liberty, 205. 16  Cyfrinach Beirdd Ynys Prydain, ed. Williams; Iolo Manuscripts, ed. Williams; Charnell-­White, Bardic Circles, 15–18, 34–7; Löffler, The Literary and Historical Legacy. 17 Geraint H. Jenkins, Bard of Liberty, 61–3. 18  MA, 1: [v]; Charnell-­White, Bardic Circles, ch. 3. Different theories of Celtic origins and the Druids were proposed by the Revd Edward ‘Celtic’ Davies (1756–1831), initially influenced by Iolo, later a fierce critic of his bardism as an invention designed to promote radical political convictions: Dearnley, ‘ “Mad Ned” ’; Löffler, The Literary and Historical Legacy, 131–2. 19 Edward Williams, ‘A Short Review’, xiv–xv, xxi; Charnell-­White, Bardic Circles, 19–23, 25–6, 33–4; Geraint H. Jenkins, Bard of Liberty, 91–4.

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CIVILIZATION, LIBERTY, AND DISSENT, 1770–1820  211 of the ancient Welsh past to the history of Britain as a whole was also given visual expression, albeit without any radical implications, in the frontispiece to the first volume of The Cambrian Register, edited by William Owen Pughe, reproduced in Fig. 9.1.)20 Iolo’s vision was all the more powerful through its embodiment in his public self-­identification as a bard with unique access to an allegedly unbroken tradition of bardism extending back almost two millennia of which he was almost the last representative and which he sought to revive, especially from 1792 onwards, through holding assemblies of the ‘Gorsedd of Bards of the Island of Britain’ whose ceremonies focused on stone circles, a practice Iolo connected to supposed Druidical monuments such as Stonehenge.21 (This self-­image was complicated, however, by his simultaneous adoption of the persona of a plebeian rustic poet designed to appeal to English readers.)22 His personal background also informed his determination to counter what he considered the excessive dom­in­ance of north Wales in accounts of Welsh literature and history by pressing the claims of the south, and especially his native county of Glamorgan, which, he maintained, had played a crucial role in the preservation of bardism.23 Iolo’s vision spoke to contemporary debates provoked by James Macpherson and Thomas Chatterton about the authenticity of ancient and medieval texts and the associated issues surrounding the oral and written transmission of literary works and also sought to rebut John Pinkerton’s denigration of the Celts as less civilized than the Goths.24 Thus key arguments adduced in support of the authenticity of medieval Welsh poetry were the survival of the bards’ works ‘in very ancient and very numerous manuscripts’, and the prevalence of variant readings indicating an extensive process of copying.25 Yet elsewhere Iolo adopted a contradictory position by privileging the oral transmission of ‘bardic tradition’ in the form of song and aphorisms recited annually in conventions of bards: This well-­guarded Tradition was a better Guardian of Truth than letters have ever been, especially before the art of Printing was discovered: we confide in letters that skulk in dens and dark corners; we know not whence they come into light, we often know not how they came into existence. Letters can transmit lies to posterity through a long, dark, and unknown, as it were, subterraneous passage: Bardic Tradition walks in open day . . .26 20  Peter Lord, Imaging the Nation, 161–2. 21 G. J. Williams, Iolo Morganwg: Y Gyfrol Gyntaf, 463–4; William Owen, The Heroic Elegies, xxiv, xxxvii–xliii, l, lix–lxiii; Edward Williams, Poems, 2: 9, 39, 160–1, 193–4, 202, 219; Charnell-­White, Bardic Circles, ch. 5. 22 Bethan M. Jenkins, Between Wales and England, 108–19. 23  William Owen, The Heroic Elegies, lxii; Edward Williams, Poems, 2: 161; Charnell-­White, Bardic Circles, ch. 4. 24 Constantine, The Truth against the World, parts I and II; Charnell-­White, Bardic Circles, 55–6; Kidd, ‘Teutonist Ethnology’, 51–4. 25  Edward Williams, ‘A Short Review’, xvi–xviii, quotation at xviii. 26 Edward Williams, Poems, 2: 221–2, and cf. 6, and William Owen, The Heroic Elegies, xxxv–xxxvi.

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212  WRITING WELSH HISTORY

Fig. 9.1  The Cambrian Register, for the Year 1795 (London, 1796), frontispiece. Coloured engraving of an illustration by the artist Richard Corbould (1757–1851).

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CIVILIZATION, LIBERTY, AND DISSENT, 1770–1820  213 Both arguments served the aim, however, of defending the antiquity and authenticity of the poetry and other compositions produced by the Welsh bards, notably ­triads (mnemonic lists linking three individuals, places, events, and so on), and their superiority to Welsh prose writing as historical sources, especially Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose account of Trojan origins he rejected with contempt.27 He was equally dismissive of origin legends deriving the Welsh from the biblical Gomer.28 Instead, Iolo pressed his interpretation of bardic learning into the service of a nativist agenda by asserting that the bards ‘always represent the Cymmry (Cimbri) as the Indigenes of Britain’.29 Likewise, the Druidic and bardic institution ori­gin­ ated in Britain, ‘from whence it was introduced into Gaul, Ireland, and other countries’,30 nor was anything in ‘the Welsh poetic taste . . . absurdly derived from the . . . Greek and Roman poets; but all is the natural growth of Britain’.31 However, his ostensibly critical approach to sources was notoriously ac­com­ pan­ied by—indeed may have been intended to deflect attention from—a readiness to forge a range of ostensibly medieval sources, some attributed to early modern copies, that fleshed out his bardic vision. In this he was by no means unique among European writers of the Romantic era: precisely because texts of broadly medieval origin were believed to throw a unique light on a nation’s ancient civ­il­ iza­tion, these had to be invented if the surviving examples were deemed in­ad­ equate to the task.32 Thus, as well as faithfully copying authentic earlier sources, Iolo faked numerous apparently medieval works by imitating and rewriting examples of the genuine article. Thus he passed off poems of his own as authentic compositions of the renowned fourteenth-­century poet Dafydd ap Gwilym and secured their inclusion in the first printed edition of Dafydd’s works in 1789,33 and doctored and concocted texts published in The Myvyrian Archaiology, including two chronicles adapted from Brut y Tywysogyon, and the ‘Third Series’ of the ‘Triads of the Island of Britain’, in which he elaborated medi­eval triads (genuine examples of which were published in the first two series) and used them to articulate his distinctive interpretation of the past.34 In particular, Iolo turned three individuals briefly mentioned in medieval sources into heroes who had played a central role in the making of the Welsh: Hu Gadarn, depicted as leading the Welsh (W. Cymry) from Constantinople to become the first inhabitants of Britain and

27  Edward Williams, Poems, 2: 2–3, 222–3. 28  Edward Williams, Poems, 2: 8. 29  Edward Williams, Poems, 2: 222. 30  William Owen, The Heroic Elegies, xxv (quotation); Edward Williams, Poems, 2: 8–9. 31  Edward Williams, Poems, 2: 147. 32  R. J. W. Evans, ‘ “The Manuscripts” ’; Constantine, The Truth against the World. 33 Constantine, The Truth against the World, 27–41; Thomas Parry, ‘Barddoniaeth Dafydd ab Gwilym, 1789’, 189–94; Dafydd Johnston, ‘Barddoniaeth Dafydd ab Gwilym 1789’. 34  MA, 2: 57–75, 468–582. See further G. J. Williams, ‘Brut Aberpergwm’; Guy, ‘Brut Ieuan Brechfa’, 375–90; Bromwich, ‘Trioedd Ynys Prydain’; Bromwich, Trioedd, 12–34. Iolo treated other categories of triads similarly, both copying examples extant in medieval and sixteenth-­century manuscripts and inventing new triads of his own: Morfydd E. Owen, Y Meddwl Obsesiynol, 16–21.

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214  WRITING WELSH HISTORY introducing them to agriculture and other hallmarks of civ­il­iza­tion; Prydain (‘Britain’) son of Aedd Mawr, praised as the original legislator of the Welsh; and Dyfnwal Moelmud, another early law-­giver.35 Iolo’s creation of Hu Gadarn as founding father of the Welsh contradicts his earlier declaration that the bards ‘never give a farther account of their origin’; it therefore provides a particularly revealing illustration of how the acerbic critic of ‘Geoffrey’s glaring lies’ created his own highly imaginative interpretation of the origins and early history of the Welsh.36 Nor were Iolo’s historical interests confined to the remote past. After all, the Welsh bards provided cultural continuity down to the present, despite persecution and eventual loss of patronage.37 (As for Evan Evans, the emphasis on con­ tinu­ity required portraying Edward I’s massacre of the bards as only partially successful.)38 Through their survival, the bards could be seen as nation-­builders who helped to counteract the impact of political conquest and union, though points.39 Likewise Iolo, here these were acknowledged as important turning-­ building on Protestant theories of early British church history, awarded a starring role to the bards for ensuring that ‘the Primitive Christianity of Britain came (hand in hand with Bardism) down to the present day through a long and very dark night of error and Gothic barbarity, through the flames of papal persecution’, a role he compared to that of the Waldenses, heretics portrayed by James Ussher and other Protestant apologists as representatives of the ‘True Church’ during the Catholic Middle Ages and thus as harbingers of the Reformation.40 The emphasis on the Welsh language and literature as markers of Welsh ethnicity led Iolo to attribute the rise of religious Dissent to linguistic discrimination, namely the imposition of English in church services despite the translation of the Bible into Welsh under Elizabeth I, a policy he attributed to a desire to destroy the Welsh language on the part of the English government.41 Similar priorities underpin the vilification of Oliver Cromwell for his alleged destruction of Welsh manuscripts at Raglan castle.42 Iolo was also swept up in the ‘Madoc fever’ of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, adapting the story of Madog ab Owain Gwynedd’s alleged discovery and settlement of Florida to support the widely reported 35 Bromwich, Trioedd, 19, 21–9; Charnell-­White, Bardic Circles, 131–5. Iolo held that ‘[t]he Welsh have always called themselves Cymry’: Edward Williams, Poems, 2: 7–8, and see also 92. 36  Edward Williams, Poems, 2: 3, 222; cf. Bethan M. Jenkins, Between Wales and England, 126. 37  William Owen, The Heroic Elegies, lix–lxiii; Edward Williams, Poems, 2: 9; MA, 1: vi. 38  Edward Williams, Poems, 2: 223; William Owen, The Heroic Elegies, lxi; Constantine, The Truth against the World, 122–4. 39  MA, 1: vi; Edward Williams, ‘A Short Review’, [ix]–x; Geraint  H.  Jenkins, Bard of Liberty, 191, 192. 40  Edward Williams, Poems, 2: 224; see also William Owen, The Heroic Elegies, xxxii, lix–lx. Cf. Cameron, The Reformation of the Heretics, 243–52. 41  Edward Williams, Poems, 2: 54–5; cf. Edward Williams, ‘A Short Review’, ix–x. 42 Edward Williams, Poems, 2: 65; William Owen, The Heroic Elegies, lxi. Cf. Kenyon, Raglan Castle, 20.

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CIVILIZATION, LIBERTY, AND DISSENT, 1770–1820  215 existence of ‘Welsh Indians’, light-­skinned native Americans who apparently spoke Welsh, first identified by Theophilus Evans as descendants of the twelfth-­century Welsh settlers (see Chapter  8) and thus hailed by Iolo as ‘lost brothers’ who enjoyed a liberty lacking in Pitt’s Great Britain.43

Topographical History: From Thomas Pennant to Theophilus Jones One major change in this period in writing about Welsh history was the publication of an increasing number of topographical works with a strong antiquarian and historical dimension. These mainly comprised two new genres: county and parish histories and accounts of travels (‘tours’). Both types of work reflected wider developments in Britain. County histories had more numerous, and often lengthier, English counterparts that had first appeared in print in the seventeenth century, and like these tended to cater for gentry readers whose residences, pedigrees, and coats of arms featured prominently on their pages.44 Tours, on the other hand, formed a more recent category of writing that engaged with Welsh history.45 A burgeoning number of narrative accounts of journeys in Great Britain appeared from the 1750s that invited their readers to view the landscapes they traversed through the lens of early Romanticism, with its emphasis on the picturesque and sublime.46 The valleys and mountains of Wales offered a particularly attractive prospect from this perspective, and from the 1770s a growing array of guides were published, mostly by English authors, to cater for gentry embarking on tours in the principality.47 However, the boundaries between published tours and histories of counties and other localities were permeable (for example, ‘his­ tor­ies’ often resembled ‘tours’ in structuring their accounts as travels between the places described),48 and the connections and similarities between them justify regarding both genres as reflections of a common topographical enterprise in which antiquities and history were important ingredients. One way of understanding this flowering of topographical writing about Wales is to see it as part of a broader endeavour by what Sir Richard Colt Hoare 43 William Owen, The Heroic Elegies, xxv; Edward Williams, Poems, 1: xi–xii; 2: 64–5, 67; Gwyn A. Williams, Madoc: The Making of a Myth, esp. 122–42; Geraint H. Jenkins, Bard of Liberty, 83–7; Glenda Carr, ‘An Uneasy Partnership’, 449–50. 44  Cf. Sweet, Antiquaries, 36–44. 45  See in general Batten, Jr., Pleasurable Instruction. 46  Batten, Jr., Pleasurable Instruction, 93–5; Constantine and Leask, ‘Introduction’, 4–5. 47  For Anglophone travel writing about Wales see W.  J.  Hughes, Wales and the Welsh in English Literature, 85–100; Hywel M. Davies, ‘Wales in English Travel Writing’; Michael Freeman, ‘In Search of the Picturesque in Wales’. Continental travellers’ accounts in this period are discussed in Kathryn N. Jones et al., Hidden Texts, Hidden Nation, 27–41, 113–34. 48  David Williams, The History of Monmouthshire, is an exception, as noticed by Theophilus Jones, ‘Remarks’, 457. (For Jones’s authorship see Hywel M. Davies, ‘Wales in English Travel Writing’, 69, 90.)

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216  WRITING WELSH HISTORY (1758–1838) called ‘the society of British antiquarians’.49 Hoare, whose ownership of Stourhead (Wiltshire) and its large estate allowed him to indulge his passion for travel and antiquarianism, made a significant contribution to the creation of historically informed Welsh topographical works. He travelled extensively in Wales with Richard Fenton (1747–1821), a member of the Pembrokeshire gentry well connected with literary figures in London, and also accompanied another friend, the Revd William Coxe (1748–1828), rector of Bemerton near Salisbury— who had already published a three-­volume account of his European travels—on a tour of Monmouthshire. Hoare encouraged both men to publish ‘historical tours’, providing illustrations for both, and himself published the first English translations of Gerald of Wales’s Welsh works, with ample topographical notes and illustrations of views.50 As we shall see, Thomas Pennant (1726–98) was encouraged by the success of his published tour of Scotland to write one of north Wales, and his account of the latter was in turn used by Richard Gough in the last edition of Camden’s Britannia in 1789.51 However, Welsh topographical writing in this period was not only an extension or imitation of wider developments in Britain but in some cases a reaction against them. The English antiquary Samuel Rush Meyrick (1783–1848) was prompted to write his earliest published work, The History and Antiquities of the County of Cardigan (1808), after undertaking ‘the fashionable tour of South Wales’ and finding that ‘all the publications of modern tourists . . . did very little justice to the history of the Principality’, with virtually nothing on Cardiganshire.52 William Williams of Llandygái (1739–1817) and Theophilus Jones (1759–1812) also sought to remedy what they saw as the failure of English travel writing about Wales to do justice to the country and its people.53 These and other antiquarian-­ minded authors were aware, moreover, not only of earlier and contemporaneous topographical writing in England but of previous Welsh accounts of particular localities. For example, Henry Rowlands’s Mona Antiqua Restaurata (1723), the earliest Welsh topographical history to appear in print, had been reissued in 1766, and was in turn supplemented by John Thomas’s History of Anglesey (1775),54 while Richard Fenton was the first to publish George Owen of Henllys’s Description of Penbrokshire, one of several early modern Welsh antiquarian works known to him in manuscript copies.55 49 Hoare, The Itinerary, 1: Dedication. 50 Coxe, An Historical Tour; Fenton, A Historical Tour; Hoare, Itinerary. 51 Camden, Britannia, vol. 1, ed. Gough, vi. 52 Meyrick, The History and Antiquities, [ix]; Lowe, Sir Samuel Meyrick, 41–7. 53  Hywel  M.  Davies, ‘Wales in English Travel Writing’; William Williams, Observations on the Snowdon Mountains, 6–7. 54 Rowlands, Mona, 2nd edn.; John Thomas, A History of the Island of Anglesey. For the latter work see John Edward Lloyd, ‘John Thomas’, 133–4, and T. P. T. Williams, ‘The “Dodsley” History of Anglesey Revisited’ (which suggests that Thomas’s contribution was limited to the description of Holyhead, the rest being the work of Nicholas Owen (1752–1811)). 55 Fenton, Tours in Wales, ed. Fisher (London, 1917), v, vii–viii; George Owen, ‘A History of Pembrokeshire’, ed. Fenton; George Owen, The Description of Penbrokshire, ed. Owen, 1: xiv–xv.

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CIVILIZATION, LIBERTY, AND DISSENT, 1770–1820  217 The following discussion begins by assessing Thomas Pennant’s A Tour in Wales (1778–83), an account of journeys in the six northern counties of the principality with illustrations by Moses Griffith that was the most substantial and popular example of historically informed travel writing in a Welsh context, and the first by a Welsh author.56 This will lead on to an analysis of the historical dimension of other Welsh topographical works published between the 1790s and the second decade of the nineteenth century, including Theophilus Jones’s History of the County of Brecknock (1805–9), the longest and most rigorous of several new Welsh county histories.

Thomas Pennant Thomas Pennant showed an interest in both natural history and antiquities also exemplified by Edward Lhuyd and the Revd Gilbert White (1720–93); indeed, the first half of White’s Natural History of Selborne originated as letters to Pennant.57 A zoologist with an international reputation and an indefatigable traveller, well connected in London, Pennant belonged to the lesser Welsh gentry and owned a small estate at Downing near Holywell in Flintshire. In embarking on his Welsh Tour he hoped to repeat the commercial success of his two Scottish Tours, first published in 1771 and 1774 respectively.58 Comparison of those two earlier works reveals ‘a subtle change in focus’ from natural history to topography and antiquarian studies that was continued in the Tour in Wales, which is striking for its detailed treatment of history and antiquities.59 Pennant’s friend and fellow squire Philip Yorke (1743–1804) of Erddig (Denbighshire), author of an influential work on Welsh genealogy, was sufficiently impressed by this treatment to declare with pardonable exaggeration that Pennant had ‘gathered the Welsh Harvest of History, so close, that there is scarce anything to Glean after you, especially in greater matters’.60 Indeed, its chronological and thematic breadth, together with the depth of its (admittedly restricted) geographical coverage, make the Tour in Wales the most wide-­ranging example of eighteenth-­century Welsh history writing. Moreover, the work thereby created ‘a “public” version of history . . . far more widely disseminated than that being created and contested in scholarly historical narratives’.61 True, unlike Henry Rowlands and Theophilus Evans earlier in the 56 Pennant, Tour. 57 For White see R.  Paul Evans, ‘ “A Round Jump” ’, 33; R.  J.  W.  Evans, ‘Was There a Welsh Enlightenment?’, 149. 58 Withers, ‘Pennant, Thomas’; R.  Paul Evans, ‘Thomas Pennant’; R.  J.  W.  Evans, ‘Was There a Welsh Enlightenment?’, 149–50; Lichtenwalter, Claiming Cambria, 97–106; Enlightenment Travel, ed. Constantine and Leask. 59  R. Paul Evans, ‘ “A Round Jump” ’, 15–37, quotation at 31; R. Paul Evans, ‘Thomas Pennant’, 408, 412–13; Constantine, ‘ “To Trace Thy Country’s Glories” ’; Dafydd Johnston, ‘Shaping a Heroic Life’. 60 Yorke, The Royal Tribes of Wales; quotation in R. Paul Evans, ‘Thomas Pennant’, 401. 61  Constantine, ‘ “To Trace Thy Country’s Glories” ’, 123.

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218  WRITING WELSH HISTORY century or some later county historians such as Theophilus Jones, Pennant showed little inclination to offer an overarching interpretation that traced the trajectory of Welsh history from distant origins. Instead he filled his topographical portrait of north Wales with a bricolage of archaeological sites and finds, Welsh laws and customs, and historical narratives, ranging from descriptions of Roman remains and medieval abbeys to biographies of individuals and accounts of battles in the Middle Ages and the Civil Wars. Pennant thus offered a diverse and capacious view of the Welsh past that both punctuated and enriched his descriptions of the landscape and society of his own day. Like early modern chorographers, Pennant offered a different perspective from the standard narratives of Humphrey Llwyd and David Powel that placed the end of Wales’s distinctive history at the Edwardian conquest. Admittedly Pennant showed conventional regard for Powel as an authority on the medieval Welsh princes and acknowledged that the conquest marked a major turning-­point, observing, for example, of the site of Madog ap Llywelyn’s defeat in 1294 that ‘[o]n this mountain may be said to have expired the liberties of Wales’.62 However, in writing of individual places and localities Pennant traced developments from the Roman or medieval periods down to the seventeenth or eighteenth century, sometimes noting gaps in the evidence or other uncertainties.63 On the other hand, Pennant had only a vague sense of the pre-­Roman past. While accepting the existence of the post-­Roman Arthur, Vortigern, and Cadwaladr, ‘last king of the Britons’,64 he disregarded the British History’s vista of pre-­Roman British kings descended from Brutus as well as theories of biblical descent from Gomer and the Celts, thereby differing not only from Llwyd and Powel but also many eighteenth-­century Welsh writers.65 Instead, the Tour was closer to Camden in tracing antiquity back to the Roman era and the indeterminate period attested by archaeological sites identified as ‘British posts’.66 Similar historical horizons were evoked by Edward I’s round table at Nefyn (Caernarfonshire) in 1284: ‘The custom is very antient; for it may be derived even higher than the days of Arthur.’67 The systematic gathering of antiquarian and historical material reflected a determination to rest the work on secure scholarly foundations. His work was thus informed by a well-­ established tradition of antiquarian and scholarly endeavour to which he contributed as both participant and publicist. As well as eliciting information in advance of his journeys by publishing questionnaires in the Chester newspapers, deploying his keen powers of observation, and recording local traditions, Pennant drew on a wide range of written sources, both published and in manuscript, many of them supplied by fellow gentry and members of the 62 Pennant, Tour, 1: 88, 139, 213–14, 264, 463; 2: 7, 10–12, 387 (quotation). 63 Pennant, Tour, 1: 50, 96, 426, 433; 2: 331, 384. 64 Pennant, Tour, 2: 184, 212, 236, 273–4. 65  Implicit scepticism about Henry VII’s descent from Brutus in Pennant, Tour, 2: 268. 66 Pennant, Tour, 1: 85, 442; 2: 167, 215, 264–5, 336, 349, 377, 385. 67 Pennant, Tour, 2: 212.

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CIVILIZATION, LIBERTY, AND DISSENT, 1770–1820  219 clergy, especially the Welsh-­ speaking Revd John Lloyd, rector of Caerwys (Flintshire), who also accompanied him on his travels.68 Pennant was particularly indebted to Lloyd for assembling the wide range of sources used in his detailed account of Owain Glyndŵr, discussed below.69 Although Pennant, like many of his gentry compatriots, had little knowledge of the Welsh language, his identification with Wales and the Welsh is a persistent feature of the Tour. His Welsh patriotism may have been less assertive than that of Lewis Morris or Evan Evans, but it is brought into clear relief by a comparison with the strongly Anglocentric perspective of Letters from Snowdon, a slightly earlier account of travels in north Wales whose author was consigned to the ranks of ‘despicable scribblers’ by Evan Evans, who took particular exception to the account’s unflattering portrayal of Welsh bards.70 While admiring the Welsh language and some other aspects of Welsh society, Letters from Snowdon portrays Wales as backward and uncivilized compared to England and provides fairly curs­ory accounts of its history and antiquities.71 Pennant, on the other hand, adopted a Welsh narrative persona and brought both scholarly commitment and sympathy to his task.72 He described the medieval Welsh princes as ‘gallant’ and ‘valiant’ and wrote warmly of ‘the great effort of our gallant countrymen to preserve their liberties and antient mode of government’ in the rising of 1282 that led to Edward I’s conquest of Wales.73 To a significant extent, this patriotism was a conventional attribute of antiquarian-­minded Welsh gentry, whose wealth and status derived from their stake in Wales and its past, as acknowledged by the Tour’s numerous accounts of the descent of landed estates and the history and genealogy of their owners.74 No less conventionally, Pennant’s sense of Welsh identity also sat comfortably with a broader allegiance to Great Britain: thus Magna Carta was ‘highly prized by every true Briton’.75 Nor did his sympathy for the Welsh preclude praise of their medieval enemies: Robert of Rhuddlan, conqueror of Gwynedd in the later eleventh century, was ‘a valiant Norman’, while Edward I gave ‘salutary laws to the Welsh’ in the ‘many excellent institutions’ introduced by the Statute of Rhuddlan.76 Yet Pennant followed the well-­established practice of using ‘British’ 68  R. Paul Evans, ‘Thomas Pennant’, 404; R. Paul Evans, ‘Reverend John Lloyd’, esp. 115–20; Dafydd Johnston, ‘Shaping a Heroic Life’, 107–9. 69  Gruffydd Aled Williams, ‘Testun o Feirionnydd’, 244. 70 Anon., Letters from Snowdon; Evan Evans, ‘The Love of Our Country’, 131; Prescott, Eighteenth-­ Century Writing, 110, 112. 71  See e.g. Anon., Letters from Snowdon, Preface, 13–14, 86, 97, 106. 72 Pennant, Tour, 1: 109, 264, 351, 356; 2: 435. Cf. Constantine and Leask, ‘Introduction’, 3, 13, n. 10. 73 Pennant, Tour, 1: 95 (quotation), 238, 424; 2: 293, 350. 74 Pennant, Tour, 1: 105–8, 224, 228–9, 246–8, 276–80, 285–8, 293–5, 305–8, 309–10, 406–7; 2: 53, 124–7, 222–3, 296–9, 308–11, 355–6, 372–3, 388–92. Cf. the naming of owners of property at or near places mentioned in medieval Welsh poetry in Evan Evans, Some Specimens, 15, n. (k), 20, n. (a), 36, n. (y), 42, n. (s). 75 Pennant, Tour, 1: 253; cf. 2: 349 (‘the British empire’). Contrast Anon., Letters from Snowdon, 38 (‘English liberty’). 76 Pennant, Tour, 2: 11, 15.

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220  WRITING WELSH HISTORY terms to refer not only to inhabitants of Britain as a whole but also to the ancient Britons and their Welsh descendants from the Middle Ages to the present.77 The different meanings of the terminology are usually clear from their context, as in the references in the same paragraph to both the ‘British name’ for Newborough (Anglesey) and the town’s ‘sending representatives to the British parlement’.78 On some occasions, though, Pennant seems to have elided ‘Welsh’ and modern ‘British’ connotations, as in his description of Owain Glyndŵr as ‘this celebrated Briton’, which may have alluded to Glyndŵr’s descent from the ‘antient race of British princes’ while also implying that he merited fame among the inhabitants of Great Britain as a whole, rather than just the Welsh in particular.79 The description comes at the end of a seventy-­page account of Glyndŵr that throws valuable light on Pennant’s approach to Welsh history.80 As has long been recognized, the sheer length and generally neutral, and at times warm, tone of the account marked a significant shift in attitudes to the prince that helped to re­habili­ tate his reputation. Pennant broke decisively with the negative portrayal of Glyndŵr by earlier historians of Wales and chose instead to give a decisive boost to recent re-­evaluations of the prince by Evan Evans and the later seventeenth-­ century Memoirs of Owen Glendowr published by John Thomas in 1775.81 This reappraisal depended partly on Pennant’s readiness to criticize received opinions and offer fresh interpretations of the evidence. Thus Pennant insisted that the assertion, in ‘[b]oth the printed histories, and the manuscript accounts’, that the prince’s end was ‘very miserable . . . does not wear the face of probability’, since he was offered peace terms by the crown: ‘Death alone deprived Owen of the glory of accepting an offered accommodation.’82 For Pennant, then, Glyndŵr was no mere rebel against the crown, but a ‘hero’ who ‘died unsubdued’—a famous figure, comparable in status to ‘our hero Arthur’.83 However, there is no attempt to portray the prince as a Welsh national hero whose political aims offered inspiration in the present; such interpretations only took hold in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.84 Indeed, Pennant offered a mixed picture that again reflected his critical approach and willingness to use a variety of sources, as he highlighted the vengeful violence as well as virtues of a prince also described as ‘irregular and

77 Pennant, Tour, 1: 308, 423, 457; 2: 125, 167, 323. 78 Pennant, Tour, 2: 233–4; see also 2: 318. 79 Pennant, Tour, 1: 394, 334. 80 Pennant, Tour, 1: 325–94. 81 Evan Evans, Some Specimens, 89–90; Evan Evans, ‘The Love of Our Country’, 142–3; Anon., ‘Memoirs of Owen Glendowr’; R. Paul Evans, ‘Reverend John Lloyd’, 117; Dafydd Johnston, ‘Shaping a Heroic Life’, 106, 108; Gruffydd Aled Williams, ‘Testun o Feirionnydd’. See also J.  E.  Lloyd, Owen Glendower, 1–4; R. R. Davies, The Revolt, 329–30; Henken, National Redeemer, 10–12. A critical view of Glyndŵr’s rising is maintained, with a moralizing reference to Gildas, by Edmund Jones, A Geographical, Historical, and Religious Account, 86. 82 Pennant, Tour, 1: 325–94, quotation at 394; Dafydd Johnston, ‘Shaping a Heroic Life’. 83 Pennant, Tour, 1: 325, 326, 358, 392–4; 2: 235. Arthur: 2: 212; also 1: 442 (‘our celebrated prince’). 84  Dafydd Johnston, ‘Shaping a Heroic Life’, 104, 114, 118; Pryce, ‘Cofio Glyndŵr’, 48–9.

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CIVILIZATION, LIBERTY, AND DISSENT, 1770–1820  221 wild’ and capable of destructive ‘rage’.85 Further nuance was added by the praise of Glyndŵr’s adversary, Henry, Prince of Wales for his ‘humanity’, prudence, and bravery, and the acknowledgement that Henry IV’s penal laws against the Welsh, while ‘certainly very severe’ were ‘perhaps, no more than what any government would have directed, against a people . . . who were considered in no other light than that of rebellious subjects’.86 Pennant presented the life of Glyndŵr, then, as the story of the rise and fall of a heroic, but flawed, individual whose vicissitudes in a distant age offered the reader plenty of drama without carrying any subversive implications for the Hanoverian realm. As such, the prince merited com­mem­ora­ tion as a ‘celebrated Briton’ in all senses of the term.87 Pennant’s treatment of history was also informed by the stadialist assumptions of his age that societies gradually progressed through different stages, although these assumptions are nowhere articulated systematically.88 The idea that Welsh history was a story of progress was, of course, nothing new. Since the sixteenth century this had had been scripted in providential and particularist terms as the tale of an ancient people, ruled by its own kings and princes, ultimately surviving conquest to gain the twin benefits of legal equality and Protestant religion through union with a powerful neighbour.89 By contrast, Pennant adopted a universalist framework in which Wales, in common with other countries, progressed from savagery to civilization. There was therefore no shame for the Welsh to admit that ‘in very early times we were as fierce and savage as the rest of Europe’, since in the present ‘they keep pace with it in civilization, and in the progress of very fine art’.90 These comments are offered as an apologia for relating tales of the vengeful fury of two Welshmen in ‘Rude Times’, evidently referring to the Middle Ages, a period also associated with the ‘primeval’ and ‘primitive’.91 Buildings told a similar story. Pennant commented on the supposed remains of a palace from the age of Gruffudd ap Cynan (d. 1137) that it ‘shews the very low state of architecture in those times’, while the houses of the ‘inferior gentry were formed of wattles, like Indian wigwams, or Highland hovels’.92 Likewise, belief in miracles was only to  be expected in the Middle Ages; accordingly it merited notice as testimony

85 Pennant, Tour, 1: 305 (quotation), 347, 349, 361; 2: 293 (quotation); Dafydd Johnston ‘Shaping a Heroic Life’, 107–14. 86 Pennant, Tour, 1: 369, 376, 380, 390. 87  Cf. Dafydd Johnston, ‘Shaping a Heroic Life’, 114. For the various uses and meanings of the term ‘Briton’ in the eighteenth century see Kidd, ‘Wales, the Enlightenment and the New British History’, 212–15. 88  Cf. Constantine and Leask, ‘Introduction’, 2–3; Hopfl, ‘From Savage to Scotsman’; Pagden, ‘The “Defence of Civilization” ’. 89  Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘ “Taphy-­land Historians” and the Union’, 5–10. 90 Pennant, Tour, 2: 56. Similar ideas in Anon., Letters from Snowdon, 17, 133, 138. Nevertheless, the latter work mainly emphasized that the Welsh remained uncivilized. 91 Pennant, Tour, 2: 56–7; 1: 297, 399. 92 Pennant, Tour, 2: 100; see also 1: 427. Other comparisons with contemporaneous peoples held to be in a primitive stage of civilization in Hopfl, ‘From Savage to Scotsman’, 24–5.

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222  WRITING WELSH HISTORY to  past mentalities while providing an occasion to proclaim the superiority of eighteenth-­century explanations based on natural causes.93 Yet his view of medi­ eval Wales was neither systematic nor entirely consistent, as Pennant also made the novel assertion that Wales under its princes was wealthy as ‘[w]e had the balance of trade in our favour’.94 Overall, though, he underlined the otherness of the past, thus providing a satisfying contrast with the Wales of his own day, symbolized by new country houses, industrial enterprises, improved roads, and enlightened thinking.95 It is significant, none the less, that Pennant was ready to relate legends about saints and their miracles, in contrast to the author of Letters from Snowdon, who merely observed of ‘the strange stories recorded of St. Winifred, by the monkish legendary writers’ that they ‘serve only to shew the superstition of those times, and create disgust in a modern reader’.96 The premise that the Welsh had conformed to a wider pattern of development from the savage to the civilized helps to explain, then, why Pennant viewed their past with both detachment and sympathy.

County Histories Accounts of tours and regional and local histories published after Pennant’s Tour in Wales similarly inserted observations on the past in topographically structured narratives. Pennant himself applied this approach on a far smaller scale in a parish history of the area around his estate at Downing that combined family history, accounts of gentry residences with their portraits, libraries, and antiquities, descriptions of church monuments, antiquities, mineral resources, agriculture, and natural history.97 Others followed in his footsteps in works on north Wales.98 From the 1790s, however, there also appeared the first works conceived as his­tor­ ies of Welsh counties. Three in number, these contained many of the standard features of their well-­established counterparts in England, including the description and illustration of the seats of the gentry, for whom such works were principally intended.99 But there were significant differences between them too. In part, this reflected the different backgrounds of their authors. The earliest, The History of Monmouthshire (1796), was the result of a commission from gentry in the county to David Williams (1738–1816), originally from the neighbouring county of Glamorgan but based in London since 1769, a prominent radical and Deist best known for his writings on political philosophy, who along with Tom Paine, 93 Pennant, Tour, 1: 33–40; 2: 206, 360–1; cf. Constantine, ‘ “To Trace Thy Country’s Glory” ’, 130–2. 94 Pennant, Tour, 2: 145. 95  Cf. Pennant, Tour, 1: 306; 2: 245, 276–82, 299, 356, 360, 394–5. 96 Anon., Letters from Snowdon, 11. 97 Pennant, The History of the Parishes. 98 E.g. Nicholas Owen, Caernarvonshire; William Williams, Observations on the Snowdon Mountains; Edward Pugh, Cambria Depicta. 99  Jonathan Williams, The History of Radnorshire was planned by 1818 but remained unfinished at the author’s death in 1829.

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CIVILIZATION, LIBERTY, AND DISSENT, 1770–1820  223 George Washington, and others had been made an honorary French citizen in 1792, although he had renounced his support for revolutionary change by the time he undertook the county history.100 The History and Antiquities of the County of the Cardigan (1808) was the first of numerous antiquarian works, including an edition of Welsh pedigrees, published by Samuel Rush Meyrick (1783–1848), a member of an English gentry family who claimed Welsh ancestry and had become closely connected to Cardiganshire through his marriage to Mary Parry of Llwyn Hywel in 1803.101 Theophilus Jones (1759–1812), author of The History of the County of Brecknock (1805–9), was descended from minor Welsh gentry and named after his maternal grandfather Theophilus Evans; trained as a lawyer, he was employed as a solicitor and as deputy registrar of the archdeaconry of Brecon.102 All three authors structured their works in different ways. Williams adopted the broadest approach in a historical account linking the county to wider developments in the history of Wales from the origins of the Britons to the 1790s. By contrast, Jones and Meyrick covered shorter chronological periods in general histories of their counties placed in substantial introductions to the detailed descriptions of parishes that make up the greater part of their works,103 the former taking his readers from the arrival of the Romans in Britain to the reign of James II (1685–8), the latter from the remote past to the Act of Union. The choice of starting points reflected differing approaches to sources dealing with the pre-­ Roman period, Williams and Meyrick producing accounts of the remote past heavily influenced by Iolo Morganwg and William Owen Pughe that rejected Brutus in favour of Hu Gadarn and other indigenous founding fathers of the Welsh, whereas Theophilus Jones agreed with Camden and eighteenth-­century historians of England such as David Hume, whose work he knew, that the Roman period furnished the earliest reliable evidence for the history of Britain. Similarly, while all three authors felt obliged to cater for the continuing appeal of Druids, Williams and Meyrick mainly focused on the plethora of interpretations advanced since the seventeenth century, including syncretist theories linking the Druids to other religions, whereas Jones based his account primarily on Roman writers and took pains to expose the inconsistencies and errors of modern writers such as John Pinkerton, whose Celtophobia was also criticized elsewhere in the work.104 This was but one instance of Jones’s determination to apply the ‘rule’ he had set himself of going back to original sources in order to avoid being misled by

100  Damian Walford Davies, ‘Williams, David’; Whitney R. D. Jones, David Williams, with discussion of The History of Monmouthshire at 162–7. 101 Lowe, Sir Samuel Meyrick, chs. 1–3; Heraldic Visitations, ed. Meyrick. 102  Prys Morgan, ‘Writing History: Theophilus Jones’; Glanmor Williams, ‘Romantic and Realist’, 18, 22–7. 103  The same is true of Jonathan Williams, History of Radnorshire. 104 David Williams, The History of Monmouthshire, 18–26, 257–8; Meyrick, The History and Antiquities, lxxviii–xc; Theophilus Jones, A History of the County of Brecknock, 1: 199–212, 275–80.

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224  WRITING WELSH HISTORY in­accur­ate second-­hand accounts, from which ‘even . . . respectable historians’ like Hume were not exempt.105 The differing backgrounds and ideological perspectives of each author influenced other aspects of their approach too. These are most apparent in the cases of Williams and Jones. In large measure this was because Jones was far more familiar with his subject, being the only one of the writers discussed here to write about his native county, where he lived all his life; it is therefore hardly surprising that his was the longest and most detailed of the early Welsh county histories, totalling some 1,200 pages, a testimony not only to his erudition but to his familiarity with the landscape and its monuments. Yet, as Jones made clear in a review of Williams, the two authors also proceeded from different assumptions.106 Jones espoused a conservative Welsh patriotism which, as for his grandfather Theophilus Evans, regarded pride in the Welsh language and culture as inseparable from loyalty to the Anglican Church and the established political order. By concluding his his­tor­ ic­al survey in the reign of James II, with a glance ahead to the Jacobite rising of 1745 thrown in for good measure, he was able to stress the loyalty of the county to the Protestant monarchy in the face of Catholic sedition abetted by France, a message that may have carried particular resonance in the political climate of the Napoleonic Wars.107 Nor did Jones share David Williams’s sympathy for the bardism of Iolo Morganwg, dismissing the latter’s Gorsedd ceremonies as ‘attempts to revive the . . . ridiculous mummeries of ancient druidism . . . Charlatanic efforts for fame . . . deservedly reprobated by the sober and discreet part of our countrymen’.108 As a self-­styled ‘philosophical historian’ who had made his name as a writer on political liberty, Williams, by contrast, set his subject in a comparative context that proceeded from general principles to the particular situation of Monmouthshire.109 Although his adherence to an English political radicalism closely connected to France and north America had diminished by the time he wrote his History of Monmouthshire, he referred to his earlier writings in praising ‘political principles’ derived from the Saxons and saw liberty and progress coming from England: hence King Alfred’s laws were superior to those of Hywel Dda and English entrepreneurs controlled industrial developments in south Wales.110 His political outlook was also reflected in his insistence that the county’s inhabitants had continued to live under ‘feodal dominion’ since the Restoration and in his condemnation of the brutalizing effects of factories.111 Similarly Williams was 105  Theophilus Jones, A History of the County of Brecknock, 1: viii–ix. 106  Theophilus Jones, ‘Remarks on the History of Monmouthshire’. 107  Theophilus Jones, A History of the County of Brecknock, 1: 198. 108  Theophilus Jones, ‘Remarks on the History of Monmouthshire’, 464–5; David Williams, The History of Monmouthshire, 206 (see also Williams’s correspondence with Iolo, Appendix, 13–17, 85–6, 120–1). 109  Quotation: David Williams, The History of Monmouthshire, 323. 110  David Williams, The History of Monmouthshire, 115–19, 126, 349, quotation at 119. 111  David Williams, The History of Monmouthshire, 323 (quotation), 328–9.

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CIVILIZATION, LIBERTY, AND DISSENT, 1770–1820  225 dismissive of gentry families’ claims to ancient descent and devoted little space to genealogy, complaining about the ‘soporific qualities’ of the pedigrees and lists of office-­holders usually included in county histories.112

William Warrington: ‘The First Regular Historian of Wales’ In The History of Wales in Nine Books (1786) the Revd William Warrington (1735–1824) broke new ground in the writing of Welsh history in both his conception and his approach.113 Whereas most previous writers on the subject had sought to supply the Welsh with an account of their own past or to emphasize its significance for the history of Britain, Warrington wrote as a ‘general historian’ whose remit did not extend to ‘minute inquiries into the antiquities of a country’. Moreover, his predecessors had provided merely ‘a simple detail of facts’ found in ‘the Chronicle of the monk Caradoc of Llancarvan’ (as published by Powel and Wynne): Warrington, by contrast, set himself a more ambitious task, promising ‘to investigate the motives of policy, to trace back effects to their causes, to de­lin­ eate with just discrimination personal or national characters, and to digest the materials of the narration into that perspicuous order which is essential to the utility of historical writing’.114 Although relatively little is known of his life, his connections with both Wales and England probably help to explain why and how Warrington undertook the work. Born in Wrexham to parents of minor gentry status from Lancashire, he not only considered himself English but appears to have spent most of his life in England.115 Nevertheless, he maintained links with north-­east Wales to judge by his debt in the History to several of the region’s antiquarian-­minded clergy and gentry, including John Lloyd of Caerwys and Philip Yorke of Erddig.116 In preparing his work Warrington also received help from Iolo Morganwg and William Owen Pughe.117 However, while his Welsh connections probably account for his sympathetic interest in the Welsh past and his access to some important sources, he wrote and published his History in England, and his connections there were probably crucial in influencing his decision to embark on the work as well as the approach he adopted. By the mid-­1770s he was living in the vicinity of London, and in the following decade enjoyed the patronage of Whig grandees, while also coming into contact with liberal and radical circles.118 Aged almost fifty, he was 112  David Williams, The History of Monmouthshire, 277, Appendix, 1 (quotation). 113  Brief assessments in Dafydd Glyn Jones, Un o Wŷr y Medra, 305–8; Braithwaite, ‘From the See of St Davids’, 47–8; Gerald Morgan, ‘Warrington’. 114 Warrington, The History, [v]–vi. References to first edition (1786) unless otherwise stated. 115  Gerald Morgan, ‘Warrington’; Iolo and Menai Roberts, ‘William Owen (Pughe)’, 297, 319. 116 Warrington, The History, 257, n. (z), 264, n. (m), 404; Warrington, The History, 2nd edn., vii. 117 G. J. Williams, Iolo Morganwg, 424–5; Glenda Carr, William Owen Pughe, 16. 118  He was living in Marylebone in 1788: Iolo and Menai Roberts, ‘William Owen (Pughe)’, 310.

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226  WRITING WELSH HISTORY ordained an Anglican priest in 1784 by Jonathan Shipley, the latitudinarian bishop of St Asaph friendly with Benjamin Franklin, Joseph Priestley, and Richard Price, and two years later was appointed chaplain to the Whig politician and bibliophile William Ponsonby, second earl of Bessborough (1704–93), who presumably secured his appointment as vicar of Old Windsor in 1789; this connection must also explain why the History was dedicated to Ponsonby’s brother-­in-­law William Cavendish, fifth duke of Devonshire (1748–1811).119 Its publication was undertaken by Joseph Johnson, a Unitarian who supported the American and French revolutions as well as campaigns to secure freedoms for religious Dissenters in Britain who was closely associated with prominent radicals such as Joseph Priestley, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft, whose works he published along with a wide range of other books he deemed commercially vi­able.120 Warrington’s History, priced at £1 1s., was among the more expensive of Johnson’s titles, but sold well, being rapidly reissued in 1788 and 1791; other publishers produced two further editions in 1805 and 1823.121 It thus became the most popular English-­language account of Welsh history of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The History broadly followed earlier precedents, as Warrington drew heavily on a wide range of previous writing on the history of the Britons and the Welsh, both ancient and medieval sources and works from the Elizabethan period onwards. A general model was provided by William Wynne’s History, which had been reissued just over a decade earlier in 1774. True, Warrington differed from Wynne by ignoring Geoffrey of Monmouth’s account of Trojan origins and pre-­ Roman kings, instead tracing the origins of the Britons to Gaul, citing the authority of Richard Verstegan and George Buchanan.122 However, like Wynne, Warrington took his main narrative from Caesar’s invasion of Britain to Edward I’s conquest of Wales, and treated the period down to the late seventh century as introductory: Books I and II together comprise a ‘Review of Ancient British History’ dealing respectively with the Roman occupation of Britain and the Britons of the fifth and sixth centuries. He also concluded with an appendix of documents, in translation and the original Latin, indebted to that printed by Wynne. Yet he did more than update Wynne. This is clear from his adoption of a new structure. Rather than providing a series of separate sections on individual rulers along the lines of Llwyd, Powel, and Wynne, Warrington divided his work into books, which, together with dates given in the margins, allowed him to convey the sense of a general chronological narrative and identify what he considered to be significant periods in ancient and medieval Welsh history as well as 119 Gerald Morgan, ‘Warrington’; cf. O’Brien, ‘Ponsonby, William’; Finnegan, ‘The Library of William Ponsonby’; Durban, ‘Cavendish, William’. 120  Tyson, ‘Joseph Johnson’; Braithwaite, Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent. For Johnson’s connections with Welsh Dissenters see Braithwaite, ‘From the See of St Davids’. 121  Anon., Review of Warrington, The History, in English Review, 321; Tyson, ‘Joseph Johnson’, 3–4 and n. 9. Editions listed in Iolo and Menai Roberts, ‘William Owen (Pughe)’, 318. 122 Warrington, The History, 1.

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CIVILIZATION, LIBERTY, AND DISSENT, 1770–1820  227 facilitating comment on wider trends. Readers of the second and subsequent e­ ditions were provided with further visual orientation in the form of a fold-­out list and genealogy of medieval Welsh princes together with two maps, one showing the medieval, the other the modern divisions of Wales, all prepared by William Owen Pughe.123 True, in most of the work Warrington focused within each book on individual rulers, whose names appear in the running heads at the  top of the rele­vant pages and provide the chronological markers for Books III–IX. However, sections were also devoted to particular themes, such as the ‘Manners of the Ancient Welsh’, and overall the novel structure of the History reflected Warrington’s ambition to create a framework conducive to advancing his own interpretations of the events narrated. Warrington also went well beyond Powel and Wynne by making extensive use of other antiquarian and historical works on Wales and England, including several published earlier in the eighteenth century. Thus Warrington was heavily indebted to Henry Rowlands’s account of ‘the ancient administration of Wales’ revealed by territorial divisions and tenurial obligations,124 drew on Wotton and Williams’s 1730 edition of the Welsh laws,125 and also cited ‘Evans Mirrour written in Welsh’ (apparently the 1740 edition of Drych y Prif Oesoedd), and Thomas Pennant.126 Naval affairs received attention lacking in previous histories of Wales thanks in part to George Berkely’s History of the British Navy, which Warrington followed in asserting that King Alfred had depended on Welsh expertise to build and command his ships against the Vikings; likewise his observation that Gruffudd ap Llywelyn (d. 1064) had probably ‘established some kind of navy’ was indebted to Lord Lyttelton.127 Such borrowings had their biggest impact on the work’s treatment of the period after the Edwardian conquest. Here, instead of continuing with the English princes of Wales as Powel and Wynne had done, Warrington provided a history of the bardic order and Welsh poetry from Edward I’s alleged massacre of the bards to the eighteenth century that relied mainly on Evan Evans’s Dissertatio de Bardis, before concluding the main narrative with a brief account of revolts against the crown from the late thirteenth century to Owain Glyndŵr.128 There followed a section on Henry VIII’s Acts of Union taken from Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s The Life and Raigne of King Henry the Eighth (1649) and, from the second edition onwards, another section on the history of Christianity and the Church among the Britons, especially in Wales, down to the acceptance of the Roman Easter in the later eighth century.129

123  Iolo and Menai Roberts, ‘William Owen (Pughe)’. 124 Warrington, The History, 124–35. 125 Warrington, The History, 164–90, esp. 189, n. 1. 126 Warrington, The History, 42, 64, 70–2 (Evans); 121, 538–9 (Pennant). 127 Warrington, The History, 144–5, 215 (quotation); Berkely, The Naval History, 69; Lyttelton, The History of the Life of King Henry II, 2: 43. 128 Warrington, The History, 527–56. 129 Warrington, The History, 559–68; Warrington, The History, 2nd edn., 536–60.

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228  WRITING WELSH HISTORY Although in much of his coverage Warrington struck a traditional chord, he went further than his predecessors in explaining and assessing the significance of the events he narrated. To begin with, he was readier to pass judgement on Welsh rulers according to the extent to which they promoted unity and preserved independence from the English crown, differing from earlier historians by declaring, for example, that Rhodri the Great (d. 878) lost all claims to greatness by dividing his united kingdom between his three sons.130 On the other hand, Warrington sought to offer balanced assessments of rulers who had enjoyed mixed success: despite temporarily succumbing to the blandishments of Henry II, the Lord Rhys (d. 1197) was commended for having defended his country’s ‘honour and liberty . . . at times . . . with so much zeal and success’, while Llywelyn ap Iorwerth (d. 1240), though sometimes too subservient to the king of England, still merited ‘the illustrious title of Llewelyn the Great’.131 Occasionally Warrington explained events in terms of emotions. Thus Maredudd ab Owain (d. 999), ‘perhaps ashamed of his late timid and unavailing policy [against the Danes], sunk under the ca­lam­ ities of his country, and died of grief ’; the king of England encouraged Norman nobles to make conquests in Wales through ‘alluring them by motives of interest and power, those strong incitements to human conduct’; while it was ‘not to be supposed’ that Henry III’s heir the Lord Edward, ‘a prince of the age of seven­teen, full of fire and ambition, would see without emotion the progress of Llewelyn’.132 However, Warrington also offered perceptive general observations on political and constitutional issues, including the failure of both the ancient Britons and most of their Welsh successors to maintain a navy despite their coastal situation, and the threat presented by repeated English claims to sovereignty over Wales: ‘A tacit acquiescence in claims successively made, in length of time constitutes a right.’133 Another novel feature of the work was its framing of the history of Wales as a struggle for liberty. The circumstances and actions of the People, whose history is related in this work, stand single and original in the annals of the world. A nation, who, from remote antiquity, were distinguished by their independency of spirit, defending for ages the rights of nature and of liberty in the bosom of their native mountains, affords a spectacle sufficiently interesting, to awaken curiosity, to excite admiration, and to call forth every liberal sentiment.134

Warrington declared, moreover, that he was all the more qualified to take this view thanks to his detachment as an outsider, stating ‘that he is an Englishman; and whatever preponderancy may be discovered in this work to the side of the 130  E.g. Warrington, The History, 141, 143–4, 148–9; also 30, 160, 229, 270, 324, 439. 131 Warrington, The History, 349, 404. 132 Warrington, The History, 203, 370, 432. 133 Warrington, The History, 83, 209, 374 (quotation). 134 Warrington, The History, [v].

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CIVILIZATION, LIBERTY, AND DISSENT, 1770–1820  229 Welsh . . . is but the voluntary tribute of justice and humanity which is due to the cause of freedom, and the violated rights of nature’.135 Although Thomas Carte, Thomas Pennant, and others had portrayed the medieval Welsh as seeking to maintain their liberties,136 Warrington went much further than these writers in making liberty the central theme of his work. This emphasis clearly had a contemporary resonance in the later eighteenth century, although its precise implications here are uncertain. Liberty was a widely used watchword in eighteenth-­century Britain whose connotations were contested across a wide spectrum of political opinion ranging from conservative Whigs to radicals and revolutionaries such as Warrington’s publisher Joseph Johnson.137 His aristocratic Whig connections make it unlikely that Warrington, in contrast to Iolo Morganwg, shared his publisher’s radical views.138 Indeed, the dedication of the History praised the duke of Devonshire’s family for its ‘steady and temperate adherence to the constitution and liberties of Great Britain’, words reminiscent of John Owen’s dedication of his Compleat and Impartial History of the Britons to the Princess of Wales in 1743 (see Chapter 8), which may suggest that Warrington was likewise merely signalling approval of the settlement of 1689.139 By contrast, there is no implication that struggles for freedom by the ancient Britons and medieval Welsh carried subversive implications for the present comparable, say, to eighteenth-­century Irish historians’ assertions that Brian Boru (d. 1014) had restored the land rights of ‘Ancient Proprietors’.140 Indeed, there is much to suggest that Warrington’s emphasis on a small nation’s struggle for liberty against a powerful neighbour sought to capitalize on an English fascination with Wales fostered by Pennant and other travellers as well as by late eighteenth-­century Anglophone fiction and to elicit a similar emotional response from readers.141 If so, Warrington provides a further instance of what has been argued to have been another side to the abstract, generalizing approach of Enlightenment historians, namely their interest ‘in engaging the reader’s sympathies, especially by presenting scenes of virtue in distress’ that provided ‘op­por­ tun­ities for sentimental identification’.142 For example, as well as describing Wales as a ‘nation’ which ‘affords a spectacle sufficiently interesting . . . to call forth every liberal sentiment’,143 Warrington declared that Welsh successes against the 135 Warrington, The History, vii. For similar arguments regarding Rapin and Hume in their his­tor­ ies of England see Sullivan, ‘Rapin’, 155, 161–2. 136  Other examples include An Universal History, 3rd edn., vol. 57, 197–8. 137 Dickinson, Liberty and Property; Scott, ‘From English to British Liberty’. 138  Cf. Geraint  H.  Jenkins, Bard of Liberty, 104–5. Johnson was one of the main sellers of Iolo’s Poems, Lyrical and Pastoral: Braithwaite, ‘From the See of St Davids’, 55. 139 Warrington, The History, [iii]. 140  Cf. O’Halloran, ‘The Triumph of “Virtuous Liberty” ’, 160. 141  Cf. Aaron and Prescott, The Oxford Literary History of Wales: Volume 3, ch. 5. 142  Mark Salber Phillips, On Historical Distance, 90. See further Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment, esp. 65–70, 85–7, 106–10, 199–203. 143 Warrington, The History, [v].

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230  WRITING WELSH HISTORY Normans ‘must surely give pleasure to every reader of sentiment, who feels a tender concern for the interests of humanity’. Moreover, despite their eventual conquest, ‘the Welsh . . . will be entitled to a tribute of admiration and esteem, as long as manly sentiment and the love of freedom shall remain’.144 Yet, like previous historians of Wales, Warrington thought that this loss of independence had been for the best and should be viewed with equanimity, as the persistent disunity and internecine conflicts that had fatally weakened the Welsh eventually led to a su­per­ior kind of liberty. It was, indeed, an interesting spectacle, and might justly have excited indignation and pity, to have seen an ancient and gallant nation falling the victims of private ambition, or sinking under the weight of a superior power. But such emotions, which were then due to that injured people, have lost, at this period, their poignancy and force. A new train of ideas arise, when we see that the change is beneficial to the vanquished: when we see a wild and precarious liberty succeeded by a freedom, secured by equal and fixed laws: when we see manners hostile and barbarous, and a spirit of rapine and cruelty, softened down into the arts of peace, and the milder habits of civilized life: when we see this Remnant of the ancient Britons, uniting in interests, and mingling in friendship with the English, and enjoying with them the same Constitutional Liberties; the purity of which, we trust, will continue uncorrupted as long as this Empire shall be numbered among the nations of the earth.145

If the invocation of ‘liberty’ and ‘rights of nature’ served to excite sympathy for the Britons and Welsh, then, this was dampened by stadialist assumptions about the progress from barbarism to civilization that found medieval Wales wanting by the polite standards of Warrington’s day (though Edward I also fell short in this regard).146 Similar thinking may underpin references to the ‘(ancient) British empire’, a term, possibly derived from Lewis Morris, which Warrington used for the territories ruled by the Britons, originally coterminous with most of Britain but eventually restricted to Wales as a result of Anglo-­ Saxon, English, and Norman conquests.147 While, like the Roman Empire, this could have served as an implicit warning for the British Empire less than a decade after the loss of the American colonies, it seems more likely that a flattering contrast was intended

144 Warrington, The History, 393, 523. 145 Warrington, The History, 556–7. Likewise the laws of Hywel Dda were contrasted with ‘the fierceness of uncivilized life, and . . . a wild independency’, while, thanks to the union with England, ‘the genius of the Welsh has . . . composed itself to rational obedience, and has been directed to those pursuits which tend to polish their manners’: Warrington, The History, 164, 568. 146 Warrington, The History, 481, 516, 527. 147 Warrington, The History, 83, 85, 362, 433, 469, 506–7, 523. Cf. Lewis Morris, Celtic Remains, 48.

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CIVILIZATION, LIBERTY, AND DISSENT, 1770–1820  231 with the superiority of ‘this Empire’ to whose continuation, with its pure ‘Constitutional Liberties’, Warrington looked forward at the end of his work.148 In his stadialist assumptions, his self-­identification as a ‘general historian’, and his appeal to ‘sentiment’, Warrington exhibited some of the characteristics of the philosophical history of his day. Yet these affinities should not be overstated: his History was above all a neo-­classical work imbued with an eighteenth-­century sensibility rather than a radical reframing of Welsh history that integrated broader constitutional, social, economic, and cultural developments as attempted by Hume or Robertson.149 In particular, while the inclusion of sections on the ‘manners of the ancient Welsh’, based largely on Gerald of Wales, and the ‘laws of Hywel Dha’ were consistent with the ambition of philosophical historians to analyse the development of society rather than simply to narrate political events, these, like similar sections in previous histories of Wales, were neither central to, nor integrated with, the political narrative that comprised the bulk of the work.150 Indeed, the inclusion of the section on ‘manners’ was justified in essentially literary terms, being intended, ‘after a tedious recital of inroads and battles, to give some relief to the reader’s mind’.151 Nevertheless, Warrington clearly wished to be seen as adopting a modern approach to history writing as understood by educated opinion of the time and early reviewers of his book took it as such. One maintained that the author had only partially succeeded in writing like ‘a philosopher, or general historian’ owing to his tendency to tire the reader with ‘a con­tinued series of murders and assassinations’ and Welsh names containing ‘barbarous and unheard-­of sounds’ as well as an excessive partiality to the Welsh. Yet there was also much to praise: Warrington ‘enters fully into the nature and spirit of historical composition . . . He is the first regular historian of Wales; all other authors, on the affairs of that country, being mere chroniclers and antiquarians.’152 His aspirations to be regarded a ‘general’ or ‘regular’ historian are also evidenced in the comparisons he drew with ancient Greek and Roman history, presumably intended to endow his subject with dignity and universal significance. The work’s epigraph, taken from William Hayley’s verse Essay on History (1780), served to justify the choice of subject by implicitly comparing the Welsh with peoples of 148 Warrington, The History, 557. Cf. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion. Volume Four, 5–6. A further parallel is the maritime Milesian Empire invented by Sylvester O’Halloran as a precedent justifying Irish Catholic participation in the British Empire, though such a justification was hardly necessary in the case of Wales: see Lyons, ‘An Imperial Harbinger’. 149 Warrington, The History, 106–35, 161–90. Cf. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion. Volume Two, 207–8, 271–2, 278–81; Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment, 52–5, 89–91; Allan, ‘Identity and Innovation’, 319–22. 150 Warrington, The History, 106–35, 161–90. Cf. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion. Volume Two, 208; Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment, 52–5. 151 Warrington, The History, 106. 152  Anon., Review of Warrington, The History, in English Review, quotations at 420, 425. The lack of any previous ‘regular history’ of Wales also noted in Anon., Review of Warrington, History of Wales, in Critical Review, 129.

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232  WRITING WELSH HISTORY classical antiquity, the Boeotians of Greece and Batavians of the lower Rhine, who had demonstrated how virtue could save ‘a liberal race . . . from Oppression’s den’, thereby ensuring that ‘[t]heir Deeds the story of the world adorn’.153 More pointedly, Warrington compared Llywelyn ap Gruffudd and his followers in November 1282, ‘a band of heroes and patriots stationed on the only mountain that was left them . . . calmly and with firmness asserting their rights, and making their last struggle for freedom’, with the Spartan king Leonidas, killed with his advance guard by the Persians at Thermopylae in 480 bce.154 In short, Warrington sought to demonstrate that, though marginal to prevailing narratives of English history culminating in the constitutional settlement of the Glorious Revolution, the history of Wales nevertheless possessed a significance and emotional appeal as the story of an ancient people who had struggled for its own liberty before becoming beneficiaries of the superior liberty of a modern Great Britain.

Nonconformist Pasts The final section of this chapter considers a cluster of works that marked the most radical break in this period with previous understandings of Welsh history. While their genres varied, these works had two crucial features in common: all were written by Nonconformist ministers and all marked a new kind of Welsh history writing that focused on the forging of a modern Welsh people in the crucible of Protestant Dissent from the seventeenth century onwards, albeit one indebted in part to earlier histories of Dissent in England by Edmund Calamy, Daniel Neal, and others as well as to previous accounts of the history of Wales. The legal dis­ abil­ities suffered by Dissenters, some of which continued even after the 1689 Act of Toleration, meant that the theme of liberty was an important undercurrent of this writing too.155 After introducing the works I will examine the themes and methods they adopted in writing about the rise of Nonconformity and Methodism, including how, and how far, they sought to link this modern history, defined above all in terms of religious conversion, to narratives of the ancient and medi­ eval past that sought to explain the origins and survival of the Welsh people. Four books were designed as religious histories that sought to instil amongst their readers a sense of Protestant Nonconformist belonging, be it at a de­nom­in­ ation­al or broader level. Two, both written in Welsh, provided internalist accounts

153 Warrington, The History, title page, citing Hayley, An Essay on History, 74, lines 279–84. 154 Warrington, The History, 500. Cf. Clough, ‘Loyalty and Liberty’. Possibly Warrington’s title was influenced by the nine books of Glover, Leonidas. More generally, the emphasis on the Welsh as a mountain people, a trope developed earlier in the eighteenth century, may have evoked the liberty associated with the mountainous terrain of Switzerland: cf. Zimmer, ‘In Search of Natural Identity’, 646–8; Löffler, Welsh Responses to the French Revolution, 166, 302, n. 41. 155  Cf. Seed, Dissenting Histories, 5–6.

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CIVILIZATION, LIBERTY, AND DISSENT, 1770–1820  233 of particular Nonconformist denominations in Wales. Joshua Thomas (1719–97), a Baptist minister in Leominster (Herefordshire), was the most prolific historical writer among the authors discussed here.156 He is best known for his book on the Baptists in Wales, the first Welsh denominational history, published in 1778, but he had already written an account of his chapel in Leominster and subsequently composed several other works, including a lengthy unpublished ‘Ecclesiastical History of Wales’ (1779) in which ‘the Welsh Protestant Church theory reaches its zenith’.157 Over four decades later, in 1820, the Calvinistic Methodist preacher Robert Jones (1745–1829) of Rhos-­lan (Caernarfonshire) published a history of his own denomination, as the Calvinistic Methodist Church of Wales had become after breaking from the Church of England in 1811, that focused on north Wales.158 Two other works were more ambitious in scope. William Richards (1749–1818), a Baptist minister in King’s Lynn (Norfolk) and political radical sympathetic to the American and French revolutions, published essays c.1805–1807 on Druidism and the early history of Christianity in Britain and Wales as well as biographical accounts of Vavasor Powell and other Puritans and Dissenters, which were collected by his biographer John Evans.159 Nor did these writings reflect the full range of Richards’s historical interests: his most substantial work was a history of his adopted town of King’s Lynn from the Romans down to his own day that attests to his extensive knowledge of English history.160 David Peter (1765–1837), an Independent denominational minister in Carmarthen and senior tutor of the town’s non-­ Presbyterian Academy, also took a long view, extending from the pre-­Christian origins of the Welsh to the early nineteenth century, in his Hanes Crefydd yng Nghymru (‘History of Religion in Wales’; 1816)—the most substantial attempt since the Middle Ages to narrate the entire chronological span of Welsh history.161 Two other works not explicitly framed as religious histories also offered a Dissenting view of the past. One, published in 1779, is an account by the Independent minister Edmund Jones (1702–93) of his home parish of Aberystruth, in north-­west Monmouthshire, often regarded as an early example of local history.162 Infused with its author’s biblically grounded beliefs, this reads

156 Tanya Louise Jenkins, ‘The Life, Work and Contribution’; D.  Densil Morgan, ‘Athrawiaeth Hanes Joshua Thomas’; Hywel M. Davies, Transatlantic Brethren, 137–43. 157  Joshua Thomas, Hanes y Bedyddwyr; Tanya Louise Jenkins, ‘The Life, Work and Contribution’, 2: 224–43, 301–38, quotation at 304. 158  Robert Jones, Drych yr Amseroedd, ed. Ashton. Discussion in J. E. Caerwyn Williams, ‘Robert Jones, Rhos-­lan’; J. E. Caerwyn Williams, ‘Ychwaneg am Robert Jones, Rhos-­lan’; Dafydd Glyn Jones, Agoriad yr Oes, 10–43; White, ‘A Tale of Two Mirrors’, esp. 86–8; Alter, ‘Cof Rhanbarthol’. 159 William Richards, The Welsh Nonconformists’ Memorial; John Evans, Memoirs. See further R. T. Jenkins, ‘William Richards’; The Writings of the Radical Welsh Baptist Minister William Richards, ed. Oddy, which lists the original publications of the essays at 413–14, 416. 160  William Richards, The History of Lynn. 161 Peter, Hanes Crefydd. For Peter see H. P. Roberts, ‘Nonconformist Academies’, 25–9. 162 Edmund Jones, A Geographical, Historical, and Religious Account; discussion in Coward, ‘Maintaining the “Ancient British Opinions of Spirits?” ’.

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234  WRITING WELSH HISTORY like a topographical sermon whose text is the parish’s mountainous landscape, presented as testimony to God’s creation and providential power as well as an arena for supernatural apparitions and, in the last third of the work, shining male and female examples of Puritan and Dissenting piety, including the author’s parents.163 The first Welsh-­language history of Great Britain (1810), by the Baptist minister and erstwhile shoemaker Titus Lewis (1773–1811), also offered a strongly Nonconformist view of the past, with its praise of Wyclif, celebration of the Reformation, and increasing emphasis on Puritanism and Dissent in England and Wales, underlined by the inclusion of a Welsh translation of the 1689 Toleration Act, which Lewis, echoing a comparison made when it was passed, termed the Nonconformists’ Magna Carta.164 All these authors believed that the Nonconformist Wales of their own day surpassed the whole of Welsh history that had gone before. For Joshua Thomas, ‘the condition of the Welsh was never as good as it has been since 1700’.165 Robert Jones of Rhos-­lan went even further and redefined Welsh exceptionalism in spiritual terms: ‘It can be said of the nation of the Welsh these days, that they have been lifted up to the heavens in privileges, more than any other inhabitants of the earth.’166 Like earlier ecclesiastical historians, in Wales and elsewhere, they believed that writing history revealed God’s providential presence in the world and was essential reading for Christians. Robert Jones of Rhos-­lan vigorously defended the value of ecclesiastical history in general and his own account of the Methodists in particular: was it right, he asked, for ‘the monoglot Welsh to be shut in darkness and ignorance about the wonderful things that the Lord did in their midst?’167 Small wonder, then, that Welsh Nonconformist historians highlighted the blessings of the present by setting them against the darker backdrop of the past. One common feature, shared with English Nonconformist historians who influenced and informed their Welsh counterparts, was the portrayal of the Nonconformists of Wales as the true heirs of the Protestantism established by the Tudor Reformation and especially of developments from the seventeenth century onwards.168 Most authors also highlighted a specifically Welsh aspect of this change by charting the history of Welsh translations of the Bible from the time of Elizabeth I onwards, a task facilitated by the Baptist schoolteacher Thomas

163 Edmund Jones, A Geographical, Historical, and Religious Account, 32 (quotation), 112–60 (‘Memoirs of some Religious Persons of Note’, comprising 17 men and 14 women). 164 Titus Lewis, Hanes Wladol; translation of Toleration Act at 508–17. Cf. Seed, Dissenting Histories, 5. Discussion in Dafydd Glyn Jones, Agoriad yr Oes, 188–92. 165  Joshua Thomas, Hanes y Bedydddwyr, xiii (and see 57, 60). Similar thinking in Thomas’s manuscript ‘Ecclesiastical History of Wales’: Tanya Louise Jenkins, ‘Life, Work and Contribution’, 2: 307–8. See also Peter, Hanes Crefydd, 664. 166  Robert Jones, Drych yr Amseroedd, 106. 167  Robert Jones, Drych yr Amseroedd, xxxi–xxxiii, quotation at xxxiii. Cf. Peter, Hanes Crefydd, ‘Rhagymadrodd’. 168  Cf. Wykes, ‘To Revive the Memory’; Keeble, ‘The Nonconformist Narrative’.

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CIVILIZATION, LIBERTY, AND DISSENT, 1770–1820  235 Llewelyn (c.1720–1783) who had published a book on the subject in 1768 as part of a campaign to secure the printing of more Welsh-­language Bibles, which Llewelyn insisted was essential to the salvation of the Welsh as ‘a nation of Protestants’.169 The works considered here thus evoked a heroic heritage peopled by Puritans, Dissenters, and Methodists who had endured persecution, including the Puritan ministers ejected from parish churches following the Act of Uniformity (1662) and, in Robert Jones’s work, Methodists who had suffered violence and discrimination.170 Accordingly considerable efforts were made to commemorate the lives of individual Puritans and Dissenters, ‘[w]hose names ought to be rescued from Oblivion, and held dear by their pious countrymen of the present generation’.171 In addition, the Methodist revival from the 1730s onwards was identified as a crucial turning-­point by both Robert Jones of Rhos-­lan and earlier Nonconformist historians.172 Titus Lewis observed that the Methodists had helped ‘not only to raise a new sect in Wales, but to revive the old sects that were there already’, so that ‘the reform through the Methodists was like the breaking of dawn, and rising of the sun, for every Calvinistic sect, throughout Wales and England’.173 A further theme was the global reach of Welsh Dissent and Nonconformity, as Joshua Thomas traced the Welsh origins of Baptist churches in north America and several writers celebrated Welsh participation in missions overseas.174 Their focus on modern developments set Nonconformist histories apart from other Welsh history writing of this period. In particular, this entailed a democratization of the subject of historical writing, as kings, princes, Druids, and poets of the ancient and medieval past yielded pride of place to the ordinary men and women, mainly from farming and craftworking backgrounds, who represented a new kind of Welsh people defined by adherence to scripturally based Christianity. Thus almost 80 per cent of Joshua Thomas’s work on the Welsh Baptists traced the histories of thirty-­three Baptist churches, commemorating their ministers and other eminent members, and Robert Jones’s account of Methodism in north Wales likewise focused on the local and particular.175 New subject matter in turn required new methods and sources: church books recording the members and 169 Joshua Thomas, Hanes y Bedyddwyr, xxviii–xxxiii, 10–18; Edmund Jones, A Geographical, Historical, and Religious Account, 92; Titus Lewis, Hanes Wladol, 355–6; Peter, Hanes Crefydd, 455–6, 596; Robert Jones, Drych yr Amseroedd, 16–21; Llewelyn, An Historical Account, quotation at 50. Llewelyn was commemorated in William Richards, The Welsh Nonconformists’ Memorial, 278–86. 170  Joshua Thomas, Hanes y Bedydddwyr, 35–43; Peter, Hanes Crefydd, 552–71; Titus Lewis, Hanes Wladol, 454–68; Robert Jones, Drych yr Amseroedd, passim. 171  William Richards, The Welsh Nonconformists’ Memorial, [133]. The importance of com­mem­ora­ tion is also highlighted in Titus Lewis, Hanes Wladol, 456, 468; Robert Jones, Drych yr Amseroedd, 107. 172  Robert Jones, Drych yr Amseroedd, xxxiii, 30. 173  Titus Lewis, Hanes Wladol, 576–7. See also Joshua Thomas, Hanes y Bedyddwyr, 51–4; Edmund Jones, A Geographical, Historical, and Religious Account, 103. 174  Joshua Thomas, Hanes y Bedyddwyr, 346–9, 371–4; Peter, Hanes Crefydd, 681–2; Robert Jones, Drych yr Amseroedd, 120–2. Cf. Titus Lewis, Hanes Wladol, 622–4. 175  Joshua Thomas, Hanes Bedyddwyr, 66–467; Tanya Louise Jenkins, ‘Life, Work and Contribution’, 2: 265–8.

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236  WRITING WELSH HISTORY activities of individual congregations, personal correspondence, and, crucially, the authors’ recollections and oral testimony supplied by others.176 These sources were supplemented by standard early modern works on the ecclesiastical history of Britain by Ussher, Stillingfleet, Burnet, and others as well as by more recent works on Puritanism and Dissent, notably Edmund Calamy’s detailed history (1713–27) of the over 2,000 ministers in England and Wales ejected after the Restoration and the abridged editions of it by Samuel Palmer (1775–8 and 1802).177 Joshua Thomas also drew extensively on Morgan Edwards’s account of the Baptists in America, which included much information on churches established by migrants from Wales, especially in the Welsh Tract in Pennsylvania, and whose geographically structured account may have been an influential model.178 Welsh Nonconformist historians differed, however, in the extent to which they linked Dissent and Nonconformity to the pre-­ Reformation era of Welsh Christianity and to the history of Wales more generally. Like Daniel Neal in his highly influential History of the Puritans (1732–8), Edmund Jones and Robert Jones of Rhos-­lan focus almost exclusively on the period from the Reformation onwards, although the former occasionally takes his readers back to the ancient Britons and the Middle Ages, for instance complaining that the Welsh were foolish to follow Owain Glyndŵr and try to throw off the yoke of the English before they had repented of the sins in which they had persisted since ‘the time of the faithful Gildas’.179 Titus Lewis was readier to invoke staple themes in Welsh his­ tori­og­raphy in support of a Nonconformist interpretation of the past, but only to a limited extent, as his history of Great Britain was heavily Anglocentric and inflected by English Whig historiography in its privileging of political and religious progress since the seventeenth century. His book opens with lists of rulers of the Britons, Welsh, and English from Brutus to George III and the subsequent preface presents the history of the Welsh from Brutus to Llywelyn ap Gruffudd as a prelude to the main action focused on the kingdom of England from the time of

176 E.g. Tanya Louise Jenkins, ‘Life, Work and Contribution’, 2: 268–84; Edmund Jones, A Geographical, Historical, and Religious Account, 97, 117–18, 127; Peter, Hanes Crefydd, 539, 541; Robert Jones, Drych yr Amseroedd, xxxiv, 56, 85. 177  For Calamy see Wykes, ‘To Revive the Memory’; Seed, Dissenting Histories, ch. 1. References to Calamy and Palmer: Joshua Thomas, Hanes y Bedyddwyr, 40; Edmund Jones, A Geographical, Historical, and Religious Account, 93; Titus Lewis, Hanes Wladol, 456; William Richards, The Welsh Nonconformists’ Memorial, 150, 242, 263. Peter, Hanes Crefydd, relies heavily on Gilbert Burnet’s History of the Reformation (1679–1714) and Neal’s History of the Puritans for the sixteenth century, and on the latter and Palmer for the seventeenth. 178  Morgan Edwards, Materials towards a History of the American Baptists, in XII Volumes, esp. 17–24. (The only other volume published in the author’s lifetime was Morgan Edwards, Materials towards a History of the Baptists in Jersey.) On Edwards and his connections with Thomas see Hywel  M.  Davies, Transatlantic Brethren, 94–5, 137–60; Tanya Louise Jenkins, ‘Life, Work and Contribution’, 2: 282–3. 179  Edmund Jones, A Geographical, Historical, and Religious Account, 9–10, 20, 59–60, 66, 85, 86 (quotation), 87–91. The novelty of Robert Jones’s focus on the period after c.1700 is emphasized by Dafydd Glyn Jones, Agoriad yr Oes, 17–18. For Neal see Seed, Dissenting Histories, ch. 2.

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CIVILIZATION, LIBERTY, AND DISSENT, 1770–1820  237 the Anglo-­Saxon heptarchy.180 Episodes of medieval Welsh history thus make only brief appearances to the extent that they impinged on the English crown, and the story of Prince Madog’s discovery of America is confined to a lengthy footnote.181 In another telling indication of priorities, Owain Glyndŵr receives fairly neutral attention and pales in significance to his close contemporary John Wyclif, who made ‘the first attempt in England at reformation from the errors of popery’—a common view among Nonconformist historians.182 Nor did Lewis, in contrast to Joshua Thomas, David Peter, and William Richards, find space for the Lollard Walter Brut, ‘the first Welshman who attempted publicly to reform his compatriots from the darkness of popery’, although neither they nor later Welsh historians tried to make Brut a potent symbol of national identity inextricably linked to proto-­Protestant convictions comparable to the portrait of John Hus drawn by some of their Czech counterparts.183 On the other hand, Joshua Thomas, David Peter, and, to a lesser extent, William Richards used their familiarity with a wide range of antiquarian and historical sources to place the rise of Nonconformity in the context of a providential reading of the Welsh past culminating in their own day. In this respect, they followed in the footsteps of Charles Edwards, Theophilus Evans, and other Protestant his­ tor­ians of Wales, just as Calamy belonged to a tradition of English Protestant hagiography exemplified by Foxe’s Acts and Monuments.184 Thus Joshua Thomas prefaced his book on the Welsh Baptists with an account of the origins and early history of the Welsh followed by a dialogue between a child and his father on the history of Christianity in Britain.185 This long-­term perspective served to persuade his readers that theirs was the best time to be Welsh, as he urged them to ‘wonder at the great goodness of God to our nation over so many ages, since the time of the Apostles; and especially in this age, above all other previous ages’.186 Following a line of thinking going back to Gildas and thence to the Old Testament, Thomas was ‘confident that neither the nation nor the [Welsh] language will be destroyed unless they reject true religion’.187 Protestant conviction was in­ex­tric­ably linked to Welsh patriotism rooted in long-­established understandings of the past. Indeed, such was Thomas’s belief in the latter that he urged ‘some obliging, 180  Titus Lewis, Hanes Wladol, x–xvi, 17–26. 181 Titus Lewis, Hanes Wladol, 114–15, 144–5, 183–4. Other references to Madog and ‘Welsh Indians’ in Joshua Thomas, Hanes y Bedyddwyr, xvii–xviii; Peter, Hanes Crefydd, 295–6, 661. 182  Titus Lewis, Hanes Wladol, 130–1. Wyclif also noticed in Joshua Thomas, Hanes y Bedyddwyr, 9–10; Peter, Hanes Crefydd, 347–53; Robert Jones, Drych yr Amseroedd, xxxii. Cf. Aston, ‘John Wycliffe’s Reformation Reputation’, esp. 24–30. 183 Joshua Thomas, Hanes y Bedyddwyr, 461–2, quotation at 461; Peter, Hanes Crefydd, 353–6; William Richards, Welsh Nonconformists’ Memorial, 434–43. Cf. Baár, Historians and Nationalism, 237–8. 184  Cf. Wykes, ‘To Revive the Memory’, 17; Seed, Dissenting Histories, 19. 185  Joshua Thomas, Hanes y Bedyddwyr, vii–xxxvi, 1–65. 186  Joshua Thomas, Hanes y Bedyddwyr, 65. Cf. Peter, Hanes Crefydd, 664; Robert Jones, Drych yr Amseroedd, 106. 187  Joshua Thomas, Hanes y Bedyddwyr, xix.

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238  WRITING WELSH HISTORY learned, and intelligent Welshman . . . to write . . . a History of our nation, in Welsh’, priced at about 2s. 6d. Such a book would sell well and ‘be an honour to the country’.188 David Peter proceeded from similar assumptions in the fullest attempt from this period to integrate religious history with Welsh history. Divided into a series of chapters each devoted to a single century, almost half the book covered the period from the alleged biblical origins of the Welsh as descendants of Gomer to the death of Llywelyn in 1282, in an eclectic though conventionally patriotic and anti-­Catholic account heavily indebted to Iolo Morganwg and William Owen Pughe that also drew on standard works of English ecclesiastical history. (Iolo, though, disparaged both the book and its ‘rank Calvinist’ author.)189 William Richards of Lynn likewise enthusiastically embraced Iolo’s bardism in his account of the Druids and their role in the Britons’ conversion to Christianity, and proposed that Pelagianism was ‘only Christianity tinctured, or adulterated with Druidism’, constituting the ‘old religion’ of the Welsh that had survived underground to his own day, ‘chiefly among the Bards or Druids of Siluria’ (south Wales).190 The attention given to the pre-­modern past by several Nonconformist his­tor­ ians is but one instance of the connections between the different kinds of Welsh history writing considered in this chapter. It also testifies to the appeal of Iolo Morganwg’s nativist reconceptualization of the origins of the Welsh, anchored in seemingly authentic manuscript sources disseminated through The Myvyrian Archaiology, the first substantial printed collection of medieval Welsh texts. A reading of Welsh history since the seventeenth century as a tale of providential salvation could be compatible, then, with adherence to a new iteration of the privileging of the Welsh as an ancient people. Both interpretations ran counter to the sceptical temper of philosophical history, revealing instead a preference for tropes long seen as fundamental to understanding the Welsh and their past. As we shall see in the next two chapters, Iolo remained a potent presence in Welsh historical writing, eliciting both ardent enthusiasm and growing scepticism, down to the late nineteenth century.

188  Joshua Thomas, Hanes y Bedyddwyr, xxviii. 189  The Correspondence of Iolo Morganwg, ed. Jenkins et al., 3: 246, 287 (quotation). 190 William Richards, The Welsh Nonconformists’ Memorial, 70, 84, quotations at 85, 124–5. See also William Richards, History of Lynn, 1: 216–20.

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10 Cultural Revival and Romantic History The World of Thomas Price (Carnhuanawc), 1820–48

In October 1840 the Revd Thomas Price (1787–1848), better known by his bardic name ‘Carnhuanawc’ (literally, ‘the sunny cairn or mound’),1 drew the attention of a rapt audience of Welsh cultural patriots to ‘the extraordinary destiny of our race and language, and the prominent situation we occupy among the nations of Europe’. Whereas the Greek and Latin languages had experienced decline and fall, ‘the antient British language’ looked set to flourish ‘for ages yet to come’, since, having already enjoyed two Augustan ages in the sixth and twelfth centuries, ‘there is a spirit awakening which shows that something extraordinary is about to take place’, heralded by the recent publication of various Welsh texts.2 This exceptionalist narrative of national revival framed against the backdrop of an ancient past articulated an essentially Romantic understanding of the nation for which there were many European counterparts in the first half of the nineteenth cen­tury.3 In Wales, that understanding was shaped and promoted above all by a network of ‘reactionary patriots’ comprising mainly Anglican clergy and gentry,4 who established new kinds of institutions exemplified by the body under whose auspices Price delivered his address, namely an eisteddfod held by the Cymreigyddion Society of Abergavenny, a small market town in Monmouthshire, and one of numerous societies established in this period with the aim of fostering Welsh culture. Two years later Price completed the most ambitious history of Wales attempted hitherto.5 Written in Welsh and published between 1836 and 1842 by a printer in the small town of Crickhowell (Breconshire), this comprised nearly 800 pages that took its readers from the origins of the Welsh to the Edwardian conquest and thence briefly to the reign of Queen Victoria. While this traditional chronological emphasis no doubt reflected Price’s own convictions, it presumably also reflected the assumptions of both author and publisher about what would make the History a commercially viable enterprise capable of attracting a wide readership. Rather 1  The name of a farm near Crickhowell where he had resided: J. Rhys, ‘Buchdraeth’, 164; cf. Jane Williams, The Literary Remains, 2: 50–2, 61–2, 83. 2  Monmouthshire Merlin, 10 October 1840. 3  Cf. Thiesse, La création des identités nationales, esp. 11–14, 106–11, 133–58; Leerssen, National Thought, 119–26. 4  Prys Morgan, ‘Early Victorian Wales’, 105. 5 Price, HC.

Writing Welsh History: From the Early Middle Ages to the Twenty-­First Century. Huw Pryce, Oxford University Press. © Huw Pryce 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198746034.003.0011

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240  WRITING WELSH HISTORY than relying on subscribers, the work was issued from July 1836 onwards in fourteen slim paper-­covered instalments, costing 1s. each, that were sold mainly by itinerant booksellers in Wales and advertised as being available from booksellers across the principality and in London and other cities in England.6 The publication of the work was facilitated, then, by developments in the Welsh book trade intended to serve the needs of the growing numbers of readers of Welsh.7 Those developments took place against a backdrop of continuing economic and demographic growth sustained by industry and trade, as the population of Wales reached a million for the first time by 1841, and more than doubled between 1821 and 1851 in the two south-­eastern counties of Glamorgan and Monmouth where industrial expansion far outpaced that elsewhere in the principality.8 The period also witnessed rural and urban protest driven by economic and political grievances which in turn left their mark on history writing, notably the 1831 Merthyr rising, the Chartist march on Newport in 1839, and the Rebecca movement’s attacks on toll gates.9 However, the composition of Price’s History also responded to Welsh readers’ interest in history, attested by the continuing popularity of Theophilus Evans’s Drych y Prif Oesoedd (‘Mirror of the Primitive Ages’), reissued nine times between 1794 and 1840,10 as well as shorter historical works in Welsh published earlier in the nineteenth century. The scale and nature of the response show, though, that Price sought to provide his readers with an authoritative account, informed by his own research, that would supersede previous Welsh-­ language histories of Wales. His book also stood comparison with the far more numerous English-­language histories of Wales that had appeared since the late sixteenth century; indeed, both its length and its approach made it the most significant new account of Welsh history to appear between the works of Warrington (1786) and Gweirydd ap Rhys (1872–4). The following discussion explores what the multiple worlds inhabited by Thomas Price reveal about the variety of Welsh history writing, in both Welsh and English, between c.1820 and his death in 1848. I assess, first, the contexts in which this writing was produced; second, the work of authors other than Price in the 1820s and 1830s; and, third, the significance of Price’s treatment of the history of Wales.

Contexts Thomas Price’s work highlights the importance of two factors that helped to encourage writing about the Welsh past: developments in print culture and the 6 Thomas Price, Hanes Cymru, Rhif 1; Thomas Price, Hanes Cymru, Rhif 2; Jane Williams, The Literary Remains, 2: 293. 7  See Chapter 9, and Philip Henry Jones, ‘Printing and Publishing’. 8  John Williams, Digest of Welsh Historical Statistics, 1: 7, 17, 20; Gareth Elwyn Jones, Modern Wales, 151–2, 161–73. 9  Gareth Elwyn Jones, Modern Wales, 225–37. 10  DPO (1740), [xxxvi].

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THE WORLD OF THOMAS PRICE ( CARNHUANAWC ) , 1820–48  241 establishment of new institutions dedicated to the preservation and study of the Welsh language and its literature. As we shall see, Price was not the first to publish a book on Welsh history in this period thanks to the initiative and support of printers in Wales. No less significant was the appearance of his earliest essays in the periodical Seren Gomer (‘The Star of Gomer’), a magazine established in Swansea in 1818 by the Baptist minister Joseph Harris (‘Gomer’; 1773–1825). An undenominational publication intended to foster the Welsh language that ‘became a forum for virtually all the leading Welsh writers and scholars of the day’, Seren Gomer—published monthly from 1820 and selling 1,500–2,000 copies of each issue—offered its readers a varied diet, including current affairs, religion, poetry, and history.11 Among the historical topics featured were hardy perennials such as the ‘Treason of the Long Knives’, St David, Prince Madog and the Welsh ‘Indians’, and Owain Glyndŵr, as well as a pedigree tracing George III’s descent from ‘Cadwaladr, last king of the Britons’ via the medieval Welsh kings and princes.12 Price also helped to found The Cambrian Quarterly Magazine and Celtic Repertory (1829–33), which, like the earlier Cambro-­Briton (1819–22), gave prominent attention to antiquarian and historical topics.13 In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries London had provided the  main centre for Welsh cultural endeavour, mainly thanks to the efforts of the Gwyneddigion Society, whose support for The Cambro-­Briton was gratefully acknowledged by its founding editor, the lawyer-­ turned-­ journalist John Humffreys Parry (1786–1825).14 However, Parry represents the end of this London-­Welsh phase as the focus of such activity moved to Wales with the foundation of Cambrian societies for the four ‘provinces’—corresponding to major medieval territorial divisions—of Dyfed (1818), Gwynedd (1819), Powys (1819), and Gwent (1821). That the revived Cymmrodorion Society in London (1820), also named the Metropolitan Cambrian Institution, was envisaged as providing central co-­ordination serves to underline the geographical shift that had occurred. There rapidly followed the establishment of similar societies, numbering over 100 by the 1820s, for individual Welsh towns, both old boroughs and new industrial communities, the most prominent being the Cymreigyddion Society of Abergavenny (1833–54).15 The societies and their associated eisteddfodau provided the first modern institutional framework in Wales dedicated to the cultivation of Welsh

11  [Thomas Price] Carnhuanawc, ‘Yr Iaith Geltaeg’; [Thomas Price] Carnhuanawc, ‘Hiliogaeth Gomer’; [Thomas Price] Carnhuanawc, ‘Cymry Llydaw’; Glanmor Williams, ‘Gomer’; Miskell, ‘Intelligent Town’, 52–3. Quotation: Huw Walters, ‘The Periodical Press’, 199. 12  Seren Gomer, 2 (1819), 290–4; 3 (1820), 171–2; 5 (1822), 139–43; 6 (1823), 336–40, 369–70; 19 (1836), 129–33; 20 (1837), 65–8, 353–6. 13  Jane Williams, The Literary Remains, 2: 97; Huw Walters, ‘The Periodical Press’, 203. 14  John H. Parry, ‘Introductory Address’, 1, n.*. 15  R. T. Jenkins and Helen M. Ramage, A History, 138–73; Mair Elvet Thomas, Afiaith yng Ngwent; Sian Rhiannon Williams, Oes y Byd i’r Iaith Gymraeg, 34–8; Löffler, ‘A Century of Change’, 237–40; Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Welsh Scholarship at Merthyr Tydfil’, 54. For an early account of the societies and their eisteddfodau see Cathrall, The History of North Wales, 1: 289–305.

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242  WRITING WELSH HISTORY culture, including writing about the Welsh past, and their activities were publicized in Seren Gomer and other periodicals as well as in the newspaper press, media which, as elsewhere in Britain, became increasingly important outlets for the publication of history in the nineteenth century.16 While the impetus for the formation of the provincial societies came from a group of scholarly, antiquarian-­ minded, and politically conservative Anglican clergy, who sought episcopal, aristocratic, and gentry patronage for their initiatives, the societies’ eisteddfodau were open to competitors of varying social standing and religious persuasions and also provided new opportunities for women to pursue their interests in Welsh culture and history. An influential pattern for the other provincial societies was set by the Cambrian Society for Dyfed established in October 1818 with the blessing of Thomas Burgess, the High Church bishop of St Davids (1803–25) ‘for the Preservation of the remains of Ancient British Literature, Poetical, Historical, Antiquarian, Sacred, and Moral; and for the Encouragement of the National Music’.17 Among its aims was the publication of ‘collections for a new history of Wales’ by Iolo Morganwg, who the following year staged a performance of his bardic vision of the Welsh past in Carmarthen by holding a Gorsedd at the society’s first eisteddfod, to the discomfiture of Burgess, the event’s patron, and despite the society’s recent resolution that it had ‘nothing in common with the Ancient Bardic prin­ ciples, or institutions’ beyond ‘promoting the preservation of the remains of the Ancient Bards’ and awarding prizes for Welsh poetry and ‘the study of the Welsh Language’.18 Iolo’s Unitarianism and political radicalism ran counter to the Cambrian societies’ strongly Anglican and loyalist character as institutions that supported the state’s resolute commitment to upholding the established order in the era after the Napoleonic Wars. Thus the Dyfed society was ‘a Church of England Society’ since it had been ‘instituted for the investigation of our National Antiquities, of which, one of the earliest and most important branches is, the origin of the National, i.e. the Episcopal Church founded by our British and Saxon Princes, and by the common Law of the land’—a conviction in line with Burgess’s recent reiteration, predicated on the High Church belief in the British churches’ apostolic continuity and prompted by the movement for Catholic Emancipation, of the theory that the Church of England established at the Reformation had in

16  Glanmor Williams, ‘Gomer’, 127–8. Cf. Howsam, ‘Mediated Histories’, 802–15. 17  NLW MS 11116E, fol. 2r; similar aims are given for the Powys and Gwent societies at fols. 17r, 27r. See also R. T. Jenkins and Helen M. Ramage, A History, 142–3; D. T. W. Price, Yr Esgob Burgess, 45–9; Nockles, The Oxford Movement, 25–6, 149, 170. The Cambrian societies may also be viewed as part of wider efforts, in which High Churchmen were closely involved, to renew and establish Church societies in this period: Andrews, ‘High Church Anglicanism’, 144–5. 18  NLW MS 11116E, fols. 2v, 14v; Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘The Unitarian Firebrand’. See also Löffler, The Literary and Historical Legacy, 46–7, 81.

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THE WORLD OF THOMAS PRICE ( CARNHUANAWC ) , 1820–48  243 fact restored an ancient, native, and fundamentally Protestant British Christianity.19 When applied to the Anglican Church, at least, the adjective ‘national’ here encompassed England as well as Wales, and is consistent with the society’s contributionist argument that ‘the Ancient Literature of Britain’ was ‘of general interest to all the inhabitants of Britain’.20 Indeed, one resolution explicitly stated that linguistic and religious conservation served a politically conservative end: That the primitive Language, Religion, and Church of Britain, are at this day subsisting in greater purity than the primitive Language, Religion, or Church of any other country in Europe; and that it is our duty to maintain these national privileges with all the zeal and fidelity to which they are entitled; especially at a period, when it requires all the aid and vigilance of Government, and Local Magistracy, to counteract the extensive combination of Anarchy and Irreligion.21

Likewise meetings of the Abergavenny Cymreigyddion Society were ‘to avoid all subjects that were discourteous, disloyal to the government, or would lead to religious, political, or quarrelsome arguments’.22 At least in part, then, the establishment of the Cambrian societies reflected anxieties about popular protests and movements for parliamentary reform; indeed, as we shall see, Thomas Price implied that the cultural activities they fostered supplied an antidote to political subversion.23

Welsh History Writing, c.1820–c.1840 Printed accounts of the history of Wales produced in the 1820s and 1830s varied both in their content and in the manner of their publication. Histories of England continued to provide limited coverage. For example, Sir James Mackintosh supplied a summary of events in Wales since the late ninth century by way of introduction to his account of the Edwardian conquest, which he maintained had extinguished Welsh nationality; he also observed that the history of the Welsh ‘has not yet been extricated from fable’ and that the ‘Chronicle of Caradoc of Llanarvon [sic]’ translated in David Powel’s Historie of Cambria had, unlike ‘the Saxon Chronicle and Irish Annals’, lacked ‘industrious and critical editors’.24 Editorial work was undertaken, however, by the British government’s Record Commission, which resulted in the publication of sources relating to Welsh 19 Burgess, Tracts; Nockles, The Oxford Movement, 166–7; Kidd, British Identities, 121; Yates, ‘Anglican Attitudes to Roman Catholicism’. 20  NLW MS 11116E, fol. 14v. 21  NLW MS 11116E, fol. 14v. 22  Mair Elvet Thomas, Afiaith yng Ngwent, 4. 23  Cf. Nockles, The Oxford Movement, 44–53, 57–63; David J. V. Jones, Before Rebecca. 24 Mackintosh, The History of England, 1: 243­–51, quotations at 243, 245, n.* (first edition 1830).

