PART IV
From the late nineteenth century the writing of Welsh history was no longer an essentially amateur endeavour but had also started to become established as an academic subject. With the benefit of hindsight the work of scholars such as J. E. Lloyd discussed in Chapter 12 marked an irreversible turning-point in a process of professionalization that served to legitimate the history of Wales as a field of scholarly enquiry by adopting conventions and creating institutions that had numerous parallels elsewhere. Indeed, one of the distinguishing features of academic Welsh history writing is its engagement with a wider world of professional history, be it by making connections and comparisons with developments beyond Wales or by adapting approaches used in other contexts. In important respects, then, professionalization meant that Welsh history writing came to look more like history writing elsewhere, notably in the increasing diversity of its subject matter. Yet—and again Wales is by no means unique in this respect—precisely because they were deemed to establish a more truthful representation of the past, the canons of critical scholarship associated with professionalization could be used to reinforce or adapt as much as to challenge or replace the assumptions of earlier amateur history writing. In either case, academic Welsh history writing has been shaped by what preceded it rather than marking a completely new departure. This is especially true of historians’ continuing preoccupation with defining the Welsh and Wales, from the quest for the origins of Welsh nationhood during the ‘national revival’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the increasing readiness since the 1980s to address Wales’s ethnic diversity. Nor has professionalization carried all before it. Academic history is but one aspect of a broader historical culture in which people seek to make sense and use of the past that also includes, for example, popular publications, textbooks and other resources for schools, radio and television programmes, websites, the packaging of the past as heritage by museums and bodies responsible for the conservation and display of historic sites and monuments, and appeals to history for political purposes. Although these other aspects of historical culture largely lie beyond the scope of this book, they provide an important context for the written narratives of Welsh history that are my main concern here.
The continuing use of the Welsh language as a medium of history writing is a further aspect of this broader historical culture. Since its origins in the late nineteenth century academic Welsh history has mostly been written in English with the aim of reaching a wide readership, including a growing number of Welsh people unable to read Welsh and scholars beyond Wales. The desire to contribute to an international republic of letters had led early modern scholars such as Sir John Prise and Humphrey Llwyd to write in Latin, while the use of English by Llwyd and other Welsh gentry in writing about the Welsh past was predicated on assumptions about the status of that language as an appropriate medium for antiquarian discourse shared with gentry culture in England. For Welsh academic historians, on the other hand, writing in English signified membership of a scholarly elite defined, not by class, but by professionalization, an association that has only grown stronger with the increasing dominance of English since the 1960s as an international language of higher education and academic publication.1 Viewed from this perspective, what is remarkable about Welsh history writing down to the present day is not so much the extensive use of English but the continuing publication of numerous historical works in Welsh. Until the late nineteenth century, the use of Welsh was essential if authors wished to communicate with the vast majority of readers in Wales for whom Welsh was their first, and for many their only, language.2 That is why the two most substantial general histories of Wales in the nineteenth century, by Thomas Price (Carnhuanawc) and R. J. Pryse (Gweirydd ap Rhys), were published in Welsh (see Chapters 10 and 11). Yet, although such pragmatic considerations became less pressing by the early twentieth century as Welsh-speakers not only declined in numbers but were mostly bilingual in English, the history of Wales has continued to be written in Welsh, reflecting a broader commitment to sustaining Welsh-language culture. Moreover, while many publications have consisted of synthesis and popularization, specialized scholarly studies have also appeared, especially in the fields of cultural and religious history with a long-established place in Welsh-language writing.3
To offer a detailed assessment of the unprecedented quantity and variety of writing about the history of Wales produced since the late nineteenth century, and especially since the exponential increase in the number of publications since the 1960s, would require much more space than is feasible or appropriate in a book exploring how the history of Wales has been written since the early Middle Ages. Previous chapters have already referred to numerous scholarly studies and editions of sources from the era of professionalization beginning c.1880, while surveys of particular aspects of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Welsh history writing, referred to in Chapters 13 and 14, provide a further indication of the available material. The last three chapters are therefore increasingly selective in their coverage. Their aim is simply to identify and explain some key developments and, above all, to assess their significance for understandings of what the history of Wales consisted of, including the extent to which those understandings marked a break with previous assumptions.
1 Crystal, English as a Global Language, 110–12; Altbach, ‘The Imperial Tongue’.
2 According to the 1891 census, the earliest to record data for the Welsh language, 30 per cent of the population of Wales over three years of age were monoglot Welsh-speakers, with a further 24 per cent being bilingual in Welsh and English, making a total of 910,000 Welsh-speakers. In 1921 only 6 per cent were monoglot, with 31 per cent bilingual, a total of 922,000. In 1961: 1 per cent monoglot, 26 per cent bilingual, total: 680,000. In 2011: 19 per cent bilingual, total: 562,000. See John Williams, Digest of Welsh Historical Statistics, 1: 78, 86; Llywodraeth Cymru/Welsh Government, ‘Welsh Speakers by Local Authority, Gender and Detailed Age Groups, 2011 Census’.
3 For comment on this theme see J. Goronwy Edwards, ‘Hanesyddiaeth Gymreig’, 27–9; R. Rees Davies, ‘’Sgrifennu Hanes Cymru’; R. Rees Davies, ‘Teyrnged Ymarferol’; J. E. Caerwyn Williams, ‘Golygyddol’.
12
Two contexts are crucial to understanding Welsh history writing from 1880 to 1920. One was the adoption, to a significantly greater extent than previously, of critical, ‘scientific’ approaches to the study of the Welsh past that were increasingly linked to the professionalization of historical study. The other was what contemporaries called a ‘national awakening’ or ‘national revival’, as mid-Victorian anxieties about Wales’s future gave way to more confident assertions of Welsh nationality in the wake of greater democratization, which led to the Liberal Party becoming the dominant electoral force in the principality from 1885 to 1922. Initiatives to secure recognition of Welsh distinctiveness focused on the spheres of education, culture, and religion, though calls for home rule were given short-lived political traction in the late nineteenth century by adherents of the Cymru Fydd or Young Wales movement within Welsh Liberalism. Wales’s continuing industrial, commercial, and demographic growth (the population increased from over 1.5 million in 1881 to over 2.6 million in 1921) underpinned these developments but also generated conflict between workers and employers over wages and working conditions that exposed stark divisions within the awakened nation.4
These contexts were closely connected in important respects. To begin with, as elsewhere in Europe at this time, to talk about the ‘awakening’ or ‘revival’ of a nation was to think historically by implying that the nation’s origins lay in the past; ‘scientific’ methods of historical inquiry thus fulfilled an important legitimizing purpose.5 Conversely, the movement towards professionalization was facilitated by the creation of institutions that provided ‘a rib cage for nationality’, especially a federal University of Wales (1893), comprising colleges at Aberystwyth (1872), Cardiff (1883), and Bangor (1884), but also a National Museum and National Library (both founded in 1907).6 Yet the overlap between the two contexts was by no means complete. Critical scholarship on the Welsh past varied in its form and purpose; so too did the use of that past to express and justify Welsh nationhood. While the decades covered by this chapter undoubtedly marked a major turning-point in which the foundations for the modern academic study of Welsh history were laid, such a teleological view captures only part of a wider and more diverse field of historiographical endeavour. True, legendary interpretations were largely consigned to the margins. For example, the second edition of the encyclopaedia Y Gwyddoniadur Cymreig (1889–96) replaced R. W. Morgan’s fanciful articles on the Welsh language and Welsh people with critical contributions reflecting the latest scholarship from the Bangor academic John Morris Jones, while Owen Morgan (Morien)’s continued adherence to bardism in his History of Wales was highly eccentric by the time of its publication in 1911.7 On the other hand, not all new works were intended as contributions to scientific scholarship. Popular accounts were also published, including general syntheses that located modern developments in the long arc of Welsh history, while changes in the curriculum of elementary schools in the early 1890s helped to generate a demand for textbooks.8
A further significant feature of this period was the public validation of Welsh history through performance and display. Thus the National Pageant of Wales, held in Cardiff in 1909, offered its spectators a series of colourful scenes from British resistance to the Romans under Caradoc (Caratacus) to Henry VIII’s acceding to a Welsh request for the Act of Union, while the organizers of the Prince of Wales’s investiture in Caernarfon castle in July 1911 commissioned a play on Owain Glyndŵr, which by ending with his coronation in 1403 transformed the leader of the last Welsh armed rising against the crown into the harbinger of unity between the Welsh and the English.9 Over five years later, on 27 October 1916, David Lloyd George, Secretary of State for War, presided over the unveiling of eleven historical sculptures in Cardiff City Hall that had been paid for by the recently ennobled coal-owner and former Liberal MP Lord Rhondda (D. A. Thomas).10 Thomas had invited the public to submit names of up to ten Welsh men or women before the reign of Queen Victoria from which a panel of adjudicators would choose the individuals to be commemorated, and the resulting competition attracted 364 entries proposing 250 subjects, the most popular being Owain Glyndŵr. The ten figures proposed by the adjudicators reflected the public’s top choices apart from Henry VII and Sir Thomas Picton, whose death at Waterloo had made him a British and Welsh hero, a widely-held estimate that ignored or minimized his reputation as a brutal military governor of the slave colony of Trinidad.11 Besides Glyndŵr the men commemorated were St David, Hywel Dda, Gerald of Wales, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, the poet Dafydd ap Gwilym, Bishop William Morgan (translator of the Bible into Welsh), and the hymn-writer William Williams Pantycelyn. The only woman admitted to their ranks was Boadicea (Boudica), a late addition possibly recommended by Thomas’s wife and daughter, both campaigners for women’s suffrage.12 However, the sculptures also provided a fitting backdrop for Lloyd George, hailed by Lord Rhondda as ‘the greatest living Welshman’,13 whom the Nonconformist minister, journalist, and Liberal MP J. Hugh Edwards had already lauded as the apogee of Welsh history whose life could only be understood by setting it against a historical background beginning with ‘The Origin of the Welsh People’.14 As we shall see, Edwards’s biography of Lloyd George was but one, albeit highly instrumentalized, instance of the permeation of Welsh history writing in this period by a politically and ideologically dominant Welsh Liberalism.
The following discussion examines two new kinds of historical writing in turn: general accounts aimed at a wide readership, and academic scholarship. It should be stressed at the outset that the boundaries between these categories were far from clear-cut. University-educated historians wrote popular works; amateurs not employed in universities or archives made significant contributions to scholarship. Furthermore, popular works drew on the findings of scholarly studies, and the latter included books intended for a broad readership that were reviewed in newspapers as well as learned journals. Nevertheless, the two categories provide a convenient framework for assessing what was significantly different about Welsh history writing between 1880 and 1920 compared to previous periods while keeping the discussion within manageable bounds. This means that little attention will be paid to further instances of genres established in the mid-Victorian era and earlier such as Nonconformist histories and memoirs, biographical dictionaries, and local and urban histories.15 The same is true of further histories of Welsh diaspora communities, including the Welsh colony established in Patagonia in 1865.16 However, though largely falling outside the remit of the present discussion, such works, together with the eisteddfodau, cultural societies, newspapers, and periodicals where some of them originated or were reported, need to be borne in mind as reflecting a broader demand for and interest in Welsh history that was a crucial context for the new kinds of historical writing considered here.
