Since the early Middle Ages Welsh history writing has interpreted the past in order to explain who the Welsh are—above all as a people but also, for example, as adherents of particular religious beliefs and bodies, as members of social classes, and in terms of gender. In the broadest terms, then, much of the writing considered in this book exemplifies the widespread use of history to articulate and justify a sense of identity.1 More specifically, much of it may be characterized as national history inasmuch as it shares some important features in common with history writing about other nations, notably its emphasis on glorious origins in classical and biblical antiquity (Brutus and Gomer) and past golden ages (under ancient and early medieval kings of Britain, followed by Welsh rulers down to 1282), as well as an ancient language that had maintained its purity and an exceptional religious legacy in the form of a proto-Protestant Christianity. As we have seen, many works of Welsh history have affirmed a sense of Welsh nationality, including, since the late nineteenth century, some explicitly intended as contributions to nation-building, none more so than the writings of O. M. Edwards, though mostly, as in his case, without advocating independence for Wales as a nation-state.2 True, understandings of the nation have differed. While many historical writers from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century privileged the Welsh as a distinct ethnic group defined by descent, there has been an increasing readiness over the last century or so to adopt a more inclusive and diverse idea of the nation as comprising all the inhabitants of the territorial (and latterly, civic) space of Wales irrespective of their ethnicity. Similar issues have arisen with respect to other national histories of course. More unusually, however, the claims of Welsh history to be considered national history are complicated by ambiguities regarding the nation’s location that go to the heart of Welsh historical thinking down to the twentieth century, and continue to resonate today, namely a sense of belonging to a lost homeland of Britain (on which more below).
This British dimension of Welsh history writing highlights how the Middle Ages mattered for what came afterwards, demonstrating the importance of continuities in historical culture emphasized by other recent scholarship.3 This went beyond the enduring power of medieval master narratives of Welsh history, which I consider shortly, to include the fundamental assumptions these articulated, especially that the Welsh were an ancient people and that their history ended in its fullest sense with the death of Llywelyn and the Edwardian conquest. Viewed from that broader perspective, the extent to which historians accepted the Trojan origins outlined in the Historia Brittonum and elaborated by Geoffrey of Monmouth, or descent from the biblical Gomer, mattered less than their continuing adherence to the notion of distant ancestry, however it was derived: thus while Iolo Morganwg’s promotion of new founding fathers such as Hu Gadarn involved the invention of tradition (albeit partly constructed from earlier materials) and J. E. Lloyd deployed the relatively recent concept of prehistory to trace the origins of the Welsh to the Neolithic, both were essentially new iterations on a long-established theme. And while general accounts of Wales’s history, from David Powel’s Historie of Cambria in 1584 to John Rhys and David Brynmor-Jones’s Welsh People in 1900, continued their narratives beyond 1282, the subsequent centuries remained overshadowed by the era preceding them. The long-held assumption that the history of the Welsh (and their British ancestors) had essentially ended after they had lost a measure of political autonomy was clearly significant, then, in shaping how that history was understood. This raises the question of why narratives constructed in the decades after the Edwardian conquest, when the chronicle Brut y Tywysogyon was configured as a sequel to Welsh translations of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History (which in turn elaborated understandings of the past first attested in Gildas), proved so enduring.
The first part of the answer to these questions lies in the history of medieval Wales, the second in the continuing relevance and utility of the medieval master narratives from the Elizabethan period onwards. In both cases, political contexts are of prime importance. Medieval Welsh literati, acutely aware that the Britons of Wales were the remnants of a people which had enjoyed dominance in the island of Britain before the conquests that led to the formation of England, articulated a sense of loss accompanied, from at least the tenth century onwards, by hopes of recovery expressed in political prophecy. Like other early medieval peoples in western Europe, the Welsh looked to the past to explain and legitimize their origins—and survival—as a people. Unlike many other peoples, however, they were unable to attach this ethnic focus to a clear dynastic or regnal framework. Although twelfth- and thirteenth-century chroniclers and the Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan celebrated the achievements of individual rulers, persistent political fragmentation meant that, despite the dominance of Gwynedd by the thirteenth century and Llywelyn ap Gruffudd’s claims to represent Wales, the people could not be connected to a single dynasty ruling a unitary kingdom.4 The Edwardian conquest was thus a crucial turning-point that cut short the possibility of further regnal consolidation by Welsh rulers while perpetuating fragmentation, as authority was divided between the lands of the royal principality and the marcher lordships, circumstances unfavourable to developing alternative frameworks for historical writing centred on Wales. This fragmented political landscape, coupled with English domination and conquest, surely helps to explain why, to the extent that Welsh chroniclers adopted a regnal framework, they borrowed it from the kingdom of England; unsurprisingly, this was truer still of marcher chroniclers. The Welsh Renaissance historian Humphrey Llwyd sought to remedy this by dividing his 1559 Cronica Walliae, a history of Wales from the late seventh to the late thirteenth centuries based on Brut y Tywysogyon and other sources, into sections headed by the name of a Welsh ruler, establishing a precedent followed by David Powel, William Wynne, and others down to the twentieth century. But this reshaping of medieval chronicles was fairly superficial and could not disguise their lack of a clear dynastic focus.