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244  WRITING WELSH HISTORY history, including the revised edition of Dugdale’s Monasticon Anglicanum (1817–30), the Record of Caernarvon (1838), and Ancient Laws and Institutes of Wales (1841), an edition of the medieval Welsh lawbooks by Aneurin Owen, son of William Owen Pughe.25 Historical works in Welsh were generally published as commercial ventures, without subscriptions. Two notable examples appeared in 1822 from the press of John Jones of Trefriw and Llanrwst, who had brought out Robert Jones’s account of Methodism two years earlier.26 One was a reissue of Theophilus Evans’s Drych y Prif Oesoedd (‘Mirror of the Primitive Ages’), the other a book completed in 1804 by the quarry-­manager and antiquary William Williams (1738–1817) of Llandygái that was explicitly described as a continuation of Evans, a notion reflected in its title: Prydnawngwaith y Cymry (‘The Noonday of the Welsh’).27 Priced 2s. 6d., Williams’s work drew on previous accounts of the medieval Welsh kings and princes by Wynne and Warrington as well as quite possibly a text of Brut y Tywysogyon (‘The Chronicle of the Princes’) in order to provide ‘the common people of Wales’ with a concise history of their nation in Welsh, thereby fulfilling a need identified by the Baptist historian Joshua Thomas over four decades earlier.28 The work’s coverage followed the conventional parameters established by earlier English-­language histories of Wales, being mainly devoted to the period down to the Edwardian conquest with only a brief narrative of subsequent events including the union with England, which, like Theophilus Evans, Williams welcomed while simultaneously indulging in anti-­English rhetoric.29 Another author who catered for the popular interest in the history of Wales was William Owen (Sefnyn; 1785–1864), a sawyer who had served as a marine in the Napoleonic Wars and was, unusually among Welsh writers of this period, a Roman Catholic, whose numerous and highly uncritical historical works, mostly in Welsh, included a prize-­winning essay on the massacre of the Welsh bards submitted to the Caernarfon eisteddfod in 1824 and a pamphlet on Owain Glyndŵr.30 The first English translation of Theophilus Evans’s ‘Mirror’ was published in Pennsylvania in 1834 with a preface commending the work’s appeal to descendants of the Welsh who had fled oppression in Britain for the liberty of the United

25  Pryce, ‘Medieval Welsh History in the Victorian Age’, 13–14. 26  Gerald Morgan, Y Dyn a Wnaeth Argraff, 12–13. 27  William Williams, Prydnawngwaith y Cymry, ed. Jones. Further editions of Evans’s work were published in Merthyr Tydfil in 1828, 1833, and 1840: DPO (1740), [xxxvi]. 28  William Williams, Prydnawngwaith y Cymry, ed. Jones, 2–3, 13 (quotation); Gerald Morgan, Y Dyn a Wnaeth Argraff, 18. Cf. Joshua Thomas, Hanes y Bedyddwyr, xxviii. 29  Dafydd Glyn Jones, Un o Wŷr y Medra, 294–319. 30 Emyr Gwynne Jones, ‘Owen, William’; J.  E.  Lloyd, Owen Glendower, 157–8; William Owen, ‘Hanes Cyflafan neu Ddinystr y Beirdd’; William Owen, Hanes Owain Glandwr. The English summary of William Owen, Drych Crefyddol, [v], makes its Roman Catholic standpoint clear: ‘a brief History of the Reformation, and an Account of many Britons who suffered Death for their Religion in the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth, King James I. and Charles I. and II’.

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THE WORLD OF THOMAS PRICE ( CARNHUANAWC ) , 1820–48  245 States.31 By contrast, new English-­language writing about the history of Wales continued to be produced largely by and for the lay and clerical gentry and professional classes. One strand was the topographical tradition represented by Thomas Pennant. For example, the artist Hugh Hughes acknowledged that his Beauties of Cambria (1823), a volume comprising sixty engravings, each with a page of facing text, derived much of its historical commentary from Pennant and Thomas Rees, author of a volume on south Wales in John Britton’s series, The Beauties of England and Wales.32 The appeal of the topographical is evident in other kinds of historical writing too. When Richard Llwyd, member of a gentry family in Llannerchfrochwel, Guilsfield (Montgomeryshire), prepared what would be the last new edition of Wynne’s History, posthumously published in 1832, he supplemented it with extensive ‘Topographical Notices’ on each county that occupied over half the volume and significantly extended the book’s geographical and chronological range.33 Llwyd exemplifies a wider desire to build on previous accounts of Welsh history through detailed treatment of particular aspects. He had abandoned plans to write a biography of Owain Glyndŵr after he was beaten to it by the Anglican clergyman Thomas Thomas (1776–1847), rector of Aberporth (Cardiganshire) in 1822.34 Thomas published his Memoirs of Owen Glendower with the support of over 500 subscribers, among them leading lights of the Cambrian societies, including Thomas Price.35 Small wonder, then, that the book exemplified the societies’ combination of cultural patriotism and political conservatism, in which a heroic Glyndŵr is conventionally lauded as part of a glorious past subsequently superseded by an even more glorious future of Welsh assimilation with England. Thomas devoted the greater part of the work to a chronological account of the prince based closely on Pennant, but framed it in the longer arc of Welsh history from the Norman and Edwardian conquests of Wales to the eighteenth century. This enabled him to stress the prince’s role as a fighter for liberty who was the equal of ‘any British king or prince in military fame’ and deserved to be remembered as much as Cromwell or Bonaparte, as well as to defend the value of early Welsh history and literature, including Geoffrey of Monmouth, while nevertheless celebrating Wales’s eventual assimilation with England, after which ‘the ancient Britons . . . have been as memorable for their allegiance, as they had before been tenacious of their rights’.36 This, Thomas held, had been demonstrated in 31  Theophilus Evans, A View of the Primitive Ages, trans. Roberts. Evans’s account of Prince Madog’s alleged discovery of America may help to explain Roberts’s subsequent inquiries about Welsh ‘Indians’: cf. Hunter, Llwybrau Cenhedloedd, 111. 32 H. Hughes, The Beauties of Cambria; Thomas Rees, The Beauties of England and Wales. 33  Richard Llwyd, The History of Wales. See also Cathrall, The History of North Wales. 34  Richard Llwyd, The History of Wales, ‘Advertisement’. 35  Thomas Thomas, Memoirs of Owen Glendower. See further Dafydd Glyn Jones, Agoriad yr Oes, 206–9. 36  Thomas Thomas, Memoirs of Owen Glendower, ii, vi, 174–5, 214–15, quotations at xxii, 214.

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246  WRITING WELSH HISTORY recent decades by Welsh responses to the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars: ‘when politics had rendered all Europe mad with insubordination and levelling principles, Wales still remained firm at her post, and shed its best blood in crushing democracy and subduing tyranny’.37 Similarly he concluded the book with an account of the defeat of the French invasion of Pembrokeshire in 1797 that prompted a resounding declaration of loyalism: May Britain appreciate her own prosperity, and learn wisdom from the fall of other nations! Let civil and religious liberty be her boast; universal justice her pride! And may the Principality of Wales, a district of much turbulence and discord heretofore, now incorporated with England under one august monarch, rapturously say, Jam cuncti Gens una Sumus –––––––– Et simus in ævum! [Now we are all one people –––––––– And may we be for ever!]38

Thomas’s book was in turn a major source for an account of Glyndŵr in The Cambrian Plutarch (1824), a collection of biographical essays by John Humffreys Parry on twenty-­two ‘most eminent Welshmen’ from King Arthur to the recently deceased clergyman, biblical scholar, and antiquary Peter Roberts (1760–1819).39 Parry exemplified the continuing contribution of London-­Welsh literati to writing about the Welsh past. A member of the Gwyneddigion Society, founding editor of the Welsh literary and historical periodical The Cambro-­Briton (1819–22), and one of those who revived the Cymmrodorion Society in 1820, serving as first editor of its Transactions, Parry was appointed editor in 1823 of the Welsh section of an edition of early British historians planned by the government, an appointment abruptly terminated after he was killed in a drunken brawl in Pentonville three years later.40 Like many previous Welsh historians who chose to write about the Welsh past in English, Parry presented his work as an attempt to remedy ignorance about the oldest of the peoples of Britain.41 As with earlier collections of biographies, The Cambrian Plutarch offered a thematically and chronologically more diverse picture than that of standard narratives focused on kings and princes down to the Edwardian conquest: poets, churchmen, and scholars far outnumbered the book’s five medieval rulers, and half of the individuals had lived 37  Thomas Thomas, Memoirs of Owen Glendower, 215; see also xxii, 236–8; ‘democracy’ referred to the French Revolution. 38  Thomas Thomas, Memoirs of Owen Glendower, 240. 39 John H. Parry, The Cambrian Plutarch, 230, n.*. 40  J. E. Lloyd, revd. Jones, ‘Parry, John Humffreys’; Glenda Carr, William Owen Pughe, 203–4, 210–11. 41 John H. Parry, The Cambrian Plutarch, iii–v.

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THE WORLD OF THOMAS PRICE ( CARNHUANAWC ) , 1820–48  247 in the centuries after 1282. Unsurprisingly, all the biographies depicted their subjects in a favourable light: Parry took great trouble, for example, to defend Glyndŵr from charges of treason against the crown.42 Parry’s celebration of the achievements of the Welsh stood in stark contrast to the iconoclastic take on their history published by his older London-­Welsh contemporary John Jones (1772–1837).43 Like The Cambrian Plutarch, Jones’s History of Wales (1824) was brought out, without subscriptions, by a London publisher.44 Its full title expresses the breadth of the author’s ambition: The History of Wales, Descriptive of the Government, Wars, Manners, Religion, Laws, Druids, Bards, Pedigrees, and Language of the Ancient Britons and Modern Welsh, and of the Remaining Antiquities of the Principality. In his preface Jones declares his determination to supersede the deficient efforts of previous writers on the subject as well as ‘to reject idle tradition, and to sacrifice even his national pride to the cause of truth’.45 His critical dismissal of consoling visions of past grandeur, while an­tici­pat­ing trends that gathered momentum from the mid-­nineteenth century, was at odds with the predominantly Romantic sensibility of Welsh history writing of his own time. In part, his ironic and at times sarcastic tone reflected his combative character: Jones had torpedoed his career as a successful barrister by making offensive comments on his fellow lawyers and been expelled from the Gwyneddigion Society after publishing a highly unflattering portrait of Owen Jones (Owain Myfyr), patron of the Myvyrian Archaiology.46 Nevertheless, as much as he may have delighted, say, in subverting Iolo Morganwg’s grandiose claims for the superiority of south Wales as the home of a continuous bardic trad­ ition deriving from the Druids by attributing its superiority in poetry to the beneficent influence of the Normans (to whom the Welsh, in his view, were indebted for much else besides),47 such interpretations cannot be explained merely as attempts to puncture some of the cherished tenets of Welsh cultural patriots. They also reflected an adherence to Enlightenment rationality and notions of human progress, an intellectual outlook quite possibly informed by his studies in Germany and Austria towards the end of the eighteenth century, when he was awarded a doctorate in law from the university of Jena.48 This comes across clearly in Jones’s downbeat assessment of the Druids: we may lay it down as certain, that mankind, in the various stages from rudeness to civility, will be found to have the same religious sentiments, the same occupations, and the same customs and manners. The frame of our mental and corporeal faculties will admit of no deviation from this identity . . . To behold an order of 42 John H. Parry, The Cambrian Plutarch, 229–30, 272. 43  Looker, ‘Jones, John’. 44  John Jones, The History of Wales. 45  John Jones, The History of Wales, vii. 46  Looker, ‘Jones, John’; Geraint Phillips, Dyn Heb ei Gyffelyb, 240–2. 47  John Jones, The History of Wales, 220–33; Pryce, ‘The Normans in Welsh History’, 9–10. 48  Looker, ‘Jones, John’; cf. Bÿggé, Travels in the French Republic, trans. John Jones, ‘LL.D.’.

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248  WRITING WELSH HISTORY men, possessed of every science and accomplishment, as the Druids are said to have been, while their compatriots were sunk in the grossest ignorance, is such a phainomenon [sic] as never was seen.49

Similar assumptions inform Jones’s criticisms, here following Gerald of Wales, of the propensity of medieval Welsh rulers for ‘civil dissentions, devastations, and murders’, defects thrown into relief by the peaceful reign of Hywel Dda (Hywel the Good), ‘the only good prince that Wales ever produced’.50 Nevertheless, the law code attributed to Hywel was cited as further evidence of Welsh backwardness, being ‘a very poor production’ whose opening section on the royal court ‘might suit the establishment of a farmer in the present day’.51 Jones was exceptional among the writers of Welsh history in this period in having studied in continental universities. Most works on the Welsh past were homegrown, many being the products of eisteddfod competitions held by regional and local Cambrian societies. These competitions included prizes for essays on a var­ iety of historical topics, mainly staples of ancient British history such as ‘The credibility of the Massacre of the British Nobles at Stonehenge’ and ‘The History of the real Arthur, King of Britain; and on the fabulous Characters of that name’ as well as local history of all periods, including accounts of medieval castles and  churches.52 The submitted compositions exemplified the widely divergent approaches of the time, ranging from the wildly imaginative efforts of William Owen (Sefnyn) to the critical scholarship of the Revd Rice Rees (1804–39), a fellow of Jesus College, Oxford and professor of Welsh at St David’s College, Lampeter. In his Essay on the Welsh Saints Rees sought to write an ecclesiastical history of Wales between c.400 and c.700 ce that was free of ‘fable’ and ‘bardic mythology’, declaring that ‘the business of the antiquary, whose object is the history of his country, is to search after the oldest authorities that can be procured, and afterwards to consider them by themselves, divested of the misconceptions and exaggerations of later ages’.53 This rigorous reappraisal of the testimony of a wide range of Latin and Welsh sources, with a particular focus on dedications, placed the subject on a new footing that in turn served to confirm the Protestant theory of Welsh ecclesiastical history, according to which the Reformation restored to the Welsh their ancestors’ independence from Rome.54 Most eisteddfod competitors were men. A notable exception was the antiquary Angharad Llwyd (1780–1866), daughter of the Revd John Lloyd who had assisted 49  John Jones, The History of Wales, 215. 50  John Jones, The History of Wales, 52, 80. 51  John Jones, The History of Wales, 151. 52  NLW MS 11116E, fols. 17v, 28r, 48r; Mair Elvet Thomas, Afiaith yng Ngwent, 73–84; Prys Morgan, ‘From Long Knives to Blue Books’, 203. 53  Rice Rees, An Essay on the Welsh Saints, quotations at viii, x; Jane Williams, Literary Remains, 2: 194–5. 54  Rice Rees, An Essay on the Welsh Saints, 313–14. For Rees’s significance see John Reuben Davies, ‘The Saints of South Wales’, 362–3.

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THE WORLD OF THOMAS PRICE ( CARNHUANAWC ) , 1820–48  249 Thomas Pennant.55 Although facing disadvantages as a single woman lacking any formal education and financially dependent on her brother, Llwyd was educated at home and inherited her father’s books and manuscripts along with his scholarly bent; she also benefited from her father’s extensive contacts with the gentry of north Wales to gain access to their libraries. Her family and social background thus allowed her to participate in the antiquarian activities and networks associated with the Cambrian societies and eisteddfodau in a way that was highly un­usual among gentry women in her day, the closest parallels being Lady Charlotte Guest (1812–95), translator of the medieval Welsh prose tales (the Mabinogion), and Augusta Hall (1802–96), Lady Llanover, author of a prize-­winning essay on the Welsh language and costume at the Cardiff eisteddfod in 1834 and patron of the Abergavenny Cymreigyddion.56 However, neither of these women could boast Angharad Llwyd’s antiquarian accomplishments. Llwyd’s best-­known work was a prize-­winning history of Anglesey submitted to the Beaumaris eisteddfod of 1832.57 After a geographical introduction and a section on the Druids, this falls into three main parts, each representing different genres of Welsh history writing current at that time: first, a history of the kings and princes of Gwynedd, with especial reference to Anglesey, from the end of the Roman occupation to the conquest of Edward I; second, a detailed topographical account, occupying almost half the entire work, that relates the history of the places covered down to the nineteenth century; third, twenty-­two ‘Biographical Sketches of Eminent Men Born in the Island of Mona’ from the sixteenth century to 1802, including the antiquaries Henry Rowlands and Lewis Morris, the poet Goronwy Owen, and William Jones, a distinguished mathematician and ‘the father of the celebrated oriental and general scholar, Sir William Jones’.58 The work concludes with a short tribute to the author’s father, the Revd John Lloyd, lists of the island’s poets, sheriffs, and Members of Parliament, and newspaper accounts of the Beaumaris eisteddfod. In its subject matter and approach the essay conforms to the conventions of previous Welsh history writing by clerical and gentry antiquaries. It not only deploys a wide variety of sources, including the late medieval Black Book of Basingwerk and transcriptions of medieval and later documents in the manuscripts of both Edward Lhuyd and her father, but addresses well-­established themes such as the Druids, the medieval princes, and the history of gentry families and their houses.59 Llwyd was also conventionally prejudiced in her criticisms of ‘Atheistical Demogogues’, ‘monkery’, and Roman

55  Mary Ellis, ‘Angharad Llwyd’. 56  Augusta Hall, Gwent and Dyfed Royal Eisteddfod; Prys Morgan, ‘Lady Llanover’; Guest and John, Lady Charlotte Guest, 97–117. 57  Angharad Llwyd, A History of the Island of Mona. References here are to the 1833 edition. 58  Angharad Llwyd, A History of the Island of Mona, 381. 59  E.g., Angharad Llwyd, A History of the Island of Mona, 2, 52–3, n. *, 148–63, 329–37.

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250  WRITING WELSH HISTORY Catholicism (William Owen (Sefnyn) was dismissed as a ‘Papist Bard’).60 Yet if in most respects her approach resembled that of her male counterparts, her gender may help to explain her unusual emphasis on the active role of some women. After quoting from a forged version of the medieval Welsh chronicles by Iolo Morganwg reporting that the women of Anglesey fiercely attacked the English who had killed Rhodri Mawr in 878, Llwyd praised the ‘heroic spirit . . . inherent in the women of Cambria, who in our time, without the aid of husbands or brothers, overcame and made prisoners, some hundreds of Frenchmen’ who invaded Pembrokeshire in 1797.61 In a more peaceful vein, Eleanor de Montfort, wife of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, is portrayed not merely as a pawn in her husband’s fractious relations with Edward I but as a peacemaker whose ‘mild influence . . . had been . . . the means of preventing hostilities’.62 Llwyd also stressed the important role played by Sir William Jones’s mother in her son’s education.63 Angharad Llwyd stands in instructive contrast to the only other female author of works on Welsh history in this period, namely Eliza Constantia Campbell (née Pryce, 1796–1864), from a gentry family in Montgomeryshire, who published two books for children in 1833, the year after the death of her first husband, a commander in the Royal Navy.64 One, intended ‘for the School-­room’ and dedicated to William Owen Pughe (praised as ‘the most distinguished Welsh and Celtic scholar of the day’), consisted of a series of questions and answers, while the other, longer volume presented the material as stories told to the author’s young son, adopting the format of ‘nursery histories’ of England published at this time.65 The subject-­matter is conventional: beginning with the origins of the Britons, the Romans, Druids, and bards, both books move on to the era of the medieval Welsh kings and princes and the Edwardian conquest, before concluding with the rising of Owain Glyndŵr and the union with England under Henry VIII. The interpretation offered likewise follows familiar lines, as Campbell presents the history of Wales as meriting attention for its distinctive, indeed to some degree fundamental, contribution to a wider ‘British History’ while stressing that its eventual subjection to the English crown had been for the best.66 Since then, ‘the Welsh have never been found behind their English neighbours in valour, faith, and loyalty, when the cause of old England required their services’.67 What 60  Angharad Llwyd, A History of the Island of Mona, 3, 51; Mary Ellis, ‘Angharad Llwyd’ (1973–4), 59; see also (1975–6), 66, 76–7. 61  Angharad Llwyd, A History of the Island of Mona, 61–2. Cf. MA, 2: 481 (‘Brut Aberpergwm’). 62  Angharad Llwyd, A History of the Island of Mona, 106. 63  Angharad Llwyd, A History of the Island of Mona, 384–5. 64  Robert Thomas Jenkins, ‘Campbell (Morrieson), Eliza Constantia’; Aaron, Nineteenth-­Century Women’s Writing, 63–5. 65  [Eliza Constantia Campbell], The History of Wales; [Eliza Constantia Campbell], Stories from the History of Wales. Cf. Howsam, Past into Print, 10–13. 66  [Eliza Constantia Campbell], The History of Wales, 79; [Eliza Constantia Campbell], Stories from the History of Wales, 50, 158. 67  [Eliza Constantia Campbell], The History of Wales, 80.

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THE WORLD OF THOMAS PRICE ( CARNHUANAWC ) , 1820–48  251 was new about her work was its form, including, in the longer book, its narration of Welsh history largely as a conversation between ‘Mrs. Campbell’ and her young son ‘Lewie’, with occasional interventions by his father. In seeking to instruct and entertain, Campbell presented her readers with a series of vignettes, based on established authorities like David Powel and infused with a Romantic sensibility exemplified by Iolo Morganwg’s bardism, Welsh American ‘Indians’ descended from Prince Madog and his companions, and descriptions of nature.68 The same is true of her insistence, probably deriving from Thomas Price, that Wales was the original home of European Romance and inclusion of the recently invented le­gend of Llywelyn the Great’s killing his faithful greyhound Gelert in the mistaken belief it ‘had devoured’ his baby son.69 Campbell approached the writing of Welsh history as a dutiful wife and mother who made little attempt to subvert established male-­dominated narratives by attributing agency to women as Angharad Llwyd had occasionally done, the only exception being Æthelflæd ‘Lady of the Mercians’, a ‘very enterprising woman’ who built towns ‘and sent an army to invade Wales’.70

Thomas Price (Carnhuanawc) and the History of Wales The Revd Thomas Price was one of the most prominent figures in the Cambrian societies and their eisteddfodau. Strongly committed to fostering the Welsh language and the cultural revival of his day, Price demonstrated an interest in Welsh antiquities from an early age.71 The son of an Anglican clergyman and former stone mason, Price completed his education at the grammar school attached to Christ’s College, Brecon (1805–12) before being ordained a priest of the Church of England. He was remembered as a dedicated pastor of the parishes he served in Radnorshire and Breconshire, and his ecclesiastical livings also provided sufficient means and leisure for him to travel extensively in Britain, Ireland, and con­tin­en­tal Europe as well as to pursue his interests in language, literature, and antiquities.72 While at Brecon his antiquarian interests were fostered by frequent visits to Theophilus Jones (1758–1812), then completing his history of Brecknockshire.

68  [Eliza Constantia Campbell], The History of Wales, 14–15, 52–7 (information partly derived from William Owen Pughe); [Eliza Constantia Campbell], Stories from the History of Wales, 75–7, 84–94. 69  [Eliza Constantia Campbell], The History of Wales, 26, 60–1; [Eliza Constantia Campbell], Stories from the History of Wales, 28, 96–101. The point on romance may have derived from Price’s essay on Brittany, which Campbell knew: Jane Williams, The Literary Remains, 1: 28; [Eliza Constantia Campbell], The History of Wales, 25. 70  [Eliza Constantia Campbell], The History of Wales, 31–2. 71 Price, HC; J. Rhys, ‘Buchdraeth’; Jane Williams, The Literary Remains, 2: 3, 83. See also S. J. Williams, ‘Carnhuanawc’; Mair Elvet Thomas, Afiaith yng Ngwent, 109–17; Herbert Hughes, ‘Thomas Price’. 72  Jane Williams, The Literary Remains, 2: 45, 61–4, 89–97, 162–3, 200–3. His annual income was £300: J. Rhys, ‘Buchdraeth’, 167.

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252  WRITING WELSH HISTORY Jones was evidently impressed by his visitor, as he asked Price to supply over half of the illustrations and plans for Volume II of the history, published in 1809, and two years later recommended him to the Secretary of the Society of Antiquaries of London as ‘a young but intelligent and zealous antiquary’.73 Price shared important assumptions and interests not only with Jones but also with the latter’s grandfather, Theophilus Evans, another Anglican priest whose identification with the Church of England had a distinctively Welsh complexion. However, Price inhabited a different cultural world from that of Evans thanks to the formation of the Cambrian societies and to the influence of Iolo Morganwg’s bardism, to which Price was highly receptive, notwithstanding its radical elements, in common with other antiquarian- and literary-­minded Welsh contemporaries.74 As well as being a frequent eisteddfod competitor and adjudicator, Price was a founding member and president of the Brecon Cambrian Society established in 1823 and played a central role in the Abergavenny Cymreigyddion Society, which he helped to found in 1833, having already excited the interest of the society’s best-­known patron, Augusta Hall, later Lady Llanover, in the Welsh language and Welsh culture.75 His commitment to cultural revivalism was also exemplified by his promotion of Welsh harp music and role in the establishment and running of the Cambrian Quarterly Magazine (1829–33) and the Welsh Manuscript Society, founded in 1836 for the purpose of publishing editions of mainly medieval texts.76 Price developed a deep interest in the literature and history of Wales and other Celtic countries, especially Brittany, with which he had first become acquainted through meeting Breton prisoners-­ of-­ war in Brecon during the Napoleonic Wars.77 From the 1820s he contributed articles on the Celtic languages, Brittany, and other topics to Welsh- and English-­language periodicals, some originating as eisteddfod prize essays.78 He also published an essay on racial characteristics attacking John Pinkerton’s arguments in favour of polygenesis, which he deemed ‘blasphemous’ as they denied the biblical view that all humankind derived from Adam.79 Instead, Price attributed physical and intellectual variations to environmental factors, explaining dark eye colour by the proximity of coalfields!80 This 73  Jane Williams, The Literary Remains, 2: 18–19, 40–1; Theophilus Jones, A History of the County of Brecknock, 2: plates II–VI, VIII–X, XII, XV, XVII; Thomas Price, ‘An Account of Some Roman Remains’. 74  On Price and Iolo see Constantine, The Truth against the World, 152–3; Löffler, The Literary and Historical Legacy, 81–2, 85, 115, 133–4. 75 Jane Williams, The Literary Remains, 2: 82, 229–31. See also Prys Morgan, ‘Lady Llanover’; Gurden-­Williams, ‘Lady Llanover’, 74–5, 83–8, 127. 76  Jane Williams, The Literary Remains, 2: 97, 233; The Liber Landavensis, ed. and trans. Rees, [iii]. Music: Jane Williams, The Literary Remains, 2: 82, 299–300, 393–411. 77  Jane Williams, The Literary Remains, 2: 149. 78  Above, n. 11; Jane Williams, The Literary Remains, 2: 83–5. 79 T. Price, An Essay on the Physiognomy, quotation at p. viii. For Pinkerton and his critics, including Price, see Kidd, The Forging of Races, 110–13. Price also rejected Pinkerton’s arguments for the Germanic or Gothic origins of the Picts: Price, HC, 120–1, 125. 80 T. Price, An Essay on the Physiognomy, 36–40, 101. Environmental factors are also cited to explain physical characteristics in Price, HC, 126–7.

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THE WORLD OF THOMAS PRICE ( CARNHUANAWC ) , 1820–48  253 work illustrated the strongly Christian dimension to Price’s work, also evidenced by his successful campaign to have the British and Foreign Bible Society sponsor the translation of the Bible into Breton. Characteristically, Price based his arguments on historical assumptions, namely that the Welsh and Bretons were closely related through their common descent from the Britons of the post-­Roman period, and also followed a suggestion by John Hughes that the translation would repay a debt incurred by the post-­Roman British Church when St Garmon (Germanus) and other saints came from ‘Armorica and Celtic Gaul’ to preach against the heresy of Pelagianism.81 Shortly before the appearance of the first part of his Hanes Cymru (‘History of Wales’) in 1836 Price declared that he had embarked on the task after failing to persuade anyone else to shoulder it, though his memorialist Jane Williams later stated that the work was commissioned by its publisher—and keen eisteddfod competitor—Thomas Williams of Crickhowell. He also stressed that his aim was to make the history of Wales available in the Welsh language, adding that the only histories of that kind were the medieval chronicles Brut y Tywysogyon and Brut y Brenhinedd, recently printed in the scarce and prohibitively expensive Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales.82 Price made his popularizing intentions clear in an address to his ‘compatriots’ in the first number, where he declared that he had tried ‘to express my thoughts in an easily understandable language’.83 Price deliberately sought, then, to make his work accessible to the common people able to read Welsh, an aim in line with his criticisms, expressed most forcefully in letters published in 1844, of the failure of what he considered to be a corrupt Anglican Church in Wales to minister adequately to a rapidly increasing and mostly Welsh-­ speaking population attracted to Dissent, especially in the industrial areas.84 Indeed, his resolutely patriotic History, with its providential interpretation of the survival of the Welsh and occasional quotations in black-­letter type from the Book of Common Prayer, may itself be seen as an extension of Price’s pastoral commitment to the Welsh-­speaking majority.85 He certainly appears to have satisfied his target audience, as the response to his work in the Welsh press was generally favourable, one commentator describing it as ‘the best written and most faithful record of the actions of our ancestors’, and Price was pleased to report

81  Jane Williams, The Literary Remains, 2: 147–79, quotation at 152; John Hughes, Horæ Britannicæ, 1: 76; Constantine, The Truth against the World, 152–4. 82  Seren Gomer, 19 (1836), 221; Jane Williams, The Literary Remains, 2: 195; Thomas Price, Hanes Cymru, Rhif 1; Thomas Price, Hanes Cymru, Rhif 2; Mair Elvet Thomas, Afiaith yng Ngwent, 82. See further Ifano Jones, A History of Printing, 170–1; Pryce, ‘Medieval Welsh History in the Victorian Age’, 5–7. 83  Thomas Price, Hanes Cymru, Rhif 1, back cover. Cf. J. Rhys, ‘Buchdraeth’, 166. 84  Jane Williams, The Literary Remains, 2: 318–29. 85 Price, HC, 133, 152.

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254  WRITING WELSH HISTORY that nearly all of the 2,000 copies printed ‘were bought by the labouring classes’ (reflecting a wider pattern among purchasers of books in Welsh in this period).86 Like most other writers of Welsh history at this time, Price appealed to his readers by striking a traditional chord, as the conception and coverage of his Hanes Cymru followed well-­worn precedents. Over 90 per cent dealt with the origins of the Welsh and their history down to the death of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd in 1282, and only 2.5 per cent with the period from Henry VII’s accession in 1485 to the author’s own day.87 Indeed, Price effectively revived the two-­stage framework of medieval Welsh historical writing, in which Welsh translations of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s history of the Britons were followed, from the late seventh century to 1282, by the chronicles known as Brut y Tywysogyon (‘The Chronicle of the Princes’)—an approach consistent with his regarding the latter as one of the main precursors of his own work. The former period appears to be synonymous with the ‘Cynoesoedd’ (‘Primitive Ages’ or ‘Antiquity’), given as the work’s starting point in its full title, which occupied half of the coverage down to 1282, the latter with ‘Tywysogion Cymru’ (‘The Princes of Wales’), the last major heading in the table of contents, and furnished with a separate introduction in which the author outlined the approach he had taken to his sources.88 The first half of the work is subdivided into five sections charting the arrival of different peoples and the Christian religion: ‘The Coming of the Welsh to the Island of Britain’; ‘The Coming of the Romans’; ‘The Coming of the Gospel’; ‘The Coming of the English’; and ‘The Church’. By contrast most of the second half structures its narrative as a sequence of Welsh royal and princely reigns from the late seventh century to the Edwardian conquest, punctuated by short thematic sections on political geog­ raphy, the marcher lords, religion, literature, and society.89 The last sixty pages bring the work to a close with a summary account of events from the conquest to Price’s own day.90 That Price wrote a longer history of Wales than his predecessors without substantially extending its chronological focus beyond 1282 was due mainly to the breadth of the sources he deployed, and also partly to his readiness to include some coverage of Scotland, Ireland, and Brittany as well as the British kingdoms of north Britain and Cornwall and their struggles with the Anglo-­Saxons.91 In this, he was a beneficiary of studies and editions published earlier in his lifetime. The former included books by William Owen Pughe, Peter Roberts, Theophilus 86  Quotations: letter from ‘Anhunog’, The Cambrian, 27 November 1841; Jane Williams, The Literary Remains, 2: 339. See also David Joshua in Seren Gomer, 19 (1836), 367; The Cambrian, 12 November 1836. Working people as the purchasers of Welsh-­language books: Philip Henry Jones, ‘Printing and Publishing’, 319. By contrast, only 300 copies were printed of Wynn, The History of the Gwydir Family, ed. Llwyd: Mary Ellis, ‘Angharad Llwyd’ (1973–4), 83. 87 Price, HC, 775–95. 88 Price, HC, vi, 323, 368–70. 89  Thematic sections: Price, HC, 449–72, 489–93, 534–41, 587–9, 600–8, 637–48. 90 Price, HC, 735–95. 91 Price, HC, 100, 118–34, 144–7, 200–3, 275–92, 323–41, 475–8.

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THE WORLD OF THOMAS PRICE ( CARNHUANAWC ) , 1820–48  255 Jones, and Rice Rees.92 Price was particularly indebted to a work on the early history of the Britons and Welsh, Horae Britannicae (1818–19), by the Wesleyan minister John Hughes, which he praised for being ‘purified of superstition and inconsistency, with outstanding detail and criticism’, and also urged the translation into Welsh of Augustin Thierry’s ‘excellent’ History of the Conquest of England by the Normans (1825), a staple of Romantic historiography indebted to Walter Scott notable for its sympathetic treatment of the Welsh and other victims of Germanic and Norman invasions.93 Most importantly, though, Price took advantage of the Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales (1801–7) in order to draw on a wider range both of Welsh-­language chronicles and of Welsh poetry and other literary texts than his predecessors, and thus to be the first to assimilate in a substantial general history of Wales the literary turn in the study of the Welsh past that had begun in the mid-­eighteenth century.94 Indeed, Price himself had devoted extensive attention to the Welsh language and its literature before embarking on his History. This is vividly demonstrated by an address to an eisteddfod at Brecon in 1822 in which, holding up the Book of Aneirin, a thirteenth-­century manuscript containing the earliest extant text of Aneirin’s ostensibly sixth-­century poem Y Gododdin, he expounded both on the poem (whose authenticity had been defended two decades earlier by Sharon Turner) and on the importance of bardism to Welsh culture through the ages, the latter argument evidently influenced by Iolo Morganwg.95 In his Hanes Cymru Price not only reiterated these points but amplified them through frequent references to medieval Welsh poets, some of whose works he quoted extensively, especially in his accounts of twelfth- and thirteenth-­ century princes.96 Price also followed Hughes’s Horae Britannicae in relying heavily on another medieval literary genre, namely the ‘Triads of the Island of Britain’.97 While some of the triads he cited were authentic medieval texts, the waters had been muddied by Iolo Morganwg’s inclusion in the Myvyrian Archaiology of a ‘Third Series’ of triads, which he in fact had concocted (albeit partly by elaborating genuine medieval triads) and passed off as the earliest and most authentic versions (see Chapter 9). Although Price was not alone among nineteenth-­century Welsh scholars in swallowing this deception, his readiness to rely on the triads 92 Price, HC, 187, 188, 408. 93 Price, HC, 54 (quotation), 474, n.*; cf. Barczewski, Myth and National Identity, 129–30; Kelley, Fortunes of History, 143–4, 154–7. Thierry was praised in 1830 for portraying the Welsh as ‘a great, a good, and an intellectual people’ by Anon., Review of Thierry, Conquête, 105. See also [Eliza Constantia Campbell], Stories from the History of Wales, 9–10. 94  His use of literature is noticed in William Williams, Prydnawngwaith y Cymry, ed. Jones, 5. 95  Report of the Proceedings at the Eisteddfod, 5–6, 21–40. The manuscript was a gift from Theophilus Jones: Huws, Llyfr Aneirin, 43–4. Cf. Turner, A Vindication, whose comments on Y Gododdin are cited approvingly by John Hughes, Horæ Britannicæ, 1: 200–2. 96 Price, HC, 42–50 (bardism), 354–9 (Aneirin), 567–8, 583–6, 663–4, 729–31 (Llywelyn ap Gruffudd). 97  Cf. John Hughes, Horæ Britannicæ, 1: 12–15. However, by relying on triads in his account of Roman Britain Price went further than Hughes, who confined his attention to Roman authors and modern studies: John Hughes, Horæ Britannicæ, 1: 85–113; Price, HC, 56–79.

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256  WRITING WELSH HISTORY was criticized both at the time of publication and subsequently, and differed sharply from the cautious approach to their use advocated by his German contemporary Albert Schulz (San-­Marte).98 It is true that Price felt it necessary to assess the historical value of the triads, arguing that they were consistent with the testimony of other sources and differed markedly from medieval texts considered to be forgeries.99 However, he unwittingly put his finger on their true character by adding that it was ‘as if they had been composed under the full radiance of historical knowledge of recent times’: Price’s ostensibly critical approach to sources provided only partial protection from the allure of the fabulous and fanciful.100 Likewise, his History exposes a tension between, on the one hand, the aim of distinguishing ‘authority’ and ‘(true) history’ from ‘imagination’ or ‘legends’ and, on the other, adherence to long-­established understandings of ancient and medieval Welsh history and the sources on which these were based.101 He was certainly prepared to challenge the veracity of particular accounts and sources: for instance, he rejected the story of Edward I’s massacre of the bards, followed Iolo Morganwg and other Welsh lit­er­ ati in condemning the poems attributed to Ossian as a fabrication, and criticized some of the interpretations of Edward ‘Celtic’ Davies.102 But Price was reluctant to dismiss the traditional sources of ancient and medieval Welsh history out of hand. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of his work, especially for the period down to the late seventh century, was its citing and assessment of different accounts of the same event, thereby demonstrating the author’s critical credentials while allowing readers to draw their own conclusions. One important consequence of this approach was to give a voice to Geoffrey of Monmouth—who Price, like earlier scholars, argued to have been merely a translator—on the grounds that, while implausible in many respects, his History might nevertheless contain a grain of truth and draw upon early medieval British sources no longer extant.103 (His younger contemporary Rice Rees was less tolerant.)104 It is telling that, even when he expressed scepticism about Geoffrey’s account of the angel’s ordering Cadwaladr to leave Brittany and end his days in Rome, on the (correct) grounds that the story evidently confused Cadwaladr with the West Saxon Cædwalla, whose death in Rome in 688 was reported by Bede, Price added that this was ‘not because of the legend about the angel; because if we were to reject every story from the early ages which contains superstitious legends, we would have nothing in

98 Price, HC, 8–11, 54, 76–9; The Cambrian, 12 January 1839; HBC, 1: 7; Die Arthur-­Sage, ed. San-­ Marte, 45–8. 99 Price, HC, 76–9. 100 Price, HC, 10–11. 101  E.g. Price, HC, 1, 12, 131, 153, 238. 102 Price, HC, 46, 116–18, 240–2, 251. By contrast, Ossian received sympathetic, though not uncritical, treatment in John Hughes, Horæ Britannicæ, 1: 30, 41–2, 72, 195, 342–55. 103  E.g. Price, HC, 68–9, 113, 142–7, 236–8, 249, 259, 305. 104  Rice Rees, Essay on the Welsh Saints, vi–vii, 83, 289–90.

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THE WORLD OF THOMAS PRICE ( CARNHUANAWC ) , 1820–48  257 existence in the shape of history’.105 Price returned to these issues in a rare passage of methodological reflection, in which he differentiated between authoritative sources and those of questionable reliability. This reserved his sharpest criticism, not for medieval sources like Geoffrey’s History, but for recent English-­language histories of Wales, all of which he considered inferior to David Powel’s 1584 Historie of Cambria. Whereas Powel had supplied ‘the events, in a comprehensive and clear manner, together with his authorities from old writings’, some of his successors—Warrington was probably in Price’s sights here—had pri­ ori­ tized literary effect over sound historical content, imputing motives and emotions to individuals without any basis in the evidence and making it impossible ‘to distinguish between the whim . . . of the writer of today and the reports of the ancient author’. Price’s aim was different, namely ‘not to assert anything, except with authority. And when I offer my conjectural opinion, to give it in such a way that it cannot be mistaken for authoritative assertions.’106 Price thus implied that it was precisely his commitment to critical rigour that allowed him to include questionable sources and interpretations. In large part, this probably reflected his reluctance to abandon the glorious visions of the Welsh past inspired by Geoffrey of Monmouth and, more recently, by Iolo Morganwg. (By contrast, Price derided medieval Irish origin legends as ‘completely worthless’.)107 In addition, whether deliberately or not, Price’s approach to his sources also spoke to the History’s intended readership by adding colour to the narrative and including, albeit with qualifications in some cases, episodes and individuals—including Gomer and Joseph of Arimathea— familiar from popular understandings of the past.108 Price sought, then, to write a history that was both authoritative and attractive. One major selling point was its patriotic standpoint. Like many other writers of Welsh history before and during his lifetime, Price presented his readers with a gallery of heroes as well as the occasional villain. Thus the work defended the historical existence of King Arthur and celebrated him together with other brave heroic leaders from Caratacus to Owain Glyndŵr, while castigating Vortigern and other traitors.109 However, Price also highlighted the unique achievements and virtues of the Welsh people as a whole. In part this was a conventional matter of stressing the antiquity of the Welsh as the original inhabitants of Britain (Edward Lhuyd’s theory of a previous Irish settlement was given short shrift),110 their survival as a nation against formidable odds (attributed to an independent spirit whose roots lay in tribal self-­government),111 and their success in preserving the language of their ancestors largely unchanged—a feat, Price pointedly noted, which had eluded the English.112 The Welsh had also been much more 105 Price, HC, 317; see also 54, 312–15. 106 Price, HC, 369. 107 Price, HC, 128–31, quotation at 131. 108 Price, HC, 12, 160–2. 109  E.g. Price, HC, 79, 258–75, 542, 544–5, 569, 770, 772 (heroes); 244, 562 (villains). 110 Price, HC, 1, 133–4, 152, 221, 226. 111 Price, HC, 294–5. 112 Price, HC, 90, 226.

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258  WRITING WELSH HISTORY successful than the English in being neither conquered by the Danes nor swiftly defeated by the Normans, and in keeping alive the memory of their early war­ riors; indeed, the Britons had done much more than the English to record the conquests of Hengist and Horsa.113 Nor was Welsh exceptionalism limited to the orbit of Britain, as Price also claimed for medieval Wales a wider European significance. This went beyond emphasizing connections with Brittany and extended to the assertion that Wales was the source of European chivalry, a theory that possibly built on brief suggestions by William Owen Pughe or Walter Scott.114 Price is first known to have advanced this idea in his address at Brecon in 1822, and he developed it over the following years. Similar assertions also began to be made by other writers, including the literary scholar Albert Schulz (San-­Marte), author of a prize-­winning essay on the influence of Welsh traditions on German, French, and Scandinavian literature at the Abergavenny eisteddfod of 1840.115 According to Price, European romance originated with the Welsh bards’ tales of Arthur and the knights of the Round Table, which had been taken via Bretons to France and beyond as part of the ‘awakening’ of Europe from about the beginning of twelfth century, thereby resulting ‘in the system of chivalry of the middle ages, that sprung out of the feelings which the Bards of Wales and Brittany had excited’.116 Yet, notwithstanding his Romantic sensibility and eagerness to praise the achievements and virtues of the Welsh, Price was careful to insist that their history was ultimately governed by a divine providence ready to punish as well as reward.117 Thus he opened the introduction to the second main part of the History by noting that, after ‘the Welsh nation’ had lost its extensive territories and been confined to Wales, Providence thought fit to stop the destruction; and for more than a thousand years, though many unfortunate events happened to our nation, nevertheless their name was not destroyed, nor was their number reduced. And since this was the sentence for our crimes . . . I see a great reason to be grateful for mildness towards us, even in the midst of chastisement . . .118

113 Price, HC, 227, 294–5, 401, 474, 481. 114  Pryce, ‘Medieval Welsh History in the Victorian Age’, 9–10. 115  Report of the Proceedings at the Eisteddfod, 28–35. Cf. [Eliza Constantia Campbell], Stories from the History of Wales, 28; Rice Rees, Essay on the Welsh Saints, ix–x; Die Arthur-­Sage, ed. San-­Marte, 28–33; Mair Elvet Thomas, Afiaith yng Ngwent, 87–8. Another German Welsh and Celtic scholar and prize-­winning essayist at the Abergavenny eisteddfod (in 1842) was Friedrich Carl Meyer: Löffler, ‘Prince Albert’s “Celtic” Librarian’. 116  See e.g. The Cambrian, 5 December 1835 (speech at Abergavenny Cymreigyddion Eisteddfod); Thomas Price, ‘An Essay on the Influence’, esp. 235–6, 271–2, 297–9; Price, HC, 257–8. 117  E.g. Price, HC, 42, 98–9, 111, 150, 333, 395–6. 118 Price, HC, 368. Divine punishment of the sinful Britons is also emphasized at 98–100, 111–12.

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THE WORLD OF THOMAS PRICE ( CARNHUANAWC ) , 1820–48  259 Likewise Price saw ‘the hand of providence’ in the introduction of Christianity to Roman Britain.119 In addition, he invoked the secular concept of fate in relation to the downfall of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd in 1282, which he not only compared with the defeat of Caradog (Caratacus) by the Romans 1,200 years earlier but attributed to Llywelyn’s marriage to Eleanor de Montfort and the resulting coup­ ling of the prince’s fate with that of the Waldenses—heretics portrayed in suitably proto-­ Protestant guise—seeking revenge after their persecution by Eleanor’s grandfather Simon de Montfort.120 The latter assertion in turn exemplified Price’s view that ‘the largest portion of the history of the nations of the earth [consists of] a catalogue of crimes and punishments; of injury and wrong on the one hand, and revenge on the other . . . The nation of the Welsh has frequently had experience of these things.’121 But not only the Welsh: the passage follows a justification for Welsh participation in the conquest of Ireland in the late twelfth century as paying the Irish back for their attacks on Britain in previous ages, while Price later observed that the Bretons in William the Conqueror’s army had recovered the land lost by their ancestors and helped ‘to place the yoke of slavery on the necks of the English, as payment for violence and exile’.122 Price’s History, then, was imbued with a strongly Christian perspective, albeit one that, in the tradition of Gildas, owed more to the Old Testament than the New. More specifically, like many other historians of Wales since the sixteenth century and some fellow Anglican clergy of his own day such as Thomas Burgess, Price wrote as a defender of the Church of England fiercely hostile to Roman Catholicism (no mention is made of Catholic Emancipation in 1829), although he admitted that the ‘Church of Rome’ had accomplished some things ‘worthy of praise’ such as preserving the Scriptures uncorrupted.123 Moreover, as a sharp critic of ‘the Anglo-­Welsh Bishops, who fatten on the dioceses of the aboriginal Britons’ to the detriment of the Welsh-­speaking poor, ‘ultimately driving them to the dissenting chapels’, whose ministers were more supportive of his History than most of his fellow Anglican clergy, it is hardly surprising that Price tried to be even-­handed in his treatment of seventeenth-­century Dissenters and the ejection of Puritan clergy after the Restoration.124 However, his ecclesiastical allegiance also had political implications, as Price shared the outlook of other Welsh cultural patriots among the Anglican clergy in regarding the preservation of Welsh culture as a fundamentally conservative enterprise allied to the maintenance of existing social hierarchies and the political status quo. At ease with the gentry and

119 Price, HC, 159–62, quotation at 162. 120 Price, HC, 677, 702–3. 121 Price, HC, 133. 122 Price, HC, 133, 478 (quotation). 123  Price admitted his ‘bias’ and ‘perhaps prejudice’ in favour of the Church in Price, HC, 789. Views on Roman Catholicism: Price, HC, 171, 203–13, 788. 124 Price, HC, 786–90; cf. Jane Williams, The Literary Remains, 2: 161–2, 195–9, 318–29, quotations at 320, 327; J. Rhys, ‘Buchdraeth’, 166, n.*. The printer of Hanes Cymru was also a Wesleyan preacher: Ifano Jones, A History of Printing, 171.

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260  WRITING WELSH HISTORY aristocracy on whose patronage he and likeminded patriots depended for resources and legitimacy in promoting the cultural activities of the Cambrian societies, Price sought not only to inform his readers about the Welsh past but to instruct them in its lessons for their place in early Victorian Britain. In part this was a matter of reiterating the well-­worn view that the history of Wales as an independent polity had ended with the Edwardian conquest; there­ after its political history was indissolubly tied to that of England.125 One corollary of this was that the Welsh could take pride in being an ancient people who continued to make a distinctive contribution to a greater Britain. More generally, Price sought to explain how Great Britain had achieved ‘its present position of national pre-­eminence’ in an essay first published in 1844 that dressed up fanciful and eccentric speculation in scientific guise, in which he proposed that empires and civilizations, from ancient Mesopotamia to the British Empire, ‘have always progressed in a north-­western direction’ at an average rate of ‘50 seconds and a fraction in a year’ under the stimulus of an ‘influence . . . analogous to that of Electricity’ for which he coined the ‘Celtic term Kyffrawd, i.e. impulse or excitement’.126 This allowed Price to present imperial expansion as natural and inevitable, being ‘a fierce and irrepressible spirit of emigration and discovery’ which ‘carried the Greeks to India, the Romans to Britain, and now urges the Britons to the extremities of the earth’.127 Towards the end of his History Price also responded to new political challenges emerging closer to home in the industrial areas of south-­east Wales. Most strikingly, he saw ‘the hand of Providence’ in the crushing of the Chartist uprising at Newport in 1839 ‘through the courage and skill of Sir Thomas Phillips, mayor of the town . . . with great slaughter’. He was quick to add, though, that ‘these disturbances of the Chartists did not belong to the Welsh as a nation, but rather the ferment was carried to Wales by the English’. On hearing of ‘the blood of the Welsh flowing along the streets of Newport, I could not refrain from groaning for my fellow-­blood’, and wishing that the enthusiasm displayed there had been directed ‘towards maintaining the true privileges and rights of their nation’.128 This consoling but inaccurate interpretation of Chartism as a foreign contagion was shared by other commentators, both Anglican and Nonconformist, and was of a piece with Price’s idealization of the Welsh working class as more peaceable, cultured, and polite than its English counterpart.129 In 1826 Price attributed these virtues to the Welsh cultural revival of his day, observing that ‘while many less fortunate districts, even in the British Islands, are all but

125 Price, HC, 761; and cf. 677, 738, 783–5. See also Jane Williams, Literary Remains, 2: 144–5. 126 T. Price, The Geographical Progress, quotations at 5, 7–8, 20, 22–3. 127 T. Price, The Geographical Progress, 25. 128 Price, HC, 793. For the events see David J. V. Jones, The Last Rising; Chris Williams, ‘ “The Great Hero of the Newport Rising” ’. 129 E. T. Davies, Religion in the Industrial Revolution, 78–82; Sian Rhiannon Williams, Oes y Byd i’r Iaith Gymraeg, 49–50; Jane Williams, Literary Remains, 2: 133–4; Price, HC, 700, n.*.

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THE WORLD OF THOMAS PRICE ( CARNHUANAWC ) , 1820–48  261 threatening rebellion . . . the happy natives of the Principality are composing odes for Eisteddfodau, and offering medals for the cultivation of the harp’.130 Small wonder that he sought to exonerate the Welsh for an insurrection that shattered this idyllic image of social harmony, an image sharply at odds with the radicalism of the Chartist leader John Frost of Newport, who presented the power held by landed families like the Morgans of Tredegar as the latest chapter in a story of aristocratic oppression going back to the Norman conquest.131 Price’s response to the Newport rising offers an unusually explicit insight into his conception of Welsh nationality as something transmitted biologically whose key hallmarks were linguistic, cultural, and religious, and whose unique virtues were set in sharp relief, moreover, by unflattering comparisons with an English other.132 This is consistent with a broader argument that the fostering of culture and civilization compensated for political defeat and subordination. In part, this meant emphasizing that the Welsh of the early Victorian period were more civ­il­ ized than their ancient and early medieval ancestors.133 But above all it meant conceiving of their nationality primarily in terms of their language and literature. Thus, Price maintained not only that, as the birthplace of romance, Wales had significantly influenced European culture but that it had also surpassed all other countries in poetry and the nurturing of its language as part of a European awaken­ing in the eleventh century.134 Although the Welsh could be proud of their ancestors’ brave defence of their liberty, ‘this was only defence, and keeping their own. Yet when [the Welsh] look at the effects of their literature, they see a cause for taking pride, not only for keeping their own, but also for conquests of the most marvellous and honourable kind.’135 Such views dovetailed neatly with Price’s emphasis on the revival of Welsh literature in his own day. It is telling, too, that in asserting that Welsh settlers in the United States ‘maintain their patriotism in a most worthy and commendable fashion’, Price singled out their continued use of their ‘old language’ and support for periodicals in Welsh.136 He concluded his History, though, in homiletic vein, by reiterating his view that Welsh nationhood was inextricably linked to Christianity, expressing the hope that while the Welsh Language continues to be an instrument for spreading scriptural knowledge, and a medium for truth; while it continues to be the language of the Christian ministry; in a word, while the Gospel is preached in the Welsh

130  Jane Williams, The Literary Remains, 2: 132. 131 David J. V. Jones, The Last Rising, 57. 132  A biological understanding of race is similarly found in the assertion that, as a result of intermarriage with the Welsh, descendants of the Norman conquerors in Glamorgan had become Welsh by blood: Price, HC, 488–9. 133 Price, HC, 13, 42, 388. The early Germanic peoples were depicted in an even less flattering light at 224, 225. 134 Price, HC, 535–40. 135 Price, HC, 258. 136 Price, HC, 794.

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262  WRITING WELSH HISTORY Language, that Almighty God will not allow that language to be extinguished, nor the nation that uses it to be erased from the land.137

As a self-­taught amateur Price was a world away from the emerging historical profession in continental Europe, centred above all in Germany and exemplified by Leopold von Ranke. Moreover, while many other writers of history were not professionals employed in universities, Price wrote in a different institutional and intellectual context from his counterparts in England, France, or central and eastern Europe. Learned societies in the latter resembled the Cambrian societies in their patriotic purpose but were more academic, and Price lacked a debt to Enlightenment historiography comparable to those of the Czech historian František Palacký, the Hungarian Mihály Horváth, or his older English contemporary, the Eton- and Oxford-­educated lawyer, Whig politician, and historian Henry Hallam (1777–1859).138 Receiving no formal education beyond grammar school and serving as a rural clergyman with a modest income, Price’s engagement with the past formed part of wider voluntary efforts to sustain the native vernacular and associated literary culture of a minority nation within the im­per­ ial orbit of a greater Britain. However, it would be mistaken to conclude that Price was completely isolated from wider trends in European historiography and culture. In particular, he was influenced by the Romantic history writing of his day reflected, for example, in his enthusiasm for the work of Augustin Thierry. His Hanes Cymru bears several of the hallmarks of Romantic national history, above all the importance it attached to medieval literature, an emphasis indebted not only to homegrown influences, especially Iolo Morganwg, but also to broader currents of European Romanticism and medievalism. Consistent with this is the work’s composition in Welsh, the first language of the overwhelming majority of people in Wales. Nevertheless, while his use of Welsh mirrors the democratization of the medium of historical writing identified by Monika Baár as a key hallcentury eastern and central mark of national history writing in nineteenth-­ Europe, Price did not resemble the latter, as well as Romantic history writing in England, France, and elsewhere, in their determination ‘to democratize their subject’ by focusing on the common people and their ancient inalienable liberties.139 On the face of it, Price did exactly the opposite, offering a view of history that emphasized the traditional themes of distant ethnic origins, saints, and heroic medieval princes, augmented by a celebration of medieval literary achievements and culminating, through Henry Tudor’s victory at Bosworth, in the recovery of sovereignty over Britain. Yet this was also a view attuned to long-­established popular understandings of Welsh history, which meant that Price to a significant 137 Price, HC, 795. 138 Cf. Baár, Historians and Nationalism, chs. 3–4, esp. 78–84, 101–2, 113–24; Kelley, Fortunes of History, 99–102. 139  Cf. Baár, Historians and Nationalism, 46–52.

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THE WORLD OF THOMAS PRICE ( CARNHUANAWC ) , 1820–48  263 degree offered his readers what they expected, reinforcing their view of themselves as the heirs of an ancient and glorious people that had preserved their distinctive identity as loyal and equal subjects of the crown. Nevertheless, while Price’s History enjoyed respect and influence in the decades following its publication, it was never reprinted. To a significant extent the work was the product of a moment in Welsh cultural and intellectual life that was already passing during Price’s last years.140 Two developments marked important shifts whose impact is assessed in Chapter 11, one challenging Price’s understanding of Wales’s place in the British state, the other the bardic and other fanciful aspects of his Romantic interpretation of the past. The first was the publication in 1847 of a report of a commission of inquiry into the state of education in Wales which included damning verdicts on the Welsh language, Nonconformity, morality, and other alleged defects of Welsh society that created a furore which reverberated for the rest of the century, verdicts that showed scant regard for the loyalism and Welsh cultural patriotism espoused by Price, who himself came under fire from the commissioners for alleged deficiencies both at his parish school and in his History that he vigorously rebutted in a letter to The Times.141 Price was not the only Anglican priest to reject the commissioners’ portrayal of the Welsh as prejudiced and inaccurate. Another was Harry Longueville Jones (1806–70), an antiquary of partly Welsh origin, who with the Revd John Williams (Ab Ithel; 1811–62), founded the journal Archaeologia Cambrensis (1846) and the ensuing Cambrian Archaeological Association (1847) in order to place the study of Welsh antiquities on a more systematic footing than before.142 These initiatives built on the antiquarian interests and activities of individuals such as Price, who shortly before his death in July 1848 agreed to be the new association’s local secretary for Breconshire.143 Nevertheless, and this brings us to the second development, the association and journal opened a new phase in the engagement of the Anglican clergy with the Welsh past that promoted the recording of arch­aeo­ logic­al monuments and artefacts and medieval architecture alongside work on written sources. While there were Welsh precedents for this approach, especially in the fieldwork of Edward Lhuyd, immediate inspiration came from English and, above all, French example, thanks to Jones’s exposure to antiquarian endeavours and government measures to record and preserve historic monuments while resident in Paris between 1835 and 1842.144 Whereas Thomas Price stressed the indebtedness of French and other continental romance literature to Wales, and supported efforts to persuade the Catholic Bretons to become Protestants like 140  Prys Morgan, ‘Early Victorian Wales’, 97–102. 141  Jane Williams, The Literary Remains, 2: 337­­–9, quotation at 339. Responses to the commissioners’ reports are discussed in Chapter 11. 142  Ben Bowen Thomas, ‘The Cambrians’; Pryce, ‘Harry Longueville Jones’; Pryce, ‘Jones, Harry Longueville’; H. L. Jones, ‘Education in Wales’. 143  Arch. Camb., 3/10 (1848), 169. 144  Pryce, ‘Harry Longueville Jones’.

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264  WRITING WELSH HISTORY their Brittonic cousins in Wales, Jones believed that Wales had much to learn from the study of antiquities in France. In his commitment to critical scholarship informed by continental example Jones adopted a more rigorous stance than both Price and, more particularly, John Williams, an ardent proponent of Iolo Morganwg’s bardism who parted company with Jones in 1853.145 The conflicting approaches they represented would become an increasingly prominent aspect of writing about the Welsh past from the mid-­nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries.

145 Löffler, The Literary and Historical Legacy, 91–2; Nancy Edwards and John Gould, ‘From Antiquarians to Archaeologists’, 145–9.

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11 ‘Living in the Past’ and the Challenges of Modernity, 1848–80 In 1852–3 Bernard Bolingbroke Woodward, a former Independent pastor who also wrote histories of Hampshire and the United States, became the first English writer since Warrington to publish a history of Wales.1 Like his predecessor, Woodward sought to bring the history of Wales to the attention of England, where ‘[i]t is almost entirely unknown’, and also stressed that ‘every passage of it is associated with scenes unsurpassed in romantic grandeur and beauty’, which were duly illustrated by plates depicting Welsh views and monuments, especially castles.2 However, whereas Warrington had presented the medieval history of Wales as a struggle for liberty, Woodward argued that the history of Wales demonstrated the benefits of its complete assimilation with England, in the process casting doubt on the reliability of most Welsh sources. In order to enjoy the success of other European nations, the Welsh, ‘instead of living in the past . . . should reach forward to and live for the future; which their history would also teach them to do’.3 Likewise one English reviewer of Woodward looked forward to ‘the fusion of the Kymro with the so-­called Saxon’ and declared that he had not gone far enough in exposing the tenuous foundations of what purported to be Welsh history.4 Not surprisingly, Welsh reactions to Woodward were less enthusiastic, one reviewer complaining of his neglect of native sources, his ‘anti-­Welsh prejudices’, and his evident desire ‘to abolish the nationality which still characterizes the descendants of Caractacus, Arthur, and the great Llewelyn’.5 Over a decade later Matthew Arnold was more sympathetic to the Welsh but similarly highlighted their devotion to the past and held that their future lay in adopting the English language and contributing a literary heritage that could enrich English culture.6 Like the commissioners on Welsh education in 1847, Woodward, Arnold, and other English commentators believed that modernity

1 Woodward, The History; quotation at [iv]. Cf. Woodward, revd. Everett, ‘Woodward, Bernard Bolingbroke’. 2 Woodward, The History, [iv]. 3 Woodward, The History, 590. 4  Anon., Review of Woodward, The History, Eclectic Review. 5  Anon., Review of Woodward, The History (parts 13–25), Arch. Camb., 217. 6  Arnold, ‘On the Study of Celtic Literature’, ed. Super. Writing Welsh History: From the Early Middle Ages to the Twenty-­First Century. Huw Pryce, Oxford University Press. © Huw Pryce 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198746034.003.0012

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266  WRITING WELSH HISTORY was inextricably intertwined with Anglicization.7 Plenty of their Welsh-­speaking contemporaries agreed.8 Woodward’s History of Wales raised questions about the significance of Welsh history and its relationship to the present and future of Wales that resonated widely in the mid-­Victorian period, above all among Welsh writers. At the risk of oversimplification, those questions boiled down to the challenge of reconciling a historical culture located primarily in the ancient and medieval past with the experience of, and aspirations towards, modernity. This has generally been understood as a contest between supporters of the Romantic and legendary on the one hand and the critical and ‘scientific’ on the other.9 However, important though such disagreements were, they belonged to a wider response to the challenge of interpreting the Welsh past in a manner fit for a modern Welsh people. In part this was a matter of reappraising the era from the origins of the Welsh to the death of Llywelyn in 1282, which had long been regarded as virtually syn­onym­ ous with their ‘national history’, in part of coming to terms with the story of the Welsh in subsequent centuries. True, historians of Wales had faced similar issues since the sixteenth century. From the late 1840s, however, the issues were framed in the new context of a ‘Wales that was eager to do anything except cling to tradition’ where many embraced a predominantly British, Anglophone modernity.10 This is not to say that the unprecedented quantity and variety of Welsh history writing from the death of Thomas Price in 1848 to 1880—including general his­ tor­ies of Wales, biographical dictionaries, and histories of religion, literature, and particular periods and localities, including towns—should be understood only in those terms. Old works were republished and old ideas recycled; antiquarian studies and editions of sources continued to appear.11 Nevertheless, a significant number of Welsh history writers may be seen as responding, sometimes in sharply differing ways, to the needs of what was perceived, more acutely than ever before, to be a modern society. I begin with some general contextualization before addressing two broad themes: first, Romantic, including legendary, interpretations and their critics;

7 Clear echoes of the Blue Books’ condemnation of the Welsh language in Woodward, The History, 586–8. 8  Millward, ‘Cymhellion Cyhoeddwyr’, 70–2, 74–81; Hywel Teifi Edwards, Gŵyl Gwalia, 53–112, 133–44, 334–5, 348–52; Prys Morgan, ‘Early Victorian Wales’, 93–4, 102, 103, 105. As recent scholarship has emphasized, Wales saw nothing in this period comparable to the expanding reach and official status of native vernaculars achieved by national movements in central and eastern Europe from Estonia to Slovenia: Okey, ‘Wales and Eastern Europe’; Brooks, Why Wales Never Was, esp. ch. 2. 9  Ben Bowen Thomas, ‘The Cambrians’; Prys Morgan, ‘Early Victorian Wales’, 97–8; Löffler, ‘Failed Founding Fathers’. 10  Chapman, ‘The Turn of the Tide’, quotation at 510. For the mid-­n ineteenth century as a turning-point in the modernization of Wales see Philip Jenkins, A History of Modern Wales, 301–2; Prys Morgan, ‘Early Victorian Wales’; Chris Williams, ‘The Modern Age’. 11  For these works see Chapman, ‘The Turn of the Tide’, 506–7; Pryce, ‘Medieval Welsh History in the Victorian Age’, 10–14.

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‘ Living in the Past ’ , 1848–80  267 second, differing approaches to post-­ medieval history, all with a marked Nonconformist inflection.

The Present and the Past in Mid-­Victorian Wales Welsh history writing in this period took place in a context of rapid and multi­fa­ cet­ed change of which contemporaries were acutely aware.12 Mid-­Victorian Wales experienced continuing demographic growth and the industrialization that sustained it, most apparent in the increasing number and size of towns, in turn reflected in the production of an unprecedented quantity of histories of industrial settlements from the 1850s onwards.13 From 1851 to 1881 the population of Wales increased by over 400,000 to some 1.5 million, nearly half of which lived in the heavily industrialized south-­eastern counties of Glamorgan and Monmouthshire; these also boasted the five largest Welsh towns, including Swansea (over 76,000) and Cardiff (almost 83,000), though these differed significantly in both size and structure from the largest English towns such as Liverpool, whose population of about 550,000 included 20,000 born in Wales. By contrast, the population of predominantly rural counties such as Cardiganshire and Radnorshire remained unchanged or saw a modest decline.14 At the same time, the people of Wales were brought both closer together and into closer contact with England by a growing railway network that helped to drive economic developments as well as to facilitate cultural activities and contacts.15 Despite a geographically uneven pattern of economic development and population growth, Welsh cultural life, including the writing and publication of historical works, flourished across the principality, being sustained by ‘a revolution in printing technology’ and the concomitant expansion of print culture in numerous Welsh towns, by numerous literary and other voluntary societies that fostered cultural interests, and by local—and from 1861 peripatetic national—eisteddfodau.16 These factors, together with the continuing lack of a dominant metropolis and university institutions (until the foundation of the University College of Wales at Aberystwyth in 1872),17 help to explain why the study and writing of Welsh history remained primarily an

12  See e.g. Thomas Rees, Miscellaneous Papers, [v], 1–14; also the wide-­ranging survey of mid-­ Victorian Wales in Neil Evans, ‘Remaking Nations’. 13  O’Leary, ‘Town and Nation’, 216–22. 14 John Williams, Digest of Welsh Historical Statistics, 1: 7–24, 63–4; Ieuan Gwynedd Jones, Explorations, 222–3; Pooley, ‘The Residential Segregation’, 365–6. 15 Wallace, ‘Organise! Organise! Organise!’, 2–3; John Davies, A History of Wales (2007), 395–8. 16 Philip Henry Jones, ‘Printing and Publishing’, 329–36, quotation at 329; Philip Henry Jones, ‘Two Welsh Publishers’; Huw Walters, ‘The Periodical Press’, 203–5; Aled Jones, ‘The Newspaper Press in Wales’, esp. 211–13; O’Leary, Claiming the Streets, 79–82, 91, 93; Hywel Teifi Edwards, The Eisteddfod, 18–27. 17  J. Gwynn Williams, The University Movement, 41–62.

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268  WRITING WELSH HISTORY amateur enterprise within a broader pattern of cultural endeavour embracing a wide social spectrum in different parts of Wales. Much of this writing was in Welsh, still spoken by the vast majority of the million or so people in Wales at the beginning of this period, but by only just over half of the substantially larger population in 1891.18 Nonconformity provided a crucial additional unifying element, despite significant sectarian divisions, that embraced both town and country and asserted a new kind of Welsh distinctiveness predicated on a sharp divergence from the political and religious establishment, with the result, it was claimed, that ‘the Welsh are now the most religious people on earth’.19 A crucial catalyst for this change was the report published in 1847 by three English commissioners appointed by the government to investigate the state of education in Wales, whose criticisms of the Welsh language and especially of Welsh Nonconformity and morality created a furore, being condemned by both Anglicans and Nonconformists.20 However, the latter went further by castigating the reports as ‘the Treason of the Blue Books’ (W. Brad y Llyfrau Gleision), a deliberate echo of the ‘Treason of the Long Knives’ (W. Brad y Cyllyll Hirion), the legendary feast, evidently still widely known among the Welsh, that led to the Britons’ conquest by the Saxons, and thereby making the reports the focus of a highly con­tem­por­ary sense of grievance that newly emergent middle-­class Nonconformist leaders seized upon in order to try and encourage members of different Dissenting sects to identify themselves as Welsh Nonconformists and mobilize them into seeking recognition of their status as the religious majority in Wales through the disestablishment of the Church of England in the principality.21 Their cause was given statistical support by the religious census of 1851, which showed that more than four-­fifths of worshippers in Wales attended Nonconformist chapels (though about two-­thirds of the population did not attend any place of worship).22 In 1866 the elision of Nonconformity and nation seemed to be complete, when the campaigner for disestablishment, peace activist, and radical Liberal Henry Richard famously declared ‘that the Welsh are now a nation of Nonconformists’.23 Two years later Richard was elected as one of the two MPs for Merthyr Tydfil, the largest Welsh parliamentary borough following the Second Reform Act which 18  John Williams, Digest of Welsh Historical Statistics, 1: 78, 86. 19 E. T. Davies, Religion and Society, 35–46, 61–8; R. Tudur Jones, ‘Religion, Nationality and State’; R.  J.  W.  Evans, ‘Nonconformity and Nation’. Quotation: Michael  D.  Jones, Gwladychfa Gymreig, 12. Similar assertions in Thomas Stephens, ‘Sefyllfa Wareiddiol y Cymry’, 397–9; Prys Morgan, ‘Early Victorian Wales’, 96. 20  Brad y Llyfrau Gleision, ed. Morgan; Ieuan Gwynedd Jones, ‘1848 and 1868’; Gwyneth Tyson Roberts, The Language of the Blue Books; M. Wynn Thomas, In the Shadow of the Pulpit, 33. 21  Prys Morgan, ‘From Long Knives to Blue Books’. 22  Ieuan Gwynedd Jones, Explorations, 221, 227. 23 Richard, Letters, 2. See further Kenneth  O.  Morgan, ‘The Relevance of Henry Richard’; Gwyn Griffiths, Henry Richard, esp. 125–30; and, for Richard’s patriotic Nonconformist rhetoric, O’Leary, ‘The Languages of Patriotism’, 547–51.

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‘ Living in the Past ’ , 1848–80  269 had increased the town’s electorate tenfold.24 Invited to stand ‘as a Welshman, advanced Liberal, and Nonconformist’, Richard published an ‘Address to the Welsh People’ which included the charge that previous MPs representing Wales ‘felt no pride in your national history’.25 This political invocation of Welsh history as a badge of nationality was something new. Yet Richard’s view of that history was ambivalent, as it subordinated the long-­cherished medieval past to a narrative of Puritan and Nonconformist struggle against an alien Anglicanism, thereby providing ideological ammunition for disestablishment, a narrative given recent historiographical expression for a similar purpose by the Independent minister Thomas Rees.26 This is clear from the report of a speech Richard gave at Aberdare during the election campaign in which he declared that ‘for the last two hundred years the history of Wales has about it a moral significance and interest of a very rare kind’, as it consisted not of ‘military glory’ but of ‘men sent forth to do battle with ignorance, with superstition, with vice and corruption’, namely preachers and religious writers, including prominent Welsh Puritans and Methodists, whose names he listed before exclaiming: ‘These are the heroes of the Welsh people, and well may we be proud of them’.27 True, Richard acknowledged elsewhere that ‘[t]he traditions of their national history . . . telling of their ancient kings, druids and bards, of Arthur and Merlin . . . and Llewelyn “ein llyw olaf ” (our last prince)’ had helped to save the Welsh people from total ignorance during centuries of neglect by the Anglican Church. However, he was quick to add that the ‘stories, half fact and half fable . . . of the cruelty and perfidy of their Saxon and Norman oppressors . . . and others of similar import . . . or at least the evil feelings ac­com­ pany­ing them—have happily faded, or are fast fading out of the popular mind’.28 Richard strongly implied, then, that tales of victimhood in the distant past had no place in the new Nonconformist Wales he personified, while nevertheless acknowledging that such long-­ cherished understandings of Welsh history retained their appeal. I return to Nonconformist approaches to the past below, but Richard’s words—like those of Woodward, Arnold, and other outside commentators—also offer a significant glimpse of a public engagement with Welsh history in mid-­Victorian Wales whose multifaceted and sometimes contested nature is attested in an ever-­growing number of periodicals, newspapers, and other sources whose investigation lies outside the scope of the present discussion.29

24  Ieuan Gwynedd Jones, Explorations, 193–214, 313–16. 25  Ieuan Gwynedd Jones, Explorations, 200; Ieuan Gwynedd Jones, ‘1848 and 1868’, 165. 26  Thomas Rees, History of Protestant Nonconformity; Prys Morgan, ‘A Nation of Nonconformists’. 27  Merthyr Express, 14 November 1868, 2. Thanks to Bill Jones for drawing this report to my attention. 28 Richard, Letters, 33. 29  For aspects of this theme see Hywel Teifi Edwards, Gŵyl Gwalia, 9–10, 102–3, 110, 147–8, 159, 169–71, 179, 183, 229–33, 343, 384, 416, n. 104; Llinos Beverley Smith, ‘Llywelyn ap Gruffudd’, 24–6; Millward, ‘ “Cenedl o Bobl Ddewrion” ’. The ‘[l]ove of the Cambrians for the history of their ancestors’ was also highlighted by Nedelec, Cambria Sacra, xviii.

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270  WRITING WELSH HISTORY Nevertheless it is important to bear in mind that the history writing considered here belonged, and in significant measure responded, to a wider knowledge of and interest in the Welsh past. Publishers certainly recognized the continuing attraction of what may be termed traditional Welsh history and sought to exploit its commercial potential. The majority of new histories of Wales published in this period were popular works, reflecting a wider trend in history publishing in Britain.30 Those in Welsh formed part of wider efforts to provide Welsh-­speakers taught to read their mother tongue in Sunday schools with a range of appealing publications.31 These included fifteen lectures on the history of the Welsh from their origins to the nineteenth century by the Calvinist Methodist minister and prolific popularizing author Owen Jones (Meudwy Môn; 1806–89), which appeared in three editions between 1850 and 1861, and a summary of Welsh history down to the Edwardian conquest heavily indebted to Thomas Price by the Independent minister Thomas Davies (1820–73) of Llandeilo (Carmarthenshire).32 Four further editions of Theophilus Evans’s Drych y Prif Oesoedd (‘Mirror of the Primitive Ages’) were also issued between 1851 and 1865, all but the last by William Spurrell of Carmarthen, a well-­connected Anglican who published a wide range of informational and literary works in Welsh; significantly, the 1865 edition was justified on the grounds that Evans’s work was written far more clearly and engagingly than Thomas Price’s substantial Hanes Cymru (‘History of Wales’) and thus ‘much more useful to the people in general’.33 In 1862–4 the Liverpool writer and publisher Isaac Foulkes brought out Cymru Fu (‘The Wales that Was’), a mis­cel­lan­eous compilation of what today would be categorized as history, literature, and folklore, derived from both oral tradition ‘never printed before’ and ‘the works of famous authors’, in which legendary material appeared alongside modernized texts of medieval prose tales and biographies of several historical figures, including Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, Owain Glyndŵr, and Iolo Morganwg; Foulkes followed this with one of the first dictionaries of Welsh biography published in Welsh.34 Welsh publishers also brought out histories of Wales in English. Hugh Humphreys of Caernarfon, who published the third edition of Owen Jones’s lectures in 1861, also issued two editions of The British Kymry, or Britons of Cambria (1857) by the Anglican clergyman R.  W.  Morgan (‘Môr Meirion’; c.1815–89), 30  Cf. Howsam, Past into Print, 7–9, 18–20, 37–40. 31  Cf. Roger J. Williams, ‘Hanes Cyhoeddi y Gwyddoniadur’ (1973–4), 66–7. 32 Owen Jones, Darlithiau ar Hanes y Cymry; Owen Jones, Hanes Cenedl y Cymry; T.  Davies, Crynodeb o Hanes y Cymry. See also Wyn, Hanes y Cymry. 33  DPO (1740), [xxxvi]; Richard  E.  Huws, ‘Spurrell of Carmarthen’, 189–91; Rhys Gwesyn Jones, ‘Rhagdraeth’, xi (quotation). 34  “Cymru Fu:”, comp. Foulkes; Geirlyfr Bywgraffiadol, ed. Foulkes; Peter and Pryse, Enwogion y Ffydd. See further J.  E.  Lloyd, revd. Rhys, ‘Foulkes, Isaac’; Löffler, The Literary and Historical Legacy, 18–20.

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‘ Living in the Past ’ , 1848–80  271 which, like Jones’s book, covered the entire span of Welsh history, almost a third of it dealing with the period from the Edwardian conquest to the Crimean War.35 Its blend of Welsh exceptionalism based on historical fantasy and fervent loyalty to Great Britain and the monarchy seems to have struck a chord, as another edition was brought out by Isaac Clarke of Ruthin, followed by a Welsh translation of the work in 1858, also published in New York two years later.36 The antiquary and Celtic scholar Robert Williams (1810–81), an Oxford graduate and vicar of Llangadwaladr (Denbighshire), compiled the most substantial dictionary of Welsh biography to date (expanded from a prize-­winning eisteddfod essay in 1831), its detailed entries extending from mythological figures named in medi­ eval Welsh literature to Aneurin Owen, the editor of the medieval Welsh laws who had died in July 1851.37 This was published in association with Longman & Co. of London by the printer and publisher William Rees (1808–73) of Llandovery whose high-­quality work included Charlotte Guest’s Mabinogion (1838–49) and the volumes of the Welsh Manuscript Society.38 Another joint venture between English and Welsh publishers was T. J. Llewelyn Prichard’s The Heroines of Welsh History (1854), the first book focused on the role of women in the history of Wales, though a great deal of it is in fact about men. The work’s eclectic assortment of romanticized biographies ranged from medieval princesses to modern actresses, but omitted Prichard’s erstwhile patron Lady Llanover, with whom he had fallen out, quite possibly because she objected to his hostile attitude towards the Welsh language.39 Welsh Sketches (1851–3) by Ernest Sylvanus Appleyard, an Anglican clergyman in England, was brought out by the London publisher James Darling and contained a large body of historical material focused on the ancient and medieval past, beginning with three chapters on bardism strongly indebted to Iolo Morganwg, other topics including the marcher lords, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, Owain Glyndŵr, and the Welsh Church.40 The work attracted readers in Wales, one of whom praised its ‘three cheap volumes’ as providing ‘a splendid outline of the events of our fathers for many a long period’.41 As we have seen, Woodward’s History of Wales was also published in London, and the same was true of the two other major syntheses produced in this period, discussed below:

35 R.  W.  Morgan, The British Kymry. See further Peter Freeman, ‘The Revd Richard Williams Morgan’; R. J. W. Evans, ‘National Historiography, 1850–1950’, 32. 36 R. W. Morgan, Hanes yr Hen Gymry. 37  Robert Williams, Enwogion Cymru; D. L. Thomas, revd. Beti Jones, ‘Williams, Robert’. 38  Selwyn Jones, ‘Rees, William’. 39 Prichard, The Heroines. Prichard had previously published poetry on aspects of medieval Welsh history as well as a historical novel, The Adventures and Vagaries of Twm Shôn Catti (1828), set in the early seventeenth century: Adams, Thomas Jeffery Llewelyn Prichard (discussion of The Heroines at 45–9, 90–3); Johns, Gender, Nation and Conquest, 166–9. 40 Appleyard, Welsh Sketches. 41  S. Llwyd, Review of Morgan, British Kymry, 27.

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272  WRITING WELSH HISTORY Jane Williams’s 1869 History of Wales and R.  J.  Pryse’s Hanes y Brytaniaid a’r Cymry (‘The History of the Britons and Welsh’, 1872–4).42 Though their approaches differed, Appleyard and Woodward exemplify a continuing interest in Welsh history among the English. That history also attracted the attention of some French, German, and Swiss authors. The Welsh were treated sympathetically by Augustin Thierry, as we shall see below, and featured in the racialized Romantic Celticism that remained influential into the 1860s, as shown by the debt of Matthew Arnold’s lectures On the Study of Celtic Literature to Ernest Renan’s 1854 essay ‘La poèsie des races celtiques’ (‘The Poetry of the Celtic Races’), although the publication of Johann Kaspar Zeuss’s Grammatica Celtica in 1853 heralded more critical approaches also promoted by the Revue Celtique established in Paris in 1870.43 A wider comparative perspective was adopted by the German legal historian Ferdinand Walter in his substantial volume Das alte Wales (‘Ancient Wales’; 1859), which drew on earlier histories of Wales by Powel and Warrington as well as on Zeuss and a range of literary and historical sources, including Aneurin Owen’s edition of the Welsh laws, sources he thought cast unique light on early European law.44 Nevertheless outside the principality interest in Welsh history was exceptional. In particular, Wales attracted scant notice in histories of its English neighbour: Macaulay treated Wales as ‘totally assimilated to England’ while Stubbs welcomed Edward I’s conquest as bringing ‘the day of account’ to the quarrelsome Welsh.45 Although the latest in a long litany going back to the Elizabethan period, Welsh writers’ complaints that the history of Wales was largely ignored or marginalized by foreign historians cannot be dismissed as mere rhetorical posturing.46 Concern was also expressed that too little was known of Welsh history in Wales itself.47 As in previous periods, much of the writing discussed in this chapter responded in varying degrees to perceived misrepresentation and neglect. It may therefore be seen as a reiteration of Welsh distinctiveness that signalled pride and defiance. Yet there is also a defensive tone to some mid-­Victorian Welsh history writing that reflected a wider unease about Wales’s place in the world, especially in relation to England. Thus a sense that the Welsh had let themselves down by being ‘far behind the English’ in relating the history of their famous people led several writers to publish biographical dictionaries, enterprises also influenced by ­

42  Jane Williams, A History of Wales; HBC. 43  Cf. O’Leary, Ffrainc a Chymru, 26–31; Charles-­Edwards, ‘The Lure of Celtic Languages’, 15–35; Mattar, Primitivism, Science, and the Irish Revival, 21–31. 44 Walter, Das alte Wales; Krause, ‘Ferdinand Walter’. 45  Catherine Hall, Macaulay and Son, 290; Stubbs, The Constitutional History of England, 2: 117–18. 46  Samuel Jenkins, Letters on Welsh History, 6; Derfel, ‘Cymru yn ei Chysylltiad ag Enwogion’, 337, 339; Anon., ‘Ein Hynafiaid’, 5–8; “Cymru Fu:”, comp. Foulkes, 115; Anon., Review of HBC, Y Beirniad, 380. 47 Prichard, The Heroines, viii; Derfel, ‘Cymru yn ei Chysylltiad ag Enwogion’, 328–9, 338–9.

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‘ Living in the Past ’ , 1848–80  273 Thomas Carlyle’s emphasis on ‘Great Men’ as the principal makers of history.48 Similar concerns impelled the criticism of Romantic legendary history discussed in the next section.

Legend and History That history should be distinguished from legend was widely accepted; disagreement arose over where to draw the boundary between them. Writers of this period thus offered differing and complex responses to the question of how Welsh history should be written, coloured in part by different understandings of patriotism. All, however, felt it incumbent to address the issue of their sources’ authenticity. Some, notably Thomas Stephens and R. J. Pryse (Gweirydd ap Rhys), took a sharply critical line, considered in the final part of this section. By contrast, R.  W.  Morgan as well as his fellow Tractarian and devotee of bardism John Williams (Ab Ithel; 1811–62)—widely respected as a scholar by many, though by no means all, of his educated contemporaries—fought what may appear in retrospect to be a rearguard action but in fact gave voice to understandings of the past still widely held amongst the Welsh. On a narrower front, Welsh triads were cited as more reliable evidence for early British Christianity than the legends of ‘Catholic monks’; by contrast, a Breton Roman Catholic priest in Cardiff claimed to have done much greater justice to that Christianity than Protestant writers because, unlike the latter, his work was based on ‘the science of the saints’ that allowed judicious use of monastic hagiography.49 Other writers, somewhat like Thomas Price in the previous generation, felt a duty to include legendary accounts while declining to vouchsafe their authenticity and offering alternative in­ter­pret­ ations alongside them. Thus Isaac Foulkes supplied his readers with a range of sources concerning the legend of Cantref y Gwaelod, the drowned kingdom off the Cardiganshire coast, together with contrasting assessments of its credibility, though he made his own scepticism clear and urged his compatriots to foster scientific advances by nurturing geologists capable of investigating such phenomena. Foulkes was similarly aware of the challenge of resolving differing interpretations in his biographical dictionary, acknowledging, for example, both the importance of distinguishing the Arthur of history from the Arthur of romance and the difficulty of ‘disentangling fact from fiction’.50

48  Josiah Thomas Jones, Geiriadur Bywgraffyddol, quotation at 1: [iii]; Geirlyfr Bywgraffiadol, ed. Foulkes; Peter and Pryse, Enwogion y Ffydd (Carlyle quoted approvingly in ‘Rhagymadrodd’, [i]). See also Derfel, ‘Cymru yn ei Chysylltiad ag Enwogion’; Owen Jones, Hanes Cenedl y Cymry, 325–50; D. Charles Davies, ‘Hanesiaeth’, 461; Hywel Teifi Edwards, ‘ “Gosodir Ni yn Îs na Phawb” ’. 49  John Hughes, Methodistiaeth Cymru, 1: [1]; Nedelec, Cambria Sacra, ix–xxix, quotation at ix. 50  “Cymru Fu:”, comp. Foulkes, 7–11; Geirlyfr Bywgraffiadol, ed. Foulkes, 29–41, quotation at 29.

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274  WRITING WELSH HISTORY A striking instance of leaving readers to judge between competing in­ter­pret­ations appears in the revised edition of Titus Lewis’s history of Great Britain (1857), in which the credulous and the critical rub shoulders within the same covers, as the preface by the antiquary Owen Williams tracing Welsh origins to Brutus and thence Gomer was immediately challenged by the work’s editor in the first chapter.51 The entry for the Druids in the encyclopaedia Y Gwyddoniadur Cymreig explicitly recognized the strength of conflicting opinions through its division into two sections, ‘The Old Views’ and ‘New Interpretations’, the former deeply indebted to Iolo Morganwg, the latter highly critical of bardic in­ter­pret­ations deriving from Iolo.52 The second article, by the Baptist minister William Roberts (Nefydd; 1813–72), provoked the ire of Ab Ithel, who ridiculed it as both un­crit­ic­al and unpatriotic, portraying Roberts as belonging to a recently established ‘school’ that aimed ‘to depreciate everything of a national character’ by throwing doubt on the authenticity of native sources.53 In privileging the testimony of such sources Ab Ithel echoed arguments by defenders of legendary history since Humphrey Llwyd and Sir John Prise, and like them he took his challenge to the terrain of his opponent by invoking principles of textual criticism in order to defend the antiquity of texts such as the ‘historical triads’ attributed to Dyfnwal Moelmud, but now known to have been concocted by Iolo Morganwg, and to point out illogicalities in Roberts’s arguments. This reaction was hardly surprising, since the review appeared in The Cambrian Journal, founded by Williams in 1854 after his break with the Cambrian Archaeological Association as a vehicle for Iolo’s ideas, to which he was ardently devoted as also shown by his unpublished history of Wales from Gomer to the death of Llywelyn in 1282.54 This approach was taken further by R. W. Morgan, who opened his British Kymry with chapters on the ‘Gomeric’ and ‘Trojan’ eras and connected these with his own day, providing a genealogy of the ‘royal line of Britain, from Gomer and Brutus, or Prydain, to Queen Victoria’ and concluding with the landing ‘of a Chief of Kymric blood, Lord Raglan . . . on the shore of the Crimea, the eastern cradle of the Gomeric race, whence above 3600 years before its forefathers had emigrated under Hu Gadarn and colonized Britain’.55 Differing responses to Morgan’s book point up how a writer’s authority was defined with reference to critical attributes, one reviewer praising Morgan’s 51  Titus Lewis, Hanes Prydain Fawr, revd. Jones, 1–11. 52  Roger Jones Williams, ‘Hanes Cyhoeddi Y Gwyddoniadur’ (1967), 150–1. By contrast, the article published on Druids in 1855 in The Encyclopædia Britannica, vol. 8, 183–90, is based largely on clas­ sic­al sources. 53  John Williams, Review of ‘Druidism’, quotation at 231. Similar rebuttal of ‘the sceptic school’ in R. W. Morgan, The British Kymry, iv. 54  Ab Ithel, ‘History of Wales’, NLW MS 17178E. See also John Williams Ab Ithel, The Traditionary Annals of the Kymry (first published in Cambrian Journal, 1–4 (1854–7)); Kenward, Ab Ithel; G.  J.  Jones, ‘John Williams Ab Ithel’; Löffler, The Literary and Historical Legacy, 55–8, 81–4, 88, 91–2, 165–72. 55 R.  W.  Morgan, The British Kymry, 9–59, 300. Descent from Gomer also defended in Josiah Thomas Jones, Geiriadur Bywgraffyddol, 1: vi–viii. Another work emphasizing the ancient eastern

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‘ Living in the Past ’ , 1848–80  275 ‘deep, penetrating mind’ and ‘critical temperament’ while Ab Ithel’s biographer condemned Morgan’s ‘historical fictions’ and contrasted them with his subject’s ‘varied and valuable researches’—which others in turn deemed irredeemably fanciful.56 Writers committed to purging Welsh history of legend nevertheless did so in different ways. Consider  B.  B.  Woodward, introduced at the beginning of this chapter, and Jane Williams (1806–85), authors of the two most important English-­ language histories of Wales produced in this period, aimed primarily at an English readership. Williams was the first woman to publish a general account of Welsh history. A versatile writer, her 500-­page History of Wales Derived from Authentic Sources (1869), mostly focused on the period from the Romans to Henry VII’s accession in 1485, was the latest in a series of publications since 1824 that included poetry, a devastating critique of the 1847 Blue Books, a memoir of Thomas Price (Carnhuanawc), a ghost-­written ‘autobiography’ of Elizabeth Davis (better known as Betsi Cadwaladr), a nurse in the Crimean War, and a history of female poets. A single middle-­class woman and staunchly anti-­Catholic Anglican, Williams spent the greater part of her life in Chelsea, where she was born to a Welsh father and English mother, but lived in Breconshire from about 1820 to 1855 and learned Welsh. Enjoying modest financial independence following a legacy in 1845, she also became a protegee of Lady Augusta Hall (later Lady Llanover) and thus a member of the Llanover circle of Welsh cultural patriots.57 This background explains why Williams adopted a patriotic stance in her History that contrasted with Woodward’s emphasis on the benefits of Wales’s conquest by the English. She also differed from Woodward by advertising her critical credentials in her title’s emphasis on ‘authentic sources’ and her frequent footnote references, choices perhaps intended to place beyond doubt her qualifications as a pioneering female writer in her field, and a writer bearing a Welsh bardic name (Ysgafell) at that. Her book’s authoritative status was reinforced, moreover, by its appearance under the imprint of Longmans, a major publisher of history.58 Woodward, on the other hand, played down his commitment to critical scholarship, describing his History as ‘a popular work’ and dispensing with footnote references, and published with Virtue & Co., a specialist in illustrated books that supplied seventy-­six plates, features that no doubt contributed to its enjoying

origins of the Welsh and indebted to Iolo’s bardism was John Jones Thomas, Britannia Antiquissima. See also the discussion of Welsh-­American history below. 56  S. Llwyd, Review of Morgan, The British Kymry, 27; Kenward, Ab Ithel, 25; Ben Bowen Thomas, ‘The Cambrians’, 4–5; The Correspondence of Thomas Stephens, ed. Coward, 178. 57  Gwyneth Tyson Roberts, Jane Williams, with discussion of A History of Wales at 94–104. See also Gwyneth Tyson Roberts, ‘ “An Account Obtained from Authentic Documents” ’; Neil Evans, ‘Finding a New Story’, 146–9. 58 See the list of titles advertised at the back of Williams’s volume. Cf. Briggs, A History of Longmans, 241–3, 270–1, 317–20.

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276  WRITING WELSH HISTORY greater commercial success than Williams’s volume.59 Yet for all his popularizing ambitions, Woodward left his readers in no doubt of his commitment to rigorous source criticism, presenting his work as an attempt to take account of the revolution in historical scholarship since Warrington had published the last ‘English History of Wales’ in the late eighteenth century, especially the unprecedented ‘discrimination between History and Legend’.60 Moreover, he had secured the help of several Welsh scholars, including W. Basil Jones and Robert Williams, as well as the book’s dedicatee, the barrister and bibliophile Enoch Salisbury.61 Although both Woodward and Williams, like other historians of their time elsewhere, combined critical rigour with a Romantic sensibility, and also resembled each other in devoting much less space than Price to the pre-­Roman period with its fertile terrain for legendary interpretations, the differences between them are more striking than the similarities. Above all, Woodward was generally more critical than Williams both in his treatment of sources and in his overall in­ter­ pret­ation. When it came to the antiquity of the Welsh, both, it is true, deployed what Woodward called the ‘newly created science of Ethnology’.62 However, he followed his discussion of this with a chapter on ‘Legendary Britain’ that sum­ mar­ized the testimony of Geoffrey of Monmouth and the triads and concluded that their stories, while not ‘veritable history’, were of great literary value, having ‘furnished . . . noble materials’ for Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, a view prefiguring Matthew Arnold’s arguments on the beneficial contribution of ‘Celtic’ writing to English literature.63 Williams, on the other hand, passed over Geoffrey’s History in one sentence, noting that it ‘has proved a vast storehouse of romantic fiction’ albeit possibly yielding ‘some valuable facts’ about ‘the Saxon Conquest’, and was more sensitive to the literary qualities of medieval Welsh poets than Woodward, who preferred to stress their unreliability as historical sources (and was highly sceptical of Iolo Morganwg’s bardism).64 She also made greater use of English literature, prefacing her chapters with lines from poets and playwrights from Shakespeare and Spenser to Wordsworth and Elizabeth Barrett Browning presumably intended to persuade readers that her narrative illustrated universal themes. After a short chapter dealing briskly with ‘The Cymry of Ancient Britain’ that drew mainly on classical writers and devoted much of its discussion to the Druids, Williams moved on to what she evidently believed to be the much safer ground of the Roman period (though she held that druidical beliefs made brief

59  Cf. Neil Evans, ‘Finding a New Story’, 148. A second edition of Woodward’s volume appeared in 1859. 60 Woodward, The History of Wales, [iv] (quotation), and cf. 580. 61 Woodward, The History of Wales, [iii], vi. Salisbury amassed a huge library of books by Welsh authors and relating to Wales: Nicholson, revd. Jones, ‘Salisbury, Enoch Robert Gibbon’. 62 Woodward, The History of Wales, 20–1, 25. 63 Woodward, The History of Wales, 48. 64  Jane Williams, A History of Wales, 233, 244 (quotations), 256–7, 264–5, 417; Woodward, The History of Wales, v, 352, 486, 522–55.

