7

Refurbishing the Past: Antiquarianism and Historical Writing, 1620–1707

From the 1620s to the early eighteenth century most writing about the Welsh past adhered to the paradigms established by Welsh Renaissance scholars of the Tudor period, and continued to be mainly preoccupied with the origins and early history of the Britons followed by the age of the Welsh kings and princes that ended with the death of Llywelyn in 1282.¹ Historical inquiry remained primarily an antiquarian pursuit undertaken by and for the gentry and Anglican clergy, whose role became all the more important following the demise in this period of the professional poets who had played an important part since the later Middle Ages in the transmission of genealogical and historical learning.² However, this was not simply a case of replicating the old. To begin with, the erudition applied to manuscript sources by some Welsh antiquaries—notably John Jones of Gellilyfdy, Robert Vaughan of Hengwrt, and William Maurice of Llansilin—helped to foster a more thorough and critical treatment of sources, reflecting a desire to establish understandings of British and Welsh history on a sounder basis than before.³ Moreover, at the end of the period Edward Lhuyd sought to adopt a systematic approach to the investigation of the Welsh past through a network of correspondents and appreciated the significance of archaeological and linguistic evidence as well as of manuscripts and documents. Nor was historical writing confined to the ranks of gentle-born antiquaries, as popular understandings of the Welsh past, likewise focused on ancient origins and medieval rulers, found extensive expression in print for the first time thanks to the production of almanacs and other cheap publications from the late seventeenth century onwards.

After outlining some important characteristics of Welsh history writing in this period, including the continuing preoccupation with the antiquity of the Welsh and their Christianity, the following discussion looks in turn at the work of Robert Vaughan of Hengwrt, Percy Enderbie, and William Wynne, with a particular focus on their reception and adaptation of Powel’s Historie. Finally, it assesses how far Edward Lhuyd adopted new approaches to Welsh history and what he reveals of the Welsh historical culture of his day, including popular understandings of the past.

Old Pasts, New Contexts

In many respects, of course, the predominantly antiquarian nature of inquiries into the Welsh past formed part of a wider pattern of historical writing in England and elsewhere.⁴ Likewise there were parallels for the profoundly genealogical character of Welsh history writing, both in its emphasis on the ancient origins of the Welsh people and in its preoccupation with the pedigrees of individual families.⁵ Yet there were differences, too, reflecting the particular historical culture of Wales with its emphasis on the period down to the death of Llywelyn and the Edwardian conquest as well as the survival of a substantial body of medieval genealogical texts. Whereas for antiquaries such as Sir William Dugdale (1605–86) the Norman conquest marked a crucial moment in establishing the noble and gentry families of England, their Welsh counterparts tended to be traced from the royal dynasties of pre-Norman Wales (apart from those claiming descent from Norman or English settlers).⁶ As well as sustaining family pride this focus on distant pedigrees allowed the seventeenth-century Welsh gentry to assert their social status as descendants of an ancient political order, whose legacy had been transmitted to the English crown via Henry VII, within the wider polity of the kingdom of England which they accepted as the legitimate arena for the pursuit of their interests as landowners and office-holders.⁷

The idea that Wales no longer had a fully-fledged history of its own after the Edwardian conquest also helps to explain the paucity of Welsh narrative histories comparable to those composed in seventeenth-century England, many of which dealt with recent events.⁸ Significantly, the works that came closest to narrative histories, Percy Enderbie’s Cambria Triumphans (1661) and William Wynne’s History of Wales (1697), largely revamped earlier accounts of the ancient and medieval past.⁹ By contrast, no narrative histories were written that focused specifically on events in late medieval and early modern Wales. Admittedly the contrast should not be overstated: the distant past could take on new significance in the light of modern developments. Just as Dugdale’s labours to preserve knowledge of the great institutions of the Middle Ages gained urgency from the revolutionary events he decried, or Gildas’s savage portrayal of the ruin of the Britons offered a parallel that ‘allowed Milton to explore his misgivings about the progress of the revolution’ in his History of Britain,¹⁰ so too Percy Enderbie dedicated his Cambria Triumphans (1661) to Charles II as proof of the deep roots of monarchical government in Britain (the narrative begins with Brutus), declaring that the work ‘will lay open and unfold the manner of Great Brittains Government, which was ever Princely, (contrary to this Chymerical Anarchy)’.¹¹ Robert Vaughan adopted a different royalist stance in his annotated text of Powel’s Historie of Cambria, also published after the Restoration, by emphasizing the loyalty to Charles I ‘in the recent troubles’ of Welsh gentry descended from the work’s medieval protagonists.¹² The clergyman and antiquary William Williams (c.1625–1684) similarly deplored the impact of the Civil Wars on Beaumaris (Anglesey) in a history of the town he completed c.1669.¹³

The Civil Wars and Commonwealth were also remembered in ballads, strict-metre poems, and popular verse dialogues known as interludes (W. anterliwtiau), as well as in stories of losses of manuscripts recorded by Edward Lhuyd, including ‘[a] large British Manuscript History…which was burnt by y^e Round Heads of Pembrock-shire’.¹⁴ In addition, the Denbighshire antiquary William Maurice (d. 1680) of Llansilin, best known for his collection and analysis of medieval sources relating to the centuries down to 1282, compiled a short but chronologically precise account of events from 1638 to 1647 that resulted in parliamentary victories in north Wales.¹⁵ Probably intended for his private use, Maurice’s ‘Remembrances’ bear some affinities with memoirs of the Civil Wars written by some of his English contemporaries.¹⁶ However, it seems that no attempts were made to write extended narrative histories of the political upheavals of mid-century with particular reference to Wales, presumably because its part in these upheavals was seen as belonging to a wider narrative embracing the kingdom of England as a whole.¹⁷ It is surely no coincidence that the Welsh authors who composed the fullest accounts of the Civil War period had careers in England and that their narratives paid little attention to the land of their birth. Wales appears only incidentally in John Davies’s The Civil Warres of Great Britain and Ireland (1661), one of the first histories of the conflict sanctioned by the Restoration regime, while ‘The Military Memoirs of John Gwyn’, probably written c.1679–82 and relating events in England, Scotland, and the Netherlands, tellingly restricts its Welsh coverage to a heraldic and genealogical defence of its author’s status as a gentleman who traced his descent from Brochwel Ysgithrog, early medieval king of Powys.¹⁸ Although other accounts of English history paid more attention to Wales, these also subsumed the Welsh in the history of England. The ambivalent nature of such treatment was expressed by the Anglican clergyman Thomas Fuller (1607/8–61), who appended a separate section on Wales to his biographical dictionary The Worthies of England on the grounds that ‘England cannot be well described without Wales, such the Intimacy of Relation betwixt them’.¹⁹ Usually, moreover, the Welsh made an appearance only when they had an impact on the English: for example, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1582?–1648) and Robert Brady (c.1627–1700) respectively summarized Henry VIII’s Acts of Union and the Treaty of Montgomery (1267).²⁰ Nor was Percy Enderbie alone in invoking the British ancestors of the Welsh as evidence of the English monarchy. Daniel Langhorne (c.1635–1681), partly drawing on Geoffrey of Monmouth, related ‘the most Ancient Affairs of Britain…to the coming in of our English Nation’, while the Breconshire-born James Howell (1594?–1666), England’s first Historiographer Royal, recruited Dunuallo Moelmutius, Lucius, and Arthur to the cause of proving the king of England’s superiority to his counterparts in France and Spain.²¹

The British History also retained its hold on understandings of the past in seventeenth-century Wales. Copies continued to be made of the Welsh versions of Geoffrey’s History, including a notable example in the hand of Morgan ap Humphrey which had multiple owners through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.²² In 1629, Rowland Vaughan (c.1590–1667) of Caer-gai (Merioneth) assured the readers of his highly influential Welsh translation of Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety that the Welsh had settled Britain before the English and condemned Camden and his disciples for falsely maintaining that Brutus was invented by Geoffrey of Monmouth.²³ Likewise c.1700 the antiquary and herald Hugh Thomas (1673–1720), a descendant of a Breconshire family living in London, compiled a list of rulers (apparently of Brycheiniog) which began with Brutus in 2855 bce and continued down to 1685.²⁴ Moreover, from the late seventeenth century the British History made its mark on popular print culture, as we shall see at the end of this chapter. Nevertheless, such unreserved acceptance of the British History was by no means universal (indeed, Rowland Vaughan had changed his mind by 1655).²⁵ Even some of its most ardent supporters, notably Robert Vaughan of Hengwrt and Percy Enderbie, thought it necessary to cite evidence in its defence.²⁶ Others followed the examples set by Sir John Prise and David Powel and conceded that elements of that history had probably been fabricated, while insisting that it should not be dismissed outright. This was the line taken by Dr John Davies (c.1567–1644) of Mallwyd in his dictionary of the Welsh language (1632), although this also argued, in a manner reminiscent of John Lewis of Llynwene, that Britain had already been settled by Noah’s son Japhet when Brutus arrived.²⁷ William Wynne (1671?–1704) likewise sought to steer a middle course in the lengthy preface to his History of Wales (1697), discussed below.²⁸

The idea that Protestantism was simply a restoration of a pristine British Christianity independent of Rome also remained powerful in this period, being refurbished and adapted to meet new needs. The most impressive restatements of the classic Anglican version of this theory came from the pen of James Ussher (1581–1656), archbishop of Armagh from 1625, who, above all in his Britannicarum Ecclesiarum Antiquitates (‘Antiquities of the British Churches’, 1639), brought his vast erudition to bear on the sources for the origins of the British and Irish churches, partly in order to establish their history more accurately than before but also to demonstrate their independence before they succumbed to the corrupting influence of Rome.²⁹ While not agreeing with all the sources he cited—which included Geoffrey’s History, in the ‘hope that it is possible to stumble upon jewels in a dunghill’—Ussher was sympathetic to staple accounts of the introduction of Christianity to Britain by Joseph of Arimathea and of King Lucius’s requesting missionaries from Pope Eleutherius.³⁰ Welsh writers also looked afresh at the origins of British Christianity. Arise Evans went so far as to claim that the Britons had effectively adopted Christianity a thousand years before Christ and ingeniously sought to reconcile the stories of Joseph of Arimathea and Lucius.³¹ More conventionally, the Puritan John Lewis expressed the hope that ‘we may recover our ancient blessing, and become as famous for our Christianity, at the last, as at first’, quoting ‘that famous Wickliffian’ Walter Brut that the Britons were one of God’s chosen peoples and might be used to overthrow the Antichrist.³² In conventional but fiercely polemical vein the Oswestry-born clergyman Thomas Jones frequently cited ‘the great Usher’, and also drew on the Welsh laws and Gerald of Wales to demonstrate the piety of the Welsh, in an anti-Catholic tract published during the Popish Plot of 1678 asserting that the ‘Old Brittish Church’ was ‘much more Ancient and pure than that of Rome’, having originated with Joseph of Arimathea, and that it was restored by Henry VIII ‘of Brittish descent’ through ‘the lawful ejection of an old Intruder’.³³ Shortly afterwards Edward Stillingfleet (1635–99) similarly sought to portray the Church of England as the true heir of ancient British Christianity, but with a greater critical rigour indebted to Mabillon’s De Re Diplomatica (1681) that led him to dismiss the story of Joseph of Arimathea as a legend concocted by the monks of Glastonbury and also to express grave doubts about ‘Monkish Traditions’ concerning King Lucius.³⁴

Charles Edwards (c.1628–c.1691), an Oxford-educated clergyman and writer from Denbighshire, produced a Puritan interpretation of religious history far more substantial than the brief appeals to the Welsh past by John Penry and John Lewis.³⁵ Edwards’s Y Ffydd Ddi-Ffuant (‘The Unfeigned Faith’) evolved over three editions published respectively in 1667, 1671, and 1677.³⁶ Its use of history was strictly subordinated to religious priorities. Initially, this was essentially a matter of popularizing John Foxe’s Protestant interpretation of the past. However, in the second and third editions Edwards supplemented this with a lengthy section on ‘The History of the Faith among the Welsh’ (‘Hanes y ffydd ymmhlith y cymru’), which he evidently believed would increase the book’s appeal to its intended readers. The section was heavily indebted not only to Bishop Richard Davies’s letter to the Welsh (1567), which Edwards had reissued in 1671, but also to Gildas’s sixth-century De Excidio Britanniae (‘Ruin of Britain’), parts of which Edwards translated into Welsh from Polydore Vergil’s edition.³⁷ Indeed, Edwards saw himself as a latter-day Gildas (he even entitled later admonitions addressed to his contemporaries ‘Gildas Minimus’), using history to further his wider prophetic purpose of bringing the Welsh—identified, like Gildas’s Britons, with the people of Israel—back to God, an identification reinforced by insisting on the Welsh language’s close derivation from Hebrew.³⁸ Thus, while occasionally voicing patriotic, and even anti-English, sentiment in his account of medieval Wales, Edwards had no doubt that the oppression suffered by the Welsh was the result of sin; resistance without repentance was useless.³⁹ Ultimately, there was little heroic about a medieval past disfigured by violence and disorder. By contrast, the Acts of Union were welcomed as a liberation from legal discrimination that demonstrated the remission of divine anger against the Welsh.⁴⁰ Likewise the high point of Welsh history came with the subsequent arrival of the Scriptures in Welsh through the agency of the English, neighbours providentially transformed from ‘rapacious wolves’ to ‘caring shepherds’.⁴¹ While the future of the Welsh was by no means guaranteed, since they were ‘today only a small part of the remnant of the Britons’ in danger of being dispatched to oblivion by their divine maker, they had nevertheless survived political conquest and union thanks to divine mercy and might continue to flourish provided they ensured the revival of the faith of their distant forefathers.⁴² For Edwards, then, the history of the Welsh was fundamentally that of their relationship with God.

