13
Addressing students of the Cambrian Society at Jesus College, Oxford in May 1921, Alfred Zimmern, professor of international politics at Aberystwyth, expressed his concern that the Welsh ‘national movement of to-day’ was too backward-looking, carrying the risk that ‘the designation “Welsh” should cease to stand for what is living and progressive in the national life and come to denote something venerable, archaic, and Druidical’.1 In particular, he was ‘alarmed by the relative abundance of works dealing with the past’ among the Welsh-language volumes he had seen ‘on the shelves of the country folk in whom the national tradition is most alive’.2 If these criticisms were aimed primarily at popular adherence to legendary accounts of Welsh history, many historians of Wales might have agreed. But there was a widespread consensus that the scholarly study and teaching of the Welsh past were entirely compatible with, if not indeed essential to, aspirations for a ‘living and progressive’ Wales undergoing major transformations with the eclipse of the Liberal Party by the Labour Party, the growth of militant socialism in the south Wales valleys and gradual decline of Nonconformist chapels, a large-scale transfer of land from the landed gentry to their erstwhile tenants, and the prolonged economic depression, resulting in high unemployment and substantial emigration, of the inter-war years.3 Economic depression prompted reflections on the industrial past of Wales as well as its future prospects as a nation, prospects threatened further in some eyes by the impact of the Second World War on Welsh-speaking communities.4 In addition, the notion of a unified Wales, and thus of a history of Wales, was problematized by an awareness of the divisions between what Zimmern called ‘Welsh Wales’ and ‘industrial, or…American Wales’ in the south-east, both of which differed from ‘upper-class or English Wales’.5
These concerns help to explain why the professionalization of Welsh history in this period was closely linked to efforts to make it more accessible. From the 1920s writers commented on the need to cater for a broad constituency encompassing scholars, research students, school teachers, and ‘those (of whom our country is justly proud) who with little or no academic training display in the Extra-Mural classes, the Eisteddfod, and the periodical literature of Wales a keen interest in the national history’.6 The quotation comes from the preface to a bibliography of works on Welsh history in 1931, one of several new initiatives taken to place the field on sound foundations; significantly, over twice as many items appear in the second edition, containing publications down to 1958.7 The bulk of the bibliography was divided into a series of chronological sections, from ‘Ancient Wales to 400 A.D.’ to ‘The Nineteenth Century’, reflecting an assumption that the history of Wales fell into a sequence of periods and thus possessed a unity extending from the Palaeolithic to the industrial age.8 To a greater extent than before, the long-established idea that Welsh history was something that had happened primarily in the centuries down to the Edwardian conquest had been substantially revised by transforming later centuries from attenuated postscripts to integral parts of a continuing story.
Nevertheless, if there was general agreement that the history of Wales extended from the prehistoric past to the twentieth century, opinions differed regarding both the relative significance of particular periods and the most appropriate frameworks for their study. Broadly speaking, opinion was divided between those who adhered to the long-established emphasis on the ancient and medieval past, especially down to 1282, as being essential to understanding the distinctiveness of Wales and those who argued that greater emphasis should be placed on the making of a modern industrial Wales. Increasing attention to the post-medieval centuries in turn helped to sustain the view that ‘[t]he writing of the history of Wales will become increasingly a social and economic inquiry’, a reaction to the privileging of political history paralleled elsewhere in the postwar period, most famously amongst the Annales historians in France.9 In assessing these differing approaches the following discussion distinguishes between two broad categories: interpretations that continued the long-established framing of Welsh history primarily in terms of political or ecclesiastical and religious history and those that prioritized analysis of the economy and society.10 First, though, it is necessary to outline some of the contexts, both institutional and individual, in which this historical writing took place.
Contexts: The Academy and Beyond
Two related initiatives occurred at the end of the era of Liberal dominance, as the reforms to the University of Wales recommended by the Haldane Commission of 1916–17 included the establishment of a University of Wales Press and a Board of Celtic Studies to co-ordinate research and publication on ‘Celtic Studies in Wales’, specified as Welsh language and literature, history, and archaeology and art. The creation of the Board (1919–2007), together with its Bulletin (1921–93), marked an important step in securing institutional support and recognition for Welsh history as an academic subject.11 The Board’s history and law committee reinforced the focus on unpublished manuscripts and records in the study of medieval and early modern Wales pioneered in London (Hubert Hall was co-opted as a member) by helping to embed this in the University of Wales, especially through publishing editions of primary sources in the Bulletin and in a ‘History and Law Series’ whose first volume appeared in 1929—a calendar of sixteenth-century records compiled by O. M. Edwards’s son Ifan ab Owen Edwards, who continued his father’s commitment to education and national revival as an extramural studies lecturer and founder of Urdd Gobaith Cymru (the Welsh League of Youth).12 One of the chief instigators of the Board was J. E. Lloyd, who had urged the need for scholarly collaboration in the field of Welsh history over the previous decade, and served as the Board’s first chairman until 1940 and as the first editor of the Bulletin’s history and law section.13 At the individual university colleges research on the history of Wales was undertaken in MA theses, while the establishment of separate departments of Welsh history at Aberystwyth, Cardiff, and Bangor in 1930–1, accompanied by the creation of chairs of Welsh history at the first two colleges, provided additional institutional support and recognition for the field.14
The University of Wales Press, subsidized by grants from the university and other sources, provided an important new outlet for publications on the history of Wales, both works of research and books in Welsh for the reading public ‘similar in form and content to the Home University Library’ (a series launched by Oxford University Press in 1911 providing concise accounts of a wide range of topics by experts in their fields).15 Like the University of Wales’s commitment to extramural education, the Welsh-language volumes brought out by the press (as well as by other publishers) were intended to bring the findings of academic scholarship to a wider audience; moreover, their synthesizing purpose was particularly conducive to attempting broad overviews and fresh interpretations of the history of Wales. These mainly dealt with particular periods or themes: R. T. Jenkins’s account of eighteenth-century Wales, discussed later in this chapter, is a case in point.16 By contrast, new surveys of the whole of Welsh history comparable to O. M. Edwards’s 1901 Wales were few and brief, the most substantial being a two-volume collection of radio talks,17 while works on the history of Britain or England providing substantial coverage of Wales were exceptional.18 In addition, new books were published, in both English and Welsh, for children and their teachers in order to try and counteract the continuing tendency ‘to concentrate almost exclusively on English history, with the history of Wales brought in…as an appendix to it’.19 If Welsh history became more firmly established in this period as an academic field with its own specialized publications, much writing on the subject continued to be produced for educated readers outside the academy in common with history writing in Britain more generally until the 1960s.20 Professionalization thus co-existed with and indeed helped to nurture the writing of Welsh history within the wider literary culture of the two languages of Wales.
The majority of writers of Welsh history were men who had studied history at university, especially in Wales, often having benefited, like O. M. Edwards, from the social mobility facilitated by the new educational opportunities available from the late nineteenth century.21 However, only some of these were employed in universities. Although staff in university history departments, together with scholars in other disciplines, notably economics, anthropology, and geography, accounted for a substantial share of publications, they belonged to a wider constellation of writers—many, but not all, university-educated—including school teachers, staff in teacher-training colleges, and adult education tutors.22 Moreover, while the latter mostly wrote works for school children and adult education classes, some published more specialized studies originating as Master’s theses or eisteddfod essays; conversely, as elsewhere in Britain, university-based historians published general works for the educated public in addition to monographs, critical editions of sources, and articles in learned journals aimed at scholars. As in previous centuries, clergy formed another category of amateur scholars, including the Anglican A. W. Wade-Evans (1875–1964), author of numerous works on the medieval Welsh Church and on post-Roman and early medieval England and Wales, and editor of a text of Welsh law and of Latin Lives of Welsh saints.23
Women remained marginal in this overwhelmingly male world, their relationship with the historical profession resembling that of female scholars more generally from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries.24 Very few female historians of Wales held university positions. Caroline Skeel (1872–1951), discussed in Chapter 12, who turned to economic history in the years before she retired from her chair at Westfield College, London in 1929, was a rare exception, reflecting the advantages of her wealthy middle-class family background in London, education at Girton College, Cambridge, and doctoral study at the LSE, advantages shared with other female economic historians of the early decades of the twentieth century.25 Little had changed by the end of the 1950s to judge by the inclusion of only two women among the thirty-eight contributors to a radio series on the history of Wales: Rachel Bromwich, a lecturer in Celtic languages and literature at Cambridge who would shortly publish her magnum opus, an edition of the medieval Welsh triads, and Mary Clement, an Aberystwyth education lecturer and historian of the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK) in Wales.26 True, women outside the academy also published work on Welsh history, some of which originated in MA theses, while a history of nineteenth-century Anglesey by Elizabeth Williams, who graduated in English from Bangor in 1906, was a revised version of an eisteddfod essay.27 In addition, Mary Salmon, a member of the Women’s Freedom League, who wrote an MA thesis on the medieval noble William Marshal and taught at the women’s teacher-training college in Swansea where her father was principal, published an anthology of translated sources relating mainly to medieval Wales for use in schools.28 Other female authors published historical novels and children’s books on Welsh history.29 Nevertheless, even outside the academy Welsh history writing was still predominantly a male pursuit, and it was only from the 1980s that female scholars began to make a distinctive mark on its content through their work on women’s history (see Chapter 14).