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‘ Living in the Past ’ , 1848–80  277 come-­backs later).65 The bulk of the work then offers a largely chronological narrative of the relations of ‘the Cymry’ with the ‘Saxons’, ‘Normans’, ‘Anglo-­ Normans’, and ‘Plantagenet Princes’, a conventional emphasis on conflict with foreign conquerors leading to a no less conventional resolution in a final chapter on ‘The Tudor Dynasty’. Although Williams was much more critical of the 1536 Act of Union than many historians of Wales (including Woodward), declaring that its treatment of the Welsh language was a ‘lamentable mistake’ that ‘counteracted all its beneficial provisions’, she welcomed Henry VIII’s break with Rome and Elizabeth I’s authorizing of the Welsh translation of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, sentiments in keeping with the earlier condemnation of Rome’s hostility to ‘the independence of the ancient British Church’.66 Williams was thus able to assure her readers that all had turned out for the best, as ‘[u]nder the influence of gentler and more equitable treatment than the nation ever experienced before the accession of their Henry [VII], and under the divine power of scriptural truth, Wales has gradually become a land of peace, to which bloodshed, with heinous crime in every form, is now almost unknown’—a conclusion that reflected widespread idealizations of the Welsh as singularly law-­abiding.67 However, the two writers who became most notorious in this period for their determination to disentangle history and legend were R. J. Pryse (Gweirydd ap Rhys; 1807–89) and his younger contemporary Thomas Stephens (1821–75), both largely self-­ educated, Nonconformist, and lower middle-­ class scholars who brought fresh approaches to the interpretation of the Welsh past; indeed, Stephens has been fairly described as ‘[a]rguably . . . Wales’s first modern, scientific, as opposed to romantic, historian’.68 An assessment of their work thus provides a fitting conclusion to this section. Like Thomas Price (Carnhuanawc), both men came to the study of Welsh history from an interest in the Welsh language and Welsh literature, and their reputations in these fields led to their being commissioned at the Llangollen eisteddfod of 1858 to reform Welsh orthography.69 Both submitted essays on the history of Wales to the Rhuddlan eisteddfod of 1850 and two decades later Pryse unsuccessfully tried to persuade Stephens, whose critical treatment of Welsh sources he greatly admired, to contribute to his Hanes y Brytaniaid a’r Cymry (‘History of the Britons and the Welsh’).70 Both resembled 65  Jane Williams, A History of Wales, 1–16, 225–6, 479; cf. Woodward, The History of Wales, 533–6. 66  Jane Williams, A History of Wales, 206, 481–3, 490–3, quotations at 483. Cf. Woodward, The History of Wales, 516–17, 576–7, 587. 67  Jane Williams, A History of Wales, 495. The idealization was only partly accurate, being most applicable to serious crime which fell significantly from the 1860s, especially in rural areas, whereas the rate of petty crime increased: David J. V. Jones, Crime in Nineteenth-­Century Wales, ch. 2. 68 Stephen  J.  Williams, ‘Thomas Stephens a Gweirydd ap Rhys’; Correspondence of Thomas Stephens, ed. Coward, ix (quotation). 69  Pryse and Stephens, Orgraph yr Iaith Gymraeg. 70  HBC, 1: [iii]; Löffler, ‘Failed Founding Fathers’, 72­–3; NLW MS 965E, no. 258, R.  J.  Pryse to Thomas Stephens, November 1869, in ‘Transcripts of Letters to Thomas Stephens’; cf. B. T. Williams, ‘The Life of Thomas Stephens’, xliv, xlvi.

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278  WRITING WELSH HISTORY many other Welsh literati of the time in their acceptance of Wales’s political ­integration with England as part of Great Britain and its empire, symbolized by their professions of loyalty to Queen Victoria and other members of the royal family, while espousing pride in the achievements of the Welsh and upholding their en­title­ment to respect as a distinctive people.71 However, there were also significant differences between the two men. With his successful business as a pharmacist in the industrial town of Merthyr Tydfil in south Wales, which gave him the resources to travel to the Continent and Ireland, Stephens was better off and enjoyed higher social status than Pryse, who had a more chequered career, spent in the countryside and small towns of north Wales, where he endured great poverty in his youth and also sometimes in later life. Stephens was readier to write in English as part of his mission to bring Welsh culture to the attention of scholars beyond Wales, with whom he conducted an extensive correspondence, whereas Pryse, while compiling dictionaries to help his compatriots learn English, gave priority to editing and writing works in Welsh. I begin with Stephens since his main works were composed before Pryse’s.

Thomas Stephens Born in the village of Pontneddfechan (Glamorgan) to a boot-­maker and the daughter of a weaver and Unitarian minister, and educated at a school in Neath run by a Unitarian headmaster, Stephens spent his adult life in Merthyr Tydfil, whose burgeoning conglomeration of iron works made it the largest town in Wales, its population growing from about 22,000 to over 50,000 between 1831 and 1871, largely thanks to continued migration from rural counties of the principality until the late 1840s, after which the pattern was reversed as economic decline led to mass out-­migration from the town.72 Stephens arrived in Merthyr aged fourteen in 1835 as an apprentice to a pharmacist whose business he took over six years later, and became a prominent member of the town’s small but influential reforming middle class, many of whom were fellow Unitarians. He shared the commitment to social improvement of both his denomination and utilitarian thinkers such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, playing a leading part in efforts to provide educational and social amenities for Merthyr, including a subscription library he helped to establish in 1846 with Sir Josiah John Guest, manager of the Dowlais iron works and the town’s MP (1832–52), and the local health board set up in 1850 to try and deal with the high mortality rates resulting 71  Thomas Stephens, ‘Sefyllfa Wareiddiol’, 230, 392–4, 394–7, and discussion below. 72  B.  T.  Williams, ‘The Life of Thomas Stephens’; Margaret Stewart Taylor, ‘Thomas Stephens of Merthyr’; Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Welsh Scholarship at Merthyr Tydfil’, 57–61; Löffler, ‘Stephens, Thomas’; Löffler, ‘Failed Founding Fathers’, esp. 70–6; Correspondence of Thomas Stephens, ed. Coward; Bill Jones, ‘Inspecting the “Extraordinary Drain” ’; John Williams, Digest of Welsh Historical Statistics, 1: 63.

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‘ Living in the Past ’ , 1848–80  279 from Merthyr’s woefully inadequate sanitation.73 Stephens was also a close friend of the next MP (1852–68), Henry Austin Bruce (first Baron Aberdare; 1815–95), with whom he shared a strong interest in education.74 Indeed, his first biographer declared that ‘[e]ducation was Stephens’s idea of all reform’.75 As these connections suggest, Stephens regarded civic reform as a paternalistic enterprise best achieved through middle-­class co-­operation with the iron masters, and supported neither Chartism—an influential presence in Merthyr into the 1850s and 1860s— nor the radical Liberalism of Henry Richard, whose defeat of Bruce in the 1868 parliamentary election, together with increasing ill health, led Stephens to withdraw from public life.76 Stephens’s commitment to social and educational progress also embraced understandings of the Welsh past. In part, as has often been noted, this was a matter of debunking Romantic interpretations promoted by Ab Ithel and others by subjecting them to critical, ‘scientific’ interrogation. As Stephens put it in 1850, The time is now approaching when the History of Wales may be written in a manner worthy of the subject. Long has the theme been disfigured by the imprudent zeal of my countrymen themselves, and sneered at by those who judged the whole mass by that which was manifestly exaggerated; but we may now hope to see it rescued from the hands of both, by the philosophic criticism which now prevails in other countries; and which by carefully distinguishing between the false and the true, will enable us to abandon our errors, and give a satisfactory reason for the faith we hold.77

However, demolition went hand in hand with rebuilding as Stephens offered an alternative vision of Welsh history’s significance that privileged cultural and intellectual achievements as fitting examples for the enlightened Wales to which he aspired, an approach informed by his belief in ‘the usefulness of historical knowledge’ because it demonstrated human progress and allowed people to learn from the achievements and mistakes of their ancestors.78 Much of his writing consisted of essays submitted to eisteddfod competitions on a range of historical and literary topics. His earliest success came at the Liverpool eisteddfod in 1840 when he 73  England, ‘Unitarians, Freemasons, Chartists’, esp. 46–9, 57. See also England, The Crucible of Modern Wales, chs. 13–15; Raymond  K.  J.  Grant, ‘Merthyr Tydfil’. Cf. the reforming initiatives of middle-­class Unitarians in Manchester: Seed, ‘Unitarianism, Political Economy and the Antinomies of Liberal Culture’. 74  B. T. Williams, ‘The Life of Thomas Stephens’, xxxii–xxxiii; cf. Cragoe, ‘Bruce, Henry Austin’. 75  B. T. Williams, ‘The Life of Thomas Stephens’, xxiv. 76 B.  T.  Williams, ‘The Life of Thomas Stephens’, xliv, xlv–xlvi; Brynley  F.  Roberts, ‘Welsh Scholarship at Merthyr Tydfil’, 58; England, Crucible of Modern Wales, 131–42, 217–21; cf. O’Leary, Claiming the Streets, 59–64. For Stephens’s radicalism see Coward, ‘English Anglers’. 77  Cited in Löffler, ‘Failed Founding Fathers’, 73. Similar statement in Thomas Stephens, ‘The Book of Aberpergwm’, 77. 78  Thomas Stephens, ‘Darlith’.

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280  WRITING WELSH HISTORY won the prize for an essay on the eleventh-­century Glamorgan lord Iestyn ap Gwrgant, and he continued to compete regularly over the following two decades. This may seem surprising, since, aged twenty-­one, Stephens published a series of letters in the Welsh press harshly critical of the eisteddfod organized in 1842 by the Abergavenny Cymreigyddion Society, ‘the most stultified body of men in existence’.79 With regard to Welsh history, Stephens questioned ‘the benefits which the Welshmen of the present age have derived from having the military exploits and butchering propensities of their ancestors recorded to them’.80 He went further still by taking sarcastic aim at the hostility provoked if any writer attempt to expose . . . the collective folly of two thousand years, which has been handed down to us by our forefathers, whose prejudices we, in duty bound, cherish; if any writer dare to assert that the manners of our savage, barbarous ancestors . . . are not of the wisest, most humane, and dignified character; if any one hint that that portion of the human family who inhabit the mountains of Wales, whose ancestral descent can be traced some forty millions of years before the creation of the world . . . are not the noblest, wisest, and best of men . . .81

It would be preferable, he added, if eisteddfod competitions encouraged work on periods of Welsh history after the Edwardian conquest rather than succouring such self-­deluding idealization of the distant past.82 True, Stephens’s success in such competitions ceased after the organizers of the Llangollen eisteddfod of 1858 refused to approve the adjudicators’ award of the prize for his essay on Prince Madog’s discovery of America because it in­con­veni­ ent­ly argued that the discovery had never taken place (the essay was eventually published posthumously).83 A subsequent essay on ‘The Origin of the English Nation’ submitted to the Chester eisteddfod of 1866 was also harshly criticized by the adjudicator Viscount Strangford.84 That Stephens continued to compete in eisteddfodau despite his reservations suggests that he found them a useful stimulus for his work and accepted their role in conferring cultural recognition and prestige. It was only when the organizers of the Llangollen eisteddfod took exception to his critical approach that he largely lost patience, mainly concentrating thereafter on writing essays for Welsh- and English-­language periodicals, which had already played an important part in disseminating his work. Moreover, while

79  Löffler (with Rhys), ‘Thomas Stephens’, quotation at 413. 80  Löffler (with Rhys), ‘Thomas Stephens’, 406. 81  Löffler (with Rhys), ‘Thomas Stephens’, 431. 82  Löffler (with Rhys), ‘Thomas Stephens’, 408–9, 429; cf. Thomas Stephens, ‘Darlith’, 76. 83  Thomas Stephens, Madoc. See also G. J. Williams, ‘Eisteddfod Llangollen’. 84  ‘File NLW MS 907C—“The Origin of the English Nation” ’. Thanks to Marion Löffler for drawing this essay and the adjudication to my attention.

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‘ Living in the Past ’ , 1848–80  281 keen to present himself as promoting ‘the daring spirit of modern criticism’,85 his response to conventional understandings of the Welsh past was more measured than some of his rhetorical outbursts might suggest. For one thing, there were limits to his critical treatment of sources. Stephens believed that parts of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History were genuine and, while maintaining that a chronicle extant only in manuscripts written by Iolo Morganwg belonged to the sixteenth century rather than, as purported, to the twelfth, he (mistakenly) accepted the text as authentic and never suggested that Iolo had forged it; he came to a similar conclusion regarding Iolo’s ‘Third Series’ of triads.86 Stephens also tried to take a balanced view of Thomas Price’s Hanes Cymru, relying on it heavily and once describing its author as ‘[t]he most careful of Welsh historians’ while also criticizing the work’s weaknesses and describing Price’s younger contemporary Rice Rees as ‘the only historical critic bred in Wales’.87 In terms of subject matter, Stephens took opportunities not only to write about post-­medieval developments but also to reappraise the ancient and medieval era ending with the death of Llywelyn in 1282. For example, at the Rhuddlan eisteddfod in 1850 he won prizes for essays on ‘A Biographical Account of Eminent Welshmen since the Accession of the House of Tudor’ and ‘The Advantages of a Resident Gentry’ as well as ‘A Summary of the History of Wales from the Earliest Period to The Present Time’.88 The latter conformed, moreover, with prevailing expectations by devoting almost 90 per cent of its coverage to the period before the Edwardian conquest, by praising medieval princes for their military and political achievements, and by emphasizing the loyalty of the Welsh to the crown since their union with England under Henry VIII.89 Nevertheless, it was criticized for ignoring both the ‘many im­port­ ant contributions by Welshmen to the general welfare of the British Empire’ and ‘our own national traditions in order to admit the speculative theories of philologists’, and, like all but one of his eisteddfod essays, failed to find patronage for its publication in his lifetime.90 The one exception was Stephens’s widely acclaimed The Literature of the Kymry (1849). It was in this work, then, that his re-­evaluation of Welsh history from the perspective of a utilitarian social reformer gained its most influential expression. A study of medieval Welsh literature, especially poetry, from the twelfth to mid-­ fourteenth centuries based on a prize-­winning eisteddfod essay on the subject at

85  Thomas Stephens, The Literature of the Kymry, 207. 86 Thomas Stephens, The Literature of the Kymry, 307–22; Thomas Stephens, ‘The Book of Aberpergwm’; Havard Walters, ‘The Literature of the Kymry’, 232–3, 238; Bromwich, Trioedd Ynys Prydain in Welsh Literature, 34–42; Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Welsh Scholarship at Merthyr Tydfil’, 60. 87  NLW MS 938B (Thomas Stephens, ‘The History of Wales’), p. [164]; Löffler (with Rhys), ‘Thomas Stephens’, 407; Thomas Stephens, ‘Sefyllfa Wareiddiol’, 298. 88  B. T. Williams, ‘The Life of Thomas Stephens’, xxvii. 89  NLW MS 938B (Thomas Stephens, ‘The History of Wales’), pp. [292], 340, [408–9]. Cf. Thomas Stephens, The Literature of the Kymry, 127, 280, 408. 90  Löffler, ‘Failed Founding Fathers’, 73.

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282  WRITING WELSH HISTORY Abergavenny the previous year, this was published thanks to the financial support of Sir John Guest, and was dedicated to the Prince of Wales whose three feathers were embossed on its cover.91 Articulating broader anxieties among Welsh lit­er­ ati, especially in the wake of the unflattering depiction of the Welsh in the 1847 Blue Books, the volume was ‘more particularly directed to English readers’ in order to persuade them of ‘the just claims of the Principality’ and ensure that ‘the English people . . . may no longer be ignorant of our real literary worth’.92 In this regard its success surpassed expectations, as the work brought Stephens into contact not only with English but also with Irish and continental scholars, and was translated into German.93 Yet, while rightly regarded as a pioneering work of Welsh literary history, its significance was greater than that description may suggest. In part, this was because Stephens set the literary texts he discussed against a fairly conventional historical background derived from standard histories of Wales, especially Price’s Hanes Cymru, and, more importantly, followed the ex­ample of previous Welsh antiquaries and scholars by arguing that literature itself could provide valuable historical evidence.94 What was new, though, was his purpose in deploying that evidence, namely to survey ‘all manifestations of the Cambrian intellect’.95 Writing of the twelfth-­ century poet Cynddelw Brydydd Mawr, Stephens emphasized his ‘vigour of thought, independence of mind, and pro­ fund­ity of reasoning’, adding that ‘this seems to be characteristic of the bards; for we not infrequently find very original ideas in their poems; and their theo­logic­al notions soar far above the dark and bigoted age in which they lived’.96 Yet poets did not live in isolation from wider Welsh society. To begin with, in what could be seen as a kind of sociology of culture avant la lettre, Stephens emphasized their social role and influence as an order with its own regulations.97 Furthermore, the nurturing of literary talent had been facilitated by ‘the dignified sway of the brilliant series of North Welsh kings’ from Gruffudd ap Cynan (d. 1137) to Llywelyn ap Gruffudd (d. 1282), rulers distinguished by their mental as well as martial attributes, Llywelyn being singled out as ‘a man of great intelligence, and ability’ whose correspondence with the archbishop of Canterbury ‘must give all who read it an exalted conception of his mental capacity’.98 The emphasis on ‘the Cambrian intellect’ was reinforced by a comparative approach that built on Thomas Price’s insistence on stressing the special contribution

91  Thomas Stephens, The Literature of the Kymry, vi. 92  Thomas Stephens, The Literature of the Kymry, vi, vii–viii (quotations). 93  Thomas Stephens, Geschichte der wälschen Literatur; Correspondence of Thomas Stephens, ed. Coward, xxi–xxvi et passim; Walter, Das alte Wales, xii, 16; B.  T.  Williams, ‘The Life of Thomas Stephens’, xxv, xxvii. 94  E.g., Thomas Stephens, The Literature of the Kymry, 35–6, 231–3. 95  Thomas Stephens, The Literature of the Kymry, vi. 96  Thomas Stephens, The Literature of the Kymry, 129. 97  Thomas Stephens, The Literature of the Kymry, 94–128. Cf. Raymond Williams, Culture, 36–8, 57–8. 98  Thomas Stephens, The Literature of the Kymry, 293, 341–2.

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‘ Living in the Past ’ , 1848–80  283 of the Welsh to European culture. Stephens followed Price in ascribing the origins of European chivalry and romance to medieval Welsh prose tales, but went further by maintaining that ‘[c]ompared with contemporaneous princes, the Welsh kings were intellectually superior, the country was more civilized’, an assessment reiterated, for example, by quoting Augustin Thierry’s declaration ‘that the Welsh were the most civilized and intellectual people of that age’.99 Indeed, Stephens even went so far as to say of medieval Welsh poets that, ‘notwithstanding all their demerits, I can, after communing with the finer and greater minds of England, and the Continent in modern days, and of Greece and Rome in the past, still feel pleasure in running over their labours . . .’100 That last passage in turn underlines how the past offered inspiring examples for a Victorian Wales which Stephens and likeminded Welsh intellectuals felt to be lagging behind its English and continental neighbours, leading him to urge his compatriots to maintain their ‘intellectual independence’ by demanding ‘a dignified literature of truly Welsh origin’ and to awake and secure their place at the forefront of progress.101 The latter injunction invites comparison with the notion, which Stephens adapted from Price, of an awakening of Europe from what Arnold Heeren (1760–1842) ‘pithily terms the sleep which threatened to be its last’ signalled by the papal reform movement associated with Pope Gregory VII (1073–85), ‘a new era’ followed, according to Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), by the rise of vernacular languages and nationalities.102 Moreover Stephens asserted the special advantages enjoyed by the Welsh in the ‘new era’ commencing in the late eleventh century, observing that, thanks to their highly developed bardic culture and vernacular language, they ‘were better prepared than most other European nations, for the impulse which was now being given to every species of intellectual effort’.103 Nor was this Stephens’s only debt to continental historians’ in­ter­pret­ations of the European Middle Ages, as he also cited the recent translation of François Guizot’s History of Civilization in Europe (1828) on the crusades being ‘a great step towards the enfranchisement of the mind’ through exposing the crusaders to the ‘two civilizations’ of the Islamic and Greek worlds.104 The concept of civilization was central to Stephens’s understanding of the past and appears to carry the broad connotations emerging in the early nineteenth century developed by Guizot and 99  Thomas Stephens, The Literature of the Kymry, 428–9, 440–2, quotations at 92, 331 (emphasis in original), and see also vi, 335, 512; Thomas Stephens, ‘Sefyllfa Wareiddiol y Cymry’, 308. 100  Thomas Stephens, The Literature of the Kymry, 128. 101  Thomas Stephens, ‘Sefyllfa Wareiddiol y Cymry’, 397–415, quotation at 414. 102  Thomas Stephens, The Literature of the Kymry, 333–6, quotation at 333, slightly adapted from Heeren, Political Treatises, 9. See also Heeren, Geschichte der classischen Literatur, 218–19; Ranke, The Ecclesiastical and Political History of the Popes, trans. Austin, 34 (adapted by Thomas Stephens, The Literature of the Kymry, 334–5). Cf. Price, HC, 534–5; Thomas Stephens, ‘Sefyllfa Wareiddiol y Cymry’, 386–7. 103  Thomas Stephens, The Literature of the Kymry, 334, 335. 104  Thomas Stephens, The Literature of the Kymry, 439, citing Guizot, The History of Civilization, trans. Hazlitt, ed. Siedentop, 145.

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284  WRITING WELSH HISTORY his English admirer John Stuart Mill, ‘in which as much emphasis is put on social order and on ordered knowledge . . . as on refinement of manners and behaviour’.105 A good example appears in a passage, again heavily indebted to Guizot, that draws parallels between medieval and modern ‘civilization’: The church was the great civilizing element of the twelfth and thirteenth cen­tur­ies; it ameliorated the social condition of the people, and was greatly instrumental in bringing about the abolition of slavery in Europe; it laboured for the suppression of many barbarous practices; and framed a penal code upon prin­ciples elevated, and enlightened, and strikingly coincident with those enunciated by Jeremy Bentham, and his followers, Mill, Molesworth, Bowring, Grote, and others who are accounted,—the profoundest thinkers of the present day.106

Stephens’s interpretation bore some affinities with re-­evaluations of medieval Christendom as a providential era contributing to human progress influentially proposed by the English scholar Henry Hart Milman, who was similarly sympathetic to Guizot and Ranke, in his History of Latin Christianity (1854–5).107 Nevertheless, it is striking that Stephens drew comparisons with modern secular writers of a utilitarian persuasion. Similarly he questioned orthodox condemnations of partible inheritance in medieval Wales on the grounds that ‘political economists are strongly condemnatory of its opposite—the law of primogeniture’.108 Here as elsewhere, Stephens viewed the past from the modernizing perspective of a widely-­read social reformer and amateur scholar in the heart of industrial south Wales.

R. J. Pryse (Gweirydd ap Rhys) Robert John Pryse edited and mainly wrote the longest Welsh-­language history of Wales composed hitherto: Hanes y Brytaniaid a’r Cymry (‘The History of the Britons and the Welsh’, 1872–4). An Anglesey-­born autodidact and independent-­ minded Nonconformist, variously employed as a weaver, shopkeeper, publisher’s assistant, and, from 1862, freelance writer, Pryse was commissioned by the publisher William Mackenzie, which had already issued a Welsh-­language illustrated biblical dictionary, and his History first appeared in twenty-­two parts, price 2s.

105  Cf. Mill, Essays on French History, ed. Robson, 257–94, esp. 266; Varouxakis, ‘Guizot’s Historical Works’, esp. 307–8 and n. 66. Quotation: Raymond Williams, Keywords, 58. 106  Thomas Stephens, The Literature of the Kymry, 435–6; cf. Guizot, The History of Civilization, trans. Hazlitt, ed. Siedentop, 105–8. 107  Cf. Bennett, God and Progress, 105–36. 108  NLW MS 938B (Thomas Stephens, ‘The History of Wales’), p. [375]. Contrast the conventional condemnation of gavelkind in Prichard, The Heroines, 267.

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‘ Living in the Past ’ , 1848–80  285 each, that came to over 1,000 pages filling two quarto volumes.109 The work was thus published in a larger format and to a higher standard than Thomas Price’s Hanes Cymru a generation earlier, its text being supplemented by maps of each Welsh county as well as seventy-­four steel engravings, mostly of Welsh scenes, costing £500. Pryse himself was paid £360 for his work, and the ten clergymen, all but one of them Nonconformists, who assisted him also received payments calculated at 2s. 6d. per page of manuscript—a collaborative model that may have been influenced by his previous experience while working for the publisher Thomas Gee on the ten-­volume Welsh-­language encyclopaedia Y Gwyddoniadur Cymreig (1856–79), to which Pryse contributed well over 400 articles.110 Pryse’s History exhibits many of the preoccupations and approaches of Welsh history writing in the mid-­Victorian period. Above all, it represents the most comprehensive attempt to cast a critical eye on established narratives of the period down to 1282 and to connect these with a modern, predominantly Nonconformist Wales politically integrated into the British state but still preserving its own national characteristics, especially the Welsh language. In significant respects, the work’s structure and thus interpretation were conventional. Unsurprisingly Thomas Price, the author of the previous major Welsh-­language history of Wales, cast his shadow over the work, eliciting both praise and criticism and, above all, inspiring its title, ‘The History of the Britons and the Welsh’, intended to emphasize a two-­stage division whereby the history of the Britons became that of the Welsh as the former were confined mainly to Wales about 664 ce.111 Pryse differed from his predecessor, however, by dividing each of the main chronological periods into four thematic sections dealing respectively with pol­it­ical, social, literary, and religious history, the first of which received the lion’s share of attention. He also devoted significantly more coverage than Price and other predecessors to the period after the death of Llywelyn in 1282, although this still amounted to only about 25 per cent of the whole, a brevity of treatment justified by Wales’s ceasing to have a separate political history under the reign of the Tudors beginning with Henry VII’s accession in 1485.112 Nevertheless, Pryse stressed that the Welsh remained distinctive in their literature and religion, both of which received considerable attention in the final parts of the work, including chapters on the main Welsh Nonconformist denominations, as well as the Church of England, from 1603 to 1874, although he omitted Roman Catholicism, to which ­he was 109 Enid Pierce Roberts, ‘Pryse, Robert John’; Enid Pierce Roberts, ‘Gweithgarwch Llenyddol Gweirydd ap Rhys’; Argraphiad Newydd o Eiriadur Beiblaidd, trans. Jones; HBC. Extracts from auto­ biog­raphy down to 1862: Gweirydd ap Rhys, Detholion o Hunangofiant, ed. Roberts. 110  Pryce, ‘Medieval Welsh History in the Victorian Age’, 6–7. On Pryse and the Gwyddoniadur see Roger Jones Williams, ‘Hanes Cyhoeddi Y Gwyddoniadur’ (1967), 134–7, 150 and n. 27; and, for the encyclopaedia’s significance, Robert Evans, ‘Cymru a’r Byd’. 111  HBC, 1: [iii]; 382. 112  HBC, 2: 400. Pryse covered the period after 1282 in about 275 quarto pages, compared to Price’s 60 demy octavo pages (7.5 per cent of the total).

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286  WRITING WELSH HISTORY unremittingly hostile in common with Jane Williams and numerous other Victorian compatriots as well as previous Protestant historians of Wales.113 Pryse subsequently expanded on this theme in a biographical dictionary he edited of religious figures in Wales since the Protestant Reformation, which he presented as a companion to his History that sought ‘to do equal justice to the leaders of Welsh thought, especially religious thought’, including living contemporaries such as William Rees (Gwilym Hiraethog), Lewis Edwards, and Henry Richard.114 The space Pryse allotted to modern history had a twofold significance, serving to confirm the fundamental importance of the period down to the Edwardian conquest that still claimed most of his attention while nevertheless asserting that Welsh history continued beyond 1282 and, indeed, 1536. In a defiant riposte to Woodward and others who advocated the complete assimilation of the Welsh with the English, Pryse declared of the union with England under Henry VIII: It appears that the political history of the Principality became united with the history of England at that moment; but the ‘History of the Welsh’ did not also end at that time; and it has not ended yet, and it will never end as long as the nation continues to speak Welsh, to write Welsh, and to worship in Welsh . . .115

Moreover, like historians since David Powel, Pryse welcomed a political union with England made palatable by the rule of a Welsh dynasty and the granting of legal equality, adding that this had helped to foster the utilitarian values also esteemed by Thomas Stephens: Instead of being a nation forever preparing itself in warlike plans . . . to throw from its neck the heavy yoke of the Tudors’ oppressive foreign predecessors, its genius now turned in a completely different direction. From then on, the Welsh gave reasonable obedience to the laws of the United Kingdom; and they used their abilities to refine their morals, to broaden their views, to cultivate their minds, and to practise the useful arts; in a word, they dedicated themselves to increasing the happiness of a particular society as well as the general welfare of the British government . . .116

If this meant that thenceforward the political and social history of Wales was essentially the same as that of England, the Welsh remained not only a distinct people thanks to their language, literature, and religion but also a thriving 113  HBC, 1: 495, 508; 2: 33, 240–3, 333–4, 442, 482; cf. O’Leary, ‘When was Anti-­Catholicism?’. 114  Peter and Pryse, Enwogion y Ffydd, quotation in ‘Rhagymadrodd’, [i], at the end of vol. 2. Pryse was responsible for most of the work following Peter’s death in 1877. He also published a history of Welsh literature intended as a continuation of Stephens’s Literature of the Kymry: Prys [sic], Hanes Llenyddiaeth Gymreig. 115  HBC, 2: 253; similar sentiments, 2: 144. 116  HBC, 2: 409.

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‘ Living in the Past ’ , 1848–80  287 modern people, more numerous than ever, with settlements in America and Australia (a view shared by R. D. Thomas, discussed below).117 Like other Welsh radical Liberals of his day, Pryse framed his political views in a British and international context. He expressed support for liberty and democracy through praise for Cromwell, Washington, Cobden, and Gladstone and sympathy for organized labour, including Chartist campaigns to extend the suffrage, provided violence was avoided, and voiced doubts about monarchy (Queen Victoria was a glorious exception), condemned Britain’s imperial wars of conquest under George III, and, like Stephens, criticized primogeniture, maintaining that medieval Welsh partible inheritance was far juster.118 Medieval Wales also offered inspiration for the present in other ways, not least in the example of its heroic princes—notably Gruffudd ap Llywelyn, the two Llywelyns, and, above all, Owain Glyndŵr—who had fought bravely for their nation’s liberty until the odds against them proved too formidable.119 Conversely, Pryse castigated the Normans as thieving and treacherous plunderers of the Welsh and took aim at the negative assessments of medieval Welsh rulers by Woodward as well as by John Jones in his 1824 History of Wales.120 Indeed, Pryse maintained that the era of the native princes had made an essential contribution to the survival of the Welsh to his own day, since, although Wales had lost its independence, ‘poetry and tradition, by preserving the records for its existence that was once so energetic, and the melancholy history of its fall, from sinking into oblivion, have kept its national spirit alive, which centuries of foreign government failed to extinguish or weaken’.121 Yet his Welsh patriotism amounted to more than singing the praises of heroic princes or standing up for the Welsh language.122 For one thing, Pryse bore some affinities with Jones and Woodward by accepting that, like their counterparts in England and elsewhere, medieval Welsh rulers behaved badly on occasions, inflicting violence on each other and oppressing the common people, although the ‘religious, literature-­loving, and peaceful’ Hywel Dda was a notable exception.123 He also added his voice to the chorus of historians’ condemnations of the princes’ lack of unity.124 But above all Pryse was unsparing in his demolition of what he believed to be baseless legends. At the outset he declared that ‘what is truly important in considering history is finding out the truth about our nation, and not praising it excessively, as is customary, without adequate foundations’; accordingly, his work was based as far as possible on contemporaneous sources and included references to his authorities, as this was ‘of great importance to our 117  HBC, 1: 1–2; 2: 144, 332, 400, 409, 413. 118  HBC, 2: 52, 408–9, 476–81, 486–7, 490–7. 119  HBC, 1: 450–62; 2: 88­–90, 131–7, 298–9. 120  HBC, 1: 466; 2: 31, 71, 88–9, n. ¶, 103, n. †, 133, 254. 121  HBC, 2: 299. 122  Welsh language: HBC, 1: 2; 2: 144, 409; cf. the call to revive the use of old Welsh personal names: HBC, 2: 44. 123  HBC, 2: 6, 8, 10, 17, 33, 38, 428. 124  HBC, 1: 450; 2: 3.

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288  WRITING WELSH HISTORY national “history”, which has been overloaded so pathetically with invented le­gends and fake histories’.125 For Pryse, like Stephens, there was nothing patriotic in peddling interpretations of the Welsh past that dissolved under critical scru­tiny.126 It is significant that Pryse’s History opens with an overview of sources that included damning assessments of Geoffrey of Monmouth, the triads, and texts in the Iolo Manuscripts; it later gave short shrift to Iolo’s ‘fake Druidism’ too.127 Indeed, especially down to the twelfth century, the work often reads like a critical commentary on sources and previous interpretations that sought to draw more stringent lines than before between ‘legend’ or ‘tradition’ and ‘history’. The energy put into this task implied that legendary views of the Welsh past continued to appeal to potential readers. Indeed, Pryse admitted as much when he responded to criticisms that he was ‘too doubtful of the authority of the old Welsh traditions’. Those critics, he continued, should remember that his promise was not to write a romance on ‘The History of the Britons and the Welsh’, like G. ab Arthur [Geoffrey of Monmouth], or a novel, like Theophilus Evans, and others, but rather true history, based on the most authoritative contemporaneous sources he could lay his hands on . . . The writer has the greatest respect for the traditions and romances of the Welsh, as such; but he thinks that basing the history of the nation on works of that kind would have been literary dishonesty.128

In seeking to place the history of Wales on sound foundations Pryse and his collaborators also drew on recent scholarship in the fields of ethnology, archae­ ology, language, and Celtic studies.129 Friedrich Max Müller and Isaac Taylor were cited by Pryse as identifying the Celts as belonging to a broader Indo-­ European family, thereby enabling him to confirm the widely held view that the British ancestors of the Welsh were an ancient people descended from the Celts while aligning himself with modern critical scholarship by jettisoning legends of Trojan or biblical origins and early British kings such as Iolo’s Hu Gadarn; instead Pryse invoked the authority not only of classical writers (a well-­established strategy since the sixteenth century) but also of the new human sciences—an approach that would be taken further by Welsh scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.130 125  HBC, 1: iv. John Peter (Ioan Bedr; 1833–77) expressed similar views: HBC, 86. 126  Views differed on which of the two writers was the more sceptical: compare Anon., Review of HBC, Y Beirniad, with Anon., Review of HBC, Y Drysorfa, 63. 127  HBC, 1: 3–7, 86, 96, 97, n. *. Robert Ellis (Cynddelw; 1812–75) criticized Iolo for holding that Druidism and Christianity were compatible: HBC, 1: 204. 128  HBC, 2: [iii]; see also 1: 201, n. †, for Pryse’s response to an early reviewer’s criticism of his treatment of Druidism. 129  Praise of James Cowles Prichard, Friedrich Max Müller, and Luke Owen Pike in HBC, 1: 2, 3. 130  HBC, 1: 21–3.

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‘ Living in the Past ’ , 1848–80  289

Nonconformity, Imperial Britain, and American Liberty: The Welsh in the Modern World While the espousal of critical approaches to the origins and medieval history of the Welsh allowed historians to demonstrate their credentials as modern scholars, this largely entailed refurbishing rather than replacing long-­established understandings of the Welsh past. True, the young Thomas Stephens had criticized the preoccupation with ancient origins and medieval princes, and his emphasis in The Literature of the Kymry on the creation of a distinctive civilization in medieval Wales offered an alternative reading more in tune with utilitarian aspirations for educational and social progress. However, even Stephens found it difficult to jettison the long-­established emphasis on distant eras, and the question of how these related to the history of the Welsh in more recent centuries remained. Since the Elizabethan period historians had responded variously to this challenge, mainly either by extending general narratives of Welsh history briefly beyond the fall of Llywelyn—a strategy taken further by R. J. Pryse than any of his predecessors—or by writing accounts of particular areas that paid greater attention to modern developments. The following discussion focuses on three other approaches to the modern history of the Welsh, namely histories of Nonconformity, histories of Great Britain, and histories of the Welsh in the United States. True, all three had precedents from the late eighteenth century onwards, and none of them fundamentally challenged narratives focused on the ancient and medieval past.131 Nevertheless these genres developed significantly in the mid-­Victorian period, reflecting two related concerns: the ideological and political dominance of Welsh Nonconformity and the relationship of the Welsh with the state.

Nonconformity Their teleological casting of Dissent as a promoter of enlightened progress disposed Nonconformist writers on Welsh religious history to privilege modern developments over the ancient and medieval past, at least implicitly in their choice of subject matter, and sometimes explicitly, as in the relief expressed that Edward I’s conquest had led to ‘more hopeful times’ of ‘political peace’ and ‘reform . . . after long ages of darkness and superstition’.132 Mostly published in Welsh, these writers’ works included memoirs (W.  cofiannau, sing. cofiant) of ministers and prominent chapel members, whose proliferation and standardized form drew a satirical response from the Anglican polemicist David Owen (Brutus; 1795–1866); an expanded edition of David Peter’s history of religion in Wales, 131  Pryce, ‘Medieval Welsh History in the Victorian Age’, 19–28. 132  John Hughes, Methodistiaeth Cymru, 1: 17.

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290  WRITING WELSH HISTORY first published in 1816; and two major denominational histories, one of the Welsh Methodists by John Hughes that started with a summary of church history from the arrival of Christianity in Britain to the eve of the Methodist revival, the other of the Welsh Independents by Thomas Rees and John Thomas giving accounts of the denomination’s churches in each county.133 A decade before embarking on the latter work Rees had published, in English, the first history of Welsh Nonconformity as a whole. This aimed to assert the rights of Welsh Nonconformists and effectively created the concept of Wales as a Nonconformist nation. Rees made no attempt to connect that nation with the early Church and medieval Christianity, but instead opened his work with the Reformation and stressed the role of Old Dissent in the making of Welsh Nonconformity, including its contribution to the success of Calvinistic Methodism, which he portrayed as part of a wider Nonconformist body. He sought to enliven the work with extensive quotations from primary sources and numerous biographies of leading figures, deploying skills already fostered in several memoirs of ministers.134 John Peter and R. J. Pryse’s biographical dictionary of notable Welsh religious figures since the Reformation shared some of the same aims as Rees in its inclusion of numerous Puritans, Methodists, and Nonconformists but was more welcoming to Anglicans and drew connections with earlier periods in its accounts of ‘forerunners of the Reformation’ from Pelagius to Walter Brut.135 As we have seen, Nonconformists also wrote general works of Welsh history imbued with their religious outlook: after traversing the well-­trodden path from the ancient Britons to Owain Glyndŵr, Owen Jones devoted the final quarter of his book mainly to the coming of Protestantism, the Methodist revival, and Nonconformity, while, R. J. Pryse included chapters on the Nonconformist denominations.136 The his­ tor­ies of Great Britain and the United States considered shortly adopted similar perspectives, while in 1867–70 the Independent minister Josiah Thomas Jones of Aberdare brought out ‘the largest of all Welsh biographical dictionaries’, published and largely written by himself, in which mostly short notices of legendary and medieval figures appeared alongside numerous, and often quite lengthy, accounts of Nonconformist preachers.137

133  Emyr Gwynne Jones, ‘Cofiannau’; Llion Pryderi Roberts, ‘ “Mawrhau ei Swydd” ’; David Owen, ‘Cofiannau’, 91–3; Peter, Hanes Crefydd, 2nd edn.; John Hughes, Methodistiaeth Cymru; Thomas Rees and John Thomas, Hanes Eglwysi Annibynol Cymru. 134  Thomas Rees, History of Protestant Nonconformity; Prys Morgan, ‘A Nation of Nonconformists’. 135  Peter and Prys, Enwogion y Ffydd. 136  Owen Jones, Hanes Cenedl y Cymry, 264–324. 137 Josiah Thomas Jones, Geiriadur Bywgraffyddol; Chapman, ‘The Turn of the Tide’, 517. Quotation: Robert Thomas Jenkins, ‘Jones, Josiah Thomas’. Cf. the five exemplary Protestant ‘mighty ones of Wales’, from Rhys Prichard, vicar of Llandovery and religious poet, to the educationalist Sir Hugh Owen, commemorated in Levi, Cedyrn Cymru.

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‘ Living in the Past ’ , 1848–80  291

Wales and Great Britain The idea that the Welsh occupied a special place in Britain as the island’s oldest people was, of course, a long-­held and persistent theme in understandings of the Welsh and their past. Related to this was a tradition of loyalty to a monarchy regarded, not as a foreign imposition, but as the embodiment of a Welsh recovery of sovereignty by Henry Tudor. These ideas took on a new complexion from the late 1840s as they fused with widespread Welsh enthusiasm for an expanding imperial Britain and its monarch Queen Victoria as well as for British Liberal causes, reflected in Welsh Nonconformists’ support for movements of national self-­determination within the Habsburg Empire, political convictions refracted in the case of the influential Congregationalist minister, author, and journalist William Rees (Gwilym Hiraethog; 1802–83) through the lens of an ‘anti-­Catholic, millenarian Calvinism’ drawing on biblical revelation.138 On the other hand, with the notable exception of the nationalist Michael D. Jones from the 1870s, there was no suggestion that Wales required such freedoms: the historical allusions in a comparison of Cavour, first prime minister of Italy, with ‘Dyfnwal Moelmud, Alfred the Great, Hywel Dda, Cromwell, and Palmerston’ only served to underline Wales’s close association with England, and were a far cry from Michael D. Jones’s invocation of Hengist and Horsa to condemn the unjust English conquest of the Welsh.139 Small wonder, then, that this period saw the publication of four Welsh-­language histories of Great Britain that explicitly integrated the history of Wales with the history of the state to which it had belonged since Henry VIII’s Acts of Union. The authors of these and other Welsh historical works maintained that the Welsh enjoyed a special relationship to Britain, and thus England. This was given new expression in claims, also advanced by Luke Owen Pike and other writers on early English history from the 1860s onwards, that the origins of the English were, at least in biological terms, Brittonic or Celtic.140 Thus R. J. Pryse, apparently taking his lead from Pike, not only asserted that ‘the great English nation’ was mainly descended from the Britons or Welsh but implied that consequently one of the achievements of the Britons was the unrivalled expansion of the English language across the world.141 Such thinking was also used to celebrate Welsh loyalty to the monarchy. Ab Ithel went so far as to claim that Wales was independent under Victoria as her queen, namely Queen Buddug II (Buddug 138 John Davies, ‘Victoria and Victorian Wales’; Aled Gruffydd Jones, ‘Politics and Prophecy’, quota­tion at 119; Brooks, Why Wales Never Was, ch. 3, esp. 57–64. 139  Tudur, ‘The Life, Work and Thought’, 46, 164–83. Quotation: Y Gwladgarwr, 22 June 1861. The close association was reflected in the 1746 act of parliament stipulating that legislation mentioning only England applied also to Wales: see Chapter 8, n. 27. 140 Pike, The English and their Origin, 245, concluded that ‘our characteristics are, in the main, decidedly Cymric’. The book originated as an unsuccessful prize essay at the 1864 Llandudno eisteddfod: Young, The Idea of English Ethnicity, 156–8. See also Pryce, Lloyd, 121–2. 141  HBC, 1: 1–2. For Pryse’s knowledge of Pike’s book see HBC, 1: 2–3, 83, 221.

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292  WRITING WELSH HISTORY being the Welsh equivalent of both Victoria and Boudica, the queen of the Iceni defeated by the Romans, quite often co-­opted in this period as a Welsh heroine), and that Wales had more right to her than England as Victoria had more Celtic than English blood.142 His fellow devotee of legendary history, R.  W.  Morgan, supplied his fanciful account of early Welsh history with a pedigree purportedly demonstrating Queen Victoria’s descent from the legendary British ruler Beli Mawr (‘Beli the Great, B.C. 100’) as well as a list of 130 rulers ‘of the Royal Family of Britain’ from Prydain Mawr (a legendary figure in the Welsh triads literally meaning ‘Great Britain’) or Brutus ‘down to Queen Victoria’.143 Nor was the contribution to Great Britain limited to the heritage of the ancient past. It had also continued into the modern era through Welsh military prowess and leadership in British armies: for example, R. W. Morgan concluded his history of Wales with a glowing account of the Welsh Fusiliers from their formation in 1689 to the siege of Sebastopol.144 The four Welsh-­language histories of Great Britain that appeared between 1857 and 1877 were brought out by Welsh publishers with the exception of the longest and most lavish, replete with colour illustrations.145 The earliest was an expanded edition of the first such work, published by Titus Lewis in 1810. That their very composition rested on the premise of a particular Welsh identification with Britain is suggested by the inclusion of introductory accounts of early British and Welsh history derived from histories of Wales, further evidence of the view that the history of modern Britain had Brittonic or Celtic, as opposed to pre­dom­in­ ant­ly Teutonic, origins. Moreover, the works sometimes explicitly assert the contribution of the Welsh to the making of Great Britain. The clearest example comes in the work of the prolific Calvinist Methodist minister Thomas Levi (1825–1916), whose previous publications had included accounts of the Crimean War and David Livingstone’s missionary journeys in Africa.146 His 1863 Prydain Fawr: Ei Chodiad, ei Chynydd, a’i Mawredd (‘Great Britain: Its Rise, its Progress and its Greatness’) begins with a brief introduction to the history of Wales that opens by declaring: ‘The Welsh nation has an important place in the history of Great Britain.’147 The author then rehearses the received view that ‘the native Britons’ had recovered their authority in the island ‘in the person of Henry Tudor’, and insists that the English were far more indebted to the Welsh than they were ready to admit.148 Yet the opening of the book’s first main chapter is no less 142  John Davies, ‘Victoria and Victorian Wales’, 14. See also Derfel, ‘Cymru yn ei Chysylltiad ag Enwogion’, 323; Vandrei, Queen Boudica and Historical Culture, 177–8. 143 R. W. Morgan, The British Kymry, facing [9]. 144 R. W. Morgan, The British Kymry, 297–300; see also vii. 145  Titus Lewis, Hanes Prydain Fawr, revd. Jones; Levi, Prydain Fawr; Owen R. Ellis, Hanes Prydain Fawr; Owen Jones, Hanes Prydain. 146 Levi, Hanes Rhyfel y Crimea; Levi, Teithiau Cenadol y Parch. Dr. Livingston. See further Dafydd Arthur Jones, Thomas Levi, esp. 12–15; Rosser, ‘Thomas Levi’. 147 Levi, Prydain Fawr, [iii]. 148 Levi, Prydain Fawr, vii–viii.

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‘ Living in the Past ’ , 1848–80  293 revealing. The chapter’s chronology, from Caesar’s invasion in 55 bce to the Norman conquest of 1066, reproduced the standard periodization of histories of England. More significant, though, were its first sentences, which explained that the author intended to give the Welsh reader ‘an outline of the history of his country’ and that his main aim was to show the various factors ‘in forming the England of today’.149 The implication, then, was that England was the Welsh reader’s country. Likewise, other Welsh histories of Great Britain implicitly presented it as ‘the land of our birth’.150 This identification was fundamentally political and did not necessarily mean that the Welsh had become English; the latter are sometimes described as ‘our neighbours’.151 Yet, as elsewhere in Britain and beyond, the inhabitants of Britain as a whole could be described as ‘English’, and Welsh w ­ riters tended to use ‘(Great) Britain’ and ‘England’ interchangeably, along with ‘the country’ and ‘the kingdom’.152 Small wonder, then, that little attempt was made to connect the introductions to early British and Welsh history with the Anglocentric narratives comprising the bulk of these texts that invited their readers to identify with English and British achievements. Levi’s final section on ‘The Greatness of Britain’ celebrated the unprecedented power of a country on whose territories the sun never set, while over a decade later Owen Jones ended his History by listing those territories and stressing that Britain was the wealthiest kingdom in the world.153 Their reiteration of long-­established claims of descent from the original Britons thus gave writers of Welsh history rhetorical tools to voice a special, arguably sentimental, attachment to Great Britain based on ethnic origins. But that ancient pedigree only had salience precisely because many people in mid-­ Victorian Wales found much to like in the modernity of a Protestant, imperial nation state in which the Welsh had long been deeply implicated.

Welsh America Some writers, by contrast, stressed that as descendants of the biblical Gomer in Asia Minor, as well as a people with a long history of settlement in north America, the Welsh were ideal migrants who should escape from Britain and make new homes abroad, especially in the United States but also in Australia and Patagonia, and thus recover the confidence and self-­respect of their ancestors by building

149 Levi, Prydain Fawr, 1. 150 Owen R. Ellis, Hanes Prydain Fawr, 1: 1. 151  Owen Jones, Hanes Prydain, [i], 12. 152  E.g. Owen Jones, Hanes Prydain, uses ‘(Great) Britain’, ‘England’, and ‘the English’ syn­onym­ ous­ly in narrating events from the later seventeenth century onwards, especially in referring to wars with France and to the British Empire. 153 Levi, Prydain Fawr, 552–4; Owen Jones, Hanes Prydain, 115–16.

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294  WRITING WELSH HISTORY better lives free of oppression from landlords and the Church of England.154 Welsh-­American history writing shared with the Nonconformist historians of Wales and Britain discussed above a providential reading of Welsh history cul­ min­at­ing in the creation of a deeply religious, hard-­working, and respectable ­people tenaciously adhering to their native language and literature: it differed, though, by displacing that vision to the other side of the Atlantic. Originating in settlements in the seventeenth century, the connections of the Welsh with the United States were, of course, far less ancient and less intimate than those with England and Great Britain. Nevertheless, they were close in this period as Welsh emigration to the United States increased sharply from the 1850s, as did the Welsh-­born population in the country, which grew from almost 30,000 in 1851 to over 83,000 by 1880 (reaching a historic high of 100,000 a decade later).155 Moreover, Welsh-­American communities bore many similarities to their equivalents in the ‘Old Country’, including an interest in Welsh culture and history sustained by Nonconformist churches, literary societies, eisteddfodau, and a flourishing Welsh-­language newspaper and periodical press.156 Welsh-­American history writing also bore affinities with Welsh historians’ treatment of Wales’s place in Britain. Just as the latter identified with an empire legitimized by the duty of bringing Christian civilization to primitive and barbarian peoples, so too did Welsh historians of America cast native Americans as ‘uncivilized people’ subjected to European territorial expansion and Christian missions.157 While scep­ tic­al of the Madog legend, one writer observed that although, if they existed, the Welsh Indians ‘would not be, in their subjugated and low condition . . . of much benefit or honour to us as a nation, they would nevertheless be truly deserving objects of our sympathy and religious efforts to bring them light and benefit’.158 Above all, the Welsh had contributed significantly to the making of their adopted homeland across the Atlantic just as they had contributed to the greatness of Britain. Although Morgan Edwards’s history of the Pennsylvania Baptists had noted that many of their ministers and congregations originated in Wales, this was cast as a Nonconformist history and works explicitly intended as accounts of 154 R.  D.  Thomas, Yr Ymfudwr, 3–5, 28–36, 48–9, 52–3; Michael  D.  Jones, Gwladychfa Gymreig, [3]–6; Hugh Hughes, Llawlyfr y Wladychfa Gymreig, esp. [3]–8; Gareth Alban Davies, ‘Wales, Patagonia, and the Printed Word’, 50–1; Bill Jones, ‘Representations of Australia’, 66, 71–2. See also R. D. Thomas, Hanes Cymry America, ‘Dosran A’, 11, 15–24. 155 William D. Jones, Wales in America, xvii–xviii, 249. These figures, derived from the US Census, did not include descendants of Welsh-­born emigrants who spoke Welsh; according to R. D. Thomas, Hanes Cymry America, ‘Dosran C’, 9–11, there were almost 116,000 Welsh-­speaking Welsh people in the United States by 1872; cf. William  D.  Jones, ‘The Welsh Language’, 262; Hunter, Sons of Arthur, 14–16. 156 William  D.  Jones, Wales in America, 87–105; Hunter, Sons of Arthur, 4­–27; D.  H.  E.  Roberts, ‘Welsh Publishing in the United States’; Rhiannon Heledd Williams, Cyfaill Pwy o’r Hen Wlad?. 157  Mid-­nineteenth-­century Welsh writers similarly declared that it was the destiny of the Welsh to colonize Australia and described the Aboriginal peoples as savages: Bill Jones, ‘Representations of Australia’, 66–7. 158 R. D. Thomas, Hanes Cymry America, ‘Dosran A’, 16.

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‘ Living in the Past ’ , 1848–80  295 Welsh settlement in the United States only began to appear in the third quarter of the nineteenth century.159 In 1852 Samuel Jenkins, who had emigrated to the United States as a youth half a century earlier, concocted a heady brew of bardism, Nonconformity, and biblical prophecy to argue that the Americans owed the principles of liberty and the rights of man to the Welsh, who had been chosen by God to preserve these since ancient times, citing Welsh triads attributed to Dyfnwal Moelmud, Baptist and Congregationalist self-­government with its gender equality, and the Book of Revelation.160 Jenkins attributed the appointment of Thomas Jefferson as one of the drafters of the Declaration of Independence to his Welsh descent and emphasized that another signatory, Lewis Morris, could trace his ancestry to the medieval legislator Hywel Dda; indeed, ‘one-­fourth of the immortal signers were either of Welsh descent or born in Wales’.161 Alexander Jones (1802–63), a New York doctor, journalist, and author of Welsh descent, took a similar line in an address for the St David’s Benevolent Society in 1855 that commemorated ‘the glorious deeds of the Cymry, and their descendants on the American continent, in behalf of the civil and religious liberty we now enjoy’, and named Jefferson first among ‘seventeen men of Cambrian birth or origin’ who had signed the Declaration of Independence.162 An appendix of miscellaneous ma­ter­ ial, including a letter from Samuel Jenkins on several not­able Welsh individuals, reinforced the message that the Welsh were an ancient people who had made significant contributions to the histories of both England and the United States, its topics ranging from the Druids to Welsh inventors of the steam engine.163 In 1872 the Independent minister R. D. Thomas (Iorthryn Gwynedd; 1817–88) sought to demonstrate the special place of the Welsh, and more particularly the Nonconformist Welsh, in the United States in his Hanes Cymry America (‘The History of the Welsh of America’), the most substantial and wide-­ranging study of its subject hitherto. Writing in Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania, Thomas had emigrated to America in 1855, a year after publishing a handbook encouraging Welsh emigration to the United States (and to a lesser extent Canada and Australia).164 Mainly comprising accounts of Welsh settlements across north America based both on his own observations and on information supplied by correspondents, his 1872 history portrayed the American Welsh as a respectable and religious people (the chapels of different Nonconformist denominations they established are carefully noted), who, while part of a Welsh nation (W.  cenedl) comprising possibly three million people, two-­thirds of whom lived outside Wales, were

159  Morgan Edwards, Materials towards a History of the American Baptists. 160  Samuel Jenkins, Letters on Welsh History, esp. 10–15. 161  Samuel Jenkins, Letters on Welsh History, 60, 121 (quotation). 162  Alexander Jones, The Cymry of ’76, 6, 11. On the author see Joan J. Hall, ‘Jones, Alexander’. 163  Alexander Jones, The Cymry of ’76, 52–3, 58–9. 164 R. D. Thomas, Yr Ymfudwr.

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296  WRITING WELSH HISTORY never­the­less American citizens.165 Yet the work also betrayed anxieties about the future of Welsh-­ American communities. In celebrating the achievements of Welsh emigrants and their descendants as well as the civil and religious freedoms of the United States, which he contrasted with the oppression of working people and the power of the Established Church in Wales, Thomas sought to document a new and better kind of Welsh world whose vigour and copiousness nevertheless belied an underlying fragility, revealed by his concern that numerous Welsh Americans were indifferent to their heritage and, above all, were abandoning their native language as they became increasingly assimilated into a pre­dom­in­ ant­ly Anglophone society.166 To counteract these tendencies his compatriots in Wales should abandon the oppression and poverty of their homeland for ‘the land of freedom and abundance’: ‘We would like to see you all here.’167 (One of Thomas’s contemporaries was more pessimistic, declaring that the Welsh faced ‘national death’ in the United States and that the only hope lay in the recently established Welsh colony in Patagonia.)168 Thomas’s 1872 history was thus both an apologia and an epitaph for a Welsh phase in American history that was already showing signs of decline.169 Similar concerns are implicit in a major Welsh-­language history of the American Civil War published in 1866 by the American newspaper Y Drych (‘The Mirror’), which editors of the Welsh-­ assumed that its readers identified themselves, in this context at least, as Americans supportive of the Union cause and, unlike the other works discussed here, paid virtually no attention to the role of the Welsh in American history.170 Moreover, its authors worried that their highly ambitious volume would find insufficient buyers to recoup the $1,000 spent on its publication and it seems to have been a commercial flop.171 For Nonconformist writers of Welsh religious history, histories of Great Britain, and histories of the Welsh in the United States, then, the ancient and medieval past was at best a badge of ethnic distinctiveness or a prelude to better things, at worst an irrelevance that was simply ignored. Yet, as the works of Owen Jones and, above all, R. J. Pryse demonstrate, when it came to writing general histories of Wales Nonconformists adhered to long-­established chronological priorities, even if they devoted more space than their predecessors to the post-­medieval

165 R. D. Thomas, Hanes Cymry America, esp. ‘Dosran A’, 9–14. 166 R. D. Thomas, Hanes Cymry America, ‘Dosran A’, 20; ‘Dosran C’, 9–11, 16–17, 68. 167 R. D. Thomas, Hanes Cymry America, ‘Dosran C’, 73. 168  D. Stephen Davies, Y Cymro, 7, 9–10, quotation at 10. The beginning of the book largely draws verbatim on Michael D. Jones, Gwladychfa Gymreig. 169 For ‘the rapid Americanization of the Welsh’ from c.1880 in Scranton, Pennsylvania see William D. Jones, Wales in America, 105–45. 170  Apart from a brief account of the legend of Prince Madog: J. W. Jones and T. B. Morris, Hanes y Gwrthryfel, 4–5. For the work and its context see Hunter, Llwch Cenhedloedd, 254–6; Aled Jones and Bill Jones, Welsh Reflections, 1–25. 171  J. W. Jones and T. B. Morris, Hanes y Gwrthryfel, [i]; Hunter, Llwch Cenhedloedd, 255.

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‘ Living in the Past ’ , 1848–80  297 centuries and went further in accommodating key elements of Nonconformist narratives. As we shall see in Chapter 12, the relationship of the centuries down to 1282 with subsequent developments, especially after the union with England under Henry VIII, continued to exercise historians of Wales from the late Victorian period to the end of the First World War. So too did the challenge of drawing a line between history and legend.

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PART IV

PROF E SSIONA L IZ AT ION A ND NAT ION HO OD, 1 8 8 0 – 2 0 2 0 From the late nineteenth century the writing of Welsh history was no longer an essentially amateur endeavour but had also started to become established as an academic subject. With the benefit of hindsight the work of scholars such as J. E. Lloyd discussed in Chapter 12 marked an irreversible turning-­point in a process of professionalization that served to legitimate the history of Wales as a field of scholarly enquiry by adopting conventions and creating institutions that had numerous parallels elsewhere. Indeed, one of the distinguishing features of academic Welsh history writing is its engagement with a wider world of professional history, be it by making connections and comparisons with developments beyond Wales or by adapting approaches used in other contexts. In important respects, then, professionalization meant that Welsh history writing came to look more like history writing elsewhere, notably in the increasing diversity of its subject matter. Yet—and again Wales is by no means unique in this respect—precisely because they were deemed to establish a more truthful representation of the past, the ­canons of critical scholarship associated with professionalization could be used to reinforce or adapt as much as to challenge or replace the assumptions of earlier amateur history writing. In either case, academic Welsh history writing has been shaped by what preceded it rather than marking a completely new departure. This is especially true of historians’ continuing preoccupation with defining the Welsh and Wales, from the quest for the origins of Welsh nationhood during the ‘national revival’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the increasing readiness since the 1980s to address Wales’s ethnic diversity. Nor has professionalization carried all before it. Academic history is but one aspect of a broader historical culture in which people seek to make sense and use of the past that also includes, for example, popular publications, textbooks and other resources for schools, radio and television programmes, websites, the packaging of the past as heritage by museums and bodies responsible for the conservation and display of historic sites and monuments, and appeals to history for political purposes. Although these other aspects of historical culture largely lie beyond the scope of this book, they provide an important context for the written narratives of Welsh history that are my main concern here.

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300  WRITING WELSH HISTORY The continuing use of the Welsh language as a medium of history writing is a further aspect of this broader historical culture. Since its origins in the late nineteenth century academic Welsh history has mostly been written in English with the aim of reaching a wide readership, including a growing number of Welsh ­people unable to read Welsh and scholars beyond Wales. The desire to contribute to an international republic of letters had led early modern scholars such as Sir John Prise and Humphrey Llwyd to write in Latin, while the use of English by Llwyd and other Welsh gentry in writing about the Welsh past was predicated on assumptions about the status of that language as an appropriate medium for antiquarian discourse shared with gentry culture in England. For Welsh academic historians, on the other hand, writing in English signified membership of a scholarly elite defined, not by class, but by professionalization, an association that has only grown stronger with the increasing dominance of English since the 1960s as an international language of higher education and academic publication.1 Viewed from this perspective, what is remarkable about Welsh history writing down to the present day is not so much the extensive use of English but the continuing publication of numerous historical works in Welsh. Until the late nineteenth century, the use of Welsh was essential if authors wished to communicate with the vast majority of readers in Wales for whom Welsh was their first, and for many their only, language.2 That is why the two most substantial general histories of Wales in the nineteenth century, by Thomas Price (Carnhuanawc) and R. J. Pryse (Gweirydd ap Rhys), were published in Welsh (see Chapters  10 and  11). Yet, although such pragmatic considerations became less pressing by the early twentieth century as Welsh-­speakers not only declined in numbers but were mostly bilingual in English, the history of Wales has continued to be written in Welsh, reflecting a broader commitment to sustaining Welsh-­language culture. Moreover, while many publications have consisted of synthesis and popularization, specialized scholarly studies have also appeared, especially in the fields of cultural and religious history with a long-­established place in Welsh-­language writing.3 To offer a detailed assessment of the unprecedented quantity and variety of writing about the history of Wales produced since the late nineteenth century, and especially since the exponential increase in the number of publications since

1 Crystal, English as a Global Language, 110–12; Altbach, ‘The Imperial Tongue’. 2  According to the 1891 census, the earliest to record data for the Welsh language, 30 per cent of the population of Wales over three years of age were monoglot Welsh-­speakers, with a further 24 per cent being bilingual in Welsh and English, making a total of 910,000 Welsh-­speakers. In 1921 only 6 per cent were monoglot, with 31 per cent bilingual, a total of 922,000. In 1961: 1 per cent monoglot, 26 per cent bilingual, total: 680,000. In 2011: 19 per cent bilingual, total: 562,000. See John Williams, Digest of Welsh Historical Statistics, 1: 78, 86; Llywodraeth Cymru/Welsh Government, ‘Welsh Speakers by Local Authority, Gender and Detailed Age Groups, 2011 Census’. 3  For comment on this theme see J.  Goronwy Edwards, ‘Hanesyddiaeth Gymreig’, 27–9; R.  Rees Davies, ‘’Sgrifennu Hanes Cymru’; R.  Rees Davies, ‘Teyrnged Ymarferol’; J.  E.  Caerwyn Williams, ‘Golygyddol’.

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PPROFESSIONALIZATION AND NATIONHOOD, 1880–2020  301 the 1960s, would require much more space than is feasible or appropriate in a book exploring how the history of Wales has been written since the early Middle Ages. Previous chapters have already referred to numerous scholarly studies and editions of sources from the era of professionalization beginning c.1880, while surveys of particular aspects of twentieth- and twenty-­first-­century Welsh history writing, referred to in Chapters  13 and  14, provide a further indication of the available material. The last three chapters are therefore increasingly selective in their coverage. Their aim is simply to identify and explain some key developments and, above all, to assess their significance for understandings of what the history of Wales consisted of, including the extent to which those understandings marked a break with previous assumptions.

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12 Scientific History and National Awakening, 1880–1920 Two contexts are crucial to understanding Welsh history writing from 1880 to 1920. One was the adoption, to a significantly greater extent than previously, of critical, ‘scientific’ approaches to the study of the Welsh past that were increasingly linked to the professionalization of historical study. The other was what contemporaries called a ‘national awakening’ or ‘national revival’, as mid-­Victorian anxieties about Wales’s future gave way to more confident assertions of Welsh nationality in the wake of greater democratization, which led to the Liberal Party becoming the dominant electoral force in the principality from 1885 to 1922. Initiatives to secure recognition of Welsh distinctiveness focused on the spheres of education, culture, and religion, though calls for home rule were given short-­lived political traction in the late nineteenth century by adherents of the Cymru Fydd or Young Wales movement within Welsh Liberalism. Wales’s con­tinu­ing industrial, commercial, and demographic growth (the population increased from over 1.5 million in 1881 to over 2.6 million in 1921) underpinned these developments but also generated conflict between workers and employers over wages and working conditions that exposed stark divisions within the ­awakened nation.1 These contexts were closely connected in important respects. To begin with, as elsewhere in Europe at this time, to talk about the ‘awakening’ or ‘revival’ of a nation was to think historically by implying that the nation’s origins lay in the past; ‘scientific’ methods of historical inquiry thus fulfilled an important le­git­im­ iz­ing purpose.2 Conversely, the movement towards professionalization was facilitated by the creation of institutions that provided ‘a rib cage for nationality’, especially a federal University of Wales (1893), comprising colleges at Aberystwyth (1872), Cardiff (1883), and Bangor (1884), but also a National Museum and National Library (both founded in 1907).3 Yet the overlap between the two contexts was by no means complete. Critical scholarship on the Welsh past varied in

1 Kenneth  O.  Morgan, Rebirth of a Nation, part I (‘The Reawakening, 1880–1914’); Griffith, ‘Devolutionist Tendencies in Wales’; John Williams, Digest of Welsh Historical Statistics, 1: 7. 2 For the metaphor of national ‘awakening’ or ‘revival’ see Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival, esp. xiii, 11, 20, 22–4; Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations, 191–2, 196–7; Hackmann, ‘Narrating the Building of a Small Nation’; Maxwell, ‘Contingency and “National Awakening” ’. 3 Prys Morgan, ‘The Creation of the National Museum and National Library’, quotation at 21; J. Gwynn Williams, The University Movement in Wales. Writing Welsh History: From the Early Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century. Huw Pryce, Oxford University Press. © Huw Pryce 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198746034.003.0013

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304  WRITING WELSH HISTORY its form and purpose; so too did the use of that past to express and justify Welsh nationhood. While the decades covered by this chapter undoubtedly marked a major turning-­point in which the foundations for the modern academic study of Welsh history were laid, such a teleological view captures only part of a wider and more diverse field of historiographical endeavour. True, legendary interpretations were largely consigned to the margins. For example, the second edition of the encyclopaedia Y Gwyddoniadur Cymreig (1889–96) replaced R. W. Morgan’s fanciful articles on the Welsh language and Welsh people with critical contributions reflecting the latest scholarship from the Bangor academic John Morris Jones, while Owen Morgan (Morien)’s continued adherence to bardism in his History of Wales was highly eccentric by the time of its publication in 1911.4 On the other hand, not all new works were intended as contributions to scientific scholarship. Popular accounts were also published, including general syntheses that located modern developments in the long arc of Welsh history, while changes in the curriculum of elementary schools in the early 1890s helped to generate a demand for textbooks.5 A further significant feature of this period was the public validation of Welsh history through performance and display. Thus the National Pageant of Wales, held in Cardiff in 1909, offered its spectators a series of colourful scenes from British resistance to the Romans under Caradoc (Caratacus) to Henry VIII’s acceding to a Welsh request for the Act of Union, while the organizers of the Prince of Wales’s investiture in Caernarfon castle in July 1911 commissioned a play on Owain Glyndŵr, which by ending with his coronation in 1403 transformed the leader of the last Welsh armed rising against the crown into the ­harbinger of unity between the Welsh and the English.6 Over five years later, on 27 October 1916, David Lloyd George, Secretary of State for War, presided over the unveiling of eleven historical sculptures in Cardiff City Hall that had been paid for by the recently ennobled coal-­owner and former Liberal MP Lord Rhondda (D. A. Thomas).7 Thomas had invited the public to submit names of up to ten Welsh men or women before the reign of Queen Victoria from which a panel of adjudicators would choose the individuals to be commemorated, and the resulting competition attracted 364 entries proposing 250 subjects, the most popular being Owain Glyndŵr. The ten figures proposed by the adjudicators reflected the public’s top choices apart from Henry VII and Sir Thomas Picton, whose death at Waterloo had made him a British and Welsh hero, a widely-­held

4 Roger Jones Williams, ‘Hanes Cyhoeddi Y Gwyddoniadur’ (1967), 157–60, 162–3; O.  Morien Morgan, A History of Wales; Löffler, The Literary and Historical Legacy, 37, 84. 5  Cf. Robert Smith, Schools, Politics and Society, 204–5. 6  Hywel Teifi Edwards, The National Pageant of Wales; Millward, ‘Beriah Gwynfe Evans’, 177–8. See also John S. Ellis, Investiture, 67, 92–5. 7  Gaffney, ‘ “A National Valhalla for Wales” ’; Chris Williams, Icons of Wales; Wilson, Memorializing History, 16–17.

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SCIENTIFIC HISTORY AND NATIONAL AWAKENING, 1880–1920  305 estimate that ignored or minimized his reputation as a brutal military governor of the slave colony of Trinidad.8 Besides Glyndŵr the men commemorated were St David, Hywel Dda, Gerald of Wales, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, the poet Dafydd ap Gwilym, Bishop William Morgan (translator of the Bible into Welsh), and the hymn-­writer William Williams Pantycelyn. The only woman admitted to their ranks was Boadicea (Boudica), a late addition possibly recommended by Thomas’s wife and daughter, both campaigners for women’s suffrage.9 However, the sculptures also provided a fitting backdrop for Lloyd George, hailed by Lord Rhondda as ‘the greatest living Welshman’,10 whom the Nonconformist minister, journalist, and Liberal MP J. Hugh Edwards had already lauded as the apogee of Welsh history whose life could only be understood by setting it against a historical background beginning with ‘The Origin of the Welsh People’.11 As we shall see, Edwards’s biography of Lloyd George was but one, albeit highly instrumentalized, instance of the permeation of Welsh history writing in this period by a politically and ideo­logic­al­ly dominant Welsh Liberalism. The following discussion examines two new kinds of historical writing in turn: general accounts aimed at a wide readership, and academic scholarship. It should be stressed at the outset that the boundaries between these categories were far from clear-­cut. University-­educated historians wrote popular works; amateurs not employed in universities or archives made significant contributions to scholarship. Furthermore, popular works drew on the findings of scholarly studies, and the latter included books intended for a broad readership that were reviewed in newspapers as well as learned journals. Nevertheless, the two categories provide a convenient framework for assessing what was significantly different about Welsh history writing between 1880 and 1920 compared to previous periods while keeping the discussion within manageable bounds. This means that little attention will be paid to further instances of genres established in the mid-­Victorian era and earlier such as Nonconformist histories and memoirs, biographical dictionaries, and local and urban histories.12 The same is true of further histories of Welsh diaspora communities, including the Welsh colony established in Patagonia in 1865.13 However, though largely falling outside the remit of the present discussion, 8  Y Llan, 9 May 1913, 2; Western Mail, 26 July 1913, 7; Chris Evans, Slave Wales, 95–104. See also Pryce, ‘Cofio Glyndŵr’, 53–4, 56. 9  Western Mail, 28 October 1916, 6; cf. Western Mail, 27 October 1916, 3; John, Turning the Tide, 53–73, 75–118, 189. 10  Western Mail, 28 October 1916, 5. 11  J.  Hugh Edwards, The Life of David Lloyd George, quotation at 1: x; Charmley, ‘Edwards, John Hugh’. Lloyd George had already been compared with Llywelyn ap Gruffudd and Glyndŵr in the context of the 1911 investiture: John S. Ellis, Investiture, 76. 12  See e.g. Glanmor Williams, ‘Local and National History in Wales’, 47–9; Llion Pryderi Roberts, ‘ “Mawrhau ei Swydd” ’; John Edward Lloyd, ‘A Dictionary of Welsh Biography’, 71–3; O’Leary, ‘Town and Nation’. 13 Matthews, Hanes y Wladfa Gymreig; Lewis Jones, Hanes y Wladva Gymreig. Both authors were key figures among the colony’s first settlers but wrote their works after returning to Wales.

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306  WRITING WELSH HISTORY such works, together with the eisteddfodau, cultural societies, newspapers, and periodicals where some of them originated or were reported, need to be borne in mind as reflecting a broader demand for and interest in Welsh history that was a crucial context for the new kinds of historical writing considered here.

From Medieval to Modern Wales One major strand of history writing in this period consolidated and adapted nineteenth-­century understandings of the Welsh past in general works that combined the long-­established focus on the origins of the Welsh and their history down to 1282 with a celebration of an enlightened modern Wales whose beginnings lay in the eighteenth century. The following discussion focuses on two influential expositions of this approach at the turn of the twentieth century. One, The Welsh People (1900), was a collaborative endeavour published by John Rhys (1840–1915), who had risen from rural poverty in Cardiganshire to become the first professor of Celtic in Oxford in 1877 and principal of Jesus College in 1895, and the lawyer and politician David Brynmor-­Jones (1852–1921).14 The other, Wales (1901), came from the hand of Owen Morgan Edwards (1858–1920), Oxford historian and indefatigable editor and writer of popular publications, mainly in Welsh, aimed at reviving a sense of Welsh nationhood.15

The Welsh People The Welsh People was a substantial volume whose genesis lay in the British government’s recognition of Welsh distinctiveness, as it largely derived from and developed introductory sections of the report (1896) of the Royal Commission on Land in Wales and Monmouthshire, of which both Rhys and Brynmor-­Jones had been members. The commission was established by Gladstone after he was persuaded by Tom Ellis and other radical and nationalist-­minded Welsh Liberals that Wales had ‘a land question different from the land question in England’, even though the catalyst for complaints by Welsh tenant farmers about deteriorating conditions of tenure was the agricultural depression of the late nineteenth century that affected the rest of Britain as well as Ireland. In the present context, it is important to stress that, for Welsh Liberals campaigning on the issue, the land question was of almost equal significance to the disestablishment of the Anglican

14  WP; Fraser, revd. Williams, ‘Rhŷs (formerly Rees), Sir John’; Robert Thomas Jenkins, ‘Jones (later Brynmor-­Jones), Sir David Brynmor’. Since he is named before Brynmor-­Jones, Rhys presumably made the greater contribution to the volume. 15 Owen M. Edwards, Wales.

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SCIENTIFIC HISTORY AND NATIONAL AWAKENING, 1880–1920  307 Church as a symbol of the difference between Wales and England.16 Furthermore, in common with debates about the land question in England, Ireland, and Scotland, the report’s strong historical dimension exemplified a wider conviction that contemporary problems ‘could only be dealt with by relating them to the history of the nation under consideration’.17 Besides the material incorporated in The Welsh People, the report provided a detailed account of the history of the Welsh land question in the nineteenth century and its appendices included a lengthy ‘Memorandum on the Manors and Lordships of Wales’ from their medieval ­origins compiled by the commission’s secretary Daniel Lleufer Thomas.18 Thomas also drafted the report’s section on the Welsh language and its literature, adapted in turn for The Welsh People.19 Since the report, supported by five volumes of ­evidence and the volume of appendices, was shelved by the Conservative administration that had come to power in 1895, Rhys and Brynmor-­Jones’s book was the commission’s most influential legacy, being reissued five times between 1900 and 1923.20 The Welsh People was the product of an ascendant Welsh Liberal intelligentsia, not only because it derived from the work of the Welsh land commission but in its authors, who pinned their colours to the mast by dedicating their book to the memory of two Welsh Liberal stalwarts strongly committed to improving education in Wales: Lord Aberdare (Henry Austin Bruce) and Thomas Edward Ellis. While the commission’s remit may help to explain the book’s understanding of speaking, these and other ‘the Welsh people’ as primarily rural and Welsh-­ em­phases reflected assumptions also held by other patriotically-­minded Welsh Liberals, not least O. M. Edwards. Admittedly Rhys and Brynmor-­Jones presented their work as only a contribution towards a history of Wales; consequently, while considerably expanding the 1896 report’s coverage of historical events down to the Edwardian conquest, they did not provide a coherent narrative. They came closest to this in the first seven chapters, occupying over half of the volume, which offers a broadly chronological account extending from pre-­Celtic Britain to 1282, including a long chapter assessing what the Welsh laws and Gerald of Wales reveal about Welsh society. The rest of the book deals mainly with aspects of Welsh ­history from the later Middle Ages, with particular attention to developments

16  Report of the Royal Commission on Land. The debt to the report goes beyond the seven chapters (out of thirteen) said to be based on it in WP, [vii]. For the Welsh land question and the commission see Kenneth  O.  Morgan, Wales in British Politics, 53–9, 123–9, 174–6; J.  Graham Jones, ‘Select Committee or Royal Commission?’; David W. Howell, ‘The Land Question’, quotation at 97. 17 Readman, Land and Nation, 137–8, quotation at 138. 18  Report of the Royal Commission on Land, 149–76; Bibliographical, Statistical, and Other Miscellaneous Memoranda, 437–75; Eddie May, ‘Thomas, Sir Daniel Lleufer’; R.  Brinley Jones, ‘Sir Daniel Lleufer Thomas’; Griffith, ‘Devolutionist Tendencies in Wales’, 101. 19  WP, [vii]. 20 Kenneth O. Morgan, Wales in British Politics, 129; WP, 6th impression (London, 1923), facing title page.

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308  WRITING WELSH HISTORY from the eighteenth century onwards in four chapters dealing respectively with the rise of Nonconformity, education, language and literature, and ‘rural Wales at  the present day’. While building on earlier interpretations of Welsh history developed over the previous century, The Welsh People thus went further than any previous work (including that of Gweirydd ap Rhys a generation earlier) in achieving chronological balance between the eras before and after the Edwardian conquest. If, on the one hand, this served to reiterate the standard doctrine that the history of Wales in its full, politically independent sense had ended in 1282, on the other it enhanced the significance of modern Welsh history by presenting it, at least in a limited sense, as a continuation of a story beginning in the ancient and medieval period that had traditionally been regarded as fundamental, if not indeed tantamount, to the history of Wales. Since the Edwardian conquest, the history of the Welsh in regard to wars, foreign policy, and general affairs becomes so merged into that of Great Britain that it is hardly susceptible of sep­ ar­ate treatment in a continuous narrative form. They have, however, a particular history as to many of the institutions, conditions, and activities, that create or maintain the life of a nation.21

The connection between the ancient and modern is explained in a passage that dismisses legendary interpretations of Welsh history rooted in a sense of defeat and decline: the Welsh people of to-­day have the satisfaction of knowing that they are not the decayed and disconsolate remnant of a once great nation, but that in the main they are the descendants of Celtic races which though absorbed into the English polity, after a prolonged struggle for independence, have steadily progressed by the side of their conquerors in regard to all that goes to make up civilisation, and by combining an obstinate vitality with a certain happy power of adapting themselves to new circumstances, have succeeded in retaining their language and some of the best characteristics of their ancestors.22

The Welsh People, like the report from which it derived, may be seen, then, as yet another assertion that the subjects of its title deserved recognition and respect from their powerful neighbour. However, the claims were now asserted with a new confidence as Welsh particularity was endowed with a transcendent significance through its service to an imperial Britain: ‘Wales and her people are more likely to

21  WP, xxvi. The point is reiterated later explicitly with reference to ‘the Welsh-­speaking people’: WP, 345. 22  WP, xxiv; see also 345. Similar sentiments in more explicitly loyalist language in Report of the Royal Commission on Land, 12.

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SCIENTIFIC HISTORY AND NATIONAL AWAKENING, 1880–1920  309 contribute to the greatness of our Anglo-­Celtic Empire by developing themselves on their own lines . . . rather than by slavishly aping the south of England’.23 The methods Rhys and Brynmor-­Jones espoused were integral to their modernizing patriotic purpose. Their alignment with recent scholarly approaches was demonstrated not only by the inclusion of the chapter from the 1896 report on the ‘History of Land Tenure in Wales’ by Frederic Seebohm (of whom more later) but by the work’s debt to Rhys himself, especially in the early chapters but also in the appraisal of modern cultural and educational developments. As in his Celtic Britain, issued in four editions between 1882 and 1908, Rhys deployed philo­logic­al, literary, and other ethnological evidence to explain the origins of the Welsh. As was common in the later nineteenth century, Rhys deployed ‘ethnology’ as a broad term encompassing the linguistic, cultural, and social characteristics of peoples, but also contrasted this with the physical characteristics given priority, albeit to a lesser extent in Britain than on the Continent, by the recently established dis­cip­ line of anthropology.24 Both categories informed his understanding of ‘race’. According to Rhys, the Welsh were descended from three principal races, each of which had arrived successively in Wales from continental Europe: the pre-­Celtic ‘aborigines’ or ‘Ivernians’, corresponding to the Iberians described by eth­nol­ ogists, followed by two Celtic peoples, namely the Goidels, whose descendants spoke Irish, Scots Gaelic, and Manx, then the Brythons, ancestors of the Welsh, Cornish, and Bretons (a two-­stage process first propounded by Edward Lhuyd).25 The Goidels arrived in Britain probably by the sixth century bce, the Brythons in the early fifth century ce as a result of conquests by Cunedda and his sons from Manaw Gododdin in northern Britain, as reported in the Historia Brittonum (‘History of the Britons’, 829/30).26 Importantly, those conquests marked ‘the beginning of the history of the Cymry, considered as a separate and independent nation’: in other words, the history of the Welsh began in the post-­Roman period, somewhat earlier than the late seventh-­century transition from British to Welsh rulers posited by Geoffrey of Monmouth, followed by Thomas Price (Carnhuanawc) and Gweirydd ap Rhys.27 Yet, while Rhys had no time for discredited views of the Welsh as successors of Britons originating in the mists of a Trojan or biblical past, the ancient population movements and interactions revealed by ethnology

23  WP, 506–10, 512 (quotations), 515. ‘Anglo-­Celtic’ is an addition to the original text of this passage in Report of the Commission on Land, 82. Cf. Brynmor-­Jones, ‘A National Museum for Wales’, 59: advances in Welsh education formed part of ‘that forward movement which has for its object the conversion of Wales from a mere aggregate of counties into a province of the British Empire, having an active and conscious national unity of its own’. 24  Cf. Stocking, Jr., Victorian Anthropology, ch. 7, esp. 245–7, 269–70. 25  For Rhys’s changing interpretations of the early languages and peoples of Wales see Charles-­ Edwards, ‘John Rhŷs’. 26  WP, 9–11. By contrast, Rhys, Celtic Britain, 2, declined to posit a date for the arrival of ‘the first Celts’ in Britain. 27  WP, xxiii.

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310  WRITING WELSH HISTORY offered an alternative explanation that salvaged the antiquity of the Welsh, whom he ­presented as a racial amalgam of ‘aborigines’, Goidels, and Brythons.28 By contrast, later settlers—from the Danes to the Normans and English—had made little difference and thus posed no challenge to the antiquity of Welsh nationality.29 Although Rhys and Brynmor-­Jones stressed that associating particular characteristics of the Welsh with their ancient racial ancestors was difficult, they ventured to suggest that their descent from the pre-­Celtic (and thus non-­Aryan) ‘aborigines’ explained the democratic pro­pen­sities of the modern Welsh evident from their adherence to Nonconformist religion and their views on ‘social and political questions’; while the medieval prose tales of the Mabinogion were held to ‘represent, though doubtless not very closely, the stories of the Goidels of ancient Wales’.30 The Welsh People’s interpretation of modern Welsh history had antecedents in the mid-­Victorian period that were indebted in turn to ideas in Nonconformist historiography from the late eighteenth century onwards. In brief, the Methodist revival resulted in ‘the new birth of a people’ and, together with agitation against the Blue Books of 1847, gave a stimulus to ‘the chief event in the special history of Wales during the last fifty years’, namely ‘the modern educational movement’ that reached its climax with the foundation of the federal University of Wales in 1893.31 Yet while the work celebrated the modern revival of Welsh nationhood, it struck an ambivalent note when it came to the language seen as fundamental to that nationhood. On the one hand, the prospects for Welsh seemed bright, as Sunday schools fostered widespread literacy in the literary Welsh of the Bible and the language ‘seems to be far more read and studied now than perhaps at any time in the past’.32 But in common with earlier controversial pronouncements by Rhys, the book also detected worrying signs of linguistic decay in ‘the shoddy Welsh’ of newspapers and declared ‘that a day must come when English is the universal speech of the United Kingdom’, even if the day was still far off and ‘the future has yet in store for the Welsh language many long years of prosperity’.33

O. M. Edwards Born and brought up on a tenant farm in Llanuwchllyn (Merioneth), Owen Edwards rose from rural poverty to the high tables of Oxford.34 In this respect, he 28  WP, ch. 1; cf. Rhys, Celtic Britain, 1–4, 80, 215, 257–8, 262–3, 270–2. 29  WP, 31–2, 35. 30  WP, 34, 69. 31  WP, xxvi, 472–6, 485–500, quotations at 474, 485. Similar interpretation in Howell T. Evans, The Making of Modern Wales, esp. 5–6, 157–8, 168–78, 196–208. 32  WP, 506–10, 512 (quotation), 515. 33  WP, 510–11, 516 (quotation); Hywel Teifi Edwards, ‘John Rhŷs yn Achos Trafferth’. 34  The fullest biographical study of Edwards is Hazel Davies, O. M.: Cofiant. Shorter accounts in English: Hazel Davies, O.  M.  Edwards; Gareth Elwyn Jones, ‘Edwards, Sir Owen Morgan’. See also Lowri Angharad Hughes, ‘Writing the Welsh People’; Lowri Angharad Hughes, ‘O. M. Edwards’.

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SCIENTIFIC HISTORY AND NATIONAL AWAKENING, 1880–1920  311 followed a similar path to Rhys. However, whereas Rhys became a wide-­ranging Celtic scholar with a European reputation, Edwards was above all an educationalist and popularizer, who, at great personal cost to himself and his family, sought to instil a new sense of Welsh nationhood among his compatriots, especially by making the Welsh language a modern form of expression and a medium for ­educating his compatriots. These priorities stemmed from his experience of, and lasting attachment to, his birthplace in north Wales, where he was influenced by the Congregationalist minister Michael  D.  Jones, a resolute campaigner against landlords and early advocate of Welsh self-­government; but his authority as an iconic and highly influential public intellectual owed much to academic success in England.35 Edwards commenced his nation-­building efforts while still a history undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford (following studies at Aberystwyth and Glasgow), as in 1885 he began to write a weekly newspaper column in Welsh that sought to educate and entertain readers back home with a wide variety of ma­ter­ial devoted to the culture and history of their locality in Merioneth, and the following year was instrumental in establishing a society for Welsh students in Oxford, Cymdeithas Dafydd ap Gwilym (named after the renowned medieval poet), whose patriotic deliberations, including the devising of a new orthography for the Welsh language, were followed in the principality through reports in the Welsh press.36 Edwards graduated in 1887 with the best first-­class history degree of his year, sealing a reputation for brilliance established by his award of a Brackenbury scholarship and prestigious university prizes that in turn paved the way for his election in 1889 as a fellow and tutor in history at Lincoln College, where he remained until his appointment in 1907 as chief inspector of schools in Wales under the newly established Welsh department of the Board of Education.37 Yet, while a dedicated and popular tutor and lecturer at Oxford, Edwards also continued to devote great energy to promoting the Welsh cultural and educational revival to which he had been committed since his youth.38 From the late 1880s he made a name for himself as a fresh literary voice in pioneering volumes of travel writing whose idiomatic and informal Welsh prose style drew on the spoken language of the ordinary people (W. gwerin) among whom he had grown up and whom he idealized as representing the essence of the Welsh nation.39 It was to these that he principally directed his nation-­building efforts, whose goal was encapsulated in the motto I godi’r hen wlad yn ei hôl (‘To raise the old country to her former glory’) chosen for the widely-­read Welsh-­language monthly 35  Hazel Davies, O. M.: Cofiant, 26–7, 232, 266, 291–2; cf. Tudur, ‘The Life, Work and Thought’, esp. chs. 3, 5, 10. 36 Hazel Davies, O.  M.: Cofiant, 213–17, 255–61, 266–7; J.  E.  Caerwyn Williams, ‘Cymdeithas Dafydd ap Gwilym’. 37  Hazel Davies, O. M.: Cofiant, 167–71, 242–3, 299–301, 378–83, 574–8. 38  Hazel Davies, O. M.: Cofiant, 279–80; J. Graham Jones, ‘The Littérateur as Politician’. 39  Millward, ‘Gwaith Cynnar  O.  M.  Edwards’; Hazel Davies, ‘Boundaries’. See also Prys Morgan, ‘The Gwerin of Wales’, 134–52; Sherrington, ‘O. M. Edwards’.

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312  WRITING WELSH HISTORY magazine Cymru (‘Wales’) he founded in 1891 and edited until his death.40 Through this and other publications, including Cymru’r Plant (‘The Children’s Wales’), the committed Oxford history tutor and later schools inspector set to out to educate and thus empower his nation. Popularizing knowledge of the history of Wales, together with Welsh traditions and literature, was fundamental to his purpose: remembering the Wales of old was essential to the task of strengthening the character of its people as they created a new Wales in an age of educational progress.41 In the first article of Cymru Edwards emphasized that one of the magazine’s main aims was ‘to tell the history of the Welsh’, a task he continued both in subsequent issues and in other publications, including several for children, over the following decade. Most of these writings were in Welsh, including essays on the homes of famous Welsh people, but his fullest account of Welsh history was the English volume Wales (1901), commissioned while Edwards was still an undergraduate by G. P. Putnam’s Sons of New York as part of ‘The Story of the Nations’, a series of popular histories— originally intended for young readers—published jointly with T. Fisher Unwin of London.42 Reprinted four times by 1912, Wales followed the series’ remit of presenting the ‘picturesque and noteworthy periods and episodes’ of each nation and ‘to enter into the real lives of the peoples’, as, wearing his learning lightly, Edwards dispensed with both footnotes and conventional protestations of a commitment to debunking legendary interpretations, and further sought to engage readers by dividing the text into short chapters and paragraphs, supplemented by numerous illustrations and written in a varied style that combined bold generalizations, concise summaries of events, and pen portraits of individuals.43 While both the content and style of the work bore similarities with his previous history writing in Welsh, as did the use of Welsh literature as a window into mentalities, the assessment of character—as well as his belief in the character-­forming propensities of historical study itself—were attributes also prized by the Oxford History School whose influence may be further attested by the attention Edwards gave to the English and European contexts of events in Wales.44 Moreover, though he certainly

40  Lowri Angharad Hughes, ‘O. M. Edwards’; Lowri Angharad Hughes, ‘Y Teimlad Cenedlaethol’. Translation of the motto from Hazel Davies, O. M. Edwards, 40. 41  Owen M. Edwards, ‘Rhagymadrodd’. For Edwards’s approach to Welsh history see Manon Jones, ‘O.  M.  Edwards’; Lowri Angharad Hughes, ‘Writing the Welsh People’, 178–206; Lowri Angharad Hughes Ahronson, ‘ “A Refreshingly New and Challenging Voice” ’. 42 Owen  M.  Edwards, Cartrefi Cymru; Owen  M.  Edwards, Wales; Hazel Davies, O.  M.: Cofiant, 250–2, 480–4, 545–9. 43  Quotations: Hazel Davies, O. M.: Cofiant, 251. In 1898 Edwards emphasized the importance of writing history in an attractive, readable style in a sympathetic appraisal of Theophilus Evans’s Drych y Prif Oesoedd (‘Mirror of the Primitive Ages’), whose lively account of the early Welsh past he preferred to ‘the short-­ lived theories of German and French and English historians these days’: Owen M. Edwards, ‘Rhagair’, quotation at 6. 44 Owen  M.  Edwards, Wales, 124, 261–6 (literature); 81, 92–3, 204, 387–9 (character). Cf. Soffer, Discipline and Power, 14, 54.

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SCIENTIFIC HISTORY AND NATIONAL AWAKENING, 1880–1920  313 sought to fashion a usable past in the service of his nationalist ideals (like Tom Ellis, he stressed the importance of commemorating Welsh heroes from the past), Edwards was no mere propagandist.45 He sought to explain as well as narrate, being sensitive, for example, to the interplay of political, economic, and social factors that contributed to the improvement in the condition of serfs after the Edwardian conquest and the Black Death, a process already beginning under the princes as the costs of war against the Normans and English encouraged them to commute labour services to money rents, which in turn was linked to the injection of cash into the economy from the export of Welsh wool and mercenaries. ‘It is this mighty, silent revolution’, Edwards declared, ‘that is the most im­port­ant part of history.’ Accordingly, the violence and cruelty of kings or barons were ‘insignificant facts’ compared with ‘the unconquerable spirit of freedom [that] was silently and irresistibly raising the weak and the wronged’.46 His commitment to Welsh national revival may have led Edwards along a very different path from that of historical research and professionalization taken by other university-­ educated historians of his day such as his friends Charles Firth and J. E. Lloyd, but his academic study and teaching of history nevertheless left their imprint on his popularizing efforts—efforts, moreover, that earned plaudits from Benjamin Jowett and other Oxford dons.47 Edwards’s vision of Welsh history was one of reassuring simplicity. As he put it in a primer for school children in 1892, ‘The prince fell to ruin, the common ­people (Y Werin) awoke. Power started to come into the hands of the common people of Wales, and it is continually increasing.’48 Edwards said much the same a decade later in his 1901 Wales. Describing the book as the ‘first attempt at writing a continuous popular history of Wales’, Edwards continued: In the first half I try to sketch the rise and fall of a princely caste; in the second, the rise of a self-­educated, self-­governing peasantry. Rome left its heritage of political unity and organisation to a Welsh governing tribal caste; the princes were alternately the oppressing organisers of their own people and their defenders against England . . . The princes were crushed by the Plantagenets, their descendants dispossessed by the Lancastrians or Anglicised by the Tudors. On their disappearance, a lower subject class became prominent . . . This class, with stronger thought and increasing material wealth, rules Wales to-­day.49

45 Owen  M.  Edwards, ‘Rhagymadrodd’; Manon Jones, ‘O.  M.  Edwards’, 213; T.  E.  Ellis, ‘The Memory of the Kymric Dead’. 46 Owen M. Edwards, Wales, 242–7, 249–5, quotations at 246–7. 47 Lowri Angharad Hughes, ‘Writing the Welsh People’, 184; Hazel Davies, O.  M.: Cofiant, 234–5, 547. 48 Owen M. Edwards, Holi ac Ateb, 29; translation adapted from Hazel Davies, O. M. Edwards, 76. 49 Owen M. Edwards, Wales, ix.

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314  WRITING WELSH HISTORY True, here and elsewhere Edwards made little attempt to trace the rise of this ‘lower subject class’—that is, the Welsh-­speaking and predominantly rural and Nonconformist gwerin—in detail, and he seems to have regarded it as a lengthy process beginning at some point between the rising of Owain Glyndŵr in the early fifteenth century and the first Act of Union in 1536 but only gathering strength from 1730.50 Moreover, as we have seen, the rise of the gwerin had already been anticipated to some extent in Edwards’s observations on the dis­sol­ ution of medieval serfdom. These uncertainties and inconsistencies suggest that what mattered most to Edwards was the overall pattern of development that connected two golden ages—in the Middle Ages and his own day—by pointing up the ruptures and contrasts between them. His vision of progress from princes to people was crucial in enabling Edwards to achieve greater coherence than previous writers, including Rhys and Brynmor-­ Jones, in advancing an overarching interpretation of Welsh history from prehistoric Iberian settlers to the 1890s. However, the coverage was uneven. Consider the structure of Edwards’s 1901 Wales. Comprising just over 400 pages, almost half of the book deals with the period down to 1282, and mostly with the six centuries from 681. While this meant that it was the first general history of Wales to devote more space to the centuries after than to those before 1282, the pre­dom­in­ ant focus nevertheless remained on the Middle Ages, as the next 100 pages or so take the reader from Edward I’s conquest of Wales to the accession of Henry Tudor in 1485.51 Only then, three-­quarters of the way through the text, do we come to Edwards’s crucial transition: ‘The Wales of the princes disappears, the Wales of the peasant begins to take shape.’52 The following fifty pages mainly focus on the political, constitutional, and religious changes introduced by Henry VIII; by contrast, the years from 1588 to 1730 are passed over in thirty pages highlighting ‘the disruption’ of the Civil Wars and Commonwealth and the ‘apathy’ following the accession of the Hanoverians.53 And, despite its significance as what Edwards later called the ‘Rise of the Welsh Democracy’, the subsequent period of educational and religious progress beginning with the Methodist revival and culminating with the foundation of the University of Wales (1893)—an ini­ tia­tive Edwards had supported in a report commissioned by the Liberal government—takes up fewer than twenty pages amounting to less than 5 per cent of the entire book.54 Unsurprisingly, this final part adapted aspects of earlier Welsh historical thinking evident since the late eighteenth century, especially the idea that the modern Welsh people had been created by Nonconformity and the Methodist revival. In that respect, as in the emphasis on education, Edwards was at one with 50  Manon Jones, ‘O. M. Edwards’, 209–10. 51  Cf. J. Goronwy Edwards, ‘Hanesyddiaeth Gymreig’, 22. 52 Owen M. Edwards, Wales, 303. 53  Quotations: Owen M. Edwards, Wales, 354, 384. 54 Owen M. Edwards, Wales, 400–1. Quotation: Owen Edwards, A Short History of Wales, 133. Cf. J. Gwynn Williams, The University Movement in Wales, 139–48.

