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Title: Wales

Author: William Watkin Davies

Release date: August 23, 2024 [eBook #74307]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1925

Credits: Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WALES ***







  WALES


  BY

  W. WATKIN DAVIES

  M.A., F.R.HIST.S.
  BARRISTER-AT-LAW

  Author of "How to Read History," etc.



  NEW YORK
  HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
  LONDON
  WILLIAMS AND NORGATE




  COPYRIGHT, 1925,
  BY
  HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY



  PRINTED IN
  THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




  CONTENTS


  CHAPTER

  I. BEGINNINGS
  II. THE ROMAN OCCUPATION
  III. SEEKING FOR UNITY
  IV. RELIGION, LAWS, ETC.
  V. THE FIGHT FOR INDEPENDENCE
  VI. WALES CONQUERED
  VII. CALM BEFORE THE STORM
  VIII. OWEN GLYNDWR
  IX. WALES AND THE TUDORS
  X. THE REFORMATION
  XI. THE CIVIL WAR
  XII. THE REVIVAL
  XIII. THE DAWN
  APPENDIX
  NOTE ON BOOKS
  INDEX




{7}

WALES


CHAPTER I

BEGINNINGS

From the low chain of sand dunes which fringes the north-eastern
coast of France can be discerned, on a day of ordinary brightness,
the great cliffs of Kent.  Frequently they are overhung by the dark
and damp canopy which has given to our island the evil reputation of
being the home of eternal mist and night.  But occasionally the sun
strikes them, and they appear brilliantly white and alluring.  To the
French shore have come, in the course of centuries, wave after wave
of wandering peoples; men impelled by every sort of motive, fear of
stronger foes, love of plunder, and eagerness for adventure.  They
have come; they have seen the beckoning white cliffs so enticing in
their mystery, and have crossed over and essayed to make them their
{8} own.  Thither only the other day came the ruthless German, bent
upon striking at the tiny heart of so vast an Empire.  Thither a
hundred years before came Napoleon, reluctant that any part of Europe
should challenge his overlordship.  Thither eight centuries earlier
had come the polished and adventurous Norman, eager to win broad
acres and martial renown beyond the sea.  Still earlier had come the
Danes, plunderers rather than settlers, but men who nevertheless left
an abiding mark upon the heterogeneous population of the island.  The
Danes had but followed in the wake of the German tribes who had come
over, conquered, and bestowed a new name upon the larger and more
fertile part of Britain.  It is with the arrival of these last-named
people that the history of England begins; but the history of Wales
must be traced to a far earlier origin.  Indeed, we can trace the
descent of the people who now inhabit the hills and valleys of the
westernmost parts of Britain to those dim prehistoric times about
which only geology, ethnology, philology, and archæology can
enlighten us.  And at an even earlier date than that this country was
inhabited by man: but the ice of the north descended upon the {9}
land, and all the higher forms of life became extinct.  Between the
men of the pre-glacial and the men of the post-glacial age in Britain
no link has as yet been discovered.

The Britain revealed to our eyes when science first raises the
curtain is not the Britain which we to-day know.  The mountains were
higher, and the chalk hills had not assumed their present smooth and
rounded shape.  It was not then an island, but part of a mighty
continent, parts of which are now submerged beneath the waters of the
North Sea, the English Channel, and the Atlantic.  In all probability
a great river flowed through what are now the Straits of Dover.  The
climate, however, apparently, did not differ to any marked degree
from that which now prevails.  Over this continent roamed many
animals, some of which are entirely extinct, and others which have
long since fled either to the colder north or to the warmer south.
They included the mammoth, the cave lion, the bear, the rhinoceros,
the hyena, the hippopotamus, the bison, the reindeer, the elk, and
the wild horse.  The men who lived with, and hunted, these beasts
were very low in the scale of civilization.  Indeed the only evidence
of the possession by them of any {10} culture at all is a number of
sketches or paintings of animals upon the walls of caves and on
domestic utensils.  The art displayed in these figures is extremely
rudimentary, and between them and the pictures seen at a modern
exhibition the gulf is a wide one; but the primitive artist
undoubtedly possessed one sovereign merit--he left the beholder in no
doubt as to the meaning of the picture!  To these earliest
inhabitants of Britain the name Men of the Old Stone Age has been
given.  Their sense of the artistic must have been far more highly
developed than their sense of the comfortable.  Their dwellings were
caves, and those without any sort of furniture.  Of manufactures they
knew nothing: they neither wove cloth nor moulded clay.  Their
clothing must have consisted of the skins of the animals which they
killed; and as the evidence seems to indicate that they were not
cannibals, the same animals must have provided them with food.  Since
they knew nothing about the use of metals, all their hunting and all
their fighting must have been carried on with weapons of stone; and
indeed a plentiful stock of their arrow heads and axes has survived.
To this period it is quite impossible to assign even an approximate
{11} date: it may have been as late as ten thousand years ago, but it
may just as easily have been a hundred thousand.

When the snow and the ice had departed and left a country which men
could once again inhabit, the outward aspect of Britain had greatly
altered.  It was now an island, differing only in minor details from
the Britain which we now know.  With the restoration of a milder
climate man returned.  But the great beasts did not come back; and
henceforth we hear only of the dog, the horse, the ox, the sheep, the
pig, the goat, and the wolf.  The age which then opened is known as
the Neolithic, or New Stone Age.  The use of metals had not yet been
discovered, and all weapons and tools were still made of stone; but
there was a marked improvement in their manufacture.  The type of
civilization was evidently higher.  Hunting and fishing, together
with incessant fighting, were still the chief occupations of man; but
to these pursuits had now been added the tending of flocks and herds.
The art of weaving, too, had been discovered, and skins had made way
for brightly-coloured cloth garments.  Pots, jugs, and dishes of
every variety were baked, many of them accurate and graceful in their
outline.  {12} Finally, the people of the New Stone Age had learned
to be agriculturists; and that led them to abandon nomadic habits for
fixed settlements where, in time, villages came to be built.  Many of
these earliest villages were built in lakes, and traces of them have
been discovered in Wales in Llangorse Lake and in Llyn Llydaw.  Who
these people were is a question which cannot be answered with even
the slightest degree of certitude.  Indeed the whole problem of race
in those early times is so obscure as to make a study of it almost
altogether barren and unprofitable.  One thing only is certain, and
that is that throughout the New Stone Age the people who dwelt in
Britain were not Celts.  As not a word of their language has
survived, it is difficult to determine whether they were members of
the great family called Aryans, to which the whole present population
of Europe, with the exception of Finns, Turks, and Hungarians,
belongs.  Of these people it is probable that three successive waves
arrived.  In many things they differed, but were alike in being all
extremely dark.  Their descendants constitute the most pronounced
element in the population of modern Wales.

The traditional name for the men of the {13} New Stone Age is the
Iberians.  Before the Celtic invasion a more or less homogeneous
people inhabited the British Isles, France, Spain, and northern
Italy.  The use of the term "Mediterranean" as a substitute for
Iberian has been suggested.  To its use there is only one real
objection, and that is that it is almost wholly devoid of meaning.
Some recent writers, rejecting both these terms, have used the term
"Hamitic," a family of languages closely allied to the Semitic.  This
novel theory has been based upon two grounds: (1) The Irish and Welsh
languages, although drawing their vocabulary from Celtic or Aryan
sources, have a syntax paralleled in Berber and Egyptian.  No one who
has seen them can fail to perceive the remarkable similarity between
the physiognomy of the Berber peoples of northern Africa and the
prevailing type of South Wales Welshman.  (2) There is identity of
culture and of religion not only between the Neolithic inhabitants of
Britain and those of North Africa, but also between them and the
people of Egypt and Babylon.  A high stage of civilization was
attained by these people.  The building of Stonehenge would in itself
be proof enough of their engineering skill.  It is likely that there
was {14} continuous contact between Britain in those days and the
great cradles of civilization--the valleys of the Nile, the Tigris,
and the Euphrates--and that traders brought to the distant isle not
only foreign wares but new knowledge and up-to-date ideas.

When, or how, the Stone Age passed into the Age of Bronze we do not
know.  Bronze was used in Egypt at least as early as the fourth
millennium B.C., and in all likelihood it was introduced into Britain
in the ordinary course of trade.  Whencesoever it came, there can be
no doubt that it speedily wrought a complete revolution in men's way
of living.  In Britain bronze was not the only metal to be largely
used.  There were famous gold mines in Ireland, copper in Wales, and
tin in Cornwall.  The men of the New Stone Age had displayed none of
their predecessors' love of drawing; but they immediately evinced a
most remarkable aptitude for working in gold and bronze.  Torques,
rings, and bracelets of extreme beauty have been discovered belonging
to this period.  As the country was sparsely populated there was room
enough for wave after wave of immigrants.  The newcomers would not be
regarded altogether as foreigners, for in race, language, and {15}
civilization the inhabitants of both sides of the English Channel
were identical.  Thus the new mingled peaceably with the old without
any of the fierce struggles which form so hideous an aspect of the
later migrations.

But this period of calm was soon to be interrupted.  A new people
appeared on the scene, a branch of the great Celtic people to whom
for purposes of identification and differentiation the name Goidels
has been given.  These people were more warlike than the older
inhabitants of the island; nevertheless there was no settled policy
of extermination or even of expropriation.  But slow and silent
pressure did its work.  The Iberians were gradually pushed into the
remoter corners of the west, and especially into the mountainous
region which we now call Wales.

It is unnecessary perhaps to impress upon, the reader that there
never was at any time anything resembling a Celtic Empire, or even a
Celtic nation.  It is only the name which we give to a branch of the
Aryan or Indo-European family of races which migrated at a very early
date from central Asia to the banks of the Rhine, the Main, and the
Danube.  They became known to the Greeks of classical times, who
called them Hyperboreans.  A {16} martial folk they were, delighting
in combat, and always thirsting for fresh conquests, for glory, and
for plunder.  Their first struggle was with the Germanic tribes, whom
they eventually subjugated.  Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a writer of
the first century B.C. refers to Germany as a Celtic territory.  But
after a time the Germans turned on their masters and expelled them
from what had been their first European home, the region which lies
between the Elbe and the Rhine.

It is but natural that wandering nations should in all ages have felt
attracted by France.  To those, particularly, who came from the arid
and frozen steppes of Russia, or from the wind-swept Scandinavian
lands, its sunny plains, its fine rivers, its fields so well adapted
for the cultivation of grain, its gentle hills on whose slopes the
vine flourishes so luxuriantly, must have seemed a veritable
paradise.  It is therefore not in the least surprising that, from the
earliest dawn of history, race should have striven with race for the
possession of so fair an inheritance.  Among the first invaders
within the period of recorded history were the Celts, who invaded
France somewhere about the year 600 B.C.  Their second invasion
occurred some time after 300 B.C.  This time {17} they swept over the
whole country from the Channel to the Bay of Biscay, and from the
Atlantic to the Mediterranean.  The land was then called Gaul; and
these were the people against whom the whole might of Rome was
directed under the leadership of Julius Cæsar.  Invaders and invaded
were closely akin in blood.  After a stubborn resistance the whole
country was subjugated.  Latin civilization was speedily assimilated,
and Gaul became, after a time, more Roman almost than Rome itself.
Even at this distant date, nowhere is it more easy to enter into the
spirit of ancient Rome than within the gaunt and gigantic
amphitheatre of Arles, by the exquisite Maison Carrée of Nimes, and
beneath the stupendous aqueduct of Pont du Gard.  But as the power of
Rome declined new torrents of invaders swept into Gaul in successive
waves, Burgundian giving place to Visigoth, and Visigoth to Frank.

Meanwhile the Celts who had been living on the banks of the Danube
had not been idle.  For them the path of sunshine and ease led in the
direction of Italy and the Balkan Peninsula.  Italy, more even than
France, has at all times possessed a wonderful, though quite
explicable, fascination for the northern {18} nations.  Its fine
climate, the fertility of its soil, its high state of cultivation and
its accumulated riches have proved an irresistible attraction.  From
the picturesque pages of Livy it is easy to gather that the steady
progress of the invaders, the forcing of the Alpine barrier, the
march across the northern plain, the pouring through the passes of
the Apennines, the capture of Clusium, and finally the holding to
ransom of Rome itself, made a profound and indelible impression upon
the Romans.  It is altogether to the credit of the Celts that they
respected the superior civilization which they found in the lands
south of the Alps, and that they committed no crimes or outrages like
those perpetrated at a later date by Vandals and Huns.