In seeking to demonstrate that the Welsh occupied a special place in the island of Britain as the descendants of the oldest inhabitants who had been ruled by a long succession of kings and princes, Llwyd and Powel used history to affirm the distinctiveness and dignity of the Welsh as a people within the enlarged kingdom created by Henry VIII’s Acts of Union. Their attempts to create a canonical history compatible with Renaissance norms by adapting the two-stage narrative—from Troy to the death of Cadwaladr the Blessed in 689, and thence to 1282—provided respectively by Geoffrey of Monmouth and by Brut y Tywysogyon is the second main reason for that narrative’s durability into the modern period. To begin with, in defending the veracity of Geoffrey’s History, Llwyd, Powel, and other Welsh Renaissance scholars exemplified a concern with establishing ancient origins, as well as a recognition of the need to prove these were well founded, common elsewhere in early modern Europe. For the Welsh, though, the need was all the greater because of the dominant influence of Geoffrey’s History on medieval Welsh history writing, reflected in the number of copies of the Welsh translations Brut y Brenhinedd and in the framing of Brut y Tywysogyon as a continuation of it. However, the latter and other chronicles provided only patchy narratives and largely petered out after 1282; indeed, apart from genealogy, history writing in later medieval Wales focused on the conservation of earlier texts. Thus, with the exception of Adam Usk, the rising of Owain Glyndŵr elicited a muted historiographical response, including its treatment in Gutun Owain’s fairly brief continuation of the chronicle Brenhinedd y Saesson to 1461, which mainly related events concerning the kingdom of England. True, Humphrey Llwyd drew on other sources to expand the accounts of the Welsh chronicles, as did David Powel and later historians, who also continued their narratives from the Edwardian conquest down to their own time. However, these adaptations did not significantly diminish adherence to understandings of the past established in the Middle Ages; indeed, they served to consolidate them. Those understandings remained serviceable since, in depicting the separate political history of the Welsh as having ended with the death of Llywelyn and the conquest of Edward I, they helped to explain both why the Welsh remained a distinct people and why they had become incorporated in a larger polity under the king of England, a constitutional arrangement that only began to be questioned to any significant extent in the twentieth century.
More generally, the durability of medieval interpretations of Welsh history was rooted in its emphasis on Britain. This was most relevant with respect to ethnic origins. Since the Welsh were the lineal descendants of the Britons of pre-Roman antiquity, the history of the former was inextricably linked to that of the latter—and thus of Britain before the Britons were confined to the island’s western extremities, above all Wales, as a result of Anglo-Saxon conquest and settlement. Significantly, the earliest work by a Welsh author to be called a history was the early ninth-century Historia Brittonum (‘History of the Britons’), an ethnic and geographical emphasis already found in Gildas’s De Excidio Britanniae (‘The Ruin of Britain’); but it is no less significant that the full title of the first work explicitly called a history of Wales, published by David Powel in 1584, opened: The Historie of Cambria, Now Called Wales: A part of the most famous Yland of Brytaine. Admittedly, William Wynne’s revised version was called simply The History of Wales, a title used more frequently by works in both English and Welsh from the eighteenth century onwards. Yet it remained problematic for some. In the 1870s Gweirydd ap Rhys maintained that ‘calling the history of the nation the history of Wales is wholly inappropriate’: the title of his Hanes y Brytaniaid a’r Cymry (‘The History of the Britons and the Welsh’) signalled that it dealt with two successive stages in the history of a single people rather than of a particular geographical space in a striking instance of the continuing salience of medieval Welsh understandings of the past.5 Furthermore, until at least the nineteenth century, the idea that the Welsh had lost their authority over the island following Anglo-Saxon conquests helped to sustain feelings of injustice and betrayal—a reminder of popular understandings of the past touched upon only briefly in this book which merit fuller investigation and surely provide a further reason for the continuing appeal of interpretations of history originating in the Middle Ages. Conversely, though, the nineteenth century also witnessed the high water-mark of contributionist interpretations of Welsh history, according to which the Welsh had made a distinctive contribution to the history of a greater Britain—from the alleged role of Llywelyn the Great in securing the constitutional liberties enshrined in Magna Carta to Welsh service in British armies across the globe.
