8
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 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 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 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
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 political 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 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 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 subscribers 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
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 declaration 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 specifically, 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 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 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 explanations. Moreover, while he defended the use of conjecture when evidence was lacking, Rowlands was careful to stress that this was a matter of proposing probabilities 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 contemporaries who, in their different ways, had sought to elucidate the origins of the Celts. 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 theories 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 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 critically 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, 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 organization 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 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, 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’ 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 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
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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” ’.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’.