History, Genealogy, and Gentry: Robert Vaughan of Hengwrt and His World

Robert Vaughan (1592–1667) of Hengwrt (near Dolgellau, Merioneth) provides a link between the Welsh antiquaries of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean period and the Restoration.⁴³ One of his earliest works, composed c.1620 but unpublished until 1662, was a response to a treatise composed c.1600 by the Pembrokeshire antiquary George Owen of Henllys, whose writings on the lordship of Cemais Vaughan also sought to acquire.⁴⁴ A member of a gentry family in Merioneth which counted among its ancestors Bleddyn ap Cynfyn (d. 1075), king of Gwynedd, Vaughan had the means and leisure to pursue his antiquarian interests. He not only became the greatest collector of books in early modern Wales, amassing a library containing probably almost 3,000 printed books and over 550 manuscripts, the latter eventually becoming the foundational collection of the National Library of Wales in 1909,⁴⁵ but, thanks to his familiarity with these and other sources, earned a high reputation in antiquarian circles both within and beyond Wales for his extensive knowledge of genealogy, heraldry, history, and literature.

Vaughan’s social status not only facilitated his engagement with the Welsh past but significantly shaped its purpose. As with the first generation of gentleman antiquaries such as George Owen and George Owen Parry, antiquarian endeavour served to enhance gentry status in two related respects. On the one hand, it furnished Welsh gentry families with pedigrees and coats of arms that symbolized their descent from medieval Welsh royalty or nobility. Although the gentry’s pride in its pedigrees was condemned by the Puritan Morgan Llwyd (1619–59) of Wrexham, and by the Anglican reformer and satirist Ellis Wynne of Y Lasynys (Merioneth) in his Gweledigaethau y Bardd Cwsc (‘Visions of the Sleeping Bard’, 1703), such criticisms merely underline the ubiquity of such thinking.⁴⁶ Equally, though, the antiquarian expertise that legitimated such families’ claims to ancient descent was in turn regarded, by both Vaughan and others, as an accomplishment that further enhanced his own status among both the Welsh gentry and the wider antiquarian world represented by correspondents including John Selden and Archbishop Ussher. Thus some gentry were better antiquaries than others: Rowland Vaughan’s doubts about the existence of Brutus elicited a dismissive put-down from his kinsman Robert that ‘you shew your want of skill in Antiquitie’.⁴⁷

Vaughan published very little during his lifetime. Much of his work survives as annotations of manuscripts he acquired and transcripts of others.⁴⁸ He also composed a survey of his native county of Merioneth, probably intended as a revision of Camden, which included comment on historical events and antiquities from the age of Arthur to the Wars of the Roses, wrote a brief discussion of the chronology of events in medieval Wales and treatises on the ‘Fifteen Tribes of Gwynedd’ and the Welsh triads, and was quite possibly the author of an account of Owain Glyndŵr eventually published in 1775.⁴⁹ However, two books were published late in his life which provide further testimony to his erudition as well as valuable insights into his assumptions and methods. The earlier, British Antiquities Revived (1662), consists mainly of a point-by-point response to the unpublished treatise by George Owen of Henllys already mentioned that sought (incorrectly) to demonstrate that the eldest son of Rhodri Mawr (d. 878), and thus his successor to the sovereignty of Wales, was Cadell (d. 910), who ruled south Wales after his father’s death. It followed, so the argument went, that the subsequent kings of south Wales—and thus their gentry successors—were superior to those of north Wales.⁵⁰ Vaughan was asked to defend the honour of the north Wales gentry by proving that the eldest son was, in fact, Anarawd (d. 916). This may seem a trivial dispute generated, perhaps somewhat artificially, by regional rivalries. Yet the form it took is highly significant and illustrates how the vindication of gentry status provided a fundamental impetus to historical research in Vaughan’s day. The same is true of two further texts in the volume. First, a correction to the genealogy of Richard Vaughan (1600?–1686), earl of Carbery and Lord President of the Council in the Marches of Wales (1660–72), established his descent from a ‘far ancienter’ ancestor than the one of the same name given in earlier sources. Second, an elaborated account of the ‘5 Royal Tribes of Cambria’, a scheme devised in the late Middle Ages (quite possibly by Gutun Owain), not only anachronistically attributed each tribe with a coat of arms but asserted that the scheme and its associated heraldry had been established by the rulers Gruffudd ap Cynan (d. 1137), Rhys ap Tewdwr (d. 1093), and Bleddyn ap Cynfyn (d. 1075). These

made diligent search after the Armes, Ensignes, and Pedegrees of their Ancestours, the Nobility and Kings of the Britains; what they discovered by their pains in any papers and records was afterwards by the Bards digested and put into books. And they ordained 5. royall Tribes (there being only 3 before) to whom their posterity to this day can derive themselves: and also 15 speciall Tribes, of whom the Gentry, especially of Northwales, are for the most part descended.⁵¹

The connection between medieval Welsh ‘tribes’ and early modern gentry families is emphasized even more sharply in Vaughan’s second publication, which appeared in 1663. This was an abortive edition of Powel’s Historie of Cambria, appended, with an explanatory preface but no title page, to the ‘Description of Wales’ attributed to Sir John Prise.⁵² The work, printed in Oxford by William Hall, appears to have been published by Vaughan’s friend Thomas Ellis (1625–73), a fellow of Jesus College. It adapted the format of Powel’s original edition of 1584 by distinguishing typographically between not only Llwyd’s text and Powel’s additions but also ‘some choyce notes’ which Vaughan, ‘out of his zeale to preserve the Antiquities of his Country’, had collected over the previous forty years.⁵³ Production of this edition was abandoned about a quarter way through, and most copies were reportedly sold for waste paper, apparently after Ellis discovered that Vaughan’s notes had already been used, without permission, by Percy Enderbie in his Cambria Triumphans of 1661; hence copies of the work are extremely rare.⁵⁴ The notes supplied by Vaughan witness not only to his extensive familiarity with medieval sources (as well as early modern histories) but also to his conservative approach to the Welsh past. The structure adopted is conservative in two respects. First, rather than writing a new history from scratch, Vaughan followed in Powel’s footsteps and added another layer of commentary to the text originally composed by Humphrey Llwyd which in turn was regarded as being largely based on medieval Welsh chronicles. This allowed Vaughan both to preserve the work of his predecessors as published by Powel, thereby signalling his acceptance of that work as providing a canonical framework for understanding the history of Wales, and to position himself as a worthy successor in the tradition of Welsh historical writing that Powel represented. Just as Powel had augmented and revised Llwyd by citing additional sources relating to people and events mentioned, so Vaughan augmented and revised Powel. Thus Vaughan inserted material from the Peniarth 20 version of Brut y Tywysogyon (‘The Chronicle of the Princes’), which he had translated for Archbishop Ussher, as well as from other works not used by Llwyd or Powel. These included the early twelfth-century Book of Llandaf, the fifteenth-century confirmation charter for the church of Clynnog Fawr (Caernarfonshire)—as further evidence for Cadwaladr, the early medieval king of Gwynedd presented in Geoffrey’s History as the last king of Britain—and ‘an old book of Records’ that referred to King Edgar’s foundation of a new church adjacent to Bangor cathedral.⁵⁵

The most striking feature of Vaughan’s notes, however, and the second aspect of his conservative approach, is their use of the medieval past to uphold the status of Welsh gentry families. The means to this end was genealogy. For centuries the preserve of professional poets, genealogical learning was increasingly cultivated by the Welsh gentry from the late Elizabethan period as the bardic order declined; indeed, Vaughan had commenced his historical training with two of the last poet-genealogists, Rhys Cain (d. 1614) and his son Siôn Cain (c.1575–c.1650).⁵⁶ The centrality of genealogy to Vaughan’s antiquarian work, including his notes on Powel’s Historie, was conservative both in the sense that it relied on a long-standing traditional branch of Welsh learning and because it served to legitimize the social order of seventeenth-century Wales. A large proportion of the notes synchronize the founders of individual ‘tribes’ with the kings in Powel’s text before proceeding to describe their arms and trace their descendants. Before the text breaks off in the later eleventh century, nine of the fifteen tribes of Gwynedd as well as the royal tribe of Elystan Glodrydd, along with their descendants, had been introduced to the reader in this way.⁵⁷ Vaughan thus extended the work’s chronological coverage beyond the Edwardian conquest, not, as Powel had done, by casting the English princes of Wales as successors of the native rulers, but rather by emphasizing the continuities between the age of those rulers and the Welsh gentry of his own day.

This is not to imply that Vaughan was hostile to the monarchy or to Wales’s union with the kingdom of England. Like the Welsh gentry historians and antiquaries of the Elizabeth period he celebrated the benefits of the union, and his preface to British Antiquities Revived indeed maintained that these were confirmed by a study of Welsh history: ‘by reflecting upon our former miseries and divisions while we contended for soveraignty, we may be induced to put the greater value upon our present happinesse’.⁵⁸ Equally, though, study of the ancient and medieval Welsh past offered a consoling source of pride, especially for Welsh gentry families, safely devoid of any subversive political implications. That pride is evident in the comparisons with classical antiquity Vaughan drew in a passage immediately preceding the words just quoted:

it is no small delight that redounds from the revolving and perusall of old records: though Troy hath for severall ages layn buried in its ashes, both its glory and government being quite dissolved, though the Athenian, Spartan, Theban, and other petit Grecian Estates have long since had their periods, yet we still take a great deale of satisfaction in reading their stories, how they began, grew up, flourished, strove, & decayed.⁵⁹

Above all, the pride Vaughan took in the Welsh past is evident in a life-long devotion to the study of Welsh antiquities marked by a determination to lay his hands on as many sources as possible, revealed, for example, in the efforts to persuade Sir John Vaughan of Trawscoed (Cardiganshire) to allow him access to the twelfth-century Book of Llandaf.⁶⁰ The breadth of his knowledge of different kinds of sources, ranging from official records to poetry and genealogy, was unprecedented among Welsh historians and antiquaries (though it did not extend to recording church buildings and monuments, in contrast to his English contemporary Dugdale).⁶¹ Moreover, his deployment of these shows a capacity for critical discrimination. For example, he argued that, in contrast to the late twelfth-century testimony of Gerald of Wales, ‘a multitude of most ancient writers’, including ‘Ninnius the old British writer…who lived in the daies of Roderic and his children’ showed that Anarawd was Rhodri’s eldest son. Likewise he supported his contention that Wales had first been conquered by Edward I—rather than, as the gentry of south Wales maintained, by William Rufus following the death of Rhys ap Tewdwr (1093)—by quoting from Edward I’s Statute of Wales (1284), of which he claimed to have seen various parchment copies.⁶² His notes on Powel’s Historie cite some documents in full, notably the earliest known copies of letters exchanged between Sir Gruffudd Llwyd and Edward Bruce in 1316.⁶³ But Vaughan also believed that Welsh literary genres, notably genealogy and poetry, had value as historical evidence, provided they were treated critically: he questioned the authenticity of poetry ascribed to Dafydd Nanmor on account of errors in the prosody.⁶⁴

The debate about when Wales was conquered carried important implications for the nature of Welsh history writing. Vaughan seized upon these in a rare disquisition on what ‘a perfect History of Wales’ should aim to achieve.⁶⁵ His comments rebutted George Owen’s suggestion that the history of Wales ended with the death of Rhys ap Tewdwr, that subsequent Welsh rulers down to Llywelyn ap Gruffudd had been usurpers, and that therefore ‘it seems not fit to register the acts of Wales for a great part of 200. years under Usurpers’.⁶⁶

And whereas you think it not fit to register the acts of Wales under Usurpers, it seems you would deprive your readers of a perfect history, and conceale such passages which are as requisite to be known, as the lawfullest proceedings; in that a history (how rugged soever, the passages thereof may be) ought to testify the truth by consent of times, and immediate succession of Princes; otherwise that will appear like a broken chaine, wanting some necessary lincks to unite the whole; neither will man’s desire be satisfied, untill it receive instruction, who were, and who were not Usurpers, and how their government differed, or whether Usurpers being really possessed of the Crown did not use the same jurisdiction which belonged unto the right heir…⁶⁷

For Vaughan, then, Welsh history was about the possession of political authority in the period before the Edwardian conquest, and especially about issues of legitimate succession and rule which had preoccupied historians since Llwyd and Powel.

