11

‘Living in the Past’ and the Challenges of Modernity, 1848–80

In 1852–3 Bernard Bolingbroke Woodward, a former Independent pastor who also wrote histories of Hampshire and the United States, became the first English writer since Warrington to publish a history of Wales.¹ Like his predecessor, Woodward sought to bring the history of Wales to the attention of England, where ‘[i]t is almost entirely unknown’, and also stressed that ‘every passage of it is associated with scenes unsurpassed in romantic grandeur and beauty’, which were duly illustrated by plates depicting Welsh views and monuments, especially castles.² However, whereas Warrington had presented the medieval history of Wales as a struggle for liberty, Woodward argued that the history of Wales demonstrated the benefits of its complete assimilation with England, in the process casting doubt on the reliability of most Welsh sources. In order to enjoy the success of other European nations, the Welsh, ‘instead of living in the past… should reach forward to and live for the future; which their history would also teach them to do’.³ Likewise one English reviewer of Woodward looked forward to ‘the fusion of the Kymro with the so-called Saxon’ and declared that he had not gone far enough in exposing the tenuous foundations of what purported to be Welsh history.⁴ Not surprisingly, Welsh reactions to Woodward were less enthusiastic, one reviewer complaining of his neglect of native sources, his ‘anti-Welsh prejudices’, and his evident desire ‘to abolish the nationality which still characterizes the descendants of Caractacus, Arthur, and the great Llewelyn’.⁵ Over a decade later Matthew Arnold was more sympathetic to the Welsh but similarly highlighted their devotion to the past and held that their future lay in adopting the English language and contributing a literary heritage that could enrich English culture.⁶ Like the commissioners on Welsh education in 1847, Woodward, Arnold, and other English commentators believed that modernity was inextricably intertwined with Anglicization.⁷ Plenty of their Welsh-speaking contemporaries agreed.⁸

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

I begin with some general contextualization before addressing two broad themes: first, Romantic, including legendary, interpretations and their critics; second, differing approaches to post-medieval history, all with a marked Nonconformist inflection.

The Present and the Past in Mid-Victorian Wales

Welsh history writing in this period took place in a context of rapid and multifaceted change of which contemporaries were acutely aware.¹² Mid-Victorian Wales experienced continuing demographic growth and the industrialization that sustained it, most apparent in the increasing number and size of towns, in turn reflected in the production of an unprecedented quantity of histories of industrial settlements from the 1850s onwards.¹³ From 1851 to 1881 the population of Wales increased by over 400,000 to some 1.5 million, nearly half of which lived in the heavily industrialized south-eastern counties of Glamorgan and Monmouthshire; these also boasted the five largest Welsh towns, including Swansea (over 76,000) and Cardiff (almost 83,000), though these differed significantly in both size and structure from the largest English towns such as Liverpool, whose population of about 550,000 included 20,000 born in Wales. By contrast, the population of predominantly rural counties such as Cardiganshire and Radnorshire remained unchanged or saw a modest decline.¹⁴ At the same time, the people of Wales were brought both closer together and into closer contact with England by a growing railway network that helped to drive economic developments as well as to facilitate cultural activities and contacts.¹⁵ Despite a geographically uneven pattern of economic development and population growth, Welsh cultural life, including the writing and publication of historical works, flourished across the principality, being sustained by ‘a revolution in printing technology’ and the concomitant expansion of print culture in numerous Welsh towns, by numerous literary and other voluntary societies that fostered cultural interests, and by local—and from 1861 peripatetic national—eisteddfodau.¹⁶ These factors, together with the continuing lack of a dominant metropolis and university institutions (until the foundation of the University College of Wales at Aberystwyth in 1872),¹⁷ help to explain why the study and writing of Welsh history remained primarily an amateur enterprise within a broader pattern of cultural endeavour embracing a wide social spectrum in different parts of Wales. Much of this writing was in Welsh, still spoken by the vast majority of the million or so people in Wales at the beginning of this period, but by only just over half of the substantially larger population in 1891.¹⁸

Nonconformity provided a crucial additional unifying element, despite significant sectarian divisions, that embraced both town and country and asserted a new kind of Welsh distinctiveness predicated on a sharp divergence from the political and religious establishment, with the result, it was claimed, that ‘the Welsh are now the most religious people on earth’.¹⁹ A crucial catalyst for this change was the report published in 1847 by three English commissioners appointed by the government to investigate the state of education in Wales, whose criticisms of the Welsh language and especially of Welsh Nonconformity and morality created a furore, being condemned by both Anglicans and Nonconformists.²⁰ However, the latter went further by castigating the reports as ‘the Treason of the Blue Books’ (W. Brad y Llyfrau Gleision), a deliberate echo of the ‘Treason of the Long Knives’ (W. Brad y Cyllyll Hirion), the legendary feast, evidently still widely known among the Welsh, that led to the Britons’ conquest by the Saxons, and thereby making the reports the focus of a highly contemporary sense of grievance that newly emergent middle-class Nonconformist leaders seized upon in order to try and encourage members of different Dissenting sects to identify themselves as Welsh Nonconformists and mobilize them into seeking recognition of their status as the religious majority in Wales through the disestablishment of the Church of England in the principality.²¹ Their cause was given statistical support by the religious census of 1851, which showed that more than four-fifths of worshippers in Wales attended Nonconformist chapels (though about two-thirds of the population did not attend any place of worship).²² In 1866 the elision of Nonconformity and nation seemed to be complete, when the campaigner for disestablishment, peace activist, and radical Liberal Henry Richard famously declared ‘that the Welsh are now a nation of Nonconformists’.²³

Two years later Richard was elected as one of the two MPs for Merthyr Tydfil, the largest Welsh parliamentary borough following the Second Reform Act which had increased the town’s electorate tenfold.²⁴ Invited to stand ‘as a Welshman, advanced Liberal, and Nonconformist’, Richard published an ‘Address to the Welsh People’ which included the charge that previous MPs representing Wales ‘felt no pride in your national history’.²⁵ This political invocation of Welsh history as a badge of nationality was something new. Yet Richard’s view of that history was ambivalent, as it subordinated the long-cherished medieval past to a narrative of Puritan and Nonconformist struggle against an alien Anglicanism, thereby providing ideological ammunition for disestablishment, a narrative given recent historiographical expression for a similar purpose by the Independent minister Thomas Rees.²⁶ This is clear from the report of a speech Richard gave at Aberdare during the election campaign in which he declared that ‘for the last two hundred years the history of Wales has about it a moral significance and interest of a very rare kind’, as it consisted not of ‘military glory’ but of ‘men sent forth to do battle with ignorance, with superstition, with vice and corruption’, namely preachers and religious writers, including prominent Welsh Puritans and Methodists, whose names he listed before exclaiming: ‘These are the heroes of the Welsh people, and well may we be proud of them’.²⁷ True, Richard acknowledged elsewhere that ‘[t]he traditions of their national history…telling of their ancient kings, druids and bards, of Arthur and Merlin…and Llewelyn “ein llyw olaf” (our last prince)’ had helped to save the Welsh people from total ignorance during centuries of neglect by the Anglican Church. However, he was quick to add that the ‘stories, half fact and half fable…of the cruelty and perfidy of their Saxon and Norman oppressors…and others of similar import…or at least the evil feelings accompanying them—have happily faded, or are fast fading out of the popular mind’.²⁸

Richard strongly implied, then, that tales of victimhood in the distant past had no place in the new Nonconformist Wales he personified, while nevertheless acknowledging that such long-cherished understandings of Welsh history retained their appeal. I return to Nonconformist approaches to the past below, but Richard’s words—like those of Woodward, Arnold, and other outside commentators—also offer a significant glimpse of a public engagement with Welsh history in mid-Victorian Wales whose multifaceted and sometimes contested nature is attested in an ever-growing number of periodicals, newspapers, and other sources whose investigation lies outside the scope of the present discussion.²⁹ Nevertheless it is important to bear in mind that the history writing considered here belonged, and in significant measure responded, to a wider knowledge of and interest in the Welsh past.

Publishers certainly recognized the continuing attraction of what may be termed traditional Welsh history and sought to exploit its commercial potential. The majority of new histories of Wales published in this period were popular works, reflecting a wider trend in history publishing in Britain.³⁰ Those in Welsh formed part of wider efforts to provide Welsh-speakers taught to read their mother tongue in Sunday schools with a range of appealing publications.³¹ These included fifteen lectures on the history of the Welsh from their origins to the nineteenth century by the Calvinist Methodist minister and prolific popularizing author Owen Jones (Meudwy Môn; 1806–89), which appeared in three editions between 1850 and 1861, and a summary of Welsh history down to the Edwardian conquest heavily indebted to Thomas Price by the Independent minister Thomas Davies (1820–73) of Llandeilo (Carmarthenshire).³² Four further editions of Theophilus Evans’s Drych y Prif Oesoedd (‘Mirror of the Primitive Ages’) were also issued between 1851 and 1865, all but the last by William Spurrell of Carmarthen, a well-connected Anglican who published a wide range of informational and literary works in Welsh; significantly, the 1865 edition was justified on the grounds that Evans’s work was written far more clearly and engagingly than Thomas Price’s substantial Hanes Cymru (‘History of Wales’) and thus ‘much more useful to the people in general’.³³ In 1862–4 the Liverpool writer and publisher Isaac Foulkes brought out Cymru Fu (‘The Wales that Was’), a miscellaneous compilation of what today would be categorized as history, literature, and folklore, derived from both oral tradition ‘never printed before’ and ‘the works of famous authors’, in which legendary material appeared alongside modernized texts of medieval prose tales and biographies of several historical figures, including Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, Owain Glyndŵr, and Iolo Morganwg; Foulkes followed this with one of the first dictionaries of Welsh biography published in Welsh.³⁴

Welsh publishers also brought out histories of Wales in English. Hugh Humphreys of Caernarfon, who published the third edition of Owen Jones’s lectures in 1861, also issued two editions of The British Kymry, or Britons of Cambria (1857) by the Anglican clergyman R. W. Morgan (‘Môr Meirion’; c.1815–89), which, like Jones’s book, covered the entire span of Welsh history, almost a third of it dealing with the period from the Edwardian conquest to the Crimean War.³⁵ Its blend of Welsh exceptionalism based on historical fantasy and fervent loyalty to Great Britain and the monarchy seems to have struck a chord, as another edition was brought out by Isaac Clarke of Ruthin, followed by a Welsh translation of the work in 1858, also published in New York two years later.³⁶ The antiquary and Celtic scholar Robert Williams (1810–81), an Oxford graduate and vicar of Llangadwaladr (Denbighshire), compiled the most substantial dictionary of Welsh biography to date (expanded from a prize-winning eisteddfod essay in 1831), its detailed entries extending from mythological figures named in medieval Welsh literature to Aneurin Owen, the editor of the medieval Welsh laws who had died in July 1851.³⁷ This was published in association with Longman & Co. of London by the printer and publisher William Rees (1808–73) of Llandovery whose high-quality work included Charlotte Guest’s Mabinogion (1838–49) and the volumes of the Welsh Manuscript Society.³⁸ Another joint venture between English and Welsh publishers was T. J. Llewelyn Prichard’s The Heroines of Welsh History (1854), the first book focused on the role of women in the history of Wales, though a great deal of it is in fact about men. The work’s eclectic assortment of romanticized biographies ranged from medieval princesses to modern actresses, but omitted Prichard’s erstwhile patron Lady Llanover, with whom he had fallen out, quite possibly because she objected to his hostile attitude towards the Welsh language.³⁹ Welsh Sketches (1851–3) by Ernest Sylvanus Appleyard, an Anglican clergyman in England, was brought out by the London publisher James Darling and contained a large body of historical material focused on the ancient and medieval past, beginning with three chapters on bardism strongly indebted to Iolo Morganwg, other topics including the marcher lords, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, Owain Glyndŵr, and the Welsh Church.⁴⁰ The work attracted readers in Wales, one of whom praised its ‘three cheap volumes’ as providing ‘a splendid outline of the events of our fathers for many a long period’.⁴¹ As we have seen, Woodward’s History of Wales was also published in London, and the same was true of the two other major syntheses produced in this period, discussed below: Jane Williams’s 1869 History of Wales and R. J. Pryse’s Hanes y Brytaniaid a’r Cymry (‘The History of the Britons and Welsh’, 1872–4).⁴²