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SCIENTIFIC HISTORY AND NATIONAL AWAKENING, 1880–1920  315 Rhys and Brynmor-­Jones. Yet, while he shared their view that the Welsh con­tinued to have a ‘particular history’ after 1282, his emphasis differed as he integrated the religious, cultural, intellectual, and educational developments they focused upon with economic and political factors, namely the new wealth resulting from industrialization and the new opportunities created by greater democratization of the British state, including the establishment of county, district, and parish councils in 1888 and 1894 that rapidly reduced the influence of landed families in their localities.55 As he had put it in 1893, ‘The glory of the Wales of the princes was nothing like the glory of the Wales of the common people.’56 For the latter had not only succeeded to but surpassed the princes’ power through a liberating process of educational and economic advancement: ‘Trained by their self-­education in religious and literary matters, enfranchised when the new wealth gave them pol­it­ical independence, the Welsh people were peculiarly adapted for local government.’57 Edwards’s juxtaposing of princes and people was mapped on to a three-­stage scheme of golden age, decline, and revival for which there were many parallels in nineteenth- and twentieth-­century national history writing. Likewise his interpretation was predicated on the widely-­held notion, ultimately derived from Herder, that nationality had deep roots in the past and was embodied in the ­people.58 However, Edwards differed from other historians of Wales, both before and during his lifetime, in anchoring this essentialist nationality, not in racial or ethnic continuity, but in geography. His 1901 history opens by declaring that ‘Wales is a land of mountains. Its mountains explain its isolation and its love of independence; they explain its internal divisions; they have determined, throughout its history, what the direction and method of its progress were to be.’59 True, ‘there has always been a slight variation of character and dialect in Wales. There are mountains and mountains; there are Welshmen and Welshmen. . . . But, throughout, there is one character, that of a true child of the mountains.’60 Edwards developed the point over the following pages: while races and languages go, the mountains remain. . . .  And here it is that we are to look for a continuity in Welsh history. . . .  Geography ever triumphs over history, climate affects the bent of the mind as it affects the colour of the skin. The inhabitants of the Welsh mountains will ever be a separate nation . . .

55 Owen  M.  Edwards, Wales, 397–401. Cf. WP, xxvi; Kenneth  O.  Morgan, Wales in British Politics, 106–7. 56 Owen M. Edwards, Trem ar Hanes Cymru (Llanuwchllyn, 1893), 32, translated in Hazel Davies, O. M. Edwards, 77. 57 Owen M. Edwards, Wales, 400. 58 Cf. Leerssen, National Thought, 97–101, 112–14; Baár, Historians and Nationalism, 109–11, 167–72, 224–5, 295; Nagle, Histories of Nationalism, 39­–42. 59 Owen M. Edwards, Wales, 2. 60 Owen M. Edwards, Wales, 8.

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316  WRITING WELSH HISTORY . . . The inhabitants of the mountains feel, amid all their differences, that they are one nation, because their land is unlike other lands.61

Edwards had first advanced this interpretation a decade earlier, applying to Wales his belief that landscape influenced history previously expressed in an 1888 Oxford prize essay on the ‘The Reformation in France’.62 Edwards was by no means alone in assuming that geographical factors offered an indispensable key to understanding history; indeed, his assumption was shared by numerous historians in the nineteenth century, from Jules Michelet to Frederick Jackson Turner, eventually joined by influential voices in the emerging discipline of geography, especially Friedrich Ratzel.63 Wales appeared in the same year as The Relations of Geography & History by one of Edwards’s fellow Oxford history tutors, Hereford B. George, who cited numerous examples to argue that ‘[h]istory is not intelligible without geography’.64 However, the ensuing discussion shies away from the geographical determinism espoused by Edwards, taking care to allow for other factors, and, while Ratzel’s ‘anthropogeography’, especially as interpreted by his American follower Ellen Semple, adopted a more determinist position, the similarities with Edwards’s approach are too general to suggest direct influence.65 For example, Semple argued that the descendants of English and Scottish settlers in the Appalachian mountains had been marginalized from modern American life by an inaccessible and harsh environment that left them stranded in the eighteenth century.66 Edwards, by contrast, held that the mountains of Wales bestowed continuity, not by imposing physical and mental constraints on an isolated community, but by inspiring their inhabitants to imagine themselves a distinct nation over many centuries, without, moreover, confining themselves to a backward past. His interpretation bears resemblances with other attempts from the late nineteenth century to anchor national identity in geog­ raphy by ‘naturalizing the nation’, a process ‘whereby a nation comes to view itself as the offspring of its natural landscape’—Turner’s thesis that the expanding frontier had created a uniquely American identity is the best-­known example.67 However, the closest parallel to Edwards’s emphasis on mountains was the identification of the Swiss nation with their Alpine landscape.68

61 Owen M. Edwards, Wales, 8–10. 62  Owen M. Edwards, ‘Cymru’, 1–2; Hazel Davies, O. M.: Cofiant, 334–5. 63  Michael Williams, ‘The Creation of Humanized Landscapes’, 168–73. 64 Millward, ‘Gwaith Cynnar  O.  M.  Edwards’, 176–7; Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition, 197–200; Friedman, Marc Bloch, Sociology and Geography, 24–7, 64–5; Pryce, ‘From the Neolithic to Nonconformity’, 20–1; George, The Relations of Geography & History, 1. 65 George, The Relations of Geography & History, 7–8, 14–18, 144, 151, 172–3, 283; Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition, 199–200, 212; Potthoff, ‘The Use of “Cultural Landscape” ’, 52. 66  Semple, ‘The Anglo-­Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains’. 67 Kaufmann, ‘ “Naturalizing the Nation” ’, quotation at 690. Cf. Neil Evans, ‘ “When Men and Mountains Meet” ’, 222–6. 68  Zimmer, ‘In Search of Natural Identity’.

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SCIENTIFIC HISTORY AND NATIONAL AWAKENING, 1880–1920  317 While his emphasis on mountains showed broad similarities with a variety of contemporaneous efforts to make geographical factors fundamental to the understanding of history, how far Edwards was inspired by such examples is unclear. On the other hand, just as American literature earlier in the nineteenth century had helped to prepare the ground for Turner’s frontier thesis through its romantic association of the American character with the Wild West, so Edwards may well have been influenced by the increasing identification of Wales with its mountains by Welsh-­language writers from the 1850s onwards, not least his favourite poet William Thomas (Islwyn).69 If so, the emphasis on mountains may have ori­gin­ ated as part of Edwards’s ‘cultural strategy’ of conveying his ideas in terms that were already familiar to his Welsh-­speaking readers.70 His evocation of mountains is probably best understood, then, as an arresting image of a fundamental assumption rather than a clearly defined analytical concept.71 Although Edwards followed Rhys’s view that the Welsh descended from the Iberians, Goidels, and Brythons and that race and language were transient phenomena, he appears to have considered this ancient legacy an unstable basis for Welsh nationality, preferring instead to ground it in an immovable landscape. This in turn led him to an emphasis on the unchanging and homogeneous character of the Welsh that sat uneasily with his image of progress from princes to people.72 One reflection of these tensions is that, while Edwards—here exemplifying the continuing influence on Welsh intellectuals of Matthew Arnold’s stereotyping of the Celts—stated that mountains held the key to the character of the Welsh as highly imaginative but woefully impractical and lacking in perseverance, he did not adhere to these assumptions consistently in the rest of the book, except, as we shall see, by way of contrast with Llywelyn the Great and, at least implicitly, other Welsh leaders praised for their statesmanship as well as the ultimately triumphant gwerin.73 Nor did Edwards suggest that the mountains exerted their nation-­building influence on the changing population of Wales in his own day.74 Whereas for his con­tem­ por­ar­ies in a polyethnic Switzerland the Alps offered an alternative basis to ethnicity and language for sustaining nationhood, Edwards invoked the mountains of Wales to reinforce what was still an essentially ethnic and linguistic national identity.75 If the mountains absorbed different races in the distant past, their 69 Neil Evans, ‘ “When Men and Mountains Meet” ’, 227; Prys Morgan, ‘Islwyn a Mynyddoedd Cymru’; Hazel Davies, O. M.: Cofiant, 504–6. Cf. Kaufmann, ‘ “Naturalizing the Nation” ’, 673–6. 70  Cf. Lowri Angharad Hughes, ‘O. M. Edwards’, esp. 53–8, 72–4. 71  Cf. Neil Evans, ‘ “When Men and Mountains Meet” ’, 223–7. 72  Early criticism of Edwards’s linking character to landscape in W. Llewelyn Williams, Review of O. M. Edwards, Wales, 166–7. 73 Owen M. Edwards, Wales, 7–8. For an account of a successful medieval Welsh ruler explicitly intended to disprove Arnoldian stereotypes see W.W., ‘Gruffydd ap Cynan’. 74  Cf. Neil Evans, ‘ “When Men and Mountains Meet” ’, 225–6. 75 Cf. Zimmer, ‘In Search of Natural Identity’, 648–52. In 1889 Edwards noticed similarities between the peoples and mountainous landscapes of Switzerland and Wales, but without attributing the character of the Swiss to their mountains; he also contrasted the Alps and Snowdonia: Owen M. Edwards, O’r Bala i Geneva, 88–9, 101, 104, 162.

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318  WRITING WELSH HISTORY ­ nifying power appears to have waned by the modern period as it failed to foster u a shared sense of nationhood uniting recent English and other settlers in industrial Wales with the Welsh-­speaking gwerin—presumably because, for Edwards, the latter already epitomized the Welsh people and their rise marked the apogee of Welsh history. If the geographical distinctiveness of Wales underwrote the claims of the Welsh to be considered a separate nation, Edwards also recognized that the principality formed part of a larger geographical unit. The political implications of this are spelled out in his discussion of Llywelyn the Great (d. 1240), portrayed as the greatest of the medieval Welsh princes in line with prevailing historiographical fashion.76 Indeed, he described Llywelyn as ‘the most important figure in medi­ aeval Welsh history’ on account of his combination of military success with statesmanlike qualities and especially of his farsighted vision of Wales’s relationship with England.77 As for Lloyd George when campaigning for Cymru Fydd over a decade earlier, the prince prefigured the ideals of Welsh home rule within a British union of nations.78 Llywelyn had discovered what the natural boundaries of Wales were . . . he had given up the Celtic luxury of scheming against the inevitable. He had seen that mountain and plain remained, while race and language changed. The new unity was not a racial one, neither was it based on common language: it was simply territorial . . . . . . He saw that . . . the independence of Wales must be its independence as a part of a more extensive kingdom. The experience of his long reign . . . had en­abled him to see very far into the future. . . . He had seen that the independence which is natural to Wales, and the unity which is natural to the islands of Britain, are not inconsistent.79

Edwards then linked Llywelyn to the traditional narrative of Welsh salvation through the Tudors by asserting that the prince’s ideas were eventually brought to fruition by ‘Henry VIII., who gave Wales a new unity and a voice in the Parliament of England and Wales’, while his conclusion expanded the wider territorial and political context to embrace the British Empire, declaring that ‘[t]he development of Wales has been twofold—in national intensity and in the expansion of imperial sympathy’.80

76  Cf. Pryce, Lloyd, 161–4. 77 Owen M. Edwards, Wales, 127. 78 Pryce, Lloyd, 163–4. 79 Owen M. Edwards, Wales, 148, 150. 80 Owen  M.  Edwards, Wales, 150–1, 403–4, quotations at 151, 403. Cf. W.  R.  Williams, The Parliamentary History of the Principality of Wales, mainly comprising lists of Welsh MPs. For Edwards’s support of the empire see Aled Jones and Bill Jones, ‘Empire and the Welsh Press’, 83–90; Hazel Davies, O. M.: Cofiant, 417.

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SCIENTIFIC HISTORY AND NATIONAL AWAKENING, 1880–1920  319 Edwards did much to revive the interest of his compatriots in the history of Wales.81 Nor was he alone in making that history more accessible to schoolchildren and the general public.82 The most colourful popularizer of Welsh history in this period was Owen Rhoscomyl (1863–1919), the sometime cowboy and ir­regu­lar soldier in the South African War whose 1905 Flame-­Bearers of Welsh History dressed up an essentially conventional reading of its subject in military garb.83 The book, published in ‘school’ and ‘public’ editions, the latter including an outline of its author’s controversial interpretation of medieval Welsh ge­neal­ ogies and prefaces by John Rhys and his fellow Celtic scholar Kuno Meyer, traced the heroic deeds of those who had borne ‘the flame of the unquenchable spirit of  our ancestors . . . through centuries of savage slaughter’ from Caratacus and Cunedda to Henry Tudor, whose victory at Bosworth was hailed as recovering the crown of Britain and paving the way for his son’s Act of Union.84 While O. M. Edwards had recognized the military feats of the Welsh in both the medieval and modern periods, his portrayal of a triumphant people (gwerin) created by religious revival and education was far too tame and effeminate for Rhoscomyl, who urged the Welsh to take pride in the legacy of ‘a masculine Wales that was at once Welsh nationalist and British imperialist in outlook’.85 To quote the preface to his school edition: No Welsh boy can well read the history of his ancestors—so stirring a record of so stubborn a race, such a good, grim, fighting race—without feeling that it is good to be a Cymro. And once he feels that, he will go on to feel that it is good to be a Briton, too, claiming a share in the glory of that crown and kingdom which was first founded by Cunedda the Burner, who was founder, too, of the Cymric nation.86

Fittingly, this pageant history celebrating warrior heroes was brought to life four years later in Cardiff at the National Pageant of Wales, which Rhoscomyl scripted.87

New Scholarly Approaches From the 1880s the academic study of Welsh history developed apace. The nearest equivalents to the ‘scientific’ history based on unpublished archival sources 81  For personal testimony to the success of Edwards’s periodicals in this regard see J.  Goronwy Edwards, ‘Hanesyddiaeth Gymreig’, 22–3. 82  Other examples include Bradley, Owen Glyndwr, and Stone, Wales, a work conventional both in its focus on the period down to Glyndŵr and in its portrayal of the Welsh as a nation conspicuous thereafter for its loyalty to crown and empire. See also Gramich, ‘Narrating the Nation’. 83 John S. Ellis, Owen Rhoscomyl; John S. Ellis, ‘Outlaw Historian’. 84 Rhoscomyl, Flame-­Bearers, public edn., quotation at 1. Both editions were reissued in 1910. 85  John S. Ellis, ‘Outlaw Historian’, 114–15, quotation at 114. 86 Rhoscomyl, Flame-­Bearers, school edn., Preface. Cunedda and his sons founded the kingdom of Gwynedd according to the Historia Brittonum (see Chapter 2). 87  John S. Ellis, ‘Outlaw Historian’, 118–19; Hywel Teifi Edwards, National Pageant, 85, 87, 95–149.

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320  WRITING WELSH HISTORY espoused by continental European historians were specialized studies of particular topics, primarily in the medieval and early modern periods, though, as in Britain generally, a ‘scientific’ approach was deemed compatible with a reliance on published materials.88 Not all of these publications were conceived as contributions to ‘Welsh history’, and some explicitly adopted and advocated a comparative approach. It should also be emphasized that, while more Welsh history was written than previously by scholars employed in universities, they by no means monopolized the field. This is clear, for example, from articles and editions of sources published by the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, which launched its annual Transactions in 1892 and its Record Series in 1893 to supplement its journal Y Cymmrodor, established in 1877. Members of the society’s Council not only promoted these initiatives but contributed to them, as shown by the independent scholar Egerton Phillimore’s impressively accurate editions of the early medieval Harleian chronicle and genealogies and his topographical notes to Henry Owen’s edition of George Owen’s Description of Penbrokshire as well as by the earliest court rolls of the marcher lordship of Ruthin edited by R. A. Roberts (1851–1943), who, as an assistant in the Public Record Office and, from 1903, secretary and then member of the Historical Manuscripts Commission, exemplified the networks at the heart of such efforts, which also included the Cambrian Archaeological Association established in 1847.89 The palaeographer J.  Gwenogvryn Evans (1852–1930) contributed to new standards of scholarly study both through his collaboration on editions of medieval Welsh texts with John Rhys in Oxford and through his employment by the Historical Manuscripts Commission to compile a detailed report on manuscripts containing texts in Welsh, which, together with a catalogue of manuscripts of Welsh interest in the British Museum compiled by Edward Owen (1853–1943), made important collections of unpublished sources more accessible.90 Owen, a civil servant in the India Office closely involved with the Cymmrodorion and subsequently the first secretary (1908–28) of the Royal Commission on Ancient and Historical Monuments in Wales, also drew on unpublished documentary sources to write on various aspects of medieval Welsh history, including a substantial article on Owain Lawgoch or Owen of Wales (d. 1378), the descendant of the princes of Gwynedd who fought for the French against the English in the Hundred Years War.91

88 Pryce, Lloyd, 104–8; Ralph A. Griffiths, ‘The Early Years and Wales’s History’, 23. 89  Phillimore, ‘The Annales Cambriae’; George Owen, ‘The Description of Penbrokshire’, ed. Owen; The Court Rolls of the Lordship of Ruthin, ed. and trans. Roberts. See further Guy, ‘Egerton Phillimore’; Griffith Milwyn Griffiths, ‘Roberts, Richard Arthur’; Ralph A. Griffiths, ‘Venturing into the “Jungle” ’, 199–202. 90  J.  Gwenogvryn Evans, Report; Edward Owen, A Catalogue; Ralph  A.  Griffiths, ‘Venturing into the “Jungle” ’, 198; Evan David Jones, ‘Evans, John Gwenogvryn’; Angela Grant, ‘The View from the Fountain Head’. 91 Edward Owen, ‘Owain Lawgoch’; Hugh Owen, ‘Owen, Edward’; Browne and Griffiths, ‘One Hundred Years of Investigation’, 20–2.

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SCIENTIFIC HISTORY AND NATIONAL AWAKENING, 1880–1920  321 The article belonged to a substantial number of the Welsh historical studies of this period that reflected the prevailing emphasis in Britain on political and military history. Another example, which similarly made extensive use of unpublished documents, was a monograph on the Welsh wars of Edward I by John Edward Morris (1859–1933), an Oxford graduate and master at Bedford grammar school, which not only traced the course of the campaigns but set them in the context of the history of the March of Wales and the development of English royal government.92 Within the academy, Thomas Frederick Tout (1855–1929), who had read history at Oxford where he became a warm admirer of Stubbs, developed an interest in medieval Welsh political history while teaching at St David’s College, Lampeter (1881–90), from where he moved to the chair of medieval and modern history at Owens College, Manchester (subsequently the University of Manchester).93 Stubbs’s influence is evident, for example, in Tout’s novel emphasis on the constitutional significance of the Treaty of Montgomery (1267) by which the English crown recognized Llywelyn ap Gruffudd as Prince of Wales as well as his survey, originating as a lecture to the Cymmrodorion, of the creation of shires in Wales from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries.94 No less significant was the attention given in these and other studies to English royal policy towards Wales, in line with Tout’s conviction that the history of Wales should be viewed from a comparative perspective that took account of its relations with England.95 Anglo-­Welsh relations also figured prominently in Wales and the Wars of the Roses (1915) by Howell  T.  Evans (1877–1950), a grammar-­ school teacher in Cardiff who had first broached the subject in a Cambridge MA thesis completed in 1904. However, as well as making extensive use of English government records to establish the course of events, Evans prefigured later scholarship by exploring culture and mentalities through the lens of Welsh poetry, which revealed ‘the deep chasm which separated the two nations’ and provided unique insights into the poets’ patrons and other aspects of society.96 For Evans, social history provided context for a narrative whose main focus was political and military. However, medieval Welsh society and economy also attracted greater attention as subjects in their own right. As with Ferdinand Walter earlier in the nineteenth century, a significant amount of this work approached Wales from a comparative perspective. In 1884 Friedrich Engels, following the American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, offered a brief discussion of the Welsh laws to support the argument that the gens, meaning a primitive grouping

92 John E. Morris, The Welsh Wars of Edward I; Robert Thomas Jenkins, ‘Morris, John Edward’. 93  Ralph  A.  Griffiths, ‘The Early Years and Wales’s History’; Gibson, ‘Thomas Frederick Tout at Lampeter’. 94  Pryce, ‘Historians and the Treaty of Montgomery’, 13–14; Tout, ‘The Welsh Shires’. 95  See especially Tout, ‘Wales and the March’. 96 H. T. Evans, Wales and the Wars of the Roses, new edn., with introduction by Ralph A. Griffiths at ix–xiii; quotation at 2. See also Ralph A. Griffiths, ‘Venturing into the “Jungle” ’, 206–7.

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322  WRITING WELSH HISTORY based on matriarchal descent in which marriage was communal, had survived into the Middle Ages among the Celtic peoples, while the lawyer, Celtic scholar, and historian William Forbes Skene cited Welsh law as providing comparisons that could help to elucidate early medieval Scottish society.97 However, a comparative approach was taken much further by Frederic Seebohm (1833–1912), a banker with wide historical interests who sought to demonstrate the significance of medieval Wales as an instance of ‘tribal’ society—influentially argued by Henry Sumner Maine to be an extension of the family in patriarchal society, regarded as the earliest form of social organization—that contrasted with the manor of medieval England, which, so Seebohm maintained in contrast to prevailing Teutonist arguments, derived from the Roman villa.98 Seebohm devoted an entire volume to the Welsh evidence in The Tribal System in Wales (1895), a work completed while a member of the Royal Commission on Land in Wales and Monmouthshire, for whose report, as mentioned earlier, he wrote a chapter on ‘The History of Land Tenure in Wales’.99 This took a benign view of the changes discussed, in keeping with its author’s stance as a Liberal Unionist who defended the landowners’ interests in the commission’s minority report, concluding that Welsh tenants had not experienced ‘intentional injustice or hardship’ through Henry VIII’s introduction of English land law and ‘that by the time of James  I., Wales, like England, was divided into estates not dissimilar in character to those of our own day’.100 However, he also noted a subsequent decline in the numbers of small landowners to the advantage of larger estate owners who benefited economically, politically, and socially from their dominant position in Wales and ‘growing association with the same class in England’.101 It is significant that The Tribal System in Wales developed a chapter in Seebohm’s earlier book on English village communities that contrasted Welsh landholding with the manor of medieval England, which, so Seebohm maintained, derived from the villa of Roman Britain and its attendant serfdom rather than from free Anglo-­Saxon communities as held by prevailing Teutonist scholarly opinion.102 Furthermore, he subsequently sum­ mar­ized and developed the conclusions of The Tribal System, especially with reference to legal compensation for homicide (W. galanas), in a later study of ‘tribal custom’ focused mainly on England.103 In describing ‘the Welsh system as a 97 Engels, The Origin of the Family, 166–8; Skene, Celtic Scotland, 3: 197–208. For Engels’s use of Morgan see Bloch, Marxism and Anthropology, 45–62. 98 Harvey, ‘Seebohm, Frederic’; Glanville  R.  J.  Jones, ‘The Tribal System in Wales’, 111–13; R.  R.  Davies, Historical Perception, 21–3; Wendy Davies, ‘Looking Backwards to the Early Medieval Past’, 206–9. For Maine’s understanding of the tribe see Maine, Ancient Law, 128–35, and Kuper, ‘The Rise and Fall of Maine’s Patriarchal Society’. 99 Seebohm, The Tribal System in Wales; Report of the Royal Commission on Land, 133–49 (republished in WP, 395–452). 100  WP, 429, 449. 101  WP, 451–2. 102 Seebohm, The Tribal System in Wales, [v]; Seebohm, The English Village Community, 181–213. See also Burrow, ‘ “The Village Community” ’, esp. 257–60, 273–5. 103 Seebohm, Tribal Custom in Anglo-­Saxon Law, 21–55.

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SCIENTIFIC HISTORY AND NATIONAL AWAKENING, 1880–1920  323 stepping-­stone to wider knowledge’, and stressing ‘the im­port­ance of a knowledge of the Tribal System, wherever found, as an almost universal factor in the early development of European society, and in the formation of mediaeval institutions’, Seebohm approached his subject, not as an aspect of the history of Wales, but as a contribution to debates about the development of medieval rural societies and economies.104 But in so doing, Seebohm made a highly original contribution, unprecedented in its scale and systematic approach, to the study of medieval Welsh society through his comparison of rules in the laws with early Welsh charters and, above all, the  extents or surveys made after the Edwardian conquest which estimated the potential revenue of lands in Wales.105 This allowed him both to demonstrate the remarkable longevity of the ‘tribal system’ down to the late thirteenth century and to corroborate the reliability of the laws. A comparable regressive method was also adopted by Alfred Neobard Palmer (1847–1915), a chemist by profession who published extensively on the history of Wrexham and its surrounding area after settling in the town in 1880.106 With respect to the history of land tenure, Palmer stressed the need for ‘a minute and careful investigation of particular districts conducted by men who live in those districts’, and his own work included detailed analysis of the marcher lordship of Bromfield and Yale based on a wide array of largely unpublished sources ranging from nineteenth-­century tithe maps to medieval extents.107 In one sense, then, Palmer may be seen as a local historian in a tradition going back to the chorographical writers of the Elizabethan period, and his intensive concentration on one area resulted in a more fine-­grained analysis, conspicuous for its grasp of topography (and toponymy), than that of Seebohm. Yet both scholars shared a common goal, as Palmer believed that his local perspective was essential to addressing the same issues of social and economic development that engaged Seebohm, whom he greatly admired, following his interpretations and declaring that The Tribal System in Wales ‘marks an epoch’.108 Moreover, Palmer also situated his work in a comparative context to some extent, especially by drawing on evidence from other parts of north Wales and Cheshire.109 That evidence included the Survey of the Honour of Denbigh, an extent of this marcher lordship made in 1334 that Seebohm also relied upon heavily, printing

104 Seebohm, The Tribal System in Wales, vi, ix. 105  See especially Seebohm, The Tribal System in Wales, 1–50, 192–233. For a different comparative approach see Hubert Lewis, The Ancient Laws of Wales, which argued that many early English institutions shared a common British origin with those of medieval Wales. 106  Dodd, ‘Palmer, Alfred Neobard’; Christopher J. Williams, ‘A. N. Palmer’. 107 Palmer and Owen, A History of Ancient Tenures, quotation at vi (first edition, by Palmer alone, 1885). 108 Palmer and Owen, A History of Ancient Tenures, 17, 25, 32–3, 60, n. 1; Palmer, Review of Seebohm, Tribal System, quotation at 73. Palmer identified himself as the review’s author in a letter to J. E. Lloyd, 30 November 1895: Bangor University Archives, Lloyd Papers, 314, no. 373. 109  Palmer and Owen, A History of Ancient Tenures, 30, 52–5, 60–5, 161–3, 188–90.

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324  WRITING WELSH HISTORY substantial extracts in an appendix of The Tribal System in Wales together with other documentary sources. He subsequently donated the manuscript copy he had acquired to Oxford University, where it was studied in a postgraduate sem­inar on the social and legal history of the Middle Ages, convened (1908–13) by Paul Vinogradoff, a strong supporter of Charles Firth’s efforts to introduce research training at Oxford, that resulted in a complete edition published as the first volume of the British Academy’s ‘Records of the Social and Economic History of England and Wales’.110 Whereas Seebohm had undertaken his work in his spare time, this collaborative effort, by seven men and three women, exemplified the incipient professionalization of historical study in Britain.111 However, the lengthy introduction analysing the society and economy of the medieval lordship of Denbigh built on Seebohm’s approach and stressed the comparative significance of the survey in pointing up the contrasts between a predominantly ‘tribal’ and pastoral north Wales and the manorialized lowland areas of south Wales and especially England that concentrated on the cultivation of crops, albeit while identifying aspects of change in the lordship resulting from ‘the gradual anglicization of tribal arrangements’.112 In addition, Beatrice Lees drew an English ana­ logy, presumably alluding to the approach of F.  W.  Maitland (in turn following Seebohm), to justify the retrogressive method applied to the Welsh evidence: If the rural life of Anglo-­Saxon days can be to a great extent reconstructed from Domesday Book and other post-­Conquest documents, the fragments of the older Welsh social order also remained embedded in the new feudal order, and may be pieced together into a coherent whole from the fourteenth-­century Denbigh Extent and its companion records of ‘the time of the princes’.113

Two years earlier, in 1912, the inaugural volume appeared in another series, under the aegis of the University of Wales, that represented moves towards professionalization within the principality, namely a revised version of a thesis on the medieval towns of north Wales by Edward Arthur Lewis (1880–1942). Lewis had been appointed a research fellow by the university (1902–5) to undertake research at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) with Hubert Hall 110  The Survey of the Honour of Denbigh, ed. Vinogradoff and Morgan; Firth, Modern History in Oxford, 47; Soffer, Discipline and Power, 109–10. 111  For the seminar’s participants and their division of labour see The Survey of the Honour of Denbigh, ed. Vinogradoff and Morgan, vi–vii. Their rigorous comparative approach contrasts with that of the lawyer J.  W.  Willis-­Bund, whose introduction to the 1326 extent of episcopal estates he edited mainly just summarized and tabulated the survey’s contents: The Black Book of St. David’s, ed. Willis-­Bund, i–cxi. 112  The Survey of the Honour of Denbigh, ed. Vinogradoff and Morgan, xvii, xlvi, lxxxvii, xcvii–cxvi, quotation at c. Earlier discussion of some of these issues, referring to the Welsh laws and extents and to Seebohm’s work, in Vinogradoff, The Growth of the Manor, ch. 1. 113  The Survey of the Honour of Denbigh, ed. Vinogradoff and Morgan, xcvii; Lees is identified as the author of this part of the Introduction at vi. Cf. Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, v.

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SCIENTIFIC HISTORY AND NATIONAL AWAKENING, 1880–1920  325 (1857–1944), an influential figure at the Public Record Office (PRO) who had assisted Sidney and Beatrice Webb in founding the LSE and subsequently collaborated in introducing a doctorate in social and economic science there in 1901.114 While indebted to Seebohm’s interpretation of Welsh ‘tribal’ society and its associated pastoral economy, Lewis was principally interested in developments from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries, which, he believed, marked a crucial stage in the transition towards the economy of modern Wales. Rather than reading back from extents and other post-­conquest records in order to reconstruct an earlier world, then, Lewis interrogated these as evidence for the later medieval period in which they were produced; in addition, he presented his work as a contribution to the history of Wales rather than to broader comparative study. The resulting picture thus highlighted change, not continuity. The Welsh rural economy was transformed by the imposition of castles, towns, and English-­style administration after the Edwardian conquest, the Black Death, and the commercial, industrial, and urban developments that ensued.115 Moreover these changes were portrayed as a narrative of progress, from pastoral tribalism to the feudalism introduced by the Normans and the ‘more civilised mode of living’ resulting from commercial centralization after the Edwardian conquest, that culminated in the flourishing Welsh economy of the early twentieth century.116 ‘The importance of the scanty references to coal-­mining in Wales prior to the reign of Henry VIII.’ lay, Lewis observed, ‘in the fact that in these little beginnings we have the origin of what is to-­day a great factor in British commerce, namely the South Wales coal-­field’.117 Although the Middle Ages garnered the lion’s share of attention, early modern Wales also attracted both professional and amateur scholars. One was Caroline Skeel (1872–1951), the first female historian of Wales to pursue an academic career. Born in Hampstead to a wealthy business family with Pembrokeshire roots, she taught at Westfield College, London after graduating in history from Cambridge, and became one of the first students to write a thesis for the new doctorate introduced at the LSE.118 Skeel’s thesis, indebted to the guidance of the PRO’s Hubert Hall amongst others and published in 1904 with the support of her old Cambridge college, was the first substantial study of the Council in the Marches of Wales from its late fifteenth-­century origins to its abolition in 1689 114  Edward Arthur Lewis, The Mediaeval Boroughs of Snowdonia; Ralph  A.  Griffiths, ‘Venturing into the “Jungle” ’, 203–4; Matthew Frank Stevens, The Economy of Medieval Wales, 3, 40, 54–5. 115  Edward  A.  Lewis, ‘The Decay of Tribalism’; E.  A.  Lewis, ‘The Development of Industry and Commerce’; Edward Arthur Lewis, The Mediaeval Boroughs of Snowdonia; Edward  A.  Lewis, ‘A Contribution to the Commercial History’. 116 Edward  A.  Lewis, ‘The Decay of Tribalism’, 2–3, 34, 48; E.  A.  Lewis, ‘The Development of Industry and Commerce’, 121, 128, 133 (quotation), 135–6, 155–6; Edward Arthur Lewis, The Mediaeval Boroughs of Snowdonia, 21–2. 117  E.  A.  Lewis, ‘The Development of Industry and Commerce’, 146. See also Edward  A.  Lewis, ‘A Contribution to the Commercial History’, 185; Pryce, ‘The Normans in Welsh History’, 15–16. 118 Sondheimer, ‘Skeel, Caroline Anne James’; Ralph  A.  Griffiths, ‘Venturing into the “Jungle” ’, 203–4.

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326  WRITING WELSH HISTORY and, as befitted its genesis in continental-­style research training, made extensive use of unpublished manuscripts and documents.119 Skeel presented her book as an exercise in administrative and political history rather than specifically a contribution to the history of Wales.120 Her emphasis thus differed from that of her older contemporary W. Llewelyn Williams (1867–1922), who had read history at Oxford before becoming a journalist and then a barrister and Liberal MP while also publishing scholarly papers on early modern Welsh history, several of which were adapted and augmented in The Making of Modern Wales (1919).121 Describing the book as ‘an attempt to describe the transformation of Mediaeval into Modern Wales’, Williams devoted well over half of its pages to constitutional and legal developments, focusing especially on the background, establishment, and consequences of Henry VIII’s Act of Union, especially with respect to the Council in the Marches (here building on Skeel) and the Court of Great Sessions abolished in 1830.122 His positive assessment of the Act of Union echoed previous interpretations, combining well-­worn tropes of gratitude for the ending of pol­it­ical chaos and lawlessness and the granting of legal equality with O. M. Edwards’s more recent highlighting of the territorial definition created by administrative re­organ­ iza­tion, which meant that ‘Wales became, for the first time, a coherent and organised country’.123 Yet Williams did much more than rehearse established views. His analysis was unprecedented in its depth and contextualization and showed independent judgement—for example, by attributing the legislation’s success to the statesmanship of Henry VIII. In addition, Williams took his cue from Edmund Burke and viewed the Act of Union through imperial spectacles, hailing it as the ‘grant of a free constitution’ and a model for ‘associating a subject race with their own government’ recently applied in South Africa, Canada, and even to some extent India; in short, ‘on the principles upon which Henry VIII. proceeded in his pacification of Wales has been based the stately edifice of the British Empire’.124 Williams also broke new ground in a substantial study of Welsh Roman Catholics exiled on the Continent after the Reformation.125 The same was true of studies of post-­Reformation Welsh ecclesiastical history by the Baptist minister and bibliophile Thomas Shankland (1858–1927), who, though not immune from the denominational partisanship still common in his day, took a broad view of

119 Skeel, The Council in the Marches. 120  Neil Evans, ‘Finding a New Story’, 160. 121  Robert Thomas Jenkins, ‘Williams, William Llewelyn’. 122  W.  Llewelyn Williams, The Making of Modern Wales, quotation at vii. Much of the argument first appeared in W.  Llewelyn Williams, ‘The Union of England and Wales’; W.  Llewelyn Williams, ‘The King’s Court of Great Sessions in Wales’. 123 W.  Llewelyn Williams, The Making of Modern Wales, 8–28, 65–86, quotation at 23. Cf. Owen  M.  Edwards, Wales, 318–20. The economic benefits of legal equality were stressed by E. A. Lewis, ‘The Development of Industry and Commerce’, 173. 124  W. Llewelyn Williams, The Making of Modern Wales, 7–9, 11, 18–22, 26–7, quotations at 11, 27. 125 W.  Llewelyn Williams, ‘Welsh Catholics on the Continent’; cf. W.  Llewelyn Williams, The Making of Modern Wales, 195–258.

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SCIENTIFIC HISTORY AND NATIONAL AWAKENING, 1880–1920  327 religious developments based on a formidable critical mastery of manuscript and printed sources.126 One of his earliest forays into print was a sixteen-­part review of Diwygwyr Cymru (‘Reformers of Wales’, 1900), a polemical, and apparently best-­ selling, rebuttal of Welsh Calvinistic Methodist interpretations of the Methodist revival by the journalist and dramatist Beriah Gwynfe Evans (who later wrote the play on Glyndŵr for the 1911 investiture).127 While considering Evans’s volume ‘an important addition’ to work on the subject and acknowledging the ‘revolutionary’ character of its darkly revisionist portrait of the Methodist leader Howel Harris, Shankland condemned its Independent author’s ‘de­nom­in­ ation­al prejudice’ and inadequate grasp of important aspects of his subject, not only the Baptists to whom Shankland belonged but also reforming movements within the Church of England, defects Shankland sought to rectify with copious references to contemporaneous sources.128 Writing on medieval ecclesiastical history reflected similar tensions between instrumental uses of the past and ‘scientific’ approaches, although a clutch of works on medieval Welsh religious houses demonstrate the continuing vitality of antiquarian scholarship.129 Both Palmer and Seebohm argued that the tribal system had helped to shape the Church in early medieval Wales, a view developed much further by J.  W.  Willis-­Bund, an English barrister closely involved with the Cymmrodorion, who sought to demonstrate that tribal Celtic Christianity, independent of both Rome and the state, had continued to influence the religious life of Wales down to the nineteenth century, when, so he held, it was best represented by the Nonconformist denominations, which ‘approached more nearly to the old Welsh tribal idea of the mutual rights of the people and the religious body’.130 Though a self-­professed ‘Tory and a Churchman’, Willis-­Bund concluded that the Anglican Church in Wales had lost its way by abandoning its Celtic Christian roots: ‘if the Welsh Church falls, it will not be the Church of David and Teilo, but of Elizabeth and Laud’.131 It was all the more timely, therefore, to write the history of ‘the only independent Church, independent of all foreign control, Papal or Royal, that survived in Western Christendom’. Looming over his account was the imminent prospect of the disestablishment of the Church in Wales (achieved in 1920), which he seemed to countenance with equanimity. Other Welsh Anglican writers were less sanguine. For example, E. J. Newell, an Anglican

126 Thomas Richards, ‘Shankland, Thomas’; Merfyn Bassett, Thomas Shankland: Hanesydd, esp. 19–29. 127  Beriah Gwynfe Evans, Diwygwyr Cymru; Millward, ‘Beriah Gwynfe Evans’, 181–2. 128  Shankland, ‘ “Diwygwyr Cymru” Beriah Gwynfe Evans’, quotations at 268, 269. The final part of the review appeared in January 1904. 129  E.g. Stephen W. Williams, The Cistercian Abbey of Strata Florida; Birch, A History of Margam Abbey; Pritchard, Cardigan Priory. 130  Palmer, ‘The Portionary Churches’; Willis Bund, The Celtic Church of Wales, quotation at 509; Robert Thomas Jenkins, ‘Willis-­Bund (formerly Willis), John William’. 131  Willis-­Bund, The Celtic Church of Wales, vi, 514–15.

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328  WRITING WELSH HISTORY clergyman and schoolmaster in Porthcawl (Glamorgan) active in the Cambrian Archaeological Association, insisted that its distinct identity within a broader Church of England made ‘the Church of Wales’ the true heir to Celtic Christianity and also compared the threat posed by disestablishment with Henry VIII’s dis­sol­ ution of the monasteries.132 Whereas earlier writers such as Theophilus Evans and Thomas Price (Carnhuanawc) had taken for granted both the established status and the Welshness of the Anglican Church in Wales, growing calls for disestablishment in the later nineteenth century by a politically influential Nonconformity prompted some Welsh Anglicans to reflect anew on their Church’s history. By contrast, the Anglican clerics Sabine Baring-­ Gould and John Fisher eschewed a partisan approach in a major work on the Welsh saints notable for its critical treatment of sources.133 Likewise Hugh Williams (1843–1911), professor of Church history at the Calvinistic Methodist college in Bala, subjected the early ecclesiastical history of Britain and Wales to rigorous examination according to the latest canons of scholarship, declaring that ‘a dispassionate study of all that original ecclesiastical records present to us, by the same methods as we study other histories, should precede whatever conclusions we draw in answer to the theological questions that belong to the history of the Church’. Moreover, while presenting ecclesiastical history ‘as a part of the history of the Welsh people’, he did so from a comparative perspective ‘as a humble follower of the painstaking students of history in Germany, France, and our own two islands’ who was ready to draw inferences from the better-­attested churches of continental Europe and Ireland.134 One fruit of this approach was a heavily annotated new edition and translation for the Cymmrodorion of the works (and Lives) of Gildas, whom Williams portrayed as ‘a preacher, a revivalist’, comparing him with St Bernard, John Wesley, and John Henry Newman.135 However, the culmination of Williams’s work in this field came with his posthumously published Christianity in Early Britain (1912), which took its readers from the Roman occupation of Britain to Augustine of Canterbury’s confrontation with the British clergy in the early seventh century that ‘caused a division between the English and the British Churches’, supporting its conclusions with copious references to both primary sources and scholarship in the fields of Church history and Celtic studies while sidelining

132 Newell, A History of the Welsh Church, ix (quotation), 387, 409–19; Lawrence Thomas, ‘Newell, Ebenezer Josiah’. See also T. J. Jones, The Church in Wales Not Alien, and Newell, A Popular History of the Ancient British Church, 31, which maintained that the ‘proper representative’ of ‘the ancient British Church’ was ‘to be found in the Church of Wales at the present day, and not in either the Church of Rome or any of the Protestant Nonconformist bodies’. For a Roman Catholic rebuttal of Willis-­Bund see de Hirsch-­Davies, Catholicism in Mediæval Wales. 133  Baring-­Gould and Fisher, The Lives of the British Saints. 134  Hugh Williams, ‘Some Aspects of the Christian Church in Wales’, 56–7. Critical assessment of one continental scholar in Hugh Williams, ‘Heinrich Zimmer on the History of the Celtic Church’. 135  Gildas, ed. Williams, quotation at vii; Hugh Williams, ‘Some Aspects of the Christian Church in Wales’, 119 (comparisons).

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SCIENTIFIC HISTORY AND NATIONAL AWAKENING, 1880–1920  329 le­gend­ary interpretations to separate chapters.136 The resulting interpretation firmly located the British Church within western Christendom, notably by emphasizing the Roman origins of British Christianity around 200 ce and the transformative impact from about the 420s of the ascetic monasticism originating in Egypt and transmitted via southern Gaul. True, Williams showed considerable sympathy for the British Church and declared that Augustine ‘struck out on a wrong path’ in his hostile dealings with its clergy.137 However, while this might seem to be merely the latest in a long litany of condemnations of Augustine beginning in the sixteenth century, Williams was restrained in his criticism and also eschewed the hostility to Roman Catholicism or other confessional point-­scoring common among many previous writers as well as several of his contemporaries. Instead, he took pains to try and elucidate the developments he described in the context of their own time.

John Edward Lloyd John Edward Lloyd (1861–1947) brings into particularly sharp focus both the achievements and the limitations of the new scholarly approaches to the history of Wales adopted in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods.138 None of the other scholars discussed above produced a synthesis of comparable scope and influence to Lloyd’s two-­volume magnum opus, A History of Wales from the Earliest Times to the Edwardian Conquest, published by Longmans in January 1911, which has rightly been seen as a seminal work thanks to its combination of unprecedented critical rigour and analytical coherence. To quote Tout, a friend of Lloyd’s and fellow product of the Oxford History School: ‘A book on such lines, or of such a type, has never previously been written.’139 The History not only superseded all previous general accounts of the period it covered but was itself only substantially superseded by new syntheses of a comparable scale in the 1980s, one of whose authors declared that it ‘may be said, without exaggeration, to in­aug­ur­ate the history of Wales as a modern academic subject’.140 Yet, for all its novelty, Lloyd’s book was also deeply informed by long-­established assumptions about the nature of Welsh history which remained influential during his formative years in the late Victorian period—above all, that the ancient and medieval past, especially down to the Edwardian conquest, was fundamental to understanding Welsh history as a whole because it explained the making and survival of a 136  Hugh Williams, Christianity in Early Britain, quotation at 439. Chapters II and VII deal re­spect­ ive­ ly with ‘Legendary Accounts of the Coming of Christianity’ and ‘Erroneous Early and Mediaeval Views’. 137  Hugh Williams, Christianity in Early Britain, 438–45, 479–80, quotation at 439. 138  This section largely follows Pryce, Lloyd. 139  Tout, Review of Lloyd, HW, 132. 140  R. R. Davies, ‘Lloyd, Sir John Edward’.

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330  WRITING WELSH HISTORY particular people, inhabiting a particular space within Britain, despite the Edwardian ­conquest and subsequent assimilation into the kingdom of England under Henry VIII.141 This concluding section contends, then, that Lloyd is best understood as a transitional figure connecting the centuries-­old amateur history writing that is the main subject of this book and the professional historiography of Wales of the last century or so that has both grown out of and challenged it. Lloyd was unusual among the Welsh historians of his day in that his upbringing straddled the two worlds of urban England and rural Wales. Born and brought up in Liverpool, Lloyd belonged to a family that formed part of the sizeable Nonconformist and Liberal middle-­class Welsh community in the town. However, his parents were originally from northern Montgomeryshire, which the family visited for extended periods in the summer, and Lloyd spoke the area’s Powysian dialect of Welsh throughout his life. By his early teens he had developed interests in Welsh literature and history and his strong sense of identification with Wales was further enhanced while a student at the recently founded University College of Wales at Aberystwyth (1877–81), whence he proceeded to Lincoln College, Oxford (1881–5), reading Classics followed by Modern History in the last two years; he also found time to write a prize-­winning essay on the history of Wales for the national eisteddfod in Liverpool in 1884 that was the nearest he came as a student to undertaking independent research. After graduating Lloyd returned to Aberystwyth as a lecturer in History and Welsh, before taking up the post of regis­ trar at the University College of North Wales, Bangor in 1892, where he remained for the rest of his career, holding the chair of History from 1899 until his retirement in 1930 (and continuing as registrar until 1920). Lloyd played a central part, then, in the ‘national awakening’ through his contribution to the development both of Welsh higher education and of Welsh history as an academic subject. Shortly after arriving in Bangor Lloyd started on the first of three bilingual textbooks on the history of Wales from prehistory to 1282 for children in elementary schools, in accordance with the provision in 1893, linked to the introduction of Welsh as a class subject, that permitted bilingual instruction.142 He later said that these provided an invaluable preparatory framework for his 1911 History, written over almost a decade with a keen attention to accuracy reflected in its numerous footnote references. The work’s two volumes are divided into twenty chapters, each of which is subdivided into several sections, followed in some cases by extended notes on particular primary sources or points of detail or controversy. Volume I shows how the Welsh people were formed by an amalgamation of three racial groups—the Iberians, followed by the Goidels, then the Brythons— ultimately originating from the Continent, between the Neolithic and post-­ Roman periods, and were subsequently confined to the territory of Wales by the 141  Explicit statement of this view in J. E. Lloyd, ‘A History Course’, 5, cited in Chapter 13. 142 Pryce, Lloyd, 58.

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SCIENTIFIC HISTORY AND NATIONAL AWAKENING, 1880–1920  331 mid-­seventh century; the volume’s remaining chapters chart political developments down to the early eleventh century and analyse the territorial and social structures of early medieval Wales. Volume II covers a much shorter period, reflecting the greater abundance of available sources, namely the two-­and-­a-­half centuries from the reign of Gruffudd ap Llywelyn (d. 1064) to the death of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd in 1282. A central theme is the role played by Welsh kings and princes in ensuring that the Welsh nationhood established in the early Middle Ages was sustained and reinforced. Accordingly, high politics loom large, as the discussion focuses mainly on the relations of Welsh rulers with members of their own and other native dynasties, Norman, Flemish, and English settlers, and the kings of England, although limited attention is also given to the Church, society, and literature. There was nothing nostalgic about Lloyd’s privileging of the ancient and medieval past. He had no doubt that the progress of his own age was preferable to all that had preceded it. As a young man, he contrasted the Wales of 1188 with that of 1886: ‘The fertile fields, the fiery coal-­mines and furnaces, the railways, the chapels, the miles of houses! As those who love our nation, we cannot be grateful enough for the alteration.’143 And half a century later he had little time for those Welsh nationalists whom he accused of idealizing the Middle Ages without giving due recognition to the period’s poverty and disease.144 His 1911 History was an avowedly modern enterprise animated by both of the impetuses highlighted at the beginning of this chapter. First, there can be little doubt that Lloyd was both inspired by and sought to further encourage a sense of national revival: after all, the work’s final words evoked ‘the enduring fabric of Welsh nationality’. More explicitly, he observed in an early essay that ‘[o]ne of the most satisfying signs of the present time is the willingness of everyone to recognize that we, the Welsh, are truly a nation . . . No occasion can be more timely, therefore, to look back at the beginning of the nation.’145 This context probably helps to explain why the History lacks the apologetic rhetoric found in many of its predecessors, be it complaints about English ignorance and misrepresentation or effusions of loyalty to the monarchy. Lloyd saw his task, then, as the writing of a national history that would legitimate the existence of the Welsh nation, an approach for which there were, of course, many parallels in his lifetime. The second impetus, again shared with many other writers of national history, was a conviction that this required the adoption of ‘scientific’ methods intended to substantiate the veracity of the account. Thus Lloyd acknowledged his general indebtedness to Sir John Rhys, Mr. Egerton Phillimore, Mr. Alfred N. Palmer, and the late Dr. Hugh Williams for the pioneer work which has so 143 John Edward Lloyd, ‘Taith Archesgobol’, 56. See also J.  E.  Lloyd, ‘Ffurfiad y Genedl Gymreig’, 265–6. 144 Pryce, Lloyd, 81, 206. 145  J. E. Lloyd, ‘Ffurfiad y Genedl Gymreig’, 264.

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332  WRITING WELSH HISTORY greatly facilitated the scientific study of Welsh history. I owe to them what cannot be expressed in the debit of citation and reference, namely, outlook and method and inspiration.146

As we have seen, all four scholars adopted an essentially philological approach involving the critical analysis of written texts, albeit supplemented in Rhys’s case by a reliance on ethnology while Phillimore and Palmer were also notable for their grasp of topography. All these approaches informed Lloyd’s attempt ‘to bring together and weave into a continuous narrative what may be fairly regarded as the ascertained facts of the history of Wales up to the fall of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd in 1282’.147 Lloyd thus set himself two related tasks. One was to establish ‘the ascertained facts’ through a comprehensive and critical assessment of the available evidence. In other words, he sought to show that the history of Wales from its prehistoric beginnings to the conquest of Edward I could sustain the kind of detailed investigation and exposition expected in early twentieth-­century historical scholarship. By and large, Lloyd relied on published sources, an approach adopted in other such syntheses at the time in Britain: while he was ready to consult unpublished manuscripts and documents for particular purposes, this was neither practicable nor indeed necessary for the writing of what Tout termed ‘a sound and scientific textbook’.148 Yet, while it was essential to achieve accuracy in relating the course of events and to purge Welsh history of legendary accounts, criticism on its own was insufficient, as Lloyd complained with reference to Gweirydd ap Rhys.149 It was also necessary to impose order on the ‘facts’ by providing a coherent narrative that explained how the Welsh people had been formed and then survived until 1282 (and thus, Lloyd implied, into the present day). That explanation rested on three principal foundations: the making of the Welsh through an amal­gam­ ation of three prehistoric races or peoples; the development of a kin-­based society and pastoral economy favourable to preserving freedom and cultural pursuits; and the inspirational leadership of rulers. Thanks to his use of recent specialized studies and, above all, his ability to construct a compelling analysis of the interplay of the different factors identified, Lloyd’s interpretation marked a novel departure in many respects. Yet, its very novelty, predicated on the superiority of the ‘scientific’ methods adopted, served to confirm rather than challenge deeply rooted understandings of the shape and significance of Welsh history. This is of course true of the History’s fundamental premise that the history of Wales was the history of the Welsh people. Although Lloyd followed the precedent of historians since David Powel who had included accounts of Norman conquest and settlement that resulted in the establishment of marcher lordships in Wales, he did not 146 Lloyd, HW, 1: vi. 147 Lloyd, HW, 1: v. 148  Tout, Review of Lloyd, HW, 131; Pryce, Lloyd, 99–100, 104–8.

149 Pryce, Lloyd, 109.

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SCIENTIFIC HISTORY AND NATIONAL AWAKENING, 1880–1920  333 treat foreign settlers as subjects in their own right and these remained marginal to the main narrative focused on the Welsh.150 Whether deliberate or not, the playing down of foreign influences on medieval Wales was consistent with Lloyd’s emphasis on the conservative continuity of Welsh society. This explains why the History opens in prehistory, as Lloyd adapted Rhys’s theory of the settlement of three successive races by drawing on the work of the archaeologist William Boyd Dawkins, whose Early Man in Britain (1880) insisted ‘that the continuity between the Neolithic age and the present day has been unbroken’, persuading Lloyd of the importance of combining archaeology, ethnology, and history.151 True, Woodward and Gweirydd ap Rhys had made limit­ed use of archaeology and ethnology. However, Rhys, Dawkins, and other archaeologists and philologists gave Lloyd the means to go well beyond those earl­ ier attempts and reaffirm the much-­vaunted antiquity of the Welsh by substituting up-­to-­date scholarship in the human sciences for discredited le­gend­ary accounts in medieval and later sources that most previous historians of Wales had felt obliged to report, albeit with increasing embarrassment since the later eighteenth century. Moreover, like Dawkins and Rhys, Lloyd believed that all three racial groups had made an enduring contribution to the formation of the Welsh. If it be contended that the first of these, the Neolithic [Iberians], was the most important in respect of its contribution to the national physique and character, and that the second, the Goidelic, was the source of the early political and social institutions of the Welsh, it cannot be denied that it is to the third [the Brythons] we owe the Welsh language.152

On the first of these points, Lloyd believed that their physical (and to some extent mental) characteristics made the descendants of prehistoric peoples visible in modern populations, a view he supported by deploying the physician and anthropologist John Beddoe’s analysis of hair and eye colour.153 Lloyd reinforced his argument for the fundamental contribution of these early races to the making of the Welsh by maintaining that the latter had largely been unaffected by the influence of Rome as their ancestors lived in the military zone of Britain that the Roman archaeologist Francis Haverfield (1861–1919) distinguished from the civil zone in the south-­east and midland areas of the island where the Roman occupation made a far greater impact on the indigenous inhabitants.154 While Lloyd accepted that the Brythonic ancestors of the Welsh had been Romanized with respect to some aspects of warfare, literacy, and material culture, the survival of

150  Pryce, ‘The Normans in Welsh History’, 13–14. 151 Dawkins, Early Man in Britain, 340; Pryce, Lloyd, 124–5. 152 Lloyd, HW, 1: 30. 153 Lloyd, HW, 1: 15 and n. 47; cf. John Beddoe, The Races of Britain. 154 Lloyd, HW, 1: 47–90; Pryce, Lloyd, 129­–30.

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334  WRITING WELSH HISTORY the Welsh language indicated that ‘the inhabitants of Wales were so far divorced from the main current of Roman life as to speak a separate language, which linked them with the customs and traditions of the past’.155 A second key element in Lloyd’s interpretation of Welsh history was the dur­ abil­ity down to the Edwardian conquest of an ancient kin-­based, pastoral society that originated in prehistory. Again, Lloyd was influenced by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-­century scholarship, which deployed the categories of legal and constitutional history in attempting to reconstruct early societies.156 In terms of the sources he used, Lloyd also followed the example of his predecessors since the sixteenth century who had included observations on medieval Welsh society based mainly on the Welsh laws together with the writings of Gerald of Wales. Gweirydd ap Rhys had taken this further by including separate sections on society. However, none of these earlier writers—with the partial exception of Henry Rowlands, who worked back from the late thirteenth-­century extents to reconstruct the society and economy of Gwynedd (see Chapter  8)—had integrated their observations on society with their broader interpretations in as full and as systematic a way as Lloyd. One of the notebooks he compiled in preparing the History clearly delineated the political and cultural consequences of pastoralism as a socio-­economic system: Wales unsuited for tillage—most profitable industry of early times: hence in­vaders always drive settlers (Iberians, Goidels, Britons) into this region & then leave them there undisturbed. Any inhabitants of Wales forced to turn to pas­ tor­al mode of life. Pastoral life nomadic—hence no permanent settlements: ­people move easily about, leaving nothing for an enemy to seize: have no stake in the country. Agricultural community at mercy of superior military force: pas­ tor­al not. Hence Welsh able to maintain independence. Same causes favoured tribal isolation: no opportunity for conquest which creates strong monarchy. Pastoral habits further make ties of association personal and not local—hence strength of family and clan feeling. Pastoral way of life means much leisure— hence cultivation of poetry, music, tale telling, and oratory.157

The last point is developed in the History, which highlights the Welsh poetry composed during the twelfth century as part of the ‘national revival’ of that era under the leadership of the native princes, and concludes its depiction of Welsh society in 1200 by affirming—in an echo of Thomas Stephens, and thence Augustin Thierry—that ‘it was only as representing the survival of tribal custom

155 Lloyd, HW, 1: 84–7, quotation at 84. 156 In England, this owed much to the influence of German legal history: Burrow, A Liberal Descent, 119–25; Kuper, ‘The Rise and Fall of Maine’s Patriarchal Society’, 104–5. 157  Cited in Pryce, Lloyd, 137.

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SCIENTIFIC HISTORY AND NATIONAL AWAKENING, 1880–1920  335 and morality that Welsh life could be termed barbarous. In intellectual ability and mental culture the race stood high . . . ’.158 Moreover, Lloyd maintained that the key institutions of early medieval Wales were extremely durable, continuing largely unchanged until the Edwardian conquest and indeed beyond it, an interpretation foreshadowed by Gweirydd ap Rhys’s observation, based on Gerald of Wales, that ‘the familial and social customs of the Welsh’ had been ‘remarkably changeless over many long ages’.159 Thus, Lloyd declared of the late twelfth century that ‘in essentials Wales still retained its ancient social structure, remaining a tribal and pastoral community in spite of the great wave of feudalism which beat upon its eastern flank and daily threatened to engulf the older social system’.160 Lloyd knew full well, of course, that the Normans had built castles, established towns, and founded religious houses.161 His tacit assumption, though, appears to have been that the marcher lordships settled by the Normans were not part of the history of Wales construed as the history of the Welsh people, a view that contrasted with O. M. Edwards’s assertion that Llywelyn the Great’s vision of Wales had encompassed both the native principalities and the marcher lordships.162 Although the History offers no comment on Welsh society after 1200, his later writings show that Lloyd, again unlike Edwards, believed that little changed during the thirteenth century.163 It is telling that, while ready to follow Seebohm, Vinogradoff, and other recent scholars in his discussion of ‘early Welsh institutions’, Lloyd ignored the evidence noticed by E. A. Lewis for commutation of food renders into money payments in Gwynedd before 1282.164 Indeed, Lloyd suggested that only the industrialization of the nineteenth century marked a decisive rupture with an ancient pastoral way of life, still evoked ‘with true poetic instinct’ by the poets Hiraethog and Ceiriog.165 The third, and most recent and decisive, factor in the formation of the Welsh people was the leadership provided by medieval Welsh kings and princes.166 Their reigns had provided the chronological framework for histories of Wales since Humphrey Llwyd constructed his narrative largely on the basis of medieval Welsh and English chronicles. In keeping with his overall aim, Lloyd sought to update this legacy by establishing what was reliably known of the rulers and assessing their significance. If some previously cherished views, such as Llywelyn the Great’s allegedly crucial role in the issue of Magna Carta, were casualties of this quest for accuracy, its overall effect was to demonstrate that Welsh rulers fully merited the starring roles they had played in previous histories of Wales.167 158 Lloyd, HW, 2: 611. 159  HBC, 2: 158–65, quotation at 158. 160 Lloyd, HW, 2: 605. Cf. John Edward Lloyd, ‘History of Wales’, 342. 161 Lloyd, HW, 2: 375, 402, 427–33, 442–6. 162 Compare HW, 2: 682­–93, with Owen M. Edwards, Wales, 147–50. 163  J. E. Lloyd, ‘Wales: The Land and its People’, esp. 365. 164 Lloyd, HW, 1: 283; cf. Edward A. Lewis, ‘The Decay of Tribalism’, 13–15. 165  J. E. Lloyd, ‘Wales: The Land and its People’, 361–2. 166 Pryce, Lloyd, 151–68. 167 Lloyd, HW, 2: 646; Pryce, Lloyd, 164–5.

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336  WRITING WELSH HISTORY Moreover, this went beyond the emphasis in previous accounts on military leadership against other Welsh rulers, marcher lords, or kings of England, as Lloyd also assessed how the rulers who emerged with the arrival of the Brythons in the post-­Roman period established and exercised their authority in Welsh society by achieving mastery over deeply-­entrenched aristocratic kin-­groups that dom­in­ated individual localities.168 Lloyd presented this process as mutually bene­ fi­cial, as the leaders of individual tribes agreed to subject themselves to a single authority in return for protection against rivals.169 The key territorial unit for the exercise of royal power was the cantref, for, while originally synonymous with the  tribe, its centre was the royal court, sustained by the food renders of the free  tribesmen and the labour of the bondmen settled around it in a nucleated township.170 The conception of politics as a struggle between king and aristocracy was of course commonplace among medieval historians of Lloyd’s day. However, whereas Stubbs and the Oxford History School framed this struggle in constitutional terms as a staging post towards curbing royal authority and creating the liberal democracy of modern Britain, Lloyd saw the extension of royal or princely authority at aristocratic expense as essential to ensuring the survival of the Welsh people.171 In part, this was because more powerful rulers were better able to foster the arts of peace—such as the codification of Welsh law under Hywel Dda or the patronage of poets—that helped to give expression to ‘national self-­consciousness’.172 But above all they were better placed both to achieve political unity and to see off the threat of conquest from the late eleventh century onwards through military leadership combined in the most exemplary cases with prudent statesmanship. Thus Gruffudd ap Llywelyn ‘bequeathed to the Welsh people the priceless legacy of a revived national spirit’ on the eve of the Norman invasions by establishing an unprecedented hegemony across the length and breadth of Wales as well as by devastating border counties in England.173 The mid-­twelfth century then witnessed a ‘national revival’ or ‘national awakening’, as under Owain Gwynedd ‘the Welsh nation attained the full measure of national consciousness which enabled it for a century and a half successfully to resist absorption in the English realm’, albeit with further ‘wise and enlightened guidance’ from the Lord Rhys and the two Llywelyns.174 Moreover, the History concludes by asserting that the Welsh ‘national consciousness’ fostered by the princes had been sufficiently resilient to survive for over six centuries after the death of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd to be 168 Lloyd, HW, 1: 308. 169 Lloyd, HW, 1: 283–4. 170 Lloyd, HW, 1: 293–7, 302–3, 308, 311–17. 171 Pryce, Lloyd, 160. Cf. Burrow, A Liberal Descent, 139–47; Baár, Historians and Nationalism, 210–11, 215–19. 172 Lloyd, HW, 1: 338–43, quotation at 343; 2: 531–5. 173 Lloyd, HW, 2: 357–71, quotation at 371; similar assessment in J.  E.  Lloyd, ‘Wales and the Coming of the Normans’, 123. 174 Lloyd, HW, 2: 462, 480, 487.

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SCIENTIFIC HISTORY AND NATIONAL AWAKENING, 1880–1920  337 revived in the national awakening of Lloyd’s day, thereby simultaneously confirming and complicating the significance of 1282 as a terminal point in Wales’s history: ‘It was for a far distant generation to see that the last Prince had not lived in vain, but by his life-­work had helped to build solidly the enduring fabric of Welsh nationality.’175 Lloyd’s 1911 History provides the strongest Welsh evidence in support of the view that modern ‘scientific’ history was established as the handmaiden of nationalism.176 However, it also raises questions about that correlation. To begin with, while Lloyd wrote at a moment of national awakening and indeed was on the more nationalist side of Welsh Liberal opinion in favouring home rule for Wales within a greater Britain and its empire,177 neither he nor any of the other his­tor­ ians discussed in this chapter called for political independence. Rather, in common with most of his predecessors since Humphrey Llwyd, he sought to demonstrate that the Welsh had a history of their own that entitled them to recognition as a distinctive people within a multinational state.178 To that extent, his use of ‘scientific’ methods to give credibility to Welsh history served a nationalist end. Yet, though unprecedented in their scope and rigour, these methods were used essentially to update a long-­established narrative and as elsewhere in Europe originated in early modern textual criticism: viewed in that perspective, Lloyd was the latest in a succession of critical scholars of the Welsh past from William Camden and Edward Lhuyd to Thomas Stephens and Gweirydd ap Rhys.179 Conversely, we have seen that a number of other late nineteenth- and early twentieth-­century historians of Wales went further than Lloyd in practising ‘­scientific’ history grounded in archival research. In part, this reflected the limited opportunities for historical training comparable to that available in many con­tin­ en­tal countries, the United States, and elsewhere when Lloyd was a student in the 1880s, a situation that only began to change gradually in the first two decades of the twentieth century.180 Fundamentally, though, Lloyd’s approach reflected the nature of the task he set himself and the challenges this posed. After all, Tout and other contemporaries denied research training ventured into the archives and Lloyd could have decided that detailed monographic studies should take precedence over a new general synthesis in order to establish the ‘scientific’ credentials of Welsh history as a field of study. True, a synthesis based on a rigorous assessment of the surviving evidence had become more feasible by the early twentieth century as the efforts of

175 Lloyd, HW, 2: 764. 176  Cf. Geary, The Myth of Nations, 15. 177 Pryce, Lloyd, 85, 87–9. 178  For national historians of central and eastern Europe who similarly supported forms of autonomy short of an independent nation-­state (before the collapse of the Austro-­Hungarian Empire in 1918) see Baár, Historians and Nationalism, 9–10, 33–4, 293; R. J. W. Evans, ‘National Historiography’, 43–4. 179  Cf. Grafton, The Footnote, esp. 73–86, 132–43. 180 Woolf, A Global History of History, 364–74.

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338  WRITING WELSH HISTORY individual scholars, voluntary societies, and government bodies had ensured the publication of many of the written sources for the history of Wales down to 1282. Yet the priority Lloyd gave to writing a new synthesis points above all to the con­ tinu­ing appeal of the assumption that Welsh history was, at its heart, a story about the making of the Welsh and the era in which they had come closest to enjoying political independence. This also helps to explain why, despite his interest in later centuries, he felt no compulsion to continue his work down to the early twentieth century as his older contemporary Peter Hume Brown had done in his three-­ volume History of Scotland, which welcomed the union with England in 1707 as a crucial step in national progress.181 Accordingly, while Lloyd’s 1911 History marked a new beginning in several respects, it was even more significant as the culmination of a historiographical tradition originating in the decades after 1282 when his narrative came to an end.

181  Cf. Broun, ‘A Forgotten Anniversary’.

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13 Consolidation and Reappraisal, 1920–60 Addressing students of the Cambrian Society at Jesus College, Oxford in May 1921, Alfred Zimmern, professor of international politics at Aberystwyth, expressed his concern that the Welsh ‘national movement of to-­day’ was too backward-­looking, carrying the risk that ‘the designation “Welsh” should cease to stand for what is living and progressive in the national life and come to denote something venerable, archaic, and Druidical’.1 In particular, he was ‘alarmed by the relative abundance of works dealing with the past’ among the Welsh-­language volumes he had seen ‘on the shelves of the country folk in whom the national tradition is most alive’.2 If these criticisms were aimed primarily at popular adherence to legendary accounts of Welsh history, many historians of Wales might have agreed. But there was a widespread consensus that the scholarly study and teaching of the Welsh past were entirely compatible with, if not indeed essential to, aspirations for a ‘living and progressive’ Wales undergoing major transformations with the eclipse of the Liberal Party by the Labour Party, the growth of militant socialism in the south Wales valleys and gradual decline of Nonconformist chapels, a large-­scale transfer of land from the landed gentry to their erstwhile tenants, and the prolonged economic depression, resulting in high unemployment and substantial emigration, of the inter-­war years.3 Economic depression prompted reflections on the industrial past of Wales as well as its future prospects as a nation, prospects threatened further in some eyes by the impact of the Second World War on Welsh-­speaking communities.4 In addition, the notion of a unified Wales, and thus of a history of Wales, was problematized by an awareness of the  divisions between what Zimmern called ‘Welsh Wales’ and ‘industrial, or . . . American Wales’ in the south-­east, both of which differed from ‘upper-­class or English Wales’.5

1 Zimmern, My Impressions of Wales, 34–7, quotations at 35. Cf. Markwell, ‘Zimmern, Sir Alfred Eckhard’; E. L. Ellis, The University College of Wales, 197–8, 217. 2 Zimmern, My Impressions of Wales, 36. 3 Kenneth O. Morgan, Rebirth of a Nation, chs. 7–8. 4  Depression: Brinley Thomas, ‘The Migration of Labour’, 275; Idris Jones, Modern Welsh History, 294; R.  T.  Jenkins, ‘The Development of Nationalism’, 174; J.  F.  Rees. ‘How Wales Became Industrialized’, 130. Second World War: A.  H.  Williams, Cymru Ddoe, prefatory note by E.  Tegla Davies; D. Hywel Davies, The Welsh Nationalist Party, 231–3. 5 Zimmern, My Impressions of Wales, 28–9, quotations at 29. See also Fleure, Wales and Her People, ‘Foreword’, explaining that the pamphlet series in which the work appeared aimed to foster mutual understanding between the ‘two cultures’ of Wales, the ‘industrial and cosmopolitan’ and the ‘native’. Writing Welsh History: From the Early Middle Ages to the Twenty-­First Century. Huw Pryce, Oxford University Press. © Huw Pryce 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198746034.003.0014

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340  WRITING WELSH HISTORY These concerns help to explain why the professionalization of Welsh history in this period was closely linked to efforts to make it more accessible. From the 1920s writers commented on the need to cater for a broad constituency encompassing scholars, research students, school teachers, and ‘those (of whom our country is justly proud) who with little or no academic training display in the Extra-­Mural classes, the Eisteddfod, and the periodical literature of Wales a keen interest in the national history’.6 The quotation comes from the preface to a bibli­ og­raphy of works on Welsh history in 1931, one of several new initiatives taken to place the field on sound foundations; significantly, over twice as many items appear in the second edition, containing publications down to 1958.7 The bulk of the bibliography was divided into a series of chronological sections, from ‘Ancient Wales to 400 A.D.’ to ‘The Nineteenth Century’, reflecting an assumption that the history of Wales fell into a sequence of periods and thus possessed a unity extending from the Palaeolithic to the industrial age.8 To a greater extent than before, the long-­established idea that Welsh history was something that had happened primarily in the centuries down to the Edwardian conquest had been substantially revised by transforming later centuries from attenuated postscripts to ­integral parts of a continuing story. Nevertheless, if there was general agreement that the history of Wales extended from the prehistoric past to the twentieth century, opinions differed regarding both the relative significance of particular periods and the most appropriate frameworks for their study. Broadly speaking, opinion was divided between those who adhered to the long-­established emphasis on the ancient and medieval past, especially down to 1282, as being essential to understanding the distinctiveness of Wales and those who argued that greater emphasis should be placed on the making of a modern industrial Wales. Increasing attention to the post-­medieval centuries in turn helped to sustain the view that ‘[t]he writing of the history of Wales will become increasingly a social and economic inquiry’, a reaction to the priv­il­ eging of political history paralleled elsewhere in the postwar period, most famously amongst the Annales historians in France.9 In assessing these differing approaches the following discussion distinguishes between two broad categories: interpretations that continued the long-­established framing of Welsh history primarily in terms of political or ecclesiastical and religious history and those that

6  A Bibliography, ed. Jenkins and Rees, v. Similar statements in R.  T.  Jenkins, Hanes Cymru yn y Ddeunawfed Ganrif, iv; Thomas Evans, The Background of Modern Welsh Politics, [1]. 7  A Bibliography, 2nd edn. [ed. Dodd et al.]. This lists 3,574 numbered items, compared with 1,587 in the first edition, though these figures are approximate as both volumes also include unnumbered items as well as listing multiple works under some numbers. Both editions were also highly selective: Philip Henry Jones, A Bibliography, 3rd edn., 8. 8  The second edition replaces the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the periods 1714–89 and 1789–1914. 9  J. F. Rees, ‘Foreword’, viii.

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CONSOLIDATION AND REAPPRAISAL, 1920–60  341 prioritized analysis of the economy and society.10 First, though, it is necessary to outline some of the contexts, both institutional and individual, in which this ­historical writing took place.

Contexts: The Academy and Beyond Two related initiatives occurred at the end of the era of Liberal dominance, as the reforms to the University of Wales recommended by the Haldane Commission of 1916–17 included the establishment of a University of Wales Press and a Board of Celtic Studies to co-­ordinate research and publication on ‘Celtic Studies in Wales’, specified as Welsh language and literature, history, and archaeology and art. The creation of the Board (1919–2007), together with its Bulletin (1921–93), marked an important step in securing institutional support and recognition for Welsh history as an academic subject.11 The Board’s history and law committee reinforced the focus on unpublished manuscripts and records in the study of medi­ eval and early modern Wales pioneered in London (Hubert Hall was co-­opted as a member) by helping to embed this in the University of Wales, especially through publishing editions of primary sources in the Bulletin and in a ‘History and Law Series’ whose first volume appeared in 1929—a calendar of sixteenth-­century records compiled by O. M. Edwards’s son Ifan ab Owen Edwards, who continued his father’s commitment to education and national revival as an extramural studies lecturer and founder of Urdd Gobaith Cymru (the Welsh League of Youth).12 One of the chief instigators of the Board was J. E. Lloyd, who had urged the need for scholarly collaboration in the field of Welsh history over the previous decade, and served as the Board’s first chairman until 1940 and as the first editor of the Bulletin’s history and law section.13 At the individual university colleges research on the history of Wales was undertaken in MA theses, while the establishment of separate departments of Welsh history at Aberystwyth, Cardiff, and Bangor in 1930–1, accompanied by the creation of chairs of Welsh history at the first two colleges, provided additional institutional support and recognition for the field.14 The University of Wales Press, subsidized by grants from the university and other sources, provided an important new outlet for publications on the history of Wales, both works of research and books in Welsh for the reading public ‘similar in form and content to the Home University Library’ (a series launched by

10  For Welsh historiography in this period see Dodd, ‘Welsh History and Historians’. 11  J. Gwynn Williams, The University of Wales, ch. 4, esp. 198–200. 12  Ifan ab Owen Edwards, A Catalogue of Star Chamber Proceedings; Pryce, Lloyd, 75–6. The series was discontinued after the publication of the thirty-­first volume in 1981. 13 Pryce, Lloyd, 73–4. 14  J. Gwynn Williams, The University of Wales, 217–18; Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘Clio and Wales’, 127. See also E. L. Ellis, The University College of Wales, 234–5. MA theses: Pryce, Lloyd, 69–71.

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342  WRITING WELSH HISTORY Oxford University Press in 1911 providing concise accounts of a wide range of topics by experts in their fields).15 Like the University of Wales’s commitment to extramural education, the Welsh-­language volumes brought out by the press (as well as by other publishers) were intended to bring the findings of academic scholarship to a wider audience; moreover, their synthesizing purpose was particularly conducive to attempting broad overviews and fresh interpretations of the history of Wales. These mainly dealt with particular periods or themes: R. T. Jenkins’s account of eighteenth-­century Wales, discussed later in this chapter, is a case in point.16 By contrast, new surveys of the whole of Welsh history comparable to O. M. Edwards’s 1901 Wales were few and brief, the most substantial being a two-­volume collection of radio talks,17 while works on the history of Britain or England providing substantial coverage of Wales were exceptional.18 In addition, new books were published, in both English and Welsh, for children and their teachers in order to try and counteract the continuing tendency ‘to concentrate almost exclusively on English history, with the history of Wales brought in . . . as an appendix to it’.19 If Welsh history became more firmly established in this period as an academic field with its own specialized publications, much writing on the subject continued to be produced for educated readers outside the academy in common with history writing in Britain more generally until the 1960s.20 Professionalization thus co-­existed with and indeed helped to nurture the writing of Welsh history within the wider literary culture of the two languages of Wales. The majority of writers of Welsh history were men who had studied history at university, especially in Wales, often having benefited, like O. M. Edwards, from the social mobility facilitated by the new educational opportunities available from the late nineteenth century.21 However, only some of these were employed in

15  Welsh in Education and Life, 280 (quotation); J.  Gwynn Williams, The University of Wales, 199–200; Glasgow, ‘The Origins of the Home University Library’. 16  This was the first of 23 volumes in Cyfres y Brifysgol a’r Werin (‘The University and the People Series’; 1928–49) that were explicitly intended to meet this popularizing purpose: Rhidian Griffiths, ‘Cyfres y Brifysgol a’r Werin’. 17  John Edward Lloyd, A History of Wales (1930); Rhys Davies, The Story of Wales; A. H. Williams, Cymru Ddoe; Wales through the Ages, ed. Roderick. Edwards’s book was still described over four decades after its first publication as ‘the only book we have that gives a reasonably full account of the whole history of the nation’ by Jarman, ‘Beth i’w Ddarllen ar Hanes Cymru’, 25. 18  See nn. 41, 107 below; Robbins, ‘Forever a Footnote?’, 222–9. 19 Salmon, A Source-­Book of Welsh History; Idris Jones, Modern Welsh History; David Williams, A Short History of Modern Wales; Irene Myrddin Davies, Welsh History, quotation at 1; Ambrose, The History of Wales. Ambrose Bebb’s books in Welsh are noticed below. See also Famous Welshmen [ed. Wheldon], a St David’s Day booklet for schoolchildren, also published in Welsh (as Cymry Enwog), used into the 1970s and giving biographies of 79 Welsh men and one woman, the hymnwriter Ann Griffiths; discussion in Philip Jenkins, A History of Modern Wales, 409. For history in schools see Wynford Davies, The Curriculum, 97–9. 20  Cannadine, ‘British History’, 170–1. See also Bentley, Modernizing England’s Past, 130–1, 142, 229. 21  In 1918 it was estimated that 75–80% of students at the University of Wales were working class, a far higher proportion than at any university in England: E. L. Ellis, The University College of Wales, 195.

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CONSOLIDATION AND REAPPRAISAL, 1920–60  343 ­niversities. Although staff in university history departments, together with u scholars in other disciplines, notably economics, anthropology, and geography, accounted for a substantial share of publications, they belonged to a wider constellation of writers—many, but not all, university-­educated—including school teachers, staff in teacher-­training colleges, and adult education tutors.22 Moreover, while the latter mostly wrote works for school children and adult education classes, some published more specialized studies originating as Master’s theses or eisteddfod essays; conversely, as elsewhere in Britain, university-­based historians published general works for the educated public in addition to monographs, critical editions of sources, and articles in learned journals aimed at scholars. As in previous centuries, clergy formed another category of amateur scholars, including the Anglican A. W. Wade-­Evans (1875–1964), author of numerous works on the medieval Welsh Church and on post-­Roman and early medieval England and Wales, and editor of a text of Welsh law and of Latin Lives of Welsh saints.23 Women remained marginal in this overwhelmingly male world, their relationship with the historical profession resembling that of female scholars more generally from the late nineteenth to the mid-­twentieth centuries.24 Very few female historians of Wales held university positions. Caroline Skeel (1872–1951), discussed in Chapter  12, who turned to economic history in the years before she retired from her chair at Westfield College, London in 1929, was a rare exception, class family background in reflecting the advantages of her wealthy middle-­ London, education at Girton College, Cambridge, and doctoral study at the LSE, advantages shared with other female economic historians of the early decades of the twentieth century.25 Little had changed by the end of the 1950s to judge by the inclusion of only two women among the thirty-­eight contributors to a radio series on the history of Wales: Rachel Bromwich, a lecturer in Celtic languages and literature at Cambridge who would shortly publish her magnum opus, an edition of the medieval Welsh triads, and Mary Clement, an Aberystwyth education lecturer and historian of the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK) in Wales.26 True, women outside the academy also published work on Welsh history, some of which originated in MA theses, while a history of 22 Wales participated in the general burgeoning of adult education in early twentieth-­century Britain: Fieldhouse et al., A History of Modern British Adult Education, 46–55, 166­–82, 199–212; Stead, Coleg Harlech; Richard Lewis, Leaders and Teachers. 23  Emanuel, ‘The Rev. A. W. Wade-­Evans’. Another Anglican scholar was J. W. James (1889–1983), chancellor of Bangor cathedral (1940–64): J. W. James, A Church History of Wales; Rhigyfarch’s Life of St. David, ed. and trans. James (on which see Sharpe, ‘Which Text is Rhygyfarch’s “Life” ’?). 24 Cf. Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Women and the World of the “Annales” ’; Bonnie  G.  Smith, The Gender of History, ch. 7. 25  Cf. Berg, ‘The First Women Economic Historians’. 26  Wales through the Ages, ed. Roderick; Morfydd E. Owen, ‘Necrologie: Rachel Sheldon Bromwich 1915–2010’; Clement, The  S.P.C.K.  and Wales. Nora Chadwick (1891­–1972) also published on early medieval Welsh history as a lecturer in the Early History and Culture of the British Isles at Cambridge from 1950 to 1958, when she was succeeded by Kathleen Hughes: Lapidge, ‘Introduction’, 26, 28–9.

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344  WRITING WELSH HISTORY nineteenth-­century Anglesey by Elizabeth Williams, who graduated in English from Bangor in 1906, was a revised version of an eisteddfod essay.27 In addition, Mary Salmon, a member of the Women’s Freedom League, who wrote an MA ­thesis on the medieval noble William Marshal and taught at the women’s teacher-­ training college in Swansea where her father was principal, published an anthology of translated sources relating mainly to medieval Wales for use in schools.28 Other female authors published historical novels and children’s books on Welsh history.29 Nevertheless, even outside the academy Welsh history writing was still predominantly a male pursuit, and it was only from the 1980s that female ­scholars began to make a distinctive mark on its content through their work on women’s history (see Chapter 14). Among the men who dominated academic Welsh history, J.  E.  Lloyd, who retired as professor of history at Bangor in 1930, remained an active and influential father figure almost until his death in June 1947.30 His younger contemporaries included his successor A. H. Dodd (1891–1975), who in his youth had known A. N. Palmer in Wrexham, and the scholars appointed respectively to head newly created departments of Welsh history at Aberystwyth, Cardiff, and Bangor in 1930–1, namely E. A. Lewis (1880–1940) and William Rees (1887–1978), both of whom had written doctoral theses at the LSE, and R. T. Jenkins (1881–1969), a graduate of Aberystwyth and Cambridge who had been a grammar-­school history teacher since 1904, first in Brecon (where he taught William Rees), then Cardiff.31 Another was the medievalist J. Goronwy Edwards (1891–1976), the son of a railway signalman and miner’s daughter who was brought up in Flintshire and read history at Oxford before writing a Master’s thesis supervised by Tout at Manchester on Edward I’s settlement in Wales (1915), which led, after war service, to an academic career in England, first at Oxford (1919­–48) and then as director of the Institute of Historical Research (IHR) in London (1948–60).32 Edwards’s contemporary James Conway Davies (1891–1971), who studied at Aberystwyth, Cardiff, and Cambridge, also worked on medieval English as well as Welsh history but followed a different career path, holding appointments as an archivist and palaeographer in various institutions, which helps to explain why 27  R.  T.  Jenkins and Helen  M.  Ramage, A History; G.  Nesta Evans, Social Life in Mid-­Eighteenth Century Anglesey; G.  Nesta Evans, Religion and Politics in Mid-­ Eighteenth Century Anglesey; E. A. Williams, Hanes Môn (translated as The Day before Yesterday, with a brief account of the author and her work at 11–13). 28 Salmon, A Source-­Book of Welsh History; The Cambrian, 12 November 1909, 3; ‘History Theses 1901–1970’; Wallace, The Women’s Suffrage Movement, 135–6. 29  E.g. Elizabeth Mary Davies (‘Moelona’), Storïau o Hanes Cymru: Llyfr I; Irene Myrddin Davies, Everyday Life in Wales. Book Three. 30 Pryce, Lloyd, 63–4, 74–5, 76–7. 31 Neil Evans, ‘Beyond 1282’; Peter Lambert, ‘The Institutionalization of History’, 185, 188–9; Ralph  A.  Griffiths, ‘Venturing into the “Jungle” ’, 203–6; Ralph Griffiths, ‘William Rees’; Llywelyn-­ Williams, R. T. Jenkins, esp. 14–17. 32  J. B. Smith, ‘Obituary: John Goronwy Edwards’.

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CONSOLIDATION AND REAPPRAISAL, 1920–60  345 much of his research on medieval Wales consisted of the publication and analysis of documentary sources.33 In the Welsh university colleges a younger generation also began to make its mark from the 1930s. David Williams (1900–78), the son of a tenant farmer in Pembrokeshire, became a highly influential historian of modern Wales: after reading history at Cardiff, he spent several years as a grammar-­school teacher interspersed by research fellowships in Paris, Berlin, and New York before returning to his old college as a lecturer in history in 1930; he subsequently held the chair of Welsh history at Aberystwyth (1945–67).34 His contemporaries included Glyn Roberts (1904–62), a student of Lloyd and Dodd at Bangor whose publications included studies of Welsh borough and parliamentary history, and who succeeded R.  T.  Jenkins to the chair of Welsh history in 1949, and the medievalist T.  Jones Pierce (1905–64), a graduate of Liverpool University who taught medieval history at Bangor (1930–45) before moving to Aberystwyth as Special Lecturer in Medieval Welsh History, being promoted to Research Professor in 1948.35

Old Themes Revisited: Political and Ecclesiastical History As we shall see, Jones Pierce exemplified the increasing interest in social and economic history that marked a significant shift in the focus of historians’ attention over the four decades from 1920, a shift that also owed much to scholars in other disciplines, notably economics and geography, and underpinned the increasing body of work on the modern history of Wales from the later eighteenth century onwards. However, Jones Pierce also wrote about political and ecclesiastical ­history—a reminder that, important though it was, the increasing attention given to economic and social history in this period belonged to a wider body of his­ torio­graph­ic­al endeavour animated by both the old and the new.36 Of course, these different approaches overlapped rather than being entirely distinct from each other. Nevertheless, the differences between them are sufficient to warrant treating work focused primarily on political and ecclesiastical developments sep­ ar­ate­ly from that which placed society and the economy centre stage. Although Welsh history writing in the period covered by this chapter evinced a decisive weakening of previous assumptions that medieval Welsh history was fundamental, if not tantamount, to the history of Wales as a whole, the Middle Ages continued to attract considerable attention from historians. If the death of 33  Brief account of Davies and his work in National Library of Wales, ‘J. Conway Davies Papers’. 34  Kenneth O. Morgan, ‘Williams, David’; Ralph A. Griffiths, ‘A Bibliography of David Williams’. 35  John Gwynn Williams, ‘Roberts, Glyn’; Glyn Roberts, Aspects of Welsh History; G.  R.  J.  Jones, ‘Professor T. Jones Pierce’; Jones Pierce, Medieval Welsh Society. 36  See below, and Jones Pierce, ‘Einion ap Ynyr (Anian II)’; Jones Pierce, Medieval Welsh Society, 391–407.

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346  WRITING WELSH HISTORY Llywelyn in 1282 had lost something of its iconic significance as a definitive turning-­point in the history of the Welsh, the persistence of the notion that ‘modern Wales’ began with Henry Tudor’s accession to the English throne in 1485 implied that the medieval centuries remained an essential part of the story.37 True, by 1900 historians had come to recognize that the eighteenth century was crucial to the making of modern Wales, thanks to the Methodist revival and the beginnings of large-­scale industrialization, a view encapsulated in J.  E.  Lloyd’s declaration in his 1930 History of Wales, an eighty-­page overview from prehistory to the early twentieth century, that ‘[t]he Wales of Victoria differed as widely from that of Queen Anne as did the latter from the Britain of Boudicca’.38 This was reflected in Lloyd’s devoting a third of his chronological coverage to the period from the Methodist revival, a substantial increase on the 4 per cent that O. M. Edwards had allocated to the period 1730–1894 a generation earlier (see Chapter 12). Yet Lloyd divided his coverage at 1485, reflecting his long-­held conviction that, if medieval history was abandoned, ‘the core of Welsh history must vanish also; no nation can less afford than ours to be explained in terms of the nineteenth century; we cannot sacrifice Arthur and St. David and the two Llywelyns and Owain Glyn Dwr [sic] to the Wales which was the product of the industrial revolution’.39 Historians writing about medieval Wales inevitably did so in Lloyd’s shadow.40 One strand elaborated on aspects of the 1911 History’s political narrative, another on aspects of medieval Welsh history that had largely fallen outside Lloyd’s remit, including social and economic history, discussed in the next section. With respect to political history, considerable energy was devoted to reassessing the age of the thirteenth-­century princes, marking a further refurbishment of what continued to be regarded as a key moment in the history of Wales. One prominent theme from the 1940s onwards was the nature of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd’s Principality of Wales, recognized by the English crown in 1267, and Anglo-­Welsh relations in the thirteenth century, as scholars assessed how far the principality was organized on ‘feudal’ lines and who was to blame for the breakdown of relations between the prince and Edward I that led to the conquest.41 For example, T. Jones Pierce broke new ground in a lecture at Bangor in January 1945 which, as well as supporting

37  For 1485 as the beginning of modern Welsh history see Howell T. Evans, The Making of Modern Wales; W. Llewelyn Williams, The Making of Modern Wales; Idris Jones, Modern Welsh History; David Williams, A Short History of Modern Wales; David Williams, A History of Modern Wales; Wales through the Ages, ed. Roderick, vol. 2. 38  John Edward Lloyd, A History of Wales (1930), 53. See also Pryce, Lloyd, 86–9. 39  J. E. Lloyd, ‘A History Course’, 5. 40 I discuss this scholarship more fully in Pryce, ‘Cenedligrwydd a Chymdeithas’; Pryce, ‘The Modern Historiography of Medieval Wales’. 41  Littere Wallie, ed. Edwards, xxxvi–lxix; The Welsh Assize Roll, ed. Davies, 1–233; Powicke, King Henry III and the Lord Edward, 2: 618–85; Powicke, The Thirteenth Century, 400–30. See also the summary of these interpretations in A. D. Carr, Medieval Wales, 24–5.

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CONSOLIDATION AND REAPPRAISAL, 1920–60  347 J.  G.  Edwards’s constitutional emphasis on Llywelyn’s creation of ‘feudal’ bonds with subordinate princes and lords, highlighted the readiness of the thirteenth-­ century princes, aided and abetted by Welsh lawyers, to imitate their ‘feudal’ neighbours in England in order to modernize society and government within Gwynedd itself. Thus, he concluded, by the wars of 1277 and 1282 ‘Welsh Wales . . . had developed in every direction all the characteristics of a feudal state in miniature’—an affirmation of medieval Welsh statehood that appealed to Plaid Cymru, which first published the lecture in a volume entitled The Historical Basis of Welsh Nationalism.42 By contrast, only limited forays were made into the later Middle Ages, with work on the administrative and legal structures established after the Edwardian conquest, introductions to editions of sources, and Lloyd’s 1931 volume on Owain Glyndŵr, presented as a successor of the thirteenth-­ century princes who had loomed large in the final parts of the 1911 History.43 Apart from the coverage in J. W. James’s concise overview of Welsh ec­cle­si­as­ tic­al history from the Roman period to 1940, work on the Church in medieval Wales was mostly specialized in nature, ranging in scope from post-­Roman and early medieval developments that reflected the well-­established places of the ‘age of the saints’ and the ‘Celtic Church’ in the historiography of Wales to various aspects of Welsh ecclesiastical history in the high Middle Ages.44 A notable ex­ample was James Conway Davies’s lengthy introduction to two volumes of documents that provided the most wide-­ranging account hitherto of the Church in Wales from the late eleventh to late thirteenth centuries. Davies traced major developments in the reorganization of the secular church and examined various other topics, though his overall interpretation resembled that of Lloyd by emphasizing the role of the Normans in effecting ecclesiastical change while insisting that ‘national and local divergencies persisted’.45 Davies also contributed to a varied body of writing on the religious orders in high and late medieval Wales, which included volumes published in 1947 on the military orders by William Rees and on the Welsh Cistercian monasteries by the Irish American historian Jeremiah F. O’Sullivan (1902–74) of Fordham University, New York.46 Of course, writing on the medieval Church also threw light on political history, such were the close ties between religion and secular power throughout the Middle Ages. The same was true of the early modern period, as shown by the prolific writings on Welsh Puritanism by Thomas Richards (1878–1962), university 42 Jones Pierce, ‘The Age of the Princes’, quotation at 59. See also Pryce, ‘Cenedligrwydd a Chymdeithas’, esp. 12–20. 43 Waters, The Edwardian Settlement; The Extent of Chirkland, ed. Jones; J.  E.  Lloyd, Owen Glendower. 44 J. W. James, A Church History of Wales. 45  Episcopal Acts, ed. Davies, 1: 1–232; 2: 415–606, quotation at 2: 594. Cf. Lloyd, HW, 2: 447–59, 590–604. 46  J. Conway Davies, ‘The Records of the Abbey of Ystrad Marchell’; William Rees, History of the Order of St John; O’Sullivan, Cistercian Settlements. For O’Sullivan see Donnelly, ‘Dedication’.

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348  WRITING WELSH HISTORY librarian at Bangor, and by Glanmor Williams’s publications from the later 1940s on the Protestant Reformation in Wales, the first fruits of his major contribution to this field—and to early modern Welsh history more generally—over the following five decades.47 Work on political history continued to focus on the governmental framework established by Henry VIII. Particularly striking was the breakdown of the consensus, originating in Elizabethan times and en­thu­si­as­tic­ al­ly endorsed as recently as 1919 by the Liberal lawyer and politician W. Llewelyn Williams, that the Acts of Union were largely beneficial to Wales, notwithstanding reservations about their effects on the Welsh language (see Chapter 12). From the early 1920s a number of Welsh scholars argued, by contrast, that the benefits conferred by the legislation were outweighed by its dam­aging assault on both Welsh nationality and the common people of Wales, a challenge to received opinion acknowledged by J. Frederick Rees, who proposed a more nuanced view that interpreted the Acts of Union in the context of their own time, a line also taken by William Rees and his pupil David Williams.48 A readiness to probe deeper into early modern governance was also seen in Penry Williams’s study of the Council in the Marches in the Elizabethan period as well as in A. H. Dodd’s pioneering explorations of local and parliamentary politics in early modern Wales.49 Disentangling the religious and the political (and both from the social and economic) proved all the more difficult once historians turned their gaze to the modern Wales that was created from the later eighteenth century onwards. ­ R. T. Jenkins was unusual among his contemporaries in making religion and, to a lesser extent, politics the main framework for interpreting the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Jenkins occupied a singular position among writers of Welsh history in this period. Although he had studied history at university, he had performed better in English, and turned himself into a historian while employed as a grammar-­school history teacher for a quarter of a century before his appointment as head of the newly created department of Welsh history at Bangor in 1930 at the age of forty-­eight.50 In addition, he was one of the few authors discussed in this chapter who appears in histories of Welsh literature, representing a late instance of the centuries-­long integration of Welsh history 47  Thomas Richards, The Puritan Movement in Wales, was the first in a series of six pioneering works on this theme published over the following decade, discussed in Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘Doc Tom’, ch. 4. For Glanmor Williams see Gareth Elwyn Jones, ‘The Tudor Historian’, and bibliography in Huw Walters, ‘A Lifetime of Writing’. 48 Bebb, Cyfnod y Tuduriaid, 52–68; J. F. Rees, ‘Tudor Policy in Wales’, esp. 44–7; William Rees, ‘The Union of England and Wales’; David Williams, A History of Modern Wales, [9], 33–45. Assessments in Glanmor Williams, ‘Haneswyr a’r Deddfau Uno’, 45–54; Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘ “Taphy-­land Historians” and the Union’, 20–2. 49  Penry Williams, The Council in the Marches; Dodd, Studies in Stuart Wales. For Dodd’s work on early modern Wales see Lloyd Bowen, The Politics of the Principality, 2–3. 50 John Gwynn Williams, ‘Jenkins, Robert Thomas’. Illuminating appraisals in English in Prys Morgan, ‘R. T. Jenkins’, and Llywelyn-­Williams, R. T. Jenkins. Autobiography: R. T. Jenkins, Edrych yn Ôl. Bibliography: Llywelyn-­Williams, ‘Llyfryddiaeth’.