Annotated copies of Powel’s Historie show that Vaughan was not alone in treating the work as a canonical account of the history of Wales open to comment and correction. For example, in 1638 his younger contemporary William Maurice wrote extensive addenda to an interleaved copy of the work, which, as with Vaughan, witness to a wide-ranging familiarity with relevant sources and a critical approach to their interpretation.⁶⁸ Particularly interesting are comparisons between different versions of the Welsh chronicles, which, like his contemporary John Jones of Gellilyfdy, Maurice referred to as Brut y Tywysogyon (‘The Chronicle of the Princes’); he also demonstrated, contrary to Llwyd and Powel, that these had not ended in 1270.⁶⁹ In addition, Maurice interjects observations on the text. Thus he complains about bias towards north Wales, but welcomes a passage that criticized William of Newburgh and Polydore Vergil: ‘The Anti Britannicall Hist. whipped’!⁷⁰ However, Maurice did not use his annotations to advance his own historiographical interpretation in a comparable way to Vaughan’s insertion of material regarding the fifteen tribes of Gwynedd and their descendants. Nor did he influence subsequent Welsh history writing to the same extent as Vaughan, whose notes were not only printed in the abortive edition of The Historie of Cambria but also used in the first new accounts of Welsh history intended to supersede Powel: Percy Enderbie’s Cambria Triumphans (1661) and, a generation later, William Wynne’s History of Wales (1697).

Percy Enderbie: Wales, Britain, and the Deep Roots of Monarchy

Percy Enderbie (c.1606–1670), a younger contemporary of Vaughan, wrote the first new history of Wales since Powel.⁷¹ Indeed, his Cambria Triumphans (1661) was the first work since the Middle Ages to relate that history straight through from the arrival of Brutus in Britain to the author’s own day.⁷² It was also the first written by an outsider who had made his home in Wales. In his address ‘[t]o the Gentle Reader Whether Welsh or English’ Enderbie declared that, though an Englishman, he had written his book on account of his marriage to a Welsh ‘person of quality’—namely, Winifred, sister of Sir Edward Morgan (d. 1653) of Llantarnam (Monmouthshire)—and his long residence in Wales, ‘which hath rendered me in a manner a Native’.⁷³ His task had been facilitated, moreover, by the encouragement of the local gentry and access to the library of his late brother-in-law, a Roman Catholic whose religious sympathies were reflected in several of the works used.⁷⁴ Enderbie was able to position himself, therefore, between the Welsh and the English, closely connected with and deeply sympathetic to the former while maintaining a certain distance: after all, he was only ‘in a manner a Native’. That distance is reflected in his antiquarian scholarship, which, though wide ranging, lacked the detailed acquaintance with medieval and later sources, especially from Wales, characteristic of Vaughan and his sixteenth-century Welsh predecessors. In both its construction and overall conception Cambria Triumphans was highly derivative. It drew on an extensive printed literature, supplemented by manuscript notes supplied by Vaughan as well as some local lore, in order to reaffirm long-established understandings of the Welsh past.⁷⁵ Thus the work provides a narrative from Brutus to the reign of Charles I comprising two principal components: the British History followed by Powel’s Historie of Cambria. These provide a framework for the insertion of material from other sources: for example, the period down to the death of Cadwaladr is supplemented by aspects of Roman history, while the final section of Powel’s Historie is expanded by borrowing from Dodderidge’s work on the Principality of Wales.⁷⁶

Enderbie also resembles Dodderidge and other Jacobean writers such as George Owen Harry in emphasizing the contribution of the Britons and Welsh to the history of the kingdom of Great Britain. This emphasis is likely to have chimed with the outlook of the Welsh gentry families that supported his enterprise. But it was presumably reinforced by his strong family connections with England. Thus, while keen to advertise his commitment to his adopted homeland by praising the Welsh and their British ancestors, Enderbie insisted that the history of Wales formed an inextricable part of the history of England and Britain. This is signalled by the first part of the work’s lengthy title: Cambria Triumphans, or Britain in its Perfect Lusture, Shevving the Origen and Antiquity of that Illustrious Nation. The Succession of their Kings and Princes, from the First, to King Charles of Happy Memory. By eliding any distinction between Wales and Britain, this implied that the full brilliance or glory of Britain derived from its origins among the ancient British and the Welsh, epitomized by the lineal succession of its monarchs from Brutus to Charles I. This allowed Enderbie to assume simultaneously the mantle of both a Welsh and a (modern) British patriot. On the one hand, the history of Britain was the triumph of Wales; on the other, the ancient and medieval history of the British and Welsh had been appropriated by the ‘Illustrious Nation’ of Britain and thus redounded to its glory, too. As for earlier writers, the adoption of ‘British’ terminology created a space for considerable rhetorical flexibility. For example, it allowed Enderbie to privilege the Welsh of his own day as ‘the very real offspring of the Brittains’ or simply ‘the very Brittains indeed’.⁷⁷ The conflation of the two peoples is similarly explicit in the observation that Camden ‘never was Friend to the Brittains and Welsh’.⁷⁸ Yet by referring to ‘our’ Britons (and similar expressions) he also implied that all his readers, English as well as Welsh, could identify with them and take pride in their legacy.⁷⁹ This was particularly true of Christianity, whose early acceptance in Britain Enderbie celebrated by waxing eloquent on ‘the admirable sanctity, the constant faith, ardent charity, and pure and unfeigned zeal of our never to be forgotten pious Brittains’.⁸⁰ Enderbie further highlighted the British dimension of his work not only by the well-established means of tracing the Welsh ancestry of his royal dedicatee but also by interpolating between each of its books the pedigrees of ducal and other leading aristocratic families, mainly in England, with a particular emphasis on their British or Welsh origins.⁸¹ True, he also recorded the pedigrees and arms of Welsh gentry families.⁸² However, rather than restricting his attention to these as Vaughan tended to do, Enderbie deployed genealogy to support his broader aim of demonstrating the British and Welsh antecedents of the Stuart kingdom as a whole.

In his interpretation of medieval Wales, Enderbie followed in the footsteps of his predecessors, in both his selection of material, presented in a distinctive colourful style, and his pithy marginal comments. For example, he observed of the hapless Gruffudd ap Llywelyn (d. 1244), transferred by his half-brother Dafydd from custody in Gwynedd to the Tower of London: ‘From prison to prison, like a fish out of the frying pan into the fire.’⁸³ While praising Llywelyn ap Gruffudd as ‘[a]n Heroick Prince’,⁸⁴ he conventionally presented the prince’s death in 1282 as a crucial turning-point that ended ‘the glory of Wales’.⁸⁵ Thereafter, the future of Wales lay in its integration with England: like Powel, Enderbie had little time for ‘the most wicked and Arch Rebel’ Owain Glyndŵr while also condemning Henry IV’s penal legislation against the Welsh as ‘more cruel than that of Julian the Apostate’.⁸⁶ Writing of the period before 1282, he lauded the bravery of individual rulers, but was swift to condemn behaviour he considered immoral: Owain Gwynedd’s blinding and castration of his nephew Cunedda in 1152 was ‘[a]n act more fit for a Turk than a Christian’.⁸⁷ Above all, his admiration for the Welsh was tempered by frustration at their internal divisions, a well-worn sentiment first voiced almost five centuries earlier by Gerald of Wales, another writer who observed the Welsh at a certain remove. The partible inheritance of kingdoms elicited predictable condemnation, as did strife within and between Welsh dynasties, which Enderbie considered a fatal weakness that opened the door to foreign invasion: ‘An easy matter for the Normans to conquer when the Welsh murder and betray their own kindred and countreymen.’⁸⁸ In a similar vein, he castigated those Welsh leaders who sided with the Normans or English against their compatriots.⁸⁹ By contrast, Enderbie rarely ascribed agency to kings of England.⁹⁰

Powel Revised: William Wynne’s History of Wales

In 1697 William Wynne, a fellow of Jesus College, Oxford published The History of Wales.⁹¹ Explicitly intended as a revised version of Powel’s Historie, this was less ambitious in chronological scope but much more influential than Enderbie’s book, being reissued four times between 1702 and 1832 and published in a German edition in 1725.⁹² That Wynne presented himself as the latest of a series of editors rather than the author of an entirely new work is explicit in the concluding words of the book’s full title: written originally in British, by Caradoc of Lhancarvan; and formerly published in English by Dr. Powel; now newly augmented and improved by W. Wynne. Edward Lhuyd summed it up as Powel’s Historie ‘in modern language with an elaborate preface of his own, wherein he [Wynne] offers what may be sayd for the credit of Geofrey [sic] of Monmouth’.⁹³ Although modern scholars have been unconvinced that the new edition was an improvement on its predecessor, complaining of its ‘dull gentility’ and ‘dry’ style, this may be to miss its significance as an attempt to update the received interpretation of Welsh history for a new age.⁹⁴

Wynne’s most substantial addition was a lengthy and learned preface assessing the reliability of the British History related by Geoffrey of Monmouth.⁹⁵ The placing of this assessment in a preface signalled that Geoffrey’s account of the Britons down to Cadwaladr, while connected to the history of Wales, was not essential to it. Indeed, Wynne stressed at the outset that the history of the Welsh princes derived from the ‘just and authentick’ author Caradog of Llancarfan, ‘so that there need no other Apology for the following Work, than that it is for the best part the genuine History of that Authour’.⁹⁶ That Wynne felt compelled to include the preface also indicates a determination, however, to demonstrate his ability to intervene in a long-running debate and thereby establish his credentials as a critical scholar. This in turn served to reinforce the authority of the ensuing history of Wales from Cadwaladr onwards. Like Prise and Powel in the sixteenth century, Wynne sought to steer a middle course between those who rejected everything in Geoffrey not corroborated by Roman writers and those who believed all aspects of his account, ‘be they never so ridiculous and extravagant’.⁹⁷ It was perfectly plausible that Geoffrey could have used Welsh sources which preserved elements of ancient British history.⁹⁸ For example, similarities between the British and Greek languages meant that ‘it is not unreasonable to suspect, that there is some real Foundation lodged in the Ruins of the Story of Brutus’.⁹⁹ Nevertheless, such qualified support for the British History destabilized its authority by pointing up the difficulties of relying on its account, especially for the pre-Roman period, and contrasted sharply with the enthusiastic embrace of Geoffrey by Vaughan and Enderbie. Writing a generation later than those authors, and associated in Oxford with the critically minded Edward Lhuyd (who took a similar line on Geoffrey and expressed approval of the preface), Wynne was at pains to show that he was no credulous purveyor of outdated legends.¹⁰⁰ True, he reproduced ‘The Description of Wales’ with little alteration, including its account of the tripartite division of Britain between Brutus’s sons.¹⁰¹ However, Wynne distanced himself from that interpretation in a new opening section to the history itself, which ignores the Brutus legend and begins with the Roman occupation of Britain before summarizing the Saxon invasions and the reigns of the last British kings (here admittedly drawing on Geoffrey) by way of background to Cadwaladr, who opened the Welsh chronicles used by Llwyd and Powel. He thereby perhaps implied that this opening section provided a more reliable account of the ancient past than the full-blown British History.¹⁰² And in concluding the main part of the history Wynne omits Humphrey Llwyd’s statement, reproduced by Powel, that 2,418 years had elapsed between the coming of Brutus and the death of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd in 1282.¹⁰³