Though their approaches differed, Appleyard and Woodward exemplify a continuing interest in Welsh history among the English. That history also attracted the attention of some French, German, and Swiss authors. The Welsh were treated sympathetically by Augustin Thierry, as we shall see below, and featured in the racialized Romantic Celticism that remained influential into the 1860s, as shown by the debt of Matthew Arnold’s lectures On the Study of Celtic Literature to Ernest Renan’s 1854 essay ‘La poèsie des races celtiques’ (‘The Poetry of the Celtic Races’), although the publication of Johann Kaspar Zeuss’s Grammatica Celtica in 1853 heralded more critical approaches also promoted by the Revue Celtique established in Paris in 1870.⁴³ A wider comparative perspective was adopted by the German legal historian Ferdinand Walter in his substantial volume Das alte Wales (‘Ancient Wales’; 1859), which drew on earlier histories of Wales by Powel and Warrington as well as on Zeuss and a range of literary and historical sources, including Aneurin Owen’s edition of the Welsh laws, sources he thought cast unique light on early European law.⁴⁴

Nevertheless outside the principality interest in Welsh history was exceptional. In particular, Wales attracted scant notice in histories of its English neighbour: Macaulay treated Wales as ‘totally assimilated to England’ while Stubbs welcomed Edward I’s conquest as bringing ‘the day of account’ to the quarrelsome Welsh.⁴⁵ Although the latest in a long litany going back to the Elizabethan period, Welsh writers’ complaints that the history of Wales was largely ignored or marginalized by foreign historians cannot be dismissed as mere rhetorical posturing.⁴⁶ Concern was also expressed that too little was known of Welsh history in Wales itself.⁴⁷ As in previous periods, much of the writing discussed in this chapter responded in varying degrees to perceived misrepresentation and neglect. It may therefore be seen as a reiteration of Welsh distinctiveness that signalled pride and defiance. Yet there is also a defensive tone to some mid-Victorian Welsh history writing that reflected a wider unease about Wales’s place in the world, especially in relation to England. Thus a sense that the Welsh had let themselves down by being ‘far behind the English’ in relating the history of their famous people led several writers to publish biographical dictionaries, enterprises also influenced by Thomas Carlyle’s emphasis on ‘Great Men’ as the principal makers of history.⁴⁸ Similar concerns impelled the criticism of Romantic legendary history discussed in the next section.

Legend and History

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

A striking instance of leaving readers to judge between competing interpretations appears in the revised edition of Titus Lewis’s history of Great Britain (1857), in which the credulous and the critical rub shoulders within the same covers, as the preface by the antiquary Owen Williams tracing Welsh origins to Brutus and thence Gomer was immediately challenged by the work’s editor in the first chapter.⁵¹ The entry for the Druids in the encyclopaedia Y Gwyddoniadur Cymreig explicitly recognized the strength of conflicting opinions through its division into two sections, ‘The Old Views’ and ‘New Interpretations’, the former deeply indebted to Iolo Morganwg, the latter highly critical of bardic interpretations deriving from Iolo.⁵² The second article, by the Baptist minister William Roberts (Nefydd; 1813–72), provoked the ire of Ab Ithel, who ridiculed it as both uncritical and unpatriotic, portraying Roberts as belonging to a recently established ‘school’ that aimed ‘to depreciate everything of a national character’ by throwing doubt on the authenticity of native sources.⁵³ In privileging the testimony of such sources Ab Ithel echoed arguments by defenders of legendary history since Humphrey Llwyd and Sir John Prise, and like them he took his challenge to the terrain of his opponent by invoking principles of textual criticism in order to defend the antiquity of texts such as the ‘historical triads’ attributed to Dyfnwal Moelmud, but now known to have been concocted by Iolo Morganwg, and to point out illogicalities in Roberts’s arguments. This reaction was hardly surprising, since the review appeared in The Cambrian Journal, founded by Williams in 1854 after his break with the Cambrian Archaeological Association as a vehicle for Iolo’s ideas, to which he was ardently devoted as also shown by his unpublished history of Wales from Gomer to the death of Llywelyn in 1282.⁵⁴ This approach was taken further by R. W. Morgan, who opened his British Kymry with chapters on the ‘Gomeric’ and ‘Trojan’ eras and connected these with his own day, providing a genealogy of the ‘royal line of Britain, from Gomer and Brutus, or Prydain, to Queen Victoria’ and concluding with the landing ‘of a Chief of Kymric blood, Lord Raglan…on the shore of the Crimea, the eastern cradle of the Gomeric race, whence above 3600 years before its forefathers had emigrated under Hu Gadarn and colonized Britain’.⁵⁵ Differing responses to Morgan’s book point up how a writer’s authority was defined with reference to critical attributes, one reviewer praising Morgan’s ‘deep, penetrating mind’ and ‘critical temperament’ while Ab Ithel’s biographer condemned Morgan’s ‘historical fictions’ and contrasted them with his subject’s ‘varied and valuable researches’—which others in turn deemed irredeemably fanciful.⁵⁶

Writers committed to purging Welsh history of legend nevertheless did so in different ways. Consider B. B. Woodward, introduced at the beginning of this chapter, and Jane Williams (1806–85), authors of the two most important English-language histories of Wales produced in this period, aimed primarily at an English readership. Williams was the first woman to publish a general account of Welsh history. A versatile writer, her 500-page History of Wales Derived from Authentic Sources (1869), mostly focused on the period from the Romans to Henry VII’s accession in 1485, was the latest in a series of publications since 1824 that included poetry, a devastating critique of the 1847 Blue Books, a memoir of Thomas Price (Carnhuanawc), a ghost-written ‘autobiography’ of Elizabeth Davis (better known as Betsi Cadwaladr), a nurse in the Crimean War, and a history of female poets. A single middle-class woman and staunchly anti-Catholic Anglican, Williams spent the greater part of her life in Chelsea, where she was born to a Welsh father and English mother, but lived in Breconshire from about 1820 to 1855 and learned Welsh. Enjoying modest financial independence following a legacy in 1845, she also became a protegee of Lady Augusta Hall (later Lady Llanover) and thus a member of the Llanover circle of Welsh cultural patriots.⁵⁷ This background explains why Williams adopted a patriotic stance in her History that contrasted with Woodward’s emphasis on the benefits of Wales’s conquest by the English. She also differed from Woodward by advertising her critical credentials in her title’s emphasis on ‘authentic sources’ and her frequent footnote references, choices perhaps intended to place beyond doubt her qualifications as a pioneering female writer in her field, and a writer bearing a Welsh bardic name (Ysgafell) at that. Her book’s authoritative status was reinforced, moreover, by its appearance under the imprint of Longmans, a major publisher of history.⁵⁸ Woodward, on the other hand, played down his commitment to critical scholarship, describing his History as ‘a popular work’ and dispensing with footnote references, and published with Virtue & Co., a specialist in illustrated books that supplied seventy-six plates, features that no doubt contributed to its enjoying greater commercial success than Williams’s volume.⁵⁹ Yet for all his popularizing ambitions, Woodward left his readers in no doubt of his commitment to rigorous source criticism, presenting his work as an attempt to take account of the revolution in historical scholarship since Warrington had published the last ‘English History of Wales’ in the late eighteenth century, especially the unprecedented ‘discrimination between History and Legend’.⁶⁰ Moreover, he had secured the help of several Welsh scholars, including W. Basil Jones and Robert Williams, as well as the book’s dedicatee, the barrister and bibliophile Enoch Salisbury.⁶¹

Although both Woodward and Williams, like other historians of their time elsewhere, combined critical rigour with a Romantic sensibility, and also resembled each other in devoting much less space than Price to the pre-Roman period with its fertile terrain for legendary interpretations, the differences between them are more striking than the similarities. Above all, Woodward was generally more critical than Williams both in his treatment of sources and in his overall interpretation. When it came to the antiquity of the Welsh, both, it is true, deployed what Woodward called the ‘newly created science of Ethnology’.⁶² However, he followed his discussion of this with a chapter on ‘Legendary Britain’ that summarized the testimony of Geoffrey of Monmouth and the triads and concluded that their stories, while not ‘veritable history’, were of great literary value, having ‘furnished…noble materials’ for Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, a view prefiguring Matthew Arnold’s arguments on the beneficial contribution of ‘Celtic’ writing to English literature.⁶³ Williams, on the other hand, passed over Geoffrey’s History in one sentence, noting that it ‘has proved a vast storehouse of romantic fiction’ albeit possibly yielding ‘some valuable facts’ about ‘the Saxon Conquest’, and was more sensitive to the literary qualities of medieval Welsh poets than Woodward, who preferred to stress their unreliability as historical sources (and was highly sceptical of Iolo Morganwg’s bardism).⁶⁴ She also made greater use of English literature, prefacing her chapters with lines from poets and playwrights from Shakespeare and Spenser to Wordsworth and Elizabeth Barrett Browning presumably intended to persuade readers that her narrative illustrated universal themes. After a short chapter dealing briskly with ‘The Cymry of Ancient Britain’ that drew mainly on classical writers and devoted much of its discussion to the Druids, Williams moved on to what she evidently believed to be the much safer ground of the Roman period (though she held that druidical beliefs made brief come-backs later).⁶⁵ The bulk of the work then offers a largely chronological narrative of the relations of ‘the Cymry’ with the ‘Saxons’, ‘Normans’, ‘Anglo-Normans’, and ‘Plantagenet Princes’, a conventional emphasis on conflict with foreign conquerors leading to a no less conventional resolution in a final chapter on ‘The Tudor Dynasty’. Although Williams was much more critical of the 1536 Act of Union than many historians of Wales (including Woodward), declaring that its treatment of the Welsh language was a ‘lamentable mistake’ that ‘counteracted all its beneficial provisions’, she welcomed Henry VIII’s break with Rome and Elizabeth I’s authorizing of the Welsh translation of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, sentiments in keeping with the earlier condemnation of Rome’s hostility to ‘the independence of the ancient British Church’.⁶⁶ Williams was thus able to assure her readers that all had turned out for the best, as ‘[u]nder the influence of gentler and more equitable treatment than the nation ever experienced before the accession of their Henry [VII], and under the divine power of scriptural truth, Wales has gradually become a land of peace, to which bloodshed, with heinous crime in every form, is now almost unknown’—a conclusion that reflected widespread idealizations of the Welsh as singularly law-abiding.⁶⁷