Among the men who dominated academic Welsh history, J. E. Lloyd, who retired as professor of history at Bangor in 1930, remained an active and influential father figure almost until his death in June 1947.30 His younger contemporaries included his successor A. H. Dodd (1891–1975), who in his youth had known A. N. Palmer in Wrexham, and the scholars appointed respectively to head newly created departments of Welsh history at Aberystwyth, Cardiff, and Bangor in 1930–1, namely E. A. Lewis (1880–1940) and William Rees (1887–1978), both of whom had written doctoral theses at the LSE, and R. T. Jenkins (1881–1969), a graduate of Aberystwyth and Cambridge who had been a grammar-school history teacher since 1904, first in Brecon (where he taught William Rees), then Cardiff.31 Another was the medievalist J. Goronwy Edwards (1891–1976), the son of a railway signalman and miner’s daughter who was brought up in Flintshire and read history at Oxford before writing a Master’s thesis supervised by Tout at Manchester on Edward I’s settlement in Wales (1915), which led, after war service, to an academic career in England, first at Oxford (1919–48) and then as director of the Institute of Historical Research (IHR) in London (1948–60).32 Edwards’s contemporary James Conway Davies (1891–1971), who studied at Aberystwyth, Cardiff, and Cambridge, also worked on medieval English as well as Welsh history but followed a different career path, holding appointments as an archivist and palaeographer in various institutions, which helps to explain why much of his research on medieval Wales consisted of the publication and analysis of documentary sources.33 In the Welsh university colleges a younger generation also began to make its mark from the 1930s. David Williams (1900–78), the son of a tenant farmer in Pembrokeshire, became a highly influential historian of modern Wales: after reading history at Cardiff, he spent several years as a grammar-school teacher interspersed by research fellowships in Paris, Berlin, and New York before returning to his old college as a lecturer in history in 1930; he subsequently held the chair of Welsh history at Aberystwyth (1945–67).34 His contemporaries included Glyn Roberts (1904–62), a student of Lloyd and Dodd at Bangor whose publications included studies of Welsh borough and parliamentary history, and who succeeded R. T. Jenkins to the chair of Welsh history in 1949, and the medievalist T. Jones Pierce (1905–64), a graduate of Liverpool University who taught medieval history at Bangor (1930–45) before moving to Aberystwyth as Special Lecturer in Medieval Welsh History, being promoted to Research Professor in 1948.35
Old Themes Revisited: Political and Ecclesiastical History
As we shall see, Jones Pierce exemplified the increasing interest in social and economic history that marked a significant shift in the focus of historians’ attention over the four decades from 1920, a shift that also owed much to scholars in other disciplines, notably economics and geography, and underpinned the increasing body of work on the modern history of Wales from the later eighteenth century onwards. However, Jones Pierce also wrote about political and ecclesiastical history—a reminder that, important though it was, the increasing attention given to economic and social history in this period belonged to a wider body of historiographical endeavour animated by both the old and the new.36 Of course, these different approaches overlapped rather than being entirely distinct from each other. Nevertheless, the differences between them are sufficient to warrant treating work focused primarily on political and ecclesiastical developments separately from that which placed society and the economy centre stage.
Although Welsh history writing in the period covered by this chapter evinced a decisive weakening of previous assumptions that medieval Welsh history was fundamental, if not tantamount, to the history of Wales as a whole, the Middle Ages continued to attract considerable attention from historians. If the death of Llywelyn in 1282 had lost something of its iconic significance as a definitive turning-point in the history of the Welsh, the persistence of the notion that ‘modern Wales’ began with Henry Tudor’s accession to the English throne in 1485 implied that the medieval centuries remained an essential part of the story.37 True, by 1900 historians had come to recognize that the eighteenth century was crucial to the making of modern Wales, thanks to the Methodist revival and the beginnings of large-scale industrialization, a view encapsulated in J. E. Lloyd’s declaration in his 1930 History of Wales, an eighty-page overview from prehistory to the early twentieth century, that ‘[t]he Wales of Victoria differed as widely from that of Queen Anne as did the latter from the Britain of Boudicca’.38 This was reflected in Lloyd’s devoting a third of his chronological coverage to the period from the Methodist revival, a substantial increase on the 4 per cent that O. M. Edwards had allocated to the period 1730–1894 a generation earlier (see Chapter 12). Yet Lloyd divided his coverage at 1485, reflecting his long-held conviction that, if medieval history was abandoned, ‘the core of Welsh history must vanish also; no nation can less afford than ours to be explained in terms of the nineteenth century; we cannot sacrifice Arthur and St. David and the two Llywelyns and Owain Glyn Dwr [sic] to the Wales which was the product of the industrial revolution’.39
Historians writing about medieval Wales inevitably did so in Lloyd’s shadow.40 One strand elaborated on aspects of the 1911 History’s political narrative, another on aspects of medieval Welsh history that had largely fallen outside Lloyd’s remit, including social and economic history, discussed in the next section. With respect to political history, considerable energy was devoted to reassessing the age of the thirteenth-century princes, marking a further refurbishment of what continued to be regarded as a key moment in the history of Wales. One prominent theme from the 1940s onwards was the nature of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd’s Principality of Wales, recognized by the English crown in 1267, and Anglo-Welsh relations in the thirteenth century, as scholars assessed how far the principality was organized on ‘feudal’ lines and who was to blame for the breakdown of relations between the prince and Edward I that led to the conquest.41 For example, T. Jones Pierce broke new ground in a lecture at Bangor in January 1945 which, as well as supporting J. G. Edwards’s constitutional emphasis on Llywelyn’s creation of ‘feudal’ bonds with subordinate princes and lords, highlighted the readiness of the thirteenth-century princes, aided and abetted by Welsh lawyers, to imitate their ‘feudal’ neighbours in England in order to modernize society and government within Gwynedd itself. Thus, he concluded, by the wars of 1277 and 1282 ‘Welsh Wales…had developed in every direction all the characteristics of a feudal state in miniature’—an affirmation of medieval Welsh statehood that appealed to Plaid Cymru, which first published the lecture in a volume entitled The Historical Basis of Welsh Nationalism.42 By contrast, only limited forays were made into the later Middle Ages, with work on the administrative and legal structures established after the Edwardian conquest, introductions to editions of sources, and Lloyd’s 1931 volume on Owain Glyndŵr, presented as a successor of the thirteenth-century princes who had loomed large in the final parts of the 1911 History.43
Apart from the coverage in J. W. James’s concise overview of Welsh ecclesiastical history from the Roman period to 1940, work on the Church in medieval Wales was mostly specialized in nature, ranging in scope from post-Roman and early medieval developments that reflected the well-established places of the ‘age of the saints’ and the ‘Celtic Church’ in the historiography of Wales to various aspects of Welsh ecclesiastical history in the high Middle Ages.44 A notable example was James Conway Davies’s lengthy introduction to two volumes of documents that provided the most wide-ranging account hitherto of the Church in Wales from the late eleventh to late thirteenth centuries. Davies traced major developments in the reorganization of the secular church and examined various other topics, though his overall interpretation resembled that of Lloyd by emphasizing the role of the Normans in effecting ecclesiastical change while insisting that ‘national and local divergencies persisted’.45 Davies also contributed to a varied body of writing on the religious orders in high and late medieval Wales, which included volumes published in 1947 on the military orders by William Rees and on the Welsh Cistercian monasteries by the Irish American historian Jeremiah F. O’Sullivan (1902–74) of Fordham University, New York.46
Of course, writing on the medieval Church also threw light on political history, such were the close ties between religion and secular power throughout the Middle Ages. The same was true of the early modern period, as shown by the prolific writings on Welsh Puritanism by Thomas Richards (1878–1962), university librarian at Bangor, and by Glanmor Williams’s publications from the later 1940s on the Protestant Reformation in Wales, the first fruits of his major contribution to this field—and to early modern Welsh history more generally—over the following five decades.47 Work on political history continued to focus on the governmental framework established by Henry VIII. Particularly striking was the breakdown of the consensus, originating in Elizabethan times and enthusiastically endorsed as recently as 1919 by the Liberal lawyer and politician W. Llewelyn Williams, that the Acts of Union were largely beneficial to Wales, notwithstanding reservations about their effects on the Welsh language (see Chapter 12). From the early 1920s a number of Welsh scholars argued, by contrast, that the benefits conferred by the legislation were outweighed by its damaging assault on both Welsh nationality and the common people of Wales, a challenge to received opinion acknowledged by J. Frederick Rees, who proposed a more nuanced view that interpreted the Acts of Union in the context of their own time, a line also taken by William Rees and his pupil David Williams.48 A readiness to probe deeper into early modern governance was also seen in Penry Williams’s study of the Council in the Marches in the Elizabethan period as well as in A. H. Dodd’s pioneering explorations of local and parliamentary politics in early modern Wales.49