The additions to the History for the period down to 1282 consist largely of borrowings from Vaughan’s printed notes to Powel.¹⁰⁴ Wynne also expanded the final part of the work on the English princes of Wales by adding, for example, further material on Owain Glyndŵr, some of it drawn from the account of the prince quite possibly written by Vaughan, as well as a report of William III’s abortive grant to the earl of Portland in 1696 of the lordships of Denbigh, Bromfield, and Yale.¹⁰⁵ He also gave a contemporary twist to sixteenth-century writers’ celebration of the establishment of the Reformation in Wales by insisting that the Welsh had been exceptionally strict in their adherence to the Church of England since the Bible and Book of Common Prayer had been translated into Welsh under Elizabeth and by accusing Thomas Gouge (1605–81), one of the ejected ministers of 1662 and a co-founder of the Welsh Trust in 1674, a voluntary initiative to establish schools in Wales, of contributing to the rise of Presbyterianism ‘by the propagating of his Doctrine among the ignorant of that Country’.¹⁰⁶ He thus reflected dominant High Church Tory opinion at the University of Oxford epitomized by his college principal Jonathan Edwards, marked by its hostility to William III’s measures granting toleration for nonconformists.¹⁰⁷ Another addition was an appendix comprising an English account of the commission of inquiry ordered by Henry VII into the pedigree of his paternal grandfather Owen Tudor, only briefly mentioned by Powel, and Latin texts of thirteenth-century sources cited in English in the main body of the work.¹⁰⁸ However, the most significant changes affected presentation rather than content. Thus Wynne declared that he had sought to prepare his edition ‘by a new modelling the Language, making the Body of the History intire, without troubling the Reader to see the same thing by way of Annotation’.¹⁰⁹ This involved both rephrasing, including the insertion of linking sentences in places,¹¹⁰ and simplifying the page layout by using a uniform typeface instead of the different typefaces that had demonstrated the composite nature of Powel’s text; marginal references are largely confined to dates, with primary sources integrated into the text or printed separately in an appendix. The result was an apparently seamless narrative that was probably more in tune with the expectations of late seventeenth-century readers than Powel’s visually complex and chronicle-like text.¹¹¹

The form of the work reflected its author’s principal aim, namely to revive knowledge of the medieval princes of Wales. Addressing Humphrey Humphreys (1648–1712), bishop of Bangor and a scholar renowned for his knowledge of Welsh antiquities, Wynne declared:

The History of our Country, my Lord, has been so much neglected, that there seems a very great Necessity of reviving, what to the generality of the Kingdom, is almost lost…if by the following History, I can revive the Memories of the several Princes therein contained, which in the English histories, are either totally omitted, or but partially interwoven, and make our History more generally Known, I have my Aim…¹¹²

Although Welsh historians since Humphrey Llwyd had expressed their determination to save the history of Wales from neglect and misrepresentation, it is unlikely that the sentiments expressed here were merely conventional. Wynne clearly gave careful thought to how he could repackage Powel’s work in order to demonstrate its continuing validity while endeavouring, above all, to make it more accessible. Thus, on the one hand, the preface demonstrated his scholarly and critical credentials, while the subsequent history, unencumbered by references and different typefaces, sought to engage the reader without parading its author’s learning in the manner of Powel, Vaughan, or Enderbie. That the history was reissued only five years after its original publication suggests, moreover, that Wynne met a demand. Nor was his patriotic sympathy for the medieval princes confined to the dedication; it is also evident in additions and amendments to Powel’s text. For example, whereas for his predecessor, in turn following Humphrey Llwyd, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd was ‘the last Prince of Brytaines blood’, Wynne explicitly praised him as ‘this worthy Prince, the greatest, though the last of the British Blood’, and emphasized that the grievances presented to Archbishop Pecham on the eve of the Edwardian conquest ‘vindicate the Welch Nation, from the unreasonable Aspersions which the English of these times cast upon it’.¹¹³ Here, Wynne resembled Enderbie, who had been warmer than Powel towards Llywelyn. Yet, also like Enderbie, Wynne bemoaned ‘unnatural’ divisions among the Welsh, occasionally drawing comparisons with Roman history, and condemned Owain Gwynedd’s violent treatment of his nephew Cunedda as ‘a very barbarous Action’.¹¹⁴ Wynne also complained that the Lord Rhys, by ingratiating himself with King Henry II, ‘was resolved to play the Politician so far, as to have regard to his own Interest, than to the Good of his native Country’.¹¹⁵

By attempting to make Powel’s Historie more readable Wynne sought, then, to give renewed life to the canonical account of medieval Welsh history. It does not follow, however, that he aimed at a popular readership in a comparable way to his older contemporary Nathaniel Crouch, the London publisher who wrote numerous historical works under the pseudonym ‘R. B.’ (Richard or Robert Burton).¹¹⁶ Among these was The History of the Principality of Wales (1695).¹¹⁷ Like Wynne’s History of Wales, this was avowedly derivative. However, rather than claiming to draw on an authoritative medieval chronicle, Crouch presented his book as a digest assembled ‘from Historians of the best Authority’ whose contents ‘I doubt not will be Novelties to many Readers, and diverting to all’.¹¹⁸ The book falls into three parts. The first, covering the history of the Britons and Welsh from Brutus to the death of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, is markedly Anglocentric and padded out with a considerable amount of English history,¹¹⁹ and the same is true of the second on the English princes of Wales down to the late seventeenth century; by contrast, the third offers ‘Remarkable Observations upon the most Memorable Persons and Places in Wales’, followed by a topographical account of the Welsh counties. Crouch drew on a variety of sources, including Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose History he used while declining to vouchsafe its reliability.¹²⁰ What mattered most for him was to produce an engaging and entertaining narrative for his intended popular readership, probably mainly in London.¹²¹ Hence he characteristically prefaced the work with a full-page illustration (depicting the French king being taken prisoner by the Black Prince at the battle of Poitiers) and enlivened it with sensationalist material such as King Edgar’s alleged sexual abuse of nuns and the barbarous appearance and customs of the ancient Britons.¹²² Whereas Wynne portrayed his task as an attempt to revive the patriotic sentiments of the Welsh and emphasized his scholarly credentials by including a dedication to a high-ranking patron, learned preface, and texts of Latin sources, Crouch eschewed such ornaments and presented himself as a successful commercial author, referring readers to several of his previous works and also printing a catalogue of twenty-two historical works he had published, many likewise under the pseudonym ‘R. B.’, competitively priced at 1s. each.¹²³

‘Fabulous Relations’ and ‘Genuine Histories’: Edward Lhuyd and the Recovery of the Past

Although he once contemplated writing ‘some part of the History of Wales’ and was encouraged to undertake this task by several contemporaries, Edward Lhuyd never completed such a work.¹²⁴ However, by his untimely death aged forty-nine in 1709 he had made a substantial and original contribution to the study of the Welsh—and by extension the British and the Irish—past.¹²⁵ His achievement in this respect is all the more remarkable as it was only one manifestation of an ‘Itch of Curiosity’ that also resulted in pioneering work on natural history, palaeontology, and the Celtic languages, and, as in those other fields, was notable for both its reliance on first-hand observation and verification and its critical approach—fundamental characteristics of the experimental natural philosophy of his day.¹²⁶ Two main aspects of his antiquarian and historical studies stand out: the recovery and recording of written and archaeological evidence on more systematic lines than before, and the use of comparative linguistic analysis in order to propose new interpretations of the settlement of the earliest peoples of Britain and Ireland. The first fruits of these investigations appeared in extensive additions to the coverage of Wales in Edmund Gibson’s revised edition of Camden’s Britannia (1695).¹²⁷ This in turn led to a much more ambitious project intended to comprise A British Dictionary, Historical and Geographical, A Natural History of Wales, and a four-part Archæologia Britannica, although of these only the first volume of the Archæologia was published, namely a pioneering work on the Celtic languages entitled Glossography (1707).¹²⁸ In addition, Lhuyd illuminates wider understandings of the past in Welsh society. This final section of this chapter aims, therefore, to situate Lhuyd in the multi-stranded historical culture of his day.

For Lhuyd, engagement with the British and Welsh past drew emotional force from a sense of Welsh identity rooted in his family background. However, the nature of that engagement was significantly shaped by his experience in Oxford. As the son, albeit illegitimate, of Edward Lloyd of Llanforda near Oswestry, an outspoken royalist during the Civil Wars and Commonwealth, and Bridget Pryse, second daughter of Thomas Pryse of Gogerddan, northern Cardiganshire, Lhuyd belonged to the Welsh gentry through both his parents.¹²⁹ This background explains his strong sense of self-identification as ‘an old Briton’, descended, so he asserted in the Irish preface to his 1707 Glossography, from the northern British ruler Coel Godebog ‘in the Province of Reged in Scotland, in the Fourth Century, before the Saxons came into Great-Britain’, thereby witnessing to a preoccupation with genealogy typical of his class which was already evident in the young Lhuyd, who, to quote his father, ‘eates drinkes & sleepes pedigrees’.¹³⁰ This strong sense of Welsh identity was also expressed through his changing his surname from the Anglicized Lloyd to the Welsh Lhwyd or Lhuyd.¹³¹

He arrived at Jesus College, Oxford in 1682 to read for a degree in civil law, but never graduated as he was quickly drawn into the orbit of Robert Plot (1640–96), the naturalist, antiquary, and first keeper of the university’s Ashmolean Museum, whom Lhuyd succeeded in 1691, having served there in various ancillary roles since 1684.¹³² His association with Plot and the Ashmolean led to correspondence with other scientists, notably the botanist John Ray (1627–1705) and the physician and naturalist Martin Lister (1639–1712). As the illegitimate son of a bankrupt father, his employment at the museum, though poorly paid, made Lhuyd the first professional Welsh scholar, in the sense that his scholarship provided his main source of income rather than being a leisure activity supported by the revenues of landed estates, as had been the case, say, for Robert Vaughan of Hengwrt and William Maurice of Llansilin earlier in the seventeenth century.¹³³ Thus, while Lhuyd belonged to the Welsh gentry, his social origins are less important to understanding his achievements than they are for most of the other antiquaries and historians discussed in this chapter. Nevertheless, his family background did help him to realize his plans, as his kinship connections facilitated collaboration with antiquarian-minded Welsh gentry, clergy, and school masters and opened doors to patrons in Wales willing to support his scholarly endeavours. Indeed, his Parochial Queries (1696) sought information on ‘Seats of the Gentry; with the Names and Quality of the present Proprietors, and their Arms and Descent’: a conventional but prudent acknowledgement of the status and preoccupations of the largest group of potential subscribers.¹³⁴

Lhuyd’s antiquarian interests developed rapidly from 1693, when he accepted Edmund Gibson’s commission to translate and update the Welsh counties in the revised edition of William Camden’s Britannia, first published over a century earlier in 1586. Instrumental in Lhuyd’s acceptance was William Nicolson (1655–1727), archdeacon (and later bishop) of Carlisle who had formerly been lecturer in Anglo-Saxon studies at the Queen’s College, one of several leading Anglo-Saxonists in late seventeenth-century Oxford.¹³⁵ Their example may have provided a further impetus for Lhuyd to do something similar for the Britons and other Celtic inhabitants of Great Britain. He was also indebted to John Aubrey (1626–97), who corresponded with Lhuyd in the 1690s on the origins of place-names and the languages of Britain and provided a model for the careful surveying of archaeological sites.¹³⁶ Encouragement to continue the work he had begun in revising Camden came from Welsh scholars in Oxford and some of the gentry of the principality, who urged Lhuyd to produce an account of both the natural history and the antiquities of Wales along the lines of Plot’s works on Oxfordshire and Staffordshire.¹³⁷