However, the two writers who became most notorious in this period for their determination to disentangle history and legend were R. J. Pryse (Gweirydd ap Rhys; 1807–89) and his younger contemporary Thomas Stephens (1821–75), both largely self-educated, Nonconformist, and lower middle-class scholars who brought fresh approaches to the interpretation of the Welsh past; indeed, Stephens has been fairly described as ‘[a]rguably…Wales’s first modern, scientific, as opposed to romantic, historian’.⁶⁸ An assessment of their work thus provides a fitting conclusion to this section. Like Thomas Price (Carnhuanawc), both men came to the study of Welsh history from an interest in the Welsh language and Welsh literature, and their reputations in these fields led to their being commissioned at the Llangollen eisteddfod of 1858 to reform Welsh orthography.⁶⁹ Both submitted essays on the history of Wales to the Rhuddlan eisteddfod of 1850 and two decades later Pryse unsuccessfully tried to persuade Stephens, whose critical treatment of Welsh sources he greatly admired, to contribute to his Hanes y Brytaniaid a’r Cymry (‘History of the Britons and the Welsh’).⁷⁰ Both resembled many other Welsh literati of the time in their acceptance of Wales’s political integration with England as part of Great Britain and its empire, symbolized by their professions of loyalty to Queen Victoria and other members of the royal family, while espousing pride in the achievements of the Welsh and upholding their entitlement to respect as a distinctive people.⁷¹ However, there were also significant differences between the two men. With his successful business as a pharmacist in the industrial town of Merthyr Tydfil in south Wales, which gave him the resources to travel to the Continent and Ireland, Stephens was better off and enjoyed higher social status than Pryse, who had a more chequered career, spent in the countryside and small towns of north Wales, where he endured great poverty in his youth and also sometimes in later life. Stephens was readier to write in English as part of his mission to bring Welsh culture to the attention of scholars beyond Wales, with whom he conducted an extensive correspondence, whereas Pryse, while compiling dictionaries to help his compatriots learn English, gave priority to editing and writing works in Welsh. I begin with Stephens since his main works were composed before Pryse’s.

Thomas Stephens

Born in the village of Pontneddfechan (Glamorgan) to a boot-maker and the daughter of a weaver and Unitarian minister, and educated at a school in Neath run by a Unitarian headmaster, Stephens spent his adult life in Merthyr Tydfil, whose burgeoning conglomeration of iron works made it the largest town in Wales, its population growing from about 22,000 to over 50,000 between 1831 and 1871, largely thanks to continued migration from rural counties of the principality until the late 1840s, after which the pattern was reversed as economic decline led to mass out-migration from the town.⁷² Stephens arrived in Merthyr aged fourteen in 1835 as an apprentice to a pharmacist whose business he took over six years later, and became a prominent member of the town’s small but influential reforming middle class, many of whom were fellow Unitarians. He shared the commitment to social improvement of both his denomination and utilitarian thinkers such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, playing a leading part in efforts to provide educational and social amenities for Merthyr, including a subscription library he helped to establish in 1846 with Sir Josiah John Guest, manager of the Dowlais iron works and the town’s MP (1832–52), and the local health board set up in 1850 to try and deal with the high mortality rates resulting from Merthyr’s woefully inadequate sanitation.⁷³ Stephens was also a close friend of the next MP (1852–68), Henry Austin Bruce (first Baron Aberdare; 1815–95), with whom he shared a strong interest in education.⁷⁴ Indeed, his first biographer declared that ‘[e]ducation was Stephens’s idea of all reform’.⁷⁵ As these connections suggest, Stephens regarded civic reform as a paternalistic enterprise best achieved through middle-class co-operation with the iron masters, and supported neither Chartism—an influential presence in Merthyr into the 1850s and 1860s—nor the radical Liberalism of Henry Richard, whose defeat of Bruce in the 1868 parliamentary election, together with increasing ill health, led Stephens to withdraw from public life.⁷⁶

Stephens’s commitment to social and educational progress also embraced understandings of the Welsh past. In part, as has often been noted, this was a matter of debunking Romantic interpretations promoted by Ab Ithel and others by subjecting them to critical, ‘scientific’ interrogation. As Stephens put it in 1850,

The time is now approaching when the History of Wales may be written in a manner worthy of the subject. Long has the theme been disfigured by the imprudent zeal of my countrymen themselves, and sneered at by those who judged the whole mass by that which was manifestly exaggerated; but we may now hope to see it rescued from the hands of both, by the philosophic criticism which now prevails in other countries; and which by carefully distinguishing between the false and the true, will enable us to abandon our errors, and give a satisfactory reason for the faith we hold.⁷⁷

However, demolition went hand in hand with rebuilding as Stephens offered an alternative vision of Welsh history’s significance that privileged cultural and intellectual achievements as fitting examples for the enlightened Wales to which he aspired, an approach informed by his belief in ‘the usefulness of historical knowledge’ because it demonstrated human progress and allowed people to learn from the achievements and mistakes of their ancestors.⁷⁸ Much of his writing consisted of essays submitted to eisteddfod competitions on a range of historical and literary topics. His earliest success came at the Liverpool eisteddfod in 1840 when he won the prize for an essay on the eleventh-century Glamorgan lord Iestyn ap Gwrgant, and he continued to compete regularly over the following two decades. This may seem surprising, since, aged twenty-one, Stephens published a series of letters in the Welsh press harshly critical of the eisteddfod organized in 1842 by the Abergavenny Cymreigyddion Society, ‘the most stultified body of men in existence’.⁷⁹ With regard to Welsh history, Stephens questioned ‘the benefits which the Welshmen of the present age have derived from having the military exploits and butchering propensities of their ancestors recorded to them’.⁸⁰ He went further still by taking sarcastic aim at the hostility provoked

if any writer attempt to expose…the collective folly of two thousand years, which has been handed down to us by our forefathers, whose prejudices we, in duty bound, cherish; if any writer dare to assert that the manners of our savage, barbarous ancestors…are not of the wisest, most humane, and dignified character; if any one hint that that portion of the human family who inhabit the mountains of Wales, whose ancestral descent can be traced some forty millions of years before the creation of the world…are not the noblest, wisest, and best of men…⁸¹

It would be preferable, he added, if eisteddfod competitions encouraged work on periods of Welsh history after the Edwardian conquest rather than succouring such self-deluding idealization of the distant past.⁸²

True, Stephens’s success in such competitions ceased after the organizers of the Llangollen eisteddfod of 1858 refused to approve the adjudicators’ award of the prize for his essay on Prince Madog’s discovery of America because it inconveniently argued that the discovery had never taken place (the essay was eventually published posthumously).⁸³ A subsequent essay on ‘The Origin of the English Nation’ submitted to the Chester eisteddfod of 1866 was also harshly criticized by the adjudicator Viscount Strangford.⁸⁴ That Stephens continued to compete in eisteddfodau despite his reservations suggests that he found them a useful stimulus for his work and accepted their role in conferring cultural recognition and prestige. It was only when the organizers of the Llangollen eisteddfod took exception to his critical approach that he largely lost patience, mainly concentrating thereafter on writing essays for Welsh- and English-language periodicals, which had already played an important part in disseminating his work. Moreover, while keen to present himself as promoting ‘the daring spirit of modern criticism’,⁸⁵ his response to conventional understandings of the Welsh past was more measured than some of his rhetorical outbursts might suggest. For one thing, there were limits to his critical treatment of sources. Stephens believed that parts of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History were genuine and, while maintaining that a chronicle extant only in manuscripts written by Iolo Morganwg belonged to the sixteenth century rather than, as purported, to the twelfth, he (mistakenly) accepted the text as authentic and never suggested that Iolo had forged it; he came to a similar conclusion regarding Iolo’s ‘Third Series’ of triads.⁸⁶ Stephens also tried to take a balanced view of Thomas Price’s Hanes Cymru, relying on it heavily and once describing its author as ‘[t]he most careful of Welsh historians’ while also criticizing the work’s weaknesses and describing Price’s younger contemporary Rice Rees as ‘the only historical critic bred in Wales’.⁸⁷ In terms of subject matter, Stephens took opportunities not only to write about post-medieval developments but also to reappraise the ancient and medieval era ending with the death of Llywelyn in 1282. For example, at the Rhuddlan eisteddfod in 1850 he won prizes for essays on ‘A Biographical Account of Eminent Welshmen since the Accession of the House of Tudor’ and ‘The Advantages of a Resident Gentry’ as well as ‘A Summary of the History of Wales from the Earliest Period to The Present Time’.⁸⁸ The latter conformed, moreover, with prevailing expectations by devoting almost 90 per cent of its coverage to the period before the Edwardian conquest, by praising medieval princes for their military and political achievements, and by emphasizing the loyalty of the Welsh to the crown since their union with England under Henry VIII.⁸⁹ Nevertheless, it was criticized for ignoring both the ‘many important contributions by Welshmen to the general welfare of the British Empire’ and ‘our own national traditions in order to admit the speculative theories of philologists’, and, like all but one of his eisteddfod essays, failed to find patronage for its publication in his lifetime.⁹⁰

The one exception was Stephens’s widely acclaimed The Literature of the Kymry (1849). It was in this work, then, that his re-evaluation of Welsh history from the perspective of a utilitarian social reformer gained its most influential expression. A study of medieval Welsh literature, especially poetry, from the twelfth to mid-fourteenth centuries based on a prize-winning eisteddfod essay on the subject at Abergavenny the previous year, this was published thanks to the financial support of Sir John Guest, and was dedicated to the Prince of Wales whose three feathers were embossed on its cover.⁹¹ Articulating broader anxieties among Welsh literati, especially in the wake of the unflattering depiction of the Welsh in the 1847 Blue Books, the volume was ‘more particularly directed to English readers’ in order to persuade them of ‘the just claims of the Principality’ and ensure that ‘the English people…may no longer be ignorant of our real literary worth’.⁹² In this regard its success surpassed expectations, as the work brought Stephens into contact not only with English but also with Irish and continental scholars, and was translated into German.⁹³ Yet, while rightly regarded as a pioneering work of Welsh literary history, its significance was greater than that description may suggest. In part, this was because Stephens set the literary texts he discussed against a fairly conventional historical background derived from standard histories of Wales, especially Price’s Hanes Cymru, and, more importantly, followed the example of previous Welsh antiquaries and scholars by arguing that literature itself could provide valuable historical evidence.⁹⁴ What was new, though, was his purpose in deploying that evidence, namely to survey ‘all manifestations of the Cambrian intellect’.⁹⁵ Writing of the twelfth-century poet Cynddelw Brydydd Mawr, Stephens emphasized his ‘vigour of thought, independence of mind, and profundity of reasoning’, adding that ‘this seems to be characteristic of the bards; for we not infrequently find very original ideas in their poems; and their theological notions soar far above the dark and bigoted age in which they lived’.⁹⁶ Yet poets did not live in isolation from wider Welsh society. To begin with, in what could be seen as a kind of sociology of culture avant la lettre, Stephens emphasized their social role and influence as an order with its own regulations.⁹⁷ Furthermore, the nurturing of literary talent had been facilitated by ‘the dignified sway of the brilliant series of North Welsh kings’ from Gruffudd ap Cynan (d. 1137) to Llywelyn ap Gruffudd (d. 1282), rulers distinguished by their mental as well as martial attributes, Llywelyn being singled out as ‘a man of great intelligence, and ability’ whose correspondence with the archbishop of Canterbury ‘must give all who read it an exalted conception of his mental capacity’.⁹⁸