From Medieval to Modern Wales
One major strand of history writing in this period consolidated and adapted nineteenth-century understandings of the Welsh past in general works that combined the long-established focus on the origins of the Welsh and their history down to 1282 with a celebration of an enlightened modern Wales whose beginnings lay in the eighteenth century. The following discussion focuses on two influential expositions of this approach at the turn of the twentieth century. One, The Welsh People (1900), was a collaborative endeavour published by John Rhys (1840–1915), who had risen from rural poverty in Cardiganshire to become the first professor of Celtic in Oxford in 1877 and principal of Jesus College in 1895, and the lawyer and politician David Brynmor-Jones (1852–1921).17 The other, Wales (1901), came from the hand of Owen Morgan Edwards (1858–1920), Oxford historian and indefatigable editor and writer of popular publications, mainly in Welsh, aimed at reviving a sense of Welsh nationhood.18
The Welsh People
The Welsh People was a substantial volume whose genesis lay in the British government’s recognition of Welsh distinctiveness, as it largely derived from and developed introductory sections of the report (1896) of the Royal Commission on Land in Wales and Monmouthshire, of which both Rhys and Brynmor-Jones had been members. The commission was established by Gladstone after he was persuaded by Tom Ellis and other radical and nationalist-minded Welsh Liberals that Wales had ‘a land question different from the land question in England’, even though the catalyst for complaints by Welsh tenant farmers about deteriorating conditions of tenure was the agricultural depression of the late nineteenth century that affected the rest of Britain as well as Ireland. In the present context, it is important to stress that, for Welsh Liberals campaigning on the issue, the land question was of almost equal significance to the disestablishment of the Anglican Church as a symbol of the difference between Wales and England.19 Furthermore, in common with debates about the land question in England, Ireland, and Scotland, the report’s strong historical dimension exemplified a wider conviction that contemporary problems ‘could only be dealt with by relating them to the history of the nation under consideration’.20 Besides the material incorporated in The Welsh People, the report provided a detailed account of the history of the Welsh land question in the nineteenth century and its appendices included a lengthy ‘Memorandum on the Manors and Lordships of Wales’ from their medieval origins compiled by the commission’s secretary Daniel Lleufer Thomas.21 Thomas also drafted the report’s section on the Welsh language and its literature, adapted in turn for The Welsh People.22 Since the report, supported by five volumes of evidence and the volume of appendices, was shelved by the Conservative administration that had come to power in 1895, Rhys and Brynmor-Jones’s book was the commission’s most influential legacy, being reissued five times between 1900 and 1923.23
The Welsh People was the product of an ascendant Welsh Liberal intelligentsia, not only because it derived from the work of the Welsh land commission but in its authors, who pinned their colours to the mast by dedicating their book to the memory of two Welsh Liberal stalwarts strongly committed to improving education in Wales: Lord Aberdare (Henry Austin Bruce) and Thomas Edward Ellis. While the commission’s remit may help to explain the book’s understanding of ‘the Welsh people’ as primarily rural and Welsh-speaking, these and other emphases reflected assumptions also held by other patriotically-minded Welsh Liberals, not least O. M. Edwards. Admittedly Rhys and Brynmor-Jones presented their work as only a contribution towards a history of Wales; consequently, while considerably expanding the 1896 report’s coverage of historical events down to the Edwardian conquest, they did not provide a coherent narrative. They came closest to this in the first seven chapters, occupying over half of the volume, which offers a broadly chronological account extending from pre-Celtic Britain to 1282, including a long chapter assessing what the Welsh laws and Gerald of Wales reveal about Welsh society. The rest of the book deals mainly with aspects of Welsh history from the later Middle Ages, with particular attention to developments from the eighteenth century onwards in four chapters dealing respectively with the rise of Nonconformity, education, language and literature, and ‘rural Wales at the present day’. While building on earlier interpretations of Welsh history developed over the previous century, The Welsh People thus went further than any previous work (including that of Gweirydd ap Rhys a generation earlier) in achieving chronological balance between the eras before and after the Edwardian conquest. If, on the one hand, this served to reiterate the standard doctrine that the history of Wales in its full, politically independent sense had ended in 1282, on the other it enhanced the significance of modern Welsh history by presenting it, at least in a limited sense, as a continuation of a story beginning in the ancient and medieval period that had traditionally been regarded as fundamental, if not indeed tantamount, to the history of Wales. Since the Edwardian conquest,
the history of the Welsh in regard to wars, foreign policy, and general affairs becomes so merged into that of Great Britain that it is hardly susceptible of separate treatment in a continuous narrative form. They have, however, a particular history as to many of the institutions, conditions, and activities, that create or maintain the life of a nation.24
The connection between the ancient and modern is explained in a passage that dismisses legendary interpretations of Welsh history rooted in a sense of defeat and decline:
the Welsh people of to-day have the satisfaction of knowing that they are not the decayed and disconsolate remnant of a once great nation, but that in the main they are the descendants of Celtic races which though absorbed into the English polity, after a prolonged struggle for independence, have steadily progressed by the side of their conquerors in regard to all that goes to make up civilisation, and by combining an obstinate vitality with a certain happy power of adapting themselves to new circumstances, have succeeded in retaining their language and some of the best characteristics of their ancestors.25
The Welsh People, like the report from which it derived, may be seen, then, as yet another assertion that the subjects of its title deserved recognition and respect from their powerful neighbour. However, the claims were now asserted with a new confidence as Welsh particularity was endowed with a transcendent significance through its service to an imperial Britain: ‘Wales and her people are more likely to contribute to the greatness of our Anglo-Celtic Empire by developing themselves on their own lines…rather than by slavishly aping the south of England’.26
The methods Rhys and Brynmor-Jones espoused were integral to their modernizing patriotic purpose. Their alignment with recent scholarly approaches was demonstrated not only by the inclusion of the chapter from the 1896 report on the ‘History of Land Tenure in Wales’ by Frederic Seebohm (of whom more later) but by the work’s debt to Rhys himself, especially in the early chapters but also in the appraisal of modern cultural and educational developments. As in his Celtic Britain, issued in four editions between 1882 and 1908, Rhys deployed philological, literary, and other ethnological evidence to explain the origins of the Welsh. As was common in the later nineteenth century, Rhys deployed ‘ethnology’ as a broad term encompassing the linguistic, cultural, and social characteristics of peoples, but also contrasted this with the physical characteristics given priority, albeit to a lesser extent in Britain than on the Continent, by the recently established discipline of anthropology.27 Both categories informed his understanding of ‘race’. According to Rhys, the Welsh were descended from three principal races, each of which had arrived successively in Wales from continental Europe: the pre-Celtic ‘aborigines’ or ‘Ivernians’, corresponding to the Iberians described by ethnologists, followed by two Celtic peoples, namely the Goidels, whose descendants spoke Irish, Scots Gaelic, and Manx, then the Brythons, ancestors of the Welsh, Cornish, and Bretons (a two-stage process first propounded by Edward Lhuyd).28 The Goidels arrived in Britain probably by the sixth century bce, the Brythons in the early fifth century ce as a result of conquests by Cunedda and his sons from Manaw Gododdin in northern Britain, as reported in the Historia Brittonum (‘History of the Britons’, 829/30).29 Importantly, those conquests marked ‘the beginning of the history of the Cymry, considered as a separate and independent nation’: in other words, the history of the Welsh began in the post-Roman period, somewhat earlier than the late seventh-century transition from British to Welsh rulers posited by Geoffrey of Monmouth, followed by Thomas Price (Carnhuanawc) and Gweirydd ap Rhys.30 Yet, while Rhys had no time for discredited views of the Welsh as successors of Britons originating in the mists of a Trojan or biblical past, the ancient population movements and interactions revealed by ethnology offered an alternative explanation that salvaged the antiquity of the Welsh, whom he presented as a racial amalgam of ‘aborigines’, Goidels, and Brythons.31 By contrast, later settlers—from the Danes to the Normans and English—had made little difference and thus posed no challenge to the antiquity of Welsh nationality.32 Although Rhys and Brynmor-Jones stressed that associating particular characteristics of the Welsh with their ancient racial ancestors was difficult, they ventured to suggest that their descent from the pre-Celtic (and thus non-Aryan) ‘aborigines’ explained the democratic propensities of the modern Welsh evident from their adherence to Nonconformist religion and their views on ‘social and political questions’; while the medieval prose tales of the Mabinogion were held to ‘represent, though doubtless not very closely, the stories of the Goidels of ancient Wales’.33
The Welsh People’s interpretation of modern Welsh history had antecedents in the mid-Victorian period that were indebted in turn to ideas in Nonconformist historiography from the late eighteenth century onwards. In brief, the Methodist revival resulted in ‘the new birth of a people’ and, together with agitation against the Blue Books of 1847, gave a stimulus to ‘the chief event in the special history of Wales during the last fifty years’, namely ‘the modern educational movement’ that reached its climax with the foundation of the federal University of Wales in 1893.34 Yet while the work celebrated the modern revival of Welsh nationhood, it struck an ambivalent note when it came to the language seen as fundamental to that nationhood. On the one hand, the prospects for Welsh seemed bright, as Sunday schools fostered widespread literacy in the literary Welsh of the Bible and the language ‘seems to be far more read and studied now than perhaps at any time in the past’.35 But in common with earlier controversial pronouncements by Rhys, the book also detected worrying signs of linguistic decay in ‘the shoddy Welsh’ of newspapers and declared ‘that a day must come when English is the universal speech of the United Kingdom’, even if the day was still far off and ‘the future has yet in store for the Welsh language many long years of prosperity’.36
O. M. Edwards
Born and brought up on a tenant farm in Llanuwchllyn (Merioneth), Owen Edwards rose from rural poverty to the high tables of Oxford.37 In this respect, he followed a similar path to Rhys. However, whereas Rhys became a wide-ranging Celtic scholar with a European reputation, Edwards was above all an educationalist and popularizer, who, at great personal cost to himself and his family, sought to instil a new sense of Welsh nationhood among his compatriots, especially by making the Welsh language a modern form of expression and a medium for educating his compatriots. These priorities stemmed from his experience of, and lasting attachment to, his birthplace in north Wales, where he was influenced by the Congregationalist minister Michael D. Jones, a resolute campaigner against landlords and early advocate of Welsh self-government; but his authority as an iconic and highly influential public intellectual owed much to academic success in England.38 Edwards commenced his nation-building efforts while still a history undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford (following studies at Aberystwyth and Glasgow), as in 1885 he began to write a weekly newspaper column in Welsh that sought to educate and entertain readers back home with a wide variety of material devoted to the culture and history of their locality in Merioneth, and the following year was instrumental in establishing a society for Welsh students in Oxford, Cymdeithas Dafydd ap Gwilym (named after the renowned medieval poet), whose patriotic deliberations, including the devising of a new orthography for the Welsh language, were followed in the principality through reports in the Welsh press.39 Edwards graduated in 1887 with the best first-class history degree of his year, sealing a reputation for brilliance established by his award of a Brackenbury scholarship and prestigious university prizes that in turn paved the way for his election in 1889 as a fellow and tutor in history at Lincoln College, where he remained until his appointment in 1907 as chief inspector of schools in Wales under the newly established Welsh department of the Board of Education.40
Yet, while a dedicated and popular tutor and lecturer at Oxford, Edwards also continued to devote great energy to promoting the Welsh cultural and educational revival to which he had been committed since his youth.41 From the late 1880s he made a name for himself as a fresh literary voice in pioneering volumes of travel writing whose idiomatic and informal Welsh prose style drew on the spoken language of the ordinary people (W. gwerin) among whom he had grown up and whom he idealized as representing the essence of the Welsh nation.42 It was to these that he principally directed his nation-building efforts, whose goal was encapsulated in the motto I godi’r hen wlad yn ei hôl (‘To raise the old country to her former glory’) chosen for the widely-read Welsh-language monthly magazine Cymru (‘Wales’) he founded in 1891 and edited until his death.43 Through this and other publications, including Cymru’r Plant (‘The Children’s Wales’), the committed Oxford history tutor and later schools inspector set to out to educate and thus empower his nation.
Popularizing knowledge of the history of Wales, together with Welsh traditions and literature, was fundamental to his purpose: remembering the Wales of old was essential to the task of strengthening the character of its people as they created a new Wales in an age of educational progress.44 In the first article of Cymru Edwards emphasized that one of the magazine’s main aims was ‘to tell the history of the Welsh’, a task he continued both in subsequent issues and in other publications, including several for children, over the following decade. Most of these writings were in Welsh, including essays on the homes of famous Welsh people, but his fullest account of Welsh history was the English volume Wales (1901), commissioned while Edwards was still an undergraduate by G. P. Putnam’s Sons of New York as part of ‘The Story of the Nations’, a series of popular histories—originally intended for young readers—published jointly with T. Fisher Unwin of London.45 Reprinted four times by 1912, Wales followed the series’ remit of presenting the ‘picturesque and noteworthy periods and episodes’ of each nation and ‘to enter into the real lives of the peoples’, as, wearing his learning lightly, Edwards dispensed with both footnotes and conventional protestations of a commitment to debunking legendary interpretations, and further sought to engage readers by dividing the text into short chapters and paragraphs, supplemented by numerous illustrations and written in a varied style that combined bold generalizations, concise summaries of events, and pen portraits of individuals.46 While both the content and style of the work bore similarities with his previous history writing in Welsh, as did the use of Welsh literature as a window into mentalities, the assessment of character—as well as his belief in the character-forming propensities of historical study itself—were attributes also prized by the Oxford History School whose influence may be further attested by the attention Edwards gave to the English and European contexts of events in Wales.47 Moreover, though he certainly sought to fashion a usable past in the service of his nationalist ideals (like Tom Ellis, he stressed the importance of commemorating Welsh heroes from the past), Edwards was no mere propagandist.48 He sought to explain as well as narrate, being sensitive, for example, to the interplay of political, economic, and social factors that contributed to the improvement in the condition of serfs after the Edwardian conquest and the Black Death, a process already beginning under the princes as the costs of war against the Normans and English encouraged them to commute labour services to money rents, which in turn was linked to the injection of cash into the economy from the export of Welsh wool and mercenaries. ‘It is this mighty, silent revolution’, Edwards declared, ‘that is the most important part of history.’ Accordingly, the violence and cruelty of kings or barons were ‘insignificant facts’ compared with ‘the unconquerable spirit of freedom [that] was silently and irresistibly raising the weak and the wronged’.49 His commitment to Welsh national revival may have led Edwards along a very different path from that of historical research and professionalization taken by other university-educated historians of his day such as his friends Charles Firth and J. E. Lloyd, but his academic study and teaching of history nevertheless left their imprint on his popularizing efforts—efforts, moreover, that earned plaudits from Benjamin Jowett and other Oxford dons.50
Edwards’s vision of Welsh history was one of reassuring simplicity. As he put it in a primer for school children in 1892, ‘The prince fell to ruin, the common people (Y Werin) awoke. Power started to come into the hands of the common people of Wales, and it is continually increasing.’51 Edwards said much the same a decade later in his 1901 Wales. Describing the book as the ‘first attempt at writing a continuous popular history of Wales’, Edwards continued:
In the first half I try to sketch the rise and fall of a princely caste; in the second, the rise of a self-educated, self-governing peasantry. Rome left its heritage of political unity and organisation to a Welsh governing tribal caste; the princes were alternately the oppressing organisers of their own people and their defenders against England…The princes were crushed by the Plantagenets, their descendants dispossessed by the Lancastrians or Anglicised by the Tudors. On their disappearance, a lower subject class became prominent…This class, with stronger thought and increasing material wealth, rules Wales to-day.52
True, here and elsewhere Edwards made little attempt to trace the rise of this ‘lower subject class’—that is, the Welsh-speaking and predominantly rural and Nonconformist gwerin—in detail, and he seems to have regarded it as a lengthy process beginning at some point between the rising of Owain Glyndŵr in the early fifteenth century and the first Act of Union in 1536 but only gathering strength from 1730.53 Moreover, as we have seen, the rise of the gwerin had already been anticipated to some extent in Edwards’s observations on the dissolution of medieval serfdom. These uncertainties and inconsistencies suggest that what mattered most to Edwards was the overall pattern of development that connected two golden ages—in the Middle Ages and his own day—by pointing up the ruptures and contrasts between them.