Lhuyd issued ambitious proposals for this project in 1695 in which he sought financial support from ‘such Gentlemen as are…inclin’d to promote it’.¹³⁸ Here, Lhuyd presented himself as a dedicated investigator eager to satisfy his patrons. However, this did not signal a readiness to compromise his academic freedom. Thus, while he acknowledged that the Glossography, with its demanding treatment of the Celtic languages, was ‘of little Use to many of those Gentlemen’ who had funded its research, he defended himself by asserting that these had contributed ‘out of their Inclination of promoting Learning in General’.¹³⁹ Indeed, Lhuyd expected the gentry and clergy not only to fund but also to participate in the systematic scholarly enterprise he had devised, since, like Plot, he planned his work as a co-operative effort in which correspondents answered a detailed questionnaire concerning the geography, antiquities, and natural history of each parish covered; 4,000 copies of these Parochial Queries were printed, and three copies distributed to each parish in Wales, the following year.¹⁴⁰ The use of questionnaires as a means of structuring such studies, inspired by Francis Bacon’s emphasis on empirical research, had been developed since the mid-seventeenth century by scholars including Robert Plot and Thomas Machell, the latter’s questionnaire (1677) seeking information on the northern counties of England probably being especially influential on Lhuyd as it was the first aimed at the parish level.¹⁴¹ Correspondents were an essential component of the ambitious programme of research that Lhuyd set himself, as their contributions offered the prospect of more comprehensive and detailed coverage than it would have been possible for him and his small band of assistants to achieve in their travels. Nevertheless, Lhuyd emphasized that the first-hand investigations undertaken during those travels were fundamental to ensuring the accuracy of his work.¹⁴² The value of this combined approach had been demonstrated in gathering material for the Welsh additions to Gibson’s Britannia. However, as the Parochial Queries show, it was raised to a new level in preparing the Archæologia and associated works, preparations that also took Lhuyd and his assistants on an arduous four-year tour of Wales, Ireland, Scotland, Cornwall, and Brittany between May 1697 and March 1701.

Central to this work was the identification and recording of sources, which Lhuyd, like other antiquaries with whom he had contact, such as William Nicolson and John Aubrey, considered an essential prerequisite for the recovery of the past; indeed, he considered it to be all the more urgent with respect to Welsh manuscripts on account of previous losses, most recently in the Civil Wars, thereby echoing a long rehearsed concern about the destruction of Welsh books.¹⁴³ Accordingly, Lhuyd, together with his assistants and correspondents, recorded inscriptions, manuscripts, and archaeological monuments; he also compiled a catalogue of manuscripts in Welsh—or, as he tellingly called it, the ‘Ancient Language of Britain’ (Antiqua Britanniæ Lingua)—giving brief descriptions of their content and their locations.¹⁴⁴ Nor did he aim merely to recover the past: the orthography he devised for Welsh words in the Glossography sought to revive it visually by ‘restoring…the Letters anciently us’d by the Britains’ found on early medieval inscribed stones and medieval manuscripts from Wales and Cornwall.¹⁴⁵

The emphasis on observation and accurate recording also reflected a commitment to rational explanation.¹⁴⁶ Conversely, Lhuyd had little time for what he regarded as ‘fables’. True, Lhuyd followed Wynne and others in refusing to condemn Geoffrey of Monmouth outright. In describing the preface to Wynne’s History, with its detailed assessment of the veracity of alleged Trojan, biblical, or Phoenician origins, as ‘elaborate’ and ‘erudite’, Lhuyd appears to have been sympathetic to its argument.¹⁴⁷ This impression is reinforced by a passage Lhuyd inserted in Gibson’s Britannia, where he attributes the ‘fabulous’ elements in Geoffrey’s History to the unenlightened Welsh of the Middle Ages: that the work ‘(as well as most other Writers of the Monkish times) abounds with Fables, is not deny’d by such as contend for some authority to that History: but that those Fables were of his own Invention, seems too severe a censure of our Author’s, and scarce a just accusation: since we find most or all of them, in that British History he translated’. (Like earlier scholars Lhuyd mistakenly believed that the medieval Welsh translations of Geoffrey, known as Brut y Brenhinedd, were in fact ‘the very old book in the British tongue’ which Geoffrey claimed to have been his source.)¹⁴⁸ Lhuyd added, moreover, that many of the ‘fables’ were already found in the work of ‘Ninnius’: that is, in the early ninth-century Historia Brittonum (‘History of the Britons’). Lhuyd concluded by directing ‘the judicious Reader’ to David Powel’s treatise on the subject of 1585 and the preface to John Davies’s Welsh dictionary of 1632, ‘and [to] balance them with the arguments and authority of those that wholly reject them’.¹⁴⁹ While Lhuyd made clear that much in Geoffrey’s History merited scepticism, then, he appears to have sympathized with the nuanced assessment of its reliability offered by Powel, Davies, and Wynne. Respect for this earlier scholarship also helps to explain why Lhuyd showed little desire to revise the medieval history of Wales, since he believed that this had already been treated adequately by David Powel, supplemented by the notes of ‘the learned and judicious Antiquary Robert Vaughan’ (frequently cited in the additions to Gibson’s edition of Britannia) and by Wynne.¹⁵⁰

Nevertheless, Lhuyd adopted a highly critical approach when it came to his major preoccupation: the origins and early history of the Britons and the other Celtic peoples of Britain and Ireland from the pre-Roman to post-Roman periods. As he put it in the Irish preface to the Glossography, ‘in these two last Centuries all learned Nations have expunged out of their true and genuine Histories, all those fabulous Relations, that were apt to bring the Truth of the whole in question’.¹⁵¹ Here, Lhuyd aligned himself firmly with a well-established critical tradition: for example, Francis Bacon had maintained that the study of antiquities ‘deserves to come in the place of those fabulous and fictitious origins of nations we abound with’.¹⁵² Nor was Lhuyd alone in his attitude among the educated Welsh of his day. Thus in 1694 one of his Glamorgan correspondents, John Williams of Swansea, also echoing Bacon, confided his hope that Lhuyd would have the opportunity ‘to frame ye naturall History of Wales; and the Civil alsoe as far as it may be retrievd and purifid fro[m] ye fabulous traditions of our own Countryman [sic], or the dry partial accounts of the English writers’.¹⁵³

In common with Camden and other antiquaries, Lhuyd accepted that ancient Greek and Roman authors provided the only reliable written accounts of the early history of Britain.¹⁵⁴ However, he believed, again like Camden, that their testimony could be supplemented both by archaeological monuments and by linguistic evidence provided by place-names and personal names. It is significant that Lhuyd began to learn Irish in 1692 on the grounds that comparisons with Welsh could help him write a history of Wales.¹⁵⁵ Over the following decade or so he increased his knowledge of the Celtic languages and deployed his study of their etymology to advance novel theories about the settlement of peoples in Britain.¹⁵⁶ The importance of linguistic evidence is underlined in the Archæologia’s dedication to Sir Thomas Mansel of Margam Abbey in Glamorgan, which refers to the hope that the book would lead ‘to a Clearer Notion than we have had hitherto of the most Ancient Languages, and Consequently of the Origin of the First Colonies of these Kingdoms’.¹⁵⁷ In this respect, Lhuyd proceeded from similar assumptions to those of the Breton scholar Paul-Yves Pezron (1639–1706) in L’Antiquité de la nation et la langue des Celtes (1703), a widely read work translated into English by David Jones, a Welshman from Cardiganshire, as The Antiquities of Nations (1706), which, as Lhuyd put it, aimed at ‘the tracing out by Language the Origin of Nations’.¹⁵⁸ However, Lhuyd found its methods defective and, in private correspondence, implied that Pezron’s grandiose claims for the ultimate descent of the Gauls from the Titans stemmed from excessive ‘national zeal’.¹⁵⁹

An interest in etymology is already apparent in the additions to Camden in Gibson’s new edition of 1695, most significantly in the argument that British words cognate with Irish, or their common Celtic ancestor, could have been borrowed into—rather than from—Latin.¹⁶⁰ However, the additions largely followed Camden’s original work in extending its historical horizons no further back than the British tribes named by Roman authors, and focused heavily on archaeological monuments and artefacts, including inscriptions, seen as pertaining to the Romans or the Britons.¹⁶¹ The piecemeal nature of his contributions also made it difficult for Lhuyd to develop a general synthesis. A rare exception is the introductory section on the Ordovices in north Wales, whom Lhuyd identified in particular with the people of Gwynedd, thereby highlighting continuity over the longue durée: thanks to their mountainous habitat, these had not only successfully resisted the Romans but also withstood conquest by the English until Edward I in the late thirteenth century.¹⁶²

The Glossography of 1707, while likewise lacking a coherent account of the early history of Britain, included new hypotheses about the ‘First Planters’ of the island that Lhuyd had developed since completing his work for Gibson—an emphasis consistent with the reference to ‘the original inhabitants of Great Britain’ in the book’s subtitle.¹⁶³ Interestingly, though, he confined the presentation of these ideas to the work’s Welsh-language preface on account, he explained, of their novelty, adding that if they were approved by ‘some of the Learned Gentlemen of our Country’ (i.e. Wales) there would ‘be no Difficulty to write them more at large hereafter in a more general Language’ (i.e. English).¹⁶⁴ Although Camden, the Dutch scholar Marcus Boxhorn (1612–53), and others had proposed Gaulish origins for the Britons,¹⁶⁵ Lhuyd used comparative etymology to take this interpretation further and argue for two waves of settlement from Gaul. The first comprised Gwyddelians (referred to elsewhere as C Britons), who, to judge by place-name evidence, occupied all of England and Wales. However, they were subsequently displaced by ‘our Ancestors’ (or P Britons), who drove them to northern England and Scotland, whence they crossed to Ireland. In addition, a third people, the Scots, migrated from Spain to Ireland where they coexisted with the Gwyddelians.¹⁶⁶ In the late nineteenth century these ideas were influentially adapted by John Rhys, first Professor of Celtic at Oxford.

Lhuyd also maintained that ‘traditions’, like ‘fables’, were of dubious evidential value. As well as demonstrating his commitment to rational explanation his treatment of these throws valuable light on popular understandings of the past in his lifetime. One of Lhuyd’s Parochial Queries sought information on ‘the Customs, and peculiar Games and Feasts amongst the Vulgar’ as well as ‘the Vulgar Errors and Traditions; parallel with those treated of by the Learned and Judicious Author of Pseudodoxia Epidemica’.¹⁶⁷ This is a telling reference to an influential work by Thomas Browne, first published in 1646, which argued that the common people were particularly susceptible to errors on account of their lack of education.¹⁶⁸ For Lhuyd, too, the credibility of the ‘fabulous’ was further undermined by its association with ‘the vulgar’—the common people distinguished from the gentry by their lack of social status and learning.¹⁶⁹ For example, Lhuyd dismissed ‘fabulous’ stories of drowned cities as ‘erroneous traditions of the Vulgar, from which few (if any) Nations are exempted’,¹⁷⁰ and was similarly sceptical of ‘the tradition of the neighbours’ associating the stone cairn known as Gwely Taliesin (‘Taliesin’s Bed’) in Cardiganshire with the poet Taliesin.¹⁷¹ Also like Browne, Lhuyd was ready to derive erroneous beliefs from antiquity, maintaining, for example, that popular beliefs concerning glass beads known as ‘snake stones’ might represent a vestige of druidical ‘superstition’.¹⁷²

The respondents to Lhuyd’s Parochial Queries followed the injunction to indicate when information they gave derived from ‘tradition’. Interestingly, some sought to provide corroborating testimony, thereby revealing both their acknowledgement of the dubious evidential status of ‘tradition’ and their reluctance to dismiss it entirely. For example, the respondent for the parish of Aberafan in Glamorgan reported:

We have an immemoriall tradition that Aber Avan was formerly a citty & that it stood where the Sea & Sands are these many ages agoe & called by the name of y dref hîr yn y wain, & that there was a court held in it, having power of life & death. It is certainly true that there is a field in it called Kae’r Grogwydd where condemned malefactors are said to be executed…¹⁷³

Such traditions maintaining the former greatness of settlements were common in early modern England, too, and point up how, for many people, perceptions of the past were anchored in, and primarily relevant to, particular local communities.¹⁷⁴

