PART III
9
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 approach, aspects of which also influenced Pennant.3 However, no Welsh historian 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 historians 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 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) 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 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
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).
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
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 originated 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 accompanied 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 civilization, these had to be invented if the surviving examples were deemed inadequate 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 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 continuity 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 these were acknowledged as important turning-points.39 Likewise Iolo, here 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 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, ‘histories’ 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 (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
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 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 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’ 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 rehabilitate 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 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 commemoration 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 to past mentalities while providing an occasion to proclaim the superiority of eighteenth-century explanations based on natural causes.93 Yet his view of medieval 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 histories 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, 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 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 historical 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 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 delineate 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 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 facilitating comment on wider trends. Readers of the second and subsequent editions 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
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 calamities 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 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 ‘opportunities 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 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 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 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 disabilities 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 medieval 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 denominational or broader level. Two, both written in Welsh, provided internalist accounts 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 minister in Carmarthen and senior tutor of the town’s non-denominational 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 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 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 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 historiography 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 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 historians 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, 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 historians 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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].
135 Warrington, The History, vii. For similar arguments regarding Rapin and Hume in their histories 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].
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.
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.
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.
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?” ’.
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’.
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 commemoration 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.
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.
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.
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.