These Celtic tribes, having conquered Macedon and Thessaly, accepted
an invitation from Nicomedes, king of Bithynia, and crossed the
Hellespont into Asia Minor.  With their aid Nicomedes speedily
defeated his enemies; but it was not long before he had good reason
to repent of having brought to the country such formidable allies.
The Celts had brought with them their families and all their
belongings, and now they settled down on both sides of the river
Halys.  There they formed a state {19} called Galatia, and became the
terror of all their neighbours.  Incensed with Mithridates the Great
on account of his treachery, they allied themselves with the Romans
in the war against him, and after that they remained a Roman client
state.  Even then they retained their language; and we have it on the
authority of St. Jerome that six centuries later the same tongue was
spoken on the banks of the Halys as on the banks of the Moselle.
With their language they also retained their customs and character;
but recent commentators have perhaps been too ready to find evidence
of the instability and impressionableness of the modern Welshman in
St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians!

From France the step was a comparatively easy one into Spain.  But
once across the Pyrenees, the forward march of the Celts was
stubbornly contested.  The country was in the hands of a queer
assortment of people, consisting of a pre-Aryan race, Iberians,
Ligurians, and Phœnicians.  Nothing could, however, resist the
Celtic advance; and ere long we find them firmly planted in Portugal
and among the hills of Galicia and the Asturias.

It will be seen from this that the invasion {20} of Britain by the
Goidels was but part of a mighty movement of expansion carried out by
the Celts in many different countries.  Britain they probably reached
sometime about the year 800 B.C.  Soon the tin mines of Cornwall
acquired something like European fame, and men of enterprise like
Pythias came from the ports of the Mediterranean to seek the pearls
and the gold so dear to the luxurious inhabitants of southern lands.
But it was not until Gaul had become a Roman province, peaceful and
well-ordered, and traversed by excellent roads, that Britain came to
be regarded as a place within the ordinary range of commercial
intercourse.

The last wave of invaders to enter Britain anterior to the coming of
the Romans were the Brythons, another branch of the Celtic family.
It is probable that they came from north-eastern Gaul at a date which
we cannot fix with any precision, but which must have been some time
between the fourth and first century B.C.  The people found by them
in Britain were but poor fighters, and the resistance offered by them
to the Brythonic invaders was feeble and brief.  They were speedily
conquered, and pushed back into the countries of the north and west.
At what {21} date they first came to Wales we do not know; but before
the end of the Roman occupation we find them living in what is now
Montgomeryshire.  The Brythons differed in many ways from their
predecessors.  They were tall, well formed, with long yellow hair,
faces shaved clean except for a moustache, light complexioned, agile
of limb, and hardy.  While excelling in war they were not unmindful
of the arts of peace.  They were an artistic people, and the weapons
and ornaments which they wrought in various metals, as well as their
enamel work, are exquisite in design and workmanship.  Many of their
spindles, their loom-weights, and their weaving combs have survived.
Julius Cæsar draws attention to their superb horsemanship.  They had
also made some headway in the art of boat building.  Yet despite the
advanced stage of civilization indicated by these things, their mode
of life was barbarous.  Their huts show practically no advance upon
those of earlier people, being circular in shape, with floors of
clays and walls of timber and wattle, the interstices being filled
with mud.  Almost invariably the hut consisted of a single room, in
which the whole family laid itself down to sleep, covered with
woollen blankets and rugs made of the {22} skins of animals.  They
knew the value of trade; and before the coming of the Romans used a
coinage.  The language which they spoke is the direct ancestor of
that spoken to-day in Wales and Brittany, just as the Goidelic branch
of the parent Celtic tongue is the ancestor of Erse and Gaelic.




{23}

CHAPTER II

THE ROMAN OCCUPATION

Julius Cæsar's two invasions of Britain could not have made much
difference in the mode of life of the inhabitants of the country.
They paid their tribute, and were left alone; and after a time even
the tribute seems to have been forgotten.  All that remained of his
conquest was the graphic, though incomplete, account which Cæsar left
of Britain in his "Gallic War," and the lingering memory of this
remote outpost of the Empire, a memory which awakened into life at a
later date and inspired ambitious emperors and generals with a desire
for conquest.

After the final departure of Cæsar it was well-nigh a hundred years
before the Romans again interfered with the Britons.  The period
between 54 B.C. and A.D. 43 is obscure in the annals of the island.
No doubt commercial intercourse with Gaul was constant, and Roman
culture must have percolated slowly {24} into the country by that
channel.  The names of some of the British kings who ruled have come
down to us, and among them Shakespeare's Cymbeline.  It was in the
year A.D. 43, during the reign of the emperor Claudius, that the
Roman general Aulus Plautius set out at the head of four legions to
re-conquer Britain.  While the campaign was still in progress the
emperor himself arrived; but his sojourn was only sixteen days in
duration, and to him belongs none of the credit for the conquest.  It
was against Caratacus and Togodumnus, sons of the late king
Cunobelinus, that Aulus Plautius directed his march.  Their capital
was Camulodunum, the modern Colchester.  Many of the neighbouring
tribes espoused the Roman cause; and in four years' time Aulus was
able to return to Rome, having completed the task of conquering
south-eastern England from Kent to Norfolk.

The next Roman leader to be sent to Britain was Publius Ostorius
Scapula; and under him the theatre of war shifted to the north and
west, those parts of the island which had hitherto remained
practically unexplored.  The nature of the struggle likewise changed.
The tribes hitherto encountered by the {25} Romans were closely akin
to the people of Gaul, and their civilization also was very similar
in quality.  They were people who valued peace and commerce, and who,
when they had recovered from the first shock of outraged
independence, were content to become Roman tributaries.  But the
tribes inhabiting the Welsh mountains were far less civilized.  Of
trade they knew practically nothing, and very little about the
settled pursuit of agriculture.  But they loved freedom, and were
prepared again and again to rise in its defence.  The first task
which Ostorius set himself was the conquest of the Decangi who dwelt,
according to Tacitus, on the shore of the Irish Sea.  He raided their
territory; but before anything like a conquest had been effected he
was called away to deal with the far more turbulent and warlike
Silures of the south.  These were the inhabitants of Monmouth and
Glamorgan; and they were now under the leadership of the famous
Caratacus.  This able man had concluded an alliance with the
neighbouring Ordovices, and the united tribes were able to offer a
stiff resistance to Roman aggression.  It was not until the war had
lasted many years, and Caratacus had won several victories, {26} that
the persistence and the superior science of Ostorius were rewarded
with success.  The site of the final battle is uncertain, but it may
well have been near Church Stretton at the spot now called Caer
Caradoc.  At this battle Caratacus was defeated and taken prisoner,
later to be led in triumph through the streets of Rome.  This was
probably in the year A.D. 51.  To keep the Silures in subjection the
first of the great Roman forts in Wales was erected at Caerleon on
the river Usk.

Following on the death of Ostorius in A.D. 52 the Silures recovered a
degree of liberty; but with the arrival of a new Roman general,
Quintus Veranius, in A.D. 58, the struggle began afresh.  Veranius,
however, died in a few months before he had accomplished anything,
and his place was taken by the truly great Suetonius Paulinus.  This
consummate general adopted the plan of building strong forts at
various strategic points all over Britain, from which the legions
could control the surrounding country.  Two of these forts were
placed close to the Welsh border, one at Deva (Chester), the other at
Viroconium (Wroxeter).  Chester for many generations after its
foundation was the base of operations for all military expeditions
launched against {27} North Wales.  The great desire of Suetonius was
to conquer the hitherto unmolested isle of Mona (Anglesey).  There
was the home of the Druids, the last remnants of the cruel custodians
of Celtic learning, protected by the surrounding sea, and by the
great mountain barrier of Snowdonia.  Flat-bottomed boats were
constructed, and the soldiers safely conveyed across the Menai
Straits.  There the legionaries were for a moment appalled by the
weird sight of Druids drawn up in a body, with uplifted arms calling
down curses upon the heads of the profane invaders, while women with
dishevelled hair and with lighted torches in their hands ran in and
out among the ranks.  But the fear of the soldiers was but momentary.
They pressed forward, completely routed the opposing army, burnt
their camp, cut down the sacred groves of oak, and cleared away the
last emblems of Druidism.  Thus perished a barbarous superstition
which had long outlived its utility.  It was just at this juncture
that news was brought to Suetonius of the great rebellion of the
Iceni under queen Boudicca, and the massacre of thousands of Roman
settlers at Camulodunum and Verulanium.  Without a moment's delay he
commenced his march back to the {28} south-west.  In quelling the
rising he was completely successful; but Wales saw him no more, as he
was recalled to Rome in the following year.

A period of peace ensued; and it was not until A.D. 71 in the reign
of Vespasian, who had himself served in Britain under Aulus Plautius,
that the forward policy was resumed.  Of the course of events in the
succeeding years our knowledge is imperfect; but it appears that the
Silures were completely beaten by the soldier-author Frontinus in
A.D. 78.  To the famous Agricola was left the task of crushing the
Ordovices.  He dealt with them so severely that they were left
completely without power to rebel again.  Having disposed of them, he
proceeded to Anglesey; and with the final subjugation of that island
the conquest of Wales was complete.

The task of organizing Wales on Roman lines then proceeded apace.
South-eastern Britain, together with the midlands, had finally
acquiesced in the Roman domination; and those parts of the country
were left almost entirely without garrisons.  With Wales it was
otherwise, and throughout its history the Roman occupation was
largely military in character.  Except for its mines {29} Wales was a
poor country, and there was little to tempt such Romans as desired to
settle for life in Britain to make it their home.  The towns that
came to be built in Wales were therefore military rather than civil.
But whatever their character and purpose they were both numerous and
important.  The most important of them perhaps was Chester, long the
home of the Twentieth Legion, from which it derived its Welsh name
Caer Lleon (Fort of the Legion).  Chester became the permanent home
of the legion; and around the fort a thriving town arose, with baths,
theatre, and all those amenities considered so essential by the
Romans.  There the legionaries lived, there they married, and there
they died.  From Chester the great road which was called Watling
Street ran straight to London, and thence to the channel ports.
Another road connected the place with York (Eboracum), the most
important Roman city in Britain.  A third road led to Wroxeter; while
from it another branched off, and ran along the hillsides to Conway
(Caerhun) and Carnarvon (Segontium).  In North Wales were several
forts, but with the exception of Carnarvon no towns of any note.  The
extreme north was well guarded by the twin {30} fortresses of Conway
and Carnarvon.  The mountains and valleys of Merioneth were kept in
subjection by the triangle formed by Tomen-y-Mur near Festiniog,
Caergai near Bala, and Pennal near Machynlleth.  Roman roads must
have been fairly numerous in Wales, but they are extremely difficult
to trace at the present day.  It is quite certain that the great
majority of mountain tracks pointed out to the credulous modern
tourist as Roman roads belong to comparatively late mediæval times.
A road ran from Conway over the mountains to Tomen-y-Mur, Caergai,
and Pennal, and then on to South Wales.  This is known as Sarn Helen,
and in several places can be clearly traced.  There was also another
road leading from Tomen-y-Mur to Chester.  In Mid-Wales were the
forts of Caersws, Caerflos, Y Gaer, and Castell Collen.  The passage
of the Teifi was guarded by Llanio.  On the Towy was Carmarthen
(Maridunum).  In Pembrokeshire there do not seem to have been Roman
settlements or roads; in all probability the country was left to its
own devices just as Cornwall was.  On the upper reaches of the Towy
stood Llandovery.  Thence a road led to Gaer near Brecon, then
following the valley of the Usk to {31} Abergavenny and Caerleon.
Beyond Caerleon, between the Usk and the Wye, lay Caerwent (Venta
Silurum), where so much of archæological and historical interest has
recently been discovered.  On the Bristol Channel there were forts at
Cardiff, and at the mouths of the Neath and the Loughor.  Connecting
the main roads no doubt were many smaller ones, some of them mere
tracks across the mountain passes.  The infinite pains which the
Romans would take to render even one of these less important ways
easy and safe is proved by the marvellous "Roman Steps" which lead
over Drws Ardudwy from the coast to the high plateau on which stands
Tomen-y-Mur.