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CONSOLIDATION AND REAPPRAISAL, 1920–60  349 writing within a broader Welsh-­language literary culture.51 Indeed, Jenkins came to prominence as a historian in the pages of Y Llenor, the quarterly founded in 1922 by his next-­door neighbour W.  J.  Gruffydd, professor of Welsh at Cardiff, who encouraged him to contribute essays to this platform for new kinds of cre­ ative writing and thinking in Welsh.52 His lucid and engaging literary style, rooted in the spoken language, gave him a distinctive voice that pronounced, with seeming ease and informality, on a wide range of topics, reflecting a breadth and depth of reading as well as a delight in delineating the character of individuals and places, especially towns, both in Wales and beyond—a confirmed Francophile, he also wrote extensively about France. As an essayist with a talent for haute vul­gar­ isa­tion or belles lettres, Jenkins saw history writing as a literary art, a view reflected in his observation that, if he had an ideal as a historian, it was ‘to try and write History something like [G. M.] Trevelyan’, as well as in his dismay at those history books whose turgid style stemmed from an apparent ambition ‘to imitate the British Pharmocopoeia’.53 Like Trevelyan, Jenkins believed that the writing of history required literary skill and imagination and should be aimed at the educated public.54 Yet, while having little time for the assumption in some quarters that austerity of expression was an essential attribute of truly rigorous professional history, Jenkins stressed the importance of expanding research on Welsh history and contributed to its professionalization, not only as head of a university department dedicated to the field but also, for example, as co-­editor of the first academic bibli­og­raphy of the subject, author of a monograph on the Moravian Brethren, and co-­author of a history of the Cymmrodorion and other Welsh societies in London (all works published in English).55 As these and other works demonstrate, Jenkins’s scholarship was both deep and exact: attention to empirical detail mattered just as much as a precise and engaging literary style. Yet he had reservations about professional history to judge by his dismissal of the idea that history was a science, by the avowedly selective and ‘ad hoc’ use of primary sources which ‘leaves much to be desired, from the truly scientific standpoint’ in his work on the Moravian Brethren, and by the paucity and brevity of his articles in the Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies compared with the steady stream of essays and reviews

51  Ambrose Bebb and Iorwerth Peate, discussed below, are two others. See Chapman, The Oxford Literary History of Wales: Volume 2, 144–5, 152, 164–5, 169, 173. 52 Chapman, W. J. Gruffydd, 73–6; Llywelyn-­Williams, R. T. Jenkins, 1. 53 Dafydd Jenkins, ‘R.  T.  Jenkins: Maitland Cymru’, 104, quotations at 98, 101; Prys Morgan, ‘R.  T.  Jenkins’, 147–8; Glanmor Williams, ‘R.  T.’; R.  Rees Davies, ‘’Sgrifennu Hanes Cymru yn y Gymraeg’, 7. See also the stimulating assessment of Jenkins’s approach to history in Chapman, ‘Yr Apêl at Felix’. 54  Cf. Cannadine, G. M. Trevelyan, 183–96. 55  A Bibliography, ed. Jenkins and Rees; R.  T.  Jenkins, The Moravian Brethren in North Wales; R. T. Jenkins and Helen Ramage, A History.

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350  WRITING WELSH HISTORY he contributed to Y Llenor and other Welsh-­language periodicals.56 Even after his appointment to a university position, Jenkins sought to reach beyond the academy and ensure that an educated Welsh-­speaking public could also benefit from the highest scholarly standards at a time when ‘[m]ore people than ever before are reading Welsh’.57 A prime example of this is his work for the dictionary of national biography, commissioned by the Cymmrodorion and first published in Welsh, which he co-­edited and helped bring to completion as well as contributing more than 600 entries.58 That over a thousand copies were sold within a few weeks of its publication in 1953 is testimony to the demand for Welsh history among educated readers of Welsh in this period that Jenkins sought to satisfy.59 The same was true of Jenkins’s first book: Hanes Cymru yn y Ddeunawfed Ganrif (‘The History of Wales in the Eighteenth Century’), the first volume to appear in the University of Wales Press’s Cyfres y Brifysgol a’r Werin (‘The University and the People Series’).60 This was an immediate success, being reprinted four times within three years of its original publication in 1928.61 Jenkins described it as a synthesis that ‘sought to draw a clear picture . . . of the main elements of Welsh life in the eighteenth century, as I saw them’—an im­port­ ant rider acknowledging the work’s personal and provisional nature, reinforced by the assertion that, ‘if the study of history in Wales is in a healthy condition, this small volume should be completely worthless in five years . . . at least as far as the facts are concerned’.62 As the reference to ‘Welsh life’ implies, Jenkins took a wide-­ ranging approach, declaring that eighteenth-­ century Wales experienced ‘four great revolutions’, three originating from outside the principality—‘an awakening in education, an awakening in religion and . . . the “Industrial Revolution”  ’—while ‘the fourth, the most remarkable in many respects . . . was native, namely the rebirth of the Welsh language and literature and tradition’. The opening and closing chapters sought to convey many of those changes in contrasting sketches of the society, economy, and culture of Wales in the times of two prominent literary figures: the Anglican prose writer Ellis Wynne (1670/1–1734) and the popular dramatist and poet Thomas Edwards (1739–1810), better known as Twm o’r Nant. However, at first sight Jenkins seems to have devoted disproportionate attention to his second ‘revolution’, as the remaining three chapters dealt in turn with the Church of England, Dissent, and Methodism, prompting one con­tem­por­ary

56  R.  T.  Jenkins, ‘A Ellir Gwyddor Hanes?’; R.  T.  Jenkins, The Moravian Brethren in North Wales,­ x–xi; Llywelyn-­Williams, ‘Llyfryddiaeth’. 57  Quotation: R. T. Jenkins, ‘The Development of Nationalism’, 181. For Jenkins’s commitment to adult education see Llywelyn-­Williams, ‘R. T. Jenkins ac Addysg Oedolion’. 58  Y Bywgraffiadur, ed. Lloyd and Jenkins; Nuttall, ‘R. T. Jenkins’ Articles’. 59  J. Goronwy Edwards, ‘Hanesyddiaeth Gymreig’, 29. 60 R. T. Jenkins, Hanes Cymru yn y Ddeunawfed Ganrif; Llywelyn-­Williams, R. T. Jenkins, 15. 61 R. T. Jenkins, Hanes Cymru yn y Ddeunawfed Ganrif (1931 edn.), v–vi. The book was reissued again in 1945 and 1972. 62 R. T. Jenkins, Hanes Cymru yn y Ddeunawfed Ganrif, iii–iv.

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CONSOLIDATION AND REAPPRAISAL, 1920–60  351 to quip that the book should really have been entitled ‘The History of the Methodist Revival with some comments on the woollen industry’.63 No doubt the privileging of religious developments partly reflected the interests of a scholar who subsequently became a leading authority on Nonconformity and Methodism in eighteenth-­century Wales, and was facilitated by the large body of previous work on Welsh religious history.64 But his choice of thematic structure was driven above all, not by a belief that religion mattered more than everything else, still less by his being a chapel-­going Calvinistic Methodist, but rather by a conviction that religious developments had a transformative impact on the Welsh people that went far beyond the sphere of religion—an impact that ran counter to some of the fundamental causes and characteristics of the Methodist revival, above all its highly charged emotionalism.65 For Jenkins, the religious changes he charted had ultimately made the Welsh more enlightened, not more emotional, reflecting a sceptical and rational outlook shared by other Welsh writers in the inter-­war period. The same outlook informed his admiration of the Methodist theologian and intellectual Lewis Edwards and his impatience with Romantic Celticism.66 Little wonder that the chapters on religion discuss aspects of education, another of the ‘great changes’ Jenkins identified.67 Most significantly, he maintained that it would not have been possible . . . for the best things in today’s Wales to exist . . . if it was not for the Methodist Revival . . . It took hold of a dumb nation—it made it vociferous . . . It took hold of a thoughtless nation; it taught it seriousness . . . It took hold of a nation carefree in its joy and its sorrow; it shook it to the depths of its nature; it opened its eyes, it made its ear sharper . . . of all the paradoxes of the Methodist Revival . . . I wonder whether the greatest is this—that it was not chiefly in the world of religion that it was most effective?68

One of its paradoxical effects, Jenkins maintained, was political: to help ‘turn the Tory Wales of 1700 into the Radical Wales of 1900’.69 He explored an important stage in this change in a subsequent volume on Wales from 1789 to 1843, which focused on the development of political consciousness and framed the discussion around the ideologies of conservatism and liberalism as articulated especially in

63  Llywelyn-­Williams, R. T. Jenkins, 22. 64  R. Tudur Jones, ‘R. T. Jenkins’. 65 R. T. Jenkins, Hanes Cymru yn y Ddeunawfed Ganrif, 75–6. 66  R. T. Jenkins, ‘Wales and the Study of Church History’, 146; R. T. Jenkins, ‘The Development of Nationalism’, 177. See also Jenkins’s observations on the importance of education, reason, and fostering the intellect in R.  T.  Jenkins, Hanes Cymru yn y Bedwaredd Ganrif ar Bymtheg, 38, 42–7; R. T. Jenkins, ‘Pedair Canrif o Hanes Cymru’, 178, 188. Jenkins’s outlook belonged to a broader reaction to Victorianism in Britain: Prys Morgan, ‘R. T. Jenkins’, 144–5, 148–51. 67 R. T. Jenkins, Hanes Cymru yn y Ddeunawfed Ganrif, 33–43, 59–61, 99. 68 R. T. Jenkins, Hanes Cymru yn y Ddeunawfed Ganrif, 103. 69 R. T. Jenkins, Hanes Cymru yn y Ddeunawfed Ganrif, 71.

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352  WRITING WELSH HISTORY the growing Welsh periodical press—an approach also taken by Thomas Evans, headmaster of Cardigan County School, in his 1936 study of Welsh politics in the same period, based on an MA thesis supervised by E. A. Lewis at Aberystwyth.70 But Jenkins (like Evans) emphasized the religious underpinnings of these ideologies, and included extensive coverage of religion within his overarching political framework. Furthermore, Jenkins pursued this theme into the latter part of the nineteenth century in an article that noted the crucial role played by Welsh Nonconformist Radicalism in the political nationalism articulated by the Liberal party, most totemically in calls for the disestablishment of the Church of England in Wales.71 However, there is a further significant aspect to Jenkins’s treatment of religion in his book on the eighteenth century. As Jenkins noted, most writing about Welsh Nonconformity had been ‘from a denominational standpoint . . . until very recently’.72 He, by contrast, adopted the stance of a dispassionate secular historian seeking to strike a balanced view of religious developments, an approach anticipated earlier in the century by the Baptist Thomas Shankland (see Chapter 12).73 Jenkins may have suggested that the Methodist leader Howel Harris ‘was the greatest Welshman of the century’, but he left the reader in no doubt about Harris’s faults.74 Fundamental to this approach was an acute sensitivity to the otherness of the past. Accordingly, Jenkins (again like Trevelyan) insisted that historians should try to avoid justifying ideological positions in the present through an ‘appeal to history’, as he put it in a 1924 essay reacting against the approach of his younger contemporary W.  Ambrose Bebb (1894–1955), a teacher-­training lecturer in Bangor and prolific Welsh-­language author whose works included six textbooks for school children on the history of Wales down to the sixteenth century strongly infused by his political nationalism.75 But, when it came to religion, respecting the integrity of the past entailed more than eschewing partisanship. In placing religious developments centre stage in his account of the eighteenth century Jenkins focused on an aspect of the period likely to be familiar to his intended readers: it was therefore all the more important to render it unfamiliar by creating a sense of historical distance.76 That Jenkins was conscious of how 70 R. T. Jenkins, Hanes Cymru yn y Bedwaredd Ganrif ar Bymtheg; Thomas Evans, Background of Modern Welsh Politics. 71  R.  T.  Jenkins, ‘The Development of Nationalism’, esp. 165, 169–73. The article was the nearest Jenkins came to achieving his aim of writing a second volume on nineteenth-­century Wales, on the period after 1843, announced in R. T. Jenkins, Hanes Cymru yn y Bedwaredd Ganrif ar Bymtheg, v. 72 R. T. Jenkins, Hanes Cymru yn y Ddeunawfed Ganrif, 44. 73  R. Tudur Jones, ‘R. T. Jenkins’, 94. 74 R.  T.  Jenkins, Hanes Cymru yn y Ddeunawfed Ganrif, 88–90, 93 (quotation). Jenkins’s critical view of Methodism is emphasized by Prys Morgan, ‘R. T. Jenkins’, 144. 75 R. T. Jenkins, Yr Apêl at Hanes, 142–78 (similar views in R. T. Jenkins, ‘Pedair Canrif o Hanes Cymru’, 176–8); Thomas Parry, ‘Bebb, William Ambrose’; Chapman, W. Ambrose Bebb, esp. 97–8, 101, 109. Cf. Cannadine, G. M. Trevelyan, 197–8. 76  Cf. Prys Morgan, ‘R. T. Jenkins’, 145–6, 151.

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CONSOLIDATION AND REAPPRAISAL, 1920–60  353 much had changed is suggested by his observation that doctrinal disputes he had explained at length to the reader had been ‘as familiar to his grandfather and grandmother as the A B C’, adding: ‘the reader’s obliviousness to these things is one of the most important differences between the Wales of today and the Wales of 1845’.77 Jenkins’s secular, demythologizing approach to religious history was probably motivated above all by a determination to offer a reading of the eighteenth century that highlighted its difference from the present and interpreted its legacy in terms consonant with his aspirations for a rational Wales in his own day.

New Approaches: I. Landscapes, Cultures, and the Remote Past J. E. Lloyd opened his 1911 History in prehistory and drew on archaeology, phys­ ic­al anthropology, and philology to argue that different prehistoric peoples had contributed to the making of the Welsh. The idea that the history of Wales began in the Neolithic was commonplace throughout the period covered by this chapter, being reiterated by Lloyd (who supplied a revised synthesis of prehistory based on more recent archaeological work in the third edition of his History in 1939) and leaving its mark on general histories.78 This line of thinking gained further momentum from the ‘Aberystwyth school’ of physical anthropologists and human geographers associated with H.  J.  Fleure (1877–1969), a polymath whose work encompassed both the natural and the human sciences: he had taught geology, botany, and zoology at Aberystwyth for over a decade before his appointment in 1917 to the college’s newly created chair of geography and anthropology, from which he later moved to become the first professor of geography at Manchester (1930–44).79 Fleure advocated a multidisciplinary approach to the past focused on the relationship of people to landscapes, declaring in 1919 that ‘[a]nthropology, history, and geography are a trilogy to be torn asunder only with severe loss of truth of value to mankind.’80 His own extensive researches in physical anthropology, informed by his belief in ‘survivals’ from the distant past, led him—like ethnologists such as John Beddoe, whose work Lloyd had also used—to maintain that the shape of skulls and other physical characteristics of present-­day populations provided evidence of descent from (mainly) prehistoric peoples. Moreover, these ancient origins also helped to explain some of the social and cultural 77 R. T. Jenkins, Hanes Cymru yn y Ddeunawfed Ganrif, 64. 78 Lloyd, HW, 3rd edn., 1: xxxix–lv; cf. John Edward Lloyd, Wales and the Past. See also e.g. A.  H.  Williams, An Introduction to the History of Wales. Volume I; Ambrose, The History of Wales, 11–16; Wales Through the Ages, ed. Roderick, 1: 11–25. Cf. A Bibliography, ed. Jenkins and Rees, 27–31. 79  Fleure is set in the context of a wider regional and cultural turn in geography in Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition, ch. 8 (discussion of Fleure at 282–9). See also J. A. Campbell, Some Sources of the Humanism of H.  J.  Fleure; Langton, ‘Habitat, Economy and Society’, 5–7; Gruffudd, ‘Back to the Land’; Amanda Rees, ‘Doing “Deep Big History” ’. 80  Fleure, ‘Human Regions’, 94.

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354  WRITING WELSH HISTORY characteristics of the Welsh in the twentieth century. Yet Fleure rejected ­geographical determinism, emphasizing that people shaped their environments within what he called ‘human regions’. Thus he argued that, precisely because of their isolation and poverty, Welsh rural communities had ‘retained characteristic modes of speech and modes of life with a long history’ which in turn had helped to foster a democratic culture fundamental to the making of modern Wales. Accordingly, he called on the Welsh to contribute to the modern world by understanding ‘their origins and evolution, social and economic’, by treasuring ‘their spiritual heritage’, by ‘assimilating the best of what comes from without’, and, in an anthropologized echo of Matthew Arnold’s Celticism, ‘by trying to help England caught in the reaction from her own over-­development in certain directions’.81 For Fleure, as an anthropologist and geographer of strongly internationalist leanings, Wales was a land of plural ‘local cultures’, fully comprehensible only if viewed from the perspective of the longue durée and contributing to wider social and cultural enrichment in the present.82 These ideas were highly influential, having an impact, for example, on the archaeologist Cyril Fox’s distinction between highland and lowland Britain, the former characterized by cultural continuity, the latter by its vulnerability to invasions from the east and the consequent imposition of new cultures.83 Fleure’s ideas were also adapted in a Welsh context by two of his students, Emrys G. Bowen (1900–83) and Iorwerth  C.  Peate (1901–82). Bowen taught geography and anthropology at Aberystwyth from 1929, eventually holding the chair there (1944–68). Best known for his controversial attempts to trace the travels of early medieval Welsh saints from church dedications, Bowen also wrote a general account of the Welsh past from the perspective of human geography.84 His 1941 volume Wales: A Study in Geography and History, containing a preface by Fleure, originated in a radio series for schools and was aimed especially at school pupils and university students.85 Bowen declared that his book sought ‘to reconstruct . . . the cultural landscape of Wales at various periods in the past’, following his Aberystwyth colleague Daryll Forde’s privileging of human agency in the creation of landscapes.86 Accordingly the bulk of the book presents a series of ‘period-­ pictures of . . . economic, social and political conditions’ from the Iron Age to ‘the industrial age’.87 One theme, strongly indebted to Fleure, is the enduring im­port­ ance of a division between thinly populated moorland regions, where native

81  Quotations: Fleure, ‘Preface’. 82 Fleure, Wales and her People, 18–19. 83  Cyril Fox, The Personality of Britain, esp. 9, 21–2, 29–32, 78. 84 Carter, ‘Emrys  G.  Bowen, 1900–1983’; E.  G.  Bowen, The Settlements of the Celtic Saints; E. G. Bowen, Saints, Seaways and Settlements; E. G. Bowen, Wales. 85 E. G. Bowen, Wales, ix–x. 86 E. G. Bowen, Wales, 4; cf. Forde, ‘Human Geography, History and Sociology’. 87 E. G. Bowen, Wales, 6–10.

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CONSOLIDATION AND REAPPRAISAL, 1920–60  355 traditions and the Welsh language were preserved most strongly, and the rest of Wales, including the increasingly Anglicized industrial areas of the south-­east.88 For Iorwerth Peate, on the other hand, these areas were marginal, even alien, to the history of Wales, which in his view consisted above all in the continuity of a ‘folk culture’ exemplified by Welsh strict-­metre poetry as well as, more controversially, by religion, with Catholicism and Calvinism representing different iterations of fatalistic attitudes that were deeply ingrained among the peasantry.89 An early expression of these views came in his 1931 book Cymru a’i Phobl (‘Wales and its People’), which owed much to Fleure in, for example, its stress on the Welsh uplands as the refuge of ancient peoples and the notion of the Welsh being a mixture of different races, some very ancient, others more recent.90 However, Peate sounded a distinctive note in his idealization of the rural craftworker (or ‘peasant-­ artisan’), reflecting his family background in Llanbrynmair (Montgomeryshire), where his father and grandfather were carpenters: like O.  M.  Edwards, Peate fashioned his image of Wales in the light of his rural upbringing.91 Peate promoted the idea of a ‘Welsh folk culture’ both in his writings and in his work at the National Museum of Wales, where he became keeper of the Department of Folk Life and subsequently first curator of its Welsh Folk Museum, established at St Fagans near Cardiff in 1948 under the influence of Scandinavian models.92 In their different ways, then, Fleure, Bowen, and especially Peate promoted the ideal­iza­tion of rural society, whose lineaments could be traced back to prehistory, as a fundamental constituent of Welshness, an idealization that marked a wider reaction in the inter-­war period against the modern industrial world.93 A related development was a series of studies by a younger generation of the ‘Aberystwyth school’ of individual Welsh rural communities. Mostly based on fieldwork in the 1940s and 1950s, these studies were notable for their attempts to explain the ­communities’ social relations and other characteristics in terms of historical influences ranging from medieval Welsh inheritance customs to nineteenth-­ century Nonconformity.94

88 E. G. Bowen, Wales, 162–9. 89  Trefor M. Owen, ‘Peate, Iorwerth Cyfeiliog’; Catrin Stevens, Iorwerth C. Peate; Trefor M. Owen, ‘Iorwerth Peate a Diwylliant Gwerin’. Poetry: Peate, ‘Welsh Folk Culture’, 294. Religion: Peate, Cymru a’i Phobl, 88; cf. T. Gwynn Jones, The Culture and Tradition of Wales, 16–18. 90 Peate, Cymru a’i Phobl, 1–2, 121–9. As a student Peate had contributed to a concise Welsh-­ language account of prehistoric Wales: Gyda’r Wawr, ed. Fleure. 91 Peate, Cymru a’i Phobl, 99–100; Catrin Stevens, Iorwerth C. Peate, 3–4. 92 Peate, Guide to the Collection; Peate, ‘Folk Culture’; Peate, Diwylliant Gwerin Cymru (English adaptation: Peate, Tradition and Folk Life); Douglas Bassett, ‘The Making of a National Museum (Part III)’, 260–7; Elen Phillips, ‘Wales in Miniature’. 93  Gruffudd, ‘Remaking Wales’; Andrew Edwards and Wil Griffith, ‘Welsh National Identity’; Chris Williams, ‘The Dilemmas of Nation and Class’, esp. 156–61. 94  Trefor M. Owen, ‘Community Studies’, 27–42; Gareth Rees, ‘Community Studies’.

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New Approaches: II. The Economic Turn From the end of the First World War to the 1950s economic history became an important framework for writing about the history of Welsh society. This was part of the bigger story of economic history’s establishment as an academic field in Britain, including the foundation of the Economic History Society in 1926, with a broad appeal reflected in the subject’s popularity in adult education ­classes.95 Historians of Wales stressed the need to take account of British and English economic history and some explicitly situated Welsh developments in a wider British context. They also acknowledged that much still needed to be done.96 Most significantly in the context of the present book, economic history complicated previous ethnically-­focused narratives of Welsh history both by shifting attention to the majority of people in Wales and their material circumstances and by raising the fundamental question of how Welsh ethnic distinctiveness was maintained in a context of increasing economic integration with England.97 In important respects, this work built on trends established in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods discussed in Chapter  12, in large part because scholars who commenced work in the field in that period remained active, notably E.  A.  Lewis and William Rees. Lewis extended his work on commerce into the sixteenth century and Caroline Skeel turned to economic history in the 1920s in articles on the early modern Welsh woollen industry and cattle trade.98 In 1924 William Rees published an innovative study, largely based on the holdings of the Public Record Office, of the social and economic history of the marcher lordships of south Wales in the long fourteenth century, which originated in a doctoral thesis at the LSE supervised by Hubert Hall while Rees was a school teacher in London (1912–20).99 In his preface, Rees explained that the work sought, first, to make a contribution to the comparative study of ‘social evolution’, following the lead of Seebohm and Vinogradoff, and, second, to address issues of contemporary relevance, since ‘a knowledge of Welsh customs and institutions . . . must be the basis for a true understanding of modern Wales, its past history, its present problems and aspirations’—an assumption he shared with E.  A.  Lewis.100 The book falls into three parts, the longest of which, ‘The Economic Organization of the 95  Koot, ‘Historians and Economists’. 96  J. F. Rees and W. Rees, ‘A Select Bibliography’; A Bibliography, ed. Jenkins and Rees, 152–61; Ben Bowen Thomas, Braslun o Hanes Economaidd Cymru, v. 97  Ben Bowen Thomas, Braslun o Hanes Economaidd Cymru, 177. 98  The Welsh Port Books (1550–1603), ed. Lewis; Skeel, ‘The Welsh Woollen Industry in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’; Skeel, ‘The Welsh Woollen Industry in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’; Skeel, ‘The Cattle Trade’. 99  William Rees, South Wales and the March; Ralph Griffiths, ‘William Rees’. 100  William Rees, South Wales and the March, [vii]. Cf. The Survey of the Honour of Denbigh, ed. Vinogradoff and Morgan, [v]; Edward Arthur Lewis, The Mediæval Boroughs of Snowdonia, 275–6.

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CONSOLIDATION AND REAPPRAISAL, 1920–60  357 Lordships of Wales’, comprising over half the text, is framed by an introduction on ‘The Economic Aspects of the Conquest of Wales’ and a final section, ‘Pestilence and War’, assessing the impact of the Black Death and the significance of the rising of Owain Glyndŵr. Central to the study is its attention to the tenants and other social groups who worked on the land and owed rents and services to their landlords, as well as the ways in which their obligations differed according to whether they lived in manorial Englishries or ‘tribal’ Welshries, ethnic divisions Rees clearly delineated on a pioneering map that won plaudits from Marc Bloch.101 But his focus on economic developments also led Rees to play down the significance of conquest and English royal policy as well as political resistance to these by arguing that ‘the dissolution of Welsh society is not found in the conscious action of English monarchs but in the economic changes of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries’ and that ‘[t]he burden, which Wales endeavoured to throw off in the Glyndwr [sic] revolt, was predominantly an economic one’.102 In addition, from the 1930s T. Jones Pierce demonstrated the development of money rents and indigenous urban development under the princes of Gwynedd in studies that paralleled contemporaneous work on the medieval English economy; he also analysed rural settlement, society, and land tenure, especially in north-­west Wales, continuing on from the work of Seebohm and other scholars discussed in Chapter 12, and explored how these evolved from the medieval to early modern periods.103 The other main focus of Welsh social and economic history in this period was the making of modern industrial society. Individual aspects of the subject had been examined since the nineteenth century in histories of particular settlements or industries, but it was only from the 1920s that more wide-­ranging studies appeared.104 A.  H.  Dodd’s The Industrial Revolution in North Wales (1933) was the most substantial early example, providing an extensively researched and engagingly written account of the period c.1760–c.1840 in just over 400 pages.105 Although Dodd acknowledged a ‘general indebtedness’ to the inspiration and encouragement of R. H. Tawney, whom he had first met as a schoolboy attending the latter’s adult education classes in Wrexham, his choice of period and themes, concern with quantification, and dismissal of romanticized notions of an idyllic pre-­industrial past suggest closer affinities with the Cambridge economic his­tor­ ian John  H.  Clapham, the first volume of whose Economic History of Modern

101  William Rees, South Wales and the March, 28–31, 142–83, 199–240. Map: [William Rees], South Wales and the Border, with accompanying handbook; Marc Bloch, Review of Rees, South Wales and the Border. 102  William Rees, South Wales and the March, 1, 25–6, 35–9, 269–73, quotations at 41. 103 Jones Pierce, Medieval Welsh Society; Dyer, ‘Modern Perspectives on Medieval Welsh Towns’, 163–4. 104  J. F. Rees and W. Rees, ‘A Select Bibliography’, 324–6; O’Leary, ‘Town and Nation’. 105 Dodd, The Industrial Revolution; Neil Evans, ‘Beyond 1282’, 229–30.

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358  WRITING WELSH HISTORY Britain he had read.106 (Clapham took his geographical remit seriously, including considerable coverage of Wales and setting it in a comparative context, pointing out that almost as much was spent on poor relief there as in ‘[t]he single county of Sussex’.)107 Dodd’s aim was twofold: ‘to throw new light on a neglected aspect of the Industrial Revolution’ and ‘to sketch a chapter . . . in the history of modern Wales’.108 The story he told was one of extensive economic change that lost momentum at a critical juncture through the failure to develop a suitable railway system in north Wales, which ‘helped to nip the Industrial Revolution in the bud’, together with a declining coal industry that increasingly paled in significance to that of south Wales, where, by contrast, industrialization advanced ‘by leaps and bounds’ from the onset of ‘the Railway Age’.109 Dodd took pains, moreover, to delineate social aspects of economic change, above all in a final chapter on ‘The Labouring Poor’ that examined the living conditions of agricultural and industrial workers (including women and children), emigration to the United States, and rural and urban revolt, including Chartism.110 The chapter also suggests that Dodd adapted the example of Clapham to his own purposes. Thus, while he ­covered some of the same ground as the latter’s final chapter on ‘Life and Labour in Industrial Britain’, Dodd devoted more space to Chartism and other popular movements, reflecting his greater readiness to address social issues. He also differed from Clapham by paying attention to religion and culture, notably the impact of Methodism, a movement that writers of Welsh history since the late nineteenth century had coupled with the industrial revolution as crucial to the making of modern Wales. Indeed, Dodd ended his book by declaring that ­chapels, with their ‘stern individualist creed’, helped to endow the worker with ‘self-­respect and confidence’ and offered him ‘an escape . . . into realms of spiritual fellowship and ecstatic song—almost his only taste of culture, and his earliest training in self-­ government’—a conclusion that tempered Tawney’s Christian socialist ­critique of capitalism with O.  M.  Edwards’s celebration of the Nonconformist gwerin.111 And, like other Welsh economic historians, Dodd pointed up the ­tensions between the maintenance of ethnic distinctiveness and movements towards economic convergence: whereas Methodism ‘intensified national feeling’, economic improvement served to foster ‘assimilation with England’.112 The 106  Tawney: Dodd, The Industrial Revolution, xii; Neil Evans, ‘Beyond 1282’, 226, 229. Cf. Clapham, An Economic History of Britain; Dodd, The Industrial Revolution, 27–30, 111, n. 3, 298, 342; Koot, ‘Historians and Economists’, 649–52. 107 Clapham, An Economic History of Britain, 364–5. 108 Dodd, The Industrial Revolution, xi. 109  Quotations: Dodd, The Industrial Revolution, 119, 202–3. 110 Dodd, The Industrial Revolution, 335–416; see also 264–5, and for a later study of one of these themes, Dodd, The Character of the Early Welsh Emigration. 111 Dodd, The Industrial Revolution, 31, 34–5, 415–16, quotation at 416. Cf. Kirby, ‘R. H. Tawney and Christian Social Teaching’. 112 Dodd, The Industrial Revolution, 31, and see also 197, 264, 351. Economic links with England were also emphasized by Caroline Skeel in the articles cited in n. 98 above.

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CONSOLIDATION AND REAPPRAISAL, 1920–60  359 Welsh-­speaking chapel culture of the workers was also highlighted by A. H. John (1915–78), an economic historian at the LSE, in his 1950 book on the industrial history of south Wales that was based on a Cambridge thesis supervised by Clapham; here again, economic history brought aspects of social history within its purview, be it the respectable clothing of prosperous industrial workers or the squalid living conditions of industrial towns.113 Syntheses of Welsh history published from the 1920s to 1950s varied in their receptiveness to specialized studies of economic and social developments. In part, this reflected the particular interests of individual authors. For example, in the early 1930s those studies made little impact on J.  E.  Lloyd’s book on Owain Glyndŵr and concise history of Wales, which remained anchored in assumptions held by their author since the Edwardian period, whereas they were indispensable to the substantial, thematically wide-­ranging, and well-­illustrated synthesis of medieval Welsh history by Robert Richards (1884–1954), written while a tutor in economics and political science at Coleg Harlech, the adult education college established in 1927 to provide one-­year residential courses for working-­class students.114 David Williams similarly integrated social and economic developments in his 1950 History of Modern Wales, including Chartism, the subject of his first major monograph a decade earlier.115 However, others went further in following through the implications of J. Frederick Rees’s assertion in 1933 that ‘the Welsh people and their achievements have somehow evaded the historians’ through a failure to give sufficient attention to ‘the economic aspect’.116 These comments came in a preface to a survey of the economic history of south Wales from prehistory to the industrial revolution, originating as an eisteddfod essay, by D. J. Davies (1893–1956), a former coalminer in Wales and north America, convert to the principles of economic co-­ operation after studying in Denmark, and prominent member of Plaid Cymru who had recently obtained a PhD in economics at Aberystwyth.117 Davies insisted on the need ‘to take account . . . of the conditions enjoyed by the workers in industry, on whose labour and skill the whole structure of economic society is built up’, a theme pursued especially in chapters on ‘The Workers and their Working Conditions’ and ‘Industry and Welfare’.118 In addition, his long chronological span served to highlight the significance of industrialization as a turning-­point of unprecedented magnitude: thus he devoted almost half his coverage to the 113 A. H. John, The Industrial Development of South Wales; Minchinton, ‘A. H. John: A Memoir’. 114 Pryce, Lloyd, 86–9; Ralph Griffiths, ‘William Rees’, 212; Robert Richards, Cymru’r Oesau Canol; Evan David Jones, ‘Richards, Robert’; Stead, Coleg Harlech, 35–9, 52–4, 78. 115  David Williams, A History of Modern Wales, esp. chs. 6, 12–15; David Williams, John Frost. 116  J. F. Rees, ‘Foreword’, viii. Rees, the son of a Pembrokeshire dock worker, was an economic his­ tor­ian and principal of the university college in Cardiff (1929–49): Evan David Jones, ‘Rees, Sir James Frederick’. 117  Ceinwen Hannah Thomas, ‘Davies, David James’; D. J. Davies, Towards Welsh Freedom. 118 D. J. Davies, The Economic History of South Wales, xi, 78–83, 144–56.

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360  WRITING WELSH HISTORY e­ ighteenth century when industrial development began to accelerate rapidly, and observed that the modern industrial south Wales that emerged after 1800 witnessed ‘stranger and more sudden changes in the lives and environment of the population than all the millennia which had gone before’.119 By contrast, ‘there were few changes from the thirteenth century till the eve of the Industrial Revolution’.120 However, the most wide-­ranging synthesis of Welsh history written from an economic perspective in this period was Ben Bowen Thomas’s 1941 Braslun o Hanes Economaidd Cymru (‘Outline of the Economic History of Wales’).121 Like Robert Richards and D.  J.  Davies, Thomas was a university-­educated son of a working-­class family; he was also one of the socialists among the founder members of Plaid Genedlaethol Cymru (the Welsh Nationalist Party) established in 1925 and closely involved with adult education, being the first warden of Coleg Harlech (1927–40; honorary warden 1940–6).122 His book is particularly significant on account of its ambitious scope and analytical cohesion. Apparently aimed primarily at adults in extramural classes, it situates its account of economic history against a backdrop of political, social, and cultural developments, making it the most original general history of Wales since that of O. M. Edwards forty years earlier.123 Like  D.  J.  Davies, Thomas adopted a long chronological framework, extending from the origins of farming in the Neolithic revolution to the latest phase of the industrial revolution in the mining and export of coal that constituted ‘the chief feature of Wales’s economic life from 1800 to 1914’, while also highlighting the momentous changes resulting from industrialization by devoting almost half of his coverage to the long nineteenth century.124 The work focused on the common people more consistently, imagined them more capaciously, and tied them more firmly to economic realities than Edwards had in his romantic celebration of the gwerin, as Thomas sought ‘to write the history of how men in Wales earned a living and the means by which the necessary economic arrangements developed’, a materialist approach that combined a focus on the production of wealth with a keen awareness of class relations.125 One result was to offer fresh perspectives on familiar turning-­points. Since it opened the way to the further development of towns and trade and the tightening of landlords’ powers over

119 D. J. Davies, The Economic History of South Wales, xi. 120 D. J. Davies, The Economic History of South Wales, 47. 121  Ben Bowen Thomas, Braslun. 122 Stead, Coleg Harlech, 37–9, 44, 52–4, 83–4, 88–9; D. Hywel Davies, The Welsh Nationalist Party, 38, 53, 99. 123  His interest in Welsh economic history went back to at least the early 1930s, to judge by Ben Bowen Thomas, Review of Dodd, The Industrial Revolution. 124  Ben Bowen Thomas, Braslun, 114, 183 (quotation), 213. The assertion (at 4) that the Neolithic marked ‘the greatest revolution . . . in the economic history of the country’ appears to echo V. Gordon Childe’s concept of a ‘Neolithic revolution’ comparable in magnitude to the industrial revolution: cf. Childe, Man Makes Himself, 14–16, 74–117; Greene, ‘V. Gordon Childe’. 125  Ben Bowen Thomas, Braslun, v.

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CONSOLIDATION AND REAPPRAISAL, 1920–60  361 their tenants, ‘the fall of Llywelyn [in 1282] is an important event not only in the political history of Wales but also in the course of its economic history’.126 More pointedly, Thomas depicted Owain Glyndŵr, Welsh hero par excellence, as a self-­ interested landlord committed to maintaining the economic status quo: although supported by ‘many who suffered from the consequences of the new economic powers . . . if he had succeeded in establishing an independent principality it is entirely certain that he would not have hindered these influences from operating in Welsh society. Was he not, as a “baron”, part of the system, with [his court of] Sycharth sucking in the energies of many labourers?’127 Furthermore, the poets patronized by the later medieval Welsh gentry were complicit in this seignorial exploitation. Taken with the ensuing declaration that ‘the century from 1350 to 1450 is the most important in the development of landlordism in Wales’, Thomas offered a sharply contrasting perspective on cultural history from the author, literary critic, and Plaid Genedlaethol Cymru leader Saunders Lewis’s celebration almost a decade earlier of ‘The Great Century’ (Y Ganrif Fawr) from 1435 to 1535 as the crowning achievement of medieval Welsh poetry, sustained by a numerous gentry class of ‘independent and free small capitalists’ who ‘were the backbone of our civilization’.128 Thomas’s sympathetic treatment of the Rebecca rioters, Chartists, and trades unions, as well as his dismay at the way modern industry and commerce had tied ‘the life of the country’s inhabitants to the whims of global markets’, likewise reflects his determination to assess the impact of economic developments on working people.129 A similar perspective informed his understanding of national revival as a reaction to increasingly close economic ties with England expressed above all in a keen sense of social responsibility among the working class, and comprising not only the democratic and educational advances emphasized by O. M. Edwards but also improvements in the standard of living, including Lloyd George’s introduction of old age pensions and national insurance, as well as the co-­operative endeavour and class conflict that propelled early twentieth-­century south Wales to ‘the forefront of the social struggle’.130 Although his book seems to have had little immediate impact, a consequence probably of its publication during the Second World War (and in a language spoken by a decreasing minority of the people of Wales), Thomas thus anticipated what would become a major strand in Welsh history writing from the 1970s, as we shall see in the next chapter.

126  Ben Bowen Thomas, Braslun, 36. 127  Ben Bowen Thomas, Braslun, 58–9. 128  Ben Bowen Thomas, Braslun, 60, 61 (quotation); Saunders Lewis, Braslun o Hanes Llenyddiaeth Gymraeg, ch. 7, quotations at 116. 129  Ben Bowen Thomas, Braslun, v (quotation), 146–53, 175–7, 199–203. 130  Ben Bowen Thomas, Braslun, 152–3, 176–8, 198–207, quotation at 202.

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14 A New Beginning? Writing Welsh History, 1960–2020

Since the 1960s the writing of Welsh history has flourished as never before.1 In important respects this marked a decisive break with the past, a new beginning that sought to recover large swathes of Welsh history excluded or marginalized in previous accounts. Distant origins have lost their final vestiges of explanatory power, while the modern period has attracted unprecedented attention. Rather than adapting frameworks inherited from medieval and early modern historiography, scholarly writing on Welsh history has been increasingly situated in an international world of professionalized history and sought to address issues of concern to other fields of historical scholarship. Admittedly, what has with some justification been widely hailed as a ‘renaissance’ or ‘revival’ of Welsh history from the 1960s2 has served not only to cement the field’s academic credentials but also to render it more amorphous and elusive, as the centuries-­long assumption that its subject was the Welsh people, conceived of as a homogeneous ethnic group, has given way to an emphasis on plurality and diversity. Of course, recent developments in Welsh history are by no means unique in prompting questions about how far an increasing diversity of approaches can be accommodated within the paradigm of national history before shattering it beyond repair.3 So far, though, these changes have given fresh impetus to the history of Wales both as a field of scholarly enquiry and as a subject of public interest. In particular, by further eroding the dominance originally accorded to the state and high politics, the rapidly accelerating diversification of academic history has helped to confer new salience on the history of Wales as a small stateless nation, be it as a distinctive microcosm of broader developments or by fostering and legitimating new frameworks that have finally laid to rest the notion that the history of Wales after 1282 was an attenuated anticlimax to what had come before. 1 Assessments of this writing include Pryce, ‘The Modern Historiography of Medieval Wales’; Philip Jenkins, A History of Modern Wales, 414–27; Neil Evans, ‘Writing the Social History of Modern Wales’; O’Leary, ‘Masculine Histories’; Johnes, ‘For Class and Nation’; Dai Smith, In the Frame, 131–59; Miskell, ‘Introduction: Industrial Wales’. Further assessments are referred to in nn. 52, 62, 104 below. 2  E.g. Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘Reading History: Modern Wales’, 49; Ieuan Gwynedd Jones and Glanmor Williams, ‘The Castor and Pollux of Welsh History’, 12–13. 3  This is particularly true with respect to ‘non-­spatial Others’ of the nation, defined as ethnicity, class, religion, and gender: Berger and Lorenz, ‘Introduction’, 2. For comparable issues in recent Scottish historiography see Roger A. Mason, ‘The State of Scottish History’, esp. 172–3.

Writing Welsh History: From the Early Middle Ages to the Twenty-­First Century. Huw Pryce, Oxford University Press. © Huw Pryce 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198746034.003.0015

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A NEW BEGINNING? WRITING WELSH HISTORY, 1960–2020  363 Over the decades since 1960 Wales has undergone major changes that have both reinforced and destabilized its distinctiveness. On the one hand, it has achieved greater institutional visibility than at any time since the Edwardian conquest thanks to devolution—initially administrative, symbolized by the creation in 1964 of the Welsh Office headed by a Secretary of State for Wales with a seat in the cabinet at Westminster, then also political, following a 1997 referendum in favour of establishing the National Assembly for Wales in Cardiff, which subsequently gained primary legislative and tax-­raising powers, an expansion of competence reflected in its renaming as Senedd Cymru/Welsh Parliament in 2020.4 On the other hand, extensive social, economic, and cultural changes have raised questions about how Wales is to be understood and prompted reappraisals of its history. For example, an important context for the rise of labour history was rapid deindustrialization, ultimately resulting from structural weaknesses in the Welsh economy since the late nineteenth century, that rendered images of modern Wales as a land of heavy industry increasingly anachronistic from the 1970s with the final demise of coal-­mining, reinvented as heritage with the opening of Big Pit in Blaenavon as a museum in 1983, as well as the contraction of steel production and the decline of other manufacturing. These developments were further accelerated by the recession of the early 1980s and ensuing economic restructuring.5 The following discussion proceeds in two stages. I begin by outlining some of the main changes in the nature and scope of Welsh history writing over the past six decades before turning to assess the impact of those changes on broader understandings of the history of Wales.

Changing Approaches The sharp increase in the amount of Welsh history writing since the 1960s of course belongs to a much bigger story of the growth in the numbers of academic historians resulting from university expansion in western Europe, north America, and elsewhere facilitated in turn by post-­war economic recovery. But it gained much of its impetus from specific initiatives within Wales. In particular, the University of Wales Board of Celtic Studies established The Welsh History Review (1960–), the first journal specifically dedicated to the history of Wales, and the monograph series ‘Studies in Welsh History’ (1977–); it also commissioned a third edition of the Bibliography of the History of Wales (1989) that was far more

4 Johnes, Wales since 1939, 217–19, 223–5, 293–9, 412–17, 437–8; Kevin Williams, ‘The Dragon Finds a Tongue’; Senedd Cymru/Welsh Parliament, ‘History of Devolution’. 5  R.  Merfyn Jones, ‘Beyond Identity?’; Martin and Wiliam, ‘Debating Nationhood’; Gooberman, From Depression to Devolution, 51–61, 85–93, 113–22, 151–5, 217–21.

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364  WRITING WELSH HISTORY comprehensive than its predecessors.6 Other new journals, single-­volume surveys, and book series, including the Oxford History of Wales, likewise sought to cater for and promote an interest in Welsh history both within and beyond the academy.7 However, conditions for the development of academic Welsh history, like other fields in the humanities, have been increasingly less propitious since the 1980s, as budget cuts halted university expansion and led to institutional re­organ­iza­tion including the incorporation of the departments of Welsh history at Bangor, Aberystwyth, and Cardiff into larger departments of history by the mid-­1990s and the abolition in 2007 of the Board of Celtic Studies, a crucial body for collaborative research and publication in the field for over eighty years.8 If institutional support for the academic study of the Welsh past has diminished, public interest in the history of Wales has continued, providing a crucial stimulus to producing, and ensuring a demand for, writing on the subject. One symptom of this was the further growth of county, local, and thematically-­based history societies, many of which publish journals; another the concerted efforts from the 1980s to promote the teaching of Welsh history in schools that led to the commissioning of books and a television series for primary school children and the inclusion of the subject in Welsh schools in the National Curriculum introduced by the 1988 Education Reform Act.9 The publication of works on Welsh history in the Welsh language likewise speaks to a determination to cater for the public (together with school and university students studying through the medium of Welsh) as well as to sustain what had become a minority language in a bilingual country. These popularizing, educational, and patriotic agendas were epitomized by the series Cof Cenedl (‘The Nation’s Memory’), an annual collections of essays in Welsh launched in 1986 and published for over two decades whose editor Geraint H. Jenkins aimed ‘to provide an opportunity for the his­tor­ ians of Wales to publish the fruit of their research in a readable and attractive manner for everyone with an interest in the history of their country’, in the hope that it would ‘deepen an awareness of their heritage among the Welsh-­speaking Welsh’.10 Significantly, Jenkins had been urged to establish the series by the former Plaid Cymru leader Gwynfor Evans, who had published a survey of Welsh history in Welsh in 1971, reflecting the wider readiness since the late twentieth century of some academic historians of Wales to adopt nationalist perspectives.11 The needs and interests of readers outside the academy have been crucial, then, in 6 Ieuan Gwynedd Jones and Glanmor Williams, ‘The Castor and Pollux of Welsh History’; Kenneth O. Morgan, ‘Welsh History Review—Fifty Years On’. Philip Henry Jones, A Bibliography, 3rd edn., lists almost 22,000 items. 7  See e.g. Charles-­Edwards and Evans, ‘Introduction’, 1–2. 8  University of Wales/Prifysgol Cymru, ‘Developments—Merger and Reconfiguration’. 9  Jeremy and Maddox, ‘A Seamless Web’; Gareth Elwyn Jones, ‘History in the National Curriculum’. 10  Cof Cenedl, ed. Jenkins, quotation from vol. [1], [x]. 11  Cof Cenedl, vol. [1], ed. Jenkins, [x]. Gwynfor Evans, Aros Mae (translated as Land of My Fathers). For comment on the ideological perspectives of academic historians of Wales see Okey, ‘Plausible Perspectives’; Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘ “Taphy-­land Historians” ’, 24–6.

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A NEW BEGINNING? WRITING WELSH HISTORY, 1960–2020  365 ensuring the continued writing of Welsh history in Welsh, be they short popular books, substantial general syntheses, or works of original scholarship, many of which have been translated into English, notable examples being John Davies’s substantial 1990 Hanes Cymru, translated as A History of Wales (1993), the only Welsh-­ language book commissioned by its publisher Penguin, and a multi-­ volume series on the social history of the Welsh language, published sim­ul­tan­ eous­ly in Welsh and English versions.12 In addition, the proliferation of broadcast media, including the Welsh-­language Sianel Pedwar Cymru (S4C) established in 1982, and dedicated English-­language radio stations and television channels for Wales, have provided new platforms to make the history of Wales accessible to a broader audience, including the television series The Dragon Has Two Tongues (1985) and The Story of Wales (2012), the former supplemented by educational materials and some 130 discussion groups, the latter one of several series accompanied by a book.13 Public engagement with the Welsh past has also been promoted by heritage organizations and museums, including the historic environment service Cadw, established in 1985, which has produced illustrated guidebooks for the monuments in its care, and National Museum Wales’s open-­air museum at St Fagans, recently redeveloped as a National Museum of History.14 The dramatic expansion in the thematic scope of Welsh history writing, especially the turn towards social history, has been closely linked to a shift in chrono­ logic­al priorities. Since the Elizabethan period histories of Wales had included depictions of medieval Welsh society based mainly on the Welsh laws and Gerald of Wales, supplemented, especially from the later nineteenth century onwards, by fiscal surveys and other documents produced after the Edwardian conquest, while the growth of economic history in the first half of the twentieth century contributed to the study of society in early modern and modern Wales. However, in line with broader historiographical trends, after 1960 the study of society became much more central than previously to understandings of the Welsh past. In an important appraisal of, and agenda for, Welsh history writing in 1970 Glanmor Williams (1920–2005), who played a highly influential role in the development of the field from the 1960s onwards, acutely observed that the ‘intensified interest in social history’ since the mid-­twentieth century served to legitimate ‘the validity of Welsh history as a field of study’, since ‘[i]ts connecting-­thread is not political or constitutional history but social development’, with a particular focus

12  John Davies, Hanes Cymru, translated as A History of Wales (see also O’Leary, ‘Obituary: John Davies (1938–2015)’); Hanes Cymdeithasol yr Iaith Gymraeg/The Social History of the Welsh Language, gen. ed. Jenkins. 13  Colin Thomas, ‘When Was Welsh History?’; Blandford and McElroy, ‘Memory, Television and the Making of the BBC’s The Story of Wales’; Gower, The Story of Wales. Books accompanying television series by R. Merfyn Jones, Dai Smith, and Martin Johnes are noticed below, nn. 61, 75, 79. 14  Rhiannon Mason, Museums, Nations, Identities, 148–51, 161–70, 173–5; Dafydd, ‘A Museum by the People for the People?’.

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366  WRITING WELSH HISTORY on ‘that complex of features . . . which made the Welsh different’.15 Accordingly the ‘general approach’ of social history ‘is one which is particularly well adapted to the task of reconstructing the Welsh past and it ought probably to be the forte of Welsh historians’.16 This approach thus served to refute the view that Welsh history was ‘an inferior kind of history’, as Williams had been told after graduating at Aberystwyth in 1942, a view the article repeatedly sought to dispel.17 These ideas also informed Williams’s call for a rebalancing of the chronological framework of Welsh history by abandoning ‘the traditional division between medieval and modern Wales, with the watershed at the Act of Union of 1536’, and replacing it with ‘one between Wales before the Industrial Revolution and Wales since’. Fundamental to his argument that the latter period, beginning around 1760, should therefore receive equal attention and resources to the former was an assessment of the period’s significance in the social history of Wales, namely that ‘the communities in which most Welsh people now live have been created by and since the Industrial Revolution’, that the availability of far more evidence than for previous periods allowed ‘the detailed analysis of social change’, and that ‘the Industrial Revolution is one of the two or three great basic changes in the nature of human existence’ (a view ultimately indebted to the archaeologist V. Gordon Childe’s concept of a Neolithic revolution analogous to the industrial revolution).18 Although as general editor of the Oxford History of Wales Williams allocated only two of the six projected volumes to the period from 1780 onwards,19 his call for an adjustment of chronological emphasis signalled an important shift in privolume histories of Wales published by orities exemplified by the single-­ Gwyn A. Williams and John Davies in 1985 and 1990 respectively.20 These works also reflected a greater readiness from the early 1980s to investigate developments since the 1880s,21 a tendency taken further in subsequent accounts extending coverage down to the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries. At the other end of the chronological spectrum, recent decades have witnessed the final demise of the emphasis on distant ancestry that was a central tenet of Welsh historical thinking since the early Middle Ages; instead, in line with scholarship on ethnogenesis elsewhere in medieval Europe, historians have located the 15  Glanmor Williams, ‘Local and National History’, quotations at 55, 57. 16  Glanmor Williams, ‘Local and National History’, 59. 17  Jeremy and Maddox, ‘A Seamless Web’, 118; Glanmor Williams, ‘Local and National History’, 55, 56, 61, 63. 18  Glanmor Williams, ‘Local and National History’, 61. See also Glanmor Williams, History in a Modern University, 20; Neil Evans, ‘Casting Nets’, 87–8; O’Leary, ‘Masculine Histories’, 275–6; Chapter 13, n. 124. 19  The volume covering 1780–1880 has not appeared. 20 Gwyn  A.  Williams, When Was Wales?; John Davies, Hanes Cymru. Similarly almost half of Geraint H. Jenkins, A Concise History of Wales, covers the period after 1776. By contrast, almost 60 per cent of The Tempus History of Wales, ed. Morgan, covers the period down to 1536, and less than 30 per cent the period after c.1750. 21  O’Leary, ‘Masculine Histories’, 254.

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A NEW BEGINNING? WRITING WELSH HISTORY, 1960–2020  367 origins of the Welsh in the post-­Roman period.22 True, general his­tor­ies of Wales have continued to open with (usually brief) accounts of prehistoric inhabitants, based on the findings of archaeology.23 However, in most cases this seems to signal deference to a long-­established convention rather than a conviction that prehistory was an essential constituent of Welsh history in the way it had been earlier in the twentieth century for J. E. Lloyd and H. J. Fleure, who sought to identify continuities in physical and also cultural characteristics from the earliest peoples settled in Wales to the Welsh of the present day. Coverage of prehistory in works of Welsh history since the 1960s has been predicated, then, not on racial or genetic continuity, but rather on the twin assumption that the fundamental framework for the history of Wales is geographical or territorial and therefore that all inhabitants within that space are its subjects. This shift away from an emphasis on ethnic origins is clear in John Davies’s 1990 volume, whose opening chapter on pre-­Roman ‘beginnings’ maintains that ‘[t]o begin with “history” and to ignore “prehistory” is to lose sight of the basic fact that, when the people of Wales first appeared on the stage of history, almost every development of importance had taken place’, from farming and metalworking to fine art and literature; they also had most of ‘the technical knowledge which would maintain the economic foundations of society, at least for the following eighteen centuries’.24 Davies’s treatment of ­prehistory is therefore at one with the significance he attached to the industrial revolution; as for Glanmor Williams, each marked an important stage in the social development of Wales that was sustained by economic developments resulting from technological innovations. The turn towards social history was the most prominent instance of the participation of historians of Wales in a much wider diversification of academic historiography also seen in the rise of cultural history, the history of women and gender, black and minority ethnic history, and global history, all of which sought to recover aspects of the past ignored or marginalized in previous accounts. True, long-­established modes of enquiry have persisted alongside, and in some im­port­ ant respects underpinned, these new approaches, not least, for medievalists especially, the opening up of fresh perspectives and avenues of enquiry though the editing and analysis of sources.25 Historical geographers, landscape historians, and archaeologists have continued the study of medieval settlement and also applied such approaches to later periods in work exploring human interaction with landscapes and other aspects of the natural environment, including a survey 22  Philip Henry Jones, A Bibliography, 3rd edn., 9, 37 (‘Sub-­Roman Britain and the Emergence of Wales’); Geraint  H.  Jenkins, Concise History of Wales, 31–3; Charles-­ Edwards, Wales (Glanmor Williams originally intended this volume in the Oxford History of Wales to begin in prehistory: personal information). 23 E.g. Gwyn  A.  Williams, When Was Wales?, 1–11; The Tempus History of Wales, ed. Morgan, 11–37; Geraint H. Jenkins, Concise History, 1–21. 24  John Davies, History of Wales (2007), 1–24, quotations at 2. 25  For examples see Chapters 2–4.

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368  WRITING WELSH HISTORY of south Wales from prehistory to the twentieth century in a series edited by the pioneering landscape historian W.  G.  Hoskins.26 Moreover, the treatment of social history has been uneven. Wendy Davies has highlighted ‘the absence of a social history of early medieval Wales’ that addresses issues central to the historiography of other European societies, though she tried to remedy this in a regional study of south-­east Wales, based on a major reappraisal of charters, as well as in  a general synthesis which opens with chapters on ‘Land, Landscape and Environment’, ‘Economy’, and ‘Social Ties and Strata’ before turning to political and religious developments, the aspects of the period emphasized in previous accounts.27 Nor did the opening of new horizons signal the end of political history; rather, they helped to reinvigorate it. For one thing, they broadened understandings of the nature of power in pre-­modern Wales, as scholars built on studies earlier in the twentieth century to investigate the fiscal resources of the thirteenth-­ century princes of Gwynedd, the forms of lordship in the March of Wales and its impact on peasant society, or the social networks and cultural patronage sustaining the authority and status of the late medieval and early modern gentry.28 The expansion of the franchise in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has led to the political history of modern Wales, like that of Britain and other democracies more generally, being situated in its wider social context.29 A turning-­point in this regard was a 1963 volume by Kenneth  O.  Morgan which demonstrated that there was a distinctive Welsh dimension to modern British political history by offering the first detailed analysis of the transformation resulting from the ascendancy of Welsh political Nonconformity and nationalism, together with ‘the growing awareness of opinion outside Wales of the distinctive needs of the Principality’, in the half-­century after the 1868 general election.30 Both Morgan and other historians have pursued this theme further over subsequent decades, mainly in relation to the organization and electoral fortunes of individual pol­it­ ical parties and Welsh devolution.31 Much has also been written on Welsh religious history, again set in its social context. Glanmor Williams broke new ground in two substantial volumes, the

26  See e.g. Glanville R. J. Jones, ‘The Tribal System in Wales’; Landscape and Settlement, ed. Edwards; Stephen Hughes, Copperopolis; David Jenkins, The Agricultural Community, esp. ch. 2 (and discussion in Trefor M. Owen, ‘Community Studies in Wales’, 48–51); Linnard, Welsh Woods; Moelwyn Williams, The Making of the South Wales Landscape. 27  Wendy Davies, ‘Looking Backwards to the Early Medieval Past’, quotation at 197; Wendy Davies, An Early Welsh Microcosm; Wendy Davies, Wales in the Early Middle Ages. See also Sims-­Williams, The Book of Llandaf. 28  E.g. Stephenson, The Governance of Gwynedd, part 2; J. Beverley Smith, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, esp. chs. 5–6; R. R. Davies, Lordship and Society; A. D. Carr, The Gentry of North Wales; J. Gwynfor Jones, The Welsh Gentry. 29  Neil Evans, ‘Writing the Social History of Modern Wales’, 481. 30 Kenneth O. Morgan, Wales in British Politics; cited here from 1991 paperback edn., quotation at vii. See also Kenneth O. Morgan, ‘Wales in British Politics: Forty Years On’. 31 E.g. The Labour Party in Wales, ed. Tanner et al.; Andrew Edwards, Labour’s Crisis.

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A NEW BEGINNING? WRITING WELSH HISTORY, 1960–2020  369 first on the later medieval Church in Wales (1962), which he undertook in order to provide background and context for the second, the first full study of the Reformation in Wales, whose appearance in 1997 marked the culmination of over half a century’s work by Williams on the subject.32 The post-­Reformation period has also continued to attract attention, with, for example, studies of individual religious denominations as well as of churches’ responses to modern industrial society.33 One important new theme has been the transformation of Wales from a Christian to a largely post-­Christian society in the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries. To take a notable example, R. Tudur Jones (1921–98), professor of church history and later also principal of the Independents’ training college in Bangor, and author of histories of the English Congregationalists and Welsh Independents published in the 1960s and 1970s, argued in his Ffydd ac Argyfwng Cenedl (1981–2; translated as Faith and the Crisis of a Nation) that the decline of organized religion in the Wales of his own day had its roots in multiple changes from 1890 to 1914, the most damaging of which was the uncoupling of Nonconformity from the Welsh language and culture that for centuries had transmitted a dis­ tinct­ive Welsh Christian tradition.34 This decline is also a central concern of a 1999 study of Christianity in twentieth-­century Wales by D. Densil Morgan, and its significance ‘as one of the most important changes in Welsh society over the past century’ has been emphasized in general accounts of Welsh history.35 The rest of this section focuses on three new developments in Welsh history writing since 1960 that are particularly pertinent to understandings of Wales and the Welsh discussed in the subsequent section of the chapter: modern labour history, women’s and gender history, and studies of immigration and ethnic diversity. First, the growth of modern Welsh labour history in the 1970s and 1980s epit­ om­ized the rethinking of the history of Wales as primarily social history in which the period from the industrial revolution onwards was of equal significance to everything before and thrust working people (or rather, for the most part, working men) centre stage for the first time as actors in their own right.36 Moreover, for a significant number of historians, this required the framing of modern Welsh history as above all the story of the working class, especially in the most heavily industrialized counties of Glamorgan and Monmouth that contained over 60 per 32  Glanmor Williams, The Welsh Church; Glanmor Williams, Wales and the Reformation. See also Glanmor Williams, Welsh Reformation Essays, and discussion in Olson and Pryce, ‘The Reluctant Medievalist?’; Gareth Elwyn Jones, ‘The Tudor Historian’, 64–70, 75–8. 33  E.g. R. Tudur Jones, Hanes Annibynwyr Cymru; White, The Welsh Methodist Society; E. T. Davies, Religion in the Industrial Revolution; Ieuan Gwynedd Jones, Communities, chs. 1–5; Pope, Building Jerusalem. 34  R.  Tudur Jones, Ffydd ac Argyfwng Cenedl; R.  Tudur Jones, Faith and the Crisis of a Nation; appraisal in D. Densil Morgan, ‘Y Gair a’r Genedl’. 35  D. Densil Morgan, The Span of the Cross; John Davies, A History of Wales (2007), 486–90, 551–2, 621–2, 706–7, quotation at 487; Johnes, Wales since 1939, 160–70, 360–2. 36 For the subordination of economic to social questions in Welsh labour history see Miskell, ‘Introduction: Industrial Wales’, 2–3.

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370  WRITING WELSH HISTORY cent of the Welsh population by 1911.37 The turn towards modern industrial Wales marked a decisive break with the dominance of the pre-­modern, and especially the medieval, period in Welsh historiography which resulted from the fusion of external example—in the form of the social, and especially labour, history that had developed elsewhere since the 1960s—and particular circumstances in Wales. As we have seen, the rebalancing of historiographical emphasis was advocated and influentially supported by Glanmor Williams, a specialist in the history of the later medieval Church and, above all, the Reformation but also, crucially, a native of Dowlais with first-­hand experience of industrial south Wales during the severe economic depression of the inter-­war period—a combination of the professional and the personal that informed a broad vision of Welsh history in which, he believed, the working-­class society he came from formed an essential part.38 The rise of labour history resulted above all from the emergence of a new generation of politically engaged historians incited by the example of a burgeoning field of radical and labour history to recover the history of the working-­class communities of south Wales threatened by increasing deindustrialization, an endeavour facilitated both by the favourable funding climate in an era of university expansion and by close ties with the labour movement.39 These new currents gained further momentum with the foundation in 1970–1 of Llafur: The Society for the Study of Welsh Labour History, which brought university historians together with trades unions (Dai Francis, Communist leader of the National Union of Mineworkers in south Wales, played an instrumental part in the society’s adoption of the Welsh name ‘Llafur’) and others in local communities to promote work in the field, including through its journal, Llafur, a major platform over the past half-­century for writing on modern Wales.40 The society thus gave a further impetus to the democratic character of Welsh history writing as an enterprise extending beyond the academy evidenced earlier in the twentieth century in eisteddfod competitions and works aimed at the educated public, including students in adult education; indeed, the journal’s editors declared in 2000 that ‘Llafur stands in the tradition of the adult education movement’.41 Some of its members also contributed to efforts in the early 1980s to breathe new life into the teaching of Welsh history in schools.42

37  Philip Jenkins, A History of Modern Wales, 236–7. 38  Glanmor Williams, A Life, 1–15, 112; Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘Sir Glanmor Williams’, 1­–3, 7–8; Neil Evans, ‘Casting Nets’, 87–91. An early example of Williams’s encouragement of working-­class history is his editing of Merthyr Politics, comprising lectures by four other historians to the Merthyr branch of the Workers’ Educational Association in 1964–5. 39  For the wider context see Richard Price, ‘Histories of Labour’; Gentry, ‘Ruskin, Radicalism and Raphael Samuel’. 40  Hopkin, ‘Llafur’; Neil Evans, ‘Labouring Men’. 41  Neil Evans and Mari Williams, ‘Editorial’, 4. 42  Jeremy and Maddox, ‘A Seamless Web’, 120–1.

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A NEW BEGINNING? WRITING WELSH HISTORY, 1960–2020  371 Articles published in Llafur belonged to a wider constellation of work that devoted unprecedented attention to the working class in nineteenth-and twentieth-­century Wales. The radical ambitions of the early years of the new Welsh labour history achieved substantial realization in The Fed (1980), an officially commissioned history of the South Wales Miners’ Federation in the twentieth century by Hywel Francis (1946–2021), son of Dai Francis, and Dai Smith (1945–), who sought to fuse institutional and social history, presenting the miners’ union as ‘intimately associated with its society’ and declaring that ‘[t]he making of, and struggle for, trade union organisation . . . is for us one of the great creative acts of working people’.43 This innovative intervention in social history was also emblematic in its conception as an act of scholarly retrieval, demonstrated by references to a wealth of written and oral sources deriving from the union and its members, which was intended in part to furnish those communities with a usable past that could provide inspiration for the future.44 The book thus gave narrative shape to efforts over the previous decade, in which both authors had participated, to rescue and preserve sources relating to the history of the south Wales coalfield that led to the establishment of the South Wales Miners’ Library at Swansea in 1973.45 The wide range of monographs and articles published on the social history of modern Wales since the appearance of The Fed in 1980 merit far fuller treatment than is feasible here.46 Suffice it to say that writing on that history has become increasingly diverse, as staple preoccupations of labour history such as class conflict and political organization have been complemented by studies of topics such as popular culture, sport, and health in working-­class communities—a broadening of focus acknowledged by the change of Llafur’s subtitle to The Welsh People’s History Society in 2001. In significant measure, of course, this simply mirrored an increasing diversification of the historian’s agenda elsewhere, which, like labour history earlier, stemmed from the desire to recover histories of social groups that had hitherto been largely hidden. However, new approaches were adapted selectively (for example, postmodernism had little impact), reflecting the particular character and interests of the fairly small number of historians working on Wales.47 Nor has work focused solely on working-­class communities: the impact of aristocratic and other landowners both on rural society and on

43  Francis and Smith, The Fed, 2nd edn., quotation at xvi. 44  See the foreword to Francis and Smith, The Fed, 2nd edn., xxii–xxiii. 45  Hopkin, ‘Llafur’, 133. 46  For assessments see O’Leary, ‘Masculine Histories’; Neil Evans, ‘Labouring Men’. 47  Croll, ‘ “People’s Remembrancers” ’ (and response in Neil Evans and Mari Williams, ‘Editorial’); Croll, ‘Holding onto History’. Both Foucault’s understanding of power and the ‘linguistic turn’ are used to analyse urban society in Merthyr Tydfil in Croll, Civilizing the Urban, esp. 7–10, 64–7, 91–2, 217–19.

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372  WRITING WELSH HISTORY industrial and urban development has also been assessed, while the urban middle class has started to receive attention.48 Turning, second, to writing on women and gender, it should be stressed that until the late twentieth century historians of Wales shared a fundamental characteristic with most of their predecessors since the Middle Ages: they were nearly all men. As Kenneth O. Morgan has observed, the ‘extraordinary renaissance’ of Welsh historical writing since the 1960s ‘was the product of a remarkably small group of scholars’ who were ‘overwhelmingly male’.49 This began to change as female historians took the lead in opening up the history of women and gender in Wales from the 1980s, some two decades after this approach began to flourish among historians of many other European societies.50 Work on the pre-­modern period has focused primarily on the legal status and political agency of women, especially in the Middle Ages, although the socio-­economic status and occupations of urban women, female literacy and religious devotion, and witchcraft have also attracted attention. Some of these studies appeared in a 2000 essay collection on women and gender in the early modern period that opened with a pioneering survey of women in late medieval Wales and broke new ground with a study of masculinity as evidenced by male riotous behaviour.51 More has been published on the modern period, initially in reaction to the labour history written from the 1970s, whose focus on male industrial workers tended to ‘take male culture and identity . . . as read, the norm against which other identities are judged’.52 Although, as elsewhere in Europe and in the United States, work on the history of women in modern Wales was stimulated by the intersection of ‘history from below’ and the women’s movement, and although women accounted for 40 per cent of the Welsh workforce by 1980, feminist historians closely associated with Llafur who endeavoured to include women in Welsh labour history initially faced an uphill task.53 Deirdre Beddoe starkly summed up the magnitude of the challenge in a lecture to the society in 1980: ‘The history of women in Wales and therefore the history of people in Wales has yet to be written.’54 True, she acknowledged that a start had been made.55 However, modern Welsh women’s history only began to make a significant impact a decade later, a 48  E.g. David W. Howell, Land and People in Nineteenth-­Century Wales; John Davies, Cardiff and the Marquesses of Bute; Cragoe, An Anglican Aristocracy; Miskell, ‘Intelligent Town’, esp. ch. 6. 49  Kenneth O. Morgan, ‘Consensus and Conflict’, 18. 50  Cf. Nelson, ‘Family, Gender and Sexuality’; Hufton, ‘Women, Gender and the Fin de Siècle’. 51 Johns, Gender, Nation and Conquest, with overview of previous studies at 6–8; Suggett, A History of Magic; Llinos Beverley Smith, ‘Towards a History of Women’; Michael Roberts, ‘ “More Prone to be Idle and Riotous” ’. 52  O’Leary, ‘Masculine Histories’, 255. For a recent survey of work in the field see Ward, ‘Towards a Welsh People’s History’. 53  Ward, ‘Towards a Welsh People’s History’, 255–6; Gwyn A. Williams, ‘Women Workers in Wales’, esp. 539. Cf. Shoemaker and Vincent, ‘Introduction’, 1. 54  Deirdre Beddoe, ‘Towards a Welsh Women’s History’, quotation at 32. 55  Deirdre Beddoe, ‘Towards a Welsh Women’s History’, 37.

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A NEW BEGINNING? WRITING WELSH HISTORY, 1960–2020  373 change heralded by the appearance of Angela V. John’s 1991 edited collection Our Mothers’ Land—an ironic nod to the ‘Land of My Fathers’ celebrated in the Welsh national anthem—that served as both manifesto and showcase for its subject.56 The momentum generated was acknowledged by John in her introduction to the reissue of the volume in 2011, which noted a significant increase in books and other publications in the field over the intervening two decades, among them Beddoe’s history of women in twentieth-­century Wales, while emphasizing that much still needed to be done, including, crucially, the integration of this work into ‘the understanding and writing of all Welsh history’.57 John has also re­covered the lives of Welsh middle-­class women and assessed their role in the struggle for women’s equality.58 Some historians of modern Wales have also begun to explore masculinity, especially in working-­class communities, as part of a broader use of gender as a category of analysis focused on the construction of masculine and feminine identities, an approach that has complicated understandings of society predicated on a division between the private family sphere and the public spheres of work and politics.59 The same is true of recent studies of key episodes of rural protest and industrial militancy from a gendered perspective as well as of LGBT history.60 While the implications of work on women and gender in Wales have so far had limited impact on general syntheses, tentative steps in that direction are evident at least in writing on modern Welsh history.61 The third development I wish to highlight is a burgeoning scholarship since the 1970s on immigrants and ethnic minorities in Wales, which has likewise challenged established understandings of the Welsh past by recovering the his­ tor­ies of groups marginalized in previous accounts.62 One important step in this direction, albeit with precedents ranging from early modern chorographical writing to the work of William Rees, was Rees Davies’s treatment of Norman, English, and other foreign settlers, together with the marcher lordships they established, as integral to—and constituting an important English dimension

56  Our Mothers’ Land, ed. John. See also W. Gareth Evans, Education and Female Emancipation. 57 Angela  V.  John, ‘Two Decades of Development’, quotation at 8; Deirdre Beddoe, Out of the Shadows. See also Philip Jenkins, A History of Modern Wales, 429. 58  Guest and John, Lady Charlotte Guest (first edition 1989); Angela  V.  John, Turning the Tide; Angela V. John, Rocking the Boat. 59  O’Leary, ‘Masculine Histories’, 262–74. 60 Rhian E. Jones, Petticoat Heroes; Bruley, The Women and Men of 1926; Leeworthy, A Little Gay History of Wales. 61  Chris Williams, Capitalism, Community and Conflict, 62–9; R. Merfyn Jones, Cymru 2000, ch. 9; Russell Davies, Hope and Heartbreak, 107–8, 263–323; Johnes, Wales since 1939, index entries for ‘gender’, ‘masculinity’, ‘women’. 62  For the modern period a key text, focusing on ‘visible ethnic minorities’, is A Tolerant Nation? Ethnic Diversity in Wales, ed. Williams et al.; revised as A Tolerant Nation? Revisiting Ethnic Diversity in a Devolved Wales, ed. Williams et al., quotation at 8. See also the wide-­ranging historiographical survey in Neil Evans, ‘How White Was My Valley?’.

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374  WRITING WELSH HISTORY of—medieval Welsh history (I return to Davies at the end of this chapter).63 By contrast, historians have written little about the English in modern Wales.64 Instead, they have focused on less numerous but more visible ethnic minorities, often by mapping the particularities of ethnic diversity in individual migrant communities.65 In addition, this work has analysed the relations of minority ethnic communities with the majority population to puncture complacent assumptions of Welsh tolerance of outsiders, most sharply in studies of violent attacks on mi­nor­ ities, notably anti-­Irish riots and the 1919 race riots in Cardiff.66

Locating Wales and The Welsh Studies of immigrants and ethnic minorities reflect two broader tendencies in Welsh historical writing over recent decades, namely a greater readiness than previously both to question what is meant by Wales and Welshness and to situate the history of Wales in the context of other histories. In 1970 Glanmor Williams treated the first issue as essentially unproblematic, asserting that ‘the soundest justification for Welsh history . . . is the simple historical fact that the Welsh have a history of their own which, despite its close links with the history of other European peoples and especially with that of the other British peoples, is in marked respects different’.67 However, as that statement makes clear, he also implied that the historiography of Wales was inherently comparative and belonged to a larger whole, not only making a distinctive contribution to the history of Britain and Europe and deriving its legitimacy from conforming with ‘the criteria normally applied to any other historical writing published in the British Isles’ but exemplifying ‘the claims of the little communities’ within a ‘common humanity’.68 This does not mean, of course, that Williams adhered to a static or essentialist view of Wales or Welsh identity: he was perfectly aware of the country’s considerable regional diversity (indeed, his 1970 article was partly an apologia for local history) and of attempts to construct notions of Welshness in the past. Moreover, 63 R.  R.  Davies, Conquest, esp. chs. 4, 10, 14–16. Cf. R.  R.  Davies, Lordship and Society, 6: ‘The March was of secondary interest in the evolution of an independent Welsh political tradition and it has thereby occupied a back-­seat in Welsh historiography.’ 64  Johnes, ‘For Class and Nation’, 1262. For sociological studies of the English in Wales see Day et al., ‘ “There’s One Shop You Don’t Go Into” ’, and references given there. 65 E.g. A Tolerant Nation? Ethnic Diversity in Wales, ed. Williams et al.; O’Leary, Immigration and Integration; Parry-­Jones, The Jews of Wales. 66  Miskell, ‘Reassessing the Anti-­Irish Riot’; Neil Evans, ‘The South Wales Race Riots of 1919’; Neil Evans, ‘Through the Prism of Ethnic Violence’. Brooks, Hanes Cymry, esp. ch. 2, has recently addressed a further aspect of these relations by exploring the history of ethnic minorities among the Welsh-­ speaking Welsh. 67  Glanmor Williams, ‘Local and National History’, 57. 68  Glanmor Williams, ‘Local and National History’, 59–60, 62, 65–6, quotations at 63, 66.

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A NEW BEGINNING? WRITING WELSH HISTORY, 1960–2020  375 he and other scholars had previously explored ideas of Welsh nationality over the previous two decades.69 Nevertheless, interest in these issues has intensified since the 1980s, influenced by a growing body of scholarship on nationalism and national identity, as historians of Wales have shown a much greater readiness than their predecessors to treat national identity as a historical phenomenon requiring investigation rather than a given that can be taken for granted. Thus particular aspects of how the Welsh have imagined themselves or been imagined by others have come under scrutiny, as studies cited in previous chapters demonstrate, including the entangled notions of British and Welsh identity in different periods, negative portrayals of the Britons and Welsh and their land by outsiders from Bede to the 1847 Blue Books, the rhetorical mobilization of ‘Wales’ and ‘the Welsh’ by thirteenth-­century princes and nineteenth-­century Nonconformist Liberals, and legendary and romanticized constructions of Welsh history. Similarly, general accounts of Welsh history have included introductory chapters explicitly addressing concepts of identity.70 The unprecedented attention devoted to modern Welsh history has also prompted debate about ideas of Wales and the Welsh. While there has been general agreement that Wales was transformed from the late eighteenth century onwards as a result of industrialization, opinions have differed regarding the impact of this transformation on the continuity of a deeply-­rooted sense of Welsh nationhood. Insistent though he was on the significance of the industrial revolution as a crucial turning-­point, Glanmor Williams assumed that the history of Wales still constituted a unified field in which modern developments belonged to a much longer story of a distinctive society, a view compatible with the long-­ established preoccupation of Welsh historians with the making of the Welsh ­people. Kenneth  O.  Morgan has also emphasized the continuity and unity of Welsh history and his work on the modern period has deployed Welsh nationality as a central organizing principle.71 Thus a prominent theme of his first book was the growth of political nationalism within Liberalism in late nineteenth-­century Wales and its subsequent decline, while, as its title suggests, his 1981 Rebirth of a Nation: Wales 1880–1980, interpreted the century it covered as an era of national revival fostered by increasing democratization, one of a raft of major changes in

69  Glanmor Williams, ‘The Idea of Nationality in Wales’; Gwyn  A.  Williams, ‘Twf Hanesyddol y Syniad o Genedl’; Kenneth O. Morgan, Wales in British Politics; see also Kenneth O. Morgan ‘Welsh Nationalism’. Glanmor Williams later returned to these issues in his Religion, Language and Nationality in Wales, chs. 1, 6. 70 Kenneth O. Morgan, Rebirth of a Nation, ch. 1 (‘Wales in the Eighties’); R. R. Davies, Conquest, ch. 1 (‘Wales and the Welsh’); Philip Jenkins, A History of Modern Wales, ch. 1 (‘Introductory: Which Wales?’); Charles-­Edwards, Wales, ch. 1 (‘Introduction: The Lands of the Britons’). See also Geraint H. Jenkins, A Concise History of Wales, ch. 8 (‘Whither Wales?’). 71 An approach criticized in Daunton, Review of Morgan, Rebirth of a Nation. Okey, ‘Plausible Perspectives’, 33, identifies inconsistencies in Morgan’s treatment of Welsh nationality and attributes these to ‘the Lib-­Lab historiography he has inherited and enriched’.

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376  WRITING WELSH HISTORY the structure of political and social authority that Morgan also highlighted.72 True, rather like some of the patriotically-­minded Welsh Liberals of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods whose significance he did so much to elucidate, Morgan portrayed the history of Wales from the late nineteenth century in progressionist terms, declaring that from the 1880s ‘colonized, “neglected”, impoverished Wales took its first conscious steps out of prehistory and the fantasies of the “twilight” towards a new era of modernity and fulfilment’.73 Yet the metaphor of ‘rebirth’ implied the existence of a sense of Welsh nationhood in the past and that modernity marked the latest stage in an evolutionary journey rather than a rad­ic­ al­ly new departure. By contrast, one of the leading protagonists of Welsh labour history mounted an impassioned and provocative challenge to such assumptions. For Dai Smith, recovering the history of a modern south Wales shaped by mining and the col­ lect­ive action of coalfield communities was more than a matter of tacking on a further chapter to previous narratives of Welsh history; instead it demanded a radical rethinking of that history which involved exposing the inadequacy of interpretations advanced in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-­century era of Liberal dominance. Introducing his 1980 edited collection A People and a Proletariat, Smith argued that the making of a modern Welsh people was in­ex­tric­ ably linked to the making of a working class and dismissed a raft of works of the 1880s to 1920s, including O. M. Edwards’s Wales, as ‘Gwaliakitsch . . . that was out to lobotomise all the Welsh on behalf of some of them’.74 Smith renewed and extended his assault on what he considered a dangerously disabling his­torio­ graph­ic­al legacy in Wales! Wales? (1984), a companion to a television series he presented, in which he again criticized the quest for a chimerical unity in the past that shunned Wales’s diversity, particularly in the modern period, a view encapsulated in his often-­quoted truism that ‘Wales is a singular noun but a plural experience’.75 For Smith, the society of the south Wales coalfield, which reached its zenith between about 1880 and 1920, differed radically from any Wales that had existed previously.76 Yet the contrast with Morgan was essentially one of emphasis, since in insisting that this society represented a singular form of Welsh modernity, one of whose key hallmarks was a predominantly English-­speaking culture, Smith nevertheless claimed a place for it within the longer arc of a history of Wales, stressing that it was no ‘mere equivalent of English history’.77 For Smith, then, the industrial working class of south Wales supplanted the Nonconformist,

72 Kenneth O. Morgan, Wales in British Politics; Kenneth O. Morgan, Rebirth of Nation, esp. ch. 14. 73 Kenneth O. Morgan, Rebirth of a Nation, 25. 74  David Smith, ‘Introduction’, quotation at 8. 75  Dai Smith, Wales! Wales?, quotation at 1; revised as Dai Smith, Wales: A Question for History. 76 See also Dai Smith, Aneurin Bevan and the World of South Wales, and the review by Chris Williams, ‘Searching for a New South Wales’. 77  David Smith, ‘Introduction’, 12.

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A NEW BEGINNING? WRITING WELSH HISTORY, 1960–2020  377 rural, and predominantly Welsh-­speaking gwerin lauded by O. M. Edwards as the true culmination of Welsh history; moreover, whereas Edwards had portrayed the gwerin as the successors of the medieval princes, Smith’s working class—not unlike the congregations memorialized by early historians of Welsh Nonconformity— constituted a new Welsh people, an entirely modern creation lacking any moorings in a distant past. However, other historians of modern Wales have followed Glanmor Williams and viewed Welsh history as an evolutionary process, in which the trans­form­ ations of modernity were part of a much longer story. In his 1985 When Was Wales? Gwyn  A.  Williams (1925–95) resembled Dai Smith in emphasizing the radical changes resulting from industrialization and stressing the need to rectify the marginalization of the English-­speaking Welsh, but was readier to situate modern developments within conventional chronological parameters beginning in prehistory and also to situate Welsh history firmly in the context of Britain.78 As we have seen, John Davies’s 1990 Hanes Cymru (‘History of Wales’) also begins in prehistory and makes the industrial revolution a crucial turning point, while Martin Johnes, though devoting over half of his 2019 survey Wales: England’s Colony? to the period since the eighteenth century, opens with the Roman conquest of Britain and insists that ‘[t]here is a link between the Wales of today and the Wales of early medieval times and even before. It was from those people that the idea of Wales evolved . . . To take them out of the story makes no sense.’79 As its title indicates, Gwyn  A.  Williams’s When Was Wales? interpreted the whole of Welsh history in constructivist terms that privileged its contingent and malleable character.80 Thus, while the book left its readers in no doubt that Wales had been fundamentally transformed thanks to industrial and demographic growth from the late eighteenth century onwards, he set this in the context of a succession of crises since the early Middle Ages that resulted in the Welsh having continually to reinvent themselves, ‘usually against the odds, usually within a British context’, a long-­term perspective no doubt facilitated by having taught Welsh history from the Palaeolithic to the present while a lecturer at Aberystwyth (1954–63) and by the shift in the focus of his own research from the Middle Ages to the modern period.81 Paradoxically, then, Williams located the continuity of Welsh history precisely in its ruptures, offering an interpretation that emphasized

78 Geraint H. Jenkins, The People’s Historian; Dai Smith, ‘Obituary: Gwyn A. Williams 1925–1995’; ‘Bibliography of Gwyn A. Williams’ Work’. Dai Smith, Wales! Wales?, 40–4, provided only a brief survey of pre-­modern Welsh history by way of contrast to modern developments. 79 Johnes, Wales: England’s Colony?, 175. 80 Gwyn A. Williams, When Was Wales?. The book grew out of a BBC radio lecture that sold out within a fortnight: Gwyn  A.  Williams, When Was Wales? (1979); Geraint  H.  Jenkins, The People’s Historian, 11. 81  Quotation: Gwyn A. Williams, When Was Wales?, 304. An early instance of this chronological range is Gwyn  A.  Williams, ‘Twf Hanesyddol y Syniad o Genedl’, a penetrating survey of changing ideas of nationhood in Wales from the post-­Roman period onwards.

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378  WRITING WELSH HISTORY the dynamic interaction of human actors and their environment, an emphasis announced by echoing a much-­quoted dictum of Marx: ‘Men and women make their own history. But they do not make it in circumstances chosen by them.’82 Yet he concluded his book by expressing doubts whether the Welsh could recreate themselves once again following what he regarded as the seismic changes represented by the rejection of devolution in the 1979 referendum and the election of a Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher, assisted by a substantial increase in the Conservative vote in Wales, which had therefore ‘finally disappeared into Britain’. Together with the ensuing acceleration of the pace of economic restructuring, these changes posed nothing less than an existential threat to ‘my people . . . who have for a millennium and a half lived . . . as a Welsh people’ but were ‘now nothing but a naked people under an acid rain’.83 If Dai Smith was the elegist for a late nineteenth- and early twentieth-­century ‘world of South Wales’, Williams appeared to sound the death knell of ‘Wales’ tout court. By contrast, Williams’s dynamic of persistent national renewal inspired John Davies to conclude his book by declaring that the best was still to come, while Martin Johnes has subversively echoed Williams by stressing that ‘the choice of in­di­vid­ uals . . . in conditions not of their own making’ had ensured the survival of Wales into the early twenty-­first century and observed that a widespread sense of Britishness among people in Wales had continued alongside their espousal of a stronger identification with Welshness in the first decade of devolution.84 If, in line with wider historiographical developments, a growing diversity of approaches has led to interpretations of Welsh history becoming more fragmented, that history has also become more clearly delineated as a result of efforts to set it on a wider stage extending beyond Wales.85 Studies of particular themes and topics, ranging from medieval kinship to aspects of twentieth-­century industrial society, have mostly compared Wales with other parts of Britain, Ireland, or the European continent.86 Some of these, moreover, have been undertaken by scholars specializing in fields other than Welsh history. There has also been a greater readiness than previously to introduce a comparative dimension in works dealing principally with Wales, exemplified by Rees Davies’s insistence in his 82 Gwyn A. Williams, When Was Wales?, 5. Cf. Reid, ‘Inciting Readings’, esp. 548–9. 83 Gwyn A. Williams, When Was Wales?, 295–306, quotations at 297, 305. 84  John Davies, Hanes Cymru, 661–2 (and cf. John Davies, A History of Wales (2007), 710–11); Johnes, Wales since 1939, 426–33, 445 (quotation). See also Johnes, ‘Wales, History and Britishness’, with comment on Williams at 605–6; Johnes, Wales: England’s Colony?, 167, 170–1, 173; and the arguments for a plural and hybrid postcolonial (or post-­national) Wales in Chris Williams, ‘Problematizing Wales’, esp. 11–17. 85 Glanmor Williams, ‘Local and National History’, 59–60; R.  J.  W.  Evans, ‘Nonconformity and Nation’, 231. 86  Book-­length studies include Charles-­Edwards, Early Irish and Welsh Kinship; Given, State and Society in Medieval Europe; Nice, Sacred History and National Identity; Brooks, Why Wales Never Was; Ward, Unemployment and the State in Britain. For a rare foray beyond Europe, extending comparisons to China, see Hill, ‘Ethnic Administration’.

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A NEW BEGINNING? WRITING WELSH HISTORY, 1960–2020  379 major synthesis of the period 1063–1415 that the history of Wales should be seen ‘as part of the histories of western European societies’, a view reflected in comparisons not only with Ireland and Scotland but with continental Europe.87 The author of three major books on medieval Wales, Davies (1938–2005) is particularly significant in this connection as he also took a leading role from the 1980s in promoting the adoption of Britain and Ireland as a historiographical framework that both complemented and complicated the islands’ individual national his­tor­ies.88 As such he belonged to a wider body of medieval historians who sought to challenge Anglocentric narratives in academic historiography.89 He may also be seen as making a critical intervention with respect to the ‘British history’ advocated by J.  G.  A.  Pocock.90 Focusing on ‘the formation of British political communities’, Pocock attached less significance to Wales, which lost any vestiges of statehood in 1282, than to England, Ireland, and Scotland; likewise other his­tor­ic­al studies adopting a ‘four nations’ approach, while providing a framework that recognized Wales, have unsurprisingly also exposed its precarious and sub­or­din­ate status within that larger whole.91 In advocating ‘British history’ as ‘a text . . . on which we can conduct exercises in comparative history and thereby sharpen the focus of our questions and interpretations’ as a corrective, or at least a supplement, to national historiographies, Davies adopted a broader view of political and social development that opened a space to counteract such marginalization.92 This in turn points up how Rees Davies’s comparative approach to the medieval history of Britain and Ireland exemplified an abiding commitment to his­torio­ graph­ic­al reflection given early expression in two articles on Marc Bloch.93 More specifically, its roots may be traced to his work on the March of Wales, a constellation of lordships that resisted neat containment in national boundaries and whose diversity necessarily made its study ‘an exercise in comparative history’.94 As well as emphasizing the lordships’ significance as enclaves of English power and settlement in medieval Wales, Davies rejected the tendency of previous historians to

87 R. R. Davies, Conquest, viii. 88 See esp. The British Isles, 1100–1500, ed. Davies; R.  R.  Davies, Domination and Conquest; R. R. Davies, The First English Empire; and more generally Pryce, ‘Robert Rees Davies’. 89 Frame, The Political Development of the British Isles 1100–1400. See also Britain and Ireland 900–1300, ed. Smith; Carpenter, The Struggle for Mastery. 90  R. R. Davies, ‘In Praise of British History’, offers an apologia predicated on the contention (at 9) that ‘British history has not in truth arrived’. 91  Pocock, ‘British History: A Plea for a New Subject’; Pocock, ‘The Limits and Divisions of British History’; Robbins, ‘Forever a Footnote?’, 218–22, 235–6; Bourke, ‘Pocock and the Presuppositions of the New British History’, quotation at 748. See also Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘Clio and Wales’, 132–3; Kidd, ‘Wales, the Enlightenment and the New British History’; O’Leary, ‘ “A Vertiginous Sense of Impending Loss” ’. 92  R. R. Davies, ‘In Praise of British History’, 18. 93  R.  Rees Davies, ‘Marc Bloch’ (1965); R.  R.  Davies, ‘Marc Bloch’ (1967). Note also the his­torio­ graph­ ic­ al (and geographical) focus of Davies’s inaugural lectures at Aberystwyth and Oxford: R. R. Davies, Historical Perception; Rees Davies, The Matter of Britain. 94 R. R. Davies, Lordship and Society, 9.

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380  WRITING WELSH HISTORY regard the March’s fragmentary and diverse nature and the extensive powers of its lords as a problematic anomaly for royal authority resolved only by the Acts of Union. Instead, he drew on ‘the studies of continental historians’ who ‘have directed attention away from “the state” to “lordship and what belonged to lordship” and have shown that the gulf between royal lordship and noble lordship was, generally speaking, far less significant than the English experience might suggest’.95 In his last, posthumously published, book Davies sought to show that lordship provided a compelling framework for a comparative study of Britain and Ireland that offered an alternative to analyses focused on English royal expansion.96 True, he readily acknowledged the strength of the English kingdom and its impact on its insular neighbours. From the 1990s, influenced by recent scholarship emphasizing the remarkable durability of the kingdom as a state over the previous millennium, Davies argued that the kingdom’s deep-­rooted elision of England with Britain explained why the widespread domination achieved by Edward I resulted in an English, rather than a looser-­limbed British, empire, with long-­term repercussions, an argument articulated most fully in his 2000 volume The First English Empire.97 Nevertheless he portrayed English expansion, not simply in terms of the state’s domination of the periphery, but rather as a wider process driven to a significant extent by English settlement and involving interaction with the ­peoples and political cultures of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. By the same token, he argued for the significance of the ‘Celtic’ peoples, including the Welsh, for a broader understanding of medieval society. ‘There is no reason after all why the fastnesses of Wales or Ireland should be any less interesting or rewarding prima facie than the high valleys of Catalonia or the Alps—or Montaillou—in the study of the varieties of medieval social organization and consciousness.’98 This observation illustrates how Davies’s comparative approach, precisely because it sought to transcend the ‘established historiographical traditions’ of individual nations,99 offered a means of enhancing the visibility and significance of Welsh history, although of course there was much more to it than that. But any explanation of Davies’s preoccupation with Britain, in particular, needs to recognize that it was in no small part a highly personal matter informed by a sense of dual identity: of being primarily Welsh but also inescapably British.100 His Welshness was rooted in the rural, Nonconformist, Welsh-­speaking society of his

95 R.  R.  Davies, Lordship and Society, 1–10, 65–6, 249–73, quotation at 66. Cf. R.  Rees Davies, ‘Marc Bloch’ (1965), 74, which urged Welsh historians ‘to raise their sights beyond the historiography of England and to try and imitate some of the methods of French historians’. 96 R. R. Davies, Lords and Lordship. 97 R. R. Davies, The First English Empire, 3, 26–30, 49–53, 195–6; R. R. Davies, ‘The English State and the “Celtic” Peoples’. Cf. Corrigan and Sayer, The Great Arch; James Campbell, The Anglo-­Saxon State. 98  Rees Davies, ‘Kinsmen, Neighbours and Communities’, 174. 99  R. R. Davies, ‘In Praise of British History’, 18. 100 R.  R.  Davies, Beth Yw’r Ots Gennyf I am—Brydain?, 2–3. Cf. R.  R.  Davies, ‘On Being Welsh’, 30, 36, 40.

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A NEW BEGINNING? WRITING WELSH HISTORY, 1960–2020  381 upbringing, a background he compared to that of O. M. Edwards, which lived on in his imagination in an adult life divided between England and Wales.101 He was keenly aware that the Welsh were intrinsically linked to Britain through their origins and subsequent history and convinced that their future therefore depended on ensuring political arrangements in the island that would counter the danger of homogenization posed by a politically dominant England. The First English Empire thus articulated what for Davies were highly contemporary concerns, which he expressed more explicitly and passionately in a public lecture he gave in Welsh in Aberystwyth that touched on the constitutional significance of Scottish and Welsh devolution following the 1997 referenda.102 His emphasis on the importance of collective or social memory focused on heroes, not least national heroes such as Owain Glyndŵr, and his warnings of the existential threat posed to nations that lost their memories spoke to similar concerns and were similarly framed both in academic terms, as in a passing allusion to Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire (‘sites of memory’), and with reference to the prospects for Welsh nationhood.103 If Davies focused on the experiences and mentalities of people in a medieval Wales subjected to domination and conquest and sought to highlight its significance in a comparative perspective, in the early twenty-­first century increasing attention has been given to Welsh participation in and attitudes to the modern British Empire, part of a wider transnational turn that has also embraced aspects of industrial history.104 The exposure of Welsh involvement in slavery, including the Pembrokeshire-­born Sir Thomas Picton’s ‘brutally authoritarian’ rule as military governor of the slave colony of Trinidad and the profits ploughed into the Penrhyn estate near Bangor in north Wales from its Jamaican slave plantations, is an important aspect also recognized by the Welsh Government in a recent audit of statues and street names in Wales commemorating beneficiaries of the slave trade.105 While this writing belongs to a much wider historiographical reckoning in Britain and Ireland with the legacies of empire, several scholars have given it a distinctive inflection, be it by exploring racially charged images of imperial subjects overseas in Welsh writing or by conceptualizing, and problematizing, the Welsh as both colonizer and colonized, exemplifying a ‘subaltern imperialism’ in

101  R. R. Davies, ‘On Being Welsh’, 30–1. 102 R.  R.  Davies, Beth Yw’r Ots Gennyf I am—Brydain? (reference to devolution at 2); Broun, ‘A Second England?’, 84–6. 103 R. R. Davies, The Revolt, 338–42; Rees Davies, Owain Glyn Dŵr, esp. 12; R. R. Davies, ‘On Being Welsh’, 35–6. 104 The Atlantic, imperial, and continental European dimensions of this turn are assessed in O’Leary, ‘Power and Modernity’. For a recent study situating an important aspect of Welsh industrial history in a transnational perspective see Evans and Miskell, Swansea Copper. 105  Aled Jones and Bill Jones, ‘The Welsh World and the British Empire’; Chris Evans, Slave Wales, quotation at 96; Wales and the British Overseas Empire, ed. Bowen; Llywodraeth Cymru/Welsh Government, The Slave Trade.