His vision of progress from princes to people was crucial in enabling Edwards to achieve greater coherence than previous writers, including Rhys and Brynmor-Jones, in advancing an overarching interpretation of Welsh history from prehistoric Iberian settlers to the 1890s. However, the coverage was uneven. Consider the structure of Edwards’s 1901 Wales. Comprising just over 400 pages, almost half of the book deals with the period down to 1282, and mostly with the six centuries from 681. While this meant that it was the first general history of Wales to devote more space to the centuries after than to those before 1282, the predominant focus nevertheless remained on the Middle Ages, as the next 100 pages or so take the reader from Edward I’s conquest of Wales to the accession of Henry Tudor in 1485.54 Only then, three-quarters of the way through the text, do we come to Edwards’s crucial transition: ‘The Wales of the princes disappears, the Wales of the peasant begins to take shape.’55 The following fifty pages mainly focus on the political, constitutional, and religious changes introduced by Henry VIII; by contrast, the years from 1588 to 1730 are passed over in thirty pages highlighting ‘the disruption’ of the Civil Wars and Commonwealth and the ‘apathy’ following the accession of the Hanoverians.56 And, despite its significance as what Edwards later called the ‘Rise of the Welsh Democracy’, the subsequent period of educational and religious progress beginning with the Methodist revival and culminating with the foundation of the University of Wales (1893)—an initiative Edwards had supported in a report commissioned by the Liberal government—takes up fewer than twenty pages amounting to less than 5 per cent of the entire book.57 Unsurprisingly, this final part adapted aspects of earlier Welsh historical thinking evident since the late eighteenth century, especially the idea that the modern Welsh people had been created by Nonconformity and the Methodist revival. In that respect, as in the emphasis on education, Edwards was at one with Rhys and Brynmor-Jones. Yet, while he shared their view that the Welsh continued to have a ‘particular history’ after 1282, his emphasis differed as he integrated the religious, cultural, intellectual, and educational developments they focused upon with economic and political factors, namely the new wealth resulting from industrialization and the new opportunities created by greater democratization of the British state, including the establishment of county, district, and parish councils in 1888 and 1894 that rapidly reduced the influence of landed families in their localities.58 As he had put it in 1893, ‘The glory of the Wales of the princes was nothing like the glory of the Wales of the common people.’59 For the latter had not only succeeded to but surpassed the princes’ power through a liberating process of educational and economic advancement: ‘Trained by their self-education in religious and literary matters, enfranchised when the new wealth gave them political independence, the Welsh people were peculiarly adapted for local government.’60
Edwards’s juxtaposing of princes and people was mapped on to a three-stage scheme of golden age, decline, and revival for which there were many parallels in nineteenth- and twentieth-century national history writing. Likewise his interpretation was predicated on the widely-held notion, ultimately derived from Herder, that nationality had deep roots in the past and was embodied in the people.61 However, Edwards differed from other historians of Wales, both before and during his lifetime, in anchoring this essentialist nationality, not in racial or ethnic continuity, but in geography. His 1901 history opens by declaring that ‘Wales is a land of mountains. Its mountains explain its isolation and its love of independence; they explain its internal divisions; they have determined, throughout its history, what the direction and method of its progress were to be.’62 True, ‘there has always been a slight variation of character and dialect in Wales. There are mountains and mountains; there are Welshmen and Welshmen.…But, throughout, there is one character, that of a true child of the mountains.’63 Edwards developed the point over the following pages:
while races and languages go, the mountains remain.…
And here it is that we are to look for a continuity in Welsh history.…
Geography ever triumphs over history, climate affects the bent of the mind as it affects the colour of the skin. The inhabitants of the Welsh mountains will ever be a separate nation…
…The inhabitants of the mountains feel, amid all their differences, that they are one nation, because their land is unlike other lands.64
Edwards had first advanced this interpretation a decade earlier, applying to Wales his belief that landscape influenced history previously expressed in an 1888 Oxford prize essay on the ‘The Reformation in France’.65
Edwards was by no means alone in assuming that geographical factors offered an indispensable key to understanding history; indeed, his assumption was shared by numerous historians in the nineteenth century, from Jules Michelet to Frederick Jackson Turner, eventually joined by influential voices in the emerging discipline of geography, especially Friedrich Ratzel.66 Wales appeared in the same year as The Relations of Geography & History by one of Edwards’s fellow Oxford history tutors, Hereford B. George, who cited numerous examples to argue that ‘[h]istory is not intelligible without geography’.67 However, the ensuing discussion shies away from the geographical determinism espoused by Edwards, taking care to allow for other factors, and, while Ratzel’s ‘anthropogeography’, especially as interpreted by his American follower Ellen Semple, adopted a more determinist position, the similarities with Edwards’s approach are too general to suggest direct influence.68 For example, Semple argued that the descendants of English and Scottish settlers in the Appalachian mountains had been marginalized from modern American life by an inaccessible and harsh environment that left them stranded in the eighteenth century.69 Edwards, by contrast, held that the mountains of Wales bestowed continuity, not by imposing physical and mental constraints on an isolated community, but by inspiring their inhabitants to imagine themselves a distinct nation over many centuries, without, moreover, confining themselves to a backward past. His interpretation bears resemblances with other attempts from the late nineteenth century to anchor national identity in geography by ‘naturalizing the nation’, a process ‘whereby a nation comes to view itself as the offspring of its natural landscape’—Turner’s thesis that the expanding frontier had created a uniquely American identity is the best-known example.70 However, the closest parallel to Edwards’s emphasis on mountains was the identification of the Swiss nation with their Alpine landscape.71
While his emphasis on mountains showed broad similarities with a variety of contemporaneous efforts to make geographical factors fundamental to the understanding of history, how far Edwards was inspired by such examples is unclear. On the other hand, just as American literature earlier in the nineteenth century had helped to prepare the ground for Turner’s frontier thesis through its romantic association of the American character with the Wild West, so Edwards may well have been influenced by the increasing identification of Wales with its mountains by Welsh-language writers from the 1850s onwards, not least his favourite poet William Thomas (Islwyn).72 If so, the emphasis on mountains may have originated as part of Edwards’s ‘cultural strategy’ of conveying his ideas in terms that were already familiar to his Welsh-speaking readers.73 His evocation of mountains is probably best understood, then, as an arresting image of a fundamental assumption rather than a clearly defined analytical concept.74 Although Edwards followed Rhys’s view that the Welsh descended from the Iberians, Goidels, and Brythons and that race and language were transient phenomena, he appears to have considered this ancient legacy an unstable basis for Welsh nationality, preferring instead to ground it in an immovable landscape. This in turn led him to an emphasis on the unchanging and homogeneous character of the Welsh that sat uneasily with his image of progress from princes to people.75 One reflection of these tensions is that, while Edwards—here exemplifying the continuing influence on Welsh intellectuals of Matthew Arnold’s stereotyping of the Celts—stated that mountains held the key to the character of the Welsh as highly imaginative but woefully impractical and lacking in perseverance, he did not adhere to these assumptions consistently in the rest of the book, except, as we shall see, by way of contrast with Llywelyn the Great and, at least implicitly, other Welsh leaders praised for their statesmanship as well as the ultimately triumphant gwerin.76 Nor did Edwards suggest that the mountains exerted their nation-building influence on the changing population of Wales in his own day.77 Whereas for his contemporaries in a polyethnic Switzerland the Alps offered an alternative basis to ethnicity and language for sustaining nationhood, Edwards invoked the mountains of Wales to reinforce what was still an essentially ethnic and linguistic national identity.78 If the mountains absorbed different races in the distant past, their unifying power appears to have waned by the modern period as it failed to foster a shared sense of nationhood uniting recent English and other settlers in industrial Wales with the Welsh-speaking gwerin—presumably because, for Edwards, the latter already epitomized the Welsh people and their rise marked the apogee of Welsh history.