The emphasis on ‘the Cambrian intellect’ was reinforced by a comparative approach that built on Thomas Price’s insistence on stressing the special contribution of the Welsh to European culture. Stephens followed Price in ascribing the origins of European chivalry and romance to medieval Welsh prose tales, but went further by maintaining that ‘[c]ompared with contemporaneous princes, the Welsh kings were intellectually superior, the country was more civilized’, an assessment reiterated, for example, by quoting Augustin Thierry’s declaration ‘that the Welsh were the most civilized and intellectual people of that age’.⁹⁹ Indeed, Stephens even went so far as to say of medieval Welsh poets that, ‘notwithstanding all their demerits, I can, after communing with the finer and greater minds of England, and the Continent in modern days, and of Greece and Rome in the past, still feel pleasure in running over their labours…’¹⁰⁰ That last passage in turn underlines how the past offered inspiring examples for a Victorian Wales which Stephens and likeminded Welsh intellectuals felt to be lagging behind its English and continental neighbours, leading him to urge his compatriots to maintain their ‘intellectual independence’ by demanding ‘a dignified literature of truly Welsh origin’ and to awake and secure their place at the forefront of progress.¹⁰¹

The latter injunction invites comparison with the notion, which Stephens adapted from Price, of an awakening of Europe from what Arnold Heeren (1760–1842) ‘pithily terms the sleep which threatened to be its last’ signalled by the papal reform movement associated with Pope Gregory VII (1073–85), ‘a new era’ followed, according to Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), by the rise of vernacular languages and nationalities.¹⁰² Moreover Stephens asserted the special advantages enjoyed by the Welsh in the ‘new era’ commencing in the late eleventh century, observing that, thanks to their highly developed bardic culture and vernacular language, they ‘were better prepared than most other European nations, for the impulse which was now being given to every species of intellectual effort’.¹⁰³ Nor was this Stephens’s only debt to continental historians’ interpretations of the European Middle Ages, as he also cited the recent translation of François Guizot’s History of Civilization in Europe (1828) on the crusades being ‘a great step towards the enfranchisement of the mind’ through exposing the crusaders to the ‘two civilizations’ of the Islamic and Greek worlds.¹⁰⁴ The concept of civilization was central to Stephens’s understanding of the past and appears to carry the broad connotations emerging in the early nineteenth century developed by Guizot and his English admirer John Stuart Mill, ‘in which as much emphasis is put on social order and on ordered knowledge…as on refinement of manners and behaviour’.¹⁰⁵ A good example appears in a passage, again heavily indebted to Guizot, that draws parallels between medieval and modern ‘civilization’:

The church was the great civilizing element of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; it ameliorated the social condition of the people, and was greatly instrumental in bringing about the abolition of slavery in Europe; it laboured for the suppression of many barbarous practices; and framed a penal code upon principles elevated, and enlightened, and strikingly coincident with those enunciated by Jeremy Bentham, and his followers, Mill, Molesworth, Bowring, Grote, and others who are accounted,—the profoundest thinkers of the present day.¹⁰⁶

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

R. J. Pryse (Gweirydd ap Rhys)

Robert John Pryse edited and mainly wrote the longest Welsh-language history of Wales composed hitherto: Hanes y Brytaniaid a’r Cymry (‘The History of the Britons and the Welsh’, 1872–4). An Anglesey-born autodidact and independent-minded Nonconformist, variously employed as a weaver, shopkeeper, publisher’s assistant, and, from 1862, freelance writer, Pryse was commissioned by the publisher William Mackenzie, which had already issued a Welsh-language illustrated biblical dictionary, and his History first appeared in twenty-two parts, price 2s. each, that came to over 1,000 pages filling two quarto volumes.¹⁰⁹ The work was thus published in a larger format and to a higher standard than Thomas Price’s Hanes Cymru a generation earlier, its text being supplemented by maps of each Welsh county as well as seventy-four steel engravings, mostly of Welsh scenes, costing £500. Pryse himself was paid £360 for his work, and the ten clergymen, all but one of them Nonconformists, who assisted him also received payments calculated at 2s. 6d. per page of manuscript—a collaborative model that may have been influenced by his previous experience while working for the publisher Thomas Gee on the ten-volume Welsh-language encyclopaedia Y Gwyddoniadur Cymreig (1856–79), to which Pryse contributed well over 400 articles.¹¹⁰

Pryse’s History exhibits many of the preoccupations and approaches of Welsh history writing in the mid-Victorian period. Above all, it represents the most comprehensive attempt to cast a critical eye on established narratives of the period down to 1282 and to connect these with a modern, predominantly Nonconformist Wales politically integrated into the British state but still preserving its own national characteristics, especially the Welsh language. In significant respects, the work’s structure and thus interpretation were conventional. Unsurprisingly Thomas Price, the author of the previous major Welsh-language history of Wales, cast his shadow over the work, eliciting both praise and criticism and, above all, inspiring its title, ‘The History of the Britons and the Welsh’, intended to emphasize a two-stage division whereby the history of the Britons became that of the Welsh as the former were confined mainly to Wales about 664 ce.¹¹¹ Pryse differed from his predecessor, however, by dividing each of the main chronological periods into four thematic sections dealing respectively with political, social, literary, and religious history, the first of which received the lion’s share of attention. He also devoted significantly more coverage than Price and other predecessors to the period after the death of Llywelyn in 1282, although this still amounted to only about 25 per cent of the whole, a brevity of treatment justified by Wales’s ceasing to have a separate political history under the reign of the Tudors beginning with Henry VII’s accession in 1485.¹¹² Nevertheless, Pryse stressed that the Welsh remained distinctive in their literature and religion, both of which received considerable attention in the final parts of the work, including chapters on the main Welsh Nonconformist denominations, as well as the Church of England, from 1603 to 1874, although he omitted Roman Catholicism, to which he was unremittingly hostile in common with Jane Williams and numerous other Victorian compatriots as well as previous Protestant historians of Wales.¹¹³ Pryse subsequently expanded on this theme in a biographical dictionary he edited of religious figures in Wales since the Protestant Reformation, which he presented as a companion to his History that sought ‘to do equal justice to the leaders of Welsh thought, especially religious thought’, including living contemporaries such as William Rees (Gwilym Hiraethog), Lewis Edwards, and Henry Richard.¹¹⁴

The space Pryse allotted to modern history had a twofold significance, serving to confirm the fundamental importance of the period down to the Edwardian conquest that still claimed most of his attention while nevertheless asserting that Welsh history continued beyond 1282 and, indeed, 1536. In a defiant riposte to Woodward and others who advocated the complete assimilation of the Welsh with the English, Pryse declared of the union with England under Henry VIII:

It appears that the political history of the Principality became united with the history of England at that moment; but the ‘History of the Welsh’ did not also end at that time; and it has not ended yet, and it will never end as long as the nation continues to speak Welsh, to write Welsh, and to worship in Welsh…¹¹⁵

Moreover, like historians since David Powel, Pryse welcomed a political union with England made palatable by the rule of a Welsh dynasty and the granting of legal equality, adding that this had helped to foster the utilitarian values also esteemed by Thomas Stephens:

Instead of being a nation forever preparing itself in warlike plans…to throw from its neck the heavy yoke of the Tudors’ oppressive foreign predecessors, its genius now turned in a completely different direction. From then on, the Welsh gave reasonable obedience to the laws of the United Kingdom; and they used their abilities to refine their morals, to broaden their views, to cultivate their minds, and to practise the useful arts; in a word, they dedicated themselves to increasing the happiness of a particular society as well as the general welfare of the British government…¹¹⁶

If this meant that thenceforward the political and social history of Wales was essentially the same as that of England, the Welsh remained not only a distinct people thanks to their language, literature, and religion but also a thriving modern people, more numerous than ever, with settlements in America and Australia (a view shared by R. D. Thomas, discussed below).¹¹⁷ Like other Welsh radical Liberals of his day, Pryse framed his political views in a British and international context. He expressed support for liberty and democracy through praise for Cromwell, Washington, Cobden, and Gladstone and sympathy for organized labour, including Chartist campaigns to extend the suffrage, provided violence was avoided, and voiced doubts about monarchy (Queen Victoria was a glorious exception), condemned Britain’s imperial wars of conquest under George III, and, like Stephens, criticized primogeniture, maintaining that medieval Welsh partible inheritance was far juster.¹¹⁸

Medieval Wales also offered inspiration for the present in other ways, not least in the example of its heroic princes—notably Gruffudd ap Llywelyn, the two Llywelyns, and, above all, Owain Glyndŵr—who had fought bravely for their nation’s liberty until the odds against them proved too formidable.¹¹⁹ Conversely, Pryse castigated the Normans as thieving and treacherous plunderers of the Welsh and took aim at the negative assessments of medieval Welsh rulers by Woodward as well as by John Jones in his 1824 History of Wales.¹²⁰ Indeed, Pryse maintained that the era of the native princes had made an essential contribution to the survival of the Welsh to his own day, since, although Wales had lost its independence, ‘poetry and tradition, by preserving the records for its existence that was once so energetic, and the melancholy history of its fall, from sinking into oblivion, have kept its national spirit alive, which centuries of foreign government failed to extinguish or weaken’.¹²¹

Yet his Welsh patriotism amounted to more than singing the praises of heroic princes or standing up for the Welsh language.¹²² For one thing, Pryse bore some affinities with Jones and Woodward by accepting that, like their counterparts in England and elsewhere, medieval Welsh rulers behaved badly on occasions, inflicting violence on each other and oppressing the common people, although the ‘religious, literature-loving, and peaceful’ Hywel Dda was a notable exception.¹²³ He also added his voice to the chorus of historians’ condemnations of the princes’ lack of unity.¹²⁴ But above all Pryse was unsparing in his demolition of what he believed to be baseless legends. At the outset he declared that ‘what is truly important in considering history is finding out the truth about our nation, and not praising it excessively, as is customary, without adequate foundations’; accordingly, his work was based as far as possible on contemporaneous sources and included references to his authorities, as this was ‘of great importance to our national “history”, which has been overloaded so pathetically with invented legends and fake histories’.¹²⁵ For Pryse, like Stephens, there was nothing patriotic in peddling interpretations of the Welsh past that dissolved under critical scrutiny.¹²⁶ It is significant that Pryse’s History opens with an overview of sources that included damning assessments of Geoffrey of Monmouth, the triads, and texts in the Iolo Manuscripts; it later gave short shrift to Iolo’s ‘fake Druidism’ too.¹²⁷ Indeed, especially down to the twelfth century, the work often reads like a critical commentary on sources and previous interpretations that sought to draw more stringent lines than before between ‘legend’ or ‘tradition’ and ‘history’. The energy put into this task implied that legendary views of the Welsh past continued to appeal to potential readers. Indeed, Pryse admitted as much when he responded to criticisms that he was ‘too doubtful of the authority of the old Welsh traditions’. Those critics, he continued,

should remember that his promise was not to write a romance on ‘The History of the Britons and the Welsh’, like G. ab Arthur [Geoffrey of Monmouth], or a novel, like Theophilus Evans, and others, but rather true history, based on the most authoritative contemporaneous sources he could lay his hands on…The writer has the greatest respect for the traditions and romances of the Welsh, as such; but he thinks that basing the history of the nation on works of that kind would have been literary dishonesty.¹²⁸

In seeking to place the history of Wales on sound foundations Pryse and his collaborators also drew on recent scholarship in the fields of ethnology, archaeology, language, and Celtic studies.¹²⁹ Friedrich Max Müller and Isaac Taylor were cited by Pryse as identifying the Celts as belonging to a broader Indo-European family, thereby enabling him to confirm the widely held view that the British ancestors of the Welsh were an ancient people descended from the Celts while aligning himself with modern critical scholarship by jettisoning legends of Trojan or biblical origins and early British kings such as Iolo’s Hu Gadarn; instead Pryse invoked the authority not only of classical writers (a well-established strategy since the sixteenth century) but also of the new human sciences—an approach that would be taken further by Welsh scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.¹³⁰