The question of the extent and durability of Roman influence in Wales
is part of the larger question of its extent and durability in
Britain as a whole.  Whether it persisted right through the English
invasions, so that early mediæval institutions can be regarded as
having Rome and not the forests of Germany as their home is a
question still warmly debated.  To what extent Britain, as apart from
Wales, had been Romanized it is difficult to determine; for the
English invasions were exceedingly destructive, and the invaders {32}
little better than savage barbarians.  But in Wales the problem
assumes a somewhat different form; for the tide of English invasion
was stemmed at the foot of the Welsh hills.  It was a new Brythonic
invasion from the north, as well as the arrival of fugitives from the
midlands, that modified the conditions left by the Romans in Wales.
Emphasis has been laid by scholars upon the purely military character
of the occupation.  With the exception of Caerwent and Wroxeter there
were no civilian towns; and that most typical product of Roman
civilization, the villa, was altogether absent from Wales.  On the
other hand, it must be pointed out that, although the language
remained Celtic, a very large number of words had been borrowed from
Latin, and those words by no means confined to the department of
warfare.  They are words which point clearly to an advance in culture
and civilization, in book learning, and in religion.  But it is true
that political and legal terms remained purely Celtic.  It is known
that the minerals of Wales were extensively worked by the
Romans--copper from Anglesey, gold from Merioneth, and iron from
Monmouth.  One thing is certain: Wales at the departure of the Romans
was a highly civilized land, {33} civilized in its political ideas
and in its laws, and Christian in its religion.  A love of
literature, of art, of independence, and of unity had been so firmly
rooted that, despite the welter of lawlessness and bloodshed which
the unhappy country had to endure during the succeeding eight hundred
years, they persisted through it all.  Wales was to enjoy nothing
comparable with the tranquillity and the good government of the Roman
period until the great Tudor sovereigns began to turn their thoughts
to the little land from which they derived the best part of their
blood.




{34}

CHAPTER III

SEEKING FOR UNITY

The period between the departure of the Romans and the coming of the
Normans was one of political chaos.  Wales almost immediately became
divided, rival kings and chieftains ruling over different parts of
the country.  To follow in any detail the petty strivings of these
men would be pure waste of time.  They fought for no principle;
neither are there any signs of nobility of purpose or of a wide and
enlightened patriotism.  Only the faintest outline of the political
history of Wales during the period need be given.

Great as were the benefits conferred upon Britain by the Romans, in
one respect their rule had been harmful--they had accustomed the
subject people to rely upon them for the defence of the island.  It
was always the policy of Rome to draw soldiers from one province and
to send them to garrison another province in some distant part of the
far-flung {35} Empire.  The martial ardour of the British youth was
not quenched; but instead of serving in Britain and so learning to
defend their own land, they were sent across the Pyrenees, to the
Danube, and into Asia Minor.  When the Empire itself began to be torn
with political dissensions in the later years of the fourth century,
adventurous Roman generals began to aspire to the higher positions.
One of these, a Spanish soldier, Maximus by name (in Welsh legend
Macsen Wledig), rose against the emperor Gratian.  In Britain he
collected a large army with which he defeated and slew Gratian.  In
A.D. 388, however, he was himself overthrown at Aquileia.  The great
soldier Stilicho was appealed to by the despairing Britons, harassed
by foes on every side; but all the forces at his disposal were needed
for the more urgent task of protecting the older and more valuable
frontiers of the Empire.

For purposes of defence Britain had been divided into two
provinces--the north, commanded by a Dux Britannorum, or, as he was
called in Welsh, the _Gwledig_; and the south-east, commanded by the
Count of the Saxon Shore.  Of these the first is the more important
in Welsh history.  The most famous holder of the office was Cunedda.
His seat of {36} government originally was in the north; but being
compelled to give way to the Picts, he led his Brythons into Wales,
where he established himself at Deganwy on the Irish Sea.  One of the
greatest of Cunedda's descendants was Maelgwn Gwynedd.  He perceived
that if Wales remained composed of a number of petty independent
principalities no other fate could possibly await it than to be
swallowed up piecemeal by the foreigners.  Accordingly, partly by
argument and partly by artifice, he persuaded the other chieftains to
acknowledge him as the heir to Roman power, and to bow to his
overlord ship.  This was about the year A.D. 550.  Nevertheless the
Saxon advance continued.  Under their leader Ceawlin they marched up
the Severn valley; and, in the year 577, won a great victory at
Deorham, the result of which was that they reached the Bristol
Channel, thus cutting off the inhabitants of Devon and Cornwall for
ever from their kindred in Wales.  Some little time later Ethelfrith,
king of the Angles, marched against Chester, won a battle there in
613, and established his power as far as the Irish Sea.  This meant
that a wedge was driven in between the people of Wales and the Welsh
people of Strathclyde.  Meanwhile all along the border {37} English
power was being consolidated under the able and vigorous kings of
Mercia; and soon Offa's Dyke was raised to mark the boundary.  Thus
by the middle of the seventh century Wales had assumed what were to
remain to all intents and purposes ever afterwards its geographical
limits.  Internally the country was forming itself into the principal
territorial divisions which remained until superseded by the shire
system of Edward I.  The extreme north was called Gwynedd.  Next came
Powys, roughly corresponding to our Montgomeryshire.  Modern
Cardiganshire was called Ceredigion.  Corresponding to Pembrokeshire
was Dyfed.  Carmarthen represents the ancient Deheubarth, and
Glamorgan the ancient Morganwg; while between the Usk and the Wye was
the principality of Gwent.

By the close of the eighth century the struggle between Celt and
Saxon had abated somewhat of its severity; but no sooner was the
strife over than the Danes appeared on the scene, a menace alike to
England and to Wales.  The most famous of Welsh champions in the
fight against the Danes was Rhodri Fawr, whose reign began in 844.
In many respects Rhodri resembles his great contemporary Alfred of
Wessex.  He consolidated his power, {38} built a fleet, and kept the
invaders at bay.  But after his death in 877 dissension and discord
again prevailed.  The Danes renewed their attacks; and the famous
law-giver Howel Dda proved quite incapable of dealing adequately with
the situation.  Howel died when things were at their worst, leaving
one child, his daughter Angharad.  Fortunately this girl was married
to a man of commanding personality, Llewelyn ap Seisyll, a good
statesman and a capable soldier.  He succeeded in bringing the whole
of Wales under his sway, in restoring order, and in keeping out both
Danish and Saxon invaders.  But towards the close of his life, in
1022, the Danes again arrived in renewed strength; and the old king's
successor, Griffith ap Llewelyn, became a fugitive, while anarchy
prevailed throughout the land.  Llewelyn, however, proved to be one
of the greatest rulers that Wales has ever had.  In 1038 he returned
from exile, overcame all resistance, drove back the Mercians, deposed
the reigning pretenders, and made himself undisputed ruler of the
whole country from the Dee to the Severn.  Griffith was a man of wide
vision who looked beyond the frontiers of Wales.  He perceived that
the great enemy of his country was Harold of {39} Wessex; and in
order to be strong enough to resist him he married Eadgyth the
daughter of Harold's great rival Aelfgar, earl of Mercia.  For some
time Griffith was successful; but in 1063 Harold organised a campaign
on a big scale.  He himself marched into Wales from Bristol; while
Tostig, with another army, invaded Gwynedd.  Wales was harried with
fire and sword; and in the midst of it all Griffith was murdered by
one of his own discontented followers.  But the English conqueror had
only just placed the country under the government of Griffith's two
brothers, Bleddyn and Rhiwallon, when he was summoned to attend to
sterner tasks by the death of Edward the Confessor.




{40}

CHAPTER IV

RELIGION, LAW, ETC.

Legends have accumulated freely about the early history of
Christianity in Britain.  According to one tradition St. Paul himself
visited the island.  According to another tradition Joseph of
Arimathea was the first to bring the glad tidings, as the beautiful
ruins of the chapel dedicated to his memory at Glastonbury testify.
A third legend tells how Bran, the father of Caratacus, accompanied
his captive son to Rome, became a convert to Christianity, then
returned to his native land as a missionary, to become known ever
after as Bran the Blessed.  All, however, that we can say with
certainty is that Christianity had made good progress in Britain many
years before its adoption as the official religion of the Roman
Empire early in the fourth century.  We have some detailed
information, which is probably authentic, about the lives of the
first British martyrs Alban, Aaron, and Julius; {41} and we know that
there were British bishops present at the Council of Arles in the
year 314.  The earliest Christian building that has been discovered
is the one at Silchester.  Of the progress of the new religion in
Wales one must speak with greater caution.  Wales had been the last
home of the Druids, and the people clung long to their old mythology.
Centuries even after the adoption of Christianity the old
deities--Llud, Merlin, Ceridwen, Coil, Olwen--shared in popular
estimation the fame of the newer saints of the Christian calendar.
It is also well known that the Roman soldiers were the men who clung
longest to the ancient paganism; and it was by the soldier, rather
than by the civil servant or the trader, that the Empire was
represented in Wales.  We should probably be fairly near the mark if
we said that there were no Christian churches in Wales prior to the
fifth century.

When Christianity did arrive in Wales it came in the form of
monasticism.  This was not the type of monasticism which became so
famous afterwards under the name Benedictinism.  Its pattern was not
found at Monte Cassino but in the Egyptian desert, where abbots ruled
over a number of associated, but otherwise independent, cells.  From
Egypt {42} the fashion had travelled to St. Honorat, one of the
beautiful isles of Lérins off the French coast, now a favourite
resort of visitors from Cannes.  There the great St. Patrick himself
lived for a time; and a painting on the walls of the monastic
refectory commemorates his expulsion of all venomous reptiles from
the island.  From Lérins the new ideal spread to Arles and the cities
of Provence; then up the Rhone valley and to Tours, where it received
a warm welcome from St. Martin.  It then came to Britain where it
struck root and, in the course of the succeeding two centuries,
produced a large number of saints, the most celebrated of whom were
David, Patrick, and Columba.  That the British Church was full of
vigour is proved by the rise of Pelagius at the beginning of the
fifth century, and the heresy associated with his name; for the
presence of heretics in a Church always indicates life, just as
orthodoxy indicates apathy and indifference.  So firm a hold did this
type of Christian life lay upon the Celtic people of the British
Isles that, despite the pressure of the Roman Church, it lingered on
well into the twelfth century.

This early Celtic Christianity was, in many respects, an exceedingly
beautiful thing.  Never {43} has the world beheld more perfect
missionaries than the spiritual and tender-hearted preachers who took
the Gospel across stormy seas, amid countless perils, to Britain,
Ireland, Scotland, parts of Germany, and even distant Iceland.  To
Christians of the West, Iona ought surely to be a spot scarcely less
sacred than Rome itself.  But little priestly pomp pertained to these
early preachers; gentleness, simplicity, and faith were their most
pronounced qualities.  Their meekness overcame every obstacle, from
the ferocity of wild beasts to the more dangerous ferocity of savage
men.  They knew little or nothing about rules and discipline, and
there is hardly a trace of Latin order and love of law perceptible in
their genius.  As saints they were superb; but their churchmanship
was indifferent.  It was the Roman and the Teuton who built the
splendid edifice of the mediæval Catholic Church.  The Christian
communities of the Celts were too mystical and too spiritual to
attempt to compress the Almighty into human formulas; they could
produce holy men, and they could produce heretics, but defenders of
the Faith they could not produce.  To appreciate the immense
difference it is only necessary to contrast the generous and genial
character of Columba {44} with that of the hard, grasping, and narrow
Augustine!  From the year 664, when the famous Synod of Whitby met,
the Celtic Church in Wales and the Roman Church in England each went
its own way, until the sword of the Norman accomplished that which
the eloquence of Augustine had failed to do, and the two Churches
were merged into one.  It is unfortunate that our knowledge of the
famous Celtic Christians of the fifth century is so scanty.  It was
eminently an age of saints--Dewi, Cybi, Padarn, Illtud, Dyfrig,
Cadog--and a host of others whose names have been perpetuated in
hundreds of churches up and down the countryside.  In the Celtic
schools, too, were found scholars who represented the very flower of
the culture of the period, far finer than anything that the England
of the day could show.

When we turn from the political annals of Wales to such topics as
legal and social institutions we find that materials for forming a
conception of what life was then like are fairly abundant.  By far
the most important source is the so-called Laws of Howel Dda.
Historians have now long been convinced of the importance of the
study of legal institutions, and of the assistance which such study
{45} affords to the student of ordinary social history.  There have
been illustrious pioneers in the field, like Maine, Seebohm,
Maitland, Pollock, and Vinogradoff.  Codes of law, from India to
Ireland, have been carefully analysed and compared, and from them
decayed and vanished civilizations have been reconstructed.