If the geographical distinctiveness of Wales underwrote the claims of the Welsh to be considered a separate nation, Edwards also recognized that the principality formed part of a larger geographical unit. The political implications of this are spelled out in his discussion of Llywelyn the Great (d. 1240), portrayed as the greatest of the medieval Welsh princes in line with prevailing historiographical fashion.79 Indeed, he described Llywelyn as ‘the most important figure in mediaeval Welsh history’ on account of his combination of military success with statesmanlike qualities and especially of his farsighted vision of Wales’s relationship with England.80 As for Lloyd George when campaigning for Cymru Fydd over a decade earlier, the prince prefigured the ideals of Welsh home rule within a British union of nations.81
Llywelyn had discovered what the natural boundaries of Wales were…he had given up the Celtic luxury of scheming against the inevitable. He had seen that mountain and plain remained, while race and language changed. The new unity was not a racial one, neither was it based on common language: it was simply territorial…
…He saw that…the independence of Wales must be its independence as a part of a more extensive kingdom. The experience of his long reign…had enabled him to see very far into the future.…He had seen that the independence which is natural to Wales, and the unity which is natural to the islands of Britain, are not inconsistent.82
Edwards then linked Llywelyn to the traditional narrative of Welsh salvation through the Tudors by asserting that the prince’s ideas were eventually brought to fruition by ‘Henry VIII., who gave Wales a new unity and a voice in the Parliament of England and Wales’, while his conclusion expanded the wider territorial and political context to embrace the British Empire, declaring that ‘[t]he development of Wales has been twofold—in national intensity and in the expansion of imperial sympathy’.83
Edwards did much to revive the interest of his compatriots in the history of Wales.84 Nor was he alone in making that history more accessible to schoolchildren and the general public.85 The most colourful popularizer of Welsh history in this period was Owen Rhoscomyl (1863–1919), the sometime cowboy and irregular soldier in the South African War whose 1905 Flame-Bearers of Welsh History dressed up an essentially conventional reading of its subject in military garb.86 The book, published in ‘school’ and ‘public’ editions, the latter including an outline of its author’s controversial interpretation of medieval Welsh genealogies and prefaces by John Rhys and his fellow Celtic scholar Kuno Meyer, traced the heroic deeds of those who had borne ‘the flame of the unquenchable spirit of our ancestors…through centuries of savage slaughter’ from Caratacus and Cunedda to Henry Tudor, whose victory at Bosworth was hailed as recovering the crown of Britain and paving the way for his son’s Act of Union.87 While O. M. Edwards had recognized the military feats of the Welsh in both the medieval and modern periods, his portrayal of a triumphant people (gwerin) created by religious revival and education was far too tame and effeminate for Rhoscomyl, who urged the Welsh to take pride in the legacy of ‘a masculine Wales that was at once Welsh nationalist and British imperialist in outlook’.88 To quote the preface to his school edition:
No Welsh boy can well read the history of his ancestors—so stirring a record of so stubborn a race, such a good, grim, fighting race—without feeling that it is good to be a Cymro. And once he feels that, he will go on to feel that it is good to be a Briton, too, claiming a share in the glory of that crown and kingdom which was first founded by Cunedda the Burner, who was founder, too, of the Cymric nation.89
Fittingly, this pageant history celebrating warrior heroes was brought to life four years later in Cardiff at the National Pageant of Wales, which Rhoscomyl scripted.90
New Scholarly Approaches
From the 1880s the academic study of Welsh history developed apace. The nearest equivalents to the ‘scientific’ history based on unpublished archival sources espoused by continental European historians were specialized studies of particular topics, primarily in the medieval and early modern periods, though, as in Britain generally, a ‘scientific’ approach was deemed compatible with a reliance on published materials.91 Not all of these publications were conceived as contributions to ‘Welsh history’, and some explicitly adopted and advocated a comparative approach. It should also be emphasized that, while more Welsh history was written than previously by scholars employed in universities, they by no means monopolized the field. This is clear, for example, from articles and editions of sources published by the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, which launched its annual Transactions in 1892 and its Record Series in 1893 to supplement its journal Y Cymmrodor, established in 1877. Members of the society’s Council not only promoted these initiatives but contributed to them, as shown by the independent scholar Egerton Phillimore’s impressively accurate editions of the early medieval Harleian chronicle and genealogies and his topographical notes to Henry Owen’s edition of George Owen’s Description of Penbrokshire as well as by the earliest court rolls of the marcher lordship of Ruthin edited by R. A. Roberts (1851–1943), who, as an assistant in the Public Record Office and, from 1903, secretary and then member of the Historical Manuscripts Commission, exemplified the networks at the heart of such efforts, which also included the Cambrian Archaeological Association established in 1847.92 The palaeographer J. Gwenogvryn Evans (1852–1930) contributed to new standards of scholarly study both through his collaboration on editions of medieval Welsh texts with John Rhys in Oxford and through his employment by the Historical Manuscripts Commission to compile a detailed report on manuscripts containing texts in Welsh, which, together with a catalogue of manuscripts of Welsh interest in the British Museum compiled by Edward Owen (1853–1943), made important collections of unpublished sources more accessible.93 Owen, a civil servant in the India Office closely involved with the Cymmrodorion and subsequently the first secretary (1908–28) of the Royal Commission on Ancient and Historical Monuments in Wales, also drew on unpublished documentary sources to write on various aspects of medieval Welsh history, including a substantial article on Owain Lawgoch or Owen of Wales (d. 1378), the descendant of the princes of Gwynedd who fought for the French against the English in the Hundred Years War.94
The article belonged to a substantial number of the Welsh historical studies of this period that reflected the prevailing emphasis in Britain on political and military history. Another example, which similarly made extensive use of unpublished documents, was a monograph on the Welsh wars of Edward I by John Edward Morris (1859–1933), an Oxford graduate and master at Bedford grammar school, which not only traced the course of the campaigns but set them in the context of the history of the March of Wales and the development of English royal government.95 Within the academy, Thomas Frederick Tout (1855–1929), who had read history at Oxford where he became a warm admirer of Stubbs, developed an interest in medieval Welsh political history while teaching at St David’s College, Lampeter (1881–90), from where he moved to the chair of medieval and modern history at Owens College, Manchester (subsequently the University of Manchester).96 Stubbs’s influence is evident, for example, in Tout’s novel emphasis on the constitutional significance of the Treaty of Montgomery (1267) by which the English crown recognized Llywelyn ap Gruffudd as Prince of Wales as well as his survey, originating as a lecture to the Cymmrodorion, of the creation of shires in Wales from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries.97 No less significant was the attention given in these and other studies to English royal policy towards Wales, in line with Tout’s conviction that the history of Wales should be viewed from a comparative perspective that took account of its relations with England.98 Anglo-Welsh relations also figured prominently in Wales and the Wars of the Roses (1915) by Howell T. Evans (1877–1950), a grammar-school teacher in Cardiff who had first broached the subject in a Cambridge MA thesis completed in 1904. However, as well as making extensive use of English government records to establish the course of events, Evans prefigured later scholarship by exploring culture and mentalities through the lens of Welsh poetry, which revealed ‘the deep chasm which separated the two nations’ and provided unique insights into the poets’ patrons and other aspects of society.99
For Evans, social history provided context for a narrative whose main focus was political and military. However, medieval Welsh society and economy also attracted greater attention as subjects in their own right. As with Ferdinand Walter earlier in the nineteenth century, a significant amount of this work approached Wales from a comparative perspective. In 1884 Friedrich Engels, following the American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, offered a brief discussion of the Welsh laws to support the argument that the gens, meaning a primitive grouping based on matriarchal descent in which marriage was communal, had survived into the Middle Ages among the Celtic peoples, while the lawyer, Celtic scholar, and historian William Forbes Skene cited Welsh law as providing comparisons that could help to elucidate early medieval Scottish society.100 However, a comparative approach was taken much further by Frederic Seebohm (1833–1912), a banker with wide historical interests who sought to demonstrate the significance of medieval Wales as an instance of ‘tribal’ society—influentially argued by Henry Sumner Maine to be an extension of the family in patriarchal society, regarded as the earliest form of social organization—that contrasted with the manor of medieval England, which, so Seebohm maintained in contrast to prevailing Teutonist arguments, derived from the Roman villa.101 Seebohm devoted an entire volume to the Welsh evidence in The Tribal System in Wales (1895), a work completed while a member of the Royal Commission on Land in Wales and Monmouthshire, for whose report, as mentioned earlier, he wrote a chapter on ‘The History of Land Tenure in Wales’.102 This took a benign view of the changes discussed, in keeping with its author’s stance as a Liberal Unionist who defended the landowners’ interests in the commission’s minority report, concluding that Welsh tenants had not experienced ‘intentional injustice or hardship’ through Henry VIII’s introduction of English land law and ‘that by the time of James I., Wales, like England, was divided into estates not dissimilar in character to those of our own day’.103 However, he also noted a subsequent decline in the numbers of small landowners to the advantage of larger estate owners who benefited economically, politically, and socially from their dominant position in Wales and ‘growing association with the same class in England’.104 It is significant that The Tribal System in Wales developed a chapter in Seebohm’s earlier book on English village communities that contrasted Welsh landholding with the manor of medieval England, which, so Seebohm maintained, derived from the villa of Roman Britain and its attendant serfdom rather than from free Anglo-Saxon communities as held by prevailing Teutonist scholarly opinion.105 Furthermore, he subsequently summarized and developed the conclusions of The Tribal System, especially with reference to legal compensation for homicide (W. galanas), in a later study of ‘tribal custom’ focused mainly on England.106 In describing ‘the Welsh system as a stepping-stone to wider knowledge’, and stressing ‘the importance of a knowledge of the Tribal System, wherever found, as an almost universal factor in the early development of European society, and in the formation of mediaeval institutions’, Seebohm approached his subject, not as an aspect of the history of Wales, but as a contribution to debates about the development of medieval rural societies and economies.107 But in so doing, Seebohm made a highly original contribution, unprecedented in its scale and systematic approach, to the study of medieval Welsh society through his comparison of rules in the laws with early Welsh charters and, above all, the extents or surveys made after the Edwardian conquest which estimated the potential revenue of lands in Wales.108 This allowed him both to demonstrate the remarkable longevity of the ‘tribal system’ down to the late thirteenth century and to corroborate the reliability of the laws.
A comparable regressive method was also adopted by Alfred Neobard Palmer (1847–1915), a chemist by profession who published extensively on the history of Wrexham and its surrounding area after settling in the town in 1880.109 With respect to the history of land tenure, Palmer stressed the need for ‘a minute and careful investigation of particular districts conducted by men who live in those districts’, and his own work included detailed analysis of the marcher lordship of Bromfield and Yale based on a wide array of largely unpublished sources ranging from nineteenth-century tithe maps to medieval extents.110 In one sense, then, Palmer may be seen as a local historian in a tradition going back to the chorographical writers of the Elizabethan period, and his intensive concentration on one area resulted in a more fine-grained analysis, conspicuous for its grasp of topography (and toponymy), than that of Seebohm. Yet both scholars shared a common goal, as Palmer believed that his local perspective was essential to addressing the same issues of social and economic development that engaged Seebohm, whom he greatly admired, following his interpretations and declaring that The Tribal System in Wales ‘marks an epoch’.111 Moreover, Palmer also situated his work in a comparative context to some extent, especially by drawing on evidence from other parts of north Wales and Cheshire.112
That evidence included the Survey of the Honour of Denbigh, an extent of this marcher lordship made in 1334 that Seebohm also relied upon heavily, printing substantial extracts in an appendix of The Tribal System in Wales together with other documentary sources. He subsequently donated the manuscript copy he had acquired to Oxford University, where it was studied in a postgraduate seminar on the social and legal history of the Middle Ages, convened (1908–13) by Paul Vinogradoff, a strong supporter of Charles Firth’s efforts to introduce research training at Oxford, that resulted in a complete edition published as the first volume of the British Academy’s ‘Records of the Social and Economic History of England and Wales’.113 Whereas Seebohm had undertaken his work in his spare time, this collaborative effort, by seven men and three women, exemplified the incipient professionalization of historical study in Britain.114 However, the lengthy introduction analysing the society and economy of the medieval lordship of Denbigh built on Seebohm’s approach and stressed the comparative significance of the survey in pointing up the contrasts between a predominantly ‘tribal’ and pastoral north Wales and the manorialized lowland areas of south Wales and especially England that concentrated on the cultivation of crops, albeit while identifying aspects of change in the lordship resulting from ‘the gradual anglicization of tribal arrangements’.115 In addition, Beatrice Lees drew an English analogy, presumably alluding to the approach of F. W. Maitland (in turn following Seebohm), to justify the retrogressive method applied to the Welsh evidence:
If the rural life of Anglo-Saxon days can be to a great extent reconstructed from Domesday Book and other post-Conquest documents, the fragments of the older Welsh social order also remained embedded in the new feudal order, and may be pieced together into a coherent whole from the fourteenth-century Denbigh Extent and its companion records of ‘the time of the princes’.116
Two years earlier, in 1912, the inaugural volume appeared in another series, under the aegis of the University of Wales, that represented moves towards professionalization within the principality, namely a revised version of a thesis on the medieval towns of north Wales by Edward Arthur Lewis (1880–1942). Lewis had been appointed a research fellow by the university (1902–5) to undertake research at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) with Hubert Hall (1857–1944), an influential figure at the Public Record Office (PRO) who had assisted Sidney and Beatrice Webb in founding the LSE and subsequently collaborated in introducing a doctorate in social and economic science there in 1901.117 While indebted to Seebohm’s interpretation of Welsh ‘tribal’ society and its associated pastoral economy, Lewis was principally interested in developments from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries, which, he believed, marked a crucial stage in the transition towards the economy of modern Wales. Rather than reading back from extents and other post-conquest records in order to reconstruct an earlier world, then, Lewis interrogated these as evidence for the later medieval period in which they were produced; in addition, he presented his work as a contribution to the history of Wales rather than to broader comparative study. The resulting picture thus highlighted change, not continuity. The Welsh rural economy was transformed by the imposition of castles, towns, and English-style administration after the Edwardian conquest, the Black Death, and the commercial, industrial, and urban developments that ensued.118 Moreover these changes were portrayed as a narrative of progress, from pastoral tribalism to the feudalism introduced by the Normans and the ‘more civilised mode of living’ resulting from commercial centralization after the Edwardian conquest, that culminated in the flourishing Welsh economy of the early twentieth century.119 ‘The importance of the scanty references to coal-mining in Wales prior to the reign of Henry VIII.’ lay, Lewis observed, ‘in the fact that in these little beginnings we have the origin of what is to-day a great factor in British commerce, namely the South Wales coal-field’.120
Although the Middle Ages garnered the lion’s share of attention, early modern Wales also attracted both professional and amateur scholars. One was Caroline Skeel (1872–1951), the first female historian of Wales to pursue an academic career. Born in Hampstead to a wealthy business family with Pembrokeshire roots, she taught at Westfield College, London after graduating in history from Cambridge, and became one of the first students to write a thesis for the new doctorate introduced at the LSE.121 Skeel’s thesis, indebted to the guidance of the PRO’s Hubert Hall amongst others and published in 1904 with the support of her old Cambridge college, was the first substantial study of the Council in the Marches of Wales from its late fifteenth-century origins to its abolition in 1689 and, as befitted its genesis in continental-style research training, made extensive use of unpublished manuscripts and documents.122 Skeel presented her book as an exercise in administrative and political history rather than specifically a contribution to the history of Wales.123 Her emphasis thus differed from that of her older contemporary W. Llewelyn Williams (1867–1922), who had read history at Oxford before becoming a journalist and then a barrister and Liberal MP while also publishing scholarly papers on early modern Welsh history, several of which were adapted and augmented in The Making of Modern Wales (1919).124 Describing the book as ‘an attempt to describe the transformation of Mediaeval into Modern Wales’, Williams devoted well over half of its pages to constitutional and legal developments, focusing especially on the background, establishment, and consequences of Henry VIII’s Act of Union, especially with respect to the Council in the Marches (here building on Skeel) and the Court of Great Sessions abolished in 1830.125 His positive assessment of the Act of Union echoed previous interpretations, combining well-worn tropes of gratitude for the ending of political chaos and lawlessness and the granting of legal equality with O. M. Edwards’s more recent highlighting of the territorial definition created by administrative reorganization, which meant that ‘Wales became, for the first time, a coherent and organised country’.126 Yet Williams did much more than rehearse established views. His analysis was unprecedented in its depth and contextualization and showed independent judgement—for example, by attributing the legislation’s success to the statesmanship of Henry VIII. In addition, Williams took his cue from Edmund Burke and viewed the Act of Union through imperial spectacles, hailing it as the ‘grant of a free constitution’ and a model for ‘associating a subject race with their own government’ recently applied in South Africa, Canada, and even to some extent India; in short, ‘on the principles upon which Henry VIII. proceeded in his pacification of Wales has been based the stately edifice of the British Empire’.127
Williams also broke new ground in a substantial study of Welsh Roman Catholics exiled on the Continent after the Reformation.128 The same was true of studies of post-Reformation Welsh ecclesiastical history by the Baptist minister and bibliophile Thomas Shankland (1858–1927), who, though not immune from the denominational partisanship still common in his day, took a broad view of religious developments based on a formidable critical mastery of manuscript and printed sources.129 One of his earliest forays into print was a sixteen-part review of Diwygwyr Cymru (‘Reformers of Wales’, 1900), a polemical, and apparently best-selling, rebuttal of Welsh Calvinistic Methodist interpretations of the Methodist revival by the journalist and dramatist Beriah Gwynfe Evans (who later wrote the play on Glyndŵr for the 1911 investiture).130 While considering Evans’s volume ‘an important addition’ to work on the subject and acknowledging the ‘revolutionary’ character of its darkly revisionist portrait of the Methodist leader Howel Harris, Shankland condemned its Independent author’s ‘denominational prejudice’ and inadequate grasp of important aspects of his subject, not only the Baptists to whom Shankland belonged but also reforming movements within the Church of England, defects Shankland sought to rectify with copious references to contemporaneous sources.131
Writing on medieval ecclesiastical history reflected similar tensions between instrumental uses of the past and ‘scientific’ approaches, although a clutch of works on medieval Welsh religious houses demonstrate the continuing vitality of antiquarian scholarship.132 Both Palmer and Seebohm argued that the tribal system had helped to shape the Church in early medieval Wales, a view developed much further by J. W. Willis-Bund, an English barrister closely involved with the Cymmrodorion, who sought to demonstrate that tribal Celtic Christianity, independent of both Rome and the state, had continued to influence the religious life of Wales down to the nineteenth century, when, so he held, it was best represented by the Nonconformist denominations, which ‘approached more nearly to the old Welsh tribal idea of the mutual rights of the people and the religious body’.133 Though a self-professed ‘Tory and a Churchman’, Willis-Bund concluded that the Anglican Church in Wales had lost its way by abandoning its Celtic Christian roots: ‘if the Welsh Church falls, it will not be the Church of David and Teilo, but of Elizabeth and Laud’.134 It was all the more timely, therefore, to write the history of ‘the only independent Church, independent of all foreign control, Papal or Royal, that survived in Western Christendom’. Looming over his account was the imminent prospect of the disestablishment of the Church in Wales (achieved in 1920), which he seemed to countenance with equanimity. Other Welsh Anglican writers were less sanguine. For example, E. J. Newell, an Anglican clergyman and schoolmaster in Porthcawl (Glamorgan) active in the Cambrian Archaeological Association, insisted that its distinct identity within a broader Church of England made ‘the Church of Wales’ the true heir to Celtic Christianity and also compared the threat posed by disestablishment with Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries.135 Whereas earlier writers such as Theophilus Evans and Thomas Price (Carnhuanawc) had taken for granted both the established status and the Welshness of the Anglican Church in Wales, growing calls for disestablishment in the later nineteenth century by a politically influential Nonconformity prompted some Welsh Anglicans to reflect anew on their Church’s history.
