In November 2020 members of the Senedd (Welsh Parliament) in Cardiff Bay debated the history of Wales. Their wide-ranging contributions evoked aspects of the Welsh past from the Iron Age to the twentieth century in response to two petitions focused on the teaching of history in Welsh schools, one calling for the inclusion of a common body of knowledge about Welsh history, the other for the compulsory teaching of Black UK histories. In their emphasis on the debatable and provisional nature of historical understanding, on plurality and diversity, and on the importance of history in helping to inculcate a sense of belonging, the contributions reflected highly contemporary concerns by no means unique to Wales; indeed, the second petition was a direct response to the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis earlier that year and the ensuing Black Lives Matter protests in the United States and across the world.1 However, the petitions and the politicians who debated them proceeded from a very old assumption: that Wales had a history of its own which was vital to understanding who its people were.
As the first substantial survey of writing on the history of Wales from the early Middle Ages to the early twenty-first century, this book explores a fundamental aspect of how that history has been interpreted and transmitted.2 Most of this writing is familiar only to specialists in Welsh history and literature and rarely features in wider studies of historiography in Britain or Europe (Geoffrey of Monmouth is a spectacular exception). First and foremost, then, the book aims to make Welsh history writing more accessible and comprehensible by delineating its contours more clearly than before. In addition, though, I argue that it merits attention on account of its interest and significance, both as a particular instance of ‘the rich and complex diversity of European historical writing’ and for the light it sheds on the cultural and intellectual history of Wales and on understandings of Wales and the Welsh.3 More specifically, the writing discussed in this book illuminates the extent to which a small nation conquered by a powerful neighbour in the late thirteenth century and subsequently assimilated into a multinational state has been regarded as having a particular history of its own, a question given contemporary salience by debates not only about the teaching of the history of Wales but also about the constitutional future of the United Kingdom. And the book’s broad chronological range provides ample opportunity to assess the extent and significance of long-term continuities in a historical culture.
I start from two premises. The first, now widely accepted, is that historical writing tells us not only, or even mainly, about the past it narrates but throws revealing light on the assumptions of those who produced it. The second is that the wide variety of works considered have enough in common for it to make sense to treat them together as examples of what may be labelled Welsh history writing, by which I mean written accounts of the history of the Welsh and Wales. This is not to imply that all their authors thought in those terms, still less to deny that the works I discuss could be analysed from other perspectives—as instances of, say, medieval Cistercian chronicling, early modern historiography and chorography, Romantic interpretations of the past, religious histories, or the ever-expanding range of topics, from economic history to gender history, that have engaged the interest of historians since the beginning of the twentieth century. Indeed, many of the works I discuss responded in varying ways, both imitative and reactive, to other history writing, especially in England. Nevertheless, a fundamental contention of this book is that there is much to be gained by viewing these works as part of a long continuum of efforts to interpret the Welsh past.
Nor is the notion of a body of Welsh history writing originating in the early Middle Ages merely a convenient analytical construct. There were major continuities in what may be termed the master narrative of Welsh history influentially created or, perhaps more accurately, consolidated by the Elizabethan scholars Humphrey Llwyd (1559) and David Powel (1584) on the basis of medieval sources and assumptions that presented that history as falling into two main epochs, the first extending from the ancient origins of the Britons from whom the Welsh were descended to their loss of sovereignty over the island of Britain to the English, placed in the late seventh century, the second continuing thereafter to the death of Prince Llywelyn ap Gruffudd in 1282 and Edward I’s conquest of Wales. In addition, writers from Powel down to the early twentieth century welcomed the Acts of Union (1536–43) incorporating Wales with the kingdom of England as bringing legal equality, peace, and Protestantism, changes interpreted by evoking fundamental elements of Welsh historical thinking, as Henry Tudor’s accession to the English throne in 1485 was portrayed as the long-anticipated restoration of Welsh sovereignty in Britain and the Reformation as restoring an ancient British Church independent of Rome.