We find that, from the sixth century to the tenth, most of the rulers
of western Europe were busy codifying the laws of the people over
whom they ruled.  For the greater part their work consisted of
codifying in the strict sense of the word; that is to say, the
collecting together of existing customs, and the setting of them
forth clearly and dogmatically, with but a small infusion of new
matter.  Law was deemed to be something already in existence,
something to be ascertained rather than something to be created.
This theory is the foundation upon which the whole subsequent legal
development of England was based.  Judges exist to ascertain the law;
and it is only indirectly, and often by means of convenient fictions,
that they make new law.  It is in this sense that the pre-Norman
rulers of France, England, and Wales are law-makers.  In Wales the
work of codification was performed by Howel Dda, a prince who ruled
in Dyfed, {46} as we have already seen, during the troubled period of
Danish invaders.  The fashion of code-making had already been set.
The first conspicuous example of it was the codification of the
Frankish laws by Charlemagne.  But long before his time there had
been Anglo-Saxon codes.  Thus in 596 Æthelbert had codified the laws
of Kent.  Sometime between 688 and 725 Ine had codified those of the
West Saxons.  Then came the last and the greatest of the English
pre-Norman codifiers, King Cnut.  As to how far foreign influences
played a part in the formation of these English and Welsh codes,
scholars are divided in opinion.  The great Corpus Juris of Justinian
had been given to the world before the earliest of the British or
English codes; and long before Justinian's day there prevailed,
throughout the Roman Empire, an admirably ordered system of
jurisprudence.  This system must have prevailed in Britain during the
period of Roman occupation; and it could not possibly have failed to
influence for all time the minds of the people by familiarising them
with certain legal conceptions.  Furthermore ecclesiastical
influences were powerful.  The Church had its Canon Law, the peculiar
Law of a society far more civilized than the world {47} around it;
and consciously or unconsciously the princes who designed the secular
codes must have learned much from it.

Doubt has been thrown upon the truth of the tradition which tells of
the making of the laws of Howel Dda; but here historical scepticism
seems to have overrun its legitimate limits.  As we have already
seen, codification was the fashion of the times; and there is no
inherent improbability in Howel's having done precisely what all his
royal contemporaries were doing.  A century ago Welsh historians were
credulous almost to the point of imbecility.  They belonged to the
pre-critical days of historical writing, above which only a towering
genius like Gibbon could rise.  Then arose the great reaction, and it
became the fashion to doubt almost everything, and especially
anything that was picturesque and intimate in the records of the
past.  Even the existence of such undoubtedly historical characters
as Saint David and King Arthur was disbelieved by these over-zealous
critics.  At last, however, the pendulum, after swinging so violently
from one side to the other, is beginning to right itself; and the
result is that we are coming to accept as true, or at least as
possibly true, much that had been {48} rejected and derided by the
last generation of scholars.

The story goes that Howel, a somewhat feeble prince reigning with his
brothers in Dyfed, and sorely distressed by the invasions of the
Danes, began to turn his mind to the peaceful pursuit of the jurist.
He summoned four men from each _cantref_ in his dominions to meet at
the Tŷ Gwyn (White House) on the river Taf in
Carmarthenshire.  There, as the fruit of their deliberations, was
drawn up what is known in Welsh as "Hên Lyfr y Tygwyn" (The old Book
of the White House).  The manuscript itself as written by Archdeacon
Blegwryd has not come down to us.  For our knowledge of its contents
we are dependent upon copies of a much later date, agreeing in
substance though differing in many details; and containing, no doubt,
the accretions of later times.  The "Old Book" is divisible into
three parts--the Venedotian Code, the Demetian Code, and the Gwentian
Code--each part representing the customary law which prevailed in a
particular part of Wales.  It is probable that the laws were
originally written in Latin, for the Archdeacon was the most famous
scholar of his day in all Wales.  The tradition that the new code was
taken to Rome, {49} and submitted to the Pope for his approval, can
scarcely be true, as the chronological difficulties in the way of its
acceptance are well-nigh insuperable.  Howel probably did pay a visit
to Rome; but the visit must have been anterior to the historic
meeting at the Tygwyn.  The society which we see depicted in the
codes is still tribal, that is to say its whole foundation, the
status of individuals as well as all the rights of property, was
based upon blood relationship.  The feudal system, in the perfected
form which we associate with the Normans in the early Middle Ages,
did not exist in Wales; but some of the principles of feudalism were
undoubtedly there.  Perhaps the most important characteristic of the
feudal system is the supremacy of the monarch, and the dependence
upon him of a long chain of persons, all differing in status, and
each dependent upon the one above him.  This we find in Wales.  There
were princes reigning in the various divisions of the country, each
of them, to all intents and purposes, independent of all the others.
But they all acknowledged the overlordship of the King of Gwynedd;
while he, in turn, acknowledged the overlordship of the King of
England.  Much as this state of things {50} conflicts with modern
political notions, there was nothing curious about it in times when
every crowned head in Europe acknowledged the spiritual headship of
the Pope and the secular headship of the Emperor.

By the time we are dealing with the country enclosed by the sea, the
estuaries of the Dee and Severn, and by Offa's Dyke, had come to be
known as Cymru, the name which it has borne among Welshmen ever
since.  The land was divided into districts called _cantrefs_ and
_cymwds_, the boundaries of which had long been fixed.  Of these two
divisions the _cymwd_ is by far the more important; for it was the
real unit of organization and local government.  The _cantref_ was
probably an area over which an _Arglwydd_ (Lord) ruled.  This Lord
was appointed by the King.  Occasionally we find several _cantrefs_
ruled by the same Lord, who then assumes the more high-sounding title
of _Tywysog_ (Prince); and sometimes even _Brenin_ (King).  Within
the _cantref_ would be two or more _cymwds_, in each of which would
be certain officials appointed by the lord of the _cantref_.  These
officials were in charge of the various governmental functions; and
the most important of them were the _Maer_ (Mayor), and the {51}
_Canghellor_ (Chancellor).  In each _cymwd_ also there was a court of
law, over which a judge presided.  To avoid confusion it must be
borne in mind that these territorial divisions, and these officials,
were governmental, and that side by side with them other divisions,
based upon kindred, existed.  Thus the Laws speak not only of the
Lord of a _cantref_, but also of a _Pencenedl_.  The Lord was an
officer appointed by the King, while the _Pencenedl_ was the head of
his own tribe or clan, and owed his appointment to no one.  When we
turn to consider the ranks into which the people were divided, we
find that status counts for everything.  The main division was that
between tribesmen and non-tribesmen, between Cymry and men of alien
birth.  The tribesmen themselves were divided as follows: (1) Men of
royal or princely caste.  (2) Men of noble birth.  (3) Ordinary free
tribesmen.  (4) Unfree persons corresponding to the villeins of
English law.  (5) Slaves in the strict sense of the term.  The alien,
however high his birth in his own land, could never find a way into
the ranks of the Cymry except by long residence, or sometimes by
inter-marriage stretching over several generations.  The kindred
(_cenedl_) was a self-governing {52} unit, having at its head a
_Pencenedl_, a personage who, as we have seen, was born and not made.
Below was an aggregate of families each under its own head of the
household (_Penteulu_) who bore a strong resemblance to the
_paterfamilias_ of Roman law.  The _cenedl_, or kindred, consisted of
all descendants from a common ancestor down to the ninth generation.

Each kindred group had a certain holding of land.  This holding was
called a _Gwely_.  It was the common possession of the whole tribe,
who held it jointly as far as the great-grandchildren of the common
ancestor, after the death of whom a complicated system of division
would again begin.  On his coming of age every member of the tribe
was allotted a portion of the land to till; and he also became the
possessor of certain rights in the common or waste land of the tribe,
as well as the possessor of a certain number of cattle.  Needless to
say, since the land belonged to the tribe, it could not be alienated
by individuals.  But side by side with tribal property went private
property even in land; and all such property could be alienated
freely.

The position of women, on the whole, appears to have been a
favourable one.  Up {53} to the age of twelve the young girl lived
with her parents, but after that she was deemed of age, and became
entitled to a share of the property of her kindred.  She was then
free to bestow herself in marriage.  A marriage was usually made by
solemn plight of faith, together with a religious ceremony; but any
proof of an intention to live together was considered sufficient.
And just as the making of a marriage was a very simple matter, so
also was the dissolution of one.  Husband and wife could separate at
any moment, and the subsequent marriage of either operated as a
divorce.  The wife brought certain dower to her husband, and the
rules affecting such dower are laid down with meticulous care in the
Laws of Howel.

The law relating to crime in Wales was very similar to the law
prevailing in England at about the same date.  There were three main
divisions or classifications, dealing respectively with murder,
assault, and arson.  By murder was meant the killing of a free
fellow-Welshman; to kill an alien was certainly not thought to be a
crime, and it well might be a meritorious action.  The killing of a
slave belonging to another man was an offence like any other damaging
of property.  {54} Before the kings had gained sufficient strength to
be able to make the avenging of murder a public concern regulated by
royal justice, the family of the murdered man was considered
responsible for avenging his death; and such a blood-feud might last
many years, and result in innumerable deaths.  When the blood-feud
had been superseded by a proper administration of justice, murder
became punishable by a fine, the fine varying according to the
position and quality of the murdered man.  In the Welsh laws this
blood-money is called _galanas_.  Thus the price of the life of a
_Penteulu_ was fixed at a hundred and eighty-nine cows, that of an
ordinary freeman at sixty-three cows, that of a slave at four cows.
The price of a woman's life was half that of a man's.  The whole of
the murderer's family was responsible for paying the price of his
murder; and if payment was not made, the murderer's life was forfeit.
The murder of a near kinsman was regarded as much more heinous than
the murder of a stranger, and in this case the murderer was cast out
of his tribe for ever.

Just as every man's life had its price, so every man's honour had
likewise its price; and an insult (_saraad_) was a punishable {55}
offence.  Here again the price varied according to the station of the
insulted man.  In those times, when villages were built entirely of
wood and other highly inflammable material, it was natural that
special laws should be enacted to deal with the use and abuse of
fire.  Fire seems to have been regarded very much as we regard a
dangerous animal--we may keep it if we so desire, but if we do so it
is at our peril, and we become responsible for any damage it may
cause by its escape.

As in all early legal systems the laws relating to contract in Wales
were extremely formal, the validity of an agreement depending
entirely upon the strict observance of certain procedure.  One
curious point is that practically everything had a fixed price.  This
was the price at which the thing could be bought or sold, and it was
the price exacted by way of fine from a person who happened to injure
or destroy it.  The onus of guaranteeing the good condition of an
article, or the good health of an animal, seems to have rested
entirely upon the seller, so that the English legal maxim _caveat
emptor_ would have to be reversed in ancient Wales.

Using the materials afforded by the Laws of Howel alone, it would be
possible to paint {56} a fairly full and accurate picture of life in
Wales in the early Middle Ages.  In addition to this source, however,
we are fortunate in possessing a document of unique interest and
great charm, a document which, though certainly later in date, does
reflect the life of the country before it had become very greatly
altered by Norman modes.  This document is the account by Giraldus
Cambrensis of his journey round Wales in 1188.  In this journey
Gerald was the companion of Baldwin Archbishop of Canterbury.  The
ostensible object of the tour was to invite the princes and people of
Wales to join in the Crusade against Saladin; but one cannot but
suspect that Baldwin's real object was to establish the authority of
Canterbury over the four Welsh sees.  In order to do this he wished
to celebrate Mass in each of the Welsh cathedrals--Llandaff, St.
David's, Bangor, and St. Asaph--and in so doing he visited
practically every corner in the country.  Gerald is one of the most
interesting men of his age.  He was born in 1148 in the beautiful
castle of Manorbier on the coast of Pembroke, the son of a Norman
father and a Welsh mother.  He was highly educated after the manner
of the age, having studied at Paris, {57} and on one occasion having
read a composition of his own before an admiring academic audience at
Oxford.  In 1188 he was an archdeacon, and the great objects of his
life--to acquire for himself the bishopric of St. David's, and to
convert that bishopric into an independent archbishopric of
Wales--were already formed in his mind.