The importance of a failure to achieve a substantial degree of dynastic and regnal unity, combined with a strong identification with Britain, is brought into sharper relief by comparisons with the early modern historiography of two other territories that entered into political unions with neighbouring kingdoms that have lasted into the modern period: Brittany, united with France in 1532 (though effectively with Anne of Brittany’s marriage to Charles VIII in 1491) and Scotland, whose monarchy was united with that of England in 1603. Both unions were fundamentally dynastic and led to a much less comprehensive degree of political assimilation with the more powerful neighbour than occurred in the case of Wales and England. While the French crown was jealous of its authority and hostile to expressions of Breton patriotism, Brittany kept its fiscal privileges, parlement, and états until the Revolution, while Scotland remained a separate kingdom until 1707 and continued to preserve its own own law, Presbyterian Kirk, and other institutions thereafter. Most pertinently, at the time of their union both Brittany and Scotland were united under a single dynasty that provided a framework for historical narratives of their peoples extending from distant origins through the later Middle Ages to the early modern present. In Brittany, the Montfort dynasty that emerged victorious from the civil war of 1341–64 patronized histories down to their own time, while at the end of the fifteenth century major syntheses were written by Pierre le Baud and Alain Bouchart, with the encouragement of Queen Anne (who remained duchess of Brittany and returned there after her husband’s death), followed by the Histoire de Bretagne of Bertrand d’Argentré (1583; published after censorship in 1588).6
Scotland exhibits a similar pattern. Although John Mair had published his Historia Maioris Britanniae tam Angliae quam Scotiae (‘History of Greater Britain as well England as Scotland’) in 1521,7 long before the 1603 union of crowns, historical writing focused on the kingdom of Scots and its rulers had been well established in the Middle Ages, notably in the histories of John of Fordun (1380s) and Walter Bower (1440s), and these provided foundations for the humanist refashioning of Scottish history by the Renaissance scholars Hector Boece and George Buchanan. Boece’s Scotorum Historia (‘History of the Scots’), translated into Scots shortly after its publication in Paris in 1527, provided a narrative from 330 bce to 1438 ce and became the basis of Holinshed’s Scottish Chronicle (1577, revised 1587). It also supplied much of the material for Buchanan’s Rerum Scoticarum Historia (‘History of Scottish Affairs’, 1582), though this omitted some of Boece’s legendary material, greatly reduced its coverage of the earliest kings, and excited controversy by insisting that the Scottish monarchy was elective and thus subject to regulation by the nobility. However, all these medieval and early modern histories, including Mair, emphasized the ancient origins of the monarchy in order to vindicate the kingdom’s continuing autonomy.8
Early modern historians of Brittany and Scotland could draw on more substantial materials, then, than their Welsh counterparts in building historiographical bridges from the Middle Ages to their own time that in turn paved the way for subsequent histories. The same was true of Ireland, although in some respects this provides closer parallels with Wales, as there, too, a strong sense of shared ethnic identity, anchored in the remote past, flourished in a context of political fragmentation. There were also important continuities from medieval to early modern history writing, especially in the Irish language. However, medieval Irish historical writing was more substantial and varied than that of Wales and also continued to flourish longer, being nurtured in Gaelic lordships that survived into the early seventeenth century whose local lords employed professional lay historians from Gaelic learned families.9 Rather like the Renaissance historians of Scotland, the seventeenth-century Gaelic scholars who sought to preserve the sources for Irish history, above all in The Annals of the Four Masters (1632–6) and Geoffrey Keating’s history of Ireland, Foras Feasa ar Éirinn (‘Compendium of Wisdom about Ireland’, c.1634–5), adapted these to provide continuous narratives from remote antiquity to their own day. Moreover, they did so in a manner that emphasized regnal succession and, especially in Keating’s case, Ireland’s status as a kingdom, marking a response to foreign conquest facilitated by the annals’ detailed coverage of Irish kings and lords, the catalogue of Irish kings from the sons of Míl to the twelfth century given in Réim ríoghraidhe Éireann (‘Succession of Kings of Ireland’), and the account of Irish origins in the Lebor Gabála (‘Book of Settlement’), a highly influential work, probably first compiled in the eleventh century, extant in different versions down to the seventeenth century.10 In maintaining that the Irish and their rulers owed their origins to a series of invasions of Ireland by refugees from western Asia, the Mediterranean, and