Nonconformity, Imperial Britain, and American Liberty: The Welsh in the Modern World

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

Nonconformity

Their teleological casting of Dissent as a promoter of enlightened progress disposed Nonconformist writers on Welsh religious history to privilege modern developments over the ancient and medieval past, at least implicitly in their choice of subject matter, and sometimes explicitly, as in the relief expressed that Edward I’s conquest had led to ‘more hopeful times’ of ‘political peace’ and ‘reform…after long ages of darkness and superstition’.¹³² Mostly published in Welsh, these writers’ works included memoirs (W. cofiannau, sing. cofiant) of ministers and prominent chapel members, whose proliferation and standardized form drew a satirical response from the Anglican polemicist David Owen (Brutus; 1795–1866); an expanded edition of David Peter’s history of religion in Wales, first published in 1816; and two major denominational histories, one of the Welsh Methodists by John Hughes that started with a summary of church history from the arrival of Christianity in Britain to the eve of the Methodist revival, the other of the Welsh Independents by Thomas Rees and John Thomas giving accounts of the denomination’s churches in each county.¹³³ A decade before embarking on the latter work Rees had published, in English, the first history of Welsh Nonconformity as a whole. This aimed to assert the rights of Welsh Nonconformists and effectively created the concept of Wales as a Nonconformist nation. Rees made no attempt to connect that nation with the early Church and medieval Christianity, but instead opened his work with the Reformation and stressed the role of Old Dissent in the making of Welsh Nonconformity, including its contribution to the success of Calvinistic Methodism, which he portrayed as part of a wider Nonconformist body. He sought to enliven the work with extensive quotations from primary sources and numerous biographies of leading figures, deploying skills already fostered in several memoirs of ministers.¹³⁴ John Peter and R. J. Pryse’s biographical dictionary of notable Welsh religious figures since the Reformation shared some of the same aims as Rees in its inclusion of numerous Puritans, Methodists, and Nonconformists but was more welcoming to Anglicans and drew connections with earlier periods in its accounts of ‘forerunners of the Reformation’ from Pelagius to Walter Brut.¹³⁵ As we have seen, Nonconformists also wrote general works of Welsh history imbued with their religious outlook: after traversing the well-trodden path from the ancient Britons to Owain Glyndŵr, Owen Jones devoted the final quarter of his book mainly to the coming of Protestantism, the Methodist revival, and Nonconformity, while, R. J. Pryse included chapters on the Nonconformist denominations.¹³⁶ The histories of Great Britain and the United States considered shortly adopted similar perspectives, while in 1867–70 the Independent minister Josiah Thomas Jones of Aberdare brought out ‘the largest of all Welsh biographical dictionaries’, published and largely written by himself, in which mostly short notices of legendary and medieval figures appeared alongside numerous, and often quite lengthy, accounts of Nonconformist preachers.¹³⁷

Wales and Great Britain

The idea that the Welsh occupied a special place in Britain as the island’s oldest people was, of course, a long-held and persistent theme in understandings of the Welsh and their past. Related to this was a tradition of loyalty to a monarchy regarded, not as a foreign imposition, but as the embodiment of a Welsh recovery of sovereignty by Henry Tudor. These ideas took on a new complexion from the late 1840s as they fused with widespread Welsh enthusiasm for an expanding imperial Britain and its monarch Queen Victoria as well as for British Liberal causes, reflected in Welsh Nonconformists’ support for movements of national self-determination within the Habsburg Empire, political convictions refracted in the case of the influential Congregationalist minister, author, and journalist William Rees (Gwilym Hiraethog; 1802–83) through the lens of an ‘anti-Catholic, millenarian Calvinism’ drawing on biblical revelation.¹³⁸ On the other hand, with the notable exception of the nationalist Michael D. Jones from the 1870s, there was no suggestion that Wales required such freedoms: the historical allusions in a comparison of Cavour, first prime minister of Italy, with ‘Dyfnwal Moelmud, Alfred the Great, Hywel Dda, Cromwell, and Palmerston’ only served to underline Wales’s close association with England, and were a far cry from Michael D. Jones’s invocation of Hengist and Horsa to condemn the unjust English conquest of the Welsh.¹³⁹ Small wonder, then, that this period saw the publication of four Welsh-language histories of Great Britain that explicitly integrated the history of Wales with the history of the state to which it had belonged since Henry VIII’s Acts of Union. The authors of these and other Welsh historical works maintained that the Welsh enjoyed a special relationship to Britain, and thus England. This was given new expression in claims, also advanced by Luke Owen Pike and other writers on early English history from the 1860s onwards, that the origins of the English were, at least in biological terms, Brittonic or Celtic.¹⁴⁰ Thus R. J. Pryse, apparently taking his lead from Pike, not only asserted that ‘the great English nation’ was mainly descended from the Britons or Welsh but implied that consequently one of the achievements of the Britons was the unrivalled expansion of the English language across the world.¹⁴¹ Such thinking was also used to celebrate Welsh loyalty to the monarchy. Ab Ithel went so far as to claim that Wales was independent under Victoria as her queen, namely Queen Buddug II (Buddug being the Welsh equivalent of both Victoria and Boudica, the queen of the Iceni defeated by the Romans, quite often co-opted in this period as a Welsh heroine), and that Wales had more right to her than England as Victoria had more Celtic than English blood.¹⁴² His fellow devotee of legendary history, R. W. Morgan, supplied his fanciful account of early Welsh history with a pedigree purportedly demonstrating Queen Victoria’s descent from the legendary British ruler Beli Mawr (‘Beli the Great, B.C. 100’) as well as a list of 130 rulers ‘of the Royal Family of Britain’ from Prydain Mawr (a legendary figure in the Welsh triads literally meaning ‘Great Britain’) or Brutus ‘down to Queen Victoria’.¹⁴³ Nor was the contribution to Great Britain limited to the heritage of the ancient past. It had also continued into the modern era through Welsh military prowess and leadership in British armies: for example, R. W. Morgan concluded his history of Wales with a glowing account of the Welsh Fusiliers from their formation in 1689 to the siege of Sebastopol.¹⁴⁴

The four Welsh-language histories of Great Britain that appeared between 1857 and 1877 were brought out by Welsh publishers with the exception of the longest and most lavish, replete with colour illustrations.¹⁴⁵ The earliest was an expanded edition of the first such work, published by Titus Lewis in 1810. That their very composition rested on the premise of a particular Welsh identification with Britain is suggested by the inclusion of introductory accounts of early British and Welsh history derived from histories of Wales, further evidence of the view that the history of modern Britain had Brittonic or Celtic, as opposed to predominantly Teutonic, origins. Moreover, the works sometimes explicitly assert the contribution of the Welsh to the making of Great Britain. The clearest example comes in the work of the prolific Calvinist Methodist minister Thomas Levi (1825–1916), whose previous publications had included accounts of the Crimean War and David Livingstone’s missionary journeys in Africa.¹⁴⁶ His 1863 Prydain Fawr: Ei Chodiad, ei Chynydd, a’i Mawredd (‘Great Britain: Its Rise, its Progress and its Greatness’) begins with a brief introduction to the history of Wales that opens by declaring: ‘The Welsh nation has an important place in the history of Great Britain.’¹⁴⁷ The author then rehearses the received view that ‘the native Britons’ had recovered their authority in the island ‘in the person of Henry Tudor’, and insists that the English were far more indebted to the Welsh than they were ready to admit.¹⁴⁸ Yet the opening of the book’s first main chapter is no less revealing. The chapter’s chronology, from Caesar’s invasion in 55 bce to the Norman conquest of 1066, reproduced the standard periodization of histories of England. More significant, though, were its first sentences, which explained that the author intended to give the Welsh reader ‘an outline of the history of his country’ and that his main aim was to show the various factors ‘in forming the England of today’.¹⁴⁹

The implication, then, was that England was the Welsh reader’s country. Likewise, other Welsh histories of Great Britain implicitly presented it as ‘the land of our birth’.¹⁵⁰ This identification was fundamentally political and did not necessarily mean that the Welsh had become English; the latter are sometimes described as ‘our neighbours’.¹⁵¹ Yet, as elsewhere in Britain and beyond, the inhabitants of Britain as a whole could be described as ‘English’, and Welsh writers tended to use ‘(Great) Britain’ and ‘England’ interchangeably, along with ‘the country’ and ‘the kingdom’.¹⁵² Small wonder, then, that little attempt was made to connect the introductions to early British and Welsh history with the Anglocentric narratives comprising the bulk of these texts that invited their readers to identify with English and British achievements. Levi’s final section on ‘The Greatness of Britain’ celebrated the unprecedented power of a country on whose territories the sun never set, while over a decade later Owen Jones ended his History by listing those territories and stressing that Britain was the wealthiest kingdom in the world.¹⁵³ Their reiteration of long-established claims of descent from the original Britons thus gave writers of Welsh history rhetorical tools to voice a special, arguably sentimental, attachment to Great Britain based on ethnic origins. But that ancient pedigree only had salience precisely because many people in mid-Victorian Wales found much to like in the modernity of a Protestant, imperial nation state in which the Welsh had long been deeply implicated.

Welsh America

Some writers, by contrast, stressed that as descendants of the biblical Gomer in Asia Minor, as well as a people with a long history of settlement in north America, the Welsh were ideal migrants who should escape from Britain and make new homes abroad, especially in the United States but also in Australia and Patagonia, and thus recover the confidence and self-respect of their ancestors by building better lives free of oppression from landlords and the Church of England.¹⁵⁴ Welsh-American history writing shared with the Nonconformist historians of Wales and Britain discussed above a providential reading of Welsh history culminating in the creation of a deeply religious, hard-working, and respectable people tenaciously adhering to their native language and literature: it differed, though, by displacing that vision to the other side of the Atlantic.