By contrast, the Anglican clerics Sabine Baring-Gould and John Fisher eschewed a partisan approach in a major work on the Welsh saints notable for its critical treatment of sources.136 Likewise Hugh Williams (1843–1911), professor of Church history at the Calvinistic Methodist college in Bala, subjected the early ecclesiastical history of Britain and Wales to rigorous examination according to the latest canons of scholarship, declaring that ‘a dispassionate study of all that original ecclesiastical records present to us, by the same methods as we study other histories, should precede whatever conclusions we draw in answer to the theological questions that belong to the history of the Church’. Moreover, while presenting ecclesiastical history ‘as a part of the history of the Welsh people’, he did so from a comparative perspective ‘as a humble follower of the painstaking students of history in Germany, France, and our own two islands’ who was ready to draw inferences from the better-attested churches of continental Europe and Ireland.137 One fruit of this approach was a heavily annotated new edition and translation for the Cymmrodorion of the works (and Lives) of Gildas, whom Williams portrayed as ‘a preacher, a revivalist’, comparing him with St Bernard, John Wesley, and John Henry Newman.138 However, the culmination of Williams’s work in this field came with his posthumously published Christianity in Early Britain (1912), which took its readers from the Roman occupation of Britain to Augustine of Canterbury’s confrontation with the British clergy in the early seventh century that ‘caused a division between the English and the British Churches’, supporting its conclusions with copious references to both primary sources and scholarship in the fields of Church history and Celtic studies while sidelining legendary interpretations to separate chapters.139 The resulting interpretation firmly located the British Church within western Christendom, notably by emphasizing the Roman origins of British Christianity around 200 ce and the transformative impact from about the 420s of the ascetic monasticism originating in Egypt and transmitted via southern Gaul. True, Williams showed considerable sympathy for the British Church and declared that Augustine ‘struck out on a wrong path’ in his hostile dealings with its clergy.140 However, while this might seem to be merely the latest in a long litany of condemnations of Augustine beginning in the sixteenth century, Williams was restrained in his criticism and also eschewed the hostility to Roman Catholicism or other confessional point-scoring common among many previous writers as well as several of his contemporaries. Instead, he took pains to try and elucidate the developments he described in the context of their own time.
John Edward Lloyd
John Edward Lloyd (1861–1947) brings into particularly sharp focus both the achievements and the limitations of the new scholarly approaches to the history of Wales adopted in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods.141 None of the other scholars discussed above produced a synthesis of comparable scope and influence to Lloyd’s two-volume magnum opus, A History of Wales from the Earliest Times to the Edwardian Conquest, published by Longmans in January 1911, which has rightly been seen as a seminal work thanks to its combination of unprecedented critical rigour and analytical coherence. To quote Tout, a friend of Lloyd’s and fellow product of the Oxford History School: ‘A book on such lines, or of such a type, has never previously been written.’142 The History not only superseded all previous general accounts of the period it covered but was itself only substantially superseded by new syntheses of a comparable scale in the 1980s, one of whose authors declared that it ‘may be said, without exaggeration, to inaugurate the history of Wales as a modern academic subject’.143 Yet, for all its novelty, Lloyd’s book was also deeply informed by long-established assumptions about the nature of Welsh history which remained influential during his formative years in the late Victorian period—above all, that the ancient and medieval past, especially down to the Edwardian conquest, was fundamental to understanding Welsh history as a whole because it explained the making and survival of a particular people, inhabiting a particular space within Britain, despite the Edwardian conquest and subsequent assimilation into the kingdom of England under Henry VIII.144 This concluding section contends, then, that Lloyd is best understood as a transitional figure connecting the centuries-old amateur history writing that is the main subject of this book and the professional historiography of Wales of the last century or so that has both grown out of and challenged it.
Lloyd was unusual among the Welsh historians of his day in that his upbringing straddled the two worlds of urban England and rural Wales. Born and brought up in Liverpool, Lloyd belonged to a family that formed part of the sizeable Nonconformist and Liberal middle-class Welsh community in the town. However, his parents were originally from northern Montgomeryshire, which the family visited for extended periods in the summer, and Lloyd spoke the area’s Powysian dialect of Welsh throughout his life. By his early teens he had developed interests in Welsh literature and history and his strong sense of identification with Wales was further enhanced while a student at the recently founded University College of Wales at Aberystwyth (1877–81), whence he proceeded to Lincoln College, Oxford (1881–5), reading Classics followed by Modern History in the last two years; he also found time to write a prize-winning essay on the history of Wales for the national eisteddfod in Liverpool in 1884 that was the nearest he came as a student to undertaking independent research. After graduating Lloyd returned to Aberystwyth as a lecturer in History and Welsh, before taking up the post of registrar at the University College of North Wales, Bangor in 1892, where he remained for the rest of his career, holding the chair of History from 1899 until his retirement in 1930 (and continuing as registrar until 1920). Lloyd played a central part, then, in the ‘national awakening’ through his contribution to the development both of Welsh higher education and of Welsh history as an academic subject.
Shortly after arriving in Bangor Lloyd started on the first of three bilingual textbooks on the history of Wales from prehistory to 1282 for children in elementary schools, in accordance with the provision in 1893, linked to the introduction of Welsh as a class subject, that permitted bilingual instruction.145 He later said that these provided an invaluable preparatory framework for his 1911 History, written over almost a decade with a keen attention to accuracy reflected in its numerous footnote references. The work’s two volumes are divided into twenty chapters, each of which is subdivided into several sections, followed in some cases by extended notes on particular primary sources or points of detail or controversy. Volume I shows how the Welsh people were formed by an amalgamation of three racial groups—the Iberians, followed by the Goidels, then the Brythons—ultimately originating from the Continent, between the Neolithic and post-Roman periods, and were subsequently confined to the territory of Wales by the mid-seventh century; the volume’s remaining chapters chart political developments down to the early eleventh century and analyse the territorial and social structures of early medieval Wales. Volume II covers a much shorter period, reflecting the greater abundance of available sources, namely the two-and-a-half centuries from the reign of Gruffudd ap Llywelyn (d. 1064) to the death of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd in 1282. A central theme is the role played by Welsh kings and princes in ensuring that the Welsh nationhood established in the early Middle Ages was sustained and reinforced. Accordingly, high politics loom large, as the discussion focuses mainly on the relations of Welsh rulers with members of their own and other native dynasties, Norman, Flemish, and English settlers, and the kings of England, although limited attention is also given to the Church, society, and literature.
There was nothing nostalgic about Lloyd’s privileging of the ancient and medieval past. He had no doubt that the progress of his own age was preferable to all that had preceded it. As a young man, he contrasted the Wales of 1188 with that of 1886: ‘The fertile fields, the fiery coal-mines and furnaces, the railways, the chapels, the miles of houses! As those who love our nation, we cannot be grateful enough for the alteration.’146 And half a century later he had little time for those Welsh nationalists whom he accused of idealizing the Middle Ages without giving due recognition to the period’s poverty and disease.147 His 1911 History was an avowedly modern enterprise animated by both of the impetuses highlighted at the beginning of this chapter. First, there can be little doubt that Lloyd was both inspired by and sought to further encourage a sense of national revival: after all, the work’s final words evoked ‘the enduring fabric of Welsh nationality’. More explicitly, he observed in an early essay that ‘[o]ne of the most satisfying signs of the present time is the willingness of everyone to recognize that we, the Welsh, are truly a nation…No occasion can be more timely, therefore, to look back at the beginning of the nation.’148 This context probably helps to explain why the History lacks the apologetic rhetoric found in many of its predecessors, be it complaints about English ignorance and misrepresentation or effusions of loyalty to the monarchy. Lloyd saw his task, then, as the writing of a national history that would legitimate the existence of the Welsh nation, an approach for which there were, of course, many parallels in his lifetime. The second impetus, again shared with many other writers of national history, was a conviction that this required the adoption of ‘scientific’ methods intended to substantiate the veracity of the account. Thus Lloyd acknowledged his
general indebtedness to Sir John Rhys, Mr. Egerton Phillimore, Mr. Alfred N. Palmer, and the late Dr. Hugh Williams for the pioneer work which has so greatly facilitated the scientific study of Welsh history. I owe to them what cannot be expressed in the debit of citation and reference, namely, outlook and method and inspiration.149
As we have seen, all four scholars adopted an essentially philological approach involving the critical analysis of written texts, albeit supplemented in Rhys’s case by a reliance on ethnology while Phillimore and Palmer were also notable for their grasp of topography. All these approaches informed Lloyd’s attempt ‘to bring together and weave into a continuous narrative what may be fairly regarded as the ascertained facts of the history of Wales up to the fall of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd in 1282’.150
Lloyd thus set himself two related tasks. One was to establish ‘the ascertained facts’ through a comprehensive and critical assessment of the available evidence. In other words, he sought to show that the history of Wales from its prehistoric beginnings to the conquest of Edward I could sustain the kind of detailed investigation and exposition expected in early twentieth-century historical scholarship. By and large, Lloyd relied on published sources, an approach adopted in other such syntheses at the time in Britain: while he was ready to consult unpublished manuscripts and documents for particular purposes, this was neither practicable nor indeed necessary for the writing of what Tout termed ‘a sound and scientific textbook’.151 Yet, while it was essential to achieve accuracy in relating the course of events and to purge Welsh history of legendary accounts, criticism on its own was insufficient, as Lloyd complained with reference to Gweirydd ap Rhys.152 It was also necessary to impose order on the ‘facts’ by providing a coherent narrative that explained how the Welsh people had been formed and then survived until 1282 (and thus, Lloyd implied, into the present day). That explanation rested on three principal foundations: the making of the Welsh through an amalgamation of three prehistoric races or peoples; the development of a kin-based society and pastoral economy favourable to preserving freedom and cultural pursuits; and the inspirational leadership of rulers. Thanks to his use of recent specialized studies and, above all, his ability to construct a compelling analysis of the interplay of the different factors identified, Lloyd’s interpretation marked a novel departure in many respects. Yet, its very novelty, predicated on the superiority of the ‘scientific’ methods adopted, served to confirm rather than challenge deeply rooted understandings of the shape and significance of Welsh history. This is of course true of the History’s fundamental premise that the history of Wales was the history of the Welsh people. Although Lloyd followed the precedent of historians since David Powel who had included accounts of Norman conquest and settlement that resulted in the establishment of marcher lordships in Wales, he did not treat foreign settlers as subjects in their own right and these remained marginal to the main narrative focused on the Welsh.153
Whether deliberate or not, the playing down of foreign influences on medieval Wales was consistent with Lloyd’s emphasis on the conservative continuity of Welsh society. This explains why the History opens in prehistory, as Lloyd adapted Rhys’s theory of the settlement of three successive races by drawing on the work of the archaeologist William Boyd Dawkins, whose Early Man in Britain (1880) insisted ‘that the continuity between the Neolithic age and the present day has been unbroken’, persuading Lloyd of the importance of combining archaeology, ethnology, and history.154 True, Woodward and Gweirydd ap Rhys had made limited use of archaeology and ethnology. However, Rhys, Dawkins, and other archaeologists and philologists gave Lloyd the means to go well beyond those earlier attempts and reaffirm the much-vaunted antiquity of the Welsh by substituting up-to-date scholarship in the human sciences for discredited legendary accounts in medieval and later sources that most previous historians of Wales had felt obliged to report, albeit with increasing embarrassment since the later eighteenth century. Moreover, like Dawkins and Rhys, Lloyd believed that all three racial groups had made an enduring contribution to the formation of the Welsh.