Disentangling the religious and the political (and both from the social and economic) proved all the more difficult once historians turned their gaze to the modern Wales that was created from the later eighteenth century onwards. R. T. Jenkins was unusual among his contemporaries in making religion and, to a lesser extent, politics the main framework for interpreting the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Jenkins occupied a singular position among writers of Welsh history in this period. Although he had studied history at university, he had performed better in English, and turned himself into a historian while employed as a grammar-school history teacher for a quarter of a century before his appointment as head of the newly created department of Welsh history at Bangor in 1930 at the age of forty-eight.50 In addition, he was one of the few authors discussed in this chapter who appears in histories of Welsh literature, representing a late instance of the centuries-long integration of Welsh history writing within a broader Welsh-language literary culture.51 Indeed, Jenkins came to prominence as a historian in the pages of Y Llenor, the quarterly founded in 1922 by his next-door neighbour W. J. Gruffydd, professor of Welsh at Cardiff, who encouraged him to contribute essays to this platform for new kinds of creative writing and thinking in Welsh.52 His lucid and engaging literary style, rooted in the spoken language, gave him a distinctive voice that pronounced, with seeming ease and informality, on a wide range of topics, reflecting a breadth and depth of reading as well as a delight in delineating the character of individuals and places, especially towns, both in Wales and beyond—a confirmed Francophile, he also wrote extensively about France. As an essayist with a talent for haute vulgarisation or belles lettres, Jenkins saw history writing as a literary art, a view reflected in his observation that, if he had an ideal as a historian, it was ‘to try and write History something like [G. M.] Trevelyan’, as well as in his dismay at those history books whose turgid style stemmed from an apparent ambition ‘to imitate the British Pharmocopoeia’.53 Like Trevelyan, Jenkins believed that the writing of history required literary skill and imagination and should be aimed at the educated public.54
Yet, while having little time for the assumption in some quarters that austerity of expression was an essential attribute of truly rigorous professional history, Jenkins stressed the importance of expanding research on Welsh history and contributed to its professionalization, not only as head of a university department dedicated to the field but also, for example, as co-editor of the first academic bibliography of the subject, author of a monograph on the Moravian Brethren, and co-author of a history of the Cymmrodorion and other Welsh societies in London (all works published in English).55 As these and other works demonstrate, Jenkins’s scholarship was both deep and exact: attention to empirical detail mattered just as much as a precise and engaging literary style. Yet he had reservations about professional history to judge by his dismissal of the idea that history was a science, by the avowedly selective and ‘ad hoc’ use of primary sources which ‘leaves much to be desired, from the truly scientific standpoint’ in his work on the Moravian Brethren, and by the paucity and brevity of his articles in the Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies compared with the steady stream of essays and reviews he contributed to Y Llenor and other Welsh-language periodicals.56 Even after his appointment to a university position, Jenkins sought to reach beyond the academy and ensure that an educated Welsh-speaking public could also benefit from the highest scholarly standards at a time when ‘[m]ore people than ever before are reading Welsh’.57 A prime example of this is his work for the dictionary of national biography, commissioned by the Cymmrodorion and first published in Welsh, which he co-edited and helped bring to completion as well as contributing more than 600 entries.58 That over a thousand copies were sold within a few weeks of its publication in 1953 is testimony to the demand for Welsh history among educated readers of Welsh in this period that Jenkins sought to satisfy.59
The same was true of Jenkins’s first book: Hanes Cymru yn y Ddeunawfed Ganrif (‘The History of Wales in the Eighteenth Century’), the first volume to appear in the University of Wales Press’s Cyfres y Brifysgol a’r Werin (‘The University and the People Series’).60 This was an immediate success, being reprinted four times within three years of its original publication in 1928.61 Jenkins described it as a synthesis that ‘sought to draw a clear picture…of the main elements of Welsh life in the eighteenth century, as I saw them’—an important rider acknowledging the work’s personal and provisional nature, reinforced by the assertion that, ‘if the study of history in Wales is in a healthy condition, this small volume should be completely worthless in five years…at least as far as the facts are concerned’.62 As the reference to ‘Welsh life’ implies, Jenkins took a wide-ranging approach, declaring that eighteenth-century Wales experienced ‘four great revolutions’, three originating from outside the principality—‘an awakening in education, an awakening in religion and…the “Industrial Revolution” ’—while ‘the fourth, the most remarkable in many respects…was native, namely the rebirth of the Welsh language and literature and tradition’. The opening and closing chapters sought to convey many of those changes in contrasting sketches of the society, economy, and culture of Wales in the times of two prominent literary figures: the Anglican prose writer Ellis Wynne (1670/1–1734) and the popular dramatist and poet Thomas Edwards (1739–1810), better known as Twm o’r Nant. However, at first sight Jenkins seems to have devoted disproportionate attention to his second ‘revolution’, as the remaining three chapters dealt in turn with the Church of England, Dissent, and Methodism, prompting one contemporary to quip that the book should really have been entitled ‘The History of the Methodist Revival with some comments on the woollen industry’.63
No doubt the privileging of religious developments partly reflected the interests of a scholar who subsequently became a leading authority on Nonconformity and Methodism in eighteenth-century Wales, and was facilitated by the large body of previous work on Welsh religious history.64 But his choice of thematic structure was driven above all, not by a belief that religion mattered more than everything else, still less by his being a chapel-going Calvinistic Methodist, but rather by a conviction that religious developments had a transformative impact on the Welsh people that went far beyond the sphere of religion—an impact that ran counter to some of the fundamental causes and characteristics of the Methodist revival, above all its highly charged emotionalism.65 For Jenkins, the religious changes he charted had ultimately made the Welsh more enlightened, not more emotional, reflecting a sceptical and rational outlook shared by other Welsh writers in the inter-war period. The same outlook informed his admiration of the Methodist theologian and intellectual Lewis Edwards and his impatience with Romantic Celticism.66 Little wonder that the chapters on religion discuss aspects of education, another of the ‘great changes’ Jenkins identified.67 Most significantly, he maintained that
it would not have been possible…for the best things in today’s Wales to exist…if it was not for the Methodist Revival…It took hold of a dumb nation—it made it vociferous…It took hold of a thoughtless nation; it taught it seriousness…It took hold of a nation carefree in its joy and its sorrow; it shook it to the depths of its nature; it opened its eyes, it made its ear sharper…of all the paradoxes of the Methodist Revival…I wonder whether the greatest is this—that it was not chiefly in the world of religion that it was most effective?68
One of its paradoxical effects, Jenkins maintained, was political: to help ‘turn the Tory Wales of 1700 into the Radical Wales of 1900’.69 He explored an important stage in this change in a subsequent volume on Wales from 1789 to 1843, which focused on the development of political consciousness and framed the discussion around the ideologies of conservatism and liberalism as articulated especially in the growing Welsh periodical press—an approach also taken by Thomas Evans, headmaster of Cardigan County School, in his 1936 study of Welsh politics in the same period, based on an MA thesis supervised by E. A. Lewis at Aberystwyth.70 But Jenkins (like Evans) emphasized the religious underpinnings of these ideologies, and included extensive coverage of religion within his overarching political framework. Furthermore, Jenkins pursued this theme into the latter part of the nineteenth century in an article that noted the crucial role played by Welsh Nonconformist Radicalism in the political nationalism articulated by the Liberal party, most totemically in calls for the disestablishment of the Church of England in Wales.71
However, there is a further significant aspect to Jenkins’s treatment of religion in his book on the eighteenth century. As Jenkins noted, most writing about Welsh Nonconformity had been ‘from a denominational standpoint…until very recently’.72 He, by contrast, adopted the stance of a dispassionate secular historian seeking to strike a balanced view of religious developments, an approach anticipated earlier in the century by the Baptist Thomas Shankland (see Chapter 12).73 Jenkins may have suggested that the Methodist leader Howel Harris ‘was the greatest Welshman of the century’, but he left the reader in no doubt about Harris’s faults.74 Fundamental to this approach was an acute sensitivity to the otherness of the past. Accordingly, Jenkins (again like Trevelyan) insisted that historians should try to avoid justifying ideological positions in the present through an ‘appeal to history’, as he put it in a 1924 essay reacting against the approach of his younger contemporary W. Ambrose Bebb (1894–1955), a teacher-training lecturer in Bangor and prolific Welsh-language author whose works included six textbooks for school children on the history of Wales down to the sixteenth century strongly infused by his political nationalism.75 But, when it came to religion, respecting the integrity of the past entailed more than eschewing partisanship. In placing religious developments centre stage in his account of the eighteenth century Jenkins focused on an aspect of the period likely to be familiar to his intended readers: it was therefore all the more important to render it unfamiliar by creating a sense of historical distance.76 That Jenkins was conscious of how much had changed is suggested by his observation that doctrinal disputes he had explained at length to the reader had been ‘as familiar to his grandfather and grandmother as the A B C’, adding: ‘the reader’s obliviousness to these things is one of the most important differences between the Wales of today and the Wales of 1845’.77 Jenkins’s secular, demythologizing approach to religious history was probably motivated above all by a determination to offer a reading of the eighteenth century that highlighted its difference from the present and interpreted its legacy in terms consonant with his aspirations for a rational Wales in his own day.