The pilgrimage of Baldwin and Gerald began at Radnor, where they were
officially received by the Lord Rees, one of the ablest of mediæval
Welsh rulers.  From Radnor they crossed the Wye into Brecon, of which
Gerald was Archdeacon.  Thence they proceeded eastwards, past
Llanthony to Abergavenny.  From Abergavenny they went to Usk, from
Usk to Caerleon, and from Caerleon to Newport.  There they turned to
the west, and visited Cardiff, Margam, Swansea, Kidwelly, Carmarthen,
Whitland, Haverfordwest; and so to the Vale of Roses at St. David's.
They then directed their steps towards the north, following the river
Teifi as far as Lampeter.  At Strata Florida they spent a night; then
proceeding past Llanddewi they came to Llanbadarn where another night
was spent.  Continuing in a northerly direction they reached the
shores of the Dovey, then {58} as now the boundary between North and
South Wales.  From the boat which carried them across the broad
estuary they would behold the great mountains of Gwynedd--Cader Idris
towering right above them, and the fine peak of Snowdon blue in the
distance; while out to sea they would discern the low outline of
Bardsey Island, the burial place of countless pilgrims and saints.
They landed at Towyn, followed the coast of Merioneth through
Barmouth and Harlech, and then struck across Carnarvonshire from
Criccieth to Nevin, where they spent Palm Sunday.  Their next
stopping-place was Carnarvon, and from that town they went to Bangor.
Not content to leave any part of the country unvisited, they next
crossed the Menai Straits into Anglesey.  Returning to the mainland,
they followed the coast to Conway and Deganwy; then they entered the
lovely Vale of Clwyd, where they were entertained by the son of Owen
Gwynedd in his castle of Rhuddlan.  From Rhuddlan they went to St.
Asaph, and then on to Chester.  They had then reached the most
northern point in their itinerary; and so, turning southwards, they
visited in succession Oswestry, Shrewsbury, Wenlock, Ludlow,
Leominster, and Hereford.  {59} The effect of the Archbishop's
sermons could not have been particularly profound; for only some
three thousand men took the cross, and in fact none of them ever
quitted their native land.

But if the journey achieved nothing for the Holy Land, it did much
for the modern historian.  Gerald was no dry analyst, but a man who
knew instinctively how to write.  No such vivid descriptions, and no
such sketches of character were penned in Britain throughout the
Middle Ages.  Gerald is a veritable prose Chaucer.  He possessed a
seeing eye, and was always quick to seize upon a trait of character,
and to note an interesting custom.  He was also tremendously fond of
gossip; and the more marvellous the tale the greater his delight in
relating it.  His attitude towards the Welsh people was somewhat
supercilious; he regarded them with a queer mixture of sympathy and
contempt.  Nevertheless the picture which he paints is not an
unpleasing one.  They were a people well advanced in civilization,
though decidedly less polished and cultivated than the Normans.
Their chief pursuits were pastoral; and for recreation they preferred
fighting to aught else, and next to that {60} hunting.  They
delighted in music and oratory.  They were brave, frugal, hospitable,
and witty.  Their reverence for religion, and for everything which
bore the stamp of antiquity, was extreme.  But side by side with
these virtues were vices of a by no means amiable character.  They
were careless of truth, unreliable, lacking in persistence,
quarrelsome, litigious, and intensely superstitious.  In fact the
pages of Giraldus are the _locus classicus_ of the "perfidious
Welshman" who has been the butt of shallow writers in modern times.

With their love of battle and of sport the mediæval Welsh were a
hardy and a comely race.  Both men and women wore their hair short;
and the men shaved their faces, except for the upper lip.
Cleanliness was one of their outstanding characteristics.  They
indulged freely in the bath, a habit which perhaps had been handed
down from Roman times.  Of their teeth they took the utmost care,
cleaning them several times in the course of a day.  Owen M. Edwards
has thus admirably summarized what Gerald tells us about the domestic
habits of the people: "The great hall rose among the cowsheds and
sheepfolds.  Its hospitable door was always open.  'No one of this
nation ever {61} begs'; the wayfarer lays his arms down at the door
and enters as an honoured guest.  Water is offered.  If he allows his
feet to be washed, he means to stay over night; if he refuses, he
wishes to partake of a meal only.  In each family the harp was
played, and this was the chief means of entertaining guests.  The
principal meal was prepared at sunset.  The hall was strewn with
fresh rushes.  The guests and members of the family sat down in
messes of three, and partook of thin oaten cakes, broth, and chopped
meat from wooden bowls and trenchers.  The host and hostess attended
to the wants of every one, and themselves partook last.  Towards
evening the hall was laid out for sleeping.  The beds were arranged
around the walls--rushes covered with the coarse cloth manufactured
in the country.  In the middle of the hall the peat or wood fire
burnt night and day."




{62}

CHAPTER V

THE FIGHT FOR INDEPENDENCE

The Norman Conquest of 1066 was almost as epoch-making in the history
of Wales as it was in that of England.  In Wales its effects were as
decisive, though very different, as they were in the neighbouring
country.  In England the first and most important result was the
unification of the whole country under a strong central government
vested in the person of the king.  Prior to the Conquest there had
been a steady movement in the direction of unity; and at different
times, under a particularly strong monarch, it had almost been
achieved.  But such unity was at best precarious; and the great earls
of Wessex, Mercia, and Northumbria were, to all intents and purposes,
independent princes.  William the Conqueror, partly from design,
partly by accident, broke up these mighty earldoms.  This was the
beginning of a long struggle between the king and the great
feudatories, a struggle which ended with {63} victory for monarchy
and centralization.  England in consequence became definitely and for
ever one country, with one ruler and one law.  This unity is
precisely what Wales failed to achieve, and the failure is the
greatest tragedy in its history.  Before the Norman Conquest Wales
had been divided into three great divisions--Gwynedd, Powys, and
Deheubarth; and although the rulers of the other two divisions
yielded a grudging theoretical homage to the lord of Gwynedd, he
exercised in practice no authority over them.  With the coming of the
Normans the supreme test had arrived.  The Welsh people were
presented, as so many other nations have been presented before and
since, with two alternatives: they might sink all differences in the
presence of alien enemies, and by forming themselves into one
powerful State successfully resist invasion and so preserve their
independence; or, in the alternative, remain divided and consequently
prove an easy prey to their foes.  Before this test the Welsh people
failed.  The princes showed that they set greater store upon their
own glory and dignity than upon the safety of the country as a whole;
and time and again they refused to lay aside their rivalries and
jealousies in order to present a united {64} front to the enemy.  A
love of liberty and independence had been born, and they were to
inspire a desperate resistance against overwhelming odds on several
occasions; but the one condition absolutely essential if independence
was to be preserved the Welsh princes were not willing to accept.
And so the people of Wales, turning their backs upon this splendid
opportunity, began to tread that long road of political failure and
futility which made them ultimately a mere appanage of England, and
which, but for the efforts of bards and men of letters in the
creation of a precious national literature, would have led inevitably
to the total extinction of the Welsh nation.

This testing time begins with the Conqueror's famous winter march of
1070 from York to Chester, and ends with the proclamation of Edward
II as Prince of Wales at Carnarvon in 1301.  In the course of this
period of well nigh two centuries and a half there were years of
comparative tranquillity; but on the whole it appears to us like one
long incessant struggle.  It divides itself naturally into two.  In
the first period we find the Norman barons conducting campaigns in
Wales in their own private interest, each one {65} fighting for
himself, and taking possession of as much land as he could lay hands
on and retain.  It was no more a war of England against Wales than
the adventure of the Conqueror had been a war of Normandy against
England.  It was part of the policy of the first Norman kings to
direct the embarrassing and overflowing martial energy of their
followers into the innocuous channel of the Welsh wars.  Whether they
destroyed the Welsh, or whether the Welsh destroyed them, was matter
of indifference to their royal master.  But this period is of short
duration; and is followed at once by another, in which we find the
King of England himself taking an interest in the conquest of Wales,
and not infrequently leading expeditions in person into its mountain
recesses.  It was the astute Henry I who began to see that the barons
who had established themselves in Wales might easily grow so powerful
as to be able successfully to defy the royal will.  Indeed at one
period it did seem as if that fine soldier and politician, Robert of
Belesme, Earl of Shrewsbury, would succeed in winning the allegiance
of all the Welsh princes, and in establishing a Norman-Welsh kingdom
of the West, which would be completely independent {66} of England.
In this there would have been nothing impossible, or even unusual.
It was the kind of thing that the Normans had been doing in various
parts of Europe in the course of the preceding hundred years; and if
the Duke of Normandy had succeeded in creating a Norman-English
kingdom, why should not the Earl of Shrewsbury succeed in
establishing a Norman-Welsh kingdom.  The scheme failed through
jealousy on the part of the other Norman barons, the Welsh people's
love of independence, and the hostility of the Norman and Angevin
kings.

By the year 1070 the conquest of England by William I was complete,
and all the available sequestrated lands had been divided among his
followers.  But the land hunger of the barons was unappeased; and in
order that he might have time to consolidate and to organize his new
kingdom, William directed their attention to Wales.  That country
possessed three obvious gates by which invading armies might enter.
The first was Chester, which William himself had visited, and from
which the great mountains of Gwynedd could be clearly discerned.  The
second was Shrewsbury, from which a broad and fertile valley
stretched right into the {67} heart of Powys.  The third was
Hereford, the natural starting point for the conquest of Deheubarth.
At each of these points William stationed one of his barons--at
Chester the rapacious Hugh the Wolf, at Shrewsbury the able Roger of
Montgomery, at Hereford William Fitz Osbern.  Using these three
towns, at each of which a strong castle was erected, as bases of
operations, the earls, in the course of the next fifty years,
advanced step by step into the country.  Their object was to possess
themselves of all the level and fertile land; and their method of
conquest was the castle.  Opposition to them was always fierce, but
seldom united or well advised.  The three original barons were soon
joined by others; and ere long chains of fortresses stretched out
from Shrewsbury, Chester, Hereford, Gloucester, and Cardiff.  The
English border was thereby studded with them; and so was the whole of
South Wales from Gloucester and Hereford to Pembroke and Aberystwyth.
They brought with them traders, architects, and craftsmen; and a
numerous colony of Flemings made Pembrokeshire their home.  At the
end of this period of advance it was recognized that to the Normans
belonged the Marches, the fertile plains, {68} and the eastern and
southern slopes of the mountains; while the rest--a land of dizzy
peaks, narrow valleys, and bleak moorland--remained in the hands of
the Welsh people.

The records of these years of conquest are interesting and sometimes
thrilling, but neither edifying nor instructive.  They are replete
with martial exploits and deeds of daring.  Battles are fought, and
castles are stormed and burned with wearisome monotony.  On both
sides there was cruelty and treachery in abundance.  A few names
stand out as deserving of remembrance.  The men who did most to stem
the on-coming tide of Norman invasion were Griffith ap Conan, and
Griffith ap Rees, both of whom died in the year 1137.  The former
ruled in Gwynedd, and the latter in Deheubarth; and to a far greater
degree than any other Welsh princes of the period they perceived how
absolutely essential unity was if Wales was to be saved from becoming
a Norman fief.  By this time the Welsh had learnt much of the
Normans' military art.  They fought clad, like their foes, in
complete armour; and they knew how to build, how to defend, and how
to attack stone castles.  Thus the disparity in equipment, which had
at first made Welsh armies an easy prey to {69} much smaller bodies
of Normans, was disappearing.  In 1136, the year after the death of
Henry I, a great pitched battle was fought at Cardigan between
Griffith ap Rees and a league of Norman barons formed in order to
crush him; and in this battle the Welsh were victorious.  The Normans
retreated, and were obliged to abandon much of the land and several
of the castles which they had previously held.  This is the
high-water mark of the power of the Norman barons as distinct from
that of the Norman kings.