Originating in settlements in the seventeenth century, the connections of the Welsh with the United States were, of course, far less ancient and less intimate than those with England and Great Britain. Nevertheless, they were close in this period as Welsh emigration to the United States increased sharply from the 1850s, as did the Welsh-born population in the country, which grew from almost 30,000 in 1851 to over 83,000 by 1880 (reaching a historic high of 100,000 a decade later).¹⁵⁵ Moreover, Welsh-American communities bore many similarities to their equivalents in the ‘Old Country’, including an interest in Welsh culture and history sustained by Nonconformist churches, literary societies, eisteddfodau, and a flourishing Welsh-language newspaper and periodical press.¹⁵⁶ Welsh-American history writing also bore affinities with Welsh historians’ treatment of Wales’s place in Britain. Just as the latter identified with an empire legitimized by the duty of bringing Christian civilization to primitive and barbarian peoples, so too did Welsh historians of America cast native Americans as ‘uncivilized people’ subjected to European territorial expansion and Christian missions.¹⁵⁷ While sceptical of the Madog legend, one writer observed that although, if they existed, the Welsh Indians ‘would not be, in their subjugated and low condition…of much benefit or honour to us as a nation, they would nevertheless be truly deserving objects of our sympathy and religious efforts to bring them light and benefit’.¹⁵⁸ Above all, the Welsh had contributed significantly to the making of their adopted homeland across the Atlantic just as they had contributed to the greatness of Britain. Although Morgan Edwards’s history of the Pennsylvania Baptists had noted that many of their ministers and congregations originated in Wales, this was cast as a Nonconformist history and works explicitly intended as accounts of Welsh settlement in the United States only began to appear in the third quarter of the nineteenth century.¹⁵⁹ In 1852 Samuel Jenkins, who had emigrated to the United States as a youth half a century earlier, concocted a heady brew of bardism, Nonconformity, and biblical prophecy to argue that the Americans owed the principles of liberty and the rights of man to the Welsh, who had been chosen by God to preserve these since ancient times, citing Welsh triads attributed to Dyfnwal Moelmud, Baptist and Congregationalist self-government with its gender equality, and the Book of Revelation.¹⁶⁰ Jenkins attributed the appointment of Thomas Jefferson as one of the drafters of the Declaration of Independence to his Welsh descent and emphasized that another signatory, Lewis Morris, could trace his ancestry to the medieval legislator Hywel Dda; indeed, ‘one-fourth of the immortal signers were either of Welsh descent or born in Wales’.¹⁶¹ Alexander Jones (1802–63), a New York doctor, journalist, and author of Welsh descent, took a similar line in an address for the St David’s Benevolent Society in 1855 that commemorated ‘the glorious deeds of the Cymry, and their descendants on the American continent, in behalf of the civil and religious liberty we now enjoy’, and named Jefferson first among ‘seventeen men of Cambrian birth or origin’ who had signed the Declaration of Independence.¹⁶² An appendix of miscellaneous material, including a letter from Samuel Jenkins on several notable Welsh individuals, reinforced the message that the Welsh were an ancient people who had made significant contributions to the histories of both England and the United States, its topics ranging from the Druids to Welsh inventors of the steam engine.¹⁶³

In 1872 the Independent minister R. D. Thomas (Iorthryn Gwynedd; 1817–88) sought to demonstrate the special place of the Welsh, and more particularly the Nonconformist Welsh, in the United States in his Hanes Cymry America (‘The History of the Welsh of America’), the most substantial and wide-ranging study of its subject hitherto. Writing in Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania, Thomas had emigrated to America in 1855, a year after publishing a handbook encouraging Welsh emigration to the United States (and to a lesser extent Canada and Australia).¹⁶⁴ Mainly comprising accounts of Welsh settlements across north America based both on his own observations and on information supplied by correspondents, his 1872 history portrayed the American Welsh as a respectable and religious people (the chapels of different Nonconformist denominations they established are carefully noted), who, while part of a Welsh nation (W. cenedl) comprising possibly three million people, two-thirds of whom lived outside Wales, were nevertheless American citizens.¹⁶⁵ Yet the work also betrayed anxieties about the future of Welsh-American communities. In celebrating the achievements of Welsh emigrants and their descendants as well as the civil and religious freedoms of the United States, which he contrasted with the oppression of working people and the power of the Established Church in Wales, Thomas sought to document a new and better kind of Welsh world whose vigour and copiousness nevertheless belied an underlying fragility, revealed by his concern that numerous Welsh Americans were indifferent to their heritage and, above all, were abandoning their native language as they became increasingly assimilated into a predominantly Anglophone society.¹⁶⁶ To counteract these tendencies his compatriots in Wales should abandon the oppression and poverty of their homeland for ‘the land of freedom and abundance’: ‘We would like to see you all here.’¹⁶⁷ (One of Thomas’s contemporaries was more pessimistic, declaring that the Welsh faced ‘national death’ in the United States and that the only hope lay in the recently established Welsh colony in Patagonia.)¹⁶⁸ Thomas’s 1872 history was thus both an apologia and an epitaph for a Welsh phase in American history that was already showing signs of decline.¹⁶⁹ Similar concerns are implicit in a major Welsh-language history of the American Civil War published in 1866 by the editors of the Welsh-American newspaper Y Drych (‘The Mirror’), which assumed that its readers identified themselves, in this context at least, as Americans supportive of the Union cause and, unlike the other works discussed here, paid virtually no attention to the role of the Welsh in American history.¹⁷⁰ Moreover, its authors worried that their highly ambitious volume would find insufficient buyers to recoup the $1,000 spent on its publication and it seems to have been a commercial flop.¹⁷¹

For Nonconformist writers of Welsh religious history, histories of Great Britain, and histories of the Welsh in the United States, then, the ancient and medieval past was at best a badge of ethnic distinctiveness or a prelude to better things, at worst an irrelevance that was simply ignored. Yet, as the works of Owen Jones and, above all, R. J. Pryse demonstrate, when it came to writing general histories of Wales Nonconformists adhered to long-established chronological priorities, even if they devoted more space than their predecessors to the post-medieval centuries and went further in accommodating key elements of Nonconformist narratives. As we shall see in Chapter 12, the relationship of the centuries down to 1282 with subsequent developments, especially after the union with England under Henry VIII, continued to exercise historians of Wales from the late Victorian period to the end of the First World War. So too did the challenge of drawing a line between history and legend.

Writing Welsh History: From the Early Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century. Huw Pryce, Oxford University Press. © Huw Pryce 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198746034.003.0012

¹ Woodward, The History; quotation at [iv]. Cf. Woodward, revd. Everett, ‘Woodward, Bernard Bolingbroke’.

² Woodward, The History, [iv].

³ Woodward, The History, 590.

⁴ Anon., Review of Woodward, The History, Eclectic Review.

⁵ Anon., Review of Woodward, The History (parts 13–25), Arch. Camb., 217.

⁶ Arnold, ‘On the Study of Celtic Literature’, ed. Super.

⁷ Clear echoes of the Blue Books’ condemnation of the Welsh language in Woodward, The History, 586–8.

⁸ Millward, ‘Cymhellion Cyhoeddwyr’, 70–2, 74–81; Hywel Teifi Edwards, Gŵyl Gwalia, 53–112, 133–44, 334–5, 348–52; Prys Morgan, ‘Early Victorian Wales’, 93–4, 102, 103, 105. As recent scholarship has emphasized, Wales saw nothing in this period comparable to the expanding reach and official status of native vernaculars achieved by national movements in central and eastern Europe from Estonia to Slovenia: Okey, ‘Wales and Eastern Europe’; Brooks, Why Wales Never Was, esp. ch. 2.

⁹ Ben Bowen Thomas, ‘The Cambrians’; Prys Morgan, ‘Early Victorian Wales’, 97–8; Löffler, ‘Failed Founding Fathers’.

¹⁰ Chapman, ‘The Turn of the Tide’, quotation at 510. For the mid-nineteenth century as a turning-point in the modernization of Wales see Philip Jenkins, A History of Modern Wales, 301–2; Prys Morgan, ‘Early Victorian Wales’; Chris Williams, ‘The Modern Age’.

¹¹ For these works see Chapman, ‘The Turn of the Tide’, 506–7; Pryce, ‘Medieval Welsh History in the Victorian Age’, 10–14.

¹² See e.g. Thomas Rees, Miscellaneous Papers, [v], 1–14; also the wide-ranging survey of mid-Victorian Wales in Neil Evans, ‘Remaking Nations’.

¹³ O’Leary, ‘Town and Nation’, 216–22.

¹⁴ John Williams, Digest of Welsh Historical Statistics, 1: 7–24, 63–4; Ieuan Gwynedd Jones, Explorations, 222–3; Pooley, ‘The Residential Segregation’, 365–6.

¹⁵ Wallace, ‘Organise! Organise! Organise!’, 2–3; John Davies, A History of Wales (2007), 395–8.

¹⁶ Philip Henry Jones, ‘Printing and Publishing’, 329–36, quotation at 329; Philip Henry Jones, ‘Two Welsh Publishers’; Huw Walters, ‘The Periodical Press’, 203–5; Aled Jones, ‘The Newspaper Press in Wales’, esp. 211–13; O’Leary, Claiming the Streets, 79–82, 91, 93; Hywel Teifi Edwards, The Eisteddfod, 18–27.

¹⁷ J. Gwynn Williams, The University Movement, 41–62.

¹⁸ John Williams, Digest of Welsh Historical Statistics, 1: 78, 86.

¹⁹ E. T. Davies, Religion and Society, 35–46, 61–8; R. Tudur Jones, ‘Religion, Nationality and State’; R. J. W. Evans, ‘Nonconformity and Nation’. Quotation: Michael D. Jones, Gwladychfa Gymreig, 12. Similar assertions in Thomas Stephens, ‘Sefyllfa Wareiddiol y Cymry’, 397–9; Prys Morgan, ‘Early Victorian Wales’, 96.

²⁰ Brad y Llyfrau Gleision, ed. Morgan; Ieuan Gwynedd Jones, ‘1848 and 1868’; Gwyneth Tyson Roberts, The Language of the Blue Books; M. Wynn Thomas, In the Shadow of the Pulpit, 33.

²¹ Prys Morgan, ‘From Long Knives to Blue Books’.

²² Ieuan Gwynedd Jones, Explorations, 221, 227.

²³ Richard, Letters, 2. See further Kenneth O. Morgan, ‘The Relevance of Henry Richard’; Gwyn Griffiths, Henry Richard, esp. 125–30; and, for Richard’s patriotic Nonconformist rhetoric, O’Leary, ‘The Languages of Patriotism’, 547–51.

²⁴ Ieuan Gwynedd Jones, Explorations, 193–214, 313–16.

²⁵ Ieuan Gwynedd Jones, Explorations, 200; Ieuan Gwynedd Jones, ‘1848 and 1868’, 165.

²⁶ Thomas Rees, History of Protestant Nonconformity; Prys Morgan, ‘A Nation of Nonconformists’.

²⁷ Merthyr Express, 14 November 1868, 2. Thanks to Bill Jones for drawing this report to my attention.

²⁸ Richard, Letters, 33.

²⁹ For aspects of this theme see Hywel Teifi Edwards, Gŵyl Gwalia, 9–10, 102–3, 110, 147–8, 159, 169–71, 179, 183, 229–33, 343, 384, 416, n. 104; Llinos Beverley Smith, ‘Llywelyn ap Gruffudd’, 24–6; Millward, ‘ “Cenedl o Bobl Ddewrion” ’. The ‘[l]ove of the Cambrians for the history of their ancestors’ was also highlighted by Nedelec, Cambria Sacra, xviii.

³⁰ Cf. Howsam, Past into Print, 7–9, 18–20, 37–40.

³¹ Cf. Roger J. Williams, ‘Hanes Cyhoeddi y Gwyddoniadur’ (1973–4), 66–7.

³² Owen Jones, Darlithiau ar Hanes y Cymry; Owen Jones, Hanes Cenedl y Cymry; T. Davies, Crynodeb o Hanes y Cymry. See also Wyn, Hanes y Cymry.

³³ DPO (1740), [xxxvi]; Richard E. Huws, ‘Spurrell of Carmarthen’, 189–91; Rhys Gwesyn Jones, ‘Rhagdraeth’, xi (quotation).

³⁴ “Cymru Fu:”, comp. Foulkes; Geirlyfr Bywgraffiadol, ed. Foulkes; Peter and Pryse, Enwogion y Ffydd. See further J. E. Lloyd, revd. Rhys, ‘Foulkes, Isaac’; Löffler, The Literary and Historical Legacy, 18–20.

³⁵ R. W. Morgan, The British Kymry. See further Peter Freeman, ‘The Revd Richard Williams Morgan’; R. J. W. Evans, ‘National Historiography, 1850–1950’, 32.

³⁶ R. W. Morgan, Hanes yr Hen Gymry.

³⁷ Robert Williams, Enwogion Cymru; D. L. Thomas, revd. Beti Jones, ‘Williams, Robert’.