The criticism of ‘fables’ and ‘traditions’ by Lhuyd and previous scholars like Thomas Browne witnesses to a desire, then, to define and police acceptable understandings of the past. Unlike later Romantics who celebrated folk-tales as expressions of a people’s deep-rooted connection with their native land and thus as ancient testimony to the existence of its national identity, Lhuyd regarded popular beliefs as errant curiosities that stood in sharp contrast to the rational explanations he espoused.¹⁷⁵ However, the evidence he collected is significant for an understanding not only of Lhuyd and his correspondents but also of those who held such beliefs. For example, he heard from north Wales that ‘Camden’s history displeases some of our people’, not only because Camden called Bala ‘a den of thieves’ but because he denied the arrival of Brutus in Britain.¹⁷⁶ This is but one indication of the widespread adherence in Wales during Lhuyd’s lifetime to the British History popularized by Geoffrey of Monmouth. Moreover, for all Lhuyd’s association of legendary history with ‘the vulgar’, this adherence extended from erudite gentry antiquaries, like Robert Vaughan and Lhuyd’s cousin Thomas Sebastian Price, to the farmers and craftworkers who consumed ballads and other popular literature. One reason for the wide appeal of such notions was that, for many in Wales, they remained fundamental components of national identity. Indeed, the persistent popularity of the British History may be seen as part of what Lloyd Bowen has characterized as ‘the ideological matrix at the heart of early modern Welsh political culture’ that maintained Welsh distinctiveness along with loyalty to the monarchy in ‘a vision shared by elites and the people’.¹⁷⁷

This interpretation finds support from the Welsh-language almanacs aimed at a popular readership that were issued annually from 1680 to 1712 by the enterprising publisher Thomas Jones.¹⁷⁸ Strongly supportive of the monarchy and the established Anglican Church, fiercely anti-Catholic and hostile to Louis XIV of France, these contained astrological prognostications for the following year supplemented by a wide variety of other material, some of it historical in nature. One aspect of this was Jones’s interpretations of medieval Welsh prophecies. For example, readers were presented with a prophecy attributed to Gronw Ddu of Anglesey c.1400 that allegedly foretold the accession of William III to the throne of England in 1688, a reading supported by its apparent anticipation of the wearing of wigs by men and other late seventeenth-century fashions!¹⁷⁹ Jones also included chronologies of events in biblical, Roman, and British history. For example, the chronology in the almanac for 1685 extends from the Creation, placed 5,364 years ago (presumably reflecting the influence of the chronology proposed by Ussher a generation earlier), to the late seventeenth century.¹⁸⁰ Particularly notable is its listing of key moments in medieval Welsh understandings of the past strongly indebted to Geoffrey of Monmouth: the destruction of Troy ‘where the Welsh lived before they came to this island’, the arrival of the Welsh in the island and the length of their rule ‘before the English came to oppress them’, the loss of England by the Welsh ‘through the persecution of the English’, and the submission of the Welsh to the government and laws of the English in 1282. Christian history also featured with notices of the arrival of the apostle Joseph of Arimathea in Britain and the death of Lucius, the island’s first Christian king, while, significantly, the only specifically Welsh reference after 1282 is to the printing of the Bible.

The almanacs also lend a voice to Geoffrey’s history in poems, among them a ballad by the clergyman Ellis ab Ellis (fl. 1685–1726) entitled Hanes y Cymru (‘The History of the Welsh’). This celebrates the history related by Geoffrey down to King Arthur, defends it from the attacks of the Renaissance scholars Polydore Vergil and Hector Boece with reference to a range of medieval and sixteenth-century writers, and concludes in conventional fashion by blaming the defeat of the Welsh on their sins and urging them to repent and place their faith in God.¹⁸¹ Although the work of an educated, moralizing clergyman, the casting of the history in verse and its inclusion in the almanac strongly suggest that it sought to appeal to, and thus reflected, the tastes of a popular audience. The same was true of another earlier ballad bearing the same title by Matthew Owen (1631–79) of Llangar (Merioneth), possibly composed in 1656, that circulated only in manuscript.¹⁸² This summarizes Geoffrey’s History, from glorious Trojan origins to defeat at the hands of the English in the treachery of ‘the long knives’, with references to Brutus, Vortigern, Hengist, and Horsa, and, like Ellis ab Ellis, declares that the disasters visited on the Welsh were divine punishment for sin.

In many respects the evocation of the Welsh and British past aimed at popular readerships and audiences touched on briefly here was a world away from the scholarly antiquarianism of Edward Lhuyd. Thomas Jones’s almanacs were cheap ephemeral booklets in Welsh costing two or three pence, whereas Gibson’s Britannia and Lhuyd’s Glossography were weighty and expensive tomes, selling for at least 36s. and 16s. respectively and intended for the educated gentry and clergy.¹⁸³ In his approach to the past, Lhuyd owed much to Camden and refused to follow the example of those who continued to recycle the early history of the Britons presented by Geoffrey of Monmouth. Thus he was more critical of what he considered to be mere ‘fables’ than some other Welsh antiquaries such as his cousin Thomas Sebastian Price of Llanfyllin, whose view of the British History he thought lacking in judgement; by contrast, one of Thomas Jones’s almanacs printed a chronology provided by Price of ‘kings of Britain’ from Noah to Queen Anne that included the succession of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s rulers from Brutus to Cadwaladr the Blessed.¹⁸⁴ Nevertheless, Lhuyd was both indebted to and illuminated the wider Welsh historical culture of his contemporaries, with which he shared some common preoccupations. This is most evident in the field of antiquarian studies, where, thanks to his collaborative approach, he engaged with a wide spectrum of antiquarian endeavour. Such endeavour in turn influenced popular genres of writing: Ellis ab Ellis invoked Sir John Prise, Humphrey Llwyd, and David Powel in defence of Geoffrey of Monmouth.¹⁸⁵ While relying on the analysis of languages rather than tales of Troy and Brutus, and apparently lacking the acute sense of loss and victimhood, often laced with bitter anti-English feeling, found in popular writing about the Welsh past, Lhuyd shared the fundamental conviction underpinning such sentiment that the Welsh were different and special because of their ancient origins. His interpretation of those origins and approach to Welsh antiquities were informed, then, not only by the empirical, critical approach associated with Baconian natural history but also by the background, connections, and outlook of ‘an old Briton’. Nevertheless, his critical scholarship, while praised, proved no match in the eighteenth century for the beguiling glamour of distant origins in the biblical, Celtic, and Druidical past, as we shall see in Chapter 8.

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/9780198746034.003.0008

¹ Assessments of Welsh history writing in this period in Geraint H. Jenkins, The Foundations of Modern Wales, 239–46; Philip Jenkins, ‘Seventeenth-Century Wales’, 218–21, 230–1.

² Suggett and White, ‘Language’, 63. Cf. the impact of the broadly contemporaneous decline of the Gaelic learned orders in Scotland: Martin MacGregor, ‘The Genealogical Histories’, esp. 197, 220–2.

³ For Jones (c.1578–c.1658) see Nesta Lloyd, ‘A History of Welsh Scholarship’.

⁴ Cf. Shapiro, Probability and Certainty, 134–6; Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time, 14; Broadway, ‘No historie so meete’, esp. 4–6, 43–52.

⁵ Cf. Kidd, British Identities; Maclagan, ‘Genealogy and Heraldry’, esp. 43–8; Broadway, ‘No historie so meete’, 150–78; Allan, ‘ “What’s in a Name?” ’; Butaud and Piétri, Les enjeux de la généalogie, 23–4, 30, 33, 38–45, 50, 54, 57–8, 93–4, 145–6, 181–4.

⁶ For the paucity of pre-Norman evidence and the impact of William the Conqueror see Dugdale, The Antiquities of Warwickshire, sig. [b1^r–v]; Dugdale, The Baronage of England, 1: 1–22. See also Broadway, ‘No historie so meete’, 155; Graham Parry, ‘The Antiquities of Warwickshire’, 15.

⁷ J. Gwynfor Jones, ‘The Welsh Gentry and the Image’; Geraint H. Jenkins, The Foundations of Modern Wales, 4–5; Morys, Y Rhyfel Cartrefol, ed. Jones, 45–6.

⁸ Cf. Woolf, ‘Narrative Historical Writing’. See also Allan, ‘ “What’s in a Name?” ’, 148, 150, 153–4.

⁹ In this respect they resembled Irish history writing: Cunningham, ‘Seventeenth-Century Reconstructions’.

¹⁰ Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time, 217, 221–2, 224–8, 242; von Maltzahn, Milton’s History of Britain, ch. 5, quotation at 136. The conflicts of the 1640s also stimulated the reinterpretation of early Irish history in the following decade: Mark Williams, ‘History, the Interregnum and the Exiled Irish’.

¹¹ Enderbie, Cambria Triumphans, sig. A2^r–v (see also criticism of the Long Parliament (1641) at 269). For a much briefer and more eccentric invocation of early Welsh history in support of Charles Stuart’s restoration see Arise Evans, Rule from Heaven, esp. 23–6, and discussion in M. Wynn Thomas, ‘Morgan Llwyd’, 117–19.

¹² Prise, A Description of Wales, 22, 26, 42, 51 (quotation), 71, 79, 87, 89. For Vaughan’s ambivalent political loyalties see Huws, Medieval Welsh Manuscripts, 289.

¹³ William Williams, ‘Historia Bellomarisei’, 295–301, date at 275.

¹⁴ Luned Mair Davies, ‘The Tregaer Manuscript’; Morys, Y Rhyfel Cartrefol, ed. Jones; Parochialia, 3: 59 (quotation). See also Lhuyd, Glossography, 225; Lhuyd to Thomas Tanner, 12 April 1698, in Gunther, Early Science, 369. Lhuyd’s letters also available online in Lhwyd, ‘The Correspondence’.

¹⁵ Robert Williams, ‘An Account of the Civil War’. See also Dafydd Jenkins, ‘Deddfgrawn William Maurice’; Huws, ‘Maurice, William’; Morys, Rhyfel Cartrefol, ed. Jones, 1, 5.

¹⁶ Cf. Woolf, ‘Narrative Historical Writing’, 218–19.

¹⁷ A possible exception was the ‘Account of the Rebellion in North and South Wales, in the last Century’ listed among volumes in the Mostyn library in Pennant, The History of the Parishes, 73–4.

¹⁸ J[ohn] D[avies], The Civil Warres; Gwyn, Military Memoirs [ed. Scott] (Edinburgh, 1822) (descent from Brochwel omitted in the abridged edition in The Civil War, ed. Young and Tucker, 39–106). See also Lord, ‘Davies, John’; Neufeld, The Civil Wars after 1660, 24–38.

¹⁹ Fuller, ‘The Principality of Wales’, quotation from preface.

²⁰ Herbert, The Life and Raigne, 369–75, 496; Pryce, ‘Historians and the Treaty of Montgomery’, 10.

²¹ James Howell, Proedria Basilikē, ‘Analysis Totius Operis’ (unpaginated), 9–11; Langhorne, An Introduction, quotation from preface ‘To the Reader’; Woolf, ‘Narrative Historical Writing’, 213, 225.

²² NLW MS 13B. Other seventeenth-century copies of Brut y Brenhinedd are listed in Jones, HWMW, 432–3.

²³ Yr Ymarfer o Dduwioldeb, trans. Vaughan, sig. a2^r–v; E. D. Jones, ‘Rowland Fychan’. Cf. Nesta Lloyd, ‘ “Yr Ymarfer o Dduwioldeb” ’.

²⁴ BL, Harleian MS, 6831, fol. 14v (though 1685 is the last date in the list, the last-named ruler occurs beside the preceding date of 1646). For Thomas see Francis Jones, ‘An Approach to Welsh Genealogy’, 421–8; Francis Jones, ‘Hugh Thomas’.

²⁵ E. D. Jones, ‘Rowland Fychan’. Cf. Kendrick, British Antiquity, 99–133.

²⁶ E. D. Jones, ‘Rowland Fychan’; Enderbie, Cambria Triumphans. See also Graham C. G. Thomas, ‘From Manuscript to Print’, 258.

²⁷ John Davies, Antiquae Linguae Britannicae…Dictionarium Duplex, 8–9; Ceri Davies, ‘Introduction’, 2.

²⁸ Wynne, History, sig. A4^r–**4^v.