An even greater ruler then ascended the throne of Gwynedd, the famous
Owen Gwynedd, fine soldier, far-sighted statesman, friend of poets,
and patron of monks.  He perceived, dimly at least, the utter
hopelessness of the struggle, which had now begun in earnest, against
incorporation in the English kingdom, unless complete national unity
could at once be achieved.  Henry II now sat on the throne of
England; for the times of Stephen and Matilda, so helpful to the
enemies of England, were over.  Owen persuaded most of the Welsh
chieftains to acknowledge his supremacy; and he made an alliance with
the princely house of Dinevor, the rulers of South Wales.  But for
the utter selfishness and the {70} treachery of his brother there is
no knowing but that something like a united Wales might have emerged
before the close of Owen's reign.  Never was unity so sorely needed;
for one of the first enterprises upon which Henry II embarked, when
he had made his throne secure, was the subjugation of Wales.  But
Henry's first venture was unsuccessful.  Starting from Chester, he
penetrated as far as Rhuddlan; but was there confronted with the
great mountain mass of Snowdonia, stretching right into the sea at
the Penmaenmawr.  He occupied Anglesey, however; but so fierce was
the opposition with which he was met that he deemed it wise to come
to terms with Owen, and to withdraw.

In 1157 Henry came a second time, but with no better results.  Twelve
years later he led his armies into Wales for the third time, on this
occasion starting from Oswestry, and crossing the mountains into the
upper valley of the Dee.  At Corwen Owen's army was drawn up in
readiness, an army fairly representative of the whole of Wales.
Before the English could reach him, however, the wind and the rain
had done their work upon the invaders.  Baggage was washed away, and
to obtain adequate supplies became an {71} impossibility.  Angry and
disappointed, Henry was obliged hurriedly to retreat.  This was the
crowning triumph of Owen Gwynedd's life.  He had successfully
withstood one of the very greatest of English kings.  In the November
of the same year he died, and was buried in Bangor cathedral.

In the years which immediately followed the death of Owen the
dominating figure in Welsh politics was Rees ap Griffith, prince of
Deheubarth, the "Lord Rees" as he was generally and familiarly
styled.  He inherited Owen's policy of unity and consolidation; but
this time the work was to proceed from Cardigan, and not from the
mountains of the North.  The task of repelling the advance of the
Normans was now less formidable than it had ever been; for the
conquest of Ireland had begun, and the more turbulent and adventurous
spirits were finding there an outlet for their energies in just the
same way as their grandfathers had done in Wales.  When king Henry II
passed through Wales on his way to Ireland, he was met by the Lord
Rees, and an amicable understanding was arrived at between them.  In
1174 Rees was able to give proof of his friendship by assisting Henry
to crush a revolt of his barons.  {72} Slowly but steadily Rees
extended his sway over all the princes and barons of the South; and
even over Merioneth beyond the Dovey, the natural boundary between
his dominions and those of the princes of Gwynedd.  Not only was Rees
a great warrior, and an able statesman; he was also a munificent and
discriminating patron of culture.  An Eisteddfod which he held at
Cardigan in 1176 has become famous.  There poets and musicians from
every part of Wales competed; and so just were the awards that the
prize for music was won by the South, and that for poetry by the
North.

The closing decade of the twelfth century saw the accession to the
throne of Gwynedd of the ablest statesman in the whole history of
mediæval Wales.  This was Llewelyn, known to English and Welsh
historians alike as Llewelyn the Great.  It was no novel spectacle to
see one of the Welsh thrones occupied by a fine soldier; and great as
Llewelyn undoubtedly was in that respect, he was no greater than some
of his predecessors and some of his successors.  Where he outshines
all competitors is in his clear reading of the signs of the times, in
his understanding of the politics of England as well as Wales, and in
his firm {73} grasp of a policy which was no fantastic dream but a
theory possible of attainment.  His long reign of forty-six years
(1194-1240) divides itself naturally into some half-dozen periods.
In the first period (1194-1201) Llewelyn is fully absorbed in the
task of making himself secure on the throne of Gwynedd.  His
difficulty was with the members of his own family, and with Prince
Gwenwynwyn of Powys.  The emergence of Gwynedd from the obscurity
which had recently overtaken it was also beheld with jealous eyes by
the princes of the South.  But from all these difficulties Llewelyn
soon emerged triumphant.  In the course of the struggle he had,
however, learnt one thing, and that was that the only hope for Wales
lay in submission to the king of England, a submission which would
involve only an acknowledgment of overlordship, without the
abandonment of one single title of substantial independence.  He
perceived clearly that to fight for the shadow would probably lead to
the loss of the substance; especially as it had now been proved
beyond all possibility of doubt that the Welsh princes never would
submit permanently and peacefully to one of their own order.

{74}

The second period in Llewelyn's reign opens with his marriage to
Joan, daughter of King John.  The marriage alliance carried with it a
political alliance as well.  Llewelyn used the brief breathing space
which this alliance brought him to the best possible advantage.  He
made his position in Gwynedd secure, overran Powys, and carried his
victorious army as far south as Aberystwyth.  There he met the
southern princes, and agreed to divide Cardigan with them.  Then
turning northwards he marched against Ranulf, Earl of Chester, whose
castles of Deganwy, Rhuddlan, Holywell, and Mold he captured.

In the meantime John had been viewing the victorious career of his
son-in-law with surprise and displeasure.  A strong and united Wales
was a thing which no king of England could tolerate.  In the third
period of his reign, therefore, between 1212 and 1215, we find John
and Llewelyn in opposition to one another.  Twice in the course of
one summer did John invade North Wales, penetrating on the second
occasion as far as Bangor, where, characteristically enough, he
burned the Cathedral, and held the Bishop to ransom.  So hard pressed
was Llewelyn that he was obliged to send Joan to make full submission
to {75} her father on his behalf.  But the tide soon turned.  The
other Welsh chieftains were greatly alarmed at John's manifest
intention to dispossess them; and placing themselves under Llewelyn
they begged him to lead them.  John had also quarrelled with Rome;
and the great Innocent III, who then held the Papacy, absolved
Llewelyn and the other Welsh princes from their allegiance to the
English king.  Events in England were also most propitious; for John
had by now come into serious conflict with his own nobility, and was
soon to be compelled to concede all their demands by the Charter.
With the English barons Llewelyn made an alliance; and Magna Carta,
when it was eventually signed, contained clauses dealing exclusively
with Wales.  One of these clauses consisted of a promise that all
Welshmen dispossessed of their lands or liberty should recover them.
Another declared that all disputes were to be decided in England by
English law, in the Marches by March law, and in Wales by Welsh law.

In the year 1213 John had convened a council, in which some have seen
the germ out of which grew the future English Parliament.  The same
idea seems to have found place in the mind of Llewelyn; for on two
occasions {76} he summoned together all the princes of Wales, and all
the wise men.  So far as we know there was no process of election,
and certainly no trace of the principle of representation;
nevertheless this council was a distinct advance politically upon
anything that had been seen in Wales before.  The princes were to act
as judges, and all questions of policy were to be debated by them
with the assistance of the wise men.  The first of these councils
assembled at Aberdovey, a convenient meeting-place for Gwynedd,
Powys, and the South.  The decrees of the council were to be upheld
by force; and when Gwenwynwyn of Powys soon after refused to obey, he
was instantly crushed and deprived of his lands.

In order to strengthen himself still further, and at the same time to
erect a bulwark between him and England, Llewelyn cemented his
alliance with the powerful lords of the Marches by giving one of his
daughters in marriage to Reginald de Braose, and the other to Ralph
Mortimer.  This lady Gladys, who married Mortimer, became the
ancestress of Elizabeth of York, the mother of Henry VIII.  Thus in
the veins of the greatest of the Tudors there flowed some of the
blood of the ancient royal house of Cunedda.

{77}

In the next period of his reign, between 1215 and 1226, we find
Llewelyn at war with the Marshalls, the able and warlike Earls of
Pembroke.  William Marshall was as able a statesman as Llewelyn
himself.  His aim was to put an end to the turmoil into which England
had been plunged by the struggle between king and barons.  He was in
favour of the Charter; but at the same time it seemed to him that the
supremacy of a king was to be preferred to the lawless self-seeking
of the great earls.  He believed that the welfare of England demanded
the existence of a strong central Government; and in this he was
unquestionably right.  In truth, Marshall was striving to achieve in
England the very same thing that Llewelyn had been striving to
achieve in Wales.  With the death of John, and the accession of the
innocent and untried Henry III, the power of the barons began to
decline.  Unfortunately the great Marshall died in 1219; and a
vigorous war broke out between his son and Llewelyn.  After some
years, however, the younger Marshall lost the favour of the king; and
Llewelyn, always quick to adjust his policy to a changed situation,
at once concluded an alliance with him.  Against such an alliance
{78} nothing could stand in Wales.  Every castle in the country, with
the solitary exception of Carmarthen, fell into their hands, and the
king's army was defeated in a great battle at Grosmont.

With the victory of Grosmont the period of Llewelyn's aggressive
policy comes to an end.  Henceforward he is on the defensive, feeling
the on-coming of old age, and desiring above all things to render
Wales secure against disintegration after his death.  Llewelyn had
read correctly the lesson of the past.  He knew that, as soon as the
strong hand of an able ruler had been removed, the fruits of his
policy had been dissipated by his mediocre successors.  What he now
desired so ardently was to build a Welsh State upon foundations so
secure that it would not be overthrown by incapacity on the part of
its sovereign.  The definite announcement of Llewelyn's policy of
dependence upon England produced two parties in Wales, one of them
antagonistic to such dependence, the other favourable to it.  This
ultimately proved to be the rock upon which the plan was wrecked; but
it was not until after the death of Llewelyn that the failure of his
policy became apparent.  While he lived, his genius and his {79}
prestige were sufficient to compel the reluctant acquiescence even of
those princes who most strongly disapproved of his policy.  An
agreement was made with the English king, whereby Wales was to
preserve its independence, while its Prince acknowledged his
dependence, in the feudal sense, upon England.  There was to be
perpetual peace between the two kingdoms; and Wales was to support
England in all foreign wars.

Llewelyn's eldest son, Griffith, an able and energetic young man, who
would naturally have inherited his father's throne, was strongly
opposed to the policy which had been adopted.  In his view Welsh
independence ought to be absolute and complete; and no political
dealings with England fought to be carried on at all except on a
footing of equality.  The young prince was consequently looked upon
as the natural leader of the war party.  With what reluctance we do
not know, Llewelyn made up his mind that Griffith should not inherit
his throne, but that it should go to Davydd, the younger of his sons,
an effeminate and peace-loving boy.  With this purpose in view the
aged Prince summoned again the Council of Princes to meet, this time
at the Cistercian abbey of Strata Florida.  There {80} Davydd was
duly nominated, and the oaths of allegiance of all the assembled
chieftains taken.  This was in 1238; and two years later Llewelyn
died, and was buried in the monastery of Aberconway.

In the brief intervals of peace which he had enjoyed in the course of
his long and strong reign, Llewelyn had proved himself not unmindful
of the things of the intellect and the spirit.  The Cistercian monks
found in him a warm friend.  It was at their home of Strata Florida
that he summoned the last of his councils; and it was at their home
on the slopes of the Conway that he came to sleep his last sleep.
While he was reigning, the mendicant Orders had also come to Wales
for the first time; and they, likewise, especially the Franciscan
Friars, found in him a sympathetic protector; and it was by his
favour that they acquired their beautiful home at Llan Vaes in
Anglesey.  We have seen how he negotiated with the Pope.  With the
desire of the Welsh Church to be completely independent of Canterbury
he was in full sympathy, although he never went so far as to lay
claims to the power of appointing Welsh bishops.  Like almost all the
greater Welsh princes he delighted in music and {81} poetry, and was
a munificent patron of the bard and the minstrel.

In accordance with the decree of the Council Davydd ascended his
father's throne, and set himself to walk the path marked out for him.
But the task which the great Llewelyn had barely been able to
accomplish was far beyond the strength of his less able and less
popular son.  His brother Griffith had already been suspected of
harbouring disloyal thoughts and had been immured by his father in
the castle of Criccieth.  In 1241 Davydd went to Gloucester, one of
the three cities at which the kings of England used regularly to meet
their advisers in council, and there did homage to Henry III.  Then
his real troubles began.  The extreme nationalists were determined to
put an end to the policy of dependence; and in the person of the
imprisoned Griffith they knew that they would find an able and
enthusiastic champion.  And not only was Davydd opposed by the Welsh
diehards; he also found enemies in many of the border princes and
barons, who resented the supremacy of Gwynedd.  Griffith's wife
Senena was free; and she was chosen by the party of opposition to go
to the king and plead her husband's cause.  Henry III was
sufficiently {82} crafty to discern the opportunity of maintaining a
state of discord in Wales, by playing off the one brother against the
other.  He accordingly decreed that both Davydd and Griffith should
come to court, and have their differences settled by Welsh law.  It
soon became obvious, however, that Henry was not to be trusted by
either party.  He marched towards Chester, and then commenced to
negotiate with Davydd.  The king's terms were accepted; and Davydd
went with Henry to London, and again swore allegiance.  Meanwhile
Griffith had been set at liberty.  But his liberty was of short
duration.  Henry imprisoned him in the Tower of London where, in
1244, he met his death while attempting to escape.