New Approaches: I. Landscapes, Cultures, and the Remote Past
J. E. Lloyd opened his 1911 History in prehistory and drew on archaeology, physical anthropology, and philology to argue that different prehistoric peoples had contributed to the making of the Welsh. The idea that the history of Wales began in the Neolithic was commonplace throughout the period covered by this chapter, being reiterated by Lloyd (who supplied a revised synthesis of prehistory based on more recent archaeological work in the third edition of his History in 1939) and leaving its mark on general histories.78 This line of thinking gained further momentum from the ‘Aberystwyth school’ of physical anthropologists and human geographers associated with H. J. Fleure (1877–1969), a polymath whose work encompassed both the natural and the human sciences: he had taught geology, botany, and zoology at Aberystwyth for over a decade before his appointment in 1917 to the college’s newly created chair of geography and anthropology, from which he later moved to become the first professor of geography at Manchester (1930–44).79 Fleure advocated a multidisciplinary approach to the past focused on the relationship of people to landscapes, declaring in 1919 that ‘[a]nthropology, history, and geography are a trilogy to be torn asunder only with severe loss of truth of value to mankind.’80 His own extensive researches in physical anthropology, informed by his belief in ‘survivals’ from the distant past, led him—like ethnologists such as John Beddoe, whose work Lloyd had also used—to maintain that the shape of skulls and other physical characteristics of present-day populations provided evidence of descent from (mainly) prehistoric peoples. Moreover, these ancient origins also helped to explain some of the social and cultural characteristics of the Welsh in the twentieth century. Yet Fleure rejected geographical determinism, emphasizing that people shaped their environments within what he called ‘human regions’. Thus he argued that, precisely because of their isolation and poverty, Welsh rural communities had ‘retained characteristic modes of speech and modes of life with a long history’ which in turn had helped to foster a democratic culture fundamental to the making of modern Wales. Accordingly, he called on the Welsh to contribute to the modern world by understanding ‘their origins and evolution, social and economic’, by treasuring ‘their spiritual heritage’, by ‘assimilating the best of what comes from without’, and, in an anthropologized echo of Matthew Arnold’s Celticism, ‘by trying to help England caught in the reaction from her own over-development in certain directions’.81 For Fleure, as an anthropologist and geographer of strongly internationalist leanings, Wales was a land of plural ‘local cultures’, fully comprehensible only if viewed from the perspective of the longue durée and contributing to wider social and cultural enrichment in the present.82
These ideas were highly influential, having an impact, for example, on the archaeologist Cyril Fox’s distinction between highland and lowland Britain, the former characterized by cultural continuity, the latter by its vulnerability to invasions from the east and the consequent imposition of new cultures.83 Fleure’s ideas were also adapted in a Welsh context by two of his students, Emrys G. Bowen (1900–83) and Iorwerth C. Peate (1901–82). Bowen taught geography and anthropology at Aberystwyth from 1929, eventually holding the chair there (1944–68). Best known for his controversial attempts to trace the travels of early medieval Welsh saints from church dedications, Bowen also wrote a general account of the Welsh past from the perspective of human geography.84 His 1941 volume Wales: A Study in Geography and History, containing a preface by Fleure, originated in a radio series for schools and was aimed especially at school pupils and university students.85 Bowen declared that his book sought ‘to reconstruct… the cultural landscape of Wales at various periods in the past’, following his Aberystwyth colleague Daryll Forde’s privileging of human agency in the creation of landscapes.86 Accordingly the bulk of the book presents a series of ‘period-pictures of…economic, social and political conditions’ from the Iron Age to ‘the industrial age’.87 One theme, strongly indebted to Fleure, is the enduring importance of a division between thinly populated moorland regions, where native traditions and the Welsh language were preserved most strongly, and the rest of Wales, including the increasingly Anglicized industrial areas of the south-east.88 For Iorwerth Peate, on the other hand, these areas were marginal, even alien, to the history of Wales, which in his view consisted above all in the continuity of a ‘folk culture’ exemplified by Welsh strict-metre poetry as well as, more controversially, by religion, with Catholicism and Calvinism representing different iterations of fatalistic attitudes that were deeply ingrained among the peasantry.89 An early expression of these views came in his 1931 book Cymru a’i Phobl (‘Wales and its People’), which owed much to Fleure in, for example, its stress on the Welsh uplands as the refuge of ancient peoples and the notion of the Welsh being a mixture of different races, some very ancient, others more recent.90 However, Peate sounded a distinctive note in his idealization of the rural craftworker (or ‘peasant-artisan’), reflecting his family background in Llanbrynmair (Montgomeryshire), where his father and grandfather were carpenters: like O. M. Edwards, Peate fashioned his image of Wales in the light of his rural upbringing.91 Peate promoted the idea of a ‘Welsh folk culture’ both in his writings and in his work at the National Museum of Wales, where he became keeper of the Department of Folk Life and subsequently first curator of its Welsh Folk Museum, established at St Fagans near Cardiff in 1948 under the influence of Scandinavian models.92 In their different ways, then, Fleure, Bowen, and especially Peate promoted the idealization of rural society, whose lineaments could be traced back to prehistory, as a fundamental constituent of Welshness, an idealization that marked a wider reaction in the inter-war period against the modern industrial world.93 A related development was a series of studies by a younger generation of the ‘Aberystwyth school’ of individual Welsh rural communities. Mostly based on fieldwork in the 1940s and 1950s, these studies were notable for their attempts to explain the communities’ social relations and other characteristics in terms of historical influences ranging from medieval Welsh inheritance customs to nineteenth-century Nonconformity.94
New Approaches: II. The Economic Turn
From the end of the First World War to the 1950s economic history became an important framework for writing about the history of Welsh society. This was part of the bigger story of economic history’s establishment as an academic field in Britain, including the foundation of the Economic History Society in 1926, with a broad appeal reflected in the subject’s popularity in adult education classes.95 Historians of Wales stressed the need to take account of British and English economic history and some explicitly situated Welsh developments in a wider British context. They also acknowledged that much still needed to be done.96 Most significantly in the context of the present book, economic history complicated previous ethnically-focused narratives of Welsh history both by shifting attention to the majority of people in Wales and their material circumstances and by raising the fundamental question of how Welsh ethnic distinctiveness was maintained in a context of increasing economic integration with England.97
In important respects, this work built on trends established in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods discussed in Chapter 12, in large part because scholars who commenced work in the field in that period remained active, notably E. A. Lewis and William Rees. Lewis extended his work on commerce into the sixteenth century and Caroline Skeel turned to economic history in the 1920s in articles on the early modern Welsh woollen industry and cattle trade.98 In 1924 William Rees published an innovative study, largely based on the holdings of the Public Record Office, of the social and economic history of the marcher lordships of south Wales in the long fourteenth century, which originated in a doctoral thesis at the LSE supervised by Hubert Hall while Rees was a school teacher in London (1912–20).99 In his preface, Rees explained that the work sought, first, to make a contribution to the comparative study of ‘social evolution’, following the lead of Seebohm and Vinogradoff, and, second, to address issues of contemporary relevance, since ‘a knowledge of Welsh customs and institutions…must be the basis for a true understanding of modern Wales, its past history, its present problems and aspirations’—an assumption he shared with E. A. Lewis.100 The book falls into three parts, the longest of which, ‘The Economic Organization of the Lordships of Wales’, comprising over half the text, is framed by an introduction on ‘The Economic Aspects of the Conquest of Wales’ and a final section, ‘Pestilence and War’, assessing the impact of the Black Death and the significance of the rising of Owain Glyndŵr. Central to the study is its attention to the tenants and other social groups who worked on the land and owed rents and services to their landlords, as well as the ways in which their obligations differed according to whether they lived in manorial Englishries or ‘tribal’ Welshries, ethnic divisions Rees clearly delineated on a pioneering map that won plaudits from Marc Bloch.101 But his focus on economic developments also led Rees to play down the significance of conquest and English royal policy as well as political resistance to these by arguing that ‘the dissolution of Welsh society is not found in the conscious action of English monarchs but in the economic changes of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries’ and that ‘[t]he burden, which Wales endeavoured to throw off in the Glyndwr [sic] revolt, was predominantly an economic one’.102 In addition, from the 1930s T. Jones Pierce demonstrated the development of money rents and indigenous urban development under the princes of Gwynedd in studies that paralleled contemporaneous work on the medieval English economy; he also analysed rural settlement, society, and land tenure, especially in north-west Wales, continuing on from the work of Seebohm and other scholars discussed in Chapter 12, and explored how these evolved from the medieval to early modern periods.103