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382  WRITING WELSH HISTORY which Wales ‘was a beneficiary of empire while . . . its language and culture were “othered” by metropolitans’—a perspective adopted in recent studies of the complex interactions between the Welsh and indigenous peoples, notably with respect to Calvinistic Methodist missionaries in north-­east India and the Welsh colony in the Argentinian province of Chubut, Patagonia.106 Work on the latter belongs to a growing number of studies of the Welsh as an ethnic minority, especially in the Americas and Australia, notable for their focus on the challenges of maintaining the Welsh language and other markers of ethnic identity faced by such diaspora communities as they were increasingly assimilated into their host societies.107 The adoption of global perspectives is but the latest instance of how Welsh history writing since the 1960s has taken new directions informed by wider his­ torio­graph­ic­al developments that have led to much more diverse and inclusive accounts of the Welsh past. They also exemplify the unprecedented shift of focus in this period to the making of a modern Welsh people, albeit one that coexisted with a continuing interest in the medieval and early modern history of Wales (as well as in its Roman and prehistoric past, now largely the preserve of archaeologists). Yet work on empire and diasporas also illustrates how this thematic, chrono­ logic­al, and geographical expansion has offered new opportunities to address the perennial question of what made the Welsh who they were and are, a question to which I return in the Conclusion.

106  O’Leary, ‘Revolution, Culture and Industry’, 260 (quotation); Aled Jones, ‘Culture, “Race” and the Missionary Public’; Andrew  J.  May, Welsh Missionaries and British Imperialism; Aaron, ‘Slaughter and Salvation’; Lucy Taylor, ‘Global Perspectives on Welsh Patagonia’; O’Leary, ‘Power and Modernity’, 48–52. 107  Glyn Williams, The Desert and the Dream; William D. Jones, Wales in America; Aled Jones and Bill Jones, Welsh Reflections; Ronald L. Lewis, Welsh Americans; Robert Llewellyn Tyler, The Welsh in an Australian Gold Town; O’Leary, ‘Power and Modernity’, 42–4.

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Conclusion Since the early Middle Ages Welsh history writing has interpreted the past in order to explain who the Welsh are—above all as a people but also, for example, as adherents of particular religious beliefs and bodies, as members of social classes, and in terms of gender. In the broadest terms, then, much of the writing considered in this book exemplifies the widespread use of history to articulate and justify a sense of identity.1 More specifically, much of it may be characterized as national history inasmuch as it shares some important features in common with history writing about other nations, notably its emphasis on glorious origins in classical and biblical antiquity (Brutus and Gomer) and past golden ages (under ancient and early medieval kings of Britain, followed by Welsh rulers down to 1282), as well as an ancient language that had maintained its purity and an exceptional religious legacy in the form of a proto-­Protestant Christianity. As we have seen, many works of Welsh history have affirmed a sense of Welsh nationality, including, since the late nineteenth century, some explicitly intended as contributions to nation-­building, none more so than the writings of O.  M.  Edwards, though mostly, as in his case, without advocating independence for Wales as a nation-­state.2 True, understandings of the nation have differed. While many ­historical writers from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century privileged the Welsh as a distinct ethnic group defined by descent, there has been an increasing readiness over the last century or so to adopt a more inclusive and diverse idea of the nation as comprising all the inhabitants of the territorial (and latterly, civic) space of Wales irrespective of their ethnicity. Similar issues have arisen with respect to other national histories of course. More unusually, however, the claims of Welsh history to be considered national history are complicated by ambiguities regarding the nation’s location that go to the heart of Welsh historical thinking down to the twentieth century, and continue to resonate today, namely a sense of belonging to a lost homeland of Britain (on which more below). This British dimension of Welsh history writing highlights how the Middle Ages mattered for what came afterwards, demonstrating the importance of

1  Cf. Coss, ‘Presentism’, esp. 228; Bloxham, Why History?, 13, 191, 350–5. 2  For Plaid Cymru’s use of Welsh history see e.g. D.  Hywel Davies, The Welsh Nationalist Party, 80–2; and for a suggestion that an ‘awareness that Wales has had a continuous history’ contributed to creating support for Welsh devolution, Kenneth  O.  Morgan, ‘Welsh History Review—Fifty Years On’, 167. Writing Welsh History: From the Early Middle Ages to the Twenty-­First Century. Huw Pryce, Oxford University Press. © Huw Pryce 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198746034.003.0016

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384  WRITING WELSH HISTORY con­tinu­ities in historical culture emphasized by other recent scholarship.3 This went beyond the enduring power of medieval master narratives of Welsh history, which I consider shortly, to include the fundamental assumptions these articulated, especially that the Welsh were an ancient people and that their history ended in its fullest sense with the death of Llywelyn and the Edwardian conquest. Viewed from that broader perspective, the extent to which historians accepted the Trojan origins outlined in the Historia Brittonum and elaborated by Geoffrey of Monmouth, or descent from the biblical Gomer, mattered less than their continuing adherence to the notion of distant ancestry, however it was derived: thus while Iolo Morganwg’s promotion of new founding fathers such as Hu Gadarn involved the invention of tradition (albeit partly constructed from earlier ma­ter­ials) and J. E. Lloyd deployed the relatively recent concept of prehistory to trace the origins of the Welsh to the Neolithic, both were essentially new iterations on a long-­established theme. And while general accounts of Wales’s history, from David Powel’s Historie of Cambria in 1584 to John Rhys and David Brynmor-­ Jones’s Welsh People in 1900, continued their narratives beyond 1282, the subsequent centuries remained overshadowed by the era preceding them. The long-­held assumption that the history of the Welsh (and their British ancestors) had essentially ended after they had lost a measure of political autonomy was clearly ­significant, then, in shaping how that history was understood. This raises the question of why narratives constructed in the decades after the Edwardian conquest, when the chronicle Brut y Tywysogyon was configured as a sequel to Welsh translations of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History (which in turn elaborated understandings of the past first attested in Gildas), proved so enduring. The first part of the answer to these questions lies in the history of medieval Wales, the second in the continuing relevance and utility of the medieval master narratives from the Elizabethan period onwards. In both cases, political contexts are of prime importance. Medieval Welsh literati, acutely aware that the Britons of Wales were the remnants of a people which had enjoyed dominance in the island of Britain before the conquests that led to the formation of England, articulated a sense of loss accompanied, from at least the tenth century onwards, by hopes of recovery expressed in political prophecy. Like other early medieval peoples in western Europe, the Welsh looked to the past to explain and legitimize their origins—and survival—as a people. Unlike many other peoples, however, they were unable to attach this ethnic focus to a clear dynastic or regnal framework. Although twelfth- and thirteenth-­century chroniclers and the Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan celebrated the achievements of individual rulers, persistent political fragmentation meant that, despite the dominance of Gwynedd by the thirteenth century and Llywelyn ap Gruffudd’s claims to represent Wales, the people could 3 Cf. Vandrei, Queen Boudica and Historical Culture, 14–15, 203–5, 207–8; also Bloxham, Why History?, 8–15.

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CONCLUSION  385 not be connected to a single dynasty ruling a unitary kingdom.4 The Edwardian conquest was thus a crucial turning-­point that cut short the possibility of further regnal consolidation by Welsh rulers while perpetuating fragmentation, as authority was divided between the lands of the royal principality and the marcher lordships, circumstances unfavourable to developing alternative frameworks for historical writing centred on Wales. This fragmented political landscape, coupled with English domination and conquest, surely helps to explain why, to the extent that Welsh chroniclers adopted a regnal framework, they borrowed it from the kingdom of England; unsurprisingly, this was truer still of marcher chroniclers. The Welsh Renaissance historian Humphrey Llwyd sought to remedy this by dividing his 1559 Cronica Walliae, a history of Wales from the late seventh to the late thirteenth centuries based on Brut y Tywysogyon and other sources, into sections headed by the name of a Welsh ruler, establishing a precedent followed by David Powel, William Wynne, and others down to the twentieth century. But this reshaping of medieval chronicles was fairly superficial and could not disguise their lack of a clear dynastic focus. In seeking to demonstrate that the Welsh occupied a special place in the island of Britain as the descendants of the oldest inhabitants who had been ruled by a long succession of kings and princes, Llwyd and Powel used history to affirm the distinctiveness and dignity of the Welsh as a people within the enlarged kingdom created by Henry VIII’s Acts of Union. Their attempts to create a canonical history compatible with Renaissance norms by adapting the two-­stage narrative— from Troy to the death of Cadwaladr the Blessed in 689, and thence to 1282—provided respectively by Geoffrey of Monmouth and by Brut y Tywysogyon is the second main reason for that narrative’s durability into the modern period. To begin with, in defending the veracity of Geoffrey’s History, Llwyd, Powel, and other Welsh Renaissance scholars exemplified a concern with establishing ancient origins, as well as a recognition of the need to prove these were well founded, common elsewhere in early modern Europe. For the Welsh, though, the need was all the greater because of the dominant influence of Geoffrey’s History on medi­ eval Welsh history writing, reflected in the number of copies of the Welsh translations Brut y Brenhinedd and in the framing of Brut y Tywysogyon as a continuation of it. However, the latter and other chronicles provided only patchy narratives and largely petered out after 1282; indeed, apart from genealogy, history writing in later medieval Wales focused on the conservation of earlier texts. Thus, with the exception of Adam Usk, the rising of Owain Glyndŵr elicited a muted historiographical response, including its treatment in Gutun Owain’s fairly brief continuation of the chronicle Brenhinedd y Saesson to 1461, which mainly related events concerning the kingdom of England. True, Humphrey Llwyd drew on other

4  Cf. R. R. Davies, ‘The Identity of “Wales” ’.

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386  WRITING WELSH HISTORY sources to expand the accounts of the Welsh chronicles, as did David Powel and later historians, who also continued their narratives from the Edwardian conquest down to their own time. However, these adaptations did not significantly diminish adherence to understandings of the past established in the Middle Ages; indeed, they served to consolidate them. Those understandings remained serviceable since, in depicting the separate political history of the Welsh as having ended with the death of Llywelyn and the conquest of Edward I, they helped to explain both why the Welsh remained a distinct people and why they had become incorporated in a larger polity under the king of England, a constitutional arrangement that only began to be questioned to any significant extent in the twentieth century. More generally, the durability of medieval interpretations of Welsh history was rooted in its emphasis on Britain. This was most relevant with respect to ethnic origins. Since the Welsh were the lineal descendants of the Britons of pre-­Roman antiquity, the history of the former was inextricably linked to that of the latter— and thus of Britain before the Britons were confined to the island’s western extremities, above all Wales, as a result of Anglo-­Saxon conquest and settlement. Significantly, the earliest work by a Welsh author to be called a history was the early ninth-­century Historia Brittonum (‘History of the Britons’), an ethnic and geographical emphasis already found in Gildas’s De Excidio Britanniae (‘The Ruin of Britain’); but it is no less significant that the full title of the first work explicitly called a history of Wales, published by David Powel in 1584, opened: The Historie of Cambria, Now Called Wales: A part of the most famous Yland of Brytaine. Admittedly, William Wynne’s revised version was called simply The History of Wales, a title used more frequently by works in both English and Welsh from the eighteenth century onwards. Yet it remained problematic for some. In the 1870s Gweirydd ap Rhys maintained that ‘calling the history of the nation the history of Wales is wholly inappropriate’: the title of his Hanes y Brytaniaid a’r Cymry (‘The History of the Britons and the Welsh’) signalled that it dealt with two successive stages in the history of a single people rather than of a particular geographical space in a striking instance of the continuing salience of medieval Welsh understandings of the past.5 Furthermore, until at least the nineteenth century, the idea that the Welsh had lost their authority over the island following Anglo-­Saxon conquests helped to sustain feelings of injustice and betrayal—a reminder of popular understandings of the past touched upon only briefly in this book which merit fuller investigation and surely provide a further reason for the continuing appeal of interpretations of history originating in the Middle Ages. Conversely, though, the nineteenth century also witnessed the high water-­mark of contributionist interpretations of Welsh history, according to which the Welsh had made a

5  HBC, 1: [iii].

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CONCLUSION  387 distinctive contribution to the history of a greater Britain—from the alleged role of Llywelyn the Great in securing the constitutional liberties enshrined in Magna Carta to Welsh service in British armies across the globe. The importance of a failure to achieve a substantial degree of dynastic and regnal unity, combined with a strong identification with Britain, is brought into sharper relief by comparisons with the early modern historiography of two other territories that entered into political unions with neighbouring kingdoms that have lasted into the modern period: Brittany, united with France in 1532 (though effectively with Anne of Brittany’s marriage to Charles VIII in 1491) and Scotland, whose monarchy was united with that of England in 1603. Both unions were fundamentally dynastic and led to a much less comprehensive degree of political assimilation with the more powerful neighbour than occurred in the case of Wales and England. While the French crown was jealous of its authority and hostile to expressions of Breton patriotism, Brittany kept its fiscal privileges, parlement, and états until the Revolution, while Scotland remained a separate kingdom until 1707 and continued to preserve its own own law, Presbyterian Kirk, and other institutions thereafter. Most pertinently, at the time of their union both Brittany and Scotland were united under a single dynasty that provided a framework for historical narratives of their peoples extending from distant origins through the later Middle Ages to the early modern present. In Brittany, the Montfort dynasty that emerged victorious from the civil war of 1341–64 patronized histories down to their own time, while at the end of the fifteenth century major syntheses were written by Pierre le Baud and Alain Bouchart, with the encouragement of Queen Anne (who remained duchess of Brittany and returned there after her husband’s death), followed by the Histoire de Bretagne of Bertrand d’Argentré (1583; published after censorship in 1588).6 Scotland exhibits a similar pattern. Although John Mair had published his Historia Maioris Britanniae tam Angliae quam Scotiae (‘History of Greater Britain as well England as Scotland’) in 1521,7 long before the 1603 union of crowns, his­ tor­ic­al writing focused on the kingdom of Scots and its rulers had been well established in the Middle Ages, notably in the histories of John of Fordun (1380s) and Walter Bower (1440s), and these provided foundations for the humanist refashioning of Scottish history by the Renaissance scholars Hector Boece and George Buchanan. Boece’s Scotorum Historia (‘History of the Scots’), translated into Scots shortly after its publication in Paris in 1527, provided a narrative from 330 bce to 1438 ce and became the basis of Holinshed’s Scottish Chronicle (1577, revised 1587). It also supplied much of the material for Buchanan’s Rerum

6  Tonnerre, ‘Introduction’; Cassard, ‘Les chroniqueurs et historiens bretons’; Kerhevé, ‘Écriture et récriture de l’histoire’; Gaillou and Jones, The Bretons, 230–3, 280–5. 7 Roger  A.  Mason, Kingship and the Commonweal, ch. 2. See also Wormald, ‘The Creation of Britain’, 179–80.

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388  WRITING WELSH HISTORY Scoticarum Historia (‘History of Scottish Affairs’, 1582), though this omitted some of Boece’s legendary material, greatly reduced its coverage of the earliest kings, and excited controversy by insisting that the Scottish monarchy was elective and thus subject to regulation by the nobility. However, all these medieval and early modern histories, including Mair, emphasized the ancient origins of the mon­ archy in order to vindicate the kingdom’s continuing autonomy.8 Early modern historians of Brittany and Scotland could draw on more substantial materials, then, than their Welsh counterparts in building historiographical bridges from the Middle Ages to their own time that in turn paved the way for subsequent histories. The same was true of Ireland, although in some respects this provides closer parallels with Wales, as there, too, a strong sense of shared ethnic identity, anchored in the remote past, flourished in a context of political fragmentation. There were also important continuities from medieval to early modern history writing, especially in the Irish language. However, medieval Irish his­tor­ic­al writing was more substantial and varied than that of Wales and also con­tinued to flourish longer, being nurtured in Gaelic lordships that survived into the early seventeenth century whose local lords employed professional lay his­tor­ians from Gaelic learned families.9 Rather like the Renaissance historians of Scotland, the seventeenth-­century Gaelic scholars who sought to preserve the sources for Irish history, above all in The Annals of the Four Masters (1632–6) and Geoffrey Keating’s history of Ireland, Foras Feasa ar Éirinn (‘Compendium of Wisdom about Ireland’, c.1634–5), adapted these to provide continuous narratives from remote antiquity to their own day. Moreover, they did so in a manner that emphasized regnal succession and, especially in Keating’s case, Ireland’s status as a kingdom, marking a response to foreign conquest facilitated by the annals’ detailed coverage of Irish kings and lords, the catalogue of Irish kings from the sons of Míl to the twelfth century given in Réim ríoghraidhe Éireann (‘Succession of Kings of Ireland’), and the account of Irish origins in the Lebor Gabála (‘Book of Settlement’), a highly influential work, probably first compiled in the eleventh century, extant in different versions down to the seventeenth century.10 In maintaining that the Irish and their rulers owed their origins to a series of invasions of Ireland by refugees from western Asia, the Mediterranean, and finally the Iberian peninsula, the Lebor Gabála resembled the Historia Brittonum in adapting bib­ lical and classical models of ethnogenesis.11 However, whereas the Irish legend served to emphasize Ireland’s integrity and autonomy, Welsh historians traced the

8  Ash-­Irisarri, ‘Scotland’; Roger A. Mason, ‘Civil Society and the Celts’. 9 Ní Mhaonaigh, ‘The Peripheral Centre’; Simms, Medieval Gaelic Sources, ch. 1; Simms, ‘The Professional Historians of Medieval Ireland’. 10  Bernadette Cunningham, ‘Seventeenth-­Century Constructions’; Bernadette Cunningham, The World of Geoffrey Keating, 65–7, 146–52; Carey, The Irish National Origin-­Legend. 11 Mark Williams, Ireland’s Immortals, 130–57; Bernadette Cunningham, ‘Seventeenth-­Century Constructions’, 13–21.

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CONCLUSION  389 origins of the Welsh to Brutus or other conquerors, not of Wales, but of Britain. Anglophone histories of Ireland provide another contrast, the earliest published example being Holinshed’s Irish Chronicle, based on recent works by Edmund Campion and Richard Stanihurst.12 Drawing partly on Gerald of Wales’s Irish works, these articulated the outlook of Old English communities descended from late twelfth- and thirteenth-­century settlers, reflecting the persistence of ethnic and cultural divisions that were less sharply defined in Wales by the sixteenth century. Unsurprisingly, the radically different historical trajectories of modern Ireland and Wales led to even sharper divergence between their respective historiographies. Yet if Welsh historical writing down to the early twentieth century was remarkable for the continuity and adaptability of a historical culture originating in the Middle Ages, it consisted of considerably more than works explicitly conceived as histories of Wales focused primarily on the period ending in 1282. To begin with, the chronicles adapted after the Edwardian conquest as continuations of Geoffrey of Monmouth had originally been composed for different purposes and belonged to a diverse body of chronicles, including those compiled in the March, whose coverage ranged eclectically from the churches and monasteries where they were written to the kingdom of England, continental Europe, and the Middle East. More significantly, the view, implicit in medieval Welsh chronicles and influentially reinforced by Humphrey Llwyd and David Powel, that the political history of Wales had been subsumed in that of England since the Edwardian conquest, while acknowledging the subaltern status of Wales and its history, nevertheless left space for other kinds of Welsh histories that continued beyond the conquest (and, increasingly, beyond the Acts of Union), especially accounts of counties and other localities and religious histories. The latter were stimulated by the introduction of Protestantism at the Reformation, a change linked to ethnic history in the theory that Protestantism marked a restitution of an ancient British Church independent of Rome first elaborated by Richard Davies and William Salesbury in 1567. A tradition of providential history, ultimately indebted to Gildas’s ex­plan­ ation of the Britons’ loss of their sovereignty over Britain as punishment for their sins, was continued both by writers of the Church of England and by Puritans and Dissenters, Charles Edwards and Theophilus Evans being the most notable early examples. From the late eighteenth century, however, histories of Dissenting denominations, including the Methodists, focused on developments from the seventeenth century onwards, representing a further iteration of providential history that reimagined the Welsh as a people born anew through their biblical faith. At the same time, though, the eighteenth century saw renewed interest in the ancient origins of the Welsh, as Theophilus Evans and others took up Pezron’s theory of the Celts as descendants of the biblical Gomer and, towards the end of

12  Lennon, ‘Ireland’.

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390  WRITING WELSH HISTORY the century, Welsh Romantics, above all Iolo Morganwg, began to elaborate Celticist visions of the Welsh past replete with Druids and bards. The history of Wales also drew the attention of outsiders, especially in England, including travel writers attracted by its exotic past and wild landscape. An associated development was the diversification of writers of Welsh history. Down to the Edwardian conquest these appear to have been mostly monks and secular clergy. These were succeeded from the later Middle Ages by lay and cler­ ic­al members of the gentry, albeit enjoying different levels of wealth and status, who continued to produce a wide variety of antiquarian and historical works into the Victorian period. However, from the eighteenth century they were joined by writers of more humble backgrounds—farmers and craftworkers, especially those who had received some education as Dissenting ministers, but also autodidacts like the stonemason Iolo Morganwg or the weaver Gweirydd ap Rhys. From the late nineteenth century the expansion of educational opportunities opened the door for more people, mostly men, from such backgrounds to study and teach history at universities, O. M. Edwards being a notable example, and the same was true of a significant number of academic historians of Wales throughout the twentieth century. While it would be simplistic to draw a direct correlation between class background and the kinds of history that were written, it surely helps to explain the pronounced concern with the experiences of working people from histories of Nonconformist congregations to labour history. Conversely, there were very few women writers of Welsh history before the twentieth century and it was only from the 1980s that these started to have a significant influence on the academic study of the subject. The various strands of Welsh history writing explored in this book were also informed by external historiographical, cultural, and intellectual influences. In general terms, the centuries-­long preoccupation of historians of Wales with the making of a people and its attempts, however limited, to achieve statehood, reflected wider assumptions in Europe regarding what history should be about. By the same token, when those assumptions changed over the past century, so too did writing about the history of Wales. More specifically, the preceding chapters have indicated numerous ways in which individual authors and works were indebted to external example and sources, especially the Bible and classical an­tiquity, which, as elsewhere, remained influential down to the nineteenth century. In the Middle Ages, Welsh history writing also drew on historical works composed in medieval Britain, Ireland, and continental Europe, while sixteenth-­ century Welsh scholars and antiquaries such as Sir John Prise and Humphrey Llwyd belonged to a wider world of Renaissance learning, especially but not exclusively in England, that influenced their interpretation of the Welsh past. In addition, George Owen of Henllys was among several antiquaries to undertake studies of individual Welsh localities modelled on English chorography, which, like the cultivation of genealogy, reflected the connected antiquarian interests of

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CONCLUSION  391 the early modern gentry in England and Wales. Likewise from the late eighteenth century historians of Welsh Dissent and Nonconformity drew on accounts of similar religious developments in England, while historians from Thomas Price (Carnhuanawc) to J. E. Lloyd utilized anthropological studies of racial origins by English writers such as James Cowles Prichard and John Beddoe. And, as Chapters 13 and 14 have shown, the increasing diversification of academic history in the twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries has been crucial to endowing Welsh history with a new significance and legitimacy as a field of enquiry that encompasses a plethora of social developments in which political and religious history form part of a much larger whole. In this it is, of course, far from unique, and reflects the increasingly ubiquitous influence of an internationalized his­tor­ic­al discipline in setting historiographical agendas. However, modern Welsh his­tor­ic­al writing cannot be understood simply as the product of a wider professionalization of the historical discipline or of a public appetite for history seen elsewhere. As in the case of other nations, it was also shaped by its own particular antecedents— texts which likewise throw revealing light on why, how, and in which contexts their authors attempted to write the people of Wales into history.

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Bibliography of Works Cited Manuscript Sources BL = British Library; NLW = National Library of Wales

Aberystwyth NLW MS 13B. NLW MS 938B (Edeyrn Davod Aur [Thomas Stephens], ‘The History of Wales from the Earliest Period to The Present Time; with an Introduction, containing the History of The Migrations of the Kymry, prior to their Arrival in The Isle of Britain’). NLW MS 1585. NLW MS 17178E. NLW MS 2023B. NLW MS 4760B. NLW MSS 5276Di–ii and 3054Di–ii (‘Elis Gruffudd’s Chronicle’, https://www.llgc.org.uk/ en/discover/digital-­g allery/manuscripts/early-­m odern-­p eriod/elis-­g ruffudds-­ chronicle) (last accessed 13 September 2021). NLW MS 11116E. NLW, Peniarth Estate PB 4. NLW, Peniarth MS 138.

Bangor Bangor University Archives, Lloyd Papers, 314.

London BL, Cotton Caligula MS A.VI. BL, Harleian MS 6831.

Oxford Jesus College MS 111 (‘Early Manuscripts at Oxford University: Jesus College MS. 111’, http://image.ox.ac.uk/show?collection=jesus&manuscript=ms111) (last accessed 13 September 2021). Jesus College MS 141 (‘Welsh Chronicles’, https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/ 4371cece-­efdb-­4b6c-­b90c-­a434e0a44304/)(last accessed 13 September 2021).

Published Works and Unpublished Theses Aaron, Jane, Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing in Wales: Nation, Gender and Identity (Cardiff, 2007). Aaron, Jane, ‘Slaughter and Salvation: Welsh Missionary Activity and British Imperialism’, in A Tolerant Nation?, ed. Williams et al., revd. edn. (2015), 51–68.

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394  Bibliography of Works Cited Aaron, Jane, and Sarah Prescott, The Oxford Literary History of Wales: Volume 3, Welsh Writing in English, 1536–1914 (Oxford, 2020). Abram, Andrew, ‘Monastic Burial in Medieval Wales’, in Monastic Wales: New Approaches, ed. Janet Burton and Karen Stöber (Cardiff, 2013), 103–15. Adams, Sam, Thomas Jeffery Llewelyn Prichard (Cardiff, 2000). Ainsworth, Peter, ‘Legendary History: Historia and Fabula’, in Historiography in the Middle Ages, ed. Deliyannis, 387–416. Alamichel, Marie-Françoise, ‘Brutus et les Troyens: une histoire européenne’, Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire, 84 (2006), 77–106. Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources, trans. Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge (Harmondsworth, 1983). Allan, David, ‘Identity and Innovation: Historiography in the Scottish Enlightenment’, in A Companion to Enlightenment Historiography, ed. Sophie Bourgault and Robert Sparling (Leiden, 2013), 307–41. Allan, David, ‘ “What’s in a Name?” Pedigree and Propaganda in Seventeenth-Century Scotland’, in Scottish History: The Power of the Past, ed. Edward  J.  Cowan and Richard J. Finlay (Edinburgh, 2002), 147–67. Alsop, James D., ‘Wading in “The Troublesome Seas . . . of Antiquityes”: William Fleetwood as Antiquary and Historian’, in The Name of a Queen: William Fleetwood’s Itinerarium ad Windsor, ed. Charles Beem and Dennis Moore (Basingstoke, 2013), 127–54. Altbach, Philip G., ‘The Imperial Tongue: English as the Dominating Academic Language’, International Higher Education, 49 (2015), 2–4. Alter, Dewi, ‘Cof Rhanbarthol a Thwf y Methodistiaid Calfinaidd’, Y Traethodydd, 174/732 (2020), 27–36. Ambrose, G. P., The History of Wales (Leeds, 1947). Andrews, Rhian M., and David Stephenson, ‘Draig Argoed: Iorwerth Goch ap Maredudd c.1110–71’, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies, 52 (2006), 65–91. Andrews, Robert M., ‘High Church Anglicanism in the Nineteenth Century’, in The Oxford History of Anglicanism, Volume III: Partisan Anglicanism and its Global Expansion, 1829–c.1914, ed. Rowan Strong (Oxford, 2017), 141–64. Anglo, Sydney, ‘The British History in Early Tudor Propaganda’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 44 (1961), 17–48. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition. Volume 4. MS B, ed. Simon Taylor (Cambridge, 1983). Annales Cambriae, ed. John Williams Ab Ithel (Rolls Series, London, 1860). Annales Cambriae, A.D. 682–954: Texts A–C in Parallel, ed. and trans. David N. Dumville, Basic Texts for Brittonic History, 1 (Cambridge, 2002). ‘Annales de Margan’, in Annales Monastici, vol. 1, ed. Henry Richards Luard (London, 1864), 1–40. Anon., ‘Ein Hynafiaid’, Y Traethodydd yn America, 1 (1857), 5–19. Anon., The History of the Cymbri (or Brittains:) . . . (n.p., 1746). Anon., Letters from Snowdon: Descriptive of a Tour through the Northern Counties of Wales (London, 1770). Anon., ‘Memoirs of Owen Glendowr’, in A History of the Island of Anglesey (London, 1775; facsimile reprint, Llansadwrn, 2007), [61]–74. Anon., Review of Gweirydd ap Rhys, Hanes y Brytaniaid a’r Cymru, Y Beirniad, 1 April 1872, 379–80. Anon., Review of Gweirydd ap Rhys, Hanes y Brytaniaid a’r Cymru, Y Drysorfa, 544 (1876), 63–4.

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Bibliography of Works Cited  395 Anon., Review of Thierry, Conquête d’Angleterre par les Normannais, Cambrian Quarterly Magazine, 2 (1830), 105–8. Anon., Review of Warrington, History of Wales, Critical Review, 61 (1786), 129–34. Anon., Review of Warrington, History of Wales, English Review, 6 (1786), 321–32, 413–25. Anon., Review of Woodward, History of Wales, Eclectic Review, 6 (1853), 44–55. Anon., Review of Woodward, History of Wales (parts 13–25), Archaeologia Cambrensis, 4/15 (1853), 217–19. Anstey, Peter  R., ‘Experimental versus Speculative Natural Philosophy’, in The Science of Nature in the Seventeenth Century: Patterns of Change in Early Modern Natural Philosophy, ed. Peter R. Anstey and John A. Schuster (Dordrecht, 2005), 215–42. ‘Appendix: List of the Chronicles of Medieval Wales and the March’, in The Chronicles of Medieval Wales, ed. Guy et al., 421–9. [Appleyard, E. S.], Welsh Sketches, 3 vols. (London, 1851–3). Argraphiad Newydd o Eiriadur Beiblaidd y Diweddar Barch. John Brown, trans. J. R. Kilsby Jones (London, 1870). Armes Prydein: The Prophecy of Britain, ed. Ifor Williams, English version by Rachel Bromwich (Dublin, 1972). Armitage, David, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000). Arnold, Matthew, ‘On the Study of Celtic Literature’, in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, III, Lectures and Essays in Criticism, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor, MI, 1962), 291–395. Die Arthur-Sage und die Märchen des rothen Buchs von Hergest, ed. San-Marte [Albert Schulz] (Quedlinburg and Leipzig, 1842). Ash-Irisarri, Kate, ‘Scotland and Anglo-Scottish Border Writing’, in Medieval Historical Writing, ed. Jahner et al., 225–43. Ashe, Laura, ‘Holinshed and Mythical History’, in The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed’s Chronicles, ed. Kewes et al., 155–70. Asher, R.  E., National Myths in Renaissance France: Francus, Samothes and the Druids (Edinburgh, 1993). Asser’s Life of King Alfred, ed. William Henry Stevenson (Oxford, 1904; repr. 1959). Aston, Margaret, ‘John Wycliffe’s Reformation Reputation’, Past & Present, 30/1 (1964), 23–51. Astudiaethau Amrywiol a Gyflwynir i Syr Thomas Parry-Williams, ed. Thomas Jones (Cardiff, 1968). Atherton, Ian, ‘Commemorating Conflict and the Ancient British Past in Augustan Britain’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 36/3 (2013), 377–93. Baár, Monika, Historians and Nationalism: East-Central Europe in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 2010). Bacon, Francis, The Advancement of Learning, ed. Michael Kiernan (Oxford, 2000). Bacon, Francis, ‘On the Dignity and Advancement of Learning’, in The Physical and Metaphysical Works of Lord Bacon, ed. Joseph Devey (London, 1904), 27–379. Bagge, Sverre, ‘Scandinavian Historical Writing, 1100–1400’, in Oxford History of Historical Writing, ed. Foot and Robinson, 414–27. Barczewski, Stephanie  L., Myth and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood (Oxford, 2000). Baring-Gould, S., and John Fisher, The Lives of the British Saints: The Saints of Wales and Cornwall and Such Irish  Saints  as Have Dedications in  Britain, 4 vols. (London, 1907–13).

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396  Bibliography of Works Cited Barron, W.  R.  J., Françoise Le Saux, and Lesley Johnson, ‘Dynastic Chronicles’, in The Arthur of the English: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval English Life and Literature, ed. W. R. J. Barron, revd. edn. (Cardiff, 2001), 11–46. Bartlett, Robert, Gerald of Wales 1146–1223 (Oxford, 1982). Bartlett, Robert, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation (Princeton, NJ, 2013). Bartrum, P. C., ‘Hen Lwythau Gwynedd a’r Mars’, National Library of Wales Journal, 12/3 (1962), 200–35. Bassett, Douglas, ‘The Making of a National Museum (Part III)’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1984, 217–316. Bassett, Merfyn, Thomas Shankland: Hanesydd (Llandysul [1966]). Bassett, Paul Merritt, ‘The Use of History in the Chronicon of Isidore of Seville’, History and Theory, 15 (1976), 278–92. Batten, Jr., Charles L., Pleasurable Instruction: Form and Convention in Eighteenth-Century Travel Literature (Berkeley, CA, 1978). Bebb, W. Ambrose, Cyfnod y Tuduriaid (Wrexham, 1939). Bebb, W. Ambrose, Machlud y Mynachlogydd (Aberystwyth, 1937). Beddoe, Deirdre, Out of the Shadows: A History of Women in Twentieth-Century Wales (Cardiff, 2000). Beddoe, Deirdre, ‘Towards a Welsh Women’s History’, Llafur, 3/2 (1981), 32–8. Beddoe, John, The Races of Britain: A Contribution to the Anthropology of Western Europe (Bristol, 1885). Bede, De Temporum Ratione, ed. C. W. Jones, Bedae Venerabilis Opera, Pars VI, 2, Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina 123B (Turnhout, 1977). Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Oxford, 1969). Beech, George, ‘Did King Egbert of Wessex Rename Britain as England at Winchester in 828?’, Nouvelle Revue d’Onomastique, 55 (2013), 99–142. Beirdd a Thywysogion: Barddoniaeth Llys yng Nghymru, Iwerddon a’r Alban, ed. Morfydd E. Owen and Brynley F. Roberts (Cardiff, 1996). Bennett, Joshua, God and Progress: Religion and History in British Intellectual Culture, 1845–1914 (Oxford, 2019). Bentley, Michael, Modernizing England’s Past: English Historiography in the Age of Modernism 1870–1970 (Cambridge, 2005). Berend, Nora, ‘Historical Writing in Central Europe (Bohemia, Hungary, Poland), c.950–1400’, in Oxford History of Historical Writing, ed. Foot and Robinson, 312–27. Berg, Maxine, ‘The First Women Economic Historians’, Economic History Review, new series, 45/2 (1992), 308–29. Berger, Stefan, and Chris Lorenz, ‘Introduction: National History Writing in Europe in a Global Age’, in The Contested Nation: Ethnicity, Class, Religion and Gender in National Histories (Basingstoke, 2008), 1–23. Berger, Stefan, with Christoph Conrad, The Past as History: National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Modern Europe (Basingstoke, 2015). Berkely, George, The Naval History of Britain (London, 1756). Bibliographical, Statistical, and Other Miscellaneous Memoranda, Being Appendices to the Report of the Royal Commission on Land in Wales and Monmouthshire (London, 1896), P.P. 1896 C.8242 xxxiii 555. ‘Bibliography of Gwyn  A.  Williams’ Work’, in Artisans, Peasants and Proletarians: Essays Presented to Gwyn  A.  Williams, ed. Clive Emsley and James Walvin (London, 1985), 226–30.

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Bibliography of Works Cited  397 A Bibliography of the History of Wales, ed. R. T. Jenkins and William Rees (Cardiff, 1931). A Bibliography of the History of Wales, 2nd edn. [ed. A.  H.  Dodd, E.  Gwynne Jones, J. Gwynn Williams, and Glyn Roberts] (Cardiff, 1962). Y Bibyl Ynghymraec sef Cyfieithiad Cymraeg Canol o’r “Promptuarium Bibliae”, ed. Thomas Jones (Cardiff, 1940). Bietenholz, Peter G., Historia and Fabula: Myths and Legends in Historical Thought from Antiquity to the Modern Age (Leiden, 1994). Birch, Walter de Gray, A History of Margam Abbey (London, 1897). The Black Book of St. David’s, ed. J. W. Willis-Bund (London, 1902). Blandford, Steve, and Ruth McElroy, ‘Memory, Television and the Making of the BBC’s The Story of Wales’, View: Journal of European Television History & Culture, 3/2 (2012), 119–26. Bloch, Marc, Review of Rees, South Wales and the Border, Annales d’Histoire Economique et Sociale, 6 (1934), 582–4. Bloch, Maurice, Marxism and Anthropology: The History of a Relationship, paperback edn. (Oxford, 1985). Bloxham, Donald, Why History? A History (Oxford, 2020). Bochart, Samuel, Geographia Sacra (Caen, 1646). Bodin, Jean, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, trans. Beatrice Reynolds (New York, 1945). Boivin, Jeanne-Marie, L’Irlande au moyen âge. Giraud de Barri et la Topographia Hibernica (1188) (Paris, 1993). Bourke, Richard, ‘Pocock and the Presuppositions of the New British History’, Historical Journal, 53/3 (2010), 747–70. Bowen, D. J., ‘Guto’r Glyn a Glyn-y-Groes’, Ysgrifau Beirniadol, 20 (1995), 149–83. Bowen, E. G., Saints, Seaways and Settlements in the Celtic Lands (Cardiff, 1969). Bowen, E. G., The Settlements of the Celtic Saints in Wales (Cardiff, 1954). Bowen, E. G., Wales: A Study in Geography and History (Cardiff, 1941). Bowen, Geraint, ‘Apêl at y Pab ynghylch Dilysrwydd Historia Regum, Sieffre o Fynwy’, National Library of Wales Journal, 15/2 (1967), 127–46. Bowen, Geraint, Y Drych Cristianogawl: Astudiaeth (Journal of Welsh Ecclesiastical History, supplementary vol., Cardiff, 1988). Bowen, Geraint, Welsh Recusant Writings (Cardiff, 1999). Bowen, Lloyd, ‘The Battle of Britain: History and Reformation in Early Modern Wales’, in Christianities in the Early Modern Celtic World, ed. Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin and Robert Armstrong (Basingstoke, 2014), 135–50, 228–31. Bowen, Lloyd, ‘Fashioning Communities: The County in Early Modern Wales’, in The County Community in Seventeenth-Century England and Wales, ed. Jacqueline Eales and Andrew Hopper (Hatfield, 2012), 77–99. Bowen, Lloyd, ‘Information, Language and Political Culture in Early Modern Wales’, Past & Present, 228 (2015), 125–58. Bowen, Lloyd, The Politics of the Principality: Wales, c.1603–1642 (Cardiff, 2007). Boyle, Andrew, ‘Henry Fitzalan, Twelfth Earl of Arundel: Politics and Culture in the Tudor Nobility’ (D.Phil. Thesis, University of Oxford, 2003). Brad y Llyfrau Gleision: Ysgrifau ar Hanes Cymru, ed. Prys Morgan (Llandysul, 1991). Bradley, Arthur Granville, Owen Glyndwr and the Last Struggle for Welsh Independence (New York and London, 1902). Braithwaite, Helen, ‘From the See of St Davids to St Paul’s Churchyard: Joseph Johnson’s Cross-Border Connections’, in Wales and the Romantic Imagination, ed. Damian Walford Davies and Lynda Pratt (Cardiff, 2007), 43–64.

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398  Bibliography of Works Cited Braithwaite, Helen, Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent: Joseph Johnson and the Cause of Liberty (Basingstoke, 2003). Branwen uerch Lyr, ed. Derick S. Thomson (Dublin, 1961). Brenhinedd y Saesson, or, The Kings of the Saxons, ed. and trans. Thomas Jones (Cardiff, 1971). Brenhinoedd y Saeson, ‘The Kings of the English’, A.D. 682–954: Texts P, R, S in Parallel, ed. and trans. David N. Dumville (Aberdeen, 2005). Y Brenin Llŷr a Baledi’r Rhyfelwraig, ed. Ffion Mair Jones (Bangor, 2016). Brett, Caroline, ‘John Leland, Wales, and Early British History’, Welsh History Review, 15/2 (1990), 169–82. Brett, Caroline, ‘The Prefaces of Two Late Thirteenth-Century Welsh Latin Chronicles’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, 35 (1988), 63–73. Breudwyt Maxen Wledic, ed. Brynley F. Roberts (Dublin, 2005). ‘The Breviate Chronicle: B-text of the Annales Cambriae’, ed. Henry Gough-Cooper (2015): http://croniclau.bangor.ac.uk/documents/AC%20B%20first%20edition.pdf (last accessed 13 September 2021). Briggs, Asa, A History of Longmans and their Books 1724–1990 (London, 2008). Britain and Ireland 900–1300: Insular Responses to Medieval European Change, ed. Brendan Smith (Cambridge, 1999). British Consciousness and Identity: The Making of Britain, 1533–1707, ed. Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Roberts (Cambridge, 1998). The British Isles, 1100–1500: Comparisons, Contrasts and Connections, ed. R.  R.  Davies (Edinburgh, 1988). Broadway, Jan, ‘No historie so meete’: Gentry Culture and the Development of Local History in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Manchester, 2006). Broadway, Jan, ‘Symbolic and Self-Consciously Antiquarian: The Elizabethan and Early Stuart Gentry’s Use of the Past’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 76/4 (2013), 541–58. Bromwich, Rachel, ‘Cyfeiriadau Traddodiadol a Chwedlonol y Gogynfeirdd’, in Beirdd a Thywysogion, ed. Owen and Roberts, 202–18. Bromwich, Rachel, ‘Trioedd Ynys Prydain: The Myvyrian “Third Series” ’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1968 (Part 2), 299–338; 1969 (Part 1), 127–56. Bromwich, Rachel, Trioedd Ynys Prydain in Welsh Literature and Scholarship (Cardiff, 1969). Brooke, Christopher  N.  L., The Church and the Welsh Border in the Central Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 1986). Brooks, Nicholas, Bede and the English (Jarrow, 2000). Brooks, Simon, Hanes Cymry: Lleiafrifoedd Ethnig a’r Gwareiddiad Cymraeg (Cardiff, 2021). Brooks, Simon, Why Wales Never Was: The Failure of Welsh Nationalism (Cardiff, 2017). Broun, Dauvit, ‘Britain and the Beginning of Scotland’, Journal of the British Academy, 3 (2015), 107–37. Broun, Dauvit, ‘A Forgotten Anniversary: P. Hume Brown’s History of Scotland (1911)’, in Writing a Small Nation’s Past, ed. Evans and Pryce, 267–82. Broun, Dauvit, ‘A Second England? Scotland and the Monarchy of Britain in The First English Empire’, in The English Isles: Cultural Transmission and Political Conflict in Britain and Ireland, 1100–1500, ed. Seán Duffy and Susan Foran (Dublin, 2013), 84–102. Brown, Peter, Salvian of Marseilles: Theology and Criticism in the Last Century of the Western Empire (Oxford, 2010). Browne, David, and Ralph  A.  Griffiths, ‘One Hundred Years of Investigation’, in Hidden Histories: Discovering the Heritage of Wales, ed. Peter Wakelin and Ralph  A.  Griffiths (Aberystwyth, 2008), 19–29.

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Bibliography of Works Cited  399 Browne, Thomas, Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica, ed. Robin Robbins, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1981). Bruley, Sue, The Women and Men of 1926: A Gender and Social History of the General Strike and Miners’ Lockout in South Wales (Cardiff, 2010). Brut y Brenhinedd: Cotton Cleopatra Version, ed. and trans. John Jay Parry (Cambridge, MA, 1937). Brut y Brenhinedd: Llanstephan MS. 1 Version, ed. Brynley F. Roberts (Dublin, 1971). Brut Dingestow, ed. Henry Lewis (Cardiff, 1942). Brut y Tywysogyon, or, The Chronicle of the Princes, Peniarth MS. 20 Version, trans. Thomas Jones (Cardiff, 1952). Brut y Tywysogyon, or, The Chronicle of the Princes, Red Book of Hergest Version, ed. and trans. Thomas Jones (Cardiff, 1955). Brynmor-Jones, D., ‘A National Museum for Wales’, The Thirteenth Annual Report of the National Eisteddfod Association, ed. E. Vincent Evans (Cardiff, 1894), 58–64. Buchedd Beuno: The Middle Welsh Life of St Beuno, ed. Patrick Sims-Williams (Dublin, 2018). Burgess, Thomas, Tracts on the Origin and Independence of the Ancient British Church . . ., 2nd edn. (London, 1815). Burrow, J.  W., A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge, 1981). Burrow, J.  W., ‘ “The Village Community” and the Uses of History in Late NineteenthCentury England’, in Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society in Honour of J. H. Plumb, ed. Neil McKendrick (London, 1974), 255–84. Butaud, Germain, and Valérie Piétri, Les enjeux de la généalogie (XIIe–XVIIIe siècles): pouvoir et identité (Paris, 2006). Bÿggé, Thomas, Travels in the French Republic, trans. John Jones (London, 1801). Byrne, Francis John, ‘Senchas: The Nature of Gaelic Historical Tradition’, Historical Studies, 9 (1970), 135–59. Y Bywgraffiadur Cymreig hyd 1940, ed. John Edward Lloyd and R.  T.  Jenkins (London, 1953). The Cambrian, 5 December 1835; 12 November 1836; 12 January 1839; 27 November 1841; 12 November 1909. The Cambrian Quarterly Magazine, 2 (1830). The Cambrian Register, for the Year 1795 (London, 1796). The Cambridge History of Welsh Literature, ed. Geraint Evans and Helen Fulton (Cambridge, 2019). Camden, William, Britannia, sive Florentissimorum Regnorum, Angliæ, Scotiæ, Hiberniæ, et insularum adiacentium ex intima antiquitate Chorographica descriptio (London, 1586). Camden, [William], Britannia, 6th edn. (London, 1607). Camden, William, Britain, trans. Philemon Holland (London, 1610). Camden, William, Britannia, vol. 1, ed. Richard Gough (London, 1789). Camden’s Britannia, Newly Translated into English: with Large Additions and Improvements, ed. Edmund Gibson (London, 1695). Camden’s Wales, comp. Terrence James (Carmarthen, 1984). Cameron, Euan, The Reformation of the Heretics: The Waldenses of the Alps, 1480–1580 (Oxford, 1984). [Campbell, Eliza Constantia] ‘A Lady of the Principality’, The History of Wales: Containing Some Interesting Facts Concerning the Existence of a Welsh Tribe among the Aborigines of America. Arranged as a Catechism for Young Persons (Shrewsbury, 1833).

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400  Bibliography of Works Cited [Campbell, Eliza Constantia], Stories from the History of Wales: Interspersed with Various Information and Amusement for Young Persons (Shrewsbury, 1833). Campbell, J.  A., Some Sources of the Humanism of H.  J.  Fleure (School of Geography, University of Oxford, Research Papers, No. 2; June 1972). Campbell, James, The Anglo-Saxon State (London, 2000). Cannadine, David, ‘British History: Past, Present—and Future?’, Past & Present, 186 (1987), 169–91. Cannadine, David, G. M. Trevelyan: A Life in History, paperback edn. (London, 1993). Carey, John, The Irish National Origin-Legend: Synthetic Pseudohistory, Quiggin Pamphlets on the Sources of Mediaeval Gaelic History, 1 (Cambridge, 1994). Carley, James P., ‘Polydore Vergil and John Leland on King Arthur: The Battle of the Books’, Interpretations, 15 (1984), 86–100. Carpenter, David, The Struggle for Mastery: Britain 1066–1284 (London, 2003). Carr, A.  D., ‘Anglo-Welsh Relations, 1066–1282’, in England and her Neighbours, 1066–1453: Essays in Honour of Pierre Chaplais, ed. Michael Jones and Malcolm Vale (London, 1989), 121–38. Carr, A. D., The Gentry of North Wales in the Later Middle Ages (Cardiff, 2017). Carr, A. D., Medieval Wales (Houndmills, 1995). Carr, A.  D., ‘Welshmen and the Hundred Years’ War’, Welsh History Review, 4/1 (1968), 21–46. Carr, Glenda, ‘An Uneasy Partnership: Iolo Morganwg and William Owen Pughe’, in A Rattleskull Genius, ed. Jenkins, 443–60. Carr, Glenda, William Owen Pughe (Cardiff, 1983). Carte, Thomas, A General History of England, 4 vols. (London, 1747–54). Carter, Harold, ‘Emrys  G.  Bowen, 1900–1983’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 9/3 (1984), 374–80. Cassard, Jean-Christophe, ‘Les chroniqueurs et historiens bretons face à la guerre de Succession’, in Chroniquers et historiens de la Bretagne, ed. Tonnerre, 57–75. Cathrall, William, The History of North Wales, 2 vols. (Manchester, 1828). Caxton, William, The Cronicles of Englond (Westminster, 1480). A Century of British Geography, ed. Ron Johnston and Michael Williams (Oxford, 2003). Chadwick, Mary, and Shaun Evans, ‘ “Ye Best Tast of Books & Learning of Any Other Country Gent”: The Library of Thomas Mostyn of Gloddaith’, in Libraries, Books and Collectors of Texts, 1600–1900, ed. Annika Bautz and James Gregory (London, 2018), 87–103. Chadwick, Nora  K., ‘Early Culture and Learning in North Wales’, in Studies in the Early British Church, ed. Nora K. Chadwick (Cambridge, 1958), 29–120. Chadwick, Nora K., ‘Intellectual Life in West Wales in the Last Days of the Celtic Church’, in Studies in the Early British Church, ed. Nora K. Chadwick (Cambridge, 1958), 121–82. Chapman, T.  Robin, ‘Yr Apêl at Felix: Hanesyddiaeth  R.  T.  Jenkins (1881–1969)’, Welsh History Review, 30/4 (2021), 609–34. Chapman, T.  Robin, The Oxford Literary History of Wales: Volume 2, Writing in Welsh, c.1740–2010: A Troubled Heritage (Oxford, 2020). Chapman, T. Robin, ‘The Turn of the Tide: Melancholy and Modernity in Mid-Victorian Wales’, Welsh History Review, 27/3 (2015), 503–27. Chapman, T. Robin, W. Ambrose Bebb (Cardiff, 1997). Chapman, T. Robin, W. J. Gruffydd (Cardiff, 1993). Chapman, T.  Robin, ‘ “Yr Ysbryd Athrylithgar Sydd yn Awr yn Cynhyrfu Hiliogaeth y Cymry”: Darllenwyr Drych y Prif Oesoedd Theophilus Evans yn y Bedwaredd Ganrif ar

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Bibliography of Works Cited  401 Bymtheg’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, new series, 24 (2018), 64–75. Charles, B. G., George Owen of Henllys: A Welsh Elizabethan (Aberystwyth, 1973). Charles, B. G., ‘George Owen of Henllys: Addenda’, National Library of Wales Journal, 23/1 (1983), 37–44. Charles-Edwards, G., and T.  M., ‘The Continuation of Brut y Tywysogion in Peniarth MS. 20’, in Ysgrifau a Cherddi Cyflwynedig i/Essays and Poems Present to Daniel Huws, ed. Tegwyn Jones and E. B. Fryde (Aberystwyth, 1994), 293–305. Charles-Edwards, T. M., ‘Bede, the Irish and the Britons’, Celtica, 15 (1983), 42–52. Charles-Edwards, T.  M., ‘Celtic Britain and Ireland: An Arena for Historical Debate’, in Historiography and Identity II: Post-Roman Multiplicity and New Political Identities, ed. Gerda Heydemann and Helmut Reimitz (Turnhout, 2020), 147–60. Charles-Edwards, T. M., Early Christian Ireland (Cambridge, 2000). Charles-Edwards, T. M., Early Irish and Welsh Kinship (Oxford, 1993). Charles-Edwards, T. M., ‘The Lure of Celtic Languages, 1850–1914’, in The Making of the Middle Ages: Liverpool Essays, ed. Marios Costambeys, Andrew Hamer, and Martin Heale (Liverpool, 2007), 15–35. Charles-Edwards, T. M., ‘John Rhŷs, Celtic Studies and the Welsh Past’, in Writing a Small Nation’s Past, ed. Evans and Pryce, 165–75. Charles-Edwards, T. M., ‘The Three Columns of Law: A Comparative Perspective’, in Tair Colofn Cyfraith: The Three Columns of Law in Medieval Wales: Homicide, Theft and Fire, ed. T.  M.  Charles-Edwards and Paul Russell (Welsh Legal History Society, 5; Bangor, 2005), 26–59. Charles-Edwards, T. M., Wales and the Britons, 350–1064 (Oxford, 2013). Charles-Edwards, T. M., The Welsh Laws (Cardiff, 1989). Charles-Edwards, T. M., and R. J. W. Evans, ‘Introduction’, in Wales and the Wider World, ed. Charles-Edwards and Evans, 1–8. Charles-Edwards, T.  M., and Nerys Ann Jones, ‘Breintiau Gwŷr Powys: The Liberties of the Men of Powys’, in The Welsh King and His Court, ed. Charles-Edwards et al., 191–213. Charmley, Gerard, ‘Edwards, John Hugh (1869–1945)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Charnell-White, Cathryn A., Bardic Circles: National, Regional and Personal Identity in the Bardic Vision of Iolo Morganwg (Cardiff, 2007). Childe, V. Gordon, Man Makes Himself (London, 1936). Chotzen, Theodore Max, ‘Some Sidelights on Cambro-Dutch Relations (with Special Reference to Humphrey Llwyd and Abrahamus Ortelius)’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1937, 101–44. Chronica Minora Saec. IV. V.  VI. VII., vol. 3, ed. T.  Mommsen, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Auctores Antiquissimi, xiii (Berlin, 1898). The Chronicle of Adam Usk 1377–1421, ed. and trans. C. Given-Wilson (Oxford, 1997). The Chronicle of Æthelweard, ed. and trans. A. Campbell (London, 1962). The Chronicle of Ireland, trans. T. M. Charles-Edwards, 2 vols. (Liverpool, 2006). The Chronicle of John of Worcester, vol. 3, ed. and trans. P. McGurk (Oxford, 1998). The Chronicle of Pierre de Langtoft, ed. Thomas Wright, 2 vols. (London, 1866–8). ‘Chronicle of the Thirteenth Century. MS. Exchequer Domesday’ [ed. H.  L.  Jones], Archaeologia Cambrensis, 3rd ser., 8 (1862), 272–83. The Chronicles of Medieval Wales and the March: New Contexts, Studies and Texts, ed. Ben Guy, Owain Wyn Jones, Georgia Henley, and Rebecca Thomas (Turnhout, 2020).

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402  Bibliography of Works Cited Chroniquers et historiens de la Bretagne du Moyen Âge au milieu du XXe siècle, ed. NoëlYves Tonnerre (Rennes, 2001). The Civil War, ed. Peter Young and Norman Tucker (London, 1967). Clancy, Thomas Owen, ‘Scotland, the “Nennian” Recension of the Historia Brittonum, and the Lebor Bretnach’, in Kings, Clerics and Chronicles in Scotland 500–1297: Essays in Honour of Marjorie Ogilvie Anderson, ed. Simon Taylor (Dublin, 2000), 87–107. Clapham, J.  H., An Economic History of Britain: The Early Railway Age 1820–1850 (Cambridge, 1926). Clapham, John, The Historie of Great Britannie (London, 1606). Clement, Mary, The S.P.C.K. and Wales, 1699–1740 (London, 1954). Clough, Emma, ‘Loyalty and Liberty: Thermopylae in the Western Imagination’, in Spartan Society, ed. Thomas J. Figueira (Swansea, 2004), 363–84. Cobban, Alan  B., ‘Polydore Vergil Reconsidered: The Anglica Historia and the English Universities’, Viator, 34 (2003), 364–91. Cof Cenedl: Ysgrifau ar Hanes Cymru, ed. Geraint  H.  Jenkins, 24 vols. (Llandysul, 1986–2009). Colker, Marvin  L., ‘The “Margam Chronicle” in a Dublin Manuscript’, Haskins Society Journal, 4 (1992), 123–48. A Companion to Geoffrey of Monmouth, ed. Georgia Henley and Joshua Byron Smith (Leiden, 2020). A Companion to Historiography, ed. Michael Bentley (London, 1997). Constantine, Mary-Ann, ‘Antiquarianism and Enlightenment in the Eighteenth Century’, in The Cambridge History of Welsh Literature, ed. Evans and Fulton, 264–84. Constantine, Mary-Ann, ‘ “To Trace Thy Country’s Glories to their Source”: Dangerous History in Thomas Pennant’s Tour in Wales’, in Rethinking British Romantic History, 1770–1845, ed. Porscha Fermanis and John Regan (Oxford, 2014), 121–43. Constantine, Mary-Ann, The Truth against the World: Iolo Morganwg and Romantic Forgery (Cardiff, 2007). Constantine, Mary-Ann, ‘Welsh Literary History and the Making of the “Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales” ’, in Editing the Nation’s Memory: Textual Scholarship and NationBuilding in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Dirk van Hulle and Joep Leerssen (Amsterdam, 2008), 109–28. Constantine, Mary-Ann, and Nigel Leask, ‘Introduction: Thomas Pennant, Curious Traveller’, in Enlightenment Travel, ed. Constantine and Leask, 1–14. Constructing the Past: Writing Irish History, 1600–1800, ed. Mark Williams and Stephen Paul Forrest (Woodbridge, 2010). Cormack, Lesley B., ‘ “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors”: Geography as Self-Definition in Early Modern England’, Isis, 82/4 (1991), 639–61. The Correspondence of Iolo Morganwg, ed. Geraint H. Jenkins, Ffion Mair Jones, and David Ceri Jones, 3 vols. (Cardiff, 2007). The Correspondence of Thomas Stephens: Revolutionising Welsh Scholarship in the Mid-Nineteenth Century through Knowledge Exchange, ed. Adam  N.  Coward ­ (Aberystwyth, 2020). Corrigan, Philip, and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (Oxford, 1985). Coss, Peter, ‘Presentism and the “Myth” of Magna Carta’, Past & Present, 234 (2017), 227–35. ‘The Cottonian Chronicle: C-text of the Annales Cambriae’, ed. Henry Gough-Cooper (2015): http://croniclau.bangor.ac.uk/documents/AC%20C%20first%20edition.pdf (last accessed 13 September 2021).

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Bibliography of Works Cited  403 The Court Rolls of the Lordship of Ruthin or Dyffryn-Clwyd of the Reign of King Edward the First, ed. and trans. Richard Arthur Roberts (London, 1893). Coward, Adam, ‘English Anglers, Welsh Salmon, and Social Justice: The Politics of Conservation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Wales’, Welsh History Review, 27/4 (2015), 730–54. Coward, Adam N., ‘Maintaining the “Ancient British Opinions of Spirits?” The “Welshness” of Edmund Jones “Yr Hen Broffwyd” (1702–1793)’, Welsh History Review, 26/4 (2013), 535–59. Cowley, F. G., The Monastic Order in South Wales 1066–1349 (Cardiff, 1977). Coxe, William, An Historical Tour in Monmouthshire, 2 vols. (London, 1801). Cragoe, Matthew, An Anglican Aristocracy: The Moral Economy of the Landed Estate in Carmarthenshire, 1832–1895 (Oxford, 1996). Cragoe, Matthew, ‘Bruce, Henry Austin, First Baron Aberdare (1815–1895)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Cram, David, ‘Edward Lhuyd’s Archæologia Britannica: Method and Madness in Early Modern Comparative Philology’, Welsh History Review, 25/1 (2010), 75–96. Cramsie, John, British Travellers and the Encounter with Britain, 1450–1700 (Woodbridge, 2015). Crick, J.  C., ‘The British Past and the Welsh Future: Gerald of Wales, Geoffrey of Monmouth and Arthur of Britain’, Celtica, 23 (1999), 60–75. Crick, Julia C., The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth, iv. Dissemination and Reception in the Later Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 1991). Crick, J. C., ‘Monmouth, Geoffrey of (d. 1154/5)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Crick, Julia, ‘The Power and the Glory: Conquest and Cosmology in Edwardian Wales’, in Textual Cultures: Cultural Texts, ed. Orietta Da Rold and Elaine Treharne (Cambridge, 2010), 21–42. Croll, Andy, Civilizing the Urban: Popular Culture and Public Space in Merthyr, c.1870–1914 (Cardiff, 2000). Croll, Andy, ‘Holding onto History: Modern Welsh Historians and the Challenge of Postmodernism’, Journal of Contemporary History, 38/2 (2003), 323–32. Croll, Andy, ‘ “People’s Remembrancers” in a Post-Modern Age: Contemplating the NonCrisis of Welsh Labour History’, Llafur, 8/1 (2000), 5–17. ‘ “Cronica de Wallia” and Other Documents from Exeter Cathedral Library MS. 3514’, ed. Thomas Jones, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, 12 (1946–8), 27–44. ‘Cronicl Hywel ap Syr Mathew’, Corpws Hanesyddol yr Iaith Gymraeg 1500–1850, https:// www.celticstudies.net/chsm/chsm_frames.htm (last accessed 13 September 2021). [Crouch, Nathaniel], The History of the Principality of Wales (London, 1695). Crystal, David, English as a Global Language, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, 2003). Cunningham, Bernadette, The Annals of the Four Masters: Irish History, Kingship and Society in the Early Seventeenth Century (Dublin, 2010). Cunningham, Bernadette, ‘Seventeenth-Century Constructions of the Historical Kingdom of Ireland’, in Constructing the Past, ed. Williams and Forrest, 9–26. Cunningham, Bernadette, The World of Geoffrey Keating, paperback edn. (Dublin, 2004). Cunningham, Jack  P., ‘ “A Little World without the World”: Ecclesiastical Foundation Myths in English Reformation Thought’, Journal of Anglican Studies, 9 (2011), 198–222. Curran, Jr., John E., Roman Invasions: The British History, Protestant Anti-Romanism, and the Historical Imagination in England, 1530–1660 (Newark, DE, 2002). Cyfoeth y Testun: Ysgrifau ar Lenyddiaeth Gymraeg yr Oesoedd Canol, ed. Iestyn Daniel, Marged Haycock, Dafydd Johnston, and Jenny Rowland (Cardiff, 2003).

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404  Bibliography of Works Cited Cyfranc Lludd a Llefelys, ed. Brynley F. Roberts (Dublin, 1975). Cyfrinach Beirdd Ynys Prydain: ys ef Llwybreiddiaeth ag Athroniaeth ar y Farddoniaeth Gymraeg a’i Pherthynasau, yn ol Trefn a Dosparth y Prif Feirdd gynt ar y Gelfyddyd wrth Gerdd Dafod, ed. Taliesin Williams (Swansea, 1829). “Cymru Fu:” yn Cynwys Hanesion, Traddodiadau, yn nghyda Chwedlau a Damhegion Cymreig [comp. Isaac Foulkes] (Liverpool, 1864). Cymry Enwog: Bywgraffiadau Byrion a Baratowyd dan Nawdd Adran Gymreig y Bwrdd Addysg a Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru [ed. Wynn P. Wheldon] (Cardiff, 1944). Dafydd, Miriam, ‘A Museum by the People for the People? A Review of St Fagans National Museum of History’s New Galleries’, Science Museum Group Journal, 13 (Spring 2020), unpaginated. Daunton, M.  J., Review of Morgan, Rebirth of a Nation, English Historical Review, 97 (1982), 160–1. Davies, Caryl, Adfeilion Babel: Agweddau ar Syniadaeth Ieithyddol y Ddeunawfed Ganrif (Cardiff, 2000). Davies, Ceri, ‘Introduction: John Davies and Renaissance Humanism’, in Dr John Davies, ed. Davies, 1–16. Davies, Ceri, Latin Writers of the Renaissance (Cardiff, 1981). Davies, Ceri, ‘The Sixteenth-Century Latin Translation of Historia Gruffud vab Kenan’, in Gruffudd ap Cynan, ed. Maund, 157–64. [Davies, D. Charles], ‘Hanesiaeth’, Y Traethodydd, 21 (1866), 454–68. Davies, D.  Hywel, The Welsh Nationalist Party 1925–1945: A Call to Nationhood (Cardiff, 1983). Davies, D. J., The Economic History of South Wales Prior to 1800 (Cardiff, 1933). Davies, D. J., Towards Welsh Freedom, ed. Ceinwen Thomas (Cardiff, 1958). Davies, D. Stephen, Y Cymro: sef Llyfr y Wladfa Gymreig Patagonia (New York, 1872). Davies, Damian Walford, ‘Williams, David (1738–1816)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Davies, E. T., Religion and Society in the Nineteenth Century (Llandybïe, 1981). Davies, Elizabeth Mary, Storïau o Hanes Cymru: Llyfr I (Cardiff, 1930). Davies, Gareth Alban, ‘Wales, Patagonia, and the Printed Word: The Missionary Role of the Press’, Llafur, 6/4 (1995), 44–59. Davies, Hazel, ‘Boundaries: The Early Travel Books and Periodicals of O. M. Edwards’, in A Guide to Welsh Literature, ed. Edwards, 186–209. Davies, Hazel, O. M. Edwards (Cardiff, 1988). Davies, Hazel, O.M.: Cofiant Syr Owen Morgan Edwards (Llandysul, 2020). Davies, Hywel M., Transatlantic Brethren: Rev. Samuel Jones (1735–1814) and His Friends: Baptists in Wales, Pennsylvania, and Beyond (Bethlehem, PA, 1995). Davies, Hywel  M., ‘Wales in English Travel Writing, 1791–8: The Welsh Critique of Theophilus Jones’, Welsh History Review, 23/3 (2007), 65–93. Davies, Irene Myrddin, Everyday Life in Wales. Book Three: From Norman Castle to Tudor Mansion (Aberystwyth, 1951). Davies, Irene Myrddin, Welsh History: A Handbook for Teachers (Cardiff [1947]). Davies, J.  Conway, ‘The Records of the Abbey of Ystrad Marchell’, Montgomeryshire Transactions, 51 (1949–50), 3–22. Davies, John, Antiquae Linguae Britannicae, Nunc vulgò dictae Cambro-Britannicae, A suis Cymraecae vel Cambricae, Ab aliis Wallicae, et Lingvae Latinae, Dictionarium Duplex (London, 1632). D[avies], J[ohn], The Civil Warres of Great Britain and Ireland (London, 1661).

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Bibliography of Works Cited  405 Davies, John, Cardiff and the Marquesses of Bute (Cardiff, 1981). Davies, John, Hanes Cymru (London, 1990). Davies, John, A History of Wales (London, 1993; revd. edn., 2007). Davies, John, ‘Victoria and Victorian Wales’, in Politics and Society in Wales, 1840–1922: Essays in Honour of Ieuan Gwynedd Jones, ed. Geraint H. Jenkins and J. Beverley Smith (Cardiff, 1988), 7–28. Davies, John Reuben, The Book of Llandaf and the Norman Church in Wales (Woodbridge, 2003). Davies, John Reuben, ‘Cathedrals and the Cult of Saints in Eleventh and Twelfth Century Wales’, in Cathedrals, Communities and Conflict in the Anglo-Norman World, ed. Paul Dalton, Charles Insley, and Louise J. Wilkinson (Woodbridge, 2011), 99–115. Davies, John Reuben, ‘The Cult of Saints in the Early Welsh March: Aspects of Cultural Transmission in a Time of Political Conflict’, in The English Isles: Cultural Transmission and Political Conflict in Britain and Ireland, 1100–1500, ed. Seán Duffy and Susan Doran (Dublin, 2013), 37–55. Davies, John Reuben, ‘The Saints of South Wales and the Welsh Church’, in Local Saints and Local Churches in the Early Medieval West, ed. Alan Thacker and Richard Sharpe (Oxford, 2002), 361–95. Davies, John Reuben, ‘Some Observations on the “Nero”, “Digby”, and “Vespasian” Recensions of Vita S. David’, in St David of Wales, ed. Evans and Wooding, 156–60. Davies, Luned Mair, ‘The Tregaer Manuscript: An Elegy for Charles I’, National Library of Wales Journal, 31/3 (2000), 243–70. Davies, Michael and Sean, The Last King of Wales: Gruffudd ap Llywelyn c.1013–1063 (Stroud, 2012). Davies, R. R., Beth Yw’r Ots Gennyf I am—Brydain? (Aberystwyth, 1999). Davies, R. R., Conquest, Coexistence, and Change: Wales 1063–1415 (Oxford, 1987). Davies, R.  R., Domination and Conquest: The Experience of Ireland, Scotland and Wales 1100–1300 (Cambridge, 1990). Davies, R. R., ‘The English State and the “Celtic” Peoples 1100–1400’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 6/1 (1993), 1–14. Davies, R. R., The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles 1093–1343 (Oxford, 2000). Davies, R. R., Historical Perception: Celts and Saxons (Cardiff, 1979). Davies, R.  R., ‘The Identity of “Wales” in the Thirteenth Century’, in From Medieval to Modern Wales, ed. Davies and Jenkins, 45–63. Davies, R.  R., ‘In Praise of British History’, in The British Isles 1100–1500: Comparisons, Contrasts and Connections, ed. R. R. Davies (Edinburgh, 1988), 9–26. Davies, Rees, ‘Kinsmen, Neighbours and Communities in Wales and the Western British Isles, c.1100–c.1400’, in Law, Laity and Solidarities: Essays in Honour of Susan Reynolds, ed. Pauline Stafford, Janet L. Nelson, and Jane Martindale (Manchester, 2001), 172–87. Davies, R. R., ‘Lloyd, Sir John Edward (1861–1947)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Davies, R. R., Lords and Lordship in the British Isles in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Brendan Smith (Oxford, 2009). Davies, R. R., Lordship and Society in the March of Wales 1282–1400 (Oxford, 1978). Davies, R. Rees, ‘Marc Bloch’, Taliesin, 11 (1965), 68–75. Davies, R. R., ‘Marc Bloch’, History, 52 (1967), 265–82. Davies, Rees, The Matter of Britain and the Matter of England (Oxford, 1996). Davies, R.  R., ‘On Being Welsh: A Historian’s Viewpoint’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, new series, 9 (2003), 29–40.

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406  Bibliography of Works Cited Davies, Rees, Owain Glyn Dŵr: Hanes a Chof Gwlad (n.p., 1995). Davies, R. R., ‘The Peoples of Britain and Ireland, 1100–1400: IV Language and Historical Mythology’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 7 (1997), 1–24. Davies, R. R., The Revolt of Owain Glyn Dŵr (Oxford, 1995). Davies, R. Rees, ‘’Sgrifennu Hanes Cymru yn y Gymraeg’, Y Faner, 18 September 1981, 6–7. Davies, R. Rees, ‘Teyrnged Ymarferol i R. T. Jenkins’, Y Faner, 25 September 1981, 14–15. Davies, Rhys, The Story of Wales (London, 1943). Davies, Russell, Hope and Heartbreak: A Social History of Wales and the Welsh, 1776–1871 (Cardiff, 2005). Davies, T., Crynodeb o Hanes y Cymry (Llanelli, 1853). Davies, Wendy, An Early Welsh Microcosm: Studies in the Llandaff Charters (London, 1978). Davies, Wendy, The Llandaff Charters (Aberystwyth, 1979). Davies, Wendy, ‘Looking Backwards to the Early Medieval Past: Wales and England, a Contrast in Approaches’, Welsh History Review, 22/2 (2004), 197–221. Davies, Wendy, Patterns of Power in Early Wales (Oxford, 1990). Davies, Wendy, ‘Property Rights and Property Claims in Welsh Vitae of the Eleventh Century’, in Hagiographie, cultures et sociétés IVe–XIIe siècles, ed. Eveleyn Patlagean and Pierre Riché (Paris, 1981), 515–33. Davies, Wendy, Wales in the Early Middle Ages (Leicester, 1982). Davies, Wynford, The Curriculum and Organization of the County Intermediate Schools 1800–1926 (Cardiff, 1989). Davis, Natalie Zemon, ‘Women and the World of the “Annales” ’, History Workshop, 33 (1992), 121–37. Dawkins, W. Boyd, Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period (London, 1880). Day, Graham, Howard Davis, and Angela Drakakis-Smith, ‘ “There’s One Shop You Don’t Go Into If You Are English”: The Social and Political Integration of English Migrants into Wales’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 36/9 (2010), 1405–23. Deakin, Q. E., ‘The Early County Historians of Wales and Western England c.1570–1656’ (PhD Thesis, University of Wales, 1982). Dearnley, Moira, ‘ “Mad Ned” and the “Smatter-Dasher”: Iolo Morganwg and Edward “Celtic” Davies’, in A Rattleskull Genius, ed. Jenkins, 425–42. Debating Nationhood and Governance in Britain, 1885–1945: Perspectives from the ‘Four Nations’, ed. Duncan Tanner, Chris Williams, Wil Griffith, and Andrew Edwards (Manchester, 2006). [Defoe, Daniel], A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, 3 vols. (London, 1724–6). Degrees of Influence: A Memorial Volume for Glanmor Williams, ed. Geraint H. Jenkins and Gareth Elwyn Jones (Cardiff, 2008). de Hirsch-Davies, J. E., Catholicism in Mediæval Wales (London, 1916). [Derfel, R. J.], ‘Cymru yn ei Chysylltiad ag Enwogion’, Y Traethodydd, 11 (1855), 322–59. Dickinson, H.  T., Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London, 1977). Dictionary of Welsh Biography, online edition, https://biography.wales (last accessed 17 September 2021). The Digest of Justinian, ed. Theodor Mommsen and Paul Krueger, trans. Alan Watson, 4 vols. (Philadelphia, PA, 1985). Dixon, Philip, ‘Edwards, Jonathan (1638/9–1712)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Dodd, A. H., The Character of the Early Welsh Emigration to the United States (Cardiff, 1953).

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Bibliography of Works Cited  407 Dodd, A. H., ‘ “A Commendacion of Welshmen” ’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, 19/3 (1961), 235–49. Dodd, A.  H., ‘The Early Days of Edward Lhuyd’, National Library of Wales Journal, 6/3 (1950), 305–6. Dodd, A. H., The Industrial Revolution in North Wales (Cardiff, 1933). Dodd, Arthur Herbert, ‘Palmer, Alfred Neobard (1847–1915)’, Dictionary of Welsh Biography. Dodd, A. H., Studies in Stuart Wales (Cardiff, 1952). Dodd, A. H., ‘Welsh History and Historians in the Twentieth Century’, in Celtic Studies in Wales: A Survey, ed. Elwyn Davies (Cardiff, 1963), 49–70. Dodderidge, John, The History of the Ancient and Moderne Estate of the Principality of Wales, Dutchy of Cornewall, and Earldome of Chester (London, 1630). Dodridge, John, An Historical Account of the Ancient and Modern State of the Principality of Wales, Dutchy of Cornwal, and Earldom of Chester, 2nd edn. (London, 1714). Doggett, Nicholas, ‘Willis, Browne (1682–1760)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Donnelly, J.  S., ‘Dedication’, in Studies in Medieval Cistercian History Presented to Jeremiah F. O’Sullivan (Shannon, 1971), ix–xi. Douglas, David C., English Scholars (London, 1939). Dr John Davies of Mallwyd: Welsh Renaissance Scholar, ed. Ceri Davies (Cardiff, 2004). Ducheyne, Steffen, ‘The Status of Theory and Hypotheses’, in The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Peter R. Anstey (Oxford, 2013), 167–91. Duffy, Seán, ‘Ostmen, Irish and Welsh in the Eleventh Century’, Peritia, 9 (1995), 378–96. Dugdale, William, The Antiquities of Warwickshire (London, 1656). Dugdale, William, The Baronage of England, 3 vols. in 1 (London, 1675–6). Dumville, David N., Celtic Essays, 2001–2007, 2 vols. (Aberdeen, 2007). Dumville, David  N., ‘Celtic-Latin Texts in Northern England, c.1150–c.1250’, Celtica, 12 (1977), 19–49. Dumville, David N., ‘Historia Brittonum: An Insular History from the Carolingian Age’, in Historiographie im frühen Mittelalter, ed. Anton Scharer and Georg Scheibelreiter, Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, 32 (Vienna, 1994), 406–34. Dumville, David N., ‘The Historical Value of the Historia Brittonum’, Arthurian Literature, 6 (1986), 1–26. “Nennius” and the Historia Brittonum’, Studia Celtica, 10–11 Dumville, David  N., ‘  (1975–6), 78–95. Dumville, David N., ‘The Origin of the C-Text of the Variant Version of the Historia Regum Britanniae’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, 26 (1974–5), 315–22. Dumville, David  N., Review of Kathleen Hughes, The Welsh Latin Chronicles, Studia Celtica, 12/13 (1977–8), 461–7. Dumville, David  N., ‘Sub-Roman Britain: History and Legend’, History, new series, 62 (1977), 173–92. Dumville, David Norman, ‘The Textual History of the Welsh-Latin Historia Brittonum’, 3 vols. (PhD Thesis, Edinburgh University, 1975). Durban, Michael, ‘Cavendish, William, Fifth Duke of Devonshire (1748–1811)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Dyer, Christopher, ‘Modern Perspectives on Medieval Welsh Towns’, in Wales and the Welsh in the Middle Ages, ed. Griffiths and Schofield, 163–79. Early Welsh Genealogical Tracts, ed. P. C. Bartrum (Cardiff, 1966).

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408  Bibliography of Works Cited Edwards, Andrew, Labour’s Crisis: Plaid Cymru, The Conservatives, and the Decline of the Labour Party in North-West Wales, 1960–74 (Cardiff, 2011). Edwards, Andrew, and Wil Griffith, ‘Welsh National Identity and Governance, 1918–45’, in Debating Nationhood and Governance in Britain, ed. Tanner et al., 118–45. Edwards, Charles, Fatherly Instructions: Being Select Pieces of the Writings of the Primitive Christian Teachers. Translated into English. With an Appendix Entitled Gildas Minimus (London, 1686). Edwards, Charles, Y Ffydd Ddi-ffuant, sef Hanes y Ffydd Gristianogol a’i Rhinwedd, ed. G. J. Williams (Cardiff, 1936). Edwards, Hywel Teifi, The Eisteddfod (Cardiff, 1990). Edwards, Hywel Teifi, ‘ “Gosodir Ni yn Îs na Phawb”: Cymru Victoria ar Drywydd Enwogrwydd’, in Gweledigaethau: Cyfrol Deyrnged Yr Athro Gwyn Thomas, ed. Jason Walford Davies (Llandybïe, 2007), 159–72. Edwards, Hywel Teifi, Gŵyl Gwalia: Yr Eisteddfod Genedlaethol yn Oes Aur Victoria 1858–1868 (Llandysul, 1980). Edwards, Hywel Teifi, ‘John Rhŷs yn Achos Trafferth’, Y Traethodydd, 161/678 (2006), 162–86. Edwards, Hywel Teifi, The National Pageant of Wales (Llandysul, 2009). Edwards, Ifan ab Owen, A Catalogue of Star Chamber Proceedings Relating to Wales (Cardiff, 1929). Edwards, J. Goronwy, ‘Hanesyddiaeth Gymreig yn yr Ugeinfed Ganrif ’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1953, 21–31. Edwards, J. Hugh, The Life of David Lloyd George with a Short History of the Welsh People, 4 vols. (London [1913–17]). Edwards, Morgan, Materials towards a History of the American Baptists, in XII Volumes (Philadelphia, 1770). Edwards, Morgan, Materials towards a History of the Baptists in Jersey (Philadelphia, 1792). Edwards, Nancy, A Corpus of Early Medieval Inscribed Stones and Stone Sculpture in Wales. Volume III: North Wales (Cardiff, 2013). Edwards, Nancy, ‘Edward Lhuyd: An Archaeologist’s View’, Welsh History Review, 25/1 (2010), 20–50. Edwards, Nancy, ‘Edward Lhuyd and the Origins of Early Medieval Celtic Archaeology’, Antiquaries Journal, 87 (2007), 165–96. Edwards, Nancy, and John Gould, ‘From Antiquarians to Archaeologists in NineteenthCentury Wales: The Question of Prehistory’, in Writing a Small Nation’s Past, ed. Evans and Pryce, 143–63. Edwards, Owen M., Cartrefi Cymru (Wrexham, 1896). Edwards, Owen M., ‘Cymru’, Cymru, 1 (1891), 1–3. Edwards, Owen  M., Holi ac Ateb ar Hanes Cymru (Wrexham, 1895) (1st edn. Llanuwchllyn, 1892). Edwards, Owen M., O’r Bala i Geneva (Bala, 1889). Edwards, Owen  M., ‘Rhagair’, in Theophilus Evans, Drych y Prif Oesoedd (Caernarfon, 1898), [5]–7. Edwards, Owen M., ‘Rhagymadrodd’, Cymru, 1 (1891), [i]. Edwards, Owen M., A Short History of Wales (2nd imp., London, 1909). Edwards, Owen M., Trem ar Hanes Cymru (Llanuwchllyn, 1893). Edwards, Owen M., Wales (London, 1901). Ellis, E. L., The University College of Wales, Aberystwyth 1872–1972 (Cardiff, 1972).

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410  Bibliography of Works Cited Evans, D.  Ellis, ‘Theophilus Evans ar Hanes Cynnar Prydain’, Y Traethodydd, 128/547 (1973), 92–113. Evans, Dylan Foster, ‘Welsh Traitors in a Scottish Chronicle: Dafydd ap Gruffudd, Penwyn and the Transmission of National Memory’, Studia Celtica, 52 (2018), 137–55. Evans, Evan, ‘Cywydd Marwnad Lewis Morys, Yswain’, in Gwaith y Parchedig Evan Evans, ed. Evans, 87–92. Evans, Evan, Gwaith y Parchedig Evan Evans (Ieuan Brydydd Hir), ed. D.  Silvan Evans (Caernarfon, 1876). [Evans, Evan], ‘The Love of Our Country, A Poem, with Historical Notes’, in Gwaith y Parchedig Evan Evans, ed. Evans, 129–45. Evans, Evan, Some Specimens of the Poetry of the Antient Welsh Bards (London, 1764). Evans, Evan Lewis, ‘William, Thomas (1697–1778)’, Dictionary of Welsh Biography. Evans, G. Nesta, Religion and Politics in Mid-Eighteenth Century Anglesey (Cardiff, 1953). Evans, G. Nesta, Social Life in Mid-Eighteenth Century Anglesey (Cardiff, 1936). Evans, Gwynfor, Aros Mae (Swansea, 1971). Evans, Gwynfor, Land of My Fathers: 2000 Years of Welsh History (Swansea, 1974). Evans, H. T., Wales and the Wars of the Roses (Cambridge, 1915; new edn., Stroud, 1995). Evans, Howell T., The Making of Modern Wales (Cardiff [1913]). Evans, J. Gwenogvryn, Report on Manuscripts in the Welsh Language, 2 vols. in 7, Historical Manuscripts Commission, 48 (London, 1898–1910). Evans, J. Wyn, ‘Bishops of St Davids from Bernard to Bec’, in Pembrokeshire County History, ii. Medieval Pembrokeshire, ed. R. F. Walker (Haverfordwest, 2002), 270–311. Evans, John, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Rev. William Richards, LL.D. (Chiswick, 1819). Evans, Neil, ‘Beyond 1282: A.  H.  Dodd and the Problem of Modern Welsh History’, in Writing a Small Nation’s Past, ed. Evans and Pryce, 223–36. Evans, Neil, ‘Casting Nets: Modern Wales’, in Degrees of Influence, ed. Jenkins and Jones, 85–100. Evans, Neil, ‘Finding a New Story: The Search for a Usable Past in Wales, 1869–1930’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, new series, 10 (2004), 144–62. Evans, Neil, ‘How White Was My Valley? Immigrants and Minorities in Modern Wales’, Llafur, 12/4 (2019–20), 68–94. Evans, Neil, ‘Immigrants and Minorities in Wales, 1840–1990: A Comparative Perspective’, in A Tolerant Nation?, ed. Williams et al., revd. edn. (2015), 24–50. Evans, Neil, ‘Labouring Men, Protesting People: The Past, Present and Future of Labour History in Wales’, Scottish Labour History, 55 (2020), 247–58. Evans, Neil, ‘Remaking Nations and their Histories: The Social, Political and Intellectual World of the Powysland Club’, Montgomeryshire Collections, 109 (2021), 45–86. Evans, Neil, ‘The South Wales Race Riots of 1919’, Llafur, 3/2 (1980), 5–29. Evans, Neil, ‘Through the Prism of Ethnic Violence: Riots and Racial Attacks in Wales, 1826–2014’, in A Tolerant Nation?, ed. Williams et al., revd. edn. (2015), 128–52. Evans, Neil, ‘ “When Men and Mountains Meet”: Historians’ Explanations of the History of Wales, 1890–1970’, Welsh History Review, 22/4 (2004), 222–51. Evans, Neil, ‘Writing the Social History of Modern Wales: Approaches, Achievements, and Problems’, Social History, 17/3 (1992), 479–92. Evans, Neil, ‘Writing Wales in to the Empire: Rhetoric, Fragments—and Beyond?’, in Wales and the British Overseas Empire: Interactions and Influences, 1650–1830, ed. H. V. Bowen (Manchester, 2011), 15–39.

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Bibliography of Works Cited  411 Evans, Neil, and Mari Williams, ‘Editorial’, Llafur, 8/1 (2000), 3–4. Evans, Robert, ‘Cymru a’r Byd yn y Pedwaredd [sic] Ganrif ar Bymtheg: Y Gwyddoniadur Cymreig’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, new series, 20 (2014), 6–17. Evans, R. J. W., ‘ “The Manuscripts”: The Culture and Politics of Forgery in Central Europe’, in A Rattleskull Genius, ed. Jenkins, 51–68. Evans, R. J. W., ‘National Historiography, 1850–1950: The European Context’, in Writing a Small Nation’s Past, ed. Evans and Pryce, 31–47. Evans, R. J. W., ‘Nonconformity and Nation: The Welsh Case’, Welsh History Review, 25/2 (2010), 231–8. Evans, R. J. W., ‘Was There a Welsh Enlightenment?’, in From Medieval to Modern Wales, ed. Davies and Jenkins, 142–59. Evans, R.  Paul, ‘Reverend John Lloyd of Caerwys (1733–93): Historian, Antiquarian and Genealogist’, Flintshire Historical Society Journal, 31 (1983–4), 109–24. Evans, R.  Paul, ‘ “A Round Jump from Ornithology to Antiquity”: The Development of Thomas Pennant’s Tours’, in Enlightenment Travel, ed. Constantine and Leask, 15–37. Evans, R.  Paul, ‘Thomas Pennant (1726–1798): The Father of Cambrian Tourists’, Welsh History Review, 13/4 (1987), 395–417. Evans, Theophilus, ‘The Crown of England’s Title to America Prior to that of Spain’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 10 (March 1740), 103–5. Evans, Theophilus, Drych y Prif Oesoedd (Caernarfon, 1898). Evans, Theophilus, Drych y Prif Oesoedd. Yn ôl Argraffiad Cyntaf: 1716, ed. Garfield H. Hughes (Cardiff, 1961). Evans, Theophilus, Drych y Prif Oesoedd (Second or 1740 Edition), ed. Samuel  J.  Evans (Bangor, 1902). Evans, Theophilus, A View of the Primitive Ages, trans. George Roberts (Ebensburgh, PA, 1834). Evans, Thomas, The Background of Modern Welsh Politics 1789–1846 (Cardiff, 1936). Evans, W. Gareth, Education and Female Emancipation: The Welsh Experience, 1847–1947 (Cardiff, 1990). The Extent of Chirkland (1391–1393), ed. G. P. Jones (Liverpool, 1933). Famous Welshmen [ed. Wynn P. Wheldon] (Cardiff, 1944). Faral, Edmond, La légende Arthurienne: Études et documents, 3 vols. (Paris, 1929). Farrell, Jennifer, ‘History, Prophecy and the Arthur of the Normans: The Question of Audience and Motivation behind Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae’, Anglo-Norman Studies, 37 (2015), 99–114. Fenton, Richard, A Historical Tour through Pembrokeshire (London, 1811). Fenton, Richard, Tours in Wales, ed. John Fisher (London, 1917). Ffransis, Ffred, ‘Traethawd Siôn Dafydd Rhys ar Wiredd Hanes Sieffre o Fynwy’, NLW MSS 21825E–21826E [1973–4]. Fieldhouse, Roger, et al., A History of Modern British Adult Education (Leicester, 1996). Finnegan, Rachel, ‘The Library of William Ponsonby, 2nd Earl of Bessborough, 1704–93’, Hermathenea, 181 (2006), 149–87. Firth, C. H., Modern History in Oxford, 1841–1918 (Oxford, 1920). Fisher, Matthew, ‘Vernacular Historiography’, in Medieval Historical Writing, ed. Jahner et al., 339–55. Flanagan, Marie Therese, ‘Historia Gruffud vab Kenan and the Origins of Balrothery, Co. Dublin’, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies, 28 (1994), 71–94. Fleure, H. J., ‘Human Regions’, Scottish Geographical Magazine, 35/3 (1919), 94–105.

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412  Bibliography of Works Cited Fleure, H. J., ‘Preface’, in E. G. Bowen, Wales: A Study in Geography and History (Cardiff, 1941), xiii–xvi. Fleure, H. J., Wales and Her People (Wrexham, 1926). Flower, Robin, ‘Richard Davies, William Cecil, and Giraldus Cambrensis’, National Library of Wales Journal, 3/1–2 (1943), 11–14. Flower, Robin, ‘William Salesbury, Richard Davies, and Archbishop Parker’, National Library of Wales Journal, 2/1 (1941), 7–16. Fœdera, Conventiones, Literæ, et Cujuscunque Generis Acta Publica, ed. Thomas Rymer, 20 vols. (London, 1704–35). Foot, Sarah, ‘Finding the Meaning of Form: Narrative in Annals and Chronicles’, in Writing Medieval History, ed. Nancy Partner (London, 2005), 88–108. Ford, Alan, James Ussher: Theology, History, and Politics in Early-Modern Ireland and England (Oxford, 2007). Ford, Lisa L., ‘Using Britain’s Past’, in Enlightened Princesses: Caroline, Augusta, Charlotte, and the Shaping of the Modern World, ed. Joanna Marschner (New Haven, CT, 2017), 219–27. Ford, Patrick  J., ‘The Death of Merlin in the Chronicle of Elis Gruffydd’, Viator, 7 (1976), 379–90. Forde, C.  Daryll, ‘Human Geography, History and Sociology’, Scottish Geographical Magazine, 54/9 (1939), 217–35. Fox, Adam, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2002). Fox, Adam, ‘Printed Questionnaires, Research Networks, and the Discovery of the British Isles, 1650–1800’, Historical Journal, 53 (2010), 593–621. Fox, Adam, ‘Remembering the Past in Early Modern England: Oral and Written Tradition’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 9 (1999), 233–56. Fox, Cyril, The Personality of Britain: Its Influence on Inhabitant and Invader in Prehistoric and Early Historic Times (Cardiff, 1932). Frame, Robin, The Political Development of the British Isles 1100–1400 (Oxford, 1990). Francis, Hywel, and Dai Smith, The Fed: A History of the South Wales Miners in the Twentieth Century (London, 1980; 2nd edn., Cardiff, 1998). Franklin, James, ‘Probable Opinion’, in The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Peter R. Anstey (Oxford, 2013), 349–72. Fraser, John, revd. Mari A. Williams, ‘Rhŷs (formerly Rees), Sir John (1840–1915)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Freeman, Elizabeth, Narratives of a New Order: Cistercian Historical Writing in England, 1150–1220 (Turnhout, 2002). Freeman, Michael, ‘In Search of the Picturesque in Wales 1770–1830’, The Picturesque, 70 (2010), 2–27. Freeman, Peter, ‘The Revd Richard Williams Morgan and His Writings’, Montgomeryshire Collections, 88 (2000), 87–93. Friedman, Susan  W., Marc Bloch, Sociology and Geography: Encountering Changing Disciplines (Cambridge, 1996). Fritze, Ronald H., ‘Powel [Powell], David (1549x52–1598)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. From Medieval to Modern Wales: Historical Essays in Honour of Kenneth O. Morgan and Ralph A. Griffiths, ed. R. R. Davies and Geraint H. Jenkins (Cardiff, 2004). Fuller, Thomas, ‘The Principality of Wales’, in The Worthies of England (London, 1662), paginated separately, 1–60.

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Bibliography of Works Cited  413 Fulton, Helen, ‘Literary Networks and Patrons in Late Medieval Wales’, in The Cambridge History of Welsh Literature, ed. Evans and Fulton, 129–53. Fulton, Helen, ‘Troy Story: The Medieval Welsh Ystorya Dared and the Brut Tradition of British History’, The Medieval Chronicle, 7 (2011), 137–50. G.  R., ‘Drych Cristianogawl: Yn yr Hwn y Dichon Pob Cristiawn Ganfod Gwreiddin a Dechreuad Pob Daioni Sprydawl’, in Rhagymadroddion 1547–1659, ed. Hughes, 49–62. Gaffney, Angela, ‘ “A National Valhalla for Wales”: D. A. Thomas and the Welsh Historical Sculpture Scheme, 1910–1916’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, new series, 5 (1999), 131–44. Gaillou, Patrick, and Michael Jones, The Bretons (Oxford, 1991). Galloway, Bruce, The Union of England and Scotland, 1603–1608 (Edinburgh, 1986). Geary, Patrick J., The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, NJ, 2002). Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru/Dictionary of the Welsh Language, https://geiriadur.ac.uk/gpc/ gpc.html (last accessed 13 September 2021). Geirlyfr Bywgraffiadol o Enwogion Cymru, ed. Isaac Foulkes (Liverpool, 1870). Gentry, Kynan, ‘Ruskin, Radicalism and Raphael Samuel: Politics, Pedagogy and the Origins of the History Workshop’, History Workshop Journal, 76 (2013), 187–211. Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain: An Edition and Translation of De gestis Britonum [Historia Regum Britanniae], ed. Michael D. Reeve and trans. Neil Wright (Woodbridge, 2007). George, H. B., The Relations of Geography & History (Oxford, 1901). Gerald of Wales, Descriptio Kambriae, ed. James F. Dimock, Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, vol. 6 (Rolls Series, London, 1868). Gerald of Wales, Itinerarium Kambriae, ed. James  F.  Dimock, Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, vol. 6 (London, 1868). Gerald of Wales: New Perspectives on a Medieval Writer and Critic, ed. Georgia Henley and A. Joseph McMullen (Cardiff, 2018). Gerrard, Christine, ‘Queens-in-Waiting: Caroline of Anspach and Augusta of Saxe-Gotha as Princesses of Wales’, in Queenship in Britain, 1660–1837: Royal Patronage, Court Culture and Dynastic Politics, ed. Clarissa Campbell Orr (Manchester, 2002), 143–61. Gesta Stephani, ed. and trans. K. R. Potter, revd. R. H. C. Davis (Oxford, 1976). Gibson, William, ‘Thomas Frederick Tout at Lampeter: The Making of a Historian’, in Thomas Frederick Tout, ed. Barron and Rosenthal, 25–39. Gildas, ed. Hugh Williams, 2 vols. (London, 1899–1901). Gildas, De Excidio Britanniae, ed. and trans. Michael Winterbottom, Gildas: The Ruin of Britain and Other Sources (Chichester, 1978). Gillespie, Alexandra, and Oliver Harris, ‘Holinshed and the Native Chronicle Tradition’, in The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed’s Chronicles, ed. Kewes et al., 135–52. Gillingham, John, The English in the Twelfth Century (Woodbridge, 2000). Given, James, State and Society in Medieval Europe: Gwynedd and Languedoc under Outside Rule (Ithaca, NY, 1990). Given-Wilson, Chris, Chronicles: The Writing of History in Medieval England (London, 2004). Glasgow, Eric, ‘The Origins of the Home University Library’, Library Review, 50/2 (2001), 95–8. [Glover, R.], Leonidas, A Poem (London, 1737). Goetz, Hans-Werner, Geschichtsschreibung und Geschichtsbewußtsein im hohen Mittelalter, 2nd edn. (Berlin, 2008).