In the summer of 1245 Henry gathered together a large army, and
marched against North Wales.  Deganwy was reached, and a new castle
built there.  This was waste of valuable time, and ere the work was
completed the king found that Davydd had secured powerful allies in
the form of famine and winter storms.  It was the same old story that
could be told of so many of the English invasions of Wales in the
Middle--a swift and irresistible advance in {83} summer, a long halt,
then the oncoming of winter followed by a retreat which very
frequently became a rout.  In the next year Davydd died, and was laid
to rest in his father's grave at Aberconway, whither, some time
later, the body of his brother Griffith was also brought.

With the death of Davydd a disputed succession again arose.  The two
most obvious claimants, since Davydd had left no children, were
Griffith's two sons, Owen Goch and Llewelyn.  But Ralph Mortimer also
claimed the throne through his wife Gladys, daughter of Llewelyn the
Great; and when he died a few months later he transmitted his claims
to his son Roger.  An entirely new candidate, however, appeared on
the scene in the person of the young Prince Edward, son of Henry III
and heir to the English throne.  The claim was vague, resting upon
the agreement come to between Senena on behalf of Griffith, and
Henry.  In effect all that was claimed by Edward was the territory
held by Llewelyn ap Griffith, which comprised the four _cantrefs_
between the Dee and the Conway--Rhos, Rhuvonig, Dyffryn Clwyd, and
Tegeingl--and certain lands south of the Dovey; and these he
obtained.  In Gwynedd Owen and {84} Llewelyn now became joint rulers;
and when they had done homage to the English king, they remained
unmolested.  Llewelyn had inherited a large measure of his
grandfather's ability and force of character; and owing to the
possession of these qualities he soon began to take the lead in
affairs.  With high and low alike he was immensely popular.  This
roused the jealousy of his two brothers, Owen and Davydd, and they
rose in revolt against him.  But from the start Llewelyn proved
himself a most capable soldier.  The rebels were swiftly defeated;
Davydd escaped, and fled to the English court; while Owen was
imprisoned.  By the end of the year 1255 Llewelyn was without a rival
in the North.




{85}

CHAPTER VI

WALES CONQUERED

Between Prince Edward and Llewelyn, in so far as the latter
represented his grandfather's policy, there was no fundamental
conflict of ideal.  The essence of that policy was that Wales should
remain independent and united, but within the bounds of allegiance to
the King of England.  To the modern man, who has inherited from the
century of the Reformation the conception of national sovereignty,
such a position may appear to be an impossible one; but to the man of
the Middle Ages, accustomed as he was to the underlying principles of
feudalism, there was nothing at all paradoxical in the position.  Now
in recent years we have again learned the soundness of the principle;
and it has become the foundation upon which the British Empire rests.
There are many of the elements of real tragedy in this mighty
conflict between Edward and Llewelyn.  Both were able, {86} valiant,
sincere, and high-minded men.  Both were statesmen of more than
ordinary capacity.  It is hard that a _modus vivendi_ should not have
been discovered between them; and it looks as if some cruel Fate had
placed each of them in a false position of inevitable hostility the
one towards the other.  To Edward the Welsh appeared in the light
only of rebellious subjects.  They owed him fealty; and with the
strict sense of feudal obligations which, with Edward, amounted
almost to an obsession, he viewed their disobedience as the breach of
a legal and a moral duty.  "The last survivor of that race of
traitors" were the words with which the Parliament of Shrewsbury
described Davydd, Llewelyn's brother.  To Llewelyn and the people of
Wales, on the other hand, the struggle was that of an independent
State, fighting for the preservation of its independence against the
encroachments of a powerful neighbour.  It was unfortunate that
Edward had come to think of Llewelyn as shifty and faithless, and
that Llewelyn had come to think of Edward as cruel, crafty, and
deceitful.  The two men regarded one another with intense personal
hatred and suspicion; and an accommodation which might have proved
fairly easy of {87} attainment in an atmosphere of goodwill and
confidence, was rendered quite impossible by the atmosphere of
dislike and distrust in which negotiations were conducted.

The trouble began when Henry III presented his son Edward, then a boy
of sixteen, with the palatine earldom of Chester, upon the extinction
of the great Norman family by which it had hitherto been held.  This
grant carried with it, as we have seen, certain lands in Wales--the
Four Cantrefs, and the lands between the Dovey and Carmarthen Bay.
These lands were recent acquisitions of the English Crown; and it was
with extreme reluctance that the chieftains of Gwynedd had
acquiesced.  Nevertheless, all might have been well but for the
ruthless policy of anglicisation upon which Edward's officials
immediately embarked.  Professor Tout is undoubtedly right when he
says that "the germ of all Edward's later Welsh policy lies in his
early attempts to establish the shire system in his Welsh estates."
He might have added with equal truth that therein lies too the germ
of all Edward's subsequent troubles in Wales; for the introduction of
the shire system meant the substitution of English law for the laws
of Howel, a new and different division of the {88} country for
administrative purposes, and eventually the imposition of English
manners and the English language upon the Welsh people.

The brutality of the soldiers left by Edward in the Four Cantrefs
infuriated the inhabitants so that they rose in rebellion, and
appealed to Llewelyn for help.  Llewelyn knew that it would be
impolitic for him to go to their assistance; but his chivalrous and
patriotic soul was stirred to its depths by their tale of outrage and
oppression, and reluctantly he agreed to go.  Within the course of a
few days the whole country from the Conway to the Dee was overrun.
But Llewelyn knew that it would not be possible to confine the
struggle within one locality.  The whole might of England would be
brought against him; and to resist such overwhelming power the united
efforts of the whole of Wales would be required.  It was thus that
Llewelyn, from being the avenger of the wrongs of the people of a
small province, came to be the champion of the whole of Wales.  The
country rose with rare unanimity; and Llewelyn moved on irresistibly
towards Chester, where Edward was stationed, impotent in the face of
the superior power of his foes.  Edward appealed to his father for
help; but at first the appeal {89} was met only with a rebuke.  In
1257, however, Henry came to his assistance with a big army.  He
succeeded in reaching Deganwy; but further he was unable to
penetrate, and his retreat was disastrous.  Indeed the only effect of
the whole campaign was to demonstrate to all waverers the feebleness
of Henry and the strength of Llewelyn.

Llewelyn was now as powerful as any Welsh prince had ever been; while
England was in the throes of the bitter struggle between the king and
the barons led by Simon de Montfort.  An alliance was concluded
between the Welsh and Simon; and the defeat and capture of Henry at
Lewes in May 1258 gave Llewelyn a respite in which to consolidate his
gains and to strengthen his position.  So long as England remained
disunited Llewelyn was perfectly secure, but the death of Simon, and
the triumph of the king, altered the whole situation.  This Llewelyn
knew perfectly well, for he was no idle dreamer; and he was then, as
indeed always, willing to come to terms with the king upon the old
conditions--Wales to be independent, and the Prince of Wales to do
homage to the King of England.  In September 1267 Henry led an army
to Shrewsbury; and with them came the legate Ottobon, {90} for the
purpose of negotiating with Llewelyn.  The Welsh prince had now, for
some years, been excommunicated.  Indeed, throughout the long
struggle the Church proved itself to be the implacable enemy of Welsh
independence.  Recognizing the hopelessness and the futility of war
against the whole strength of England, Llewelyn, at Shrewsbury, came
to terms with Henry; and four days afterwards the terms were embodied
in the Treaty of Montgomery.  Llewelyn was to do homage to Henry, and
to pay him an indemnity.  His own position as Prince of Wales was
recognized; and he was to retain possession of the Four Cantrefs.
This was the position in 1273, when Henry III died.

The accession of Edward I completely altered the situation.  He and
Llewelyn were ancient enemies, and each was, from the first, on the
lookout for assault and aggressions on the part of the other.  Edward
was crowned in London, upon his return from the Holy Land in August
1274.  In accordance with feudal usage he summoned the King of
Scotland and the Prince of Wales to do homage to him.  Alexander of
Scotland obeyed and went; but Llewelyn refused.  He sought to justify
his refusal on the ground that Edward had proved so faithless in the
past that he dare {91} not venture his life inside the English
capital; furthermore he accused Edward of having broken the Treaty of
Montgomery.  A year elapsed; and then Edward came to Chester, and
again summoned Llewelyn to his presence.  Acting on the advice of his
council, Llewelyn refused to go; and Edward returned to London in
deep displeasure.  At this juncture Fate played into the hands of the
English king.  Llewelyn was betrothed to Eleanor, daughter of Simon
de Montfort, at that time living with her mother in France.  It was
arranged that she should come over in 1275 for the purpose of getting
married; but on the way she was captured by a vessel from Bristol and
taken to London, where Edward kept her in captivity.  The crafty
monarch saw his opportunity.  Eleanor should not become the wife of
Llewelyn until the latter had performed the long-delayed act of
homage.  This condition Llewelyn indignantly refused; and in 1277 war
began.  The English army moved in four divisions, one from Chester,
one from Shrewsbury, one from Hereford, and one from Carmarthen.
South Wales was speedily reduced to subjection; and Llewelyn
presently found himself besieged in the fastnesses of Snowdonia, an
army hemming him {92} in on the land side, while a fleet from the
Cinque Ports rendered escape by sea impossible.  Perceiving that
further resistance would be useless, in November 1277 he signed the
Treaty of Rhuddlan in Edward's presence.  The terms of the treaty
were severe--an indemnity of fifty thousand marks, the restoration of
the Four Cantrefs, a yearly rent to be paid for Anglesey, all barons
except those of Snowdon to hold their lands of the English king, the
title Prince of Wales to cease with Llewelyn's life, and Llewelyn to
come to England once every year to do homage.  It was made a
condition that the inhabitants of the Four Cantrefs were to be
allowed to retain their old customs, and to be judged by their own
laws.  Eleanor was then released; and her marriage to Llewelyn took
place at Worcester in October 1278.

It is well known by all historians and statesmen that a too severe
treaty is always the parent of new wars, and the Treaty of Rhuddlan
was undoubtedly too severe.  The latent discontent which was felt
throughout Wales, and especially in the North, was greatly
exacerbated by the oppressive administration of the king's Welsh
lands by his officials.  Justice was denied.  Englishmen {93} might
murder and steal with impunity so long as their victims were only
Welsh.  Offices were sold; and extortionate fines were exacted.  The
old Welsh laws were disregarded, the excuse being that they
conflicted with the king's superior sense of justice.  So terrible
was the oppression, and so impossible was it to obtain redress by
constitutional means, that in 1282 revolts broke out in many parts of
the country.  Llewelyn had scrupulously abstained from giving the
least encouragement to any of these revolts; but once they had broken
out of their own accord, he perceived how essential it was that they
should be directed by one mind, and placed himself at their head.

This time Edward determined to make an end of his troublesome vassal,
and to crush the independent power of the Welsh chieftain once and
for all.  Llewelyn prepared himself to meet the enormous English army
which was marching against him, his mind filled with evil
forebodings, and his heart heavy with sorrow at the recent death of
his wife.  The meddlesome Peckham, Archbishop of Canterbury, after
first excommunicating Llewelyn, tried to mediate.  But Edward
insisted upon unconditional surrender, and {94} that Llewelyn would
not stoop to make.  Meanwhile winter was coming on, and Edward had
only succeeded in reaching Penmaenmawr.  To try to penetrate the
towering mountain barrier of Arfon at that season of the year would
be reckless folly; and so he retreated to Rhuddlan to await the
return of spring.

Accorded this brief respite, Llewelyn paid what was intended to be a
flying visit to South Wales, in order to encourage his allies.  In a
lonely dell near Builth, on December 11th, the last Prince of Wales
was slain in a chance skirmish with some Cheshire soldiers who were
quite ignorant of his identity.  He was refused Christian burial by
the Archbishop; and whether his body eventually found a resting place
within the sacred precincts of Cwm Hir, as tradition says it did, we
have no means of ascertaining.