³⁸ Selwyn Jones, ‘Rees, William’.

³⁹ Prichard, The Heroines. Prichard had previously published poetry on aspects of medieval Welsh history as well as a historical novel, The Adventures and Vagaries of Twm Shôn Catti (1828), set in the early seventeenth century: Adams, Thomas Jeffery Llewelyn Prichard (discussion of The Heroines at 45–9, 90–3); Johns, Gender, Nation and Conquest, 166–9.

⁴⁰ Appleyard, Welsh Sketches.

⁴¹ S. Llwyd, Review of Morgan, British Kymry, 27.

⁴² Jane Williams, A History of Wales; HBC.

⁴³ Cf. O’Leary, Ffrainc a Chymru, 26–31; Charles-Edwards, ‘The Lure of Celtic Languages’, 15–35; Mattar, Primitivism, Science, and the Irish Revival, 21–31.

⁴⁴ Walter, Das alte Wales; Krause, ‘Ferdinand Walter’.

⁴⁵ Catherine Hall, Macaulay and Son, 290; Stubbs, The Constitutional History of England, 2: 117–18.

⁴⁶ Samuel Jenkins, Letters on Welsh History, 6; Derfel, ‘Cymru yn ei Chysylltiad ag Enwogion’, 337, 339; Anon., ‘Ein Hynafiaid’, 5–8; “Cymru Fu:”, comp. Foulkes, 115; Anon., Review of HBC, Y Beirniad, 380.

⁴⁷ Prichard, The Heroines, viii; Derfel, ‘Cymru yn ei Chysylltiad ag Enwogion’, 328–9, 338–9.

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

⁴⁹ John Hughes, Methodistiaeth Cymru, 1: [1]; Nedelec, Cambria Sacra, ix–xxix, quotation at ix.

⁵⁰ “Cymru Fu:”, comp. Foulkes, 7–11; Geirlyfr Bywgraffiadol, ed. Foulkes, 29–41, quotation at 29.

⁵¹ Titus Lewis, Hanes Prydain Fawr, revd. Jones, 1–11.

⁵² Roger Jones Williams, ‘Hanes Cyhoeddi Y Gwyddoniadur’ (1967), 150–1. By contrast, the article published on Druids in 1855 in The Encyclopædia Britannica, vol. 8, 183–90, is based largely on classical sources.

⁵³ John Williams, Review of ‘Druidism’, quotation at 231. Similar rebuttal of ‘the sceptic school’ in R. W. Morgan, The British Kymry, iv.

⁵⁴ Ab Ithel, ‘History of Wales’, NLW MS 17178E. See also John Williams Ab Ithel, The Traditionary Annals of the Kymry (first published in Cambrian Journal, 1–4 (1854–7)); Kenward, Ab Ithel; G. J. Jones, ‘John Williams Ab Ithel’; Löffler, The Literary and Historical Legacy, 55–8, 81–4, 88, 91–2, 165–72.

⁵⁵ R. W. Morgan, The British Kymry, 9–59, 300. Descent from Gomer also defended in Josiah Thomas Jones, Geiriadur Bywgraffyddol, 1: vi–viii. Another work emphasizing the ancient eastern origins of the Welsh and indebted to Iolo’s bardism was John Jones Thomas, Britannia Antiquissima. See also the discussion of Welsh-American history below.

⁵⁶ S. Llwyd, Review of Morgan, The British Kymry, 27; Kenward, Ab Ithel, 25; Ben Bowen Thomas, ‘The Cambrians’, 4–5; The Correspondence of Thomas Stephens, ed. Coward, 178.

⁵⁷ Gwyneth Tyson Roberts, Jane Williams, with discussion of A History of Wales at 94–104. See also Gwyneth Tyson Roberts, ‘ “An Account Obtained from Authentic Documents” ’; Neil Evans, ‘Finding a New Story’, 146–9.

⁵⁸ See the list of titles advertised at the back of Williams’s volume. Cf. Briggs, A History of Longmans, 241–3, 270–1, 317–20.

⁵⁹ Cf. Neil Evans, ‘Finding a New Story’, 148. A second edition of Woodward’s volume appeared in 1859.

⁶⁰ Woodward, The History of Wales, [iv] (quotation), and cf. 580.

⁶¹ Woodward, The History of Wales, [iii], vi. Salisbury amassed a huge library of books by Welsh authors and relating to Wales: Nicholson, revd. Jones, ‘Salisbury, Enoch Robert Gibbon’.

⁶² Woodward, The History of Wales, 20–1, 25.

⁶³ Woodward, The History of Wales, 48.

⁶⁴ Jane Williams, A History of Wales, 233, 244 (quotations), 256–7, 264–5, 417; Woodward, The History of Wales, v, 352, 486, 522–55.

⁶⁵ Jane Williams, A History of Wales, 1–16, 225–6, 479; cf. Woodward, The History of Wales, 533–6.

⁶⁶ Jane Williams, A History of Wales, 206, 481–3, 490–3, quotations at 483. Cf. Woodward, The History of Wales, 516–17, 576–7, 587.

⁶⁷ Jane Williams, A History of Wales, 495. The idealization was only partly accurate, being most applicable to serious crime which fell significantly from the 1860s, especially in rural areas, whereas the rate of petty crime increased: David J. V. Jones, Crime in Nineteenth-Century Wales, ch. 2.

⁶⁸ Stephen J. Williams, ‘Thomas Stephens a Gweirydd ap Rhys’; Correspondence of Thomas Stephens, ed. Coward, ix (quotation).

⁶⁹ Pryse and Stephens, Orgraph yr Iaith Gymraeg.

⁷⁰ HBC, 1: [iii]; Löffler, ‘Failed Founding Fathers’, 72–3; NLW MS 965E, no. 258, R. J. Pryse to Thomas Stephens, November 1869, in ‘Transcripts of Letters to Thomas Stephens’; cf. B. T. Williams, ‘The Life of Thomas Stephens’, xliv, xlvi.

⁷¹ Thomas Stephens, ‘Sefyllfa Wareiddiol’, 230, 392–4, 394–7, and discussion below.

⁷² B. T. Williams, ‘The Life of Thomas Stephens’; Margaret Stewart Taylor, ‘Thomas Stephens of Merthyr’; Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Welsh Scholarship at Merthyr Tydfil’, 57–61; Löffler, ‘Stephens, Thomas’; Löffler, ‘Failed Founding Fathers’, esp. 70–6; Correspondence of Thomas Stephens, ed. Coward; Bill Jones, ‘Inspecting the “Extraordinary Drain” ’; John Williams, Digest of Welsh Historical Statistics, 1: 63.

⁷³ England, ‘Unitarians, Freemasons, Chartists’, esp. 46–9, 57. See also England, The Crucible of Modern Wales, chs. 13–15; Raymond K. J. Grant, ‘Merthyr Tydfil’. Cf. the reforming initiatives of middle-class Unitarians in Manchester: Seed, ‘Unitarianism, Political Economy and the Antinomies of Liberal Culture’.

⁷⁴ B. T. Williams, ‘The Life of Thomas Stephens’, xxxii–xxxiii; cf. Cragoe, ‘Bruce, Henry Austin’.

⁷⁵ B. T. Williams, ‘The Life of Thomas Stephens’, xxiv.

⁷⁶ B. T. Williams, ‘The Life of Thomas Stephens’, xliv, xlv–xlvi; Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Welsh Scholarship at Merthyr Tydfil’, 58; England, Crucible of Modern Wales, 131–42, 217–21; cf. O’Leary, Claiming the Streets, 59–64. For Stephens’s radicalism see Coward, ‘English Anglers’.

⁷⁷ Cited in Löffler, ‘Failed Founding Fathers’, 73. Similar statement in Thomas Stephens, ‘The Book of Aberpergwm’, 77.

⁷⁸ Thomas Stephens, ‘Darlith’.

⁷⁹ Löffler (with Rhys), ‘Thomas Stephens’, quotation at 413.

⁸⁰ Löffler (with Rhys), ‘Thomas Stephens’, 406.

⁸¹ Löffler (with Rhys), ‘Thomas Stephens’, 431.

⁸² Löffler (with Rhys), ‘Thomas Stephens’, 408–9, 429; cf. Thomas Stephens, ‘Darlith’, 76.

⁸³ Thomas Stephens, Madoc. See also G. J. Williams, ‘Eisteddfod Llangollen’.

⁸⁴ ‘File NLW MS 907C—“The Origin of the English Nation” ’. Thanks to Marion Löffler for drawing this essay and the adjudication to my attention.

⁸⁵ Thomas Stephens, The Literature of the Kymry, 207.

⁸⁶ Thomas Stephens, The Literature of the Kymry, 307–22; Thomas Stephens, ‘The Book of Aberpergwm’; Havard Walters, ‘The Literature of the Kymry’, 232–3, 238; Bromwich, Trioedd Ynys Prydain in Welsh Literature, 34–42; Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Welsh Scholarship at Merthyr Tydfil’, 60.

⁸⁷ NLW MS 938B (Thomas Stephens, ‘The History of Wales’), p. [164]; Löffler (with Rhys), ‘Thomas Stephens’, 407; Thomas Stephens, ‘Sefyllfa Wareiddiol’, 298.

⁸⁸ B. T. Williams, ‘The Life of Thomas Stephens’, xxvii.

⁸⁹ NLW MS 938B (Thomas Stephens, ‘The History of Wales’), pp. [292], 340, [408–9]. Cf. Thomas Stephens, The Literature of the Kymry, 127, 280, 408.

⁹⁰ Löffler, ‘Failed Founding Fathers’, 73.

⁹¹ Thomas Stephens, The Literature of the Kymry, vi.

⁹² Thomas Stephens, The Literature of the Kymry, vi, vii–viii (quotations).

⁹³ Thomas Stephens, Geschichte der wälschen Literatur; Correspondence of Thomas Stephens, ed. Coward, xxi–xxvi et passim; Walter, Das alte Wales, xii, 16; B. T. Williams, ‘The Life of Thomas Stephens’, xxv, xxvii.

⁹⁴ E.g., Thomas Stephens, The Literature of the Kymry, 35–6, 231–3.

⁹⁵ Thomas Stephens, The Literature of the Kymry, vi.

⁹⁶ Thomas Stephens, The Literature of the Kymry, 129.

⁹⁷ Thomas Stephens, The Literature of the Kymry, 94–128. Cf. Raymond Williams, Culture, 36–8, 57–8.

⁹⁸ Thomas Stephens, The Literature of the Kymry, 293, 341–2.

⁹⁹ Thomas Stephens, The Literature of the Kymry, 428–9, 440–2, quotations at 92, 331 (emphasis in original), and see also vi, 335, 512; Thomas Stephens, ‘Sefyllfa Wareiddiol y Cymry’, 308.

¹⁰⁰ Thomas Stephens, The Literature of the Kymry, 128.

¹⁰¹ Thomas Stephens, ‘Sefyllfa Wareiddiol y Cymry’, 397–415, quotation at 414.

¹⁰² Thomas Stephens, The Literature of the Kymry, 333–6, quotation at 333, slightly adapted from Heeren, Political Treatises, 9. See also Heeren, Geschichte der classischen Literatur, 218–19; Ranke, The Ecclesiastical and Political History of the Popes, trans. Austin, 34 (adapted by Thomas Stephens, The Literature of the Kymry, 334–5). Cf. Price, HC, 534–5; Thomas Stephens, ‘Sefyllfa Wareiddiol y Cymry’, 386–7.