If it be contended that the first of these, the Neolithic [Iberians], was the most important in respect of its contribution to the national physique and character, and that the second, the Goidelic, was the source of the early political and social institutions of the Welsh, it cannot be denied that it is to the third [the Brythons] we owe the Welsh language.155
On the first of these points, Lloyd believed that their physical (and to some extent mental) characteristics made the descendants of prehistoric peoples visible in modern populations, a view he supported by deploying the physician and anthropologist John Beddoe’s analysis of hair and eye colour.156 Lloyd reinforced his argument for the fundamental contribution of these early races to the making of the Welsh by maintaining that the latter had largely been unaffected by the influence of Rome as their ancestors lived in the military zone of Britain that the Roman archaeologist Francis Haverfield (1861–1919) distinguished from the civil zone in the south-east and midland areas of the island where the Roman occupation made a far greater impact on the indigenous inhabitants.157 While Lloyd accepted that the Brythonic ancestors of the Welsh had been Romanized with respect to some aspects of warfare, literacy, and material culture, the survival of the Welsh language indicated that ‘the inhabitants of Wales were so far divorced from the main current of Roman life as to speak a separate language, which linked them with the customs and traditions of the past’.158
A second key element in Lloyd’s interpretation of Welsh history was the durability down to the Edwardian conquest of an ancient kin-based, pastoral society that originated in prehistory. Again, Lloyd was influenced by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholarship, which deployed the categories of legal and constitutional history in attempting to reconstruct early societies.159 In terms of the sources he used, Lloyd also followed the example of his predecessors since the sixteenth century who had included observations on medieval Welsh society based mainly on the Welsh laws together with the writings of Gerald of Wales. Gweirydd ap Rhys had taken this further by including separate sections on society. However, none of these earlier writers—with the partial exception of Henry Rowlands, who worked back from the late thirteenth-century extents to reconstruct the society and economy of Gwynedd (see Chapter 8)—had integrated their observations on society with their broader interpretations in as full and as systematic a way as Lloyd. One of the notebooks he compiled in preparing the History clearly delineated the political and cultural consequences of pastoralism as a socio-economic system:
Wales unsuited for tillage—most profitable industry of early times: hence invaders always drive settlers (Iberians, Goidels, Britons) into this region & then leave them there undisturbed. Any inhabitants of Wales forced to turn to pastoral mode of life. Pastoral life nomadic—hence no permanent settlements: people move easily about, leaving nothing for an enemy to seize: have no stake in the country. Agricultural community at mercy of superior military force: pastoral not. Hence Welsh able to maintain independence. Same causes favoured tribal isolation: no opportunity for conquest which creates strong monarchy. Pastoral habits further make ties of association personal and not local—hence strength of family and clan feeling. Pastoral way of life means much leisure—hence cultivation of poetry, music, tale telling, and oratory.160
The last point is developed in the History, which highlights the Welsh poetry composed during the twelfth century as part of the ‘national revival’ of that era under the leadership of the native princes, and concludes its depiction of Welsh society in 1200 by affirming—in an echo of Thomas Stephens, and thence Augustin Thierry—that ‘it was only as representing the survival of tribal custom and morality that Welsh life could be termed barbarous. In intellectual ability and mental culture the race stood high…’.161
Moreover, Lloyd maintained that the key institutions of early medieval Wales were extremely durable, continuing largely unchanged until the Edwardian conquest and indeed beyond it, an interpretation foreshadowed by Gweirydd ap Rhys’s observation, based on Gerald of Wales, that ‘the familial and social customs of the Welsh’ had been ‘remarkably changeless over many long ages’.162 Thus, Lloyd declared of the late twelfth century that ‘in essentials Wales still retained its ancient social structure, remaining a tribal and pastoral community in spite of the great wave of feudalism which beat upon its eastern flank and daily threatened to engulf the older social system’.163 Lloyd knew full well, of course, that the Normans had built castles, established towns, and founded religious houses.164 His tacit assumption, though, appears to have been that the marcher lordships settled by the Normans were not part of the history of Wales construed as the history of the Welsh people, a view that contrasted with O. M. Edwards’s assertion that Llywelyn the Great’s vision of Wales had encompassed both the native principalities and the marcher lordships.165 Although the History offers no comment on Welsh society after 1200, his later writings show that Lloyd, again unlike Edwards, believed that little changed during the thirteenth century.166 It is telling that, while ready to follow Seebohm, Vinogradoff, and other recent scholars in his discussion of ‘early Welsh institutions’, Lloyd ignored the evidence noticed by E. A. Lewis for commutation of food renders into money payments in Gwynedd before 1282.167 Indeed, Lloyd suggested that only the industrialization of the nineteenth century marked a decisive rupture with an ancient pastoral way of life, still evoked ‘with true poetic instinct’ by the poets Hiraethog and Ceiriog.168
The third, and most recent and decisive, factor in the formation of the Welsh people was the leadership provided by medieval Welsh kings and princes.169 Their reigns had provided the chronological framework for histories of Wales since Humphrey Llwyd constructed his narrative largely on the basis of medieval Welsh and English chronicles. In keeping with his overall aim, Lloyd sought to update this legacy by establishing what was reliably known of the rulers and assessing their significance. If some previously cherished views, such as Llywelyn the Great’s allegedly crucial role in the issue of Magna Carta, were casualties of this quest for accuracy, its overall effect was to demonstrate that Welsh rulers fully merited the starring roles they had played in previous histories of Wales.170 Moreover, this went beyond the emphasis in previous accounts on military leadership against other Welsh rulers, marcher lords, or kings of England, as Lloyd also assessed how the rulers who emerged with the arrival of the Brythons in the post-Roman period established and exercised their authority in Welsh society by achieving mastery over deeply-entrenched aristocratic kin-groups that dominated individual localities.171 Lloyd presented this process as mutually beneficial, as the leaders of individual tribes agreed to subject themselves to a single authority in return for protection against rivals.172 The key territorial unit for the exercise of royal power was the cantref, for, while originally synonymous with the tribe, its centre was the royal court, sustained by the food renders of the free tribesmen and the labour of the bondmen settled around it in a nucleated township.173
The conception of politics as a struggle between king and aristocracy was of course commonplace among medieval historians of Lloyd’s day. However, whereas Stubbs and the Oxford History School framed this struggle in constitutional terms as a staging post towards curbing royal authority and creating the liberal democracy of modern Britain, Lloyd saw the extension of royal or princely authority at aristocratic expense as essential to ensuring the survival of the Welsh people.174 In part, this was because more powerful rulers were better able to foster the arts of peace—such as the codification of Welsh law under Hywel Dda or the patronage of poets—that helped to give expression to ‘national self-consciousness’.175 But above all they were better placed both to achieve political unity and to see off the threat of conquest from the late eleventh century onwards through military leadership combined in the most exemplary cases with prudent statesmanship. Thus Gruffudd ap Llywelyn ‘bequeathed to the Welsh people the priceless legacy of a revived national spirit’ on the eve of the Norman invasions by establishing an unprecedented hegemony across the length and breadth of Wales as well as by devastating border counties in England.176 The mid-twelfth century then witnessed a ‘national revival’ or ‘national awakening’, as under Owain Gwynedd ‘the Welsh nation attained the full measure of national consciousness which enabled it for a century and a half successfully to resist absorption in the English realm’, albeit with further ‘wise and enlightened guidance’ from the Lord Rhys and the two Llywelyns.177 Moreover, the History concludes by asserting that the Welsh ‘national consciousness’ fostered by the princes had been sufficiently resilient to survive for over six centuries after the death of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd to be revived in the national awakening of Lloyd’s day, thereby simultaneously confirming and complicating the significance of 1282 as a terminal point in Wales’s history: ‘It was for a far distant generation to see that the last Prince had not lived in vain, but by his life-work had helped to build solidly the enduring fabric of Welsh nationality.’178
Lloyd’s 1911 History provides the strongest Welsh evidence in support of the view that modern ‘scientific’ history was established as the handmaiden of nationalism.179 However, it also raises questions about that correlation. To begin with, while Lloyd wrote at a moment of national awakening and indeed was on the more nationalist side of Welsh Liberal opinion in favouring home rule for Wales within a greater Britain and its empire,180 neither he nor any of the other historians discussed in this chapter called for political independence. Rather, in common with most of his predecessors since Humphrey Llwyd, he sought to demonstrate that the Welsh had a history of their own that entitled them to recognition as a distinctive people within a multinational state.181 To that extent, his use of ‘scientific’ methods to give credibility to Welsh history served a nationalist end. Yet, though unprecedented in their scope and rigour, these methods were used essentially to update a long-established narrative and as elsewhere in Europe originated in early modern textual criticism: viewed in that perspective, Lloyd was the latest in a succession of critical scholars of the Welsh past from William Camden and Edward Lhuyd to Thomas Stephens and Gweirydd ap Rhys.182 Conversely, we have seen that a number of other late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians of Wales went further than Lloyd in practising ‘scientific’ history grounded in archival research. In part, this reflected the limited opportunities for historical training comparable to that available in many continental countries, the United States, and elsewhere when Lloyd was a student in the 1880s, a situation that only began to change gradually in the first two decades of the twentieth century.183
Fundamentally, though, Lloyd’s approach reflected the nature of the task he set himself and the challenges this posed. After all, Tout and other contemporaries denied research training ventured into the archives and Lloyd could have decided that detailed monographic studies should take precedence over a new general synthesis in order to establish the ‘scientific’ credentials of Welsh history as a field of study. True, a synthesis based on a rigorous assessment of the surviving evidence had become more feasible by the early twentieth century as the efforts of individual scholars, voluntary societies, and government bodies had ensured the publication of many of the written sources for the history of Wales down to 1282. Yet the priority Lloyd gave to writing a new synthesis points above all to the continuing appeal of the assumption that Welsh history was, at its heart, a story about the making of the Welsh and the era in which they had come closest to enjoying political independence. This also helps to explain why, despite his interest in later centuries, he felt no compulsion to continue his work down to the early twentieth century as his older contemporary Peter Hume Brown had done in his three-volume History of Scotland, which welcomed the union with England in 1707 as a crucial step in national progress.184 Accordingly, while Lloyd’s 1911 History marked a new beginning in several respects, it was even more significant as the culmination of a historiographical tradition originating in the decades after 1282 when his narrative came to an end.
Writing Welsh History: From the Early Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century. Huw Pryce, Oxford University Press. © Huw Pryce 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198746034.003.0013
4 Kenneth O. Morgan, Rebirth of a Nation, part I (‘The Reawakening, 1880–1914’); Griffith, ‘Devolutionist Tendencies in Wales’; John Williams, Digest of Welsh Historical Statistics, 1: 7.
5 For the metaphor of national ‘awakening’ or ‘revival’ see Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival, esp. xiii, 11, 20, 22–4; Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations, 191–2, 196–7; Hackmann, ‘Narrating the Building of a Small Nation’; Maxwell, ‘Contingency and “National Awakening” ’.