As previous scholars have noted, the persistence of this master narrative raises important questions about how the history of Wales was understood over most of the period covered in this book. Some distinguished modern historians of Wales have diagnosed it as a symptom of arrested historiographical development and drawn unflattering comparisons with English historical writing from the sixteenth century onwards to suggest a ‘prolonged time-lag in the writing of Welsh history’, explicable, they suggest, by a variety of adverse circumstances, including loss of interest by an increasingly Anglicized gentry, the inaccessibility of sources,4 and the lack before the late Victorian period of ‘major urban centres, literary clubs and…especially a national university to train young scholars in the craft of writing history and sustaining the memory of the nation’.5 Notwithstanding their sympathetic treatment of aspects of pre-modern historiography,6 it is understandable that, as scholars who had contributed to the creation and consolidation of Welsh history as a modern academic subject, they sought to highlight its achievements by effectively dismissing their predecessors’ efforts as an amateur prelude to the ‘serious’ work that came with professionalization, a prelude occasionally redeemed by heroic individuals whose critical treatment of sources foreshadowed modern approaches but all too often embarrassing in its propensity to peddle mythical views of the past.7
The literary scholar Dafydd Glyn Jones has raised different concerns, focused on the interpretations of the master narrative and their implications for Welsh self-understanding. Jones adopts a longer chronological framework than the modern historians just mentioned (who largely ignore medieval history writing), emphasizing that fundamental tenets of Welsh historical thinking originated with Gildas in the sixth century and continued, with various permutations, down to the early twentieth century.8 ‘There is such a thing as the historical tradition of the Welsh, and it is as old as the Welsh themselves’, its ‘central idea’ being that ‘the Welsh, or the Britons, were the true possessors of the whole of the Island of Britain’.9 Moreover, while acknowledging that aspects of this tradition encouraged resignation to defeat and conquest (after all, Gildas declared that God had deprived the Britons of rule over the island as punishment for their sins), Jones insists that the idea of the Welsh enjoying a special relationship with Britain merits serious attention, not only in order to understand their past but also as a key to their future—a conviction also held by the historian Rees Davies, as discussed in Chapter 14.10 Rather than viewing Welsh historiography before the twentieth century as ‘backward’, then, Jones presents it as an adaptable ideological construct of enduring power.11
As indicated earlier, this book also emphasizes the significance of continuities. However, it is attentive to their differing forms and purposes and, more importantly, demonstrates that they formed only part of a much larger and more diverse historiographical landscape. In trying to map that landscape I have not only taken my cue from the brief general surveys already mentioned but benefited from numerous studies of individual texts, authors, and genres. As the following chapters show, recent examples include fresh interpretations of the construction and significance of medieval Welsh chronicles, analyses of the sources and assumptions of Welsh historical writing in the sixteenth century, renewed interest in the antiquarian endeavours and connections of the naturalist and Celtic scholar Edward Lhuyd (1659–1709), the fruits of a major project on Edward Williams (Iolo Morganwg; 1747–1826) which paid close attention to his vision of the Welsh past and its legacy and set these in the context of European Romanticism, and a growing number of assessments both of individual historians and of approaches to modern Welsh history in the era of professionalization. Nevertheless, some parts of the terrain have been mapped in far more detail than others. In addition, although this book is not a comparative study, I have tried to set the works discussed in wider contexts, both by indicating some of the ways that historians of Wales have borrowed from, reacted to, or otherwise engaged with other kinds of history writing and by pointing up contrasts and similarities with the latter. I hope that the book will facilitate and encourage further such comparisons in the future, for example with respect to the use of the Middle Ages—the period on which most Welsh history writing focused until the twentieth century—to foster a sense of modern nationhood.12
One fundamental aspect of Welsh history writing is its enduring preoccupation with the place of Wales and the Welsh in Britain. Although the relationship with England or Britain has also been an important concern of Irish and Scottish historiography, for many historians of Wales it has been fundamental since the Welsh were seen as the true heirs of the Britons who had once held sovereignty over the island of Britain, an idea that originated, as we have seen, in the early Middle Ages. One of its effects was to engender hopes of the recovery of that sovereignty, hopes eventually fulfilled, so Welsh poets declared, by the partly Welsh Henry Tudor’s accession to the throne of England in 1485, a view seized upon by historians of Wales from the Elizabethan period onwards who sought to legitimate political union with England. Yet if their conceptualization of Wales as part of Britain allowed these historians to devise what might seem like a face-saving act of surrender, it also enabled them to mount acts of resistance to ethnic assimilation, as their celebration of the union with England vied with expressions of pride in the deep ancestry and brave leadership of the medieval princes of Wales, to whose deeds they devoted most of their coverage, and hostility to the English for regarding the Welsh as inferior. Any attempt to assess the character and significance of Welsh history writing has to recognize that, for many of its practitioners (and consumers), its Welshness was inseparable from a British dimension that served to sustain not only ardent loyalty to the monarchy and the British state but also unbridled Anglophobia.13
However, if the British dimension, with its two-stage sequence of conquests, first of the Britons, then of the Welsh, underpinned continuities in Welsh history writing, it also contributed to the variety of that writing. To begin with, while most authors I discuss were Welsh by birth and/or ancestry, there were plenty of exceptions. In particular, English writers included coverage of the Britons or Welsh in works focused on England or Britain. Bede was the first in a long line of medieval and early modern historians who made the history of the Britons, as related by Gildas and, much more influentially, Geoffrey of Monmouth, a prequel to English history, and since the late eighteenth century several English authors have written standalone histories of Wales. In addition, the marcher lordships created by conquest left their mark in generally Anglocentric medieval chronicles and early modern county histories that placed English, Norman, and other foreign settlers centre stage. These works belonged in turn to a larger body of local (including urban), regional, and family histories from the Middle Ages onwards, which, together with religious histories, merit attention alongside works specifically designated as histories of Wales.