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414  Bibliography of Works Cited Goetz, Hans-Werner, ‘The “Methodology” of Medieval Chronicles’, in Chronicon: Medieval Narrative Sources, ed. János M.  Bak and Ivan Jurković (Turnhout 2013), 25–33. Goetz, Hans-Werner, ‘Von der res gesta zur narratio rerum gestarum. Anmerkungen zu Methoden und Hilfswissenchaften des mittelalterlichen Geschichtsschreibers’, Revue Belge de philologie et d’histoire, 67 (1989), 695–713. Goffart, Walter, The Narrators of Barbarian History (A.D.  550–800): Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, Bede, and Paul the Deacon (Princeton, NJ, 1988). Gooberman, Leon, From Depression to Devolution: Economy and Government in Wales, 1934–2006 (Cardiff, 2017). Gordon, Bruce, ‘The Changing Face of Protestant History and Identity in the Sixteenth Century’, in Protestant History and Identity in Sixteenth-Century Europe, ed. Bruce Gordon, 2 vols. (Aldershot, 1996), 1: 1–22. Gosodedigaethau Anrhydeddus Gymdeithas y Cymmrodorion yn Llundain/Constitutions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion in London (London, 1755). Gough-Cooper, Henry, ‘Decennovenal Reason and Unreason in the C-Text of Annales Cambriae’, The Medieval Chronicle, 11 (2017), 195–212. Gower, Jon, The Story of Wales (London, 2012). Grabowski, Kathryn, and D. N. Dumville, Chronicles and Annals in Mediaeval Ireland and Wales: The Clonmacnoise-group Texts (Woodbridge, 1984). Grafton, Anthony, The Footnote: A Curious History (London, 1997). Grafton, Anthony, ‘Invention of Tradition and Traditions of Invention: The Strange Case of Annius of Viterbo’, in The Transmission of Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Grafton and Ann Blair (Philadelphia, 1998), 8–38. Grafton, Anthony, What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2007). Grafton, Richard, A Chronicle at Large and Meere History of the Affayres of Englande and Kinges of the Same (London, 1569). Gramadegau’r Penceirddiaid, ed. G. J. Williams and E. J. Jones (Cardiff, 1934). Gramich, Katie, ‘Narrating the Nation: Telling Stories of Wales’, North American Journal of Welsh Studies, 6/1 (2011), 2–19. Gransden, Antonia, Historical Writing in England c.550 to c.1307 (London, 1974). Gransden, Antonia, Historical Writing in England II: c.1307 to the Early Sixteenth Century (London, 1996). Grant, Angela, ‘The View from the Fountain Head: The Rise and Fall of John Gwenogvryn Evans’ (D.Phil. Thesis, University of Oxford, 2018). Grant, Raymond  K.  J., ‘Merthyr Tydfil in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: The Struggle for Public Health’, Welsh History Review, 14/4 (1989), 574–94. Greene, Kevin, ‘V. Gordon Childe and the Vocabulary of Revolutionary Change’, Antiquity, 73 (1999), 77–109. Greengrass, Mark, and Matthew Philpott, ‘John Bale, John Foxe and the Reformation of the English Past’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 101 (2010), 275–88. Greengrass, Mark, and Matthias Pohlig, ‘Themenschwerpunkt / Focal Point: The Protestant Reformation and the Middle Ages: Preface’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 101 (2010), 233–7. Greenslade, S.  L., ‘The Faculty of Theology’, in The History of the University of Oxford. Volume III: The Collegiate University, ed. James McConica (Oxford, 1986), 295–334. Gresham, Colin A., ‘Sir John Wynn Historian and the Great Eifionydd Feud (with Notes by Nia  M.  W.  Powell)’, Transactions of the Caernarvonshire Historical Society, 51 (1990), 23–133.

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Bibliography of Works Cited  415 Griffith, Wil, ‘Devolutionist Tendencies in Wales, 1885–1914’, in Debating Nationhood and Governance in Britain, ed. Tanner et al., 89–117. Griffiths, G. M., ‘John Lewis of Llynwene’s Defence of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s “Historia” ’, National Library of Wales Journal, 7/3 (1952), 228–34. Griffiths, Griffith Milwyn, ‘Roberts, Richard Arthur (1851–1943)’, Dictionary of Welsh Biography. Griffiths, Gwyn, Henry Richard: Apostle of Peace and Welsh Patriot 1812–1888 (London, 2012). [Griffiths, Ralph  A.], ‘A Bibliography of David Williams’, Welsh History Review, 3/4 (1967), 473­–9. Griffiths, Ralph A., Conquerors and Conquered in Medieval Wales (Stroud, 1994). Griffiths, Ralph  A., ‘The Early Years and Wales’s History’, in Thomas Frederick Tout, ed. Barron and Rosenthal, 9–24. Griffiths, Ralph A., ‘Introduction’, in H. T. Evans, Wales and the Wars of the Roses, new edn. (Stroud, 1995), ix–xiii. Griffiths, Ralph A., The Principality of North Wales in the Later Middle Ages: The Structure and Personnel of Government, I. South Wales 1277–1536 (Cardiff, 1972). Griffiths, Ralph A., Sir Rhys ap Thomas and His Family: A Study in the Wars of the Roses and Early Tudor Politics (Cardiff, 1993). Griffiths, Ralph  A., ‘Stradling, Sir Edward (c.1529–1609)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Griffiths, Ralph  A., ‘Venturing into the “Jungle”: Late Medieval Wales in the Edwardian Age’, in Writing a Small Nation’s Past, ed. Evans and Pryce, 195–207. Griffiths, Ralph, ‘Wales’, in The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed’s Chronicles, ed. Kewes et al., 679–94. Griffiths, Ralph, ‘William Rees and the Modern Study of Medieval Wales’, in Wales and the Welsh in the Middle Ages, ed. Griffiths and Schofield, 203–20. Griffiths, Rhidian, ‘Cyfres y Brifysgol a’r Werin’, Y Casglwr, 24 (1984), 10. Gruffudd ap Cynan: A Collaborative Biography, ed. K. L. Maund (Woodbridge, 1996). Gruffudd, Pyrs, ‘Back to the Land: Historiography, Rurality and the Nation in Interwar Wales’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 19/1 (1994), 61–77. Gruffudd, Pyrs, ‘Remaking Wales: Nation-Building and the Geographical Imagination, 1925–50’, Political Geography, 14/3 (1995), 219–39. Gruffydd, R. Geraint, ‘The First Printed Books, 1546–1604’, in A Nation and its Books, ed. Jones and Rees, 55–65. Gruffydd, Geraint, ‘Humphrey Lhuyd a Deddf Cyfieithu’r Beibl i’r Gymraeg’, Llên Cymru, 4/2 (1956), 114–15; 4/4 (1957), 233. Gruffydd, R. Geraint, ‘Humphrey Llwyd of Denbigh: Some Documents and a Catalogue’, Transactions of the Denbighshire Historical Society, 17 (1968), 54–107. Gruffydd, R.  Geraint, ‘Humphrey Llwyd: Dyneiddiwr’, Efrydiau Athronyddol, 53 (1970), 57–74. Gruffydd, R. Geraint, ‘Print yn Dwyn Ffrwyth i’r Cymro: Yny Lhyvyr Hwnn, 1546’, Y Llyfr yng Nghymru/Welsh Book Studies, 1 (1998), 1–20. Gruffydd, R.  Geraint, ‘The Renaissance and Welsh Literature’, in The Celts and the Renaissance: Tradition and Innovation, ed. Glanmor Williams and Robert Owen Jones (Cardiff, 1990), 17–39. Gruffydd, R. Geraint, ‘Yny Lhyvyr Hwnn: The Earliest Welsh Printed Book’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, 23/2 (1969), 105–16. Guenée, Bernard, ‘Temps de l’histoire et temps de la mémoire au moyen âge’, AnnuaireBulletin de la Société de l’Histoire de France, 1976–7, 25–35.

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416  Bibliography of Works Cited Guest, Revel, and Angela  V.  John, Lady Charlotte Guest: An Extraordinary Life (Stroud, 2007). A Guide to Welsh Literature 1282–c.1550, ed. A. O. H. Jarman and Gwilym Rees Hughes, revd. Dafydd Johnston (Cardiff, 1997). A Guide to Welsh Literature c.1530–1700, ed. R. Geraint Gruffydd (Cardiff, 1997). A Guide to Welsh Literature c.1700–1800, ed. Branwen Jarvis (Cardiff, 2000). A Guide to Welsh Literature c.1800–1900, ed. Hywel Teifi Edwards (Cardiff, 2000). Guizot, F., The History of Civilization in Europe, trans. William Hazlitt [1846], ed. Larry Siedentop (London, 1997). Gunther, R.  T., Early Science in Oxford: Vol. XIV. Life and Letters of Edward Lhwyd (Oxford, 1945). Gurden-Williams, Celyn, ‘Lady Llanover and the Creation of a Welsh Cultural Utopia’ (PhD Thesis, Cardiff University, 2008). Guy, Ben, ‘Brut Ieuan Brechfa: A Welsh Poet Writes the Early Middle Ages’, in Chronicles of Medieval Wales, ed. Guy et al., 375–419. Guy, Ben, ‘Egerton Phillimore (1856–1937) and the Study of Welsh Historical Texts’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, new series, 21 (2015), 36–50. Guy, Ben, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Welsh Sources’, in A Companion to Geoffrey of Monmouth, ed. Henley and Smith, 31–66. Guy, Ben, ‘Gerald and Welsh Genealogical Learning’, in Gerald of Wales, ed. Henley and McMullen, 47–61. Guy, Ben, ‘Historical Scholars and Dishonest Charlatans: Studying the Chronicles of Medieval Wales’, in Chronicles of Medieval Wales, ed. Guy et al., 69–106. Guy, Ben, ‘The Life of St Dyfrig and the Lost Charters of Moccas (Mochros), Herefordshire’, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies, 75 (Summer 2018), 1–37. Guy, Ben, ‘A Lost Medieval Manuscript from North Wales: Hengwrt 33, the Hanesyn Hên’, Studia Celtica, 50 (2016), 69–105. Guy, Ben, Medieval Welsh Genealogy: An Introduction and Textual Study (Woodbridge, 2020). Guy, Ben, ‘The Origins of the Compilation of Welsh Historical Texts in Harley 3859’, Studia Celtica, 49 (2015), 21–56. Guy, Ben, Review of Llythyr Gildas a Dinistr Prydain, ed. and trans. Iestyn Daniel, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies, 80 (2020), 104–7. Guy, Ben, ‘Rheinwg: The Lost Kingdom of South Wales’, Peritia, 30 (2019), 97–121. Guy, Ben, ‘A Welsh Manuscript in America: Library Company of Philadelphia, 8680.O’, National Library of Wales Journal, 36/1 (2014), 1–26. Guy, Ben, ‘Writing Genealogy in Wales, c.1475–c.1640: Sources and Practitioners’, in Genealogical Knowledge in the Making: Tools, Practices, and Evidence in Early Modern Europe, ed. Jost Eickmeyer, Markus Friedrich, and Volker Bauer (Berlin, 2019), 99–125. Gweirydd ap Rhys [R. J. Pryse], Hanes y Brytaniaid a’r Cymry, 2 vols. (London, 1872–4). Y Gwladgarwr, 22 June 1861. Gwyn, John, Military Memoirs of the Great Civil War [ed. Walter Scott] (Edinburgh, 1822), 148–53. Gyda’r Wawr, ed. H. J. Fleure (Wrexham, 1923). Hackmann, Jörg, ‘Narrating the Building of a Small Nation: Divergence and Convergence in the Historiography of Estonian “National Awakening”, 1868–2005’, in Nationalizing the Past: Historians as Nation Builders in Modern Europe, ed. Stefan Berger and Chris Lorenz (Basingstoke, 2010), 170–91.

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Bibliography of Works Cited  417 Hadfield, Andrew, ‘Briton and Scythian: Tudor Representations of Irish Origins’, Irish Historical Studies, 28 (1993), 390–408. [Hall, Augusta], Gwenynen Gwent (Mrs. Hall, of Llanover), Gwent and Dyfed Royal Eisteddfod, 1834: The Prize Essay on the Advantages Resulting from the Preservation of the Welsh Language, and National Costumes of Wales (London, 1836). Hall, Catherine, Macaulay and Son: Architects of Imperial Britain (New Haven, CT, 2012). Hall, Joan  J., ‘Jones, Alexander’ [1988], NCPedia, https://www.ncpedia.org/biography/ jones-alexander (last accessed 13 September 2021). Hammer, J., Geoffrey of Monmouth: Historia Regum Britanniae: A Variant Version Edited from Manuscripts (Cambridge, MA, 1951). Handley, Stuart, ‘Humphreys, Humphrey (1648–1712)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Hanes Cymdeithasol yr Iaith Gymraeg, gen. ed. Geraint  H.  Jenkins, 5 vols. (Cardiff, 1997–2000). ‘Hanes y Cymru ar y Mesur Elwir Prince Rupert’, in Llawysgrif Richard Morris o Gerddi, &c., ed. T. H. Parry-Williams (Cardiff, 1931), 120–6. Hanning, Robert  W., The Vision of History in Early Britain: From Gildas to Geoffrey of Monmouth (New York, 1966). Harris, Silas M., ‘The Kalendar of the Vitae Sanctorum Wallensium’, Journal of the Historical Society of the Church in Wales, 3 (1953), 3–53. Harrison, Julian, ‘Cistercian Chronicling in the British Isles’, in Dauvit Broun and Julian Harrison, The Chronicle of Melrose: A Stratigraphic Edition. I. Introduction and Facsimile Edition (Woodbridge, 2007), 13–28. Harrison, Julian, ‘The Tintern Abbey Chronicles’, Monmouthshire Antiquary, 16 (2000), 84–98. Harrison, Kenneth, ‘Early Wessex Annals in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’, English Historical Review, 86 (1971), 527–33. Harry, George Owen, The Genealogy of the High and Mighty Monarch, James (London, 1604). Harvey, P.  D.  A., ‘Seebohm, Frederic (1833–1912)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Hay, Denys, Polydore Vergil: Renaissance Historian and Man of Letters (Oxford, 1952). Haycock, David Boyd, William Stukeley: Science, Religion and Archaeology in EighteenthCentury England (Woodbridge, 2002). Hayley, William, An Essay on History; in Three Epistles to Edward Gibbon, Esq. (London, 1780). Hays, Rhys W., The History of the Abbey of Aberconway, 1186–1537 (Cardiff, 1963). Hayton, D. W., ‘Nicolson, William 1655–1727’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Heal, Felicity, ‘Appropriating History: Catholic and Protestant Polemics and the National Past’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 68 (2005), 109–32. Heal, Felicity, Reformation in Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2003). Heal, Felicity, ‘What Can King Lucius Do for You? The Reformation and the Early British Church’, English Historical Review, 120 (2005), 593–614. Heeren, Arnold Herrmann Ludwig, Geschichte der classischen Literatur im Mittelalter (Historische Werke, vol. 4; Göttingen, 1822). Heeren, A. H. L., Political Treatises (Oxford, 1836). Henken, Elissa R., National Redeemer: Owain Glyndŵr in Welsh Tradition (Cardiff, 1996). Henken, Elissa R., The Welsh Saints: A Study in Patterned Lives (Cambridge, 1991).

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418  Bibliography of Works Cited Henley, Georgia, ‘The Cardiff Chronicle in London, British Library, Royal MS 6 B XI’, in The Chronicles of Medieval Wales, ed. Guy et al., 231–87. Henley, Georgia, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Conventions of History Writing in Early 12th-Century England’, in A Companion to Geoffrey of Monmouth, ed. Henley and Smith, 291–314. Henley, Georgia, ‘Rhetoric, Translation and Historiography: The Literary Qualities of Brut y Tywysogyon’, Quaestio Insularis, 13 (2012), 78–103. Henley, Georgia, ‘The Use of English Annalistic Sources in Medieval Welsh Chronicles’, Haskins Society Journal, 26 (2014), 229–47. Heraldic Visitations of Wales and Part of the Marches, ed. Samuel Rush Meyrick, 2 vols. (Llandovery, 1846). Herbert, Edward, Lord of Cherbury, The Life and Raigne of King Henry the Eighth (London, 1649). Hill, Michael, ‘Ethnic Administration and Dichotomization in a Eurasian Context: Wales c.1100–1350 CE’, Welsh History Review, 27/2 (2014), 175–213. Himsworth, Katherine, ‘Dafydd ap Maredudd Glais: A Fifteenth-Century Aberystwyth Felon and Scribe’, Welsh History Review, 28/2 (2016), 269–82. Himsworth, Katherine, ‘A Fifteenth-Century Brenhinedd y Saesson, Written by the Aberystwyth Scribe, Dafydd ap Maredudd Glais’, Studia Celtica, 51 (2017), 129–49. Hinnant, Charles H., ‘Changing Perspectives on the Past: The Reception of Thomas Gray’s The Bard’, Clio, 3/3 (1974), 315–29. Historia Gruffud vab Kenan, ed. D. Simon Evans (Cardiff, 1977). The Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth, I. Bern, Burgerbibliothek, MS. 568, ed. Neil Wright (Cambridge, 1985). The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth, II. The First Variant Version: A Critical Edition, ed. Neil Wright (Woodbridge, 1988). Historical Texts from Medieval Wales, ed. Patricia Williams (London, 2012). Historiography in the Middle Ages, ed. Deborah Mauskopf Deliyannis (Leiden, 2012). ‘History Theses 1901–1970: Historical Research for Higher Degrees in the Universities of the United Kingdom’, British History Online, https://www.british-history.ac.uk/noseries/theses-1901-70 (last accessed 13 September 2021). Hoare, Richard Colt, The Itinerary of Archbishop Baldwin through Wales, A.D. MCLXXXVIII. By Giraldus de Barri, 2 vols. (London, 1806). Hopfl, H.  M., ‘From Savage to Scotsman: Conjectural History in the Scottish Enlightenment’, Journal of British Studies, 17/2 (1978), 19–40. Hopkin, Deian, ‘Llafur a’r Diwylliant Cymraeg 1900–1940’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, new series, 7 (2001), 128–48. Hopkin, Deian, ‘Llafur: Labour History Society and People’s Remembrancer, 1970–2009’, Labour History Review, 75, Supplement 1 (2010), 129–46. Howell, David W., Land and People in Nineteenth-Century Wales (London, 1978). Howell, David  W., ‘The Land Question in Nineteenth-Century Wales, Ireland and Scotland: A Comparative Study’, Agricultural History Review, 61/1 (2013), 83–110. Howell, James, Proedria Basilikē: A Discourse concerning the Precedency of Kings (London, 1664). Howsam, Leslie, ‘Mediated Histories: How Did Victorian Periodicals Parse the Past?’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 50/4 (2017), 802–24. Howsam, Leslie, Past into Print: The Publishing of History in Britain 1850–1950 (London, 2009).

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Bibliography of Works Cited  419 Hufton, Olwen, ‘Women, Gender and the Fin de Siècle’, in Companion to Historiography, ed. Bentley, 929–40. Hughes, H., The Beauties of Cambria (London, 1823). Hughes, Herbert, ‘Thomas Price (Carnhuanawc), Cwm-du, 1787–1848’, Brycheiniog, 34 (2002), 133–52. Hughes, John, Horæ Britannicæ; or, Studies in Ancient British History, 2 vols. (London, 1818–19). Hughes, John, Methodistiaeth Cymru, 3 vols. (Wrexham, 1851–6). Hughes, Kathleen, Celtic Britain in the Early Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 1980). Hughes, Lowri Angharad, ‘O.  M.  Edwards: Ei Waith a’i Weledigaeth’, Ysgrifau Beirniadol, 29 (2010), 51–77. Hughes Ahronson, Lowri Angharad, ‘  “A Refreshingly New and Challenging Voice”: O. M. Edwards’s Interpretation of the Welsh Past’, in Writing a Small Nation’s Past, ed. Evans and Pryce, 127–40. Hughes, Lowri Angharad, ‘Y Teimlad Cenedlaethol: Cymru a’i Gyfoeswyr’, Y Traethodydd, 165/695 (2010), 232–55. Hughes, Lowri Angharad, ‘Writing the Welsh People: O. M. Edwards and the Shaping of Welsh Identity’ (D.Phil. Thesis, Oxford University, 2007). Hughes, Stephen, Copperopolis: Landscapes of the Early Industrial Period in Swansea (Aberystwyth, 2000). Hughes, W.  J., Wales and the Welsh in English Literature from Shakespeare to Scott (Wrexham, 1924). Hulbert-Powell, C.  L., ‘Some Notes on Henry Rowlands’ “Mona Antiqua Restaurata” ’, Transactions of the Anglesey Antiquarian Society and Field Club, 1953, 21–34. Hunt, Arnold, Dora Thornton, and George Dalgleish, ‘A Jacobean Antiquary Reassessed: Thomas Lyte, the Lyte Genealogy and the Lyte Jewel’, Antiquaries Journal, 96 (2016), 169–205. Hunter, Thomas Gerald [Jerry], ‘The Chronicle of Elis Gruffydd’ (PhD Thesis, Harvard University, 1995). Hunter, Jerry, Llwch Cenhedloedd: Y Cymry a Rhyfel Cartref America (Llanrwst, 2003). Hunter, Jerry, Llwybrau Cenhedloedd: Cyd-destunoli’r Genhadaeth Gymreig i’r Tsalagi (Cardiff, 2012). Hunter, Jerry, ‘Myth and Historiography: One Hundred and Sixty Years of Madog and the Madogwys’, Yearbook of English Studies, 46 (2016), 37–55. Hunter, Jerry, Soffestri’r Saeson: Hanesyddiaeth a Hunaniaeth yn Oes y Tuduriaid (Cardiff, 2000). Hunter, Jerry, Sons of Arthur, Children of Lincoln: Welsh Writing from the American Civil War (Cardiff, 2007). Hurlock, Kathryn, Wales and the Crusades, c.1095–1291 (Cardiff, 2011). Hutton, Ronald, Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain (New Haven, CT, 2009). Huws, Daniel, ‘John Wynn’s History of the Gwydir Family: The Manuscript Texts’, Transactions of the Caernarvonshire Historical Society, 74–5 (2013–14), 36–43. Huws, Daniel, Llyfr Aneirin: Ffacsimile/Llyfr Aneirin: A Facsimile (Aberystwyth, 1989). Huws, Daniel, ‘Llyfr Coch Hergest’, in Cyfoeth y Testun, ed. Daniel et al., 1–30. Huws, Daniel, ‘Maurice, William (1619/20–1680)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Huws, Daniel, Medieval Welsh Manuscripts (Cardiff, 2000).

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420  Bibliography of Works Cited Huws, Daniel, ‘The Neath Abbey Breviate of Domesday’, in Wales and the Welsh in the Middle Ages, ed. Griffiths and Schofield, 46–55. Huws, Daniel, A Repertory of Welsh Manuscripts and Scribes (Aberystwyth, forthcoming). Huws, Richard  E., ‘Spurrell of Carmarthen’, in A Nation and its Books, ed. Jones and Rees, 189–96. Iggers, Georg  G., and Q.  Edward Wang, A Global History of Modern Historiography (Harlow, 2008). Iolo Manuscripts: A Selection of Ancient Welsh Manuscripts, in Prose and Verse, from the Collection made by the Late Edward Williams, Iolo Morganwg, for the Purpose of Forming a Continuation of the Myvyrian Archaiology; and Subsequently Proposed as Materials for a New History of Wales, ed. Taliesin Williams (Llandovery, 1848). James, Christine, ‘Ban wedy i dynny: Medieval Welsh Law and Early Protestant Propaganda’, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies, 27 (1994), 61–86. James, Christine, ‘ “Llwyr Wybodau, Llên a Llyfrau”: Hopcyn ap Tomas a’r Traddodiad Llenyddol Cymraeg’, in Cyfres y Cymoedd: Cwm Tawe, ed. Hywel Teifi Edwards (Llandysul, 1993), 4–44. James, J. W., A Church History of Wales (Ilfracombe, 1945). Jankulak, Karen, Geoffrey of Monmouth (Cardiff, 2010). Jarman, A. O. H., ‘Beth i’w Ddarllen ar Hanes Cymru’, Lleufer, 1/1 (1944), 24–9. Jarman, A. O. H., ‘Lewis Morris a Brut Tysilio’, Llên Cymru, 2/3 (1953), 161–83. Jarvis, Branwen, ‘Welsh Humanist Learning’, in A Guide to Welsh Literature, ed. Gruffydd, 128–53. Jenkins, Bethan, Between Wales and England: Anglophone Welsh Writing of the Eighteenth Century (Cardiff, 2017). Jenkins, Bethan, ‘ “No Rebellious Jarring Noise”: Expressions of Loyalty to the British State in Eighteenth-Century Welsh Writing’, in Writing Wales, from the Renaissance to Romanticism, ed. Mottram and Prescott, 149–66. Jenkins, Dafydd, ‘Bardd Teulu and Pencerdd’, in The Welsh King and His Court, ed. CharlesEdwards et al., 142–66. Jenkins, Dafydd, ‘Deddfgrawn William Maurice’, National Library of Wales Journal, 2/1 (1941), 33–6. Jenkins, Dafydd, ‘R. T. Jenkins: Maitland Cymru’, Y Traethodydd, 125/535 (1970), 98–109. Jenkins, David, The Agricultural Community in South-West Wales at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Cardiff, 1971). Jenkins, Ffion Llywelyn, ‘Celticism and Pre-Romanticism: Evan Evans’, in A Guide to Welsh Literature, ed. Jarvis, 104–25. Jenkins, Geraint  H., Bard of Liberty: The Political Radicalism of Iolo Morganwg (Cardiff, 2012). Jenkins, Geraint  H., ‘Clio and Wales: Welsh Remembrancers and Historical Writing, 1751–2001’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, new series, 8 (2002), 119–36. Jenkins, Geraint H., A Concise History of Wales (Cambridge, 2007). Jenkins, Geraint  H., ‘The Cultural Uses of the Welsh Language 1660–1800’, in The Welsh Language before the Industrial Revolution, ed. Jenkins, 369–406. Jenkins, Geraint H., Y Digymar Iolo Morganwg (Talybont, 2018). Jenkins, Geraint H., ‘Doc Tom’: Thomas Richards (Cardiff, 1999). Jenkins, Geraint  H., ‘Evans, Evan [pseud. Ieuan Fardd; called Ieuan Brydydd Hir] (1731–1788)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Jenkins, Geraint H., The Foundations of Modern Wales 1642–1780 (Oxford, 1987).

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Bibliography of Works Cited  421 Jenkins, Geraint  H., ‘Historical Writing in the Eighteenth Century’, in A Guide to Welsh Literature, ed. Jarvis, 23–44. Jenkins, Geraint  H., ‘ “I Will Tell You a Word or Two about Cardiganshire”: Welsh Clerics and Literature in the Eighteenth Century’, Studies in Church History, 38 (2004), 303–23. Jenkins, Geraint H., Literature, Religion and Society in Wales, 1660–1730 (Cardiff, 1978). Jenkins, Geraint H., ‘On the Trail of a “Rattleskull Genius”: Introduction’, in A Rattleskull Genius, ed. Jenkins, 1–26. Jenkins, Geraint  H., The People’s Historian: Professor  Gwyn  A.  Williams  (1925–1995) (Aberystwyth, 1996). Jenkins, Geraint H., ‘Reading History: Modern Wales’, History Today, 37/2 (1987), 49–53. Jenkins, Geraint H., ‘Sir Glanmor Williams 1920–2005: A Memoir’, in Degrees of Influence, ed. Jenkins and Jones, 1–29. Jenkins, Geraint  H., ‘ “The Sweating Astrologer”: Thomas Jones the Almanacer’, in Welsh Society and Nationhood, ed. Davies et al., 161–77. Jenkins, Geraint  H., ‘ “The Taffy-Land Historians Have Hitherto Been Sad Dogs For the Most Part”: Iolo Morganwg the Historian’, Morgannwg, 52 (2008), 5–29. Jenkins, Geraint  H., ‘ “Taphy-land Historians” and the Union of England and Wales 1536–2007’, Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies, 1/2 ([2008]), 1–27. Jenkins, Geraint H., Theophilus Evans (1693–1767): Y Dyn, Ei Deulu, a’i Oes (Aberystwyth, 1993). Jenkins, Geraint H., Thomas Jones yr Almanaciwr 1648–1713 (Cardiff, 1980). Jenkins, Geraint H., ‘The Unitarian Firebrand, the Cambrian Society and the Eisteddfod’, in A Rattleskull Genius, ed. Jenkins, 267–92. Jenkins, J. P., ‘From Edward Lhuyd to Iolo Morganwg: The Death and Rebirth of Glamorgan Antiquarianism in the Eighteenth Century’, Morgannwg, 23 (1979), 29–47. Jenkins, Philip, A History of Modern Wales 1536–1990 (London, 1992). Jenkins, Philip, ‘Seventeenth-Century Wales: Definition and Identity’, in British Consciousness and Identity, ed. Bradshaw and Roberts, 213–35. Jenkins, R. T., ‘A Ellir Gwyddor Hanes?’, Efrydiau Athronyddol, 6 (1943), 38–44. Jenkins, R. T., Yr Apêl at Hanes ac Ysgrifau Eraill (Wrexham, 1929). Jenkins, Robert Thomas, ‘Campbell (Morrieson), Eliza Constantia (1796–1864)’, Dictionary of Welsh Biography. Jenkins, R.  T., ‘The Development of Nationalism in Wales’, Sociological Review, 27/2 (1935), 163–82. Jenkins, R. T., Edrych yn Ôl (London, 1968). Jenkins, R.  T., Hanes Cymru yn y Bedwaredd Ganrif ar Bymtheg: Y Gyfrol Gyntaf (1789–1843) (Cardiff, 1933). Jenkins, R. T., Hanes Cymru yn y Ddeunawfed Ganrif (Cardiff, 1931). Jenkins, Robert Thomas, ‘Jones, Josiah Thomas (1799–1873)’, Dictionary of Welsh Biography. Jenkins, Robert Thomas, ‘Jones (later Brynmor-Jones), Sir David Brynmor (1852–1921)’, Dictionary of Welsh Biography. Jenkins, R.  T., ‘The Moravian Brethren in North Wales: An Episode in the Religious History of North Wales’, Y Cymmrodor, 45 (1938). Jenkins, Robert Thomas, ‘Morris, John Edward (1859–1933)’, Dictionary of Welsh Biography. Jenkins, R. T., ‘Pedair Canrif o Hanes Cymru’, Y Llenor, 29/4 (1950), 175–91. Jenkins, Robert Thomas, ‘Thomas, Simon (died 1743?)’, Dictionary of Welsh Biography. Jenkins, Robert Thomas, ‘Wales and the Study of Church History’, Welsh Outlook, 4/4 (1917), 145–9.

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422  Bibliography of Works Cited Jenkins, R. T., ‘William Richards o Lynn’, Trafodion Cymdeithas Hanes Bedyddwyr Cymru, 1930, 17–68. Jenkins, R.  T., ‘William Wynne and the History of Wales’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, 6/2 (1932), 153–9. Jenkins, Robert Thomas, ‘Williams, William Llewelyn (1867–1922)’, Dictionary of Welsh Biography. Jenkins, Robert Thomas, ‘Willis-Bund (formerly Willis), John William (1843–1928)’, Dictionary of Welsh Biography. Jenkins, R. T., and Helen M. Ramage, A History of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion and of the Gwyneddigion and Cymreigyddion Societies (1751–1951) (London, 1951). Jenkins, Samuel, Letters on Welsh History (Philadelphia, 1852). Jenkins, Tanya Louise, ‘The Life, Work and Contribution of the Rev. Joshua Thomas (1719–1797)’, 2 vols. (PhD Thesis, University of Wales, 1993). Jeremy, Paul, and David Maddox, ‘A Seamless Web: Welsh History in Schools’, in Degrees of Influence, ed. Jenkins and Jones, 118–41. John, A. H., The Industrial Development of South Wales 1750–1850 (Cardiff, 1950). John, Angela  V., Rocking the Boat: Welsh Women who Championed Equality 1840–1940 (Cardigan, 2018). John, Angela V., Turning the Tide: The Life of Lady Rhondda (Cardigan, 2013). John, Angela V., ‘Two Decades of Development: Introduction to the New Edition’, in Our Mothers’ Land, ed. Angela V. John, 2nd edn. (Cardiff, 2011), 1–8. Johnes, Martin, England’s Colony? The Conquest, Assimilation and Re-creation of Wales (Cardigan, 2019). Johnes, Martin, ‘For Class and Nation: Dominant Trends in the Historiography of Twentieth-Century Wales’, History Compass, 8/11 (2010), 1257–74. Johnes, Martin, ‘Wales, History and Britishness’, Welsh History Review, 25/4 (2011), 596–619. Johnes, Martin, Wales since 1939 (Manchester, 2012). Johns, Susan M., Gender, Nation and Conquest in the High Middle Ages: Nest of Deheubarth (Manchester, 2013). Johnston, Charlotte, ‘Evan Evans: Dissertatio De Bardis’, National Library of Wales Journal, 22/1 (1981), 64–91. Johnston, Dafydd, ‘Barddoniaeth Dafydd ab Gwilym 1789 a’r Chwyldro Ffrengig’, Llên Cymru, 35 (2012), 32–53. Johnston, Dafydd, ‘Shaping a Heroic Life: Thomas Pennant on Owen Glyndwr’, in Enlightenment Travel, ed. Constantine and Leask, 105–21. Jones, Aled, ‘Culture, “Race” and the Missionary Public in Mid-Victorian Wales’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 10/2 (2005), 157–83. Jones, Aled, ‘The Newspaper Press in Wales 1840–1945’, in A Nation and its Books, ed. Jones and Rees, 209–20. Jones, Aled Gruffydd, ‘Politics and Prophecy in the Journalism of Gwilym Hiraethog’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, new series, 9 (2003), 106–21. Jones, Aled, and Bill Jones, ‘Empire and the Welsh Press’, in Newspapers and Empire: Ireland and Britain, c.1857–1921, ed. Simon Potter (Dublin, 2004), 75–91. Jones, Aled, and Bill Jones, Welsh Reflections: Y Drych and America 1851–2001 (Llandysul, 2001). Jones, Aled, and Bill Jones, ‘The Welsh World and the British Empire, c.1851–1939: An Exploration’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 31/2 (2003), 57–81.

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Bibliography of Works Cited  423 Jones, Alexander, The Cymry of ’76; or, Welshmen and Their Descendants of the American Revolution (New York, 1855). Jones, Alun R., Lewis Morris (Cardiff, 2004). Jones, Bedwyr Lewis, ‘Theophilus Evans’, in Y Traddodiad Rhyddiaith, ed. Geraint Bowen (Llandysul, 1970), 262–75. Jones, Bill, ‘Inspecting the “Extraordinary Drain”: Emigration and the Urban Experience in Merthyr Tydfil in the 1860s’, Urban History, 32/1 (2005), 100–13. Jones, Bill, ‘Representations of Australia in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Welsh Emigrant Literature: Gwlad yr Aur and Awstralia a’r Cloddfeydd Aur’, Welsh History Review, 23/2 (2006), 51­–74. Jones, Dafydd Arthur, Thomas Levi (Caernarfon, 1996). Jones, Dafydd Glyn, Agoriad yr Oes (Llandysul, 2001). Jones, Dafydd Glyn, ‘The Interludes’, in A Guide to Welsh Literature, ed. Jarvis, 210–55. Jones, Dafydd Glyn, Un o Wŷr y Medra: Bywyd a Gwaith William Williams, Llandygái 1783–1817 (Denbigh, 1999). Jones, David Ceri, ‘A Glorious Work in the World’: Welsh Methodists and the International Evangelical Revival, 1735–1750 (Cardiff, 2004). Jones, David J. V., Crime in Nineteenth-Century Wales (Cardiff, 1992). Jones, David J. V., The Last Rising: The Newport Insurrection of 1839 (Oxford, 1985). Jones, E. D., Beirdd y Bymthegfed Ganrif a’u Cefndir (Aberystwyth, 1984). Jones, E. D., ‘Camden, Vaughan, and Lhwyd, and Merionethshire’, Journal of the Merioneth Historical and Record Society, 2/3 (1955), 209–27. Jones, Evan David, ‘Evans, John Gwenogvryn (1852–1930)’, Dictionary of Welsh Biography. Jones, E. D., ‘George Owen Harry, c.1553–1614’, Pembrokeshire Historian, 6 (1979), 58–75. Jones, Evan David, ‘Rees, Sir James Frederick (1883–1967)’, Dictionary of Welsh Biography. Jones, Evan David, ‘Richards, Robert (1884–1954)’, Dictionary of Welsh Biography. Jones, E. D., ‘Robert Vaughan of Hengwrt’, Journal of the Merioneth Historical and Record Society, 1 (1949–51), 21–30. Jones, E.  D., ‘Rowland Fychan o Gaer-fai a Brut Sieffre o Fynwy’, Llên Cymru, 4 (1956–7), 228. Jones, Edmund, A Geographical, Historical, and Religious Account of the Parish of Aberystruth: In the County of Monmouth (Trevecka, 1779). Jones, Edward, Musical and Poetical Relicks of the Welsh Bards (London, 1784). Jones, Emyr Gwynne, ‘Cofiannau’, in Gwŷr Llên y Bedwaredd Ganrif ar Bymtheg, ed. Dyfnallt Morgan (Llandybie, 1968), 175–86. Jones, Emyr Gwynne, Cymru a’r Hen Ffydd (Cardiff, 1951). Jones, Emyr Gwynne, ‘Owen, William (1785–1864), Antiquary’, Dictionary of Welsh Biography. Jones, Ffion Mair, ‘[M]ae r Stori yn Wir iw Gweled / yn Nghronicle y Brutanied’: Dramateiddiadau Cymraeg o’r Ffug-hanes Brytanaidd (Aberystwyth, 2008). Jones, Francis, ‘An Approach to Welsh Genealogy’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1948, 303–466. Jones, Francis, ‘Hugh Thomas, Deputy-Herald’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1961, 45–71. Jones, G.  J., ‘John Williams Ab Ithel’, Y Traethodydd, 123/527 (1968), 49–61; 123/528 (1968), 113–27; 127/541 (1972), 19–33. Jones, Gareth Elwyn, ‘Edwards, Sir Owen Morgan (1858–1920)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

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424  Bibliography of Works Cited Jones, Gareth Elwyn, ‘History in the National Curriculum: A Lesson in Curriculum Devolution’, The Curriculum Journal, 20/4 (2009), 331–44. Jones, Gareth Elwyn, Modern Wales: A Concise History, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, 1994). Jones, Gareth Elwyn, ‘The Tudor Historian’, in Degrees of Influence, ed. Jenkins and Jones, 58–84. Jones, G. R. J., ‘Professor T. Jones Pierce—An Appreciation’, Transactions of the Caernarvonshire Historical Society, 26 (1965), 9–19. Jones, Glanville  R.  J., ‘The Tribal System in Wales: A Re-assessment in the Light of Settlement Studies’, Welsh History Review, 1/2 (1961), 111–32. [Jones, H.  L.], ‘Education in Wales’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 63/391 (May 1848), 540–63. Jones, Idris, Modern Welsh History from 1485 to the Present Day (London, 1934). Jones, Ieuan Gwynedd, ‘1848 and 1868: “Brad y Llyfrau Gleision” and Welsh Politics’, in Ieuan Gwynedd Jones, Mid-Victorian Wales: The Observers and the Observed (Cardiff, 1992), 103–65. Jones, Ieuan Gwynedd, Communities: Essays in the Social History of Victorian Wales (Llandysul, 1987). Jones, Ieuan Gwynedd, Explorations and Explanations: Essays in the Social History of Victorian Wales (Llandysul, 1981). Jones, Ieuan Gwynedd, and Glanmor Williams, ‘The Castor and Pollux of Welsh History’, in From Medieval to Modern Wales, ed. Davies and Jenkins, 1–13. Jones, Ifano, A History of Printing and Printers in Wales . . . and Monmouthshire (Cardiff, 1925). Jones, J. Graham, ‘The Littérateur as Politician: O. M. Edwards M.P.’, Welsh History Review, 17/4 (1995), 571–89. Jones, J. Graham, ‘Select Committee or Royal Commission?: Wales and the Land Question, 1892’, Welsh History Review, 17/2 (1994), 205–29. Jones, J.  Gwynfor, The Welsh Gentry 1536–1640: Images of Status, Honour and Authority (Cardiff, 1998). Jones, J.  Gwynfor, ‘The Welsh Gentry and the Image of the “Cambro-Briton”, c.1603–25’, Welsh History Review, 20/4 (2001), 615–55. Jones, J. Gwynfor, ‘The Welsh Poets and their Patrons, c.1550–1640’, Welsh History Review, 9/3 (1979), 245–77. Jones, J.  Gwynfor, ‘Wynn, Sir John, First Baronet (1553–1627)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Jones, J.  W., and T.  B.  Morris, Hanes y Gwrthryfel Mawr yn y Talaethau Unedig (Utica, NY, 1866). Jones, John, The History of Wales (London, 1824). Jones, Josiah Thomas, Geiriadur Bywgraffyddol o Enwogion Cymru, 2 vols. (Aberdare, 1867–70). J[ones], L[ewis], Hanes y Wladva Gymreig, Tiriogaeth Chubut, yn y Weriniaeth Ariannin, De Amerig (Caernarfon, 1898). Jones, Manon, ‘O.  M.  Edwards: Hanesydd Cymreig’, Y Traethodydd, 165/695 (2010), 207–31. Jones, Michael D., Gwladychfa Gymreig (Liverpool [1860]). Jones, Nerys Ann, and Morfydd  E.  Owen, ‘Twelfth-Century Welsh Hagiography: The Gogynfeirdd Poems to Saints’, in Celtic Hagiography and Saints’ Cults, ed. Jane Cartwright (Cardiff, 2003), 45–76.

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Bibliography of Works Cited  425 Jones, Owain Wyn, ‘Brut y Tywysogion: The History of the Princes and Twelfth-Century Cambro-Latin Historical Writing’, Haskins Society Journal, 26 (2015), 209–27. Jones, Owain Wyn, ‘Historical Writing in Medieval Wales’ (PhD Thesis, Bangor University, 2013). Jones, Owain Wyn, ‘The Most Excellent Princes: Geoffrey of Monmouth and Medieval Welsh Historical Writing’, in A Companion to Geoffrey of Monmouth, ed. Henley and Smith, 257–90. Jones, Owain Wyn, ‘O Oes Gwrtheyrn: A Medieval Welsh Chronicle’, in The Chronicles of Medieval Wales, ed. Guy et al., 169–229. Jones, Owain Wyn, and Huw Pryce, ‘Historical Writing in Medieval Wales’, in Medieval Historical Writing, ed. Jahner et al., 208–24. Jones, Owen, Darlithiau ar Hanes y Cymry (Pwllheli, 1850; 2nd edn., Pwllheli, 1853). Jones, Owen, Hanes Cenedl y Cymry mewn Pymtheg o Ddarlithiau (Caernarfon, 1861). Jones, Owen (Meudwy Môn), Hanes Prydain, wedi ei Grynhoi i Gylch Byr (Llangollen [c.1877]). Jones, Owen, Edward Williams, and William Owen, The Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales, 3 vols. (London, 1801–7). Jones, Owen  E., ‘Llyfr Coch Asaph: A Textual and Historical Study’, 2 vols. (MA Thesis, University of Wales, 1968). Jones, Philip Henry, A Bibliography of the History of Wales, 3rd edn. (Cardiff, 1989). Jones, Philip Henry, ‘Printing and Publishing in the Welsh Language’, in The Welsh Language and its Social Domains, ed. Jenkins, 317–47. Jones, Philip Henry, ‘Two Welsh Publishers of the Golden Age: Gee a’i Fab and Hughes a’i Fab’, in A Nation and its Books, ed. Jones and Rees, 173–87. Jones, R. Brinley, ‘Llwyd, Humphrey (1527–1568)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Jones, R. Brinley, William Salesbury (Cardiff, 1994). Jones, R.  I.  D., ‘Astudiaeth Feirniadol o Peniarth 168B (tt. 41a–126b)’ (MA Thesis, University of Wales, 1954). Jones, R.  Merfyn, ‘Beyond Identity? The Reconstruction of the Welsh’, Journal of British Studies, 31/4 (1992), 330–57. Jones, R. Merfyn, Cymru 2000: Hanes Cymru yn yr Ugeinfed Ganrif (Cardiff, 1999). Jones, R. Tudur, ‘The Church and the Welsh Language in the Nineteenth Century’, in The Welsh Language and its Social Domains, ed. Jenkins, 215–37. Jones, R. Tudur, Faith and the Crisis of a Nation: Wales 1890–1914, trans. Sylvia Prys Jones, ed. Robert Pope (Cardiff, 2004). Jones, R.  Tudur, Ffydd ac Argyfwng Cenedl: Cristionogaeth a Diwylliant yng Nghymru 1890–1914, 2 vols. (Swansea, 1981–2). Jones, R. Tudur, Hanes Annibynwyr Cymru (Swansea, 1966). Jones, R. Tudur, ‘Nonconformity and the Welsh Language in the Nineteenth Century’, in The Welsh Language and its Social Domains, ed. Jenkins, 239–63. Jones, R.  Tudur, ‘R.  T.  Jenkins: Yr Hanesydd Eglwysig’, Y Traethodydd, 125/535 (1970), 89–97. Jones, R. Tudur, ‘Religion, Nationality and State in Wales, 1840–90’, in Religion, State and Ethnic Groups: Comparative Studies on Governments and Non-Dominant Ethnic Groups in Europe, 1850–1940, Volume II, ed. Donal A. Kerr (Aldershot, 1992), 261–76. Jones, Rhian E., Petticoat Heroes: Gender, Culture and Popular Protest in the Rebecca Riots (Cardiff, 2015). Jones, Rhys Gwesyn, ‘Rhagdraeth’, in Theophilus Evans, Drych y Prif Oesoedd (Llanidloes, 1865), [vii]–xii.

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426  Bibliography of Works Cited Jones, Robert, Drych yr Amseroedd [Trefriw, 1820], ed. G. M. Ashton (Cardiff, 1958). Jones, Selwyn, ‘Rees, William (1808–1873)’, Dictionary of Welsh Biography. Jones, T. Gwynn, The Culture and Tradition of Wales (Wrexham, 1927). Jones, T. Gwynn, Welsh Folk Lore and Folk Custom (repr., Cambridge, 1979). Jones, T. J., The Church in Wales Not Alien: A Reply to Mr. J. W. Willis Bund (Cardiff, 1906). Jones, Theophilus, A History of the County of Brecknock, 2 vols. in 3 (Brecon, 1805–9). [Jones, Theophilus], ‘Remarks on the History of Monmouthshire. By David Williams’, Cambrian Register, 2 (1796), 455–69. J[ones], T[homas], Of the Heart, and its Right Soveraign, and Rome No Mother-Church to England (London, 1678). Jones, Thomas, ‘Cyfieithiad Robert Vaughan o “Frut y Tywysogyon” ’, National Library of Wales Journal, 5/4 (1948), 291–4. Jones, Thomas, ‘Gerald the Welshman’s “Itinerary through Wales” and “Description of Wales”: An Appreciation and Analysis’, National Library of Wales Journal, 6/2 (1949), 117–48; 6/3 (1950), 197–222. Jones, Thomas, ‘Gwraig Maelgwn a’r Fodrwy’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, 18/1 (1958), 55–8. Jones, Thomas, ‘Historical Writing in Medieval Welsh’, Scottish Studies, 12 (1968), 15–27. Jones, Thomas, ‘Pethau Nas Cyhoeddwyd’, National Library of Wales Journal, 3/3–4 (1944), 151–7. Jones, Thomas, ‘The Story of Myrddin and the Five Dreams of Gwenddydd in the Chronicle of Elis Gruffudd’, Études Celtiques, 8 (1958), 315–45. Jones, Thomas, ‘Syr Thomas ap Ieuan ap Deicws a’i Gyfaddasiad Cymraeg o “Fasciculus Temporum” Werner Rolewinck’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1943–4, 35–61. Jones, Thomas, ‘A Welsh Chronicler in Tudor England’, Welsh History Review, 1/1 (1960), 1–17. Jones, Whitney R. D., David Williams: The Anvil and the Hammer (Cardiff, 1986). Jones, William D., Wales in America: Scranton and the Welsh 1860–1920 (Cardiff, 1993). Jones, William  D., ‘The Welsh Language and Welsh Identity in a Pennsylvanian Community’, in Language and Community in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Geraint H. Jenkins (Cardiff, 1998), 261–86. Jones, William Garel, ‘The Life and Works of Henry Rowlands (Author of “Mona Antiqua” and Vicar of Llanidan)’ (MA Thesis, University of Wales, 1936). Kaminski-Jones, Rhys, ‘True Britons: Ancient British Identity in Wales and Britain, 1680–1815’ (PhD Thesis, University of Wales, 2016). Kaminski-Jones, Rhys, ‘ “Where Cymry United, Delighted Appear”: The Society for Ancient Britons and the Celebration of St David’s Day in London, 1715–1815’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, new series, 23 (2017), 56–68. Kanemura, Rei, ‘Historical Perspectives on the Anglo-Scottish Union Debate: Re-reading the Norman Conquest in the 1610s’, History of European Ideas, 40 (2014), 155–76. Karrow, Jr., R.  W., et al., Abraham Ortelius (1527–1598): cartographe et humaniste (Turnhout, 1998). Kastan, David Scott, and Aaron  T.  Pratt, ‘Printers, Publishers, and the Chronicles as Artefact’, in The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed’s Chronicles, ed. Kewes et al., 21–42. Kaufmann, Erik, ‘ “Naturalizing the Nation”: The Rise of Naturalistic Nationalism in the United States and Canada’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 40/4 (1998), 666–95. Keeble, N. H., ‘The Nonconformist Narrative of the Bartholomeans’, in ‘Settling the Peace of the Church’: 1662 Revisited, ed. N. H. Keeble (Oxford, 2014), 209–32.

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Bibliography of Works Cited  427 Kelley, Donald  R., Fortunes of History: Historical Inquiry from Herder to Huizinga (New Haven, CT, 2003). Kelley, Donald  R., Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law, and History in the French Renaissance (New York, 1970). Kelton, Arthur, A Chronycle with a Genealogie declarying that the Brittons and Welshemen are lineallye dyscended from Brute (London, 1547). Kempshall, Matthew, Rhetoric and the Writing of History, 400–1500 (Manchester, 2011). Kendrick, T. D., British Antiquity (London, 1950). Kenward, James, Ab Ithel: An Account of the Life and Writings of the Rev. John Williams Ab Ithel (Tenby, 1871). Kenyon, John R., Raglan Castle, revd. edn. (Cardiff, 2003). Ker, N. R., Books, Collectors, and Libraries, ed. A. G. Watson (London, 1985). Kerhevé, Jean, ‘Écriture et récriture de l’histoire dans l’Histoire de Bretaigne de Bertrand d’Argentré. L’exemple du Livre XII’, in Chroniquers et historiens de la Bretagne, ed. Tonnerre, 77–109. Kersken, Norbert, Geschichtsschreibung im Europa der “nationes”. Nationalgeschichtliche Gesamtdarstellungen im Mittelalter (Cologne, 1995). Kersken, Norbert, ‘High and Late Medieval National Historiography’, in Historiography in the Middle Ages, ed. Deliyannis, 181–215. Kewes, Paulina, ‘History and Its Uses: Introduction’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 68/1–2 (2005), 1–31. Kidd, Colin, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World 1600–1800 (Cambridge, 1999). Kidd, Colin, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000 (Cambridge, 2006). Kidd, Colin, ‘Gaelic Antiquity and National Identity in Enlightenment Ireland and Scotland’, English Historical Review, 109 (1994), 1197–1214. Kidd, Colin, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity, 1689–c.1830 (Cambridge, 1993). Kidd, Colin, ‘Teutonist Ethnology and Scottish Nationalist Inhibition, 1780–1880’, Scottish Historical Review, 74 (1995), 45–68. Kidd, Colin, ‘Wales, the Enlightenment and the New British History’, Welsh History Review, 25/2 (2010), 209–30. Kirby, James, ‘R.  H.  Tawney and Christian Social Teaching: Religion and the Rise of Capitalism Reconsidered’, English Historical Review, 131 (2016), 793–822. Koot, Gerard M., ‘Historians and Economists: The Study of Economic History in Britain ca.1920–1950’, History of Political Economy, 25/4 (1993), 641–75. Krause, Thomas, ‘Ferdinand Walter (1794–1879) and Welsh Legal History’, in Canmlwyddiant, Cyfraith a Chymreictod: A Celebration of the Life and Work of Dafydd Jenkins 1911–2012, ed. Noel  S.  B.  Cox and Thomas Glyn Watkin (Bangor, 2011), 174–80. Kuper, Adam, ‘The Rise and Fall of Maine’s Patriarchal Society’, in The Victorian Achievement of Sir Henry Maine: A Centennial Appraisal, ed. Alan Diamond (Cambridge, 1991), 99–110. The Labour Party in Wales 1900–2000, ed. Duncan Tanner, Chris Williams, and Deian Hopkin (Cardiff, 2000). Lambarde, William, Perambulation of Kent: Containing the Description, Hystorie and Customs of that Shyre (London, 1576). Lambert, David, ‘The Uses of Decay: History in Salvian’s De Gubernatione Dei’, Augustinian Studies, 30 (1999), 115–30.

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428  Bibliography of Works Cited Lambert, Peter, ‘The Institutionalization of History in the University Colleges of Wales, 1880–1930: Aberystwyth and Bangor’, in Writing a Small Nation’s Past, ed. Evans and Pryce, 177–93. Lambert, Peter, and Björn Weiler, ‘Introduction’, in How the Past Was Used: Historical Cultures c.750–2000, ed. Peter Lambert and Björn Weiler (Oxford, 2017), 1­–48. Landscape and Settlement in Medieval Wales, ed. Nancy Edwards (Oxford, 1997). Langhorne, Daniel, An Introduction to the History of England (London, 1676). Langton, John, ‘Habitat, Economy and Society Revisited: Peasant Ecotypes and Economic Development in Sweden’, Cambria, 13/1 (1986), 5–24. Lapidge, Michael, ‘Gildas’s Education and the Latin Culture of Sub-Roman Britain’, in Gildas; New Approaches, ed. Michael Lapidge and David Dumville (Woodbridge, 1984), 27–50. Lapidge, Michael, ‘Introduction: The Study of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic in Cambridge, 1878–1999’, H. M. Chadwick and the Study of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic in Cambridge, ed. Michael Lapidge, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies, 69­–70 (Aberystwyth, 2015), 1–58. Lapidge, Michael, ‘The Welsh-Latin Poetry of Sulien’s Family’, Studia Celtica, 8/9 (1973–4), 68–106. Lapidge, Michael, and Richard Sharpe, A Bibliography of Celtic-Latin Literature 400–1200 (Dublin, 1985). The Latin Texts of the Welsh Laws, ed. Hywel D. Emanuel (Cardiff, 1967). The Law of Hywel Dda: Law Texts from Medieval Wales, ed. and trans. Dafydd Jenkins (Llandysul, 1986). Leckie, Jr., R.  William, The Passage of Dominion: Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Periodization of Insular History in the Twelfth Century (Toronto, 1981). Leerssen, Joep, National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History (Amsterdam, 2006). Lennon, Colm, ‘Ireland’, The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed’s Chronicles, ed. Kewes et al., 663–78. L[evi], T[homas], Cedyrn Cymru (London [1882]). Levi, Thomas, Hanes Rhyfel y Crimea (Swansea, 1855). Levi, Thomas, Prydain Fawr: Ei Chodiad, ei Chynydd, a’i Mawredd (Swansea [1863]). Levi, Thomas, Teithiau Cenadol y Parch. Dr. Livingston, a’i Ddarganfyddiadau yn Nghanolbarth Deheudir Affrica (Merthyr Tydfil, 1857). Levy, F. J., ‘The Making of Camden’s Britannia’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 24 (1964), 70–97. Lewis, Barry J., ‘Bonedd y Saint, Brenhinedd y Saesson, and Historical Scholarship at Valle Crucis Abbey’, in The Chronicles of Medieval Wales, ed. Guy et al., 139–54. Lewis, Barry  J., ‘A Possible Provenance for the Old Cornish Vocabulary’, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies, 73 (2017), 1–14. Lewis, C. P., ‘Gruffudd ap Cynan and the Reality and Representation of Exile’, in Exile in the Middle Ages, ed. Laura Napran and Elisabeth van Houts (Turnhout, 2004), 39–51. Lewis, Ceri  W., ‘The Decline of Professional Poetry’, in A Guide to Welsh Literature, ed. Gruffydd, 29–74. Lewis, Ceri  W., ‘Syr Edward Stradling (1529–1609), y “Marchog Disgleirlathr” o Sain Dunwyd’, Ysgrifau Beirniadol, 19 (1993), 139–207. Lewis, Edward  A., ‘A Contribution to the Commercial History of Mediaeval Wales’, Y Cymmrodor, 24 (1913), 86–188. Lewis, Edward A., ‘The Decay of Tribalism in North Wales’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1902–3, 1–75.

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430  Bibliography of Works Cited The Life of King Edward who Rests at Westminster, ed. and trans. F. Barlow (Oxford, 1962). Life of Merlin: Geoffrey of Monmouth, Vita Merlini, ed. and trans. Basil Clarke (Cardiff, 1973). Linnard, William, Welsh Woods and Forests: History and Utilization (Cardiff, 1982). Littere Wallie Preserved in Liber A in the Public Record Office, ed. J.  Goronwy Edwards (Cardiff, 1940). Lives of the Cambro British Saints, ed. and trans. W. J. Rees (Llandovery, 1853). Livingstone, David N., ‘British Geography, 1500–1900: An Imprecise View’, in A Century of British Geography, ed. Johnston and Williams, 11–44. Livingstone, David N., The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise (Malden, MA, 1992). Y Llan, 9 May 1913. Llewelyn, Thomas, An Historical Account of the British or Welsh Versions and Editions of the Bible (London, 1768). Lloyd, D.  Myrddin, ‘Appendix: William Salesbury and “Epistol  E.  M.  at y Cembru” ’, in Flower, Robin, ‘William Salesbury, Richard Davies, and Archbishop Parker’, National Library of Wales Journal, 2/1 (1941), 14–16. Lloyd, D. Myrddin, ‘Enderbie, Percy [c.1606–1670], historian and antiquary’, Dictionary of Welsh Biography. Lloyd, John Edward, ‘A Dictionary of Welsh Biography’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1938, 67–75. Lloyd, J. E., ‘Ffurfiad y Genedl Gymreig’, Y Geninen, 4 (1886), 264–70. Lloyd, J.  E., ‘A History Course for Secondary Schools in Wales’, Welsh Outlook, 15 (1928), 4–7. Lloyd, John Edward, ‘History of Wales’, in Transactions of the Royal National Eisteddfod of Wales, Liverpool, 1884, ed. William R. Owen (Liverpool, 1885), 341–408. Lloyd, J. E., A History of Wales (London, 1930). Lloyd, John Edward, A History of Wales from the Earliest Times to the Edwardian Conquest, 2 vols. (London, 1911). Lloyd, John Edward, ‘John Thomas: A Forgotten Antiquary’, Journal of the Welsh Bibliographical Society, 2 (1920), 129–34. Lloyd, J. E., Owen Glendower: Owen Glyndŵr (Oxford, 1931). Lloyd, John Edward, ‘Taith Archesgobol drwy Gymru’, Y Geninen, 4/1 (1886), 54–6. Lloyd, J. E., ‘Wales and the Coming of the Normans’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1899–1900, 122–79. Lloyd, J. E., ‘Wales: The Land and its People’, Wales, 2 (1912), 359–68. Lloyd, John Edward, Wales and the Past—Two Voices (Cardiff, 1932). Lloyd, John Edward, ‘The Welsh Chronicles’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 14 (1928), 369–91. Lloyd, John Edward, and Victor Sholderer, ‘Powel’s Historie (1584)’, National Library of Wales Journal, 3/1–2 (1943), 15–18. Lloyd, J.  E., revd. Robert Rhys, ‘Foulkes, Isaac [pseud. Llyfrbryf] (1836–1904)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Lloyd, J.  E., revd. Beti Jones, ‘Parry, John Humffreys [John Humphreys] (1786–1825)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Lloyd, Nesta, ‘A History of Welsh Scholarship in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century, with Special Reference to the Writings of John Jones, Gellilyfdy’, 2 vols. (D.Phil. Thesis, University of Oxford, 1970).

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Bibliography of Works Cited  431 Lloyd, Nesta, ‘ “Yr Ymarfer o Dduwioldeb” a Rhai o Gerddi Rhys Prichard’, Y Traethodydd, 150/635 (1995), 94–106. Lloyd-Morgan, Ceridwen, ‘Elis Gruffudd a Thraddodiad Cymraeg Calais a Chlwyd’, Cof Cenedl, 11 (1996), 29–58. Lloyd-Morgan, Ceridwen, ‘Oral et écrit dans la chronique d’Elis Gruffydd’, Kreiz, 5 (1996), 179–86. Lloyd-Morgan, Ceridwen, ‘Welsh Tradition in Calais: Elis Gruffydd and His Biography of King Arthur’, in The Fortunes of King Arthur, ed. Norris  J.  Lacy (Cambridge, 2005), 77–91. Llwyd, Angharad, A History of the Island of Mona, or Anglesey (Ruthin, 1833; new edn., Llansadwrn, 2009). Llwyd, Humphrey, ‘Angliae Regni Florentissimi Nova Descriptio’ and ‘Cambriae Typus’, in Abraham Ortelius, Additamentum Theatri Orbis Terrarum (Antwerp, 1573). Llwyd, Humphrey, The Breviary of Britain, with Selections from The History of Cambria, ed. Philip Schwyzer, MHRA Tudor & Stuart Translations, 5 (London, 2011). Llwyd, Humphrey, Commentarioli Britannicae Descriptionis Fragmentum (Cologne, 1572). Llwyd, Humphrey, Cronica Walliae, ed. Ieuan M. Williams (Cardiff, 2002). Llwyd, Humphrey, ‘De Mona Insula Druidum’, in Abraham Ortelius, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Antwerp, 1570), pagination following maps, sig. a.ir–b.iv. Llwyd, Humphrey, Humfredi Llwyd, Armigeri, Britannicæ Descriptionis Commentariolum . . ., ed. Moses Williams (London, 1731). Llwyd, Morgan, Llyfr y Tri Aderyn, ed. M. Wynn Thomas (Cardiff, 1988). Llwyd, Rheinallt, ‘Printing and Publishing in the Seventeenth Century’, in A Nation and its Books, ed. Jones and Rees, 93–107. Llwyd, Richard, The History of Wales . . . Augmented by W. Wynne . . . Revised and Corrected, and a Collection of Topographical Notices Attached Thereto (Shrewsbury, 1833). Llwyd, S., Review of Morgan, The British Kymry, Yr Haul, 2/13 (1858), 26–7. Llyfr Iorwerth, ed. Aled Rhys Wiliam (Cardiff, 1960). Llywelyn-Williams, Alun, ‘Llyfryddiaeth yr Athro Emeritus  R.  T.  Jenkins’, Journal of the Welsh Bibliographical Society, 10/2 (1968), 47–55. Llywelyn-Williams, Alun, R. T. Jenkins (Cardiff, 1977). Llywelyn-Williams, Alun, ‘R. T. Jenkins ac Addysg Oedolion’, Lleufer, 25/1 (1971), 3–5. Llywodraeth Cymru/Welsh Government, ‘The Co-operation Agreement: Full Policy Programme’, https://gov.wales/co-operation-agreement-full-policy-programme-html, updated December 2021 (last accessed 23 December 2021). Llywodraeth Cymru/Welsh Government, The Slave Trade and the British Empire: An Audit of Commemoration in Wales ([Cardiff] 2020), https://gov.wales/slave-trade-and-britishempire-audit-commemoration-wales, published 26 November 2020. Llywodraeth Cymru/Welsh Government, ‘Welsh Speakers by Local Authority, Gender and  Detailed Age Groups, 2011 Census’, https://statswales.gov.wales/Catalogue/WelshLanguage/Census-Welsh-Language/welshspeakers-by-localauthority-gender-detailedagegroups-2011census, updated December 2012 (last accessed 13 September 2021). Loades, David, ‘Introduction: John Foxe and the Editors’, in John Foxe and the English Reformation, ed. David Loades (Aldershot, 1997), 1–11. Löffler, Marion, ‘ “Bordering on the Region of the Marvellous”: The Battle of St Fagans (1648) in Nineteenth-Century Welsh History Writing’, Welsh History Review, 26/1 (2012), 2–33.

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432  Bibliography of Works Cited Löffler, Marion, ‘A Century of Change: The Eisteddfod and Welsh Cultural Nationalism’, in Matica and Beyond: Cultural Associations and Nationalism in Europe, ed. Krisztina Lajosi and Andreas Stynen (Leiden, 2020), 233–54. Löffler, Marion, ‘Failed Founding Fathers and Abandoned Sources: Edward Williams, Thomas Stephens and the Young J. E. Lloyd’, in Writing a Small Nation’s Past, ed. Evans and Pryce, 67–81. Löffler, Marion, The Literary and Historical Legacy of Iolo Morganwg, 1826–1926 (Cardiff, 2007). Löffler, Marion, ‘Prince Albert’s “Celtic” Librarian: Culture, Diplomacy and Politics’, in Dynastie—Wissenschaft—Kunst. Die Verbindungen der Dynastien Sachsen-GothaAltenburg und Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha zum Britischen Empire, ed. Friedegund Freitag (Würzburg, 2020), 145–60. Löffler, Marion, ‘Stephens, Thomas (Casnodyn, Gwrnerth, Caradawg; 1821–1875)’, Dictionary of Welsh Biography. Löffler, Marion, Welsh Responses to the French Revolution: Press and Public Discourse 1789–1802 (Cardiff, 2012). Löffler, Marion (with Hywel Gethin Rhys), ‘Thomas Stephens and the Abergavenny Cymreigyddion: Letters from the Cambrian 1842–3’, National Library of Wales Journal, 34/4 (2009), 399–451. Looker, Ray, ‘Hywel ap “Syr” Mathew’, Dictionary of Welsh Biography. Looker, Ray, ‘Jones, John (1772–1837)’, Dictionary of Welsh Biography. Lord, E., ‘Davies, John (1625–1693)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Lord, Peter, Imaging the Nation (Cardiff, 2000). Lotz-Heumann, Ute, ‘The Protestant Interpretation of History in Ireland: The Case of James Ussher’s Discourse’, in Protestant History and Identity in Sixteenth-Century Europe, ed. Bruce Gordon, 2 vols. (Aldershot, 1996), 1: 107–20. Lowe, Rosalind, Sir Samuel Meyrick and Goodrich Court (Little Logaston, 2003). Luft, Diana, ‘Commemorating the Past after 1066: Tales from The Mabinogion’, in The Cambridge History of Welsh Literature, ed. Evans and Fulton, 73–92. Luft, Diana, ‘The NLW Peniarth 32 Latin Chronicle’, Studia Celtica, 44 (2010), 47–70. Lurbe, Pierre, ‘Entre histoire et mythistoire: Edward Stillingfleet, Origines Britannicae (1685)’, Revista de Historiografia, 21 (2014), 51–66. Lynch, Peredur I., Proffwydoliaeth a’r Syniad o Genedl (Bangor, 2007). Lyons, Claire  E., ‘An Imperial Harbinger: Sylvester O’Halloran’s General History (1778)’, Irish Historical Studies, 39/155 (2015), 357–77. Lyons, Mary Ann, ‘Towards a Catholic History for a Catholic Nation: The Contribution of Irish Émigré Scholars in Europe, c.1580–c.1630’, in Representing Irish Religious Histories: Historiography, Ideology and Practice, ed. Jacqueline Hill and Mary Ann Lyons (Cham, 2017), 3–19. Lyttelton, Lord, George, The History of the Life of King Henry II, 4 vols. (Dublin, 1768–72). The Mabinogion, trans. Sioned Davies (Oxford, 2007). MacColl, Alan, ‘The Construction of England as a Protestant “British” Nation in the Sixteenth Century’, Renaissance Studies, 18 (2004), 582–608. MacColl, Alan, ‘The Meaning of “Britain” in Medieval and Early Modern England’, Journal of British Studies, 45 (2006), 248–69. McCormick, Michael, Les annales du haut Moyen Âge (Typologie des sources du Moyen Âge occidental, 14; Turnhout, 1975). Mc Elligott, Jason, ‘Crouch, Nathaniel [pseud. Robert Burton] (c.1640–1725?)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

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Bibliography of Works Cited  433 MacGregor, Arthur, ‘Edward Lhuyd: Museum Keeper’, Welsh History Review, 25/1 (2010), 51–74. MacGregor, Martin, ‘The Genealogical Histories of Gaelic Scotland’, in The Spoken Word, ed. Fox and Woolf, 196–239. McKenna, Catherine, ‘Aspects of Tradition Formation in Eighteenth-Century Wales’, in Memory and the Modern in Celtic Literatures, ed. Joseph Falaky Nagy (Dublin, 2006), 37–60. McKenna, Catherine, ‘Court Poetry and Historiography Before 1282’, in The Cambridge History of Welsh Literature, ed. Evans and Fulton, 93–111. Mackintosh, James, The History of England from the Earliest Times to the Establishment of the Reformation, 2nd edn., 2 vols. (London, 1853). McKisack, May, Medieval History in the Tudor Age (Oxford, 1971). McKitterick, David, Print, Manuscript, and the Search for Order 1450–1830 (Cambridge, 2003). Maclagan, Michael, ‘Genealogy and Heraldry in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in English Historical Scholarship in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. Levi Fox (London, 1956), 31–48. MacMillan, Ken, ‘Discourse on History, Geography and Law: John Dee and the Limits of the British Empire, 1576–80’, Canadian Journal of History, 36 (2001), 1–25. Maine, Henry Sumner, Ancient Law (London, 1861). Maitland, Frederic William, Domesday Book and Beyond: Three Essays in the Early History of England (Cambridge, 1897). Malone, Patricia, ‘ “There Has Been Treachery from the Beginning”: The Historia Gruffudd ap Cynan as Narrative Hybrid’, in Proceedings of the Celtic Studies Association of North America Annual Meeting 2008, CSANA Yearbook 10, ed. Morgan Thomas Davies (New York, 2011), 61–74. Markwell, D. J., ‘Zimmern, Sir Alfred Eckhard (1879–1957)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Martin, Benjamin, The Natural History of England, 2 vols. (London, 1759–63). Martin, F. X., ‘Giraldus as Historian’, in Expugnatio Hibernica: The Conquest of Ireland, by Giraldus Cambrensis, ed. and trans. A. B. Scott and F. X. Martin (Dublin, 1978), 267–84. Martin, Seán Aeron, and Mari Elin Wiliam, ‘Debating Nationhood, c.1945–2000’, in The Cambridge History of Welsh Literature, ed. Evans and Fulton, 491–506. Mason, Rhiannon, Museums, Nations, Identities: Wales and its National Museums (Cardiff, 2007). Mason, Roger  A., ‘Civil Society and the Celts: Hector Boece, George Buchanan and the Ancient Scottish Past’, in Scottish History: The Power of the Past, ed. Edward J. Cowan and Richard J. Finlay (Edinburgh, 2002), 95–119. Mason, Roger  A., Kingship and the Commonweal: Political Thought in Renaissance and Reformation Scotland (Edinburgh, 1998). Mason, Roger  A., ‘Scotching the Brut: Politics, History and National Myth in SixteenthCentury Britain’, in Scotland and England, 1286–1815, ed. Roger A. Mason (Edinburgh, 1987), 60–84. Mason, Roger  A., ‘The State of Scottish History: Some Reflections’, SHR, 92, Supplement (2013), 167–75. Matheson, Lister  M., ‘Printer and Scribe: Caxton, the Polychronicon, and the Brut’, Speculum, 60 (1985), 593–614. Matheson, Lister  M., The Prose Brut: The Development of a Middle English Chronicle (Tempe, AZ, 1998).

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434  Bibliography of Works Cited Matonis, A.  T.  E., ‘A Case Study: Historical and Textual Aspects of the Welsh Bardic Grammar’, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies, 41 (2001), 25–36. Matonis, A.  T.  E., ‘Gutun Owain and His Orbit: The Welsh Bardic Grammar and its Cultural Context in Northeast Wales’, Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie, 54 (2004), 154–69. Mattar, Sinéad Garrigan, Primitivism, Science, and the Irish Revival (Oxford, 2004). Matthews, A., Hanes y Wladfa Gymreig yn Patagonia (Aberdare, 1894). Maurice, William, ‘An Account of the Civil War in North Wales, Transcribed from the MS. Note Book of William Maurice, Esq., Preserved in the Wynnstay Library’, ed. Robert Williams, Archaeologia Cambrensis, 1 (1846), 33–42. Maxwell, Alexander, ‘Contingency and “National Awakening” ’, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 26/2 (2020), 183–201. May, Andrew J., Welsh Missionaries and British Imperialism: The Empire of Clouds in NorthEast India (Manchester, 2012). May, Eddie, ‘Thomas, Sir Daniel Lleufer (1863–1940)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Mayer, Robert, ‘Nathaniel Crouch, Bookseller and Historian: Popular Historiography and Cultural Power in Late Seventeenth-Century England’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 27 (1994), 391–419. Medieval Historical Writing: Britain and Ireland, 500–1500, ed. Jennifer Jahner, Emily Steiner, and Elizabeth M. Tyler (Cambridge, 2019). Mendyk, Stan, ‘Early British Chorography’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 17 (1986), 459–81. Merrick, Rice, Morganiae Archaiographia, ed. Brian Ll. James (South Wales Record Soc., 1; Barry Island, 1983). Merrills, A. H., History and Geography in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 2005). Merthyr Express, 14 November 1868. Merthyr Politics: The Making of a Working-Class Tradition, ed. Glanmor Williams (Cardiff, 1966). Meyrick, Samuel Rush, The History and Antiquities of the County of Cardigan (London, 1808). “An Exquisite Antiquary”: George Owen of Henllys (1552–1613)’, Miles, Dillwyn, ‘  Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, new series, 5 (1999), 5–23. Mill, John Stuart, Essays on French History and Historians, ed. John M. Robson (Collected Works, vol. 20; Toronto, 1985). Miller, Molly, ‘Bede’s Use of Gildas’, English Historical Review, 90 (1975), 241–61. Millward, E.  G., ‘Beriah Gwynfe Evans: A Pioneer Playwright-Producer’, in A Guide to Welsh Literature, ed. Edwards, 166–85. Millward, E.  G., Cenedl o Bobl Ddewrion: Agweddau ar Lenyddiaeth Oes Victoria (Llandysul, 1991). Millward, E. G., ‘ “Cenedl o Bobl Ddewrion”: Y Rhamant Hanesyddol yn Oes Victoria’, in Millward, Cenedl o Bobl Ddewrion, 104–19. Millward, E.  G., ‘Cymhellion Cyhoeddwyr yn y XIX Ganrif ’, in Astudiaethau Amrywiol, ed. Jones, 67–83. Millward, E.  G., ‘Gwaith Cynnar  O.  M.  Edwards’, in Millward, Cenedl o Bobl Ddewrion, 166–82. Minchinton, Walter, ‘A. H. John: A Memoir’, in A. H. John, The Industrial Development of South Wales 1750–1850, 2nd edn. (Cardiff, 1995), xi–xv. Miskell, Louise, ‘Intelligent Town’: An Urban History of Swansea, 1780–1855 (Cardiff, 2006). Miskell, Louise, ‘Introduction: Industrial Wales: Historical Traditions and Approaches’, in New Perspectives on Welsh Industrial History, ed. Louise Miskell (Cardiff, 2020), 1–23.

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438  Bibliography of Works Cited O’Leary, Paul, Ffrainc a Chymru, 1830–1880: Dehongliadau Ffrengig o Genedl Ddiwladwriaeth (Carmarthen, 2015). O’Leary, Paul, Immigration and Integration: The Irish in Wales 1798–1922 (Cardiff, 2000). O’Leary, Paul, ‘The Languages of Patriotism in Wales 1840–1880’, in The Welsh Language and its Social Domains, ed. Jenkins, 533–60. O’Leary, Paul, ‘Masculine Histories: Gender and the Social History of Modern Wales’, Welsh History Review, 22/2 (2004), 252–77. O’Leary, Paul, ‘Obituary: John Davies (1938–2015)’, Welsh History Review, 28/3 (2017), 549–63. O’Leary, Paul, ‘Power and Modernity: Transnational Wales, c.1780–1939’, Llafur, 12/4 (2019–20), 33–55. O’Leary, Paul, ‘Revolution, Culture and Industry, c.1700–1850’, in The Cambridge History of Welsh Literature, ed. Evans and Fulton, 253–63. O’Leary, Paul, ‘Town and Nation: Writing Urban Histories in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Wales’, in Writing a Small Nation’s Past, ed. Evans and Pryce, 209–22. O’Leary, Paul, ‘ “A Vertiginous Sense of Impending Loss”: Four Nations History and the Problem of Narrative’, in Four Nations Approaches to Modern ‘British’ History: A (Dis)united Kingdom?, ed. Naomi Lloyd-Jones and Margaret M. Scull (London, 2017), 59–82. O’Leary, Paul, ‘When was Anti-Catholicism? The Case of Nineteenth- and TwentiethCentury Wales’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 56 (2005), 308–25. O’Loughlin, Thomas, Gildas and the Scriptures: Observing the World through a Biblical Lens (Turnhout, 2012). Olson, Katharine  K., ‘Religion, Politics, and the Parish in Tudor England and Wales: A View from the Marches of Wales, 1534–1553’, Recusant History, 30 (2011), 527–36. Olson, Katharine K., and Huw Pryce, ‘The Reluctant Medievalist?’, in Degrees of Influence, ed. Jenkins and Jones, 30–57. O’Sullivan, Jeremiah  F., Cistercian Settlements in Wales and Monmouthshire, 1140–1540 (New York, 1947). Our Mothers’ Land: Chapters in Welsh Women’s History 1830–1939, ed. Angela  V.  John (Cardiff, 1991; 2nd edn., 2011). Owain Glyndŵr: A Casebook, ed. Michael Livingston and John K. Bollard (Liverpool, 2013). [Owen, David], ‘Cofiannau, Marwnadau ac Emynau’ [1848], in David Owen (Brutus), Bugeiliaid Mynydd Epynt, ed. Thomas Jones (Cardiff, 1950), 91–7. Owen, David, ‘Locke on Judgment’, in The Cambridge Companion to Locke’s “Essay Concerning Human Understanding”, ed. Lex Newman (Cambridge, 2007), 406–35. Owen, Edward, A Catalogue relating to Wales in the British Museum, 4 parts (London, 1900–22). Owen, Edward, ‘Owain Lawgoch—Yeuain de Galles: Some Facts and Suggestions’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1899–1900, 6–105. Owen, George, of Henllys, The Description of Pembrokeshire, ed. Dillwyn Miles (Llandysul, 1994). Owen, George, ‘The Description of Penbrokshire’, in The Description of Penbrokshire, ed. Owen, vol. 1. Owen, George, The Description of Penbrokshire by George Owen of Henllys, Lord of Kemes, ed. Henry Owen, 4 vols. (London, 1892–1936). Owen, George, ‘The Dialogue of the Government of Wales’, in The Description of Penbrokshire, ed. Owen, 3: 1–119. Owen, George, The Dialogue of the Government of Wales (1594): Updated Text and Commentary, ed. John Gwynfor Jones (Cardiff, 2010).

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Bibliography of Works Cited  443 Price, Thomas, Carnhuanawc, Hanes Cymru, Rhif 2 (Crickhowell, 1837). Price, Thomas (Carnhuanawc), Hanes Cymru, a Chenedl y Cymry, o’r Cynoesoedd hyd at Farwolaeth Llewelyn ap Gruffydd; ynghyd a Rhai Cofiaint Perthynol i’r Amseroedd o’r Pryd Hynny i Waered (Crickhowell, 1842). [Price, Thomas] Carnhuanawc, ‘Hiliogaeth Gomer’, Seren Gomer, 6 (1823), 81–3. [Price, Thomas] Carnhuanawc, ‘Yr Iaith Geltaeg’, Seren Gomer, 4 (1821), 12–15, 74–6, 176–9 (and correspondence at 206–7, 233–5, 274–5, 340–2, 366–8); 8 (1825), 361–3. Prichard, T. J. Llewelyn, The Heroines of Welsh History: Comprising Memoirs and Biographical Notices of the Celebrated Women of Wales, especially the Eminent for Talent, the Exemplary in Conduct, the Eccentric in Character, and the Curious by Position, or Otherwise (London, 1854). Prise, John, A Description of Wales (Oxford, 1663). Prise, John, Historiae Britannicae Defensio: A Defence of the British History, ed. and trans. Ceri Davies (Toronto, 2015). Prise, John, Historiae Brytannicae Defensio (London, 1573). Pritchard, Emily M., Cardigan Priory in the Olden Days (London, 1904). Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council of England, vol. 5, ed. Sir Harris Nicholas (Record Commission, London, 1835). Prophecies from the Book of Taliesin, ed. and trans. Marged Haycock (Aberystwyth, 2013). Pryce, Huw, ‘British or Welsh? National Identity in Twelfth-Century Wales’, English Historical Review, 116 (2001), 775–801. Pryce, Huw, ‘Y Canu Lladin er Cof am yr Arglwydd Rhys’, in Yr Arglwydd Rhys, ed. Nerys Ann Jones and Huw Pryce (Cardiff, 1996), 212–23. Pryce, Huw, ‘Cenedligrwydd a Chymdeithas: Dehongli Oes y Tywysogion’, Transactions of the Caernarvonshire Historical Society, 67 (2006), 12–29. Pryce, Huw, ‘Cofio Glyndŵr’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, new series, 22 (2016), 43–60. Pryce, Huw, ‘The Dynasty of Deheubarth and the Church of St Davids’, in St David of Wales, ed. Evans and Wooding, 305–16. Pryce, Huw, ‘From the Neolithic to Nonconformity: J.  E.  Lloyd and the History of Caernarfonshire’, Transactions of the Caernarvonshire Historical Society, 66 (2005), 14–37. Pryce, Huw, ‘Gerald of Wales and the Welsh Past’, in Gerald of Wales, ed. Henley and McMullen, 19–45. Pryce, Huw, ‘Gerald of Wales, Gildas and the Descriptio Kambriae’, in Tome: Studies in Medieval Celtic History and Law in Honour of Thomas Charles-Edwards, ed. Fiona Edmonds and Paul Russell (Woodbridge, 2011), 115–24. Pryce, Huw, ‘Gerald’s Journey through Wales’, Journal of Welsh Ecclesiastical History, 6 (1989), 17–34. Pryce, Huw, ‘Giraldus and the Geraldines’, in The Geraldines and Medieval Ireland: The Making of a Myth, ed. Peter Crooks and Seán Duffy (Dublin, 2016), 53–68. Pryce, Huw, ‘Harry Longueville Jones, FSA, Medieval Paris and the Heritage Measures of the July Monarchy’, Antiquaries Journal, 96 (2016), 391–414. Pryce, Huw, ‘Historians and the Treaty of Montgomery’, Montgomeryshire Collections, 106 (2018), 5–16. Pryce, Huw, J.  E.  Lloyd and the Creation of Welsh History: Renewing a Nation’s Past (Cardiff, 2011). Pryce, Huw, ‘Jones, Harry Longueville (1806–70)’, Dictionary of Welsh Biography.

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444  Bibliography of Works Cited Pryce, Huw, ‘A New Edition of the Historia Divae Monacellae’, Montgomeryshire Collections, 82 (1994), 23–40. Pryce, Huw, ‘The Normans in Welsh History’, Anglo-Norman Studies, 30 (2008), 1–18. Pryce, Huw, ‘Medieval Welsh History in the Victorian Age’, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies, 71 (2016), 1–28. Pryce, Huw, ‘The Modern Historiography of Medieval Wales: Contexts and Approaches’, in A Companion to Medieval Wales, ed. Emma Cavell and Kathryn Hurlock (Leiden, forthcoming). Pryce, Huw, ‘Owain Gwynedd (d. 1170)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Pryce, Huw, ‘Prise, Sir John [Syr Siôn ap Rhys] (1501/2–1555)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Pryce, Huw, ‘Robert Rees Davies 1938–2005’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 161 (2009), 135–55. Prys, R.  I. (Gweirydd ap Rhys), Hanes Llenyddiaeth Gymreig, o’r Flwyddyn 1300 hyd y Flwyddyn 1650 (Liverpool [1885]). Pryse, R. I., and Thomas Stephens, Orgraph yr Iaith Gymraeg (Denbigh, 1859). Pugh, Edward, Cambria Depicta: A Tour through North Wales, Illustrated with Picturesque Views (London, 1816). Ranke, Leopold, The Ecclesiastical and Political History of the Popes of Rome during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Sarah Austin, vol. 1 (London, 1841). Rapin Thoyras, [Paul] de, The History of England. Volume I, trans. N. Tindal (London, 1725). Rapin Thoyras, [Paul] de, The History of England. Volume IV, trans. N.  Tindal (London, 1727). A Rattleskull Genius: The Many Faces of Iolo Morganwg, ed. Geraint  H.  Jenkins (Cardiff, 2005). Readman, Paul, Land and Nation in England: Patriotism, National Identity, and the Politics of Land, 1880–1914 (Woodbridge, 2008). Rees, Amanda, ‘Doing “Deep Big History”: Race, Landscape and the Humanity of H. J. Fleure (1877–1969)’, History of the Human Sciences, 32/1 (2019), 99–120. Rees, Eiluned, ‘Developments in the Book Trade in Eighteenth-Century Wales’, The Library, 5th ser., 24 (1969), 33–43. Rees, Eiluned, ‘An Introductory Survey of 18th Century Welsh Libraries’, Journal of the Welsh Bibliographical Society, 10/4 (1971), 197–258. Rees, Eiluned, The Welsh Book-Trade before 1820 (Aberystwyth, 1988). Rees, Eiluned, ‘The Welsh Book Trade from 1718 to 1820’, in A Nation and its Books, ed. Jones and Rees, 123–33. Rees, Gareth, ‘Community Studies and Twentieth-century Social Change’, in Social Anthropologies of the Welsh: Past and Present, ed. W.  John Morgan and Fiona Bowie (RAI Country Series, 5; Canon Pyon, 2021), 145–62. Rees, J. F., ‘Foreword’, in D. J. Davies, The Economic History of South Wales prior to 1800, vii–viii. Rees, J.  F., ‘How Wales Became Industrialized’ [1936], in his Studies in Welsh History, 130–48. Rees, J. F., Studies in Welsh History (Cardiff, 1947). Rees, J. F., ‘Tudor Policy in Wales’ [1935], in his Studies in Welsh History, 26–47. Rees, J. F., and W. Rees, ‘A Select Bibliography of the Economic History of Wales’, Economic History Review, 2/2 (1930), 320–6. Rees, Rice, An Essay on the Welsh Saints or the Primitive Christians Usually Considered to Have Been the Founders of Churches in Wales (London, 1836).

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Bibliography of Works Cited  445 Rees, Thomas, The Beauties of England and Wales . . ., vol. XVIII, South Wales (London, 1815). Rees, Thomas, History of Protestant Nonconformity in Wales, from its Rise to the Present Time (London, 1861). Rees, Thomas, Miscellaneous Papers Relating to Wales (London, 1867). Rees, Thomas, and John Thomas, Hanes Eglwysi Annibynol Cymru, 5 vols. (Liverpool, 1871–91). Rees, William, History of the Order of St John of Jerusalem in Wales and on the Welsh Border, Including an Account of the Templars (Cardiff, 1947). [Rees, William], South Wales and the Border in the Fourteenth Century (map and handbook; London, 1933). Rees, William, South Wales and the March 1284–1415: A Social and Agrarian Study (Oxford, 1924). Rees, William, ‘The Union of England and Wales’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1937, 27–100. The Register of John Trefnant, Bishop of Hereford (A.D.  1389–1404), ed. W.  W.  Capes (Hereford, 1914). Registrum Epistolarum Fratris Johannis Peckham, Archiepiscopi Cantuariensis, ed. C. T. Martin, 3 vols. (Rolls Series, London, 1882–5). Reid, Donald, ‘Inciting Readings and Reading Cites: Visits to Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, Modern Intellectual History, 4/3 (2007), 545–70. Religion, Identity and Conflict in Britain: From the Restoration to the Twentieth Century, ed. Stewart J. Brown, Frances Knight, and John Morgan-Guy (repr. Abingdon, 2016). Report of the Proceedings at the Eisteddfod . . . of the Cambrian Society of Gwent . . . Held at Brecon, Sept. 24th, 25th, 1822 (Brecon, 1823). Report of the Royal Commission on Land in Wales and Monmouthshire (London, 1896), P. P. 1896 C.8221 xxxiv 1. Reynolds, Susan, ‘Medieval Origines Gentium and the Community of the Realm’, History, 68 (1983), 375–90. Rhagymadroddion 1547–1659, ed. Garfield H. Hughes (Cardiff, 1951). Rhagymadroddion a Chyflwyniadau Lladin 1551–1632, trans. Ceri Davies (Cardiff, 1980). Rhigyfarch’s Life of St. David: The Basic Mid Twelfth-Century Latin Text, ed. and trans. J. W. James (Cardiff, 1967). Rhoscomyl, Owen, Flame-Bearers of Welsh History, public edn. (Merthyr Tydfil, 1905). Rhoscomyl, Owen, Flame-Bearers of Welsh History, school edn. (Merthyr Tydfil, 1905). ‘Rhygyfarch’s Life of St David’, ed. and trans. John Reuben Davies and Richard Sharpe, in St David of Wales, ed. Evans and Wooding, 107–55. Rhys, J., ‘Buchdraeth y Diweddar  T.  Price (Carnhuanawc)’, Yr Ymofynydd, 3 (1850), 163–7. Rhys, John, Celtic Britain (London, 1882). Rhys, John, and David Brynmor-Jones, The Welsh People (London, 1900). Richard, Henry, Letters on the Social and Political Condition of the Principality of Wales (London [1866]). Richards, Melville, ‘Gildas a’r Brytaniaid’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, 13 (1948–50), 64–5. Richards, Robert, Cymru’r Oesau Canol (Wrexham, 1933). Richards, Thomas, The Puritan Movement in Wales (London, 1920). Richards, Thomas, ‘Shankland, Thomas (1858–1927)’, Dictionary of Welsh Biography. Richards, William, The History of Lynn, 2 vols. (Lynn, 1812).

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446  Bibliography of Works Cited Richards, William, The Welsh Nonconformists’ Memorial; or, Cambro-British Biography, ed. John Evans (London, 1820). Richards, William, The Writings of the Radical Welsh Baptist Minister William Richards (1749–1818), ed. John Oddy (Lewiston, NY, 2008). Richter, Michael, ‘Canterbury’s Primacy in Wales and the First Stage of Bishop Bernard’s Opposition’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 22 (1971), 177–89. Ringler, William  A., ‘Arthur Kelton’s Contributions to Early British History’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 40 (1977), 353–6. Robbins, Keith, ‘Forever a Footnote? Wales in Modern British History’, in Wales and the Wider World, ed. Charles-Edwards and Evans, 218–36. Roberts, Brynley  F., ‘Edward Lhuyd y Cymro’, National Library of Wales Journal, 24/1 (1985), 63–83. Roberts, Brynley  F., ‘Edward Lhuyd—Welshman’, Nature in Wales, new series, 2 (1984), 42–55. Roberts, Brynley F., ‘Edward Lhwyd a Cheredigion’, Ceredigion, 16/1 (2009), 49–69. Roberts, Brynley F., ‘Fersiwn Dingestow o Brut y Brenhinedd’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, 27 (1976–8), 331–61. Roberts, Brynley F., ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth and Welsh Historical Tradition’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, 20 (1976), 29–40. Roberts, Brynley F., ‘Gerald of Wales and Welsh Tradition’, in The Formation of Culture in Medieval Britain, ed. Françoise H. M. Le Saux (Lewiston, 1995), 129–47. Roberts, Brynley  F., ‘Gildas a’r Brytaniaid’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, 25 (1972–4), 11–14. Roberts, Brynley F., ‘The Red Book of Hergest Version of Brut y Brenhinedd’, Studia Celtica, 12–13 (1977–8), 147–86. Roberts, Brynley  F., ‘Testunau Hanes Cymraeg Canol’, in Y Traddodiad Rhyddiaith yn yr Oesau Canol, ed. Geraint Bowen (Llandysul, 1974), 274–302. Roberts, Brynley  F., ‘The Treatment of Personal Names in the Early Welsh Versions of Historia Regum Britanniae’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, 25 (1972–4), 274–90. Roberts, Brynley  F., ‘Un o Lawysgrifau Hopcyn ap Tomas o Ynys Dawy’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, 22 (1966–8), 223–8. Roberts, Brynley  F., ‘Welsh Scholarship at Merthyr Tydfil’, Merthyr Historian, 10 (1999), 51–62. Roberts, Brynley  F., ‘Williams, Moses (1685–1742)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Roberts, Brynley F., ‘Ystoria’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, 26/1 (1974), 13–20. Roberts, Brynley  F., ‘Ystoriaeu Brenhinedd Ynys Brydeyn: A Fourteenth-Century Welsh Brut’, CSANA Yearbook, 8–9 (2011), 217–27. Roberts, D. H. E., ‘Welsh Publishing in the United States of America’, in A Nation and its Books, ed. Jones and Rees, 253–64. Roberts, Enid Pierce, ‘Gweithgarwch Llenyddol  Gweirydd ap Rhys (1807–1889)’, Y Traethodydd, 102/443 (1947), 61–9. Roberts, Enid Pierce, ‘Pryse, Robert John (Gweirydd ap Rhys; 1807–1889)’, Dictionary of Welsh Biography. Roberts, Euryn Rhys, ‘A Surfeit of Identity? Regional Solidarities, Welsh Identity and the Idea of Britain’, in Imagined Communities: Constructing Collective Identities in Medieval Europe, ed. Andrzej Pleszczyński, Joanna Sobiesiak, Michał Tomaszek, and Przemysław Tyszka (Leiden, 2018), 247–78. Roberts, Glyn, Aspects of Welsh History: Selected Papers (Cardiff, 1969).

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Bibliography of Works Cited  447 Roberts, Gwyneth Tyson, ‘ “An Account Obtained from Authentic Documents”: Jane Williams (Ysgafell) as a Historian’, in Writing a Small Nation’s Past, ed. Evans and Pryce, 83–96. Roberts, Gwyneth Tyson, Jane Williams (Ysgafell) (Cardiff, 2020). Roberts, Gwyneth Tyson, The Language of the Blue Books: The Perfect Instrument of Empire (Cardiff, 1998). Roberts, H.  P., ‘Nonconformist Academies in Wales (1662–1862)’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1928–9, 1–98. Roberts, Iolo and Menai, ‘De Mona Druidum Insula’, in Abraham Ortelius and the First Atlas: Essays Commemorating the Quadricentennial of his Death 1598–1998, ed. Marcel van den Broecke, Peter van der Krogt, and Peter Maurer (Utrecht, 1998), 347–61. Roberts, Iolo and Menai, ‘William Owen (Pughe) y Mapiwr’, National Library of Wales Journal, 30/3 (1998), 295–322. Roberts, Llion Pryderi, ‘  “Mawrhau ei Swydd”: Owen Thomas, Lerpwl (1812–91) a Chofiannau Pregethwyr y Bedwaredd Ganrif ar Bymtheg’ (PhD Thesis, Cardiff University, 2011). Roberts, Michael, ‘ “More Prone to be Idle and Riotous than the English”? Attitudes to Male Behaviour in Early Modern Wales’, in Women and Gender in Early Modern Wales, ed. Roberts and Clarke, 259–90. Roberts, Peter  R., ‘The “Act of Union” in Welsh History’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1972–3, 49–72. Roberts, Peter R., ‘Parry, Blanche (1507/8–1590)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Roberts, Peter R., ‘Tudor Legislation and the Political Status of “the British Tongue” ’, in The Welsh Language before the Industrial Revolution, ed. Jenkins, 123–52. Roberts, Peter, ‘Tudor Wales, National Identity and the British Inheritance’, in British Consciousness and Identity, ed. Bradshaw and Roberts, 8–42. Roberts, Peter  R., ‘Wales and England after the Tudor “Union”: Crown, Principality and Parliament, 1543–1624’, in Law and Government under the Tudors, ed. Claire Cross, David Loades, and J. J. Scarisbrick (Cambridge, 1988), 111–38. Robinson, Benedict Scott, ‘ “Dark Speeche”: Matthew Parker and the Reforming of History’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 29 (1998), 1061–83. Rockett, William, ‘The Structural Plan of Camden’s Britannia’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 26 (1995), 829–41. Rolt, Richard, Cambria. A Poem, in Three Books (London, 1749). Rosser, Siwan  M., ‘Thomas Levi a Dychymyg y Cymry’, Cylchgrawn Cymdeithas Hanes y Methodistiaid Calfinaidd, 40 (2016), 87–102. Rowlands, Henry, ‘Antiquitates Parochiales’, Archaeologia Cambrensis, 1–4 (1846–9), passim. Rowlands, Henry, Idea Agriculturae: The Principles of Vegetation Asserted and Defended (Dublin, 1764). Rowlands, Henry, Mona Antiqua Restaurata: An Archæological Discourse on the Antiquities, Natural and Historical, of the Isle of Anglesey, the Ancient Seat of the British Druids (Dublin, 1723). Rowlands, Henry, Mona Antiqua Restaurata, 2nd edn. (London, 1766). Rowse, A. L., ‘Alltyrynys and the Cecils’, English Historical Review, 75 (1960), 54–76. Russell, Paul, ‘ “Divers Evidences Antient of Some Welsh Princes”: Dr John Dee and the Welsh Context of the Reception of Geoffrey of Monmouth in Sixteenth-Century England and Wales’, in L’Historia regum Britannie et les ‘Bruts’ en Europe, Tome II: Production, circulation et réception (xiie -xvie siècle), ed. H.  Tétrel and G.  Veysseyre (Paris, 2018), 395–426.