The other main focus of Welsh social and economic history in this period was the making of modern industrial society. Individual aspects of the subject had been examined since the nineteenth century in histories of particular settlements or industries, but it was only from the 1920s that more wide-ranging studies appeared.104 A. H. Dodd’s The Industrial Revolution in North Wales (1933) was the most substantial early example, providing an extensively researched and engagingly written account of the period c.1760–c.1840 in just over 400 pages.105 Although Dodd acknowledged a ‘general indebtedness’ to the inspiration and encouragement of R. H. Tawney, whom he had first met as a schoolboy attending the latter’s adult education classes in Wrexham, his choice of period and themes, concern with quantification, and dismissal of romanticized notions of an idyllic pre-industrial past suggest closer affinities with the Cambridge economic historian John H. Clapham, the first volume of whose Economic History of Modern Britain he had read.106 (Clapham took his geographical remit seriously, including considerable coverage of Wales and setting it in a comparative context, pointing out that almost as much was spent on poor relief there as in ‘[t]he single county of Sussex’.)107 Dodd’s aim was twofold: ‘to throw new light on a neglected aspect of the Industrial Revolution’ and ‘to sketch a chapter…in the history of modern Wales’.108 The story he told was one of extensive economic change that lost momentum at a critical juncture through the failure to develop a suitable railway system in north Wales, which ‘helped to nip the Industrial Revolution in the bud’, together with a declining coal industry that increasingly paled in significance to that of south Wales, where, by contrast, industrialization advanced ‘by leaps and bounds’ from the onset of ‘the Railway Age’.109 Dodd took pains, moreover, to delineate social aspects of economic change, above all in a final chapter on ‘The Labouring Poor’ that examined the living conditions of agricultural and industrial workers (including women and children), emigration to the United States, and rural and urban revolt, including Chartism.110 The chapter also suggests that Dodd adapted the example of Clapham to his own purposes. Thus, while he covered some of the same ground as the latter’s final chapter on ‘Life and Labour in Industrial Britain’, Dodd devoted more space to Chartism and other popular movements, reflecting his greater readiness to address social issues. He also differed from Clapham by paying attention to religion and culture, notably the impact of Methodism, a movement that writers of Welsh history since the late nineteenth century had coupled with the industrial revolution as crucial to the making of modern Wales. Indeed, Dodd ended his book by declaring that chapels, with their ‘stern individualist creed’, helped to endow the worker with ‘self-respect and confidence’ and offered him ‘an escape…into realms of spiritual fellowship and ecstatic song—almost his only taste of culture, and his earliest training in self-government’—a conclusion that tempered Tawney’s Christian socialist critique of capitalism with O. M. Edwards’s celebration of the Nonconformist gwerin.111 And, like other Welsh economic historians, Dodd pointed up the tensions between the maintenance of ethnic distinctiveness and movements towards economic convergence: whereas Methodism ‘intensified national feeling’, economic improvement served to foster ‘assimilation with England’.112 The Welsh-speaking chapel culture of the workers was also highlighted by A. H. John (1915–78), an economic historian at the LSE, in his 1950 book on the industrial history of south Wales that was based on a Cambridge thesis supervised by Clapham; here again, economic history brought aspects of social history within its purview, be it the respectable clothing of prosperous industrial workers or the squalid living conditions of industrial towns.113
Syntheses of Welsh history published from the 1920s to 1950s varied in their receptiveness to specialized studies of economic and social developments. In part, this reflected the particular interests of individual authors. For example, in the early 1930s those studies made little impact on J. E. Lloyd’s book on Owain Glyndŵr and concise history of Wales, which remained anchored in assumptions held by their author since the Edwardian period, whereas they were indispensable to the substantial, thematically wide-ranging, and well-illustrated synthesis of medieval Welsh history by Robert Richards (1884–1954), written while a tutor in economics and political science at Coleg Harlech, the adult education college established in 1927 to provide one-year residential courses for working-class students.114 David Williams similarly integrated social and economic developments in his 1950 History of Modern Wales, including Chartism, the subject of his first major monograph a decade earlier.115
However, others went further in following through the implications of J. Frederick Rees’s assertion in 1933 that ‘the Welsh people and their achievements have somehow evaded the historians’ through a failure to give sufficient attention to ‘the economic aspect’.116 These comments came in a preface to a survey of the economic history of south Wales from prehistory to the industrial revolution, originating as an eisteddfod essay, by D. J. Davies (1893–1956), a former coalminer in Wales and north America, convert to the principles of economic co-operation after studying in Denmark, and prominent member of Plaid Cymru who had recently obtained a PhD in economics at Aberystwyth.117 Davies insisted on the need ‘to take account…of the conditions enjoyed by the workers in industry, on whose labour and skill the whole structure of economic society is built up’, a theme pursued especially in chapters on ‘The Workers and their Working Conditions’ and ‘Industry and Welfare’.118 In addition, his long chronological span served to highlight the significance of industrialization as a turning-point of unprecedented magnitude: thus he devoted almost half his coverage to the eighteenth century when industrial development began to accelerate rapidly, and observed that the modern industrial south Wales that emerged after 1800 witnessed ‘stranger and more sudden changes in the lives and environment of the population than all the millennia which had gone before’.119 By contrast, ‘there were few changes from the thirteenth century till the eve of the Industrial Revolution’.120
However, the most wide-ranging synthesis of Welsh history written from an economic perspective in this period was Ben Bowen Thomas’s 1941 Braslun o Hanes Economaidd Cymru (‘Outline of the Economic History of Wales’).121 Like Robert Richards and D. J. Davies, Thomas was a university-educated son of a working-class family; he was also one of the socialists among the founder members of Plaid Genedlaethol Cymru (the Welsh Nationalist Party) established in 1925 and closely involved with adult education, being the first warden of Coleg Harlech (1927–40; honorary warden 1940–6).122 His book is particularly significant on account of its ambitious scope and analytical cohesion. Apparently aimed primarily at adults in extramural classes, it situates its account of economic history against a backdrop of political, social, and cultural developments, making it the most original general history of Wales since that of O. M. Edwards forty years earlier.123 Like D. J. Davies, Thomas adopted a long chronological framework, extending from the origins of farming in the Neolithic revolution to the latest phase of the industrial revolution in the mining and export of coal that constituted ‘the chief feature of Wales’s economic life from 1800 to 1914’, while also highlighting the momentous changes resulting from industrialization by devoting almost half of his coverage to the long nineteenth century.124 The work focused on the common people more consistently, imagined them more capaciously, and tied them more firmly to economic realities than Edwards had in his romantic celebration of the gwerin, as Thomas sought ‘to write the history of how men in Wales earned a living and the means by which the necessary economic arrangements developed’, a materialist approach that combined a focus on the production of wealth with a keen awareness of class relations.125 One result was to offer fresh perspectives on familiar turning-points. Since it opened the way to the further development of towns and trade and the tightening of landlords’ powers over their tenants, ‘the fall of Llywelyn [in 1282] is an important event not only in the political history of Wales but also in the course of its economic history’.126 More pointedly, Thomas depicted Owain Glyndŵr, Welsh hero par excellence, as a self-interested landlord committed to maintaining the economic status quo: although supported by ‘many who suffered from the consequences of the new economic powers…if he had succeeded in establishing an independent principality it is entirely certain that he would not have hindered these influences from operating in Welsh society. Was he not, as a “baron”, part of the system, with [his court of] Sycharth sucking in the energies of many labourers?’127 Furthermore, the poets patronized by the later medieval Welsh gentry were complicit in this seignorial exploitation. Taken with the ensuing declaration that ‘the century from 1350 to 1450 is the most important in the development of landlordism in Wales’, Thomas offered a sharply contrasting perspective on cultural history from the author, literary critic, and Plaid Genedlaethol Cymru leader Saunders Lewis’s celebration almost a decade earlier of ‘The Great Century’ (Y Ganrif Fawr) from 1435 to 1535 as the crowning achievement of medieval Welsh poetry, sustained by a numerous gentry class of ‘independent and free small capitalists’ who ‘were the backbone of our civilization’.128
Thomas’s sympathetic treatment of the Rebecca rioters, Chartists, and trades unions, as well as his dismay at the way modern industry and commerce had tied ‘the life of the country’s inhabitants to the whims of global markets’, likewise reflects his determination to assess the impact of economic developments on working people.129 A similar perspective informed his understanding of national revival as a reaction to increasingly close economic ties with England expressed above all in a keen sense of social responsibility among the working class, and comprising not only the democratic and educational advances emphasized by O. M. Edwards but also improvements in the standard of living, including Lloyd George’s introduction of old age pensions and national insurance, as well as the co-operative endeavour and class conflict that propelled early twentieth-century south Wales to ‘the forefront of the social struggle’.130 Although his book seems to have had little immediate impact, a consequence probably of its publication during the Second World War (and in a language spoken by a decreasing minority of the people of Wales), Thomas thus anticipated what would become a major strand in Welsh history writing from the 1970s, as we shall see in the next chapter.