6 Prys Morgan, ‘The Creation of the National Museum and National Library’, quotation at 21; J. Gwynn Williams, The University Movement in Wales.
7 Roger Jones Williams, ‘Hanes Cyhoeddi Y Gwyddoniadur’ (1967), 157–60, 162–3; O. Morien Morgan, A History of Wales; Löffler, The Literary and Historical Legacy, 37, 84.
8 Cf. Robert Smith, Schools, Politics and Society, 204–5.
9 Hywel Teifi Edwards, The National Pageant of Wales; Millward, ‘Beriah Gwynfe Evans’, 177–8. See also John S. Ellis, Investiture, 67, 92–5.
10 Gaffney, ‘ “A National Valhalla for Wales” ’; Chris Williams, Icons of Wales; Wilson, Memorializing History, 16–17.
11 Y Llan, 9 May 1913, 2; Western Mail, 26 July 1913, 7; Chris Evans, Slave Wales, 95–104. See also Pryce, ‘Cofio Glyndŵr’, 53–4, 56.
12 Western Mail, 28 October 1916, 6; cf. Western Mail, 27 October 1916, 3; John, Turning the Tide, 53–73, 75–118, 189.
13 Western Mail, 28 October 1916, 5.
14 J. Hugh Edwards, The Life of David Lloyd George, quotation at 1: x; Charmley, ‘Edwards, John Hugh’. Lloyd George had already been compared with Llywelyn ap Gruffudd and Glyndŵr in the context of the 1911 investiture: John S. Ellis, Investiture, 76.
15 See e.g. Glanmor Williams, ‘Local and National History in Wales’, 47–9; Llion Pryderi Roberts, ‘ “Mawrhau ei Swydd” ’; John Edward Lloyd, ‘A Dictionary of Welsh Biography’, 71–3; O’Leary, ‘Town and Nation’.
16 Matthews, Hanes y Wladfa Gymreig; Lewis Jones, Hanes y Wladva Gymreig. Both authors were key figures among the colony’s first settlers but wrote their works after returning to Wales.
17 WP; Fraser, revd. Williams, ‘Rhŷs (formerly Rees), Sir John’; Robert Thomas Jenkins, ‘Jones (later Brynmor-Jones), Sir David Brynmor’. Since he is named before Brynmor-Jones, Rhys presumably made the greater contribution to the volume.
18 Owen M. Edwards, Wales.
19 Report of the Royal Commission on Land. The debt to the report goes beyond the seven chapters (out of thirteen) said to be based on it in WP, [vii]. For the Welsh land question and the commission see Kenneth O. Morgan, Wales in British Politics, 53–9, 123–9, 174–6; J. Graham Jones, ‘Select Committee or Royal Commission?’; David W. Howell, ‘The Land Question’, quotation at 97.
20 Readman, Land and Nation, 137–8, quotation at 138.
21 Report of the Royal Commission on Land, 149–76; Bibliographical, Statistical, and Other Miscellaneous Memoranda, 437–75; Eddie May, ‘Thomas, Sir Daniel Lleufer’; R. Brinley Jones, ‘Sir Daniel Lleufer Thomas’; Griffith, ‘Devolutionist Tendencies in Wales’, 101.
22 WP, [vii].
23 Kenneth O. Morgan, Wales in British Politics, 129; WP, 6th impression (London, 1923), facing title page.
24 WP, xxvi. The point is reiterated later explicitly with reference to ‘the Welsh-speaking people’: WP, 345.
25 WP, xxiv; see also 345. Similar sentiments in more explicitly loyalist language in Report of the Royal Commission on Land, 12.
26 WP, 506–10, 512 (quotations), 515. ‘Anglo-Celtic’ is an addition to the original text of this passage in Report of the Commission on Land, 82. Cf. Brynmor-Jones, ‘A National Museum for Wales’, 59: advances in Welsh education formed part of ‘that forward movement which has for its object the conversion of Wales from a mere aggregate of counties into a province of the British Empire, having an active and conscious national unity of its own’.
27 Cf. Stocking, Jr., Victorian Anthropology, ch. 7, esp. 245–7, 269–70.
28 For Rhys’s changing interpretations of the early languages and peoples of Wales see Charles-Edwards, ‘John Rhŷs’.
29 WP, 9–11. By contrast, Rhys, Celtic Britain, 2, declined to posit a date for the arrival of ‘the first Celts’ in Britain.
30 WP, xxiii.
31 WP, ch. 1; cf. Rhys, Celtic Britain, 1–4, 80, 215, 257–8, 262–3, 270–2.
32 WP, 31–2, 35.
33 WP, 34, 69.
34 WP, xxvi, 472–6, 485–500, quotations at 474, 485. Similar interpretation in Howell T. Evans, The Making of Modern Wales, esp. 5–6, 157–8, 168–78, 196–208.
35 WP, 506–10, 512 (quotation), 515.
36 WP, 510–11, 516 (quotation); Hywel Teifi Edwards, ‘John Rhŷs yn Achos Trafferth’.
37 The fullest biographical study of Edwards is Hazel Davies, O. M.: Cofiant. Shorter accounts in English: Hazel Davies, O. M. Edwards; Gareth Elwyn Jones, ‘Edwards, Sir Owen Morgan’. See also Lowri Angharad Hughes, ‘Writing the Welsh People’; Lowri Angharad Hughes, ‘O. M. Edwards’.
38 Hazel Davies, O. M.: Cofiant, 26–7, 232, 266, 291–2; cf. Tudur, ‘The Life, Work and Thought’, esp. chs. 3, 5, 10.
39 Hazel Davies, O. M.: Cofiant, 213–17, 255–61, 266–7; J. E. Caerwyn Williams, ‘Cymdeithas Dafydd ap Gwilym’.
40 Hazel Davies, O. M.: Cofiant, 167–71, 242–3, 299–301, 378–83, 574–8.
41 Hazel Davies, O. M.: Cofiant, 279–80; J. Graham Jones, ‘The Littérateur as Politician’.
42 Millward, ‘Gwaith Cynnar O. M. Edwards’; Hazel Davies, ‘Boundaries’. See also Prys Morgan, ‘The Gwerin of Wales’, 134–52; Sherrington, ‘O. M. Edwards’.
43 Lowri Angharad Hughes, ‘O. M. Edwards’; Lowri Angharad Hughes, ‘Y Teimlad Cenedlaethol’. Translation of the motto from Hazel Davies, O. M. Edwards, 40.
44 Owen M. Edwards, ‘Rhagymadrodd’. For Edwards’s approach to Welsh history see Manon Jones, ‘O. M. Edwards’; Lowri Angharad Hughes, ‘Writing the Welsh People’, 178–206; Lowri Angharad Hughes Ahronson, ‘ “A Refreshingly New and Challenging Voice” ’.
45 Owen M. Edwards, Cartrefi Cymru; Owen M. Edwards, Wales; Hazel Davies, O. M.: Cofiant, 250–2, 480–4, 545–9.
46 Quotations: Hazel Davies, O. M.: Cofiant, 251. In 1898 Edwards emphasized the importance of writing history in an attractive, readable style in a sympathetic appraisal of Theophilus Evans’s Drych y Prif Oesoedd (‘Mirror of the Primitive Ages’), whose lively account of the early Welsh past he preferred to ‘the short-lived theories of German and French and English historians these days’: Owen M. Edwards, ‘Rhagair’, quotation at 6.
47 Owen M. Edwards, Wales, 124, 261–6 (literature); 81, 92–3, 204, 387–9 (character). Cf. Soffer, Discipline and Power, 14, 54.
48 Owen M. Edwards, ‘Rhagymadrodd’; Manon Jones, ‘O. M. Edwards’, 213; T. E. Ellis, ‘The Memory of the Kymric Dead’.
49 Owen M. Edwards, Wales, 242–7, 249–5, quotations at 246–7.
50 Lowri Angharad Hughes, ‘Writing the Welsh People’, 184; Hazel Davies, O. M.: Cofiant, 234–5, 547.
51 Owen M. Edwards, Holi ac Ateb, 29; translation adapted from Hazel Davies, O. M. Edwards, 76.
52 Owen M. Edwards, Wales, ix.
53 Manon Jones, ‘O. M. Edwards’, 209–10.
54 Cf. J. Goronwy Edwards, ‘Hanesyddiaeth Gymreig’, 22.
55 Owen M. Edwards, Wales, 303.
56 Quotations: Owen M. Edwards, Wales, 354, 384.
57 Owen M. Edwards, Wales, 400–1. Quotation: Owen Edwards, A Short History of Wales, 133. Cf. J. Gwynn Williams, The University Movement in Wales, 139–48.
58 Owen M. Edwards, Wales, 397–401. Cf. WP, xxvi; Kenneth O. Morgan, Wales in British Politics, 106–7.
59 Owen M. Edwards, Trem ar Hanes Cymru (Llanuwchllyn, 1893), 32, translated in Hazel Davies, O. M. Edwards, 77.
60 Owen M. Edwards, Wales, 400.
61 Cf. Leerssen, National Thought, 97–101, 112–14; Baár, Historians and Nationalism, 109–11, 167–72, 224–5, 295; Nagle, Histories of Nationalism, 39–42.
62 Owen M. Edwards, Wales, 2.
63 Owen M. Edwards, Wales, 8.
64 Owen M. Edwards, Wales, 8–10.
65 Owen M. Edwards, ‘Cymru’, 1–2; Hazel Davies, O. M.: Cofiant, 334–5.
66 Michael Williams, ‘The Creation of Humanized Landscapes’, 168–73.
67 Millward, ‘Gwaith Cynnar O. M. Edwards’, 176–7; Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition, 197–200; Friedman, Marc Bloch, Sociology and Geography, 24–7, 64–5; Pryce, ‘From the Neolithic to Nonconformity’, 20–1; George, The Relations of Geography & History, 1.
68 George, The Relations of Geography & History, 7–8, 14–18, 144, 151, 172–3, 283; Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition, 199–200, 212; Potthoff, ‘The Use of “Cultural Landscape” ’, 52.
69 Semple, ‘The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains’.
70 Kaufmann, ‘ “Naturalizing the Nation” ’, quotation at 690. Cf. Neil Evans, ‘ “When Men and Mountains Meet” ’, 222–6.
71 Zimmer, ‘In Search of Natural Identity’.
72 Neil Evans, ‘ “When Men and Mountains Meet” ’, 227; Prys Morgan, ‘Islwyn a Mynyddoedd Cymru’; Hazel Davies, O. M.: Cofiant, 504–6. Cf. Kaufmann, ‘ “Naturalizing the Nation” ’, 673–6.
73 Cf. Lowri Angharad Hughes, ‘O. M. Edwards’, esp. 53–8, 72–4.
74 Cf. Neil Evans, ‘ “When Men and Mountains Meet” ’, 223–7.
75 Early criticism of Edwards’s linking character to landscape in W. Llewelyn Williams, Review of O. M. Edwards, Wales, 166–7.
76 Owen M. Edwards, Wales, 7–8. For an account of a successful medieval Welsh ruler explicitly intended to disprove Arnoldian stereotypes see W.W., ‘Gruffydd ap Cynan’.
77 Cf. Neil Evans, ‘ “When Men and Mountains Meet” ’, 225–6.
78 Cf. Zimmer, ‘In Search of Natural Identity’, 648–52. In 1889 Edwards noticed similarities between the peoples and mountainous landscapes of Switzerland and Wales, but without attributing the character of the Swiss to their mountains; he also contrasted the Alps and Snowdonia: Owen M. Edwards, O’r Bala i Geneva, 88–9, 101, 104, 162.
79 Cf. Pryce, Lloyd, 161–4.
80 Owen M. Edwards, Wales, 127.
81 Pryce, Lloyd, 163–4.
82 Owen M. Edwards, Wales, 148, 150.
83 Owen M. Edwards, Wales, 150–1, 403–4, quotations at 151, 403. Cf. W. R. Williams, The Parliamentary History of the Principality of Wales, mainly comprising lists of Welsh MPs. For Edwards’s support of the empire see Aled Jones and Bill Jones, ‘Empire and the Welsh Press’, 83–90; Hazel Davies, O. M.: Cofiant, 417.
84 For personal testimony to the success of Edwards’s periodicals in this regard see J. Goronwy Edwards, ‘Hanesyddiaeth Gymreig’, 22–3.
85 Other examples include Bradley, Owen Glyndwr, and Stone, Wales, a work conventional both in its focus on the period down to Glyndŵr and in its portrayal of the Welsh as a nation conspicuous thereafter for its loyalty to crown and empire. See also Gramich, ‘Narrating the Nation’.
86 John S. Ellis, Owen Rhoscomyl; John S. Ellis, ‘Outlaw Historian’.
87 Rhoscomyl, Flame-Bearers, public edn., quotation at 1. Both editions were reissued in 1910.
88 John S. Ellis, ‘Outlaw Historian’, 114–15, quotation at 114.
89 Rhoscomyl, Flame-Bearers, school edn., Preface. Cunedda and his sons founded the kingdom of Gwynedd according to the Historia Brittonum (see Chapter 2).