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Bibliography of Works Cited  457 White, Eryn  M., ‘Popular Schooling and the Welsh Language 1650–1800’, in The Welsh Language before the Industrial Revolution, ed. Jenkins, 317–41. White, Eryn M., ‘A Tale of Two Mirrors: Forming an Identity for the Calvinistic Methodist Church in Wales’, in Religion, Identity and Conflict in Britain, ed. Brown et al., 81–9. White, Eryn  M., The Welsh Methodist Society: The Early Societies in South-West Wales 1737–1750 (Cardiff, 2020). Wilkinson, Louise J., ‘Joan, Wife of Llywelyn the Great’, in Thirteenth Century England, 10, ed. Michael Prestwich, Richard Britnell, and Robin Frame (Woodbridge, 2005), 81–93. William, Tho[mas], Oes Lyfr ([Carmarthen, 1724]; 2nd edn. (Carmarthen, 1768)). Williams, A. H., Cymru Ddoe sef Cefndir Hanes Cymru (Liverpool, 1944). Williams, A.  H., An Introduction to the History of Wales. Volume I: Prehistoric Times to 1063 (Cardiff, 1941). Williams, B. T., ‘The Life of Thomas Stephens’, in Thomas Stephens, The Literature of the Cymry, ed. D. Silvan Evans, 2nd edn. (London, 1876), xix–xlviii. Williams, Chris, Capitalism, Community and Conflict: The South Wales Coalfield, 1898–1947 (Cardiff, 1998). Williams, Chris, ‘The Dilemmas of Nation and Class in Wales, 1914–45’, in Debating Nationhood and Governance in Britain, ed. Tanner et al., 146–68. Williams, Chris, ‘ “The Great Hero of the Newport Rising”: Thomas Phillips, Reform and Chartism’, Welsh History Review, 21/3 (2003), 481–511. Williams, Chris, Icons of Wales: Eiconau Cymru (Milton Keynes, 2012). Williams, Chris, ‘The Modern Age, c.1850–1945’, in The Cambridge History of Welsh Literature, ed. Evans and Fulton, 355–64. Williams, Chris, ‘Problematizing Wales: An Exploration in Historiography and Postcoloniality’, in Postcolonial Wales, ed. Jane Aaron and Chris Williams (Cardiff, 2005), 3–22. Williams, Chris, ‘Searching for a New South Wales’, History Workshop Journal, 41 (1996), 266–76. Williams, Christopher  J., ‘A.  N.  Palmer, Historian of Wrexham’, Denbighshire Historical Society Transactions, 46 (1997), 109–36. Williams, David, The History of Monmouthshire (London, 1796). Williams, David, A History of Modern Wales (London, 1950). Williams, David, John Frost: A Study in Chartism (Cardiff, 1939). Williams, David, A Short History of Modern Wales (Cardiff, 1934). Williams, David, ‘Thomas, Sir Daniel (Lleufer) (1863–1940)’, Dictionary of Welsh Biography. Williams, E. A., The Day before Yesterday: Anglesey in the Nineteenth Century (Beaumaris, 1988). Williams, E. A., Hanes Môn yn y Bedwaredd Ganrif ar Bymtheg (Llangefni, 1927). Williams, Edward, Poems, Lyric and Pastoral, 2 vols. (London, 1794). [Williams, Edward], ‘A Short Review of the Present State of Welsh Manuscripts’, in Jones et al., The Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales, 1: ix–xxi. Williams, G. J., ‘Brut Aberpergwm: A Version of the Chronicle of the Princes’, Glamorgan Historian, 4 (1967), 205–20. Williams, G. J., ‘The Early Historians of Glamorgan’, Glamorgan Historian, 3 (1966), 63–74. Williams, G.  J., ‘Eisteddfod Llangollen, 1858’, Transactions of the Denbigshire Historical Society, 7 (1958), 139–61. Williams, G. J., Iolo Morganwg: Y Gyfrol Gyntaf (Cardiff, 1956). Williams, G. J., Traddodiad Llenyddol Morgannwg (Cardiff, 1948). Williams, G. J., ‘Tri Chof Ynys Brydain’, Llên Cymru, 3 (1954–5), 234–9.

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458  Bibliography of Works Cited Williams, Glanmor, ‘Bishop Sulien, Bishop Richard Davies, and Archbishop Parker’, National Library of Wales Journal, 5/3 (1948), 215–19. Williams, Glanmor, ‘Cipdrem Arall ar y “Ddamcaniaeth Eglwysig Brotestannaidd”  ’, Y Traethodydd, 103/447 (1948), 49–57. Williams, Glanmor, ‘Gomer: “Sylfaenydd ein Llenyddiaeth Gyfnodol” ’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1982, 111–38. Williams, Glanmor, ‘Haneswyr a’r Deddfau Uno’, in Cof Cenedl, 10 (1995), 31–60. Williams, Glanmor, History in a Modern University (Swansea, 1959). Williams, Glanmor, ‘The Idea of Nationality in Wales’, Cambridge Journal, 7/3 (1953), 145–58. Williams, Glanmor, ‘John Penry: Marprelate and Patriot?’, Welsh History Review, 3/4 (1967), 361–80. Williams, Glanmor, A Life (Cardiff, 2002). Williams, Glanmor, ‘Local and National History in Wales’, Welsh History Review, 5/1 (1970), 45–66. Williams, Glanmor, ‘R. T.’, Taliesin, 21 (1970), 13–25. Williams, Glanmor, Recovery, Reorientation, and Reformation: Wales c.1415–1642 (Oxford, 1987). Williams, Glanmor, Religion, Language and Nationality in Wales (Cardiff, 1979). Williams, Glanmor, ‘Richard Davies, Bishop of St. Davids, 1561–81’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1948, 147–69. Williams, Glanmor, ‘Romantic and Realist: Theophilus Evans and Theophilus Jones’, Archaeologia Cambrensis, 140 (1991), 17–27. Williams, Glanmor, ‘Some Protestant Views of Early British Church History’, History, 38 (1953), 219–33. Williams, Glanmor, Wales and the Reformation (Cardiff, 1997). Williams, Glanmor, The Welsh Church from Conquest to Reformation (Cardiff, 1962; 2nd edn., 1976). Williams, Glanmor, Welsh Reformation Essays (Cardiff, 1967). Williams, Glyn, The Desert and the Dream: A Study of Welsh Colonization in Chubut, 1865–1915 (Cardiff, 1975). Williams, Gruffydd Aled, ‘ “Ail Dewi Menew”: Golwg ar Richard Davies’, Y Traethodydd, 174/729 (2019), 94–112. Williams, Gruffydd Aled, ‘The Bardic Road to Bosworth: A Welsh View of Henry Tudor’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1986, 7–31. Williams, Gruffydd Aled, ‘Gwrthryfel Glyndŵr: Dau Nodyn’, Llên Cymru, 33 (2010), 80–7. Williams, Gruffydd Aled, The Last Days of Owain Glyndŵr (Talybont, 2017). Williams, Gruffydd Aled, ‘The Later Welsh Poetry Referencing Owain’, in Owain Glyndŵr, ed. Livingston and Bollard, 519–50. Williams, Gruffydd Aled, ‘The Literary Tradition to c.1560’, in History of Merioneth, Volume II: The Middle Ages, ed. J. Beverley Smith and Llinos Beverley Smith (Cardiff, 2001), 507–628. Williams, Gruffydd Aled, ‘Owain, Gutun (fl. c.1451–1498)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Williams, Gruffydd Aled, ‘Testun o Feirionnydd: Golwg Arall ar “The History of Owen Glyndwr” ’, Journal of the Merioneth Historical and Record Society, 18/3 (2020), 237–53. Williams, Gruffydd Aled, ‘Welsh Raiding in the Twelfth-Century Shropshire/Cheshire March: The Case of Owain Cyfeiliog’, Studia Celtica, 40 (2006), 89–115. Williams, Gwyn A., Madoc: The Making of a Myth (London, 1979).

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Bibliography of Works Cited  459 Williams, Gwyn  A., The Search for Beulah Land: The Welsh and the Atlantic Revolution (London, 1980). Williams, Gwyn A., ‘The Succession to Gwynedd, 1238–47’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, 20 (1962–4), 393–413. Williams, Gwyn  A., ‘Twf Hanesyddol y Syniad o Genedl yng Nghymru’, Efrydiau Athronyddol, 24 (1961), 18–30. Williams, Gwyn A., When Was Wales? (London, 1979). Williams, Gwyn  A., When Was Wales? A History of the Welsh, paperback edn. (Harmondsworth, 1985). Williams, Gwyn  A., ‘Women Workers in Wales, 1968–82’, Welsh History Review, 11/4 (1983), 530–48. Williams, Hugh, Christianity in Early Britain (Oxford, 1912). Williams, Hugh, ‘Heinrich Zimmer on the History of the Celtic Church’, Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie, 4 (1903), 527–74. Williams, Hugh, ‘Some Aspects of the Christian Church in Wales during the Fifth and  Sixth Centuries’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1893–4, 55–132. Williams, Ieuan M., ‘Ysgolheictod Hanesyddol yr Unfed Ganrif ar Bymtheg’, Llên Cymru, 2 (1952–3), 111–24, 209–223. Williams, J. E.  Caerwyn, ‘Cymdeithas Dafydd ap Gwilym, Mai 1886–Mehefin 1888’, in Astudiaethau Amrywiol, ed. Jones, 137–81. Williams, J. E.  Caerwyn, ‘Gutun Owain’, in A Guide to Welsh Literature, ed. Jarman and Hughes, 240–55. Williams, J. E.  Caerwyn, ‘Robert Jones, Rhos-lan: Yr Hanesydd’, Transactions of the Caernarvonshire Historical Society, 24 (1963), 153–95. Williams, J. E. Caerwyn, ‘Ychwaneg am Robert Jones, Rhos-lan, a’i Deulu’, Transactions of the Caernarvonshire Historical Society, 25 (1964), 66–80. Williams, J. Gwynn, ‘Jenkins, Robert Thomas (1881–1969)’, Dictionary of Welsh Biography. Williams, J. Gwynn, ‘Roberts, Glyn (1904–1962)’, Dictionary of Welsh Biography. Williams, J. Gwynn, The University Movement in Wales (Cardiff, 1993). Williams, J. Gwynn, The University of Wales 1893–1939 (Cardiff, 1997). Williams, Jane, A History of Wales, Derived from Authentic Sources (London, 1869). Williams, Jane, Ysgafell, The Literary Remains of the Rev. Thomas Price, Carnhuanawc, Vicar of Cwmdû, Breconshire; and Rural Dean; with a Memoir of His Life, 2 vols. (Llandovery and London, 1854–5). [Williams, John], Review of ‘Druidism. Second Article in the Gwyddoniadur; or, Encyclopedia Cambrensis. Part XXXII’, Cambrian Journal (Alban Elved 1860), 231–40. Williams Ab Ithel, John, The Traditionary Annals of the Kymry (Tenby, 1867). Williams, John, Digest of Welsh Historical Statistics, 2 vols. ([Cardiff] 1985). Williams, Jonathan, The History of Radnorshire (London, 1859). Williams, Kelsey Jackson, The Antiquary: John Aubrey’s Historical Scholarship (Oxford, 2016). Williams, Kevin, ‘The Dragon Finds a Tongue: Devolution and Government in Wales since 1997’, in The Cambridge History of Welsh Literature, ed. Evans and Fulton, 655–68. Williams, Mark, ‘History, the Interregnum and the Exiled Irish’, in Constructing the Past, ed. Williams and Forrest, 27–48. Williams, Mark, Ireland’s Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth (Princeton, NJ, 2016). Williams, Michael, ‘The Creation of Humanized Landscapes’, in A Century of British Geography, ed. Johnston and Williams, 167–212.

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460  Bibliography of Works Cited Williams, Moelwyn, The Making of the South Wales Landscape (London, 1975). Williams, Moses, Pregeth a Barablwyd yn Eglwys Grist yn Llundain, ar Ddyddgwyl Ddewi, yn y Flwyddyn 1717 (London, 1718). Williams, Penry, The Council in the Marches of Wales under Elizabeth I (Cardiff, 1958). Williams, Raymond, Culture (London, 1981). Williams, Raymond, Keywords, revd. edn. (London, 1983). Williams, Raymond, People of the Black Mountains II: The Eggs of the Eagle (London, 1990). Williams, Rhiannon Heledd, Cyfaill Pwy o’r Hen Wlad? Gwasg Gyfnodol Gymraeg America 1838–1866 (Cardiff, 2017). Williams, Robert, Enwogion Cymru: A Biographical Dictionary of Eminent Welshmen, from the Earliest Times to the Present (Llandovery, 1852). Williams, Roger Jones, ‘Hanes Cyhoeddi Y Gwyddoniadur Cymreig’, Llên Cymru, 9/3­–4 (1967), 133–65. Williams, Roger  J., ‘Hanes Cyhoeddi y Gwyddoniadur Cymreig’, Journal of the Welsh Bibliographical Society, 11/1–2 (1973–4), 54–67. Williams, S. J., ‘Carnhuanawc, Eisteddfodwr ac Ysgolhaig’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1954, 18–30. Williams, Stephen  J., ‘Thomas Stephens a Gweirydd ap Rhys’, in Gwŷr Llên y Bedwaredd Ganrif ar Bymtheg, ed. Dyfnallt Morgan (Llandybïe, 1968), 224–33. Williams, Sian Rhiannon, Oes y Byd i’r Iaith Gymraeg: Y Gymraeg yn Ardal Ddiwydiannol Sir Fynwy yn y Bedwaredd Ganrif ar Bymtheg (Cardiff, 1992). Williams, Stephen W., The Cistercian Abbey of Strata Florida (London, 1889). Williams, T. P. T., ‘The “Dodsley” History of Anglesey Revisited’, Transactions of the Anglesey Antiquarian Society and Field Club, 2006, 15–33. Williams, W.  Llewelyn, ‘The King’s Court of Great Sessions in Wales’, Y Cymmrodor, 26 (1916), 1–87. Williams, W.  Llewelyn, The Making of Modern Wales: Studies in the Tudor Settlement of Wales (London, 1919). Williams, W. Llewelyn, Review of O. M. Edwards, Wales, Y Cymmrodor, 15 (1901), 150–68. Williams, W. Llewelyn, ‘The Union of England and Wales’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1907–8, 47–117. Williams, W. Llewelyn, ‘Welsh Catholics on the Continent’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1901–2, 46–144. Williams, W.  R., The Parliamentary History of the Principality of Wales from the Earliest Times to the Present Day, 1541–1895 (Brecknock, 1895). Williams, William, ‘Historia Bellomarisei, or The History of the Town and Burrough of Beaumaris’, in Richard Fenton, Tours in Wales (1804–1813), ed. John Fisher (London, 1917), 275–306. Williams, William, Observations on the Snowdon Mountains (London, 1802). Williams, William, Prydnawngwaith y Cymry a Gweithiau Eraill, ed. Dafydd Glyn Jones (Bangor, 2011). Willis Bund, J. W., The Celtic Church of Wales (London, 1897). Wilson, John  R., Memorializing History: Public Sculpture in Industrial South Wales (Aberystwyth, 1996). Winkler, Emily  A., ‘The Latin Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan, British Kingdoms and the Scandinavian Past’, Welsh History Review, 28/3 (2017), 425–56. Winkler, Emily  A., ‘William of Malmesbury and the Britons’, in Discovering William of Malmesbury, ed. Rodney  M.  Thomson, Emily Dolmans, and Emily  A.  Winkler (Woodbridge, 2017), 189–201.

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Bibliography of Works Cited  461 Winterbottom, Michael, ‘The Preface of Gildas’ De Excidio’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1974­–5, 277–87. Winward, Fiona, ‘The Lives of St Wenefred (BHL 8847–8851)’, Analecta Bollandiana, 117 (1999), 89–132. Withers, Charles  W.  J., ‘Pennant, Thomas (1726–98)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Wolf, Kordula, Troja—Metamorphosen eines Mythos: französische, englische und italienische Überlieferungen des 12. Jahrhunderts im Vergleich (Berlin, 2009). Women and Gender in Early Modern Wales, ed. Michael Roberts and Simone Clarke (Cardiff, 2000). Wood, Ian, The Modern Origins of the Early Middle Ages (Oxford, 2013). Woodward, B. B., The History of Wales, from the Earliest Times, to its Final Incorporation with the Kingdom of England (London, 1853). Woodward, B.  B., revd. Oliver Everett, ‘Woodward, Bernard Bolingbroke (1816–1869)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Woolf, Daniel, A Global History of History (Cambridge, 2011). Woolf, D. R., The Idea of History in Early Stuart England (Toronto, 1990). Woolf, D.  R., ‘Narrative Historical Writing in Restoration England’, in The Restoration Mind, ed. W. Gerald Marshall (Newark, DE, 1997), 207–51. Woolf, Daniel, ‘Of Nations, Nationalism, and National Identity: Reflections on the Historiographic Organization of the Past’, in The Many Faces of Clio: Cross-Cultural Approaches to Historiography, Essays in Honour of Georg G. Iggers, ed. Q. Edward Wang and Franz L. Fillafer (New York, 2007), 71–103. Woolf, D. R., Reading History in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2000). Woolf, D. R., ‘Rowlands, Henry (1655–1723)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Woolf, Daniel, ‘Senses of the Past in Tudor Britain’, in A Companion to Tudor Britain, ed. Robert Tittler and Norman Jones (Oxford, 2004), 407–29. Wormald, Jenny, ‘The Creation of Britain: Multiple Kingdoms or Core and Colonies?’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 2 (1992), 175–94. Wormald, Jenny, ‘James VI, James I and the Identity of Britain’, in The British Problem, c.1534–1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago, ed. Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill (Basingstoke, 1996), 148–71. Wotton, W., A Sermon Preached in Welsh Before the British Society in the Church of St. Mary-le-Bow, London, Upon St.-David’s Day, 1722 (London, 1723). Wotton, William, with the assistance of Moses Williams, Cyfreithjeu Hywel Dda ac Eraill, seu Leges Wallicae (London, 1730). Wright, Neil, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth and Bede’, Arthurian Literature, 6 (1986), 27–59. Wright, Neil, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth and Gildas’, Arthurian Literature, 2 (1982), 1–40. Wright, Neil, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth and Gildas Revisited’, Arthurian Literature, 4 (1985), 155–63. Wright, Neil, ‘Gildas’s Prose Style and its Origins’, in Gildas: New Approaches, ed. Michael Lapidge and David N. Dumville (Woodbridge, 1984), 107–28. Writing a Small Nation’s Past: Wales in Comparative Perspective, 1850–1950, ed. Neil Evans and Huw Pryce (Farnham, 2013). Writing Wales, from the Renaissance to Romanticism, ed. Stewart Mottram and Sarah Prescott (Farnham, 2012). Wykes, David L., ‘To Revive the Memory of Some Excellent Men’: Edmund Calamy and the Early Historians of Nonconformity, Friends of Dr Williams’s Library Fiftieth Lecture (London, 1997).

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462  Bibliography of Works Cited Wyn, Elis, o Wyrfai, Hanes y Cymry . . . hyd Gydymgorphoriad Cymru a Lloegr gan Iorwerth y Cyntaf (Caernarfon, 1853). Wynn, Sir John, The History of the Gwedir Family [ed. Daines Barrington] (London, 1770). Wynn, Sir John, The History of the Gwydir Family, ed. ‘A Lady of the Principality’ [Angharad Llwyd] (Ruthin, 1827). Wynn, Sir John, of Gwydir, The History of the Gwydir Family, ed. John Ballinger (Cardiff, 1927). Wynn, Sir John, History of the Gwydir Family and Memoirs, ed. J.  Gwynfor Jones (Llandysul, 1990). Wynne, William, The History of Wales Comprehending the Lives and Succession of the Princes of Wales from Cadwalader the Last King, to Lhewelyn the last Prince, of British Blood, with a Short Account of the Affairs of Wales, under the Kings of England (London, 1697). Wynne, [William], Die Historie von Walles [trans. Philipp Georg Hübner] (Coburg, 1725). Wynne, W., The History of Wales, new edn. (London, 1774). Wynne, W., The History of Wales, new edn. (Merthyr Tydfil, 1812). Wynne, William, ‘Letter of William Wynne, the Historian, to Bishop Humphreys of St. Asaph [sic]’, ed. Rowland Williams, Archaeologia Cambrensis, 3rd ser., 1 (1855), 45–6. Yardley, Edward, Menevia Sacra [1739 × 1761], ed. Francis Green, Archaeologia Cambrensis Supplemental Volume (London, 1927). Yates, Nigel, ‘Anglican Attitudes to Roman Catholicism in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’, in Religion, Identity and Conflict in Britain, ed. Brown et al., 121–34. Yr Ymarfer o Dduwioldeb, trans. Rowland Vaughan (London, 1629). Yorke, Barbara, Kings and Kingdoms of Early Anglo-Saxon England (London, 1990). Yorke, Philip, The Royal Tribes of Wales (Wrexham, 1799). Young, Robert J. C., The Idea of English Ethnicity (Malden, MA, 2008). Younger, Neil, ‘How Protestant was the Elizabethan Regime?’, English Historical Review, 133 (2018), 1060–92. ‘Ystorya Erkwlf ’, ed. Thomas Jones, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, 10/4 (1941), 284–97; 11/1 (1941), 21–30; 11/2 (1943), 85–90. Ystoria Taliesin, ed. Patrick K. Ford (Cardiff, 1992). Zeiser, Sarah, ‘Bragmaticus omnibus brittonibus: David, Sulien, and an Ecclesiastical Dynasty in Conquest-Era Wales’, Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 31 (2011), 305–20. Zeiser, Sarah Elizabeth, ‘Latinity, Manuscripts, and the Rhetoric of Conquest in LateEleventh-Century Wales’ (PhD Thesis, Harvard University, 2012). Zimmer, Oliver, ‘In Search of Natural Identity: Alpine Landscape and the Reconstruction of the Swiss Nation’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 40/4 (1998), 637–65. Zimmern, Alfred E., My Impressions of Wales, 2nd edn. (London, 1921).

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Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Ab Ithel, see Williams, John Aberafan 182–3 Aberconwy, abbey  60–1, 66–7, 126–7, 129–30, 141–2 Aberffraw  136–7, 146–7 Abergavenny Cymreigyddion Society  239, 241–3, 248–9, 279–80 priory 84 Abergele 22–3 Aberystwyth ‘Aberystwyth school’ of anthropology and geography, see anthropology, physical University College  267–8, 303–4, 330, 339, 341–5, 351–2, 359–60, 363–4, 377–8 ‘aborigines’ 309–10 Acts of Union, see union of England and Wales Adam Usk  83–4 Aeneas  29–30, 79 Æthelflæd ‘Lady of the Mercians’  18–19, 141n.116, 250–1 Æthelweard, chronicle of  18 Æthelwulf, king of the West Saxons  131 Albanactus son of Brutus  48–9, 66, 95 Alexander, bishop of Lincoln  47–8 Alexander the Great  124 Alfred, king of the West Saxons and of the Anglo-Saxons  14–15, 224–5, 227, 291–2 almanacs  183–5, 187–8 America, north Baptists in  235–6 histories of Welsh in  293–7 Welsh settlement in  261, 294–5, 357–9 see also ‘Indians’, Welsh; Madog, Prince Anarawd ap Rhodri Mawr  162–3, 165–6 Aneirin  28–9, 36–7 Book of  254–6 Angharad, wife of Gruffudd ap Cynan  56 Anglesey, histories of, see Rowlands, Henry; Llwyd, Angharad Anglicanism, see Church of England Anglicization  118–19, 191, 265–6, 310, 313 Anglophobia  81, 160–1, 185, 191, 200–1

Anglo-Saxon studies  177 Annales Cambriae A-text, see Harleian chronicle B-text, see Breviate chronicle C-text, see Cottonian chronicle Annals of Æthelflæd 18–19 annals of Clonmacnoise  22–3 Annals of the Four Masters  136n.90, 388–9 Anne, queen of Great Britain and Ireland  185 Annius of Viterbo  96–8, 110–14 anthropology, physical  353–6 see also ethnology anterliwtiau, see interludes Antiochus, king of Syria  56–7 Appleyard, Ernest Sylvanus  270–2 Archaeologia Cambrensis 263–4 archaeology  177–8, 181, 191–2, 263–4, 288, 333, 366–7 Armes Prydein Vawr 18–19 Arnold, Matthew  265–6, 272, 317–18 Arthur, king  25, 28–9, 32–3, 46–7, 53, 75–6, 78–9, 124–6, 162–3, 184–5, 198–9, 246–7, 268–9, 273 as source of prestige  157–8, 265–6 as subject of fables  95–6 comparisons with  56–7, 66, 75 in Welsh hagiography  39–40, 43–4 vindication of  96–7, 103–4, 106–7, 110–11, 200–1, 218, 248, 257–8 Arundel, Henry Fitzalan, twelfth earl of  104, 129–30, 133–4 Asser of St Davids  14–15, 18–19 Aubrey, John  177 Augusta of Saxe-Gotha  190–1 Augustine of Canterbury criticism of  113–16, 119, 129–30, 328–9 Australia 294n.157 awakening, national, see nationality/nationhood, revival of sense of Bacon, Francis  99–101, 177–80 Bala 183 Baldwin, archbishop of Canterbury  50

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464 Index Bale, John  92, 112n.116, 113–14, 153–4 ballads  157–8, 183–5 Balliol, Edward  82–3 Bangor, Caernarfonshire  54–6, 163–4, 352–3 University College  303–4, 330, 341–5, 348–9, 363–4 Bangor Is-coed, Flintshire, monastery  104–6, 129–30 Baptists  232–6, 294–5, 326–7 barbarians  21–2, 36, 47, 334–5 bardism (barddas)  210–11, 254–6, 303–4 bards, legendary massacre of  203–4, 214–15, 227, 244, 254–6 Bardsey Island  39, 118–19 Baring-Gould, Sabine  328–9 Barrington, Daines  201–2 Basingwerk abbey  39–40, 85–6 Black Book of  80, 85–6, 249–50 Bayly, Lewis  158–9 Beaumaris, history of  156–7 Bebb, William Ambrose  352–3 Becket, Thomas  84 Beddoe, Deirdre  372–3 Beddoe, John  333–4, 353–4 Bede  25, 104–6 De Temporibus 59–60 Historia Ecclesiastica  5, 15–16 influence of  32–3, 41, 47 use of Gildas by  18 Beli Mawr  25–7, 53, 291–2 Belinus 46–7 Bentham, Jeremy  284 Berkely, George  227 Berosus  96–9, 111–12 Beuno, St  39n.17 Bever, John  138–9 Bible Breton translation of  252–3 printing of  183–4 verses cited from  81–2, 199 Welsh translations of  104, 114–16, 129–30, 160–1, 172–3, 234–5, 276–7 bibliographies  340, 363–4 Bibyl Ynghymraec, Y 79 biographies  153–4, 246–7, 249–50, 342n.19 biographical dictionaries  270–3, 285–6, 289–90, 349–50 Black Death  312–13, 324–5, 356–7 Blathaon, promontory of  70 Bleddyn ap Cynfyn, king of Gwynedd and Powys  70, 161–2 search for ancestors’ arms and pedigrees attributed to  162–3

Bloch, Marc  356–7, 379–80 Blue Books  263–6, 268, 275–6, 310 Blwydyn Eiseu 83–4 Bochart, Samuel  195–6 Bodin, Jean  94 Boece, Hector, Scotorum Historia 95, 101–2, 387–8 criticism of  106–7, 184–5 books and manuscripts, loss of  116–18, 157–8, 178 Bouchart, Alain  387 Boudica  291–2, 304–5 Bowen, Emrys G.  354–5 Bower, Walter  387–8 Boxhorn, Marcus  181–2 Brad y Cyllyll Hirion, see Treason of the Long Knives Brad y Llyfrau Gleision, see Blue Books Brady, John  157–8 Brecon priory 102 see also Thomas ap John Brenhinedd y Saesson  45, 61, 77–81, 85–7 continuations to 1461 of  87 Brennius  46–7, 95–6 Bretons  45, 259 Breviate chronicle  58–9, 68–70, 75, 77–8, 80–1 Brigit, St  25 Britain and Ireland as framework for history writing 378–80 as ‘the island of the mighty’  70 Disgrifiad o Ynys Brydain 85–6 kingdom of  48–9 name changed to England  18, 92, 99–101, 131–2 place of Wales/the Welsh in  4–5, 14, 16, 18–22, 30–1, 48–9, 75–6, 92, 121–2, 131–2, 168–9, 191, 308, 380–1, 383, 385–7 Unbeiniaeth Prydain 37–8 see also Britannia; dominion, passage of; Great Britain; histories of England or Britain; Llwyd, Humphrey; Prydain son of Aedd Mawr; Triads of the Island of Britain Britannia as name for Wales  14–15 name derived from Brutus  103–4 British Empire  230–1, 260–1 as ‘Anglo-Celtic Empire’  308–9 celebration of  293, 318, 325–6 criticism of  286–7 Welsh involvement in  280–1, 381–2 British History, the  95–112 as prized possession of Welsh  204

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Index  465 popular appeal of  158–9, 183–5, 187–8 see also Brut y Brenhinedd; Geoffrey of Monmouth Britishness  377–8, 380–1 Britons, the as ancestors of the Welsh  14, 16, 26–7, 95, 115–17, 386–7 as Christian people  21–2, 25, 38–9 see also Easter; Joseph of Arimathea; Lucius, king as name for modern inhabitants of Britain  101–2, 132, 219–20 as name for the Welsh  69–70 as the first inhabitants of Britain  104–6, 110–11, 129–30, 132, 144, 191, 257–8 kingdom of, in Wales  70 see also Brythons; dominion, passage of; Gaul; Gildas; Historia Brittonum Brittany histories of  387 settlement of Britons in  26–7, 200–1 union with France  387 Welsh connections with  177–8, 252–3 Britto  29–31, 33–4, 48–9 Britton, John  244–5 Brochwel Ysgithrog  157–8 Bromfield and Yale, lordship of  323 Bromwich, Rachel  343–4 Brown, Peter Hume  337–8 Browne, Thomas  182 Bruce, Edward  165–6 Bruce, Henry Austin, first Baron Aberdare  278–9, 307–8 brud, see prophecy Brut, Walter  114, 159–60, 236–7, 289–90 Brut chronicle  87, 128 see also Caxton Brut Tysilio  98, 204n.125 Brut y Brenhinedd  11, 13, 45, 52–3, 78–81, 85–6, 254 adaptation of  98 illustrated copy of  52–3, 79–80 early modern copies of  92–3, 98, 158–9 see also Brut Tysilio Brut y Saeson 83–4 Brut y Tywysogyon  11, 13, 45, 52–3, 77–8, 85–6, 254 adaptation of  84–5 as continuation of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s De Gestis Britonum  61–3, 78–9, 383–4 continuation from 1282 to 1332  82–3 early modern reception of  92–3, 134–6, 141–2, 163–4 name of  13, 167

relationship to earlier Latin chronicles  61–3, 69–70 Brutus  29–31, 33–4, 44–5, 73–4, 95, 187–8, 291–2 arrived in Britain later than Gomer  199 as first king of Britain  48–9, 98–101, 110, 118–19, 122–4, 128, 132, 156–9, 167–8, 174–5, 185, 236–7 comparison with  75 date of coming to Britain  83–4, 133 existence contested  95–6, 158–9, 171–2, 183, 191–2, 218, 274–5 Brychan, St  39, 118–19 Brynmor-Jones, David  305–6 The Welsh People 306–10 Brythons  309–10, 317–18, 330–1, 333–6 Buchanan, George  226–7, 387–8 Burgess, Thomas, bishop of St Davids  242–3, 259 Burke, Edmund  325–6 Cadell ap Gruffudd  66–7 Cadell ap Rhodri Mawr  162–3 Cadog, St Lives of  42–5 Cadwaladr (the Blessed) ap Cadwallon  83–4, 99, 110–12, 124–5, 127–9, 132, 144, 163–4, 167–8, 171–2, 185, 218 death in Rome of  46–7, 78–9, 118–19, 132–3, 256–7 descent from  86–7, 96–7, 240–1 Cadwaladr ap Gruffudd  55, 65 Cadwallon ap Gruffudd  56 Cædwalla, king of the West Saxons  118–19, 141n.116 Caerleon 47–9 Caernarfon 75 see also Edward II Calais 122–4 Calamy, Edmund  235–6 Calvinism  234–5, 237–8, 291–2, 354–5 Camber, see Kamber Cambrenses, see Kambrenses Cambria, see Wales, Cambria as name for Cambrian Archaeological Association  263–4, 319–20 Cambrian Journal, The 274–5 Cambrian Quarterly Magazine, The  240–1, 251–2 Cambrian Register, The 210–12 Cambrian societies  241–3, 248, 251–2, 262–3 see also Abergavenny, Cymreigyddion Society Cambridge  325–6, 344–5 Girton College  343–4 Cambro-British identity  101–2, 119 Cambro-Briton, The  240–2, 246–7

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466 Index Camden, William  106–7, 111–12, 181–2 Britannia  92, 95–6, 99–101, 148, 150–1 reception of  159–60, 162–3, 168–9, 183, 185, 191, 193–4, 204 see also Gibson, Edmund; Gough, Richard Camlan, battle of  25, 46–7, 53 Campbell, Eliza Constantia  250–1 Campion, Edmund  388–9 Caradog of Llancarfan  39, 44–5, 47–8, 80 Brut y Tywysogyon misattributed to  134–6, 141–2, 171–2 Caratacus (Caradog)  259, 304–5, 319 Cardiff City Hall  304–5 priory 76–7 University College  303–4, 341–2, 344–5, 363–4 see also National Pageant of Wales Cardiff chronicle  76–7 Carew, Richard  150–1 Carlyle, Thomas  272–3 Carmarthen 104–6 Carnhuanawc, see Price, Thomas (Carnhuanawc) Caroline of Ansbach  189 Carte, Thomas  202 Cavendish, William, fifth duke of Devonshire  225–6, 229 Cavour, Count Camillo Benso di  291–2 Caxton, William Chronicles of England  87, 121n.1, 125–6 Cecil, William  138–9, 149 Ceiriog, see Hughes, John (Ceiriog) Celtic Christianity/Church  327–8, 347 languages  175–8, 180–1, 272 peoples  179–80, 191, 288, 308 see also Lhuyd, Edward; Pezron, Paul-Yves; Rhys (Rhŷs), John Celticism  203–4, 351, 389–90 Chadwick, Nora  343n.26 Charlemagne 124 Charles I, king of England, Scotland, and Ireland  156–7, 167–8 Charles II, king of England, Scotland, and Ireland 156–7 Chartism  260–1, 278–9, 286–7, 357–9, 361 Childe, V. Gordon  360n.124, 365–6 chivalry 67 see also romance, European chorography  148, 150–4 Christianity, early British  112–20, 193–4 as proto-Protestant  113–16, 159–60, 198–9, 214–15, 242–3, 248, 389–90 Chronicle of Ireland  24

chronicles dating in  63–4 in early medieval Gwynedd  22–4 Welsh  57–72, 75–7, 83–4, 128 see also Brenhinedd y Saesson; Breviate chronicle; Brut y Tywysogyon; Cardiff chronicle; Cottonian chronicle; Cronica de Wallia; Elis Gruffudd; Harleian chronicle; O Oes Gwrtheyrn; Oed yr Arglwydd chronology chronological coverage  63–4, 122–4, 128, 153–4, 164–5, 217–18, 254, 280–1, 285–6, 314–15, 345–6, 362, 365–6, 377–8 early modern chronologies  183–5, 191n.29 Church of England  193–4, 196–9, 239, 242–3, 253–4, 259–60, 268–9, 350–1 see also disestablishment of Church of England Cistercian monasteries as burial places  66–7 as centres of historical writing  16–17, 57–8, 63–4, 68, 71–2 Civil War, American  295–6 Civil Wars  156–8, 176, 190–1, 314–15 civilization  201–4, 210–11, 213–14, 221–2, 261, 282–3, 308, 324–5 Clapham, John, historian and poet  92 Clapham, John Harold, economic historian 357–9 Clarke, Isaac  270–2 Clarke, William  190–1 classical antiquity comparisons with  165, 231–2, 239 Clement, Mary  343–4 climate  50–1, 315 Clydog, St  39 Clynnog Fawr  56, 163–4 Cnut, king of England  132 coal industry  208–9, 252–3, 324–5, 331, 357–61, 363, 371, 376–7 Coel Hen/Coel Godebog  26–7, 176 Cof Cenedl 364–5 cofiannau 289–90 Coleg Harlech  359–61 College of Arms  151–2 Columba, St  25 Columbus, Christopher  124, 132 common people as readers  253–4 termed ‘the vulgar’  182 see also gwerin/y werin; workers/working class Commonwealth 314–15

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Index  467 Compendium Historiae in Genealogia Christi, see Bibyl Ynghymraec, Y conjecture as method  194–5, 256–7 conservatism, political  224, 241–3, 259–61, 351–2 Conservative Party  377–8 Constantine, king of Cornwall  42–3 Constantine the Great, emperor  25–6, 118–19 Cornwall  150–1, 177–8 Cortés, Hernán  124 Cottonian chronicle  58–9, 69–70, 75, 77–8 county histories  215, 222–5 Council in the Marches of Wales  102, 147–8, 325–6, 347–8 see also Sidney, Henry; Vaughan, Richard Court of Great Sessions  325–6 Coxe, William  215–16 Crimean War  270–2, 274–6, 291–3 Cromwell, Oliver  214–15 Cromwell, Thomas  102 Cronica de Wallia  60–1, 75–6 Crouch, Nathaniel  174–5 crusades  50, 68, 283–4 Cunedda  26–7, 26n.48, 31–2, 42–3, 309–10, 319 Cwm-hir, abbey  58–9, 68 Cyfranc Lludd a Llefelys 53 Cyfres y Brifysgol a’r Werin  342n.16, 350–1 Cymbeline 53 Cymerau, battle of  68 Cymmrodorion, Honourable Society of  188–9, 241–2, 246–7, 319–20, 349–50 Cymru, magazine  311–13 Cymru Fydd, see Wales, home rule for Cyngar, St  44–5 Dafydd ap Gruffudd, prince of Wales  75, 202 Dafydd ap Gwilym  213–14 commemoration of  304–5 Cymdeithas Dafydd ap Gwilym  310–11 Dafydd ap Llywelyn, prince of Wales  136–7, 146–7 Dafydd ap Maredudd Glais  79–80 Dafydd Nanmor  165–6 Danes 309–10 Daniel ap Sulien  63 Dares the Phrygian, see Historia de Excidio Troiae; Ystorya Dared d’Argentré, Bertrand  387 David, St  25, 304–5 Life of  40–3 Davies, David James  359–60 Davies, Edward ‘Celtic’  210–11, 254–6 Davies, James Conway  344–5, 347 Davies, John, historian of Civil Wars  157–8 Davies, John, historian of Wales  364–7, 377–8 Davies, John, of Mallwyd  158–9, 179

Davies, R. Rees  373–4, 378–81 Davies, Richard, bishop of St Davids  114–15, 153–4 letter to the Welsh  115–19, 160–1 Davies, Thomas  270 Davies, Wendy  367–8 Dawkins, William Boyd  333 Dee, John  128–9, 132, 146n.153 Deheubarth  133–4, 136–7 Denbigh 104 lordship of  131–2, 323–4 depression, economic  339 devolution  363, 367–8, 377–8, 380–1, 383n.2 Dinefwr 146–7 Diocletian, emperor  25–6 disestablishment of Church of England  306–7, 327–8, 351–2 Dissent  214–15, 225–6, 253–4, 259, 350–1 histories of  232–8 see also Nonconformity Dissenting academies  208–9, 232–3 dissolution of monasteries  102 Dodd, Arthur Herbert  344–5, 347–8, 357–9 Dodderidge, John  148n.162, 167–8 dominion, passage of, from Britons to English 309–10 in medieval sources  14, 18–19, 26–7, 46–8, 73–4, 78–9 in early modern sources  92, 116–17, 124–5, 132–3, 153–4, 183–4 see also ‘Gyldas hen broffwyt y Brytaniaid’ Drayton, Michael  203–4 Druids  182, 193–4, 202, 223–4, 237–8, 247–8, 274–5 see also bardism Drych Cristnogawl, Y 118–19 Dubricius, see Dyfrig Dugdale, William  156–7, 165–6 Dunuallo Moelmutius  48–9, 157–8 see also Dyfnwal Moelmud Dwnn, Lewys  93–4 Dyfnwal Moelmud  37–8, 213–14, 291–2, 294–5 see also Dunuallo Moelmutius Dyfrig, St  39, 44–5, 47 dynasties, as framework for histories  15–16, 384–5, 387–8 Easter cycle 24 Roman  23–4, 28–9 Ecgberht, king of the West Saxons  86–7, 92, 99–101, 131–2 Edgar, king of England  163–4, 174–5 Ednyfed Fychan  147–8

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 27/02/22, SPi

468 Index education adult  340–3, 356, 369–70 progress of Welsh  310, 314–15 reports on Welsh, see Blue Books Welsh department of the Board of Education 310–11 see also Coleg Harlech; Dissenting academies; Jones, Griffith; schools; University of Wales Edward I, king of England  68, 379–80 see also bards, legendary massacre of; Edwardian conquest of Wales Edward II (Edward of Caernarfon), king of England birth in Caernarfon castle  127–8, 145–7 Life of  73–4 Edward IV, king of England  85–6 Edward VI, king of England and Ireland  103, 114–15 Edward the Confessor, king of England  57–8, 68 Life of  18–19 pedigree of  86–7 Edward the Elder, king of the Anglo-Saxons  144–5 Edwardian conquest of Wales  14–15, 61–3, 116–17, 181 accounts of  75, 202, 219–20, 321 as turning-point  14, 127–8, 132–3, 183–4, 190–1, 289–90, 307–8, 314–15, 324–5, 340, 356–7, 384–5 condemnation of  200–1 Edwards, Charles  160–1, 193–4 Edwards, Ifan ab Owen  341 Edwards, John Goronwy  344–7 Edwards, John Hugh  304–5 Edwards, Jonathan  172–3 Edwards, Lewis  285–6, 351 Edwards, Morgan  235–6, 294–5 Edwards, Owen Morgan  305–8, 310–19, 325–6, 335, 341–2, 345–6, 383 Edwin, king of Northumbria  32–3 Egyptians 195–6 eisteddfod  241–2, 247, 267–8, 277–82, 294–5, 340, 342–4 Beaumaris (1832)  249–50 Caerwys (1523 and 1567)  93–4 Llangollen (1858)  277–8, 280–1 Eleutherius, pope  44–5, 113–14, 118–19, 159–60 Elfoddw, ‘archbishop of Gwynedd’  23–4, 28 Elgar, St  39 Elis Gruffudd  122 chronicle of  92–3, 122–8 on Geoffrey of Monmouth  98 Eliseg, Pillar of  27n.55

Elizabeth I, queen of England and Ireland  114–15, 145–6, 276–7 Ellis ab Ellis  184–5 Ellis, Thomas (d. 1673)  163–4 Ellis, Thomas Edward (Tom)  306–8, 312–13 Elystan Glodrydd  164–5 emigration, see America, north emotions  228–30, 351 empire, see British Empire; Roman Empire Enderbie, Percy  156–7, 163–4, 167–70 Engels, Friedrich  321–3 England Loegria as name for  46–9, 104–7 see also Great Britain; histories of England or Britain English empire  379–80 English people as pagans  32–3, 81, 115–16, 200–1 as settlers in Britain and Ireland  379–80 in Wales  133–4, 151–2, 156, 317–18, 373–4 see also March of Wales English language  181–2, 204, 208–9, 214–15, 265–6, 276–7, 291–2, 310, 376–7 Enlightenment  229–30, 247, 262–3, 289–90 enlightened characteristics  221–2, 279–80, 284, 306, 336–7, 351 see also history, philosophical Erasmus 149–50 ethnic minorities  373–4, 381–2 ethnology  275–6, 288, 309–10, 332–3 etymology  180–2, 193–6 Euddogwy, St  39 Europe awakening of  261, 283–4 central and eastern  262–3, 266n.8, 337n.178 see also romance Eusebius  21, 24 Evans, Arise  159–60 Evans, Beriah Gwynfe  326–7 Evans, Evan (Ieuan Fardd)  201–2, 204, 210–11, 219–20, 227 Evans, Gwynfor  364–5 Evans, Howell Thomas  321 Evans, John Gwenogvryn  319–20 Evans, Theophilus  191–2, 196–201, 287–8 popularity of his Drych y Prif Oesoedd 207–8, 244–5, 270, 312n.43 Evans, Thomas  351–2 evidence status of  5–6, 29–30, 97–8, 108, 111–12, 117–18, 125–7, 152–3 eyewitness testimony  29–30, 152–3 see also fable/fabulous; legend; oral sources extents, medieval  194–5, 321–5, 334

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Index  469 fable/fabulous  95–6, 110–11, 179–80, 182–3, 243–4, 248 Fabyan, Robert  122–4 Fenton, Richard  215–16 feud  25, 56 feudalism  194, 224–5, 260–1, 324–5, 335, 346–7 ‘Five Royal Tribes of Wales’  85, 99n.45, 100, 162–5 Firth, Charles  312–13, 323–4 Fisher, John  328–9 Fleetwood, William  108–9 Flemings 104–6 Fleure, Herbert John  353–5 folk culture  354–5 folk-tales  73–4, 125–7 folklore  125–6, 209–10, 270 Forde, C. Daryll  354–5 Fordun, John of  95, 387–8 Foulkes, Isaac  270, 273 forgery 213–14 Fox, Cyril  354–5 Foxe, John  113–14 France  94, 263–4, 348–9 historical study in  328–9, 379n.94 historical accounts of  15–16, 122–4, 257–8, 316 Francis, Dai  369–70 Francis, Hywel  371 Frederick, Prince of Wales  190–1 French Revolution  222–3, 245–6 Froissart, Jean  104 Frost, John  260–1 Fuller, Thomas  157–8 Gaul, origins of Britons in  95–6, 111–12, 181–2 Gauls language of  195–6 origins of  180–1 gavelkind, see inheritance, partible gender 372–3 genealogies  75–6, 85–7, 93–4, 117–18, 145–6, 224–5, 319 Achau’r Mamau 135n.86 and social status  73–4 Bonedd y Saint 39–40 collection reflecting hegemony of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth 60–1 defence of Welsh cultivation of  131 early modern  93–4, 150–2, 156–8, 162–5, 168–9, 176 Gwynedd collection of  25–6 later medieval copies of  73, 84–5 Lyte genealogy  99–101

poets’ cultivation of  25–6, 36–7, 164–5 see also Gruffudd ap Cynan, king of Gwynedd, genealogy of; Harleian genealogies gentry, Welsh  367–8 Anglicization of  118–19 as landlords  219–20, 321–3, 339, 360–1 as patrons of historical writing  16–17, 73, 77–8, 84–5, 177–8 reduced influence of  314–15 status of  162–4, 176–7 Geoffrey of Monmouth  45 adaptation and use of  50–1, 55, 59–60, 75, 124–5, 159–60, 167–8, 174–5, 183–4, 199–200 and English history writing  47–8, 75, 95 criticism of  73–4, 201–2, 213, 287–8 De Gestis Britonum (Historia Regum Britanniae)  5–6, 11, 45–9, 52–3, 75–6 defences of  95–112, 171–2, 179, 184–5, 245–6, 256–7, 276–7, 280–1, 385–6 edition of  109 manuscript copy of  57–8 ‘very old book in the British tongue’ allegedly translated by  46–7, 52–3, 103, 108, 179 see also Brut chronicle; Brut y Brenhinedd; Vergil, Polydore; Virunio, Pontico geography  353–4, 367–8 influence on history of  315–18 George II, king of Great Britain and Ireland 189 George III, king of Great Britain and Ireland  236–7, 240–1 George, Hereford B.  316 Gerald of Wales  49–52, 304–5 and Geoffrey of Monmouth  50–1 and Gildas  50–1 Descriptio Kambriae  49–50, 143–4, 146–7 Expugnatio Hibernica 49–50 Itinerarium Kambriae 49–50 on English crown’s title to Ireland  95 reception of  104–7, 133–6, 159–60, 165–6, 307–8, 334–5, 388–9 Topographia Hibernica 49–50 Germanus, St  28–32, 38–40, 42–5 Gibson, Edmund edition of Camden’s Britannia  175–7, 181 Gildas  25, 42–3, 328–9 adaptation and use of  3–4, 32–3, 47, 50–1, 68–9, 92n.5, 104–6, 160–1, 200–1 comparisons with  50, 160–1 De Excidio Britanniae  18–22, 386–7 education of  21 Historia Brittonum misattributed to  33–4, 103–4

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470 Index Gildas (cont.) imitates Old Testament prophets  19–21 Lives of  44–5 praise of  199–200, 236–7 see also ‘Gyldas hen broffwyt y Brytaniaid’ ‘Gildas the poet’  109, 110n.106 Giovanni Nanni, see Annius of Viterbo Gladstone, William Ewart  306–7 Glamorgan chronicles written in  83–4 see also Breviate chronicle; Cardiff chronicle; Margam; Neath Clare lords of  76–7 Norman conquest of, see Merrick, Rice; Stradling, Edward Gloucester, abbey  39 Glover, Robert  138–9 Goidels  309–10, 317–18, 330–1, 333–4 golden ages  49–50, 190–1, 314–15, 331, 383 Gomer son of Japhet as ancestor of Britons/Welsh  111–12, 191–2, 198–202, 237–8 descent of Welsh from contested  213, 218, 274–5 Gorsedd  210–11, 224, 242–3 Gouge, Thomas  172–3 Gough, Richard  215–16 Gower Briouze lords of  58–9, 76–7 history of Norman conquest of  76–7 Grafton, Richard  95 Gray, Thomas  203–4 Great Britain  92, 98–101, 219–20 histories of  92, 233–4, 236–7, 291–3 United Kingdom of  190–1 see also Welsh people, contribution to/service in England or Great Britain Greek language  107 influence on Welsh language  171–2, 199 Gronw Ddu, of Anglesey  183–4 Gruffudd ap Cynan, king of Gwynedd genealogy of  54–5 Irish connections of  54–5, 56n.127 Latin Life of  53–7, 65–7, 69–71 post-medieval views of  136–7, 147–50, 162–3 search for ancestors’ arms and pedigrees attributed to  162–3 statute on bardic order attributed to  93–4, 139–41 Welsh Life of  141n.117 Gruffudd ap Cynan ab Owain  66–7 Gruffudd ap Llywelyn ap Seisyll, king of Gwynedd and Wales  14–15, 18–19, 66, 227, 330–1, 336–7

Gruffudd ap Llywelyn ap Iorwerth  60–1, 168–9 Gruffudd ap Rhys ap Tewdwr  68–9 Gruffudd Hiraethog  128n.42 Gruffydd, William John  348–9 Gualenses, see Walenses/Gualenses Gualia/Gualiae, see Wales, Gualia/Gualiae Guest, Charlotte  248–9 Guest, Josiah John  278–9, 281–2 Guizot, François  283–4 Gutun Owain  12–14, 84–8, 141–2, 162–3 Gweirydd ap Rhys, see Pryse, Robert John (Gweirydd ap Rhys) Gwenwynwyn ab Owain Cyfeiliog  71 gwerin/y werin  311–14, 317–19, 357–9, 376–7 Gwrtheyrn, see Vortigern Gwyddelians 181–2 Gwyddoniadur Cymreig, Y  274–5, 284–5, 303–4 Gwyn, John  157–8 Gwyn, Robert, of Llŷn  118–19 Gwynedd 181 archbishop of, see Elfoddw campaign against  70 dynasty of  25–6, 31–2, 55 ‘Fifteen Tribes of Gwynedd’  85, 162–5 kingdom/principality of  14–15, 22–3, 124–5, 133–4 lawyers of  37–8 see also Aberffraw; Bleddyn ap Cynfyn; Cadwaladr (the Blessed) ap Cadwallon; Cunedda; Gruffudd ap Cynan; Llywelyn ap Gruffudd; Llywelyn ap Iorwerth; Merfyn Frych; Owain Gwynedd; Rhodri Mawr Gwyneddigion Society  188–9, 241–2, 246–7 Gwynllyw, St  44–5 ‘Gyldas hen broffwyt y Brytaniaid’  81–2 Hall, Augusta Waddington, Lady Llanover  248–9, 251–2, 275–6 Hall, Hubert  324–5, 341, 356–7 Ham son of Noah  112n.116 Hanmer, Meredith  145n.140 Hanoverian dynasty  189, 314–15 Harleian chronicle  22–5 Harleian genealogies  22–3, 25–7, 42, 47 Harold Godwineson, king of England  122–4 Harris, Howel  326–7, 352–3 Harry, George Owen  98–100 Haverfield, Francis  333–4 Hayley, William  231–2 Hebrew language affinities with Welsh language  107, 160–1, 186–7, 193–4 Heeren, Arnold  283–4

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 27/02/22, SPi

Index  471 Helen, mother of Constantine the Great  25–6, 118–19 Hengist  81, 132, 257–8, 291–2 Henry I, king of England  68–71, 132, 151–2 Henry IV, king of England  152–3 penal laws against Welsh of  147–8, 169–70, 220–1 Henry V, king of England  88 Henry VI, king of England  83–4 Henry VII, king of England  146–7, 156 accession as chronological divide in historical writing  254, 275–7, 285–6, 314–15, 345–6 as patron of historical writing  95–6 as restorer of Britons’ sovereignty in Britain  2, 4–5, 14, 99, 292–3, 319 commemoration of  304–5 inquiry into paternal pedigree of  138–9, 172–3 Henry VIII, king of England and Ireland  95–6, 122, 159–60, 325–6 see also union of England and Wales Henry of Huntingdon  47–8, 75–6, 80, 134–6, 142–3 heraldry  93–4, 162–3, 168–9 see also College of Arms; Llyfr Dysgread Arfau Herbert, Edward, Lord of Cherbury  157–8, 227 Herbert, Henry, earl of Pembroke  151–2 Hercules 124 Herder, Johann Gottfried von  315 Hereford, priory  102 Herewald, bishop of Glamorgan  42 heritage 364–5 heroes  220–1, 268–72, 380–1 Higden, Ranulf  85–6, 122–4 Hiraethog, see Rees, William (Gwilym Hiraethog) Historia Brittonum  15–16, 22–3, 26–34, 38–9, 386–7 Nennius as author of  28 reception of  47–9, 60n.148, 165–6, 179, 309–10 Historia de Excidio Troiae  11, 75–6 historical accuracy  5–6, 110, 127–8, 248, 254–6 see also evidence historical continuum, Welsh  79, 85–6 historical culture  5–6 continuities in  383–4 early modern  93–4 medieval  25, 28–9, 36–8 modern 299 Historical Manuscripts Commission  319–20 histories of England or Britain  5, 15–16, 18, 98–9, 113–14

treatment of the Britons or Welsh in  18–19, 32–3, 36, 75, 157–8, 191, 202 history as identity  383 as a literary art  348–9 biblical  79, 183–4, 187–8, 191–2 see also Gomer son of Japhet civil and natural distinguished  179–80 comparative  224–5, 272, 282–3, 321–3, 374–5, 378–81 constitutional  190–1, 228, 314–15, 321, 325–6, 334, 336–7, 346–7 ecclesiastical and religious  18, 113–15, 232–5, 248, 326–9, 347, 350–3, 368–9, 389–90 see also Davies, Richard; Edwards, Charles; hagiography economic  321–5, 340–1, 343–4, 356–61 exemplary purpose of  143, 199, 279–80 for children  250–1, 312–13, 330–1, 341–4, 352–3 gender 372–3 labour  363, 369–72 landscape 367–8 language adopted for writing  101–2, 104–6, 130–1, 181–2, 246–7, 277–8, 300, 341–2, 349–50 legal 334 local 323 military 321 national  12–16, 268–9, 287–8, 362, 378–9, 383–5 Nonconformist  285–6, 289–91, 293–6, 310 perfect 166–7 performance of  304–5 philosophical  207–8, 224–5, 231 political  260–1, 285–6, 346–7, 367–8 popular understandings of/interest in  73–4, 157–8, 182–5, 268–70, 339, 364–5, 386–7 popularization of  175–6, 312–13, 340–2, 349–50 professionalization of  2–3, 176–7, 262–3, 299–300, 303–4, 312–13, 323–5, 340–1, 344–5, 348–9, 362–4 Romantic 262–3 scientific  303–4, 319–20, 331–3, 337–8, 349–50 social  194, 321–5, 332–4, 340–1, 356–61, 365–74 transnational 381–2 urban 324–5 see also women, history of Holinshed, Raphael Chronicles  92, 138–9, 387–9 Hoare, Richard Colt  215–16

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472 Index Holywell 39–40 Hopcyn ap Tomas  11, 16–17, 81 Howell, James  157–8 Hu Gadarn  213–14, 383–4 Hugh, earl of Chester  56–7 Hughes, Hugh  244–5 Hughes, John, Calvinistic Methodist minister 289–90 Hughes, John, Wesleyan minister  252–6 Hughes, John (Ceiriog)  335 Hughes, Kathleen  343n.26 Hume, David  207–8, 223–4 Humphreys, Hugh  270 Hundred Years War  88 Humphreys, Humphrey, bishop of Bangor  173 Hywel ap ‘Syr’ Mathew  128 Hywel Dda (Hywel the Good), king in Wales  14–15, 37–8, 136–7, 247, 291–2, 304–5 law of, see Welsh law, medieval Hywel Fychan, scribe  81 Iberians  309–10, 314–15, 317–18, 330–1, 333–4 ideology 351–3 Idwal Foel, king of Gwynedd  136–7, 140, 144–5 Iestyn ap Gwrgant  151–2, 279–80 Ieuan ap Sulien  40n.25, 41, 68–9 Ieuan Brechfa  84–5 Ifan Llwyd ap Dafydd  98, 118–19 Ifor son of Alan, king of Brittany  78–9 Illtud, St  38–9, 44–5 immigrants 373–4 Independents  187–8, 289–90 ‘Indians’, Welsh  198–9, 214–15, 250–1, 294–5 industrial revolution/industrialization  208–9, 267–8, 303, 331, 339, 363 as turning-point  314–15, 335, 345–6, 359–60, 365–7, 369–70, 375–6 histories of  357–60 inheritance, partible  145–6, 152–3, 169–70, 202, 284, 286–7 interludes (anterliwtiau)  157–8, 184n.182, 187–8 investiture of the Prince of Wales (1911)  304–5 Iolo Morganwg, see Williams, Edward (Iolo Morganwg) Iorwerth Drwyndwn  126–7 Ireland English invasion of  49–50, 259 histories of  92, 138–9, 153–4, 190–1, 229, 388–9 Welsh connections with  177–8, 194 see also Annals of the Four Masters; Campion, Edmund; Gerald of Wales; Hanmer, Meredith; Keating, Geoffrey; Leland, Thomas; O’Halloran, Sylvester

Irish language  180–1 Irish people  180–2, 256–7 Isidore of Seville, Chronicon Epitome 59–60 Islwyn, see Thomas, William (Islwyn) Israel, people of Britons/Welsh compared with  20–2, 56–7, 67 Ivernians 309–10 James II, king of England, Scotland, and Ireland 223–4 James VI and I, king of Scotland, England, and Ireland  98–101, 111–12, 148n.162 James, John Williams  347 Japhet son of Noah  29–30, 79, 157–8 Jefferson, Thomas  294–5 Jenkins, Geraint H.  364–5 Jenkins, Robert Thomas  344–5, 348–53 Jenkins, Samuel  294–5 Jerome, chronicle of  24 Jerusalem 42–3 John, king of England  60–1 John, A. H.  357–9 John, Angela V.  372–3 Johnes, Martin  377–8 Johnson, Joseph  225–6, 229 Jones, Alexander  294–5 Jones, Dafydd Glyn  3–4 Jones, Edmund  220n.81, 233–4, 236–7 Jones, Griffith, of Llanddowror  186–7 Jones, Harry Longueville  263–4 Jones, John, historian  247, 287 Jones, John, of Gellilyfdy  155, 167 Jones, John, of Trefriw  244 Jones, John Morris  303–4 Jones, Josiah Thomas  289–90 Jones, Michael Daniel  291–2, 310–11 Jones, Owen (Meudwy Môn)  270, 289–90 Jones, Owen (Owain Myfyr)  209–10, 247 Jones, Robert, of Rhos-lan  232–7 Jones, Robert Tudur  368–9 Jones, Theophilus  216, 222–4, 251–2 Jones, Thomas, almanacer  183–4 Jones, Thomas, artist  203–4 Jones, Thomas, clergyman  159–60 Jones, W. Basil  275–6 Joseph of Arimathea  97–8, 113–14, 116–19, 129–30, 142–3, 159–60, 183–4 Jowett, Benjamin  312–13 Judas Maccabeus  56–7, 65, 67 Julius Caesar  92, 292–3 Kamber son of Brutus  48–9, 66, 95, 104–6 Kambrenses, Kambri  50–1, 56, 69–70 Kambria, see Wales, Cambria as name for

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Index  473 Keating, Geoffrey  95, 388–9 Kelton, John  96–7 kinship  37–8, 86–7, 177–8, 334, 378–9 see also tribal society Labour Party  339 Lambarde, William  146n.153, 150–1 Lampeter 321 landowners 371–2 see also gentry, Welsh land tenure  76–7, 194, 229, 321–3 see also lordship; Royal Commission on Land in Wales and Monmouthshire Langhorne, Daniel  157–8 Langtoft, Peter  75 Latin hermeneutic 42–3 Renaissance  107, 112–13, 300 law English  151–2, 200–1, 321–3 of nature  145–6 Roman 145–6 Welsh, see Welsh law, medieval Lebar Gabála  15–16, 49–50, 388–9 le Baud, Pierre  387 Lebor Bretnach 33–4 Lees, Beatrice  323–4 legend, distinguished from history  132, 159–60, 256–7, 273–89, 308, 332–3 see also fable/fabulous Leland, John  96–7 Leland, Thomas  207–8 Leo the Great, pope  23–4 Leonidas, king of Sparta  231–2 Letters from Snowdon 219–22 Levi, Thomas  290n.137, 292–3 Lewes, William, of Llwynderw  196–7, 199 Lewis, Edward Arthur  324–5, 335, 344–5, 351–2, 356–7 Lewis, John, of Llynwene  111–12, 191, 201–2 Lewis, John, Puritan writer  159–60 Lewis, Rice, A Breviat of Glamorgan 150–2 Lewis, Saunders  360–1 Lewis, Titus  233–7, 274–5, 291–2 Lhuyd, Edward  157–8, 170–2, 175–85, 191–2, 309–10 reception of  193–6, 204, 249–50 Liber Landavensis, see Llandaf, Book of Liberalism  286–7, 291–2, 303, 306–7, 325–6, 330, 337, 339, 351–2, 375–6 Liberal government  314–15, 341 see also Richard, Henry Liberal Unionism  321–3

liberties/liberty  190–1, 202, 228–31, 286–7 American  244–5, 294–6 English 190–1 of Arfon and Powys  37–8 of Wales/Welsh  218–20, 287 Lifris of Llancarfan  42 Lister, Martin  176–7 literacy  186–7, 208–9, 310 Liverpool  330, 344–5 Livy 111n.113 Llafur, society, see history, labour Llanbadarn Fawr, church  39–41 historical writing at  40n.25, 41, 61–5, 68–70 Llancarfan, church  39, 47 see also Caradog of Llancarfan Llandaf Book of  39, 42, 44–5, 163–6 church of  39, 47 Llandyfrïog, Cardiganshire  196–7 Llannerch, Denbighshire lost manuscript of  85–7 Llanuwchllyn 310–11 Llenor, Y 348–9 Llewelyn, Thomas  234–5 Lloyd, Edward, of Llanforda  176 Lloyd, John, of Caerwys  218–19, 225–6, 248–50 Lloyd, John Edward  312–13, 329–38, 341, 344–7, 353–4, 359, 383–4 Lloyd George, David  304–5, 318, 361 Llwyd, Angharad  248–50 Llwyd, Gruffudd  165–6 Llwyd, Humphrey  2, 101–2, 104–8, 118–19, 185, 201–2, 300 Breviary of Britayne 106–7 Commentarioli Britannicae descriptionis fragmentum 106–7 Cronica Walliae  104–6, 128–37, 384–6 De Mona druidum insula . . . epistola 104–6 description of Wales  133–4 influence of  98 maps  104–6, 133–4 on medieval Welsh rulers  136–7 Protestantism of  129–30 sources used by  134–6 Llwyd, Morgan  162 Llwyd, Richard  244–6 Llyfr Dysgread Arfau 85–6 Llywelyn ap Gruffudd (Llywelyn the Last), prince of Gwynedd and Wales as nation builder  336–7 as prince of Wales  14–15, 146–7, 346–7 as usurper  166 commemoration of  304–5 confused with Llywelyn ap Iorwerth  124–5

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 27/02/22, SPi

474 Index Llywelyn ap Gruffudd (Llywelyn the Last), prince of Gwynedd and Wales  (cont.) death as turning-point  84, 128, 132–3, 169–70, 174–5, 187–8, 198–9, 237–8, 254, 330–1, 345–6, 360–2, 383–4 divine aid given to  68 explanations for downfall of  136–7, 259 praise of  173–4, 281–2 see also Edwardian conquest of Wales Llywelyn ap Iorwerth (Llywelyn the Great), prince of Gwynedd as greatest of medieval Welsh princes  318 as prince of Wales  146–7 campaigns of  57–8 death of  66–7 deeds of  106–7, 124–7 legends about  73–4, 126–7, 250–1 Magna Carta, alleged role in issue of  335–6 praise of  228 rightful successors of  136–7, 145–6 surrender to King John of  60–1 Llywelyn Bren  73–4 local government  314–15 Locke, John  194–5 Locrinus son of Brutus  48–9, 66, 95 Lollardy, see Brut, Walter; Oldcastle, John London Caerludd as name for  124 crown of  14 Institute of Historical Research  344–5 London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)  324–6, 343–5, 356–9 Westfield College  325–6, 343–4 see also Cymmrodorion, Honourable Society of; Gwyneddigion Society; Society of Antient Britons Longmans  270–2, 275–6 lordship  306–7, 323–4, 356–7, 367–8, 379–80 Lucius, king  32–3, 44–5, 97–8, 113–14, 116–19, 157–60, 183–4 Ludlow  137–8, 147–8 Lumley, John, Lord  104 Luther, Martin  190–1 Lyttelton, George, first Baron Lyttelton  204, 227 Mabillon, Jean  159–60 Mabinogi, Four Branches of/Mabinogion 11n.3, 70, 309–10 Macaulay, Thomas Babington  272–3 Machell, Thomas  177–8 Mackenzie, William  284–5 Mackintosh, James  243–4 Macpherson, James  203–4, 254–6 Macsen Wledig  26–7

Madog, Prince, alleged discoverer of America  132, 198–9, 214–15, 236–7, 240–1, 280–1 Madog ap Gwallter  52–3 Madog of Edeirnion  52–3 Madog ap Llywelyn (d. 1295)  121–2, 128–9, 133, 218 Madog ap Llywelyn (d. 1332)  82–3 Maelgwn, king of Gwynedd  26n.48, 31–2, 53, 125–6 in Welsh hagiography  39–40, 42–3 Maelgwn ap Rhys  67–8 Magna Carta  219–20, 335–6 Magnus Maximus  26–7, 75 Maine, Henry Sumner  321–3 Mair, John  387–8 Man, Isle of  104–6 dynasty of  26–7, 31–2 Manaw Gododdin  31–2, 309–10 Manchester  321, 344–5, 353–4 Mansel, Thomas  180–1 manuscripts 178 British Library, Cotton Caligula MS A.VI  135n.86 British Library, Cotton Cleopatra B.V  80–1, 85–7 British Library, Cotton Vespasian A.XIV  39 British Library, Harleian 3859  22–34 Exeter Cathedral Library 3514  75–6 Jesus College, Oxford 111, see Red Book of Hergest Jesus College, Oxford 141  85–6 Library Company of Philadelphia 8680  81 National Library of Wales 7006, see Black Book of Basingwerk see also books and manuscripts March of Wales  14–15, 49–50, 319–20, 335, 373–4, 379–80 histories of  149, 151–2, 356–7 Maredudd ab Owain  136–7 Margam, abbey  57–8 Marx, Karl  377–8 masculinity 372–3 Matthew Paris  36, 134–6 Maurice, William, of Llansilin  157–8, 167 Medrawd, see Modred Melangell, St  141n.117 memoirs, see cofiannau memory  2–3, 133, 203–4, 257–8, 364–5, 380–1 Mercian Register, see Annals of Æthelflæd Merfyn Frych, king of Gwynedd  28, 31–2 Merlin  78–9, 104–6, 110–11, 125–6 Merioneth, history of  162–3, 310–11 Merrick, Rice  98, 150–3

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Index  475 Merthyr Tydfil  268–9 see also Stephens, Thomas Metasthenes 97–8 Methodism Calvinistic Methodist Church of Wales  232–3, 289–90, 328–9 hostility to  196–7, 234–5 Methodist revival  186–7, 234–5, 310, 314–15, 326–7, 345–6 transformative impact of  350–3, 357–9 Meyer, Kuno  319 Meyrick, Samuel Rush  216, 222–4 Michelet, Jules  316 middle class  371–3 Mill, John Stuart  283–4 Milman, Henry Hart  284 Milton, John  156–7 missionaries/missions  234–5, 292–5, 381–2 modernity  265–6, 293, 375–7 Modred 81 Monmouth 45–6 priory 39 Montfort, Eleanor de  249–50, 259 Montgomery, treaty of  157–8, 321 Morgan ap Humphrey  158–9 Morgan, D. Densil  368–9 Morgan, Edward, of Llantarnam  167–8 Morgan, Kenneth O.  367–8, 372–3, 375–6 Morgan, Lewis Henry  321–3 Morgan, Owen (Morien)  303–4 Morgan, Richard Williams (Môr Meirion)  270–5, 291–2, 303–4 Morgan, William  304–5 Morris, John Edward  321 Morris, Lewis  188–9, 201–4, 230–1 Morris, Roger  98 Mortimer, Roger  136–7, 145–6 Müller, Friedrich Max  288 Myrddin, see Merlin Myrsilus Lesbius  110–11 Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales, The  209–10, 253–6 National Library of Wales  303–4 National Museum of Wales  303–4, 354–5 National Museum of History, St Fagans  364–5 National Pageant of Wales  304–5, 319 nationalism/national movement  339, 352–3, 364–5, 367–8 see also Plaid Cymru nationality/nationhood basis of Welsh  261–2, 315, 374–8, 383 origins of Welsh  309–10 revival of sense of  303–4, 310–12, 330–1, 336–7, 361, 375–6 see also history, national

natural phenomena  24–5, 31–2, 63–4, 64n.171 natural philosophy  175–6, 194–5 Neal, Daniel  236–7, 236n.177 Neath, abbey  57–9, 76–7, 80–1 Nechtansmere, battle of  28 Nefyn, Round Table at  75 Nennius, see Historia Brittonum Neolithic  330–1, 333, 353–4 revolution  360–1, 365–6 Nest, daughter of Rhys ap Tewdwr  65 Newell, Ebenezer Josiah  327–8 newspapers 241–2 Newton, Isaac  194–5 Nicolson, William  177 Noah  96–9, 128, 185 see also Japhet son of Noah Noe, king of Dyfed  117–18 Nonconformity  268–70, 309–10, 314–15, 327–8, 330, 339, 367–9 see also Dissent; history, Nonconformist Norman conquest of England  57–8, 142–3, 145–6 as turning-point  57–8, 86–7, 122–4, 156 Norman conquests in Wales  35–6, 41, 45–6 as turning-point  152–4 impact on Church of  38–9, 43–5 impact on Welsh nationality of  309–10 lawfulness of  145–6 place in Welsh history of  332–3, 335 see also March of Wales Normans  39–40, 247, 287 novels, contrasted with history writing  5–6, 288 O Oes Gwrtheyrn  60–1, 201–2 Oed yr Arglwydd 75–6 O’Halloran, Sylvester  207–8, 231n.148 ‘Old North’, the  26–7, 31–2 Oldcastle, John  87–8 oral sources as historical evidence  28–9, 50n.84, 125–6, 235–6 orally transmitted stories  56–7, 66n.180 privileging of  211 Ordovices 181 origin legends  15–16, 28–30, 94, 179–80 British/Welsh 48–9 English 73–4 Irish 256–7 see also Brutus; Cunedda; Gomer son of Japhet; Trojan origins Orosius 21 Ortelius, Abraham  104–7 Osiris 96–7

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476 Index Ossian, see Macpherson, James O’Sullivan, Jeremiah Francis  347 Oswestry 84–5 Oudoceus, see Euddogwy Owain ap Hywel Dda, king in south Wales  25–6 Owain Glyndŵr  11 accounts of  83–4, 87–8, 124–6, 162–3, 172–3, 218–21, 240–1, 244–6, 346–7, 385–6 commemoration of  304–5, 380–1 criticism of  145–6, 169–70, 236–7, 360–1 defence of  152–3, 246–7 impact of rising of  116–17, 356–7 Memoirs of Owen Glendowr 220–1 play about  304–5 Owain Gwynedd (Owain ap Gruffudd), king of Gwynedd as nation builder  336–7 as prince of Wales  146–7 condemned for his cruelty  169–70, 173–4 divine aid given to  67–8 praise of  65–7 Owain Lawgoch (Owen of Wales)  319–20 Owain Myfyr, see Jones, Owen Owen, Aneurin  243–4, 270–2 Owen, David (Brutus)  289–90 Owen, Edward  319–20 Owen, George, of Henllys  98–9, 150–3, 161–2, 319–20 account of Pembrokeshire writers  153–4 criticism of  162–3, 165–6 Owen, John  190–1, 201–2 Owen, Matthew, of Llangar  184–5 Owen, William (Sefnyn)  244, 249–50 Oxford  45–6, 176–7 Ashmolean Museum  176–7 Balliol College  310–11 History School  312–13, 325–6, 329–30 Jesus College  163–4, 170–1, 176–7, 305–6, 339, 344–5 Lincoln College  310–11, 330 Padarn, St  40n.25, 42–3 Palmer, Alfred Neobald  323, 327–8, 331–2, 344–5 parish histories  222–3, 233–4 Parker, Matthew  104, 115–16 Parry, Blanche  138–9 Parry, John Humffreys  241–2, 246–7 pastoralism  323–5, 332–5 Patagonia  295–6, 305–6, 381–2 patria  21–2, 41 Patrick, St  25, 32–3, 38–40, 42–3, 153–4 Paulinus 32–3 Peate, Iorwerth Cyfeiliog  354–5

Pecham, John, archbishop of Canterbury  73–4, 172n.108 Pelagius/Pelagianism  39–40, 42–5, 116–17, 252–3, 289–90 Pembrokeshire French invasion of  245–6, 249–50 see also Owen, George penance  21–2, 50 Pennant, Thomas, abbot of Basingwerk  85–6 Pennant, Thomas, of Downing  217–23, 245–6 Penry, John  119 Penwith, promontory of  70 Percy, Thomas  203–4 periodicals  240–2, 351–2 Peter, David  232–3, 237–8, 289–90 Peter, John  289–90 Pezron, Paul-Yves  180–1, 191, 195–6, 201–2 Phillimore, Egerton  319–20, 331–2 philology  309–10, 332 Phoenicians 195–6 Picton, Thomas  304–5, 381–2 Pierce, Thomas Jones  344–7, 356–7 Pike, Luke Owen  291–2 Pinkerton, John  223–4, 252–3 place-names  53, 106–7, 110–11, 124, 149, 177, 180–1 Plaid Cymru  346–7, 359–61, 383n.2 Plot, Robert  176–8 Plutarch 149–50 Pocock, J. G. A.  378–9 poetry/poets 261 and early modern historical culture  93–4, 155 and genealogy  25–6, 164–5 as historical sources  210–11, 254–6, 276–7, 321 authenticity of  165–6, 211–14 history of  28–9, 227, 281–2 historical commentary in anthologies of  203–4, 209–10 medieval Welsh  36–8, 84–5, 88n.84 Norman influence on  247 pastoralism conducive to cultivation of  334 verse accounts of the past  203–4 see also Ystorya Taliesin Ponsonby, William, second earl of Bessborough 225–6 Popish Plot  159–60 postcolonialism 378n.84 postmodernism 371–2 Powel, David  2, 108–9, 118–19, 185 and Gerald of Wales  143–4, 146–7 and Humphrey Llwyd  134–6, 138–9 ‘De Britannica Historia recte intelligenda, et cum Romanis Scriptoribus reconcilianda’  108–10, 179

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 27/02/22, SPi

Index  477 Historiae Britannicae Libri Sex, edition of  109 Historie of Cambria, The  93–4, 109, 128–9, 137–49, 167–8, 243–4, 256–7, 272, 385–7 on value of history  142–4 use of illustrations  138–41 use of sources  141–2 see also Maurice, William; Vaughan, Robert; Wynne, William Powys  27n.55, 38n.15, 68–70 as one of three kingdoms of Wales  133–4, 136–7 see also Gwenwynwyn ab Owain Cyfeiliog; liberties of Arfon and Powys prehistory  314–15, 330–4, 340–1, 353–4, 366–7 Presbyterianism  172–3, 187–8 Price, Thomas (Carnhuanawc)  239–41, 245–6, 251–3 commemoration of  275–6 conservativism of  259–61 Hanes Cymru 253–63 on progress of empires  260–1 reception of  263, 270, 280–2, 285–6 Price, Thomas Sebastian  183, 185 Prichard, T. J. Llewelyn  270–2 printing impact on history writing of  92–3, 139–41, 186–8, 240–1, 253–4 see also publishing Prise, John  98, 101–4, 185, 300 description of Wales misattributed to  133–4, 163–4 Historiae Britannicae Defensio  102–8, 110 Yny lhyvyr hwnn 102 prophecy 54–5 medieval Welsh political (brud)  14, 36–7, 73–4, 124, 183–4 Old Testament  20–1 see also Merlin Prosper of Aquitaine  24 Protestantism, see Church of England; Dissent; Nonconformity; Reformation, Protestant proverbs  114–15, 117–18 providence, divine and religious salvation  197–8, 234–5, 237–8 and territorial loss  30–3, 67–9, 258–9 and union of Wales with England  146–7 see also sin, divine punishment for Prydain son of Aedd Mawr  213–14, 291–2 Pryse, Robert John (Gweirydd ap Rhys)  277–8 and Nonconformist history  289–90 criticism of  332–3 Hanes y Brytaniaid a’r Cymry  270–2, 284–9, 335, 386–7 on the English  291–2

Pryse, Thomas, of Gogerddan  176 Ptolemy 104–6 Public Record Office  319–20, 324–5 publishing  186–7, 208–9, 267–72 Pughe, William Owen  209–10, 226–7, 250–1 Puritanism  119, 159–60, 162 histories of  232–7 see also Edwards, Charles Putnam’s Sons, G. P.  312–13 questionnaires 177–8 race biological basis of  291–2, 309–10 environmental influences on characteristics of 252–3 influence on formation of Welsh of  333–4 mixture of races  198–9, 354–5 transient character of  315, 317–18 Raglan castle  214–15 railways  267–8, 331, 357–9 Ranke, Leopold von  283–4 Rapin-Thoyras, Paul de  191, 202 Rastell, John  95–6, 98, 122–5 Ratzel, Friedrich  316 Ray, John  176–7 Rebecca movement  239–40, 361 Record Commission  243–4 recusants  111–12, 138–9 Red Book of Hergest  11, 13, 102 Rees, James Frederick  347–8, 359–60 Rees, Rice  248, 256–7, 270 Rees, Thomas  268–9, 289–90 Rees, William (Gwilym Hiraethog)  285–6, 291–2, 335 Rees, William, historian  344–5, 347–8, 356–7 Rees, William, publisher  270–2 Reformation, Protestant  347–8 as restoration of Britons’ pure Christianity  113–16, 196–8, 214–15, 248 regnal framework for histories  136, 144–5, 384–5, 388–9 see also dynasties Réim ríoghraidhe Éireann 388–9 religious houses/orders  16–17, 35–6, 102, 327–8, 347 see also Cistercian monasteries Renaissance humanism  95–8, 104, 110–11, 114–15, 149–50 revival, national, see nationality/nationhood, revival of sense of rhetoric, classical  21, 47–8, 65–6

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478 Index Rhodri Mawr (Rhodri the Great), king of Gwynedd 22–3 genealogical connections of  86–7 revenge for killing of  25 succession from  136–7, 162–3 tripartite division of Wales attributed to  133–4, 146–7, 228 Rhodri Molwynog  78–9 Rhoscomyl, Owen  319 Rhun ab Urien Rheged  32–3 Rhun ap Neithon  25–6 Rhygyfarch ap Sulien  40–3, 63 Rhys ap Gruffudd (the Lord Rhys)  66–7, 173–4, 228 Rhys ap Gruffydd  122–4, 149–50 Rhys ap Tewdwr, king in south Wales as lawful ruler  136–7 death of  70, 128, 165–6 demeaning portrayal of  56n.121 search for ancestors’ arms and pedigrees attributed to  162–3 Rhys ap Thomas, Life of  149–50 Rhys Cain  164–5 Rhys (Rhŷs), John  305–6, 319–20, 331–3 Celtic Britain 309–10 The Welsh People 306–10 Rice, Henry  149–50 Richard II, king of England  83–4, 87, 152–3 Richard, Henry  268–70, 278–9, 285–6 Richards, Robert  359 Richards, Thomas  347–8 Richards, William  232–3, 237–8 Robert, earl of Gloucester  45, 47–8, 109 Robert fitz Hamon  149, 151–2 Robert of Rhuddlan  219–20 Roberts, Glyn  344–5 Roberts, Richard Arthur  319–20 Roberts, William (Nefydd)  274–5 Robertson, William  207–8 Rolt, Richard  190–1 Roman Catholicism  244, 259, 273, 328–9, 354–5 apologetic in defence of  112–14, 118–19 history of  326–7 hostility to  129–30, 142–3, 159–60, 198–9, 224, 276–7, 285–6 romance, European, Welsh origins of  250–1, 257–8, 282–3 romances 125–6 Romans  21–2, 46–7 and Druids  193–4 Annales Romanorum 29–30

British history beginning with invasion of  92, 171–2, 223–4, 226–7, 232–3, 292–3 Britons’ resistance to  41, 181 influence on Britons of  201–2, 333–4 Roman authors  103–4 Roman Britain  19–20, 28, 32–3, 110–11, 199, 254, 275–6 Roman Empire/emperors  25–7, 29–30 Roman history  167–8 see also Boudica; Caratacus Romanticism  203–4, 215, 250–1 see also Williams, Edward Rome  46–7, 78–9 English College in  118–19 Rowlands, Henry  191–6, 201–2, 334 influence of  227 Royal Commission on Ancient and Historical Monuments in Wales  319–20 Royal Commission on Land in Wales and Monmouthshire  306–7, 321–3 Rymer, Thomas  188 saints  118–19, 221–2, 248, 252–3, 328–9 ‘age of the’  347, 354–5 Lives of  20n.12, 38–45, 273, 342–3 miracles of  28, 31–2, 36, 38–40, 43–4, 221–2 poetry to  38–9 see also genealogies, Bonedd y Saint Salesbury, William  104, 113–17 Salisbury, Enoch  275–6 Salmon, Mary  343–4 Salvian of Marseilles  21–2 Sammes, Aylett  195–6 Samothes son of Japhet  112n.116, 113–14 Samson, St  39 Sawley, abbey, Lancashire  33–4 schools, history in  303–4, 364–5 schoolteachers  340, 342–5, 348–9, 356 Schulz, Albert (San-Marte)  254–8 Scota daughter of Pharoah  95 Scotland Albania as name for  48–9, 106–7 English claims of sovereignty over  95 Gaelic learned orders of  155n.2 histories of  92, 190–1 union with England of  387 Welsh connections with  177–8 see also Boece, Hector; Bower, Walter; Brown, Peter Hume; Buchanan, George; Fordun, John of; James VI and I; Mair, John sculptures, Welsh historical  304–5 Second World War  339

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Index  479 secularization 368–9 Seebohm, Frederic  194, 309–10, 321–3, 327–8, 335 Selden, John  94, 162, 193–4 Semple, Ellen  316 Senedd Cymru  1, 363 Seren Gomer 240–1 serfs  312–14, 321–3 Shankland, Thomas  326–7 Shipley, Jonathan, bishop of St Asaph  225–6 Sidney, Henry  108–10, 128–9, 137–9, 143–4, 147–8 Sidney, Philip  142–3 sin, divine punishment for  32–3, 41, 50–1, 68–9, 71–2, 113–14, 127–8, 151–2, 184–5, 197–9 see also Gildas Siôn Cain  164–5 Siôn Dafydd Rhys  111n.114, 112n.116 Skeel, Caroline  325–6, 356–7 Skene, William Forbes  321–3 slavery  259, 284, 381–2 Smith, Dai (David)  371, 376–8 socialism  339, 360–1 Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK)  343–4 Society of Antient Britons  188–9, 191 Speed, John  92n.5 Spurrell, William  270 St Asaph bishops of  45–6, 225–6 St Davids  25, 47, 56, 66–7 archives of  40–1, 117–18 bishops of  40–1, 115–16, 153–4, 242–3 cathedral of  188 chronicle writing at  22–4, 58–9, 61–2 claims to metropolitan status of  42–3, 49–50 St Donat’s  149 stadialism  221–2, 230–1 Stanihurst, Richard  388–9 state, the  327–8, 379–80 Stephens, Thomas  277–84 Stillingfleet, Edward  159–60 ‘Story of the Nations, The’  312–13 Stow, John  138–9 Stradling, Edward  138–9, 149 Strata Florida, abbey  58–9, 61–2, 66–7, 77–8, 82–3, 141–2 Stubbs, William  272–3, 321, 336–7 subscribers to historical publications  176–7, 187–8, 191–2, 201–2, 245–6 Suetonius 56–7 suffrage movement  304–5, 343–4

Sulien, bishop of St Davids  40–1 Sunday schools  208–9, 310 Swansea 343–4 Switzerland 316–18 Table of Nations  29–30 Tacitus 149–50 Taliesin  28–9, 36–7 Gwely Taliesin 182 Ystorya Taliesin 125–6 Tatheus, St  44–5 Tawney, R. H.  357–9 Taylor, Isaac  288 Teilo, St  39, 42–3 television, history on  364–5, 376–7 Tewkesbury, abbey  76–7 theses, postgraduate  321, 324–6, 341–5, 351–2, 356–9 Thierry, Augustin  254–6, 282–3 Thomas ap John, ‘Historie of Brecon’  149 Thomas, Ben Bowen  360–1 Thomas, Daniel Lleufer  306–7 Thomas, David Alfred, first Viscount Rhondda 304–5 Thomas, Hugh  158–9, 191, 201–2 Thomas, John  289–90 Thomas, Joshua  232–8 Thomas, Robert David (Iorthryn Gwynedd) 295–6 Thomas, Simon  187–8, 201–2 Thomas, Thomas  245–6 Thomas, William (Islwyn)  317–18 time, Christian  24–5, 31–2 see also Easter Tintern, abbey, chronicles written at  77n.22 Titans  180–1, 195–6 Toleration Act  187–8, 232–4 Tout, Thomas Frederick  321, 329–30, 332–3, 337–8, 344–5 towns  267–8, 356–7 see also history, urban trades unions  361, 369–70 tradition, status of  108, 110–12, 182–3, 256–7 see also evidence travel writing  215–16, 311–12 see also Pennant, Thomas, of Downing Treason of the Blue Books, see Blue Books Treason of the Long Knives  184–5, 240–1, 268 Trevelyan, George Macaulay  348–9, 352–3 Trevet, Nicholas  134–6 Triads of the Island of Britain  36–7, 254–7, 343–4 ‘Third Series’ of  213–14, 274–5 tribal society  194, 321–5, 327–8, 335–6, 356–7

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480 Index Trioedd Ynys Prydain, see Triads of the Island of Britain Trojan origins  11–16, 29–30, 36, 45–6, 50–1, 75–6, 94, 183–4, 383–4 denigration of Welsh claims to  18–19, 73–4, 111–12 in France  94 of kings of England  96–7 Trojan War  11, 29–30, 46–7 Tudor, Owen  172–3 Turner, Frederick Jackson  316–18 Tyndale, William  113–14 uchelwyr, see gentry, Welsh union of England and Wales  2, 102, 127–8, 147–8, 157–8, 319 as turning-point  152–4, 286, 304–5, 365–6, 385–6 criticism of  152–3, 276–7, 347–8 praise of  114–15, 133, 143–4, 146–7, 152–3, 156, 160–1, 165, 318, 325–6 Unitarianism  209–10, 225–6, 242–3, 278–9 utilitarianism 278–9 universal histories  59–60, 85–6 see also Elis Gruffudd; Higden, Ranulf University of Wales  303–4, 310, 314–15 Board of Celtic Studies  341, 363–4 Press 341–2 Unwin, Thomas Fisher  312–13 Urban, bishop of Llandaf  44–5 Urdd Gobaith Cymru  341 Ussher, James  159–60, 162–4, 183–4, 214–15 usurpers  26–7, 166–7 Valle Crucis, abbey  75–8, 80–5 Vaughan, John, of Trawscoed  165–6 Vaughan, Richard, earl of Carbery  162–3 Vaughan, Robert, of Hengwrt  84, 161–7, 179, 183, 201–2 British Antiquities Revived 162–3 edition of The Historie of Cambria  163–4, 172–3 Vaughan, Rowland, of Caer-gai  158–9, 162 Vergil, Polydore Anglica Historia 95–6 criticized  96–7, 101–2, 131, 167, 184–5 edition of Gildas  160–1 Verstegan, Richard  226–7 Victoria, queen of Great Britain and Ireland  274–5, 286–7, 291–2 villas, Roman  321–3 Vinogradoff, Paul  323–4, 335

Virtue & Co.  275–6 Virunio, Pontico  109 Vortigern  28–30, 32–3, 60–1, 78–9, 81 Wace, Roman de Brut 125–6 Wade-Evans, Arthur Wade  342–3 Waldenses  214–15, 259 Walenses/Gualenses  47–8, 50–1, 69–70 Waleran, count of Meulan  47–8 Wales ‘American’ 339 as a Nonconformist nation  268, 289–90 boundaries of  133–4 Cambria as name for  48–51, 104–7 counties of  133–4, 146–7, 150–2, 321 economy of  239–40, 267–8, 312–13, 339, 363 see also history, economic English royal policy towards  321 Gualia, Gualiae 48–51 home rule for  303, 318, 337 idealization of rural  307–8, 314, 353–5 king of  48–9 mountains of  232n.154, 315–18 population of  208–9, 267–8, 303 Princes of, English  127–8, 145–8 Principality of  14–15, 145–6, 346–7 Statute of  165–6, 219–20 tripartite division of  133–4, 146–7 Wallia 48–51 see also Britannia; Council in the Marches of Wales; investiture; March of Wales; Welsh kings and princes Walter, archdeacon of Oxford  45–7 Walter, Ferdinand  272 Warrington, William  225–32, 256–7, 272, 275–6 Wars of the Roses  162–3, 321 Waverley, annals of  58–9 Welsh Government  381–2 Welsh kings and princes as nation builders  287, 335–7 compared with classical and biblical figures  56–7, 65–7, 231–2 conflicts between  81–2, 145–6, 165, 169–70, 173–4, 202, 229–30, 247, 287–8 fiscal resources of  312–13, 335, 356–7, 367–8 government of  146–7, 194 legitimacy of their rule  54–5 medieval historical writers’ treatment of 53–72 obituary notices of  66–7 succession of  55, 68, 136–7, 145–6, 166–7

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Index  481 supremacy over Wales or Welsh of  65–6, 70–2, 136–7, 146–7 titles of  71, 78–9, 87–8, 146–7 Welsh language as medium of historical writing  16–17, 77–8, 300, 341–2, 348–50, 361, 364–5 neglect of  98 number of speakers of  267–8, 300n.2 Old Welsh  25–6 orthography of  107, 178, 277–8, 310–11 preservation celebrated  191, 197–8, 257–8, 261, 383 privileged status of sources in  97–8, 103, 106–8, 117–18, 204 religious texts in  102, 104 survival of  214–15, 310, 333–4 works concerning  114–15, 248–9, 303–4, 306–7, 364–5 Welsh law, medieval  37–8 as evidence for Welsh society  307–8, 321–3, 334 as historical precedent  114–15 constitutional implications of  136–7, 145–7 criticism of  224–5, 248 editions of  188, 190–1, 243–4 Welsh Manuscript Society  251–2, 270–2 Welsh Parliament, see Senedd Cymru Welsh people contribution to/service in England or Great Britain of  88, 101–2, 122, 128, 259, 353–4, 386–7 democracy of  309–10, 314–15, 353–4 ignorant of their history  98 in British armies  291–2 loyalty to crown of England of  88, 99–102, 114–15, 138–9, 149–52, 156–7, 183, 189, 280–1, 291–2, 319 oppression of  81, 191, 293–6 post-Roman origins of  309–10, 366–7 vindication of  130–1, 143–6 see also Britones; Kambrenses; Walenses/ Gualenses Whigs  225–6, 229, 262–3 Whig historiography  202, 236–7 Whitby, synod of  23–4 White, Gilbert  217–18 Whitland, abbey  58–61, 75–6 William I, king of England  122–4, 145–6 William II (Rufus), king of England  151–2, 165–6 William III, king of England, Scotland, and Ireland  172–3, 183–4

William Llŷn  83–4 William of Malmesbury  47–8, 57–8, 80–1 William of Newburgh  95–6, 167 William, Thomas  187–8, 201–2 Williams, David, historian of modern Wales  344–5, 347–8, 359 Williams, David, political philosopher and historian 222–4 Williams, Edward (Iolo Morganwg)  209–15, 225–6, 237–8, 242–3, 383–4 assessments of  247, 280–1, 287–8 influence of  223–4, 270–2, 274–5 Williams, Elizabeth  343–4 Williams, Glanmor  347–8, 365–6, 368–70, 374, 377 Williams, Gwyn Alfred  365–6, 377–8 Williams, Hugh  328–9, 331–2 Williams, Jane (Ysgafell)  270–2, 275–6 Williams, John (Ab Ithel)  263–4, 273–5, 291–2 Williams, John, correspondent of Edward Lhuyd 179–80 Williams, Moses  188, 191, 201–2 Williams, Owen  274–5 Williams, Penry  347–8 Williams, Robert  270–2, 275–6 Williams, Samuel  188, 196–7 Williams, Thomas  253–4 Williams, William, antiquary  156–7 Williams, William, of Llandygái  216, 244 Williams, William, Pantycelyn  304–5 Williams, William Llewelyn  325–6 Willis, Browne  188 Willis-Bund, John William  323n.111, 327–8 Winchester annals  80–1 Winefride, St  39–40, 221–2 Wingfield, Robert  122 women historians 343–4 history of  249–50, 270–2, 372–3 see also Campbell, Eliza Constantia; Llwyd, Angharad; Skeel, Caroline Woodward, Bernard Bolingbroke  265–6, 275–6, 287 workers/working class  303, 357–61, 369–73, 376–7 Wotton, William  188, 191 Wrexham  323, 357–9 Wyclif, John  236–7 Wynn, John, of Gwydir  149–50, 152–3, 201–2 Wynne, Ellis  162

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482 Index Wynne, William The History of Wales  128–9, 170–5, 226–7, 244–5 Yale, Thomas  138–9 Yorke, Philip  217–18, 225–6 Ysgolan 117n.144

ystorya  36–7, 81–2, 118n.150, 124, 126–7 Ystorya Dared  11, 52–3, 77–9, 85–6 Ystorya Taliesin, see Taliesin Zeuss, Johann Kaspar  272 Zimmern, Alfred Eckhard  339