²⁹ Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time, ch. 5; Alan Ford, James Ussher, chs. 6 and 9.

³⁰ Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time, 139; Alan Ford, James Ussher, 212–14, quotation at 213.

³¹ Arise Evans, Rule from Heaven, 6–10.

³² [John Lewis], Contemplations upon these Times, 27–32, quotations at 30, 32.

³³ T[homas] J[ones], Of the Heart, and its Right Soveraign, esp. preface ‘To the Reader’ and sections IV–XII; quotations at 129, 151, 187, 192. See also J. Gwynfor Jones, ‘Jones, Thomas’. Thanks to Lloyd Bowen for drawing this work to my attention.

³⁴ Stillingfleet, Origines Britannicae, 6–14, 58–70, quotation at 62. See also Douglas, English Scholars, 253–5; Lurbe, ‘Entre histoire et mythistoire’.

³⁵ The fullest study of Edwards remains D. L. Morgan, ‘A Critical Study’. See also M. Wynn Thomas, ‘Seventeenth-Century Puritan Writers’; D. Densil Morgan, Theologia Cambrensis, 225–31.

³⁶ References are given here to the third edition: Charles Edwards, Y Ffydd Ddi-ffuant, ed. Williams; discussion of the three editions at liv–lvii.

³⁷ Charles Edwards, Y Ffydd Ddi-ffuant, ed. Williams, 162–85.

³⁸ Charles Edwards, Y Ffydd Ddi-ffuant, ed. Williams, 150, 394–421; Charles Edwards, Fatherly Instructions, 182–202. For the first systematic attempt to prove a close relationship between Welsh and Hebrew see Poppe, ‘John Davies and the Study of Grammar’, 124–30, 135–7, 145; and, for the wider European context, Kidd, British Identities, 30–2.

³⁹ Charles Edwards, Y Ffydd Ddi-ffuant, ed. Williams, 97–8, 194, 195.

⁴⁰ Charles Edwards, Y Ffydd Ddi-ffuant, ed. Williams, 197–8.

⁴¹ Charles Edwards, Y Ffydd Ddi-ffuant, ed. Williams, 209–10, quotations at 210.

⁴² Charles Edwards, Y Ffydd Ddi-ffuant, ed. Williams, 211–14, quotation at 211.

⁴³ E. D. Jones, ‘Robert Vaughan’; Richard Morgan, ‘Robert Vaughan’; T. E. Parry, ‘Llythyrau Robert Vaughan’; Huws, Medieval Welsh Manuscripts, 287–302.

⁴⁴ Vaughan, British Antiquities Revived; Vaughan to Richard Herbert, 25 March 1656, in T. E. Parry, ‘Llythyrau Robert Vaughan’, 330. Owen’s authorship of the treatise to which Vaughan responded was established by Charles, George Owen, 140–3.

⁴⁵ Huws, Medieval Welsh Manuscripts, 295–9.

⁴⁶ Morgan Llwyd, Llyfr y Tri Aderyn, ed. Thomas, 56; Geraint H. Jenkins, The Foundations of Modern Wales, 235. For Llwyd this was part of a broader renunciation of the culture of his youth: M. Wynn Thomas, ‘Morgan Llwyd’, 115, 127.

⁴⁷ E. D. Jones, ‘Rowland Fychan’.

⁴⁸ See e.g. Thomas Jones, ‘Cyfieithiad Robert Vaughan’; O. E. Jones, ‘Llyfr Coch Asaph’, 1: ix–xiv; Trioedd Ynys Prydain, ed. and trans. Bromwich, xlviii–lvi.

⁴⁹ E. D. Jones, ‘Camden, Vaughan, and Lhwyd’, 209, 222–7; Bartrum, ‘Hen Lwythau’, 204; Lhuyd to Richard Mostyn, 27 December 1696, in Gunther, Early Science, 318; Gruffydd Aled Williams, ‘Testun o Feirionnydd’, esp. 239–40 (and see also Gruffydd Aled Williams, The Last Days of Owain Glyndŵr, 37–40).

⁵⁰ Vaughan, British Antiquities.

⁵¹ Vaughan, British Antiquities, 40–3.

⁵² Prise, A Description of Wales.

⁵³ W[illiam] H[all], ‘The Printer to the Reader’, in Prise, A Description of Wales, unpaginated.

⁵⁴ J. Beverley Smith, ‘Gruffudd Llwyd’, 469–70.

⁵⁵ Prise, A Description of Wales, 7–8, 93; BT, Pen20Tr, xix–xx. Cf. Willis, A Survey of the Cathedral Church of Bangor, 56–7, 183.

⁵⁶ Huws, Medieval Welsh Manuscripts, 289; Ceri W. Lewis, ‘The Decline of Professional Poetry’, 57; Guy, ‘Writing Genealogy in Wales’. See also Nesta Lloyd, ‘A History of Welsh Scholarship’, 1: 151–7.

⁵⁷ Prise, A Description of Wales, 19 (bis), 32, 42, 50, 63, 85, 107, 111–12, 126. See also E. D. Jones, ‘Camden’, 223, 225.

⁵⁸ Vaughan, British Antiquities, sig. A2^v.

⁵⁹ Vaughan, British Antiquities, sig. A2^v.

⁶⁰ T. E. Parry, ‘Llythyrau Robert Vaughan’, 305–6, 309, 328–9, 330–1; Prise, A Description of Wales, 51.

⁶¹ Cf. Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time, 221, 225, 231–40.

⁶² Vaughan, British Antiquities, 16–20, 33–4.

⁶³ Prise, A Description of Wales, 64–6; J. Beverley Smith, ‘Gruffudd Llwyd’, 469–70, 477–8.

⁶⁴ Vaughan, British Antiquities, 34–5.

⁶⁵ It is unclear how far Owen’s and Vaughan’s use of ‘perfect history’ with respect to an accurate narrative of legitimate princely succession echoed the elusive Renaissance and Baconian ideal of ‘perfect history’ as an extended explanatory narrative: cf. Shapiro, Probability and Certainty, 123–4, 130–4, 137–8, 144. See also Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. Kiernan, 65–6, for the contrasting of ‘parfite’ history, including chronicles, with ‘vnperfect’ ‘memorialls’ and ‘antiquities’.

⁶⁶ Vaughan, British Antiquities, 35.

⁶⁷ Vaughan, British Antiquities, 36.

⁶⁸ NLW MS 4760B.

⁶⁹ For Maurice’s knowledge of manuscripts of the chronicles see BT, Pen20Tr, xxi–xxiii. The earliest known reference to the chronicle as Brut y Tywysogyon occurs in NLW MS Peniarth 19 (c.1400), which was copied by John Jones in 1634: Jones, HWMW, 186; Nesta Lloyd, ‘A History of Welsh Scholarship’, 1: 114–15.

⁷⁰ NLW MS 4760B, p. 239.

⁷¹ D. Myrddin Lloyd, ‘Enderbie, Percy’; D. L. Morgan, ‘A Critical Study’, 156–63.

⁷² Elis Gruffudd included coverage from Brutus to his own day but in a much broader chronological and geographical framework than Enderbie (see Chapter 6).

⁷³ Enderbie, Cambria Triumphans, sig. [A4^r].

⁷⁴ E.g. Baronius: Enderbie, Cambria Triumphans, 45, 102–3, 142.

⁷⁵ References to Llantarnam and other places in Monmouthshire in Enderbie, Cambria Triumphans, 91, 190, 196–7, 205, 207, 261, 287–8, 295.

⁷⁶ E.g. Enderbie, Cambria Triumphans, 2–3, 80–5, 109–29, 332–6, 342–52.

⁷⁷ Enderbie, Cambria Triumphans, 205, 188.

⁷⁸ Enderbie, Cambria Triumphans, 18.

⁷⁹ Enderbie, Cambria Triumphans, 28, 85, 90, 92, 102, 160, 176; sig. Aa4^v.

⁸⁰ Enderbie, Cambria Triumphans, 104.

⁸¹ E.g., Enderbie, Cambria Triumphans, 49–55, 109, 149–50, 193–5, [221–32].

⁸² See especially Enderbie, Cambria Triumphans, 250–1, including depictions of coats of arms inserted there.

⁸³ Enderbie, Cambria Triumphans, 305.

⁸⁴ Enderbie, Cambria Triumphans, 307; see also 299, 309, and cf. 106 (‘heroick’ Arthur).

⁸⁵ Enderbie, Cambria Triumphans, 324.

⁸⁶ Enderbie, Cambria Triumphans, 28, 336.

⁸⁷ Enderbie, Cambria Triumphans, 270. Contrast Powel, HC, 203.

⁸⁸ Enderbie, Cambria Triumphans, 262; cf. 311, apropos of the surrender to Edward I in 1277: ‘The jangling of the Welsh among themselves their utter overthrow.’

⁸⁹ Enderbie, Cambria Triumphans, 261, 269, 291.

⁹⁰ For an exception see Enderbie, Cambria Triumphans, 342.

⁹¹ Wynne, History; R. T. Jenkins, ‘William Wynne’. Wynne had completed a draft of the work by 15 October 1696: Wynne, ‘Letter’, ed. Williams.

⁹² R. T. Jenkins, ‘William Wynne’, 158–9; Wynne, Die Historie von Walles [trans. Hübner].

⁹³ Lhuyd to Richard Mostyn, 27 December 1696, in Gunther, Early Science, 318. See also Lhuyd to Howel Vaughan, 4 November 1696, in Gunther, Early Science, 313.

⁹⁴ R. T. Jenkins, ‘William Wynne’, 158–9; Dafydd Glyn Jones, Un o Wŷr y Medra, 305.

⁹⁵ Wynne, History, sig. A4^r–**4^v.

⁹⁶ Wynne, History, sig. A4^r.

⁹⁷ Wynne, History, sig. A4^v.

⁹⁸ Wynne, History, sig. *4^r–6^v.

⁹⁹ Wynne, History, sig. **3^v.

¹⁰⁰ Wynne, History, sig. **4^v. Wynne asked Lhuyd to read a draft of the latter part of the work prior to publication: Wynne, ‘Letter’, ed. Williams, 46.

¹⁰¹ Wynne, History, i–ii.

¹⁰² Wynne, History, 1–7. Wynne explained to Humphreys that he had ‘prefixed…a brief account y^e British affairs before Cadwalader, y^t y^e Reader might have a short view of y^e chain of y^e History’: Wynne, ‘Letter’, ed. Williams, 45.

¹⁰³ Llwyd, CW, 222; Powel, HC, 374; Wynne, History, 299.

¹⁰⁴ See e.g. Wynne, History, 11–12, 35, 54, 58, 59, 310–13.

¹⁰⁵ Wynne, History, 302–4, 315–23; cf. Anon., ‘Memoirs of Owen Glendowr’, 64, 67–8, and n. 49 above.

¹⁰⁶ Wynne, History, 326–8, quotation at 328. Wynne was responding to Tillotson, A Sermon, esp. 82–3. For Gouge see Suggett and White, ‘Language’, 68.

¹⁰⁷ Cf. Dixon, ‘Edwards, Jonathan’.

¹⁰⁸ Wynne, History, 331–98; cf. Powel, HC, 391; Anglo, ‘The British History’, 24–5. The sources used by Wynne included a copy of Archbishop Pecham’s register in All Souls College: ‘Letter’, ed. Williams, 46.

¹⁰⁹ Wynne, History, sig. **4v.

¹¹⁰ E.g. Wynne, History, 169, 207, 234, 255.

¹¹¹ R. T. Jenkins, ‘William Wynne’, 159. Cf. Woolf, ‘Narrative Historical Writing’, 213–15.

¹¹² Wynne, History, sig. A2v–A3v. See also Wynne, ‘Letter’, ed. Williams; Handley, ‘Humphreys, Humphrey’; Chadwick and Evans, ‘ “Ye Best Tast of Books” ’, 92–6; Gruffydd Aled Williams, ‘Testun o Feirionnydd’, 237–9; and, for a chronology by Humphreys of British and Welsh rulers, 446–960, NLW MS 2023B, pp. 117–29.

¹¹³ Wynne, History, 290, 299 (and see also 171, 173); Powel, HC, 374.

¹¹⁴ Wynne, History, 27, 28, 36, 153, 170, 212, 271.

¹¹⁵ Wynne, History, 203.