90 John S. Ellis, ‘Outlaw Historian’, 118–19; Hywel Teifi Edwards, National Pageant, 85, 87, 95–149.
91 Pryce, Lloyd, 104–8; Ralph A. Griffiths, ‘The Early Years and Wales’s History’, 23.
92 Phillimore, ‘The Annales Cambriae’; George Owen, ‘The Description of Penbrokshire’, ed. Owen; The Court Rolls of the Lordship of Ruthin, ed. and trans. Roberts. See further Guy, ‘Egerton Phillimore’; Griffith Milwyn Griffiths, ‘Roberts, Richard Arthur’; Ralph A. Griffiths, ‘Venturing into the “Jungle” ’, 199–202.
93 J. Gwenogvryn Evans, Report; Edward Owen, A Catalogue; Ralph A. Griffiths, ‘Venturing into the “Jungle” ’, 198; Evan David Jones, ‘Evans, John Gwenogvryn’; Angela Grant, ‘The View from the Fountain Head’.
94 Edward Owen, ‘Owain Lawgoch’; Hugh Owen, ‘Owen, Edward’; Browne and Griffiths, ‘One Hundred Years of Investigation’, 20–2.
95 John E. Morris, The Welsh Wars of Edward I; Robert Thomas Jenkins, ‘Morris, John Edward’.
96 Ralph A. Griffiths, ‘The Early Years and Wales’s History’; Gibson, ‘Thomas Frederick Tout at Lampeter’.
97 Pryce, ‘Historians and the Treaty of Montgomery’, 13–14; Tout, ‘The Welsh Shires’.
98 See especially Tout, ‘Wales and the March’.
99 H. T. Evans, Wales and the Wars of the Roses, new edn., with introduction by Ralph A. Griffiths at ix–xiii; quotation at 2. See also Ralph A. Griffiths, ‘Venturing into the “Jungle” ’, 206–7.
100 Engels, The Origin of the Family, 166–8; Skene, Celtic Scotland, 3: 197–208. For Engels’s use of Morgan see Bloch, Marxism and Anthropology, 45–62.
101 Harvey, ‘Seebohm, Frederic’; Glanville R. J. Jones, ‘The Tribal System in Wales’, 111–13; R. R. Davies, Historical Perception, 21–3; Wendy Davies, ‘Looking Backwards to the Early Medieval Past’, 206–9. For Maine’s understanding of the tribe see Maine, Ancient Law, 128–35, and Kuper, ‘The Rise and Fall of Maine’s Patriarchal Society’.
102 Seebohm, The Tribal System in Wales; Report of the Royal Commission on Land, 133–49 (republished in WP, 395–452).
103 WP, 429, 449.
104 WP, 451–2.
105 Seebohm, The Tribal System in Wales, [v]; Seebohm, The English Village Community, 181–213. See also Burrow, ‘ “The Village Community” ’, esp. 257–60, 273–5.
106 Seebohm, Tribal Custom in Anglo-Saxon Law, 21–55.
107 Seebohm, The Tribal System in Wales, vi, ix.
108 See especially Seebohm, The Tribal System in Wales, 1–50, 192–233. For a different comparative approach see Hubert Lewis, The Ancient Laws of Wales, which argued that many early English institutions shared a common British origin with those of medieval Wales.
109 Dodd, ‘Palmer, Alfred Neobard’; Christopher J. Williams, ‘A. N. Palmer’.
110 Palmer and Owen, A History of Ancient Tenures, quotation at vi (first edition, by Palmer alone, 1885).
111 Palmer and Owen, A History of Ancient Tenures, 17, 25, 32–3, 60, n. 1; Palmer, Review of Seebohm, Tribal System, quotation at 73. Palmer identified himself as the review’s author in a letter to J. E. Lloyd, 30 November 1895: Bangor University Archives, Lloyd Papers, 314, no. 373.
112 Palmer and Owen, A History of Ancient Tenures, 30, 52–5, 60–5, 161–3, 188–90.
113 The Survey of the Honour of Denbigh, ed. Vinogradoff and Morgan; Firth, Modern History in Oxford, 47; Soffer, Discipline and Power, 109–10.
114 For the seminar’s participants and their division of labour see The Survey of the Honour of Denbigh, ed. Vinogradoff and Morgan, vi–vii. Their rigorous comparative approach contrasts with that of the lawyer J. W. Willis-Bund, whose introduction to the 1326 extent of episcopal estates he edited mainly just summarized and tabulated the survey’s contents: The Black Book of St. David’s, ed. Willis-Bund, i–cxi.
115 The Survey of the Honour of Denbigh, ed. Vinogradoff and Morgan, xvii, xlvi, lxxxvii, xcvii–cxvi, quotation at c. Earlier discussion of some of these issues, referring to the Welsh laws and extents and to Seebohm’s work, in Vinogradoff, The Growth of the Manor, ch. 1.
116 The Survey of the Honour of Denbigh, ed. Vinogradoff and Morgan, xcvii; Lees is identified as the author of this part of the Introduction at vi. Cf. Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, v.
117 Edward Arthur Lewis, The Mediaeval Boroughs of Snowdonia; Ralph A. Griffiths, ‘Venturing into the “Jungle” ’, 203–4; Matthew Frank Stevens, The Economy of Medieval Wales, 3, 40, 54–5.
118 Edward A. Lewis, ‘The Decay of Tribalism’; E. A. Lewis, ‘The Development of Industry and Commerce’; Edward Arthur Lewis, The Mediaeval Boroughs of Snowdonia; Edward A. Lewis, ‘A Contribution to the Commercial History’.
119 Edward A. Lewis, ‘The Decay of Tribalism’, 2–3, 34, 48; E. A. Lewis, ‘The Development of Industry and Commerce’, 121, 128, 133 (quotation), 135–6, 155–6; Edward Arthur Lewis, The Mediaeval Boroughs of Snowdonia, 21–2.
120 E. A. Lewis, ‘The Development of Industry and Commerce’, 146. See also Edward A. Lewis, ‘A Contribution to the Commercial History’, 185; Pryce, ‘The Normans in Welsh History’, 15–16.
121 Sondheimer, ‘Skeel, Caroline Anne James’; Ralph A. Griffiths, ‘Venturing into the “Jungle” ’, 203–4.
122 Skeel, The Council in the Marches.
123 Neil Evans, ‘Finding a New Story’, 160.
124 Robert Thomas Jenkins, ‘Williams, William Llewelyn’.
125 W. Llewelyn Williams, The Making of Modern Wales, quotation at vii. Much of the argument first appeared in W. Llewelyn Williams, ‘The Union of England and Wales’; W. Llewelyn Williams, ‘The King’s Court of Great Sessions in Wales’.
126 W. Llewelyn Williams, The Making of Modern Wales, 8–28, 65–86, quotation at 23. Cf. Owen M. Edwards, Wales, 318–20. The economic benefits of legal equality were stressed by E. A. Lewis, ‘The Development of Industry and Commerce’, 173.
127 W. Llewelyn Williams, The Making of Modern Wales, 7–9, 11, 18–22, 26–7, quotations at 11, 27.
128 W. Llewelyn Williams, ‘Welsh Catholics on the Continent’; cf. W. Llewelyn Williams, The Making of Modern Wales, 195–258.
129 Thomas Richards, ‘Shankland, Thomas’; Merfyn Bassett, Thomas Shankland: Hanesydd, esp. 19–29.
130 Beriah Gwynfe Evans, Diwygwyr Cymru; Millward, ‘Beriah Gwynfe Evans’, 181–2.
131 Shankland, ‘ “Diwygwyr Cymru” Beriah Gwynfe Evans’, quotations at 268, 269. The final part of the review appeared in January 1904.
132 E.g. Stephen W. Williams, The Cistercian Abbey of Strata Florida; Birch, A History of Margam Abbey; Pritchard, Cardigan Priory.
133 Palmer, ‘The Portionary Churches’; Willis Bund, The Celtic Church of Wales, quotation at 509; Robert Thomas Jenkins, ‘Willis-Bund (formerly Willis), John William’.
134 Willis-Bund, The Celtic Church of Wales, vi, 514–15.
135 Newell, A History of the Welsh Church, ix (quotation), 387, 409–19; Lawrence Thomas, ‘Newell, Ebenezer Josiah’. See also T. J. Jones, The Church in Wales Not Alien, and Newell, A Popular History of the Ancient British Church, 31, which maintained that the ‘proper representative’ of ‘the ancient British Church’ was ‘to be found in the Church of Wales at the present day, and not in either the Church of Rome or any of the Protestant Nonconformist bodies’. For a Roman Catholic rebuttal of Willis-Bund see de Hirsch-Davies, Catholicism in Mediæval Wales.
136 Baring-Gould and Fisher, The Lives of the British Saints.
137 Hugh Williams, ‘Some Aspects of the Christian Church in Wales’, 56–7. Critical assessment of one continental scholar in Hugh Williams, ‘Heinrich Zimmer on the History of the Celtic Church’.
138 Gildas, ed. Williams, quotation at vii; Hugh Williams, ‘Some Aspects of the Christian Church in Wales’, 119 (comparisons).
139 Hugh Williams, Christianity in Early Britain, quotation at 439. Chapters II and VII deal respectively with ‘Legendary Accounts of the Coming of Christianity’ and ‘Erroneous Early and Mediaeval Views’.
140 Hugh Williams, Christianity in Early Britain, 438–45, 479–80, quotation at 439.
141 This section largely follows Pryce, Lloyd.
142 Tout, Review of Lloyd, HW, 132.
143 R. R. Davies, ‘Lloyd, Sir John Edward’.
144 Explicit statement of this view in J. E. Lloyd, ‘A History Course’, 5, cited in Chapter 13.
145 Pryce, Lloyd, 58.
146 John Edward Lloyd, ‘Taith Archesgobol’, 56. See also J. E. Lloyd, ‘Ffurfiad y Genedl Gymreig’, 265–6.
147 Pryce, Lloyd, 81, 206.
148 J. E. Lloyd, ‘Ffurfiad y Genedl Gymreig’, 264.
149 Lloyd, HW, 1: vi.
150 Lloyd, HW, 1: v.
151 Tout, Review of Lloyd, HW, 131; Pryce, Lloyd, 99–100, 104–8.
152 Pryce, Lloyd, 109.
153 Pryce, ‘The Normans in Welsh History’, 13–14.
154 Dawkins, Early Man in Britain, 340; Pryce, Lloyd, 124–5.
155 Lloyd, HW, 1: 30.
156 Lloyd, HW, 1: 15 and n. 47; cf. John Beddoe, The Races of Britain.
157 Lloyd, HW, 1: 47–90; Pryce, Lloyd, 129–30.
158 Lloyd, HW, 1: 84–7, quotation at 84.
159 In England, this owed much to the influence of German legal history: Burrow, A Liberal Descent, 119–25; Kuper, ‘The Rise and Fall of Maine’s Patriarchal Society’, 104–5.
160 Cited in Pryce, Lloyd, 137.
161 Lloyd, HW, 2: 611.
162 HBC, 2: 158–65, quotation at 158.
163 Lloyd, HW, 2: 605. Cf. John Edward Lloyd, ‘History of Wales’, 342.
164 Lloyd, HW, 2: 375, 402, 427–33, 442–6.
165 Compare HW, 2: 682–93, with Owen M. Edwards, Wales, 147–50.
166 J. E. Lloyd, ‘Wales: The Land and its People’, esp. 365.
167 Lloyd, HW, 1: 283; cf. Edward A. Lewis, ‘The Decay of Tribalism’, 13–15.
168 J. E. Lloyd, ‘Wales: The Land and its People’, 361–2.
169 Pryce, Lloyd, 151–68.
170 Lloyd, HW, 2: 646; Pryce, Lloyd, 164–5.
171 Lloyd, HW, 1: 308.
172 Lloyd, HW, 1: 283–4.
173 Lloyd, HW, 1: 293–7, 302–3, 308, 311–17.
174 Pryce, Lloyd, 160. Cf. Burrow, A Liberal Descent, 139–47; Baár, Historians and Nationalism, 210–11, 215–19.
175 Lloyd, HW, 1: 338–43, quotation at 343; 2: 531–5.
176 Lloyd, HW, 2: 357–71, quotation at 371; similar assessment in J. E. Lloyd, ‘Wales and the Coming of the Normans’, 123.
177 Lloyd, HW, 2: 462, 480, 487.
178 Lloyd, HW, 2: 764.
179 Cf. Geary, The Myth of Nations, 15.
180 Pryce, Lloyd, 85, 87–9.
181 For national historians of central and eastern Europe who similarly supported forms of autonomy short of an independent nation-state (before the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918) see Baár, Historians and Nationalism, 9–10, 33–4, 293; R. J. W. Evans, ‘National Historiography’, 43–4.
182 Cf. Grafton, The Footnote, esp. 73–86, 132–43.
183 Woolf, A Global History of History, 364–74.
184 Cf. Broun, ‘A Forgotten Anniversary’.