A common thread connecting these different strands of Welsh history writing is that their authors, in common with their counterparts in other fields of history writing, claimed to be attempting to provide truthful accounts of the past based on trustworthy evidence, even if these accounts may seem hopelessly far-fetched today. Admittedly, this definition of history writing is fundamentally a pragmatic choice intended to help keep the book within manageable limits, and it could be objected that it is difficult to draw firm boundaries between the historical texts considered here and genres such as medieval romance, folklore, and poems and plays on historical topics.14 Nor is this true only of notoriously inventive writers such as Geoffrey of Monmouth and Iolo Morganwg: even the most empirically rigorous study is in some degree an imaginative reconstruction of the past. Conversely, authors of ‘literary’ texts might claim to convey true pictures of the past and make use of ‘historical’ works.15 Yet a concern with evidence, even if its admissibility was contested, was sufficiently accepted for critics to complain that writers of what purported to be historical works lacked reliable evidence for their assertions, as is clear, say, from the heated controversies surrounding Geoffrey’s British History in the sixteenth century or nineteenth-century denigration of some historical works as ‘novels’.16 It is also true, of course, that, as in other societies, written narratives were only one, and for many only a minor, aspect of how people in Wales have understood and used the past.17 That wider historical culture is a fascinating and important topic which merits detailed investigation.18 However, it is not the main focus of this book. Accordingly, while I touch on some other expressions of it, from medieval political prophecy to modern heritage sites, this is merely in order to help contextualize the particular aspect of it represented by Welsh history writing.19 Nor, on the other hand, is the book intended as a history of scholarship, although it necessarily considers differing interpretations of particular periods or topics as part of its broader aim of elucidating how the history of Wales and the Welsh has been understood.
I have tried throughout not only to indicate major themes and developments in Welsh history writing but to bring individual instances of these into sharper focus by analysing texts and writers that seem to me especially significant. Given the number of works produced over the centuries covered, my treatment is necessarily selective, increasingly so from the nineteenth century and especially in discussing the ever more diverse historiographical landscape since 1960. In short, the book offers my particular interpretation and is the product of a particular time. Thus, while I have written it partly in reaction against the presentist perspectives of some previous scholars who have viewed most of what it covers as ‘prefatory and antiquarian addenda to the “real” disciplinary story that follows’, I, too, have unavoidably interpreted the texts discussed through the assumptions and categories of the present, which include previous interpretations.20 And I have written as a scholar not only committed to the critical analysis of evidence fundamental to the procedures of modern academic historiography but closely involved in the story I tell, being a historian of Wales who, like most (though by no means all) other writers on the subject, is himself Welsh.21 Others with different backgrounds and interests from mine will offer different perspectives, and I hope this book will help to encourage further work that builds on and challenges both the particular readings and the broader interpretations offered here.