Writing Welsh History: From the Early Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century. Huw Pryce, Oxford University Press. © Huw Pryce 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198746034.003.0014
1 Zimmern, My Impressions of Wales, 34–7, quotations at 35. Cf. Markwell, ‘Zimmern, Sir Alfred Eckhard’; E. L. Ellis, The University College of Wales, 197–8, 217.
2 Zimmern, My Impressions of Wales, 36.
3 Kenneth O. Morgan, Rebirth of a Nation, chs. 7–8.
4 Depression: Brinley Thomas, ‘The Migration of Labour’, 275; Idris Jones, Modern Welsh History, 294; R. T. Jenkins, ‘The Development of Nationalism’, 174; J. F. Rees. ‘How Wales Became Industrialized’, 130. Second World War: A. H. Williams, Cymru Ddoe, prefatory note by E. Tegla Davies; D. Hywel Davies, The Welsh Nationalist Party, 231–3.
5 Zimmern, My Impressions of Wales, 28–9, quotations at 29. See also Fleure, Wales and Her People, ‘Foreword’, explaining that the pamphlet series in which the work appeared aimed to foster mutual understanding between the ‘two cultures’ of Wales, the ‘industrial and cosmopolitan’ and the ‘native’.
6 A Bibliography, ed. Jenkins and Rees, v. Similar statements in R. T. Jenkins, Hanes Cymru yn y Ddeunawfed Ganrif, iv; Thomas Evans, The Background of Modern Welsh Politics, [1].
7 A Bibliography, 2nd edn. [ed. Dodd et al.]. This lists 3,574 numbered items, compared with 1,587 in the first edition, though these figures are approximate as both volumes also include unnumbered items as well as listing multiple works under some numbers. Both editions were also highly selective: Philip Henry Jones, A Bibliography, 3rd edn., 8.
8 The second edition replaces the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the periods 1714–89 and 1789–1914.
9 J. F. Rees, ‘Foreword’, viii.
10 For Welsh historiography in this period see Dodd, ‘Welsh History and Historians’.
11 J. Gwynn Williams, The University of Wales, ch. 4, esp. 198–200.
12 Ifan ab Owen Edwards, A Catalogue of Star Chamber Proceedings; Pryce, Lloyd, 75–6. The series was discontinued after the publication of the thirty-first volume in 1981.
13 Pryce, Lloyd, 73–4.
14 J. Gwynn Williams, The University of Wales, 217–18; Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘Clio and Wales’, 127. See also E. L. Ellis, The University College of Wales, 234–5. MA theses: Pryce, Lloyd, 69–71.
15 Welsh in Education and Life, 280 (quotation); J. Gwynn Williams, The University of Wales, 199–200; Glasgow, ‘The Origins of the Home University Library’.
16 This was the first of 23 volumes in Cyfres y Brifysgol a’r Werin (‘The University and the People Series’; 1928–49) that were explicitly intended to meet this popularizing purpose: Rhidian Griffiths, ‘Cyfres y Brifysgol a’r Werin’.
17 John Edward Lloyd, A History of Wales (1930); Rhys Davies, The Story of Wales; A. H. Williams, Cymru Ddoe; Wales through the Ages, ed. Roderick. Edwards’s book was still described over four decades after its first publication as ‘the only book we have that gives a reasonably full account of the whole history of the nation’ by Jarman, ‘Beth i’w Ddarllen ar Hanes Cymru’, 25.
18 See nn. 41, 107 below; Robbins, ‘Forever a Footnote?’, 222–9.
19 Salmon, A Source-Book of Welsh History; Idris Jones, Modern Welsh History; David Williams, A Short History of Modern Wales; Irene Myrddin Davies, Welsh History, quotation at 1; Ambrose, The History of Wales. Ambrose Bebb’s books in Welsh are noticed below. See also Famous Welshmen [ed. Wheldon], a St David’s Day booklet for schoolchildren, also published in Welsh (as Cymry Enwog), used into the 1970s and giving biographies of 79 Welsh men and one woman, the hymnwriter Ann Griffiths; discussion in Philip Jenkins, A History of Modern Wales, 409. For history in schools see Wynford Davies, The Curriculum, 97–9.
20 Cannadine, ‘British History’, 170–1. See also Bentley, Modernizing England’s Past, 130–1, 142, 229.
21 In 1918 it was estimated that 75–80% of students at the University of Wales were working class, a far higher proportion than at any university in England: E. L. Ellis, The University College of Wales, 195.
22 Wales participated in the general burgeoning of adult education in early twentieth-century Britain: Fieldhouse et al., A History of Modern British Adult Education, 46–55, 166–82, 199–212; Stead, Coleg Harlech; Richard Lewis, Leaders and Teachers.
23 Emanuel, ‘The Rev. A. W. Wade-Evans’. Another Anglican scholar was J. W. James (1889–1983), chancellor of Bangor cathedral (1940–64): J. W. James, A Church History of Wales; Rhigyfarch’s Life of St. David, ed. and trans. James (on which see Sharpe, ‘Which Text is Rhygyfarch’s “Life” ’?).
24 Cf. Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Women and the World of the “Annales” ’; Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History, ch. 7.
25 Cf. Berg, ‘The First Women Economic Historians’.
26 Wales through the Ages, ed. Roderick; Morfydd E. Owen, ‘Necrologie: Rachel Sheldon Bromwich 1915–2010’; Clement, The S.P.C.K. and Wales. Nora Chadwick (1891–1972) also published on early medieval Welsh history as a lecturer in the Early History and Culture of the British Isles at Cambridge from 1950 to 1958, when she was succeeded by Kathleen Hughes: Lapidge, ‘Introduction’, 26, 28–9.
27 R. T. Jenkins and Helen M. Ramage, A History; G. Nesta Evans, Social Life in Mid-Eighteenth Century Anglesey; G. Nesta Evans, Religion and Politics in Mid-Eighteenth Century Anglesey; E. A. Williams, Hanes Môn (translated as The Day before Yesterday, with a brief account of the author and her work at 11–13).
28 Salmon, A Source-Book of Welsh History; The Cambrian, 12 November 1909, 3; ‘History Theses 1901–1970’; Wallace, The Women’s Suffrage Movement, 135–6.