finally the Iberian peninsula, the Lebor Gabála resembled the Historia Brittonum in adapting biblical and classical models of ethnogenesis.11 However, whereas the Irish legend served to emphasize Ireland’s integrity and autonomy, Welsh historians traced the origins of the Welsh to Brutus or other conquerors, not of Wales, but of Britain. Anglophone histories of Ireland provide another contrast, the earliest published example being Holinshed’s Irish Chronicle, based on recent works by Edmund Campion and Richard Stanihurst.12 Drawing partly on Gerald of Wales’s Irish works, these articulated the outlook of Old English communities descended from late twelfth- and thirteenth-century settlers, reflecting the persistence of ethnic and cultural divisions that were less sharply defined in Wales by the sixteenth century. Unsurprisingly, the radically different historical trajectories of modern Ireland and Wales led to even sharper divergence between their respective historiographies.
Yet if Welsh historical writing down to the early twentieth century was remarkable for the continuity and adaptability of a historical culture originating in the Middle Ages, it consisted of considerably more than works explicitly conceived as histories of Wales focused primarily on the period ending in 1282. To begin with, the chronicles adapted after the Edwardian conquest as continuations of Geoffrey of Monmouth had originally been composed for different purposes and belonged to a diverse body of chronicles, including those compiled in the March, whose coverage ranged eclectically from the churches and monasteries where they were written to the kingdom of England, continental Europe, and the Middle East. More significantly, the view, implicit in medieval Welsh chronicles and influentially reinforced by Humphrey Llwyd and David Powel, that the political history of Wales had been subsumed in that of England since the Edwardian conquest, while acknowledging the subaltern status of Wales and its history, nevertheless left space for other kinds of Welsh histories that continued beyond the conquest (and, increasingly, beyond the Acts of Union), especially accounts of counties and other localities and religious histories. The latter were stimulated by the introduction of Protestantism at the Reformation, a change linked to ethnic history in the theory that Protestantism marked a restitution of an ancient British Church independent of Rome first elaborated by Richard Davies and William Salesbury in 1567. A tradition of providential history, ultimately indebted to Gildas’s explanation of the Britons’ loss of their sovereignty over Britain as punishment for their sins, was continued both by writers of the Church of England and by Puritans and Dissenters, Charles Edwards and Theophilus Evans being the most notable early examples. From the late eighteenth century, however, histories of Dissenting denominations, including the Methodists, focused on developments from the seventeenth century onwards, representing a further iteration of providential history that reimagined the Welsh as a people born anew through their biblical faith. At the same time, though, the eighteenth century saw renewed interest in the ancient origins of the Welsh, as Theophilus Evans and others took up Pezron’s theory of the Celts as descendants of the biblical Gomer and, towards the end of the century, Welsh Romantics, above all Iolo Morganwg, began to elaborate Celticist visions of the Welsh past replete with Druids and bards. The history of Wales also drew the attention of outsiders, especially in England, including travel writers attracted by its exotic past and wild landscape.
An associated development was the diversification of writers of Welsh history. Down to the Edwardian conquest these appear to have been mostly monks and secular clergy. These were succeeded from the later Middle Ages by lay and clerical members of the gentry, albeit enjoying different levels of wealth and status, who continued to produce a wide variety of antiquarian and historical works into the Victorian period. However, from the eighteenth century they were joined by writers of more humble backgrounds—farmers and craftworkers, especially those who had received some education as Dissenting ministers, but also autodidacts like the stonemason Iolo Morganwg or the weaver Gweirydd ap Rhys. From the late nineteenth century the expansion of educational opportunities opened the door for more people, mostly men, from such backgrounds to study and teach history at universities, O. M. Edwards being a notable example, and the same was true of a significant number of academic historians of Wales throughout the twentieth century. While it would be simplistic to draw a direct correlation between class background and the kinds of history that were written, it surely helps to explain the pronounced concern with the experiences of working people from histories of Nonconformist congregations to labour history. Conversely, there were very few women writers of Welsh history before the twentieth century and it was only from the 1980s that these started to have a significant influence on the academic study of the subject.