The discussion is structured chronologically, in four parts. Part I explores medieval writing on the history of the Welsh and their British ancestors, highlighting the fundamental importance of the idea of Britain as a lost homeland but also exploring a variety of chronicles and other works focused primarily on Wales. Part II assesses how this medieval legacy was adapted in the early modern period to create the first works conceived as histories of Wales as well as the elaboration of new theories of Welsh origins and the composition of new kinds of regional, family, and religious histories that both complemented and challenged the thematic and chronological priorities of a range of master narratives indebted to medieval sources. A similar pattern, albeit more varied and on a larger scale, is evident in the Welsh history writing examined in Part III, which covers the period from the late eighteenth to late nineteenth centuries. One key theme is the impact on approaches to the Welsh past of the major social and intellectual changes of this period, evident in tensions between continuing adherence to legendary interpretations and increasing aspirations to a demythologizing ‘scientific’ history. Part IV surveys aspects of Welsh history writing since 1880 in the twin contexts of the professionalization of history and the changing face of Wales, both of which have contributed to the increasing diversity of that writing, especially since the 1960s.
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/9780198746034.003.0001
1 Senedd Cymru/Welsh Parliament, ‘Record of Proceedings: Plenary 04/11/2020: 9’. The Co-operation Agreement between the Welsh Government and Plaid Cymru announced in November 2021 included a commitment ‘to the teaching of Welsh history – in all of its diversity and complexity – being mandatory in the Curriculum for Wales’: Llywodraeth Cymru/Welsh Government, ‘The Co-operation Agreement’, section 35.
2 Previous surveys have been brief and focused mainly on academic Welsh history writing from the late nineteenth century onwards: Dodd, ‘Welsh History and Historians’; Glanmor Williams, ‘Local and National History in Wales’, 45–66; Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘Clio and Wales’.
3 Quotation: Baár, Historians and Nationalism, 2.
4 Dodd, ‘Welsh History and Historians’, 49–54, quotation at 50.
5 Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘Clio and Wales’, 120–3, quotation at 120. See also Glanmor Williams, ‘Local and National History’, 45–6.
6 E.g. Glanmor Williams, ‘Some Protestant Views’; Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘Historical Writing in the Eighteenth Century’; Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘ “The Taffy-land historians” ’.
7 Dodd, ‘Welsh History’, 49; Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘Clio and Wales’, 120.
8 Dafydd Glyn Jones, Un o Wŷr y Medra, 300–9; Dafydd Glyn Jones, Agoriad yr Oes, chs. 1, 3–4, 7, 12. See also Prys Morgan, ‘Iolo Morganwg’, 252–6.
9 Dafydd Glyn Jones, Agoriad yr Oes, 33.
10 Dafydd Glyn Jones, Agoriad yr Oes, 41, 89, 101.
11 Cf. Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘Clio and Wales’, 123.
12 Cf. Geary, The Myth of Nations, 1–40; The Uses of the Middle Ages, ed. Evans and Marchal; Wood, The Modern Origins of the Early Middle Ages.
13 Dafydd Glyn Jones, Agoriad yr Oes, 35, 100.
14 Cf. Kewes, ‘History and Its Uses’, which argues (at 3) that studies of early modern history writing need to transcend ‘disciplinary divisions between history and literary studies’ and encompass a wide range of genres.
15 See e.g. Raymond Williams, People of the Black Mountains, with sources used to research the novel’s historical background at 326–30.
16 For the latter see HBC, 2: [iii]; Emrys ap Iwan, Breuddwyd Pabydd wrth ei Ewyllys, ed. Jones, 72.
17 Rees Davies, Owain Glyn Dŵr, 7–12; R. R. Davies, The Revolt, 338–42.
18 Cf. Lambert and Weiler, ‘Introduction’, esp. 1–16; Vandrei, Queen Boudica and Historical Culture, 12–15.
19 For a similar approach on a vastly broader canvas see Iggers and Wang, A Global History of Modern Historiography, 4–5; Woolf, A Global History of History, 4–7.
20 Cf. Livingstone, ‘British Geography, 1500–1900’, 11–12, quotation at 12. While acknowledging the dangers of presentism pointed out by Quentin Skinner, this endorses Hans-Georg Gadamer’s theory that the past can only be understood through a dynamic dialogue between it and the perspectives of the present-day interpreter. See further Charles Taylor, ‘Gadamer on the Human Sciences’; Paul, ‘Gadamer and Philosophy of History’, esp. 159ff.; and the reflections on presentism in Walsham, ‘Introduction’, and the articles introduced there.
21 Cf. the comments on the compatibility of a commitment to truthfulness based on a critical interpretation of evidence and particular interests as motives for studying the past in Bloxham, Why History?, 311–12, 355.