¹¹⁶ Mayer, ‘Nathaniel Crouch’; Mc Elligott, ‘Crouch, Nathaniel’; Vandrei, Queen Boudica and Historical Culture, 62–7.

¹¹⁷ Crouch, The History.

¹¹⁸ Crouch, The History, [3]; cf. Mayer, ‘Nathaniel Crouch’, 395–6, 402, 408.

¹¹⁹ Almost 70 per cent of Part I consists of an account of the kings of England from Ecgberht to Harold Godwineson (Crouch, The History, 28–49), followed by a narrative of Anglo-Welsh relations from William I to Edward I (at 49–65).

¹²⁰ Crouch, The History, 5, 13–14.

¹²¹ Cf. Mayer, ‘Nathaniel Crouch’, 408.

¹²² Crouch, The History, [1], 34–6, 123–5; cf. Mayer, ‘Nathaniel Crouch’, 399–400, 403–7.

¹²³ Crouch, The History, 13, 120, [182–9]; cf. Mayer, ‘Nathaniel Crouch’, 397–8.

¹²⁴ Lhuyd to John Jones, 3 March 1692, and Lhuyd to Martin Lister, ?17 April 1692, in Gunther, Early Science, 161, 249. Dating of the latter follows Lhwyd, ‘The Correspondence’, tinyurl.com/y8ygl979 (last accessed 13 September 2021).

¹²⁵ Emery, Edward Lhuyd; Graham Parry, ‘Edward Lhuyd’; Cramsie, British Travellers, 357–93; Emery, ‘ “The Best Naturalist” ’; Caryl Davies, Adfeilion Babel, 69–90; Cram, ‘Edward Lhuyd’s Archæologia Britannica’.

¹²⁶ Lhuyd to Humphrey Foulkes, 28 July 1705, in Gunther, Early Science, 506; Emery, ‘ “The Best Naturalist” ’, 54. Cf. Anstey, ‘Experimental versus Speculative Natural Philosophy’.

¹²⁷ Britannia (1695). The Welsh chapters of the 1722 edition are reprinted in Camden’s Wales, comp. James. See further Walters and Emery, ‘Edward Lhuyd’; Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time, 331–57, esp. 345–54; Cramsie, British Travellers, 361–7.

¹²⁸ Lhuyd, Glossography; Lhwyd, A Design of a British Dictionary; repr. in Lhwyd, Archæologia, 35–9.

¹²⁹ For Edward Lloyd’s royalism see Ward Clavier, ‘ “Horrid Rebellion” ’, 60, 63, 66.

¹³⁰ Lhwyd, Archæologia, 198–9; Dodd, ‘The Early Days’, quotation at 305; see also Britannia (1695), col. 627. For Lhuyd’s Welsh connections and identity see Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Edward Lhuyd y Cymro’ (abridged in Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Edward Lhuyd—Welshman’). Note also Lhuyd’s pride in the material achievements of the ancient Britons: Britannia (1695), cols. 648, 658.

¹³¹ He changed the spelling of his name c.1688: Lhwyd, Archæologia, 2.

¹³² Arthur MacGregor, ‘Edward Lhuyd’.

¹³³ For Lhuyd as a ‘professional scholar’, in contrast to his correspondents among the ‘amateur’ clergy and gentry, see Brynley R. Roberts, ‘Edward Lhuyd y Cymro’, 77.

¹³⁴ Lhwyd, Parochial Queries, 1 (no. V); for the date see Lhwyd, Archæologia, 5 (text repr. at 41–7). See also Lhwyd, A Design of a British Dictionary, 1.

¹³⁵ Walters and Emery, ‘Edward Lhuyd’, 114; Hayton, ‘Nicolson, William’.

¹³⁶ Kelsey Jackson Williams, The Antiquary, 20–1, 30–1, 145–53; Hunter, John Aubrey, 192–3, 200–2; Nancy Edwards, ‘Edward Lhuyd and the Origins’, 167–8.

¹³⁷ Cf. Lhwyd, Archæologia, 2–4; Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time, 300–7, 353, 363.

¹³⁸ Lhwyd, A Design of a British Dictionary; repr. in Lhwyd, Archæologia, 35–9, quotation at 38.

¹³⁹ Lhwyd, Archæologia, 51; cf. 53–4, 63–4.

¹⁴⁰ Lhwyd, Archæologia, 41–7.

¹⁴¹ Emery, ‘A Map’, 43–4; Adam Fox, ‘Printed Questionnaires’.

¹⁴² Lhwyd, A Design of a British Dictionary, 2. Lhuyd noted that his additions to Gibson’s edition of Britannia were ‘generally observations of my own’: Britannia (1695), col. 583.

¹⁴³ Lhuyd, Glossography, 225.

¹⁴⁴ Antiquities and monuments: Britannia (1695), cols. 603–4, 607, 613–15, 625, 663–4. Catalogue: Lhuyd, Glossography, 254–65. Cf. Lhwyd, Parochial Queries, 2 (nos. VI–XI).

¹⁴⁵ Lhuyd, ‘At y Kymry’, 108–9.

¹⁴⁶ See e.g. the rejection of explanations of natural phenomena as resulting from Noah’s deluge: Britannia (1695), col. 668; Lhuyd, Lithophilacii Britannici Ichnographia, 128–39.

¹⁴⁷ Lhuyd to Richard Mostyn, 27 December 1696, in Gunther, Early Science, 318; Lhuyd, Glossography, 257.

¹⁴⁸ DRG, 4–5.

¹⁴⁹ Britannia (1695), col. 603.

¹⁵⁰ Powel: Britannia (1695), cols. 635, 690–1, 695–6, quotation at 695; Vaughan: cols. 591–2, 593, 643, 657, 671–2, 689, 691, 693–4, quotation at 591. Wynne: Lhuyd, Glossography, 226, n. (b), 257; see also 214, 258, 263.

¹⁵¹ Lhwyd, Archæologia, 180–1.

¹⁵² Bacon, ‘On the Dignity and Advancement of Learning’, ed. Devey, 87. Cf. Shapin, A Social History of Truth, 200–1; Grafton, What Was History?, 96–105.

¹⁵³ Cited in Emery, ‘Edward Lhuyd and Some of his Glamorgan Correspondents’, 72. Cf. Bacon, ‘On the Dignity and Advancement of Learning’, ed. Devey, 79: ‘History is either natural or civil: the natural records the works and acts of nature; the civil, the works and acts of men.’

¹⁵⁴ Lhuyd, ‘At y Kymry’, 112–13.

¹⁵⁵ Lhuyd to Lister, ?17 April 1692 (above, n. 124).

¹⁵⁶ Use of place-name and other linguistic evidence: Britannia (1695), cols. 603, 621–2, 626, 627, 635, 639, 649–50, 653, 658–9, 667, 670.

¹⁵⁷ Lhuyd, Glossography, Dedication ‘To the Right Honourable S^r Thomas Mansel of Margam, Bar^t’ (repr. in Lhwyd, Archæologia, 54).

¹⁵⁸ Lhuyd, Glossography, 266 (repr. in Lhwyd, Archæologia, 166). See also P. T. J. Morgan, ‘The Abbé Pezron’; Caryl Davies, Adfeilion Babel, 60–9, 85–90.

¹⁵⁹ Lhuyd to John Lloyd, 29 September 1703, and cf. Lhuyd to Martin Lister, 5 June 1698, in Gunther, Early Science, 489–90, 400; dating of latter follows Lhwyd, ‘The Correspondence’, tinyurl.com/y6who7dg (last accessed 13 September 2021). For the wider context of attempts to privilege biblical, Noachic origins over medieval legends tracing the descent of peoples of Troy see Kidd, British Identities, ch. 3.

¹⁶⁰ Britannia (1695), cols. 658–9; Lhuyd, Glossography, 32, 267–8 (repr. in Lhwyd, Archæologia, 167–71).

¹⁶¹ Nancy Edwards, ‘Edward Lhuyd: An Archaeologist’s View’.

¹⁶² Britannia (1695), cols. 649–50.

¹⁶³ ‘First Planters’: Lhuyd, Glossography, sig. b² (repr. in Lhwyd, Archæologia, 55).

¹⁶⁴ Lhuyd, ‘At y Kymry’, 134–5.

¹⁶⁵ Camden, Britannia (1586 edn.), 8–19; Prys Morgan, ‘Boxhorn, Leibniz, and the Welsh’, 222.

¹⁶⁶ Lhuyd, ‘At y Kymry’, esp. 116–21, 126–9, 132–5. C and P Britons: Lhuyd to Mr Babington, 14 October 1703, in Gunther, Early Science, 490–1. See further Caryl Davies, Adfeilion Babel, 72–9.

¹⁶⁷ Lhwyd, Parochial Queries, 2 (no. 15).

¹⁶⁸ Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica, I.3, ed. Robbins, 1: 15–21, with commentary at 2: 653–9; Cramsie, British Travellers, 369, 374; Harriet Phillips, ‘Hereditary Error’. Cf. Kelsey Jackson Williams, The Antiquary, 46, and, for assumptions that truthfulness was an attribute of gentlemen lacking in other social groups, including servants and the poor, Shapin, A Social History of Truth, ch. 3.

¹⁶⁹ Lhwyd, Parochial Queries, 2 (nos. XV–XVI), 4. Lhuyd stressed that the Glossography was not intended for ‘the common People’: Lhuyd, ‘At y Kymry’, 116–17.

¹⁷⁰ Britannia (1695), col. 592; see also col. 623.

¹⁷¹ Britannia (1695), col. 647; see also cols. 661–2, 675–7, 681–4. For Gwely Taliesin cf. Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Edward Lhwyd a Cheredigion’, 59–60.

¹⁷² Britannia (1695), cols. 683–4.

¹⁷³ Lhwyd, Parochialia, 3: 6.

¹⁷⁴ Cf. Adam Fox, ‘Remembering the Past’; Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture, ch. 4.

¹⁷⁵ For folklore see e.g. Thiesse, La création des identités nationales, part II.

¹⁷⁶ William Rowlands to Lhuyd, 28 September [1695?], in Lhwyd, The Correspondence, tinyurl.com/y29aavbw (last accessed 13 September 2021).

¹⁷⁷ Lloyd Bowen, ‘Information, Language and Political Culture’, 156.

¹⁷⁸ Geraint H. Jenkins, Thomas Jones yr Almanaciwr, esp. 122–3; Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘ “The Sweating Astrologer” ’; Ffion Mair Jones, ‘[M]ae r Stori yn Wir iw Gweled’, 20–2; Kaminski-Jones, ‘True Britons’, 45–51.

¹⁷⁹ Thomas Jones, Newyddion Mawr oddiwrth y Ser. Neu Almanacc am y Flwyddyn…1698 (Shrewsbury, 1697), [31], in ‘Welsh Almanac Collection’.

¹⁸⁰ For Ussher’s chronology, which pinpointed the date of the Creation to 23 October 4004 bce, see Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time, 147–8. Jones’s chronology implied a date of 3679 bce.

¹⁸¹ Thomas Jones, Newydd oddiwrth y Ser…1686 (Shrewsbury, ?1685), [17–20], in ‘Welsh Almanac Collection’.

¹⁸² ‘Hanes y Cymru’, ed. Parry-Williams. Owen evoked similar themes in a carol published in 1656 and may also have been the author of Cronicl y Cymry, an interlude that dramatized aspects of the British History: Ffion Mair Jones, ‘[M]ae r Stori yn Wir iw Gweled’, 3–20.

¹⁸³ Price of Glossography: Lhwyd, Archaeologia, 9 (bound 18s. 6d.; unbound 16s.). Gibson’s Britannia: Lhuyd to John Lloyd, 23 March 1695, in Gunther, Early Science, 259.

¹⁸⁴ Lhuyd to John Lloyd, 8 September 1694, in Gunther, Early Science, 243; Thomas Jones, Y cyfreithlawn Almanacc Cymraeg…1709 (Shrewsbury, ?1708), [22–5]; cf. Thomas Jones, Almanac am y Flwyddyn 1704 (Shrewsbury, 1703), [32–8] (both in ‘Welsh Almanac Collection’).

¹⁸⁵ Thomas Jones, Newydd oddiwrth y Ser…1686 (Shrewsbury, ?1685), [18], in ‘Welsh Almanac Collection’. Cf. Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture, 242–4.