¹⁰³ Thomas Stephens, The Literature of the Kymry, 334, 335.

¹⁰⁴ Thomas Stephens, The Literature of the Kymry, 439, citing Guizot, The History of Civilization, trans. Hazlitt, ed. Siedentop, 145.

¹⁰⁵ Cf. Mill, Essays on French History, ed. Robson, 257–94, esp. 266; Varouxakis, ‘Guizot’s Historical Works’, esp. 307–8 and n. 66. Quotation: Raymond Williams, Keywords, 58.

¹⁰⁶ Thomas Stephens, The Literature of the Kymry, 435–6; cf. Guizot, The History of Civilization, trans. Hazlitt, ed. Siedentop, 105–8.

¹⁰⁷ Cf. Bennett, God and Progress, 105–36.

¹⁰⁸ NLW MS 938B (Thomas Stephens, ‘The History of Wales’), p. [375]. Contrast the conventional condemnation of gavelkind in Prichard, The Heroines, 267.

¹⁰⁹ Enid Pierce Roberts, ‘Pryse, Robert John’; Enid Pierce Roberts, ‘Gweithgarwch Llenyddol Gweirydd ap Rhys’; Argraphiad Newydd o Eiriadur Beiblaidd, trans. Jones; HBC. Extracts from autobiography down to 1862: Gweirydd ap Rhys, Detholion o Hunangofiant, ed. Roberts.

¹¹⁰ Pryce, ‘Medieval Welsh History in the Victorian Age’, 6–7. On Pryse and the Gwyddoniadur see Roger Jones Williams, ‘Hanes Cyhoeddi Y Gwyddoniadur’ (1967), 134–7, 150 and n. 27; and, for the encyclopaedia’s significance, Robert Evans, ‘Cymru a’r Byd’.

¹¹¹ HBC, 1: [iii]; 382.

¹¹² HBC, 2: 400. Pryse covered the period after 1282 in about 275 quarto pages, compared to Price’s 60 demy octavo pages (7.5 per cent of the total).

¹¹³ HBC, 1: 495, 508; 2: 33, 240–3, 333–4, 442, 482; cf. O’Leary, ‘When was Anti-Catholicism?’.

¹¹⁴ Peter and Pryse, Enwogion y Ffydd, quotation in ‘Rhagymadrodd’, [i], at the end of vol. 2. Pryse was responsible for most of the work following Peter’s death in 1877. He also published a history of Welsh literature intended as a continuation of Stephens’s Literature of the Kymry: Prys [sic], Hanes Llenyddiaeth Gymreig.

¹¹⁵ HBC, 2: 253; similar sentiments, 2: 144.

¹¹⁶ HBC, 2: 409.

¹¹⁷ HBC, 1: 1–2; 2: 144, 332, 400, 409, 413.

¹¹⁸ HBC, 2: 52, 408–9, 476–81, 486–7, 490–7.

¹¹⁹ HBC, 1: 450–62; 2: 88–90, 131–7, 298–9.

¹²⁰ HBC, 1: 466; 2: 31, 71, 88–9, n. ¶, 103, n. †, 133, 254.

¹²¹ HBC, 2: 299.

¹²² Welsh language: HBC, 1: 2; 2: 144, 409; cf. the call to revive the use of old Welsh personal names: HBC, 2: 44.

¹²³ HBC, 2: 6, 8, 10, 17, 33, 38, 428.

¹²⁴ HBC, 1: 450; 2: 3.

¹²⁵ HBC, 1: iv. John Peter (Ioan Bedr; 1833–77) expressed similar views: HBC, 86.

¹²⁶ Views differed on which of the two writers was the more sceptical: compare Anon., Review of HBC, Y Beirniad, with Anon., Review of HBC, Y Drysorfa, 63.

¹²⁷ HBC, 1: 3–7, 86, 96, 97, n. *. Robert Ellis (Cynddelw; 1812–75) criticized Iolo for holding that Druidism and Christianity were compatible: HBC, 1: 204.

¹²⁸ HBC, 2: [iii]; see also 1: 201, n. †, for Pryse’s response to an early reviewer’s criticism of his treatment of Druidism.

¹²⁹ Praise of James Cowles Prichard, Friedrich Max Müller, and Luke Owen Pike in HBC, 1: 2, 3.

¹³⁰ HBC, 1: 21–3.

¹³¹ Pryce, ‘Medieval Welsh History in the Victorian Age’, 19–28.

¹³² John Hughes, Methodistiaeth Cymru, 1: 17.

¹³³ Emyr Gwynne Jones, ‘Cofiannau’; Llion Pryderi Roberts, ‘ “Mawrhau ei Swydd” ’; David Owen, ‘Cofiannau’, 91–3; Peter, Hanes Crefydd, 2nd edn.; John Hughes, Methodistiaeth Cymru; Thomas Rees and John Thomas, Hanes Eglwysi Annibynol Cymru.

¹³⁴ Thomas Rees, History of Protestant Nonconformity; Prys Morgan, ‘A Nation of Nonconformists’.

¹³⁵ Peter and Prys, Enwogion y Ffydd.

¹³⁶ Owen Jones, Hanes Cenedl y Cymry, 264–324.

¹³⁷ Josiah Thomas Jones, Geiriadur Bywgraffyddol; Chapman, ‘The Turn of the Tide’, 517. Quotation: Robert Thomas Jenkins, ‘Jones, Josiah Thomas’. Cf. the five exemplary Protestant ‘mighty ones of Wales’, from Rhys Prichard, vicar of Llandovery and religious poet, to the educationalist Sir Hugh Owen, commemorated in Levi, Cedyrn Cymru.

¹³⁸ John Davies, ‘Victoria and Victorian Wales’; Aled Gruffydd Jones, ‘Politics and Prophecy’, quotation at 119; Brooks, Why Wales Never Was, ch. 3, esp. 57–64.

¹³⁹ Tudur, ‘The Life, Work and Thought’, 46, 164–83. Quotation: Y Gwladgarwr, 22 June 1861. The close association was reflected in the 1746 act of parliament stipulating that legislation mentioning only England applied also to Wales: see Chapter 8, n. 27.

¹⁴⁰ Pike, The English and their Origin, 245, concluded that ‘our characteristics are, in the main, decidedly Cymric’. The book originated as an unsuccessful prize essay at the 1864 Llandudno eisteddfod: Young, The Idea of English Ethnicity, 156–8. See also Pryce, Lloyd, 121–2.

¹⁴¹ HBC, 1: 1–2. For Pryse’s knowledge of Pike’s book see HBC, 1: 2–3, 83, 221.

¹⁴² John Davies, ‘Victoria and Victorian Wales’, 14. See also Derfel, ‘Cymru yn ei Chysylltiad ag Enwogion’, 323; Vandrei, Queen Boudica and Historical Culture, 177–8.

¹⁴³ R. W. Morgan, The British Kymry, facing [9].

¹⁴⁴ R. W. Morgan, The British Kymry, 297–300; see also vii.

¹⁴⁵ Titus Lewis, Hanes Prydain Fawr, revd. Jones; Levi, Prydain Fawr; Owen R. Ellis, Hanes Prydain Fawr; Owen Jones, Hanes Prydain.

¹⁴⁶ Levi, Hanes Rhyfel y Crimea; Levi, Teithiau Cenadol y Parch. Dr. Livingston. See further Dafydd Arthur Jones, Thomas Levi, esp. 12–15; Rosser, ‘Thomas Levi’.

¹⁴⁷ Levi, Prydain Fawr, [iii].

¹⁴⁸ Levi, Prydain Fawr, vii–viii.

¹⁴⁹ Levi, Prydain Fawr, 1.

¹⁵⁰ Owen R. Ellis, Hanes Prydain Fawr, 1: 1.

¹⁵¹ Owen Jones, Hanes Prydain, [i], 12.

¹⁵² E.g. Owen Jones, Hanes Prydain, uses ‘(Great) Britain’, ‘England’, and ‘the English’ synonymously in narrating events from the later seventeenth century onwards, especially in referring to wars with France and to the British Empire.

¹⁵³ Levi, Prydain Fawr, 552–4; Owen Jones, Hanes Prydain, 115–16.

¹⁵⁴ R. D. Thomas, Yr Ymfudwr, 3–5, 28–36, 48–9, 52–3; Michael D. Jones, Gwladychfa Gymreig, [3]–6; Hugh Hughes, Llawlyfr y Wladychfa Gymreig, esp. [3]–8; Gareth Alban Davies, ‘Wales, Patagonia, and the Printed Word’, 50–1; Bill Jones, ‘Representations of Australia’, 66, 71–2. See also R. D. Thomas, Hanes Cymry America, ‘Dosran A’, 11, 15–24.

¹⁵⁵ William D. Jones, Wales in America, xvii–xviii, 249. These figures, derived from the US Census, did not include descendants of Welsh-born emigrants who spoke Welsh; according to R. D. Thomas, Hanes Cymry America, ‘Dosran C’, 9–11, there were almost 116,000 Welsh-speaking Welsh people in the United States by 1872; cf. William D. Jones, ‘The Welsh Language’, 262; Hunter, Sons of Arthur, 14–16.

¹⁵⁶ William D. Jones, Wales in America, 87–105; Hunter, Sons of Arthur, 4–27; D. H. E. Roberts, ‘Welsh Publishing in the United States’; Rhiannon Heledd Williams, Cyfaill Pwy o’r Hen Wlad?.

¹⁵⁷ Mid-nineteenth-century Welsh writers similarly declared that it was the destiny of the Welsh to colonize Australia and described the Aboriginal peoples as savages: Bill Jones, ‘Representations of Australia’, 66–7.

¹⁵⁸ R. D. Thomas, Hanes Cymry America, ‘Dosran A’, 16.

¹⁵⁹ Morgan Edwards, Materials towards a History of the American Baptists.

¹⁶⁰ Samuel Jenkins, Letters on Welsh History, esp. 10–15.

¹⁶¹ Samuel Jenkins, Letters on Welsh History, 60, 121 (quotation).

¹⁶² Alexander Jones, The Cymry of ’76, 6, 11. On the author see Joan J. Hall, ‘Jones, Alexander’.

¹⁶³ Alexander Jones, The Cymry of ’76, 52–3, 58–9.

¹⁶⁴ R. D. Thomas, Yr Ymfudwr.

¹⁶⁵ R. D. Thomas, Hanes Cymry America, esp. ‘Dosran A’, 9–14.

¹⁶⁶ R. D. Thomas, Hanes Cymry America, ‘Dosran A’, 20; ‘Dosran C’, 9–11, 16–17, 68.

¹⁶⁷ R. D. Thomas, Hanes Cymry America, ‘Dosran C’, 73.

¹⁶⁸ D. Stephen Davies, Y Cymro, 7, 9–10, quotation at 10. The beginning of the book largely draws verbatim on Michael D. Jones, Gwladychfa Gymreig.

¹⁶⁹ For ‘the rapid Americanization of the Welsh’ from c.1880 in Scranton, Pennsylvania see William D. Jones, Wales in America, 105–45.

¹⁷⁰ Apart from a brief account of the legend of Prince Madog: J. W. Jones and T. B. Morris, Hanes y Gwrthryfel, 4–5. For the work and its context see Hunter, Llwch Cenhedloedd, 254–6; Aled Jones and Bill Jones, Welsh Reflections, 1–25.

¹⁷¹ J. W. Jones and T. B. Morris, Hanes y Gwrthryfel, [i]; Hunter, Llwch Cenhedloedd, 255.