The various strands of Welsh history writing explored in this book were also informed by external historiographical, cultural, and intellectual influences. In general terms, the centuries-long preoccupation of historians of Wales with the making of a people and its attempts, however limited, to achieve statehood, reflected wider assumptions in Europe regarding what history should be about. By the same token, when those assumptions changed over the past century, so too did writing about the history of Wales. More specifically, the preceding chapters have indicated numerous ways in which individual authors and works were indebted to external example and sources, especially the Bible and classical antiquity, which, as elsewhere, remained influential down to the nineteenth century. In the Middle Ages, Welsh history writing also drew on historical works composed in medieval Britain, Ireland, and continental Europe, while sixteenth-century Welsh scholars and antiquaries such as Sir John Prise and Humphrey Llwyd belonged to a wider world of Renaissance learning, especially but not exclusively in England, that influenced their interpretation of the Welsh past. In addition, George Owen of Henllys was among several antiquaries to undertake studies of individual Welsh localities modelled on English chorography, which, like the cultivation of genealogy, reflected the connected antiquarian interests of the early modern gentry in England and Wales. Likewise from the late eighteenth century historians of Welsh Dissent and Nonconformity drew on accounts of similar religious developments in England, while historians from Thomas Price (Carnhuanawc) to J. E. Lloyd utilized anthropological studies of racial origins by English writers such as James Cowles Prichard and John Beddoe. And, as Chapters 13 and 14 have shown, the increasing diversification of academic history in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been crucial to endowing Welsh history with a new significance and legitimacy as a field of enquiry that encompasses a plethora of social developments in which political and religious history form part of a much larger whole. In this it is, of course, far from unique, and reflects the increasingly ubiquitous influence of an internationalized historical discipline in setting historiographical agendas. However, modern Welsh historical writing cannot be understood simply as the product of a wider professionalization of the historical discipline or of a public appetite for history seen elsewhere. As in the case of other nations, it was also shaped by its own particular antecedents—texts which likewise throw revealing light on why, how, and in which contexts their authors attempted to write the people of Wales into history.
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/9780198746034.003.0016
1 Cf. Coss, ‘Presentism’, esp. 228; Bloxham, Why History?, 13, 191, 350–5.
2 For Plaid Cymru’s use of Welsh history see e.g. D. Hywel Davies, The Welsh Nationalist Party, 80–2; and for a suggestion that an ‘awareness that Wales has had a continuous history’ contributed to creating support for Welsh devolution, Kenneth O. Morgan, ‘Welsh History Review—Fifty Years On’, 167.
3 Cf. Vandrei, Queen Boudica and Historical Culture, 14–15, 203–5, 207–8; also Bloxham, Why History?, 8–15.
4 Cf. R. R. Davies, ‘The Identity of “Wales” ’.
5 HBC, 1: [iii].
6 Tonnerre, ‘Introduction’; Cassard, ‘Les chroniqueurs et historiens bretons’; Kerhevé, ‘Écriture et récriture de l’histoire’; Gaillou and Jones, The Bretons, 230–3, 280–5.
7 Roger A. Mason, Kingship and the Commonweal, ch. 2. See also Wormald, ‘The Creation of Britain’, 179–80.
8 Ash-Irisarri, ‘Scotland’; Roger A. Mason, ‘Civil Society and the Celts’.
9 Ní Mhaonaigh, ‘The Peripheral Centre’; Simms, Medieval Gaelic Sources, ch. 1; Simms, ‘The Professional Historians of Medieval Ireland’.
10 Bernadette Cunningham, ‘Seventeenth-Century Constructions’; Bernadette Cunningham, The World of Geoffrey Keating, 65–7, 146–52; Carey, The Irish National Origin-Legend.
11 Mark Williams, Ireland’s Immortals, 130–57; Bernadette Cunningham, ‘Seventeenth-Century Constructions’, 13–21.
12 Lennon, ‘Ireland’.