29 E.g. Elizabeth Mary Davies (‘Moelona’), Storïau o Hanes Cymru: Llyfr I; Irene Myrddin Davies, Everyday Life in Wales. Book Three.
30 Pryce, Lloyd, 63–4, 74–5, 76–7.
31 Neil Evans, ‘Beyond 1282’; Peter Lambert, ‘The Institutionalization of History’, 185, 188–9; Ralph A. Griffiths, ‘Venturing into the “Jungle” ’, 203–6; Ralph Griffiths, ‘William Rees’; Llywelyn-Williams, R. T. Jenkins, esp. 14–17.
32 J. B. Smith, ‘Obituary: John Goronwy Edwards’.
33 Brief account of Davies and his work in National Library of Wales, ‘J. Conway Davies Papers’.
34 Kenneth O. Morgan, ‘Williams, David’; Ralph A. Griffiths, ‘A Bibliography of David Williams’.
35 John Gwynn Williams, ‘Roberts, Glyn’; Glyn Roberts, Aspects of Welsh History; G. R. J. Jones, ‘Professor T. Jones Pierce’; Jones Pierce, Medieval Welsh Society.
36 See below, and Jones Pierce, ‘Einion ap Ynyr (Anian II)’; Jones Pierce, Medieval Welsh Society, 391–407.
37 For 1485 as the beginning of modern Welsh history see Howell T. Evans, The Making of Modern Wales; W. Llewelyn Williams, The Making of Modern Wales; Idris Jones, Modern Welsh History; David Williams, A Short History of Modern Wales; David Williams, A History of Modern Wales; Wales through the Ages, ed. Roderick, vol. 2.
38 John Edward Lloyd, A History of Wales (1930), 53. See also Pryce, Lloyd, 86–9.
39 J. E. Lloyd, ‘A History Course’, 5.
40 I discuss this scholarship more fully in Pryce, ‘Cenedligrwydd a Chymdeithas’; Pryce, ‘The Modern Historiography of Medieval Wales’.
41 Littere Wallie, ed. Edwards, xxxvi–lxix; The Welsh Assize Roll, ed. Davies, 1–233; Powicke, King Henry III and the Lord Edward, 2: 618–85; Powicke, The Thirteenth Century, 400–30. See also the summary of these interpretations in A. D. Carr, Medieval Wales, 24–5.
42 Jones Pierce, ‘The Age of the Princes’, quotation at 59. See also Pryce, ‘Cenedligrwydd a Chymdeithas’, esp. 12–20.
43 Waters, The Edwardian Settlement; The Extent of Chirkland, ed. Jones; J. E. Lloyd, Owen Glendower.
44 J. W. James, A Church History of Wales.
45 Episcopal Acts, ed. Davies, 1: 1–232; 2: 415–606, quotation at 2: 594. Cf. Lloyd, HW, 2: 447–59, 590–604.
46 J. Conway Davies, ‘The Records of the Abbey of Ystrad Marchell’; William Rees, History of the Order of St John; O’Sullivan, Cistercian Settlements. For O’Sullivan see Donnelly, ‘Dedication’.
47 Thomas Richards, The Puritan Movement in Wales, was the first in a series of six pioneering works on this theme published over the following decade, discussed in Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘Doc Tom’, ch. 4. For Glanmor Williams see Gareth Elwyn Jones, ‘The Tudor Historian’, and bibliography in Huw Walters, ‘A Lifetime of Writing’.
48 Bebb, Cyfnod y Tuduriaid, 52–68; J. F. Rees, ‘Tudor Policy in Wales’, esp. 44–7; William Rees, ‘The Union of England and Wales’; David Williams, A History of Modern Wales, [9], 33–45. Assessments in Glanmor Williams, ‘Haneswyr a’r Deddfau Uno’, 45–54; Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘ “Taphy-land Historians” and the Union’, 20–2.
49 Penry Williams, The Council in the Marches; Dodd, Studies in Stuart Wales. For Dodd’s work on early modern Wales see Lloyd Bowen, The Politics of the Principality, 2–3.
50 John Gwynn Williams, ‘Jenkins, Robert Thomas’. Illuminating appraisals in English in Prys Morgan, ‘R. T. Jenkins’, and Llywelyn-Williams, R. T. Jenkins. Autobiography: R. T. Jenkins, Edrych yn Ôl. Bibliography: Llywelyn-Williams, ‘Llyfryddiaeth’.
51 Ambrose Bebb and Iorwerth Peate, discussed below, are two others. See Chapman, The Oxford Literary History of Wales: Volume 2, 144–5, 152, 164–5, 169, 173.
52 Chapman, W. J. Gruffydd, 73–6; Llywelyn-Williams, R. T. Jenkins, 1.
53 Dafydd Jenkins, ‘R. T. Jenkins: Maitland Cymru’, 104, quotations at 98, 101; Prys Morgan, ‘R. T. Jenkins’, 147–8; Glanmor Williams, ‘R. T.’; R. Rees Davies, ‘’Sgrifennu Hanes Cymru yn y Gymraeg’, 7. See also the stimulating assessment of Jenkins’s approach to history in Chapman, ‘Yr Apêl at Felix’.
54 Cf. Cannadine, G. M. Trevelyan, 183–96.
55 A Bibliography, ed. Jenkins and Rees; R. T. Jenkins, The Moravian Brethren in North Wales; R. T. Jenkins and Helen Ramage, A History.
56 R. T. Jenkins, ‘A Ellir Gwyddor Hanes?’; R. T. Jenkins, The Moravian Brethren in North Wales, x–xi; Llywelyn-Williams, ‘Llyfryddiaeth’.
57 Quotation: R. T. Jenkins, ‘The Development of Nationalism’, 181. For Jenkins’s commitment to adult education see Llywelyn-Williams, ‘R. T. Jenkins ac Addysg Oedolion’.
58 Y Bywgraffiadur, ed. Lloyd and Jenkins; Nuttall, ‘R. T. Jenkins’ Articles’.
59 J. Goronwy Edwards, ‘Hanesyddiaeth Gymreig’, 29.
60 R. T. Jenkins, Hanes Cymru yn y Ddeunawfed Ganrif; Llywelyn-Williams, R. T. Jenkins, 15.
61 R. T. Jenkins, Hanes Cymru yn y Ddeunawfed Ganrif (1931 edn.), v–vi. The book was reissued again in 1945 and 1972.
62 R. T. Jenkins, Hanes Cymru yn y Ddeunawfed Ganrif, iii–iv.
63 Llywelyn-Williams, R. T. Jenkins, 22.
64 R. Tudur Jones, ‘R. T. Jenkins’.
65 R. T. Jenkins, Hanes Cymru yn y Ddeunawfed Ganrif, 75–6.
66 R. T. Jenkins, ‘Wales and the Study of Church History’, 146; R. T. Jenkins, ‘The Development of Nationalism’, 177. See also Jenkins’s observations on the importance of education, reason, and fostering the intellect in R. T. Jenkins, Hanes Cymru yn y Bedwaredd Ganrif ar Bymtheg, 38, 42–7; R. T. Jenkins, ‘Pedair Canrif o Hanes Cymru’, 178, 188. Jenkins’s outlook belonged to a broader reaction to Victorianism in Britain: Prys Morgan, ‘R. T. Jenkins’, 144–5, 148–51.
67 R. T. Jenkins, Hanes Cymru yn y Ddeunawfed Ganrif, 33–43, 59–61, 99.
68 R. T. Jenkins, Hanes Cymru yn y Ddeunawfed Ganrif, 103.
69 R. T. Jenkins, Hanes Cymru yn y Ddeunawfed Ganrif, 71.
70 R. T. Jenkins, Hanes Cymru yn y Bedwaredd Ganrif ar Bymtheg; Thomas Evans, Background of Modern Welsh Politics.
71 R. T. Jenkins, ‘The Development of Nationalism’, esp. 165, 169–73. The article was the nearest Jenkins came to achieving his aim of writing a second volume on nineteenth-century Wales, on the period after 1843, announced in R. T. Jenkins, Hanes Cymru yn y Bedwaredd Ganrif ar Bymtheg, v.
72 R. T. Jenkins, Hanes Cymru yn y Ddeunawfed Ganrif, 44.
73 R. Tudur Jones, ‘R. T. Jenkins’, 94.
74 R. T. Jenkins, Hanes Cymru yn y Ddeunawfed Ganrif, 88–90, 93 (quotation). Jenkins’s critical view of Methodism is emphasized by Prys Morgan, ‘R. T. Jenkins’, 144.
75 R. T. Jenkins, Yr Apêl at Hanes, 142–78 (similar views in R. T. Jenkins, ‘Pedair Canrif o Hanes Cymru’, 176–8); Thomas Parry, ‘Bebb, William Ambrose’; Chapman, W. Ambrose Bebb, esp. 97–8, 101, 109. Cf. Cannadine, G. M. Trevelyan, 197–8.
76 Cf. Prys Morgan, ‘R. T. Jenkins’, 145–6, 151.
77 R. T. Jenkins, Hanes Cymru yn y Ddeunawfed Ganrif, 64.
78 Lloyd, HW, 3rd edn., 1: xxxix–lv; cf. John Edward Lloyd, Wales and the Past. See also e.g. A. H. Williams, An Introduction to the History of Wales. Volume I; Ambrose, The History of Wales, 11–16; Wales Through the Ages, ed. Roderick, 1: 11–25. Cf. A Bibliography, ed. Jenkins and Rees, 27–31.
79 Fleure is set in the context of a wider regional and cultural turn in geography in Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition, ch. 8 (discussion of Fleure at 282–9). See also J. A. Campbell, Some Sources of the Humanism of H. J. Fleure; Langton, ‘Habitat, Economy and Society’, 5–7; Gruffudd, ‘Back to the Land’; Amanda Rees, ‘Doing “Deep Big History” ’.
80 Fleure, ‘Human Regions’, 94.
81 Quotations: Fleure, ‘Preface’.
82 Fleure, Wales and her People, 18–19.
83 Cyril Fox, The Personality of Britain, esp. 9, 21–2, 29–32, 78.
84 Carter, ‘Emrys G. Bowen, 1900–1983’; E. G. Bowen, The Settlements of the Celtic Saints; E. G. Bowen, Saints, Seaways and Settlements; E. G. Bowen, Wales.
85 E. G. Bowen, Wales, ix–x.
86 E. G. Bowen, Wales, 4; cf. Forde, ‘Human Geography, History and Sociology’.
87 E. G. Bowen, Wales, 6–10.
88 E. G. Bowen, Wales, 162–9.
89 Trefor M. Owen, ‘Peate, Iorwerth Cyfeiliog’; Catrin Stevens, Iorwerth C. Peate; Trefor M. Owen, ‘Iorwerth Peate a Diwylliant Gwerin’. Poetry: Peate, ‘Welsh Folk Culture’, 294. Religion: Peate, Cymru a’i Phobl, 88; cf. T. Gwynn Jones, The Culture and Tradition of Wales, 16–18.
90 Peate, Cymru a’i Phobl, 1–2, 121–9. As a student Peate had contributed to a concise Welsh-language account of prehistoric Wales: Gyda’r Wawr, ed. Fleure.
91 Peate, Cymru a’i Phobl, 99–100; Catrin Stevens, Iorwerth C. Peate, 3–4.
92 Peate, Guide to the Collection; Peate, ‘Folk Culture’; Peate, Diwylliant Gwerin Cymru (English adaptation: Peate, Tradition and Folk Life); Douglas Bassett, ‘The Making of a National Museum (Part III)’, 260–7; Elen Phillips, ‘Wales in Miniature’.
93 Gruffudd, ‘Remaking Wales’; Andrew Edwards and Wil Griffith, ‘Welsh National Identity’; Chris Williams, ‘The Dilemmas of Nation and Class’, esp. 156–61.
94 Trefor M. Owen, ‘Community Studies’, 27–42; Gareth Rees, ‘Community Studies’.
95 Koot, ‘Historians and Economists’.
96 J. F. Rees and W. Rees, ‘A Select Bibliography’; A Bibliography, ed. Jenkins and Rees, 152–61; Ben Bowen Thomas, Braslun o Hanes Economaidd Cymru, v.
97 Ben Bowen Thomas, Braslun o Hanes Economaidd Cymru, 177.
98 The Welsh Port Books (1550–1603), ed. Lewis; Skeel, ‘The Welsh Woollen Industry in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’; Skeel, ‘The Welsh Woollen Industry in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’; Skeel, ‘The Cattle Trade’.
99 William Rees, South Wales and the March; Ralph Griffiths, ‘William Rees’.
100 William Rees, South Wales and the March, [vii]. Cf. The Survey of the Honour of Denbigh, ed. Vinogradoff and Morgan, [v]; Edward Arthur Lewis, The Mediæval Boroughs of Snowdonia, 275–6.
101 William Rees, South Wales and the March, 28–31, 142–83, 199–240. Map: [William Rees], South Wales and the Border, with accompanying handbook; Marc Bloch, Review of Rees, South Wales and the Border.
102 William Rees, South Wales and the March, 1, 25–6, 35–9, 269–73, quotations at 41.
103 Jones Pierce, Medieval Welsh Society; Dyer, ‘Modern Perspectives on Medieval Welsh Towns’, 163–4.
104 J. F. Rees and W. Rees, ‘A Select Bibliography’, 324–6; O’Leary, ‘Town and Nation’.
105 Dodd, The Industrial Revolution; Neil Evans, ‘Beyond 1282’, 229–30.
106 Tawney: Dodd, The Industrial Revolution, xii; Neil Evans, ‘Beyond 1282’, 226, 229. Cf. Clapham, An Economic History of Britain; Dodd, The Industrial Revolution, 27–30, 111, n. 3, 298, 342; Koot, ‘Historians and Economists’, 649–52.
107 Clapham, An Economic History of Britain, 364–5.
108 Dodd, The Industrial Revolution, xi.
109 Quotations: Dodd, The Industrial Revolution, 119, 202–3.
110 Dodd, The Industrial Revolution, 335–416; see also 264–5, and for a later study of one of these themes, Dodd, The Character of the Early Welsh Emigration.
111 Dodd, The Industrial Revolution, 31, 34–5, 415–16, quotation at 416. Cf. Kirby, ‘R. H. Tawney and Christian Social Teaching’.
112 Dodd, The Industrial Revolution, 31, and see also 197, 264, 351. Economic links with England were also emphasized by Caroline Skeel in the articles cited in n. 98 above.
113 A. H. John, The Industrial Development of South Wales; Minchinton, ‘A. H. John: A Memoir’.
114 Pryce, Lloyd, 86–9; Ralph Griffiths, ‘William Rees’, 212; Robert Richards, Cymru’r Oesau Canol; Evan David Jones, ‘Richards, Robert’; Stead, Coleg Harlech, 35–9, 52–4, 78.
115 David Williams, A History of Modern Wales, esp. chs. 6, 12–15; David Williams, John Frost.
116 J. F. Rees, ‘Foreword’, viii. Rees, the son of a Pembrokeshire dock worker, was an economic historian and principal of the university college in Cardiff (1929–49): Evan David Jones, ‘Rees, Sir James Frederick’.
117 Ceinwen Hannah Thomas, ‘Davies, David James’; D. J. Davies, Towards Welsh Freedom.
118 D. J. Davies, The Economic History of South Wales, xi, 78–83, 144–56.
119 D. J. Davies, The Economic History of South Wales, xi.
120 D. J. Davies, The Economic History of South Wales, 47.
121 Ben Bowen Thomas, Braslun.
122 Stead, Coleg Harlech, 37–9, 44, 52–4, 83–4, 88–9; D. Hywel Davies, The Welsh Nationalist Party, 38, 53, 99.
123 His interest in Welsh economic history went back to at least the early 1930s, to judge by Ben Bowen Thomas, Review of Dodd, The Industrial Revolution.
124 Ben Bowen Thomas, Braslun, 114, 183 (quotation), 213. The assertion (at 4) that the Neolithic marked ‘the greatest revolution…in the economic history of the country’ appears to echo V. Gordon Childe’s concept of a ‘Neolithic revolution’ comparable in magnitude to the industrial revolution: cf. Childe, Man Makes Himself, 14–16, 74–117; Greene, ‘V. Gordon Childe’.
125 Ben Bowen Thomas, Braslun, v.
126 Ben Bowen Thomas, Braslun, 36.
127 Ben Bowen Thomas, Braslun, 58–9.
128 Ben Bowen Thomas, Braslun, 60, 61 (quotation); Saunders Lewis, Braslun o Hanes Llenyddiaeth Gymraeg, ch. 7, quotations at 116.
129 Ben Bowen Thomas, Braslun, v (quotation), 146–53, 175–7, 199–203.
130 Ben Bowen Thomas, Braslun, 152–3, 176–8, 198–207, quotation at 202.