With the death of Llewelyn the rebellion instantly collapsed, except
that his brother Davydd, who had once betrayed him, kept up a show of
resistance in the heart of Snowdonia.  But in March 1284 he was
betrayed and captured, and sent by Edward in chains to Shrewsbury to
abide his trial.  Davydd was unquestionably a bad man; but it is
difficult to conceive of any degree of turpitude {95} meriting the
dreadful penalties which were inflicted upon him.  A special
Parliament was summoned to meet at Shrewsbury; and it was this body,
representing, as we may fairly assume that it did, the finest
intellect and character in the England of the day, that, sitting in
cold blood, condemned the hapless prisoner to be drawn at the tails
of horses through the streets of Shrewsbury, to be hanged, to be
disembowelled while still alive, then to be quartered and beheaded.
English historians have been known to contrast the superior
civilization of the England of Edward I with the barbarity of the
Wales of Llewelyn.  One might well invite them to think the matter
over afresh in the light of the doings of the Parliament of
Shrewsbury.  About the native Welsh princes, Owen M. Edwards has
finely and truly said that "they had never tortured a prisoner, or
betrayed a guest, or wreaked inhuman vengeance on a fallen enemy."

Wales was now conquered, and the "English Justinian" could proceed
with the task of organization.  In this work he was keenly
interested, as is vouched for by the fact that he spent the greater
part of the succeeding two years in the country.  From Rhuddlan, {96}
in 1284, he issued the great Statute of Wales which, until the
changes wrought by Henry VIII, remained the foundation upon which the
government of Wales rested.  The shire principle was extended.  In
the north Anglesey, Carnarvon, and Merioneth were made into shires,
under the jurisdiction of the Justice of Snowdon.  Likewise Flint
became a shire under the jurisdiction of the Justice of Chester.  In
the south Cardigan and Carmarthen were made shires under the Justice
of South Wales.  There were to be County Courts as in England; and
twice every year the new official, the sheriff, was to make his tourn
through the commotes.  The main body of Welsh law was to remain in
force; but it was subject to a good deal of modification.  For the
protection of the land, and especially for the subjugation of
Llewelyn's stronghold of Gwynedd, a circle of the newly-devised
concentric castles was built--Conway, Beaumaris, Carnarvon,
Criccieth, and Harlech.  In order to break the old tribal system, and
in order to anglicise the population as much as possible, the growth
of towns was encouraged.  These were given special privileges by
Royal Charter.  Cardigan, Builth, Montgomery, Welshpool, Rhuddlan,
Aberystwyth, Carnarvon, Conway, Criccieth, {97} Harlech, Caerwys,
Beaumaris, and Newburgh were among those which received charters from
Edward I; while Edward II gave charters to Bala, Llanfyllin, Cardiff,
Usk, Caerleon, Newport, Cowbridge, and Neath.

In 1284 Edward, accompanied by his wife Eleanor, made a tour of the
Principality.  At the beginning of the tour Edward, the first English
Prince of Wales, had been born; and, according to tradition, had been
presented by his father publicly to the people of Carnarvon.  From
Carnarvon the royal progress wended its way to Nevin, where a
splendid tournament was held.  From Nevin it proceeded to
Aberystwyth, and thence to St. David, and finally to Bristol.

But Edward was destined never to find rest in his relations with
either Scotland or Wales.  In 1294 a rebellion broke out, caused by
the injustice of the new sheriffs.  It was fairly general, breaking
out simultaneously in Dyfed in Glamorgan, and in the North.  Again
the king led an army to Conway; and in a comparatively short time the
rebellion was quelled.  It was not, however, altogether fruitless.
Edward seems to have realised that his policy was goading the country
into revolt, and that a greater measure of clemency would serve {98}
his interests better.  At all events administration became, for a
time at least, more pure and less harsh.  The last attempt to win
independence for Wales in the reign of Edward I was, curiously
enough, made by a Norman lord, Sir Thomas Turberville.  He entered
into an agreement with the French, by which he was to bring Wales to
their assistance in their war against England, the reward for this
service being the Principality itself.  Before anything had been
done, however, the plot was discovered; and Turberville's head was
placed to rot on the Tower of London.

The question whether the Edwardian conquest was a benefit or a
misfortune to Wales in the long run is one to which no certain answer
can be given.  In so far as it put an end to the rivalries and the
internecine strife which, for centuries, had convulsed the land, it
was an unalloyed blessing.  But there were signs that Welshmen had
already learnt the lesson of the past; and that they were willing,
without the drastic measures applied to them from without, to set
their own house in order.  The multiplication of small States is now,
no doubt, an evil; but the same cannot be said with confidence about
the Middle Ages.  The {99} assertion of writers, unable themselves to
read a line of Welsh, that the culture of England in the latter half
of the thirteenth century was superior to that of Wales is certainly
untrue.  Indeed the direct contrary is the fact.  Welsh literature,
both prose and poetry, was far ahead of that of England; and the
Welsh language had attained a decidedly higher stage of development.
Welsh customs were "barbarous" only in the sense in which all that is
strange is considered barbarous by the man of insular mind.  We have
now learned (and it is our good fortune that we have learned) that a
nation can live its own free life of the mind and the spirit while
forming, for political purposes, part of a larger body called a
State; but it does not follow that, in the thirteenth century, a
nation could exist at all without enjoying a large measure of
political independence, if not sovereignty itself.  Llewelyn may have
been crafty, proud, and impulsive; but it is equally true that Edward
was harsh, perfidious, and a narrow legalist always thinking in terms
of strict feudal law.  His plea that the amending or abrogating of
Welsh laws was for the good of the Welsh people themselves is the
excuse which strong empires have always made use {100} of when
seeking to justify the subjugation and assimilation of small nations.
He talked much about justice; but this justice, which sounded so fair
in theory, resolved itself in practice into the oppression and
cruelty of ruthless and unsympathetic foreign officials.  At heart
what Edward most desired was not that Welshmen should remain Welshmen
and be at peace with him, but that they should as quickly as possible
be turned into Englishmen.  It has been noted that in the towns which
Edward founded in Wales English was the language of the people down
to the close of the sixteenth century.




{101}

CHAPTER VII

CALM BEFORE THE STORM

With the death of Edward I Wales settled down to a long period of
comparative tranquillity.  The next eighty years were as peaceful a
time as the unhappy country had enjoyed for centuries.  Edward II was
now on the throne of England; and his Welsh birth, his mild
disposition, and his obvious desire to deal justly with the
Principality caused him to be regarded with trust and even with
affection.  On two occasions during the reign the new Welsh shires
were allowed to send representatives to the English Parliament.  All
forms of lawlessness were sternly repressed.  The consequence was
that the Welsh people began, as they had never done before, to turn
their attention to trade and the accumulation of wealth.  The
fourteenth century witnessed a great increase in industry and
commerce all over Western Europe, and both England and Wales
participated in the {102} increase.  Edward III conferred a most
precious benefit upon Wales by bringing it within the scope of the
Statute of Staple.  In 1332 Shrewsbury and Carmarthen were
constituted staple towns for the Principality.  Then came the Black
Death, which swept over England and Wales in the year 1349.  The
amount of immediate distress which it occasioned was immense; but
some of its results were good.  The fact that among the labouring
classes the rate of mortality had been something like fifty per cent.
made labour very scarce; and in spite of the efforts of Parliament to
control the situation by means of Statutes of Labourers, the economic
and social position of the villeins was immensely improved.  But it
was not in Wales only that Welshmen were bettering their position;
they were covering themselves with glory on all the great
battlefields of Europe.  The fourteenth century was the age of the
long bow; with it the finest victories of the Hundred Years' War were
won; and the home of the long bow was Wales.  The weapon had been in
use for a long time in border wars, and its superiority to the cross
bow had been clearly demonstrated.  The Black Prince, who became
Prince of Wales in 1343, was immensely {103} popular in the
Principality, and a large body of archers and spearmen from Wales
followed him to the French wars.  At Crécy there were five thousand
Welsh troops; and it was at the close of that battle that the Prince
assumed the crest and the motto which ever since have been worn by
all Princes of Wales.  No lover of English literature is ever likely
to forget the pages in which Shakespeare has drawn an amusing but
kindly caricature of the Welshmen who distinguished themselves on the
field of Agincourt.  But it was not only in the armies of their own
sovereign that Welshmen were to be found; they were, throughout the
fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries, among the most famous
mercenary troops in Europe.  Many of them fought in the French armies
against the Black Prince and against Henry V.  Owen of Wales, the
friend of the great _condottiere_ Bertrand du Guesclin, won much fame
as the leader of a Free Company.  This Owen, however, was much more
than a successful mercenary captain: he remembered the land of his
birth; and the great ambition of his life was to win back Welsh
independence with the assistance of France and Spain.

The Black Death had very adversely affected {104} the monastic life
of Wales.  Even in the thirteenth century--the golden age of
monasticism--Wales was too poor a country to support such princely
foundations as Fountains or St. Albans.  Its monasteries were, for
the most part, small, drawing what wealth they possessed from acres
of barren mountain land.  As we have already seen, Wales, from the
first coming of Christianity into the country, had its monastic
foundations.  So far back as the sixth century, those of Bangor
Iscoed and Llantwit Major were famous throughout Christendom.  The
rule of St. Benedict, which dates from that century, seems to have
found much favour in Wales; for in South Wales alone there were some
fifteen Benedictine houses, one of them being an abbey, and the
remaining ones priories.  Soon, however, these priories fell into
evil odour; for they were "alien" in the sense that they belonged to
some foreign abbey whose abbot used them merely for the purpose of
augmenting his revenues.  The great Cluniac reformation of the tenth
century had singularly little influence upon the religious life of
Wales, and only three priories were established in the country.  The
lives of the monks who inhabited them were notoriously {105} lax, and
gave considerable scandal even in that age of easy morals.  It was
the Cistercian Order, however, that seems to have won the religious
heart of the Welsh people.  All the most famous religious houses in
Wales--Strata Florida, Strata Marcella, Aberconway, Valle Crucis,
Basingwerk, Cwm Hir, Margam, Whitland, Neath, Dore, Grace Dieu,
Tintern, Cymer, and Llantarnan--were Cistercian.  For the most part
the monks favoured the cause of national independence.  They were not
great scholars, nor did any particular sanctity pertain to their
lives; but they were excellent farmers, their conduct was at least
decent, they were witnesses after their fashion to the value of the
spiritual life, and they occasionally wrote chronicles like the
_Annales Cambriæ_ and the _Brut_ which are invaluable to the
historian of to-day.

The Friars, too, found a warm welcome in many parts of Wales.  The
Cistercian monks were to be found in remote and lonely valleys, or on
the edge of high and bleak moorlands; the Friars, on the other hand,
were to be found in the towns, among the busiest haunts of men.
Towns in Wales were few and insignificant, so we do not find the
Friars occupying the position of importance which they so {106} soon
acquired in England.  Nevertheless the Dominicans had houses at
Bangor, Rhuddlan, Brecon, Haverfordwest, and Cardiff, while the
Franciscans were to be found at Carmarthen, Cardiff, and Llan Vaes.
In addition to the two great Orders, there was a settlement of White
Friars (Carmelites) at Denbigh, and one of the Austin Friars at
Newport.  In Wales all the Friars seem to have been energetic
preachers and lecturers; and in that way they did much to diffuse
what learning they themselves were possessed of among the common
people.

The Black Death greatly reduced the numbers of the monks.  Their
rents fell very considerably in value, and they consequently became
extremely poor.  Nevertheless the second half of the fourteenth
century witnessed a remarkable religious awakening in the country.
There was a new and enquiring spirit abroad, and Wales turned an
interested, and occasionally a sympathetic, ear to the teaching of
the Lollards.  The Catholic Church, as represented by its two great
officers, the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury, had so often
shown itself to be the enemy of Welsh liberty that the people of
Wales listened with much favour to the teaching of Walter Brute,
{107} one of Wycliffe's disciples, when he began to preach in the
Marches in 1391.  That the official religion had fallen into
considerable contempt in Wales is indicated by the insulting tone of
many of the triads in which it was the fashion of the day for
literary men to express themselves.  "Three things are objects of
derision," says one of these, "an old hag displaying her finery, an
old man trying to show his agility, and an old priest drunk."
Another tells us that "Three things there are which he who can may
love--a fat priest singing Mass, the cry of a soul in the clutches of
the Fiend, and an English song."

In the quarrel between Richard II and his barons the sympathy of
Wales was with the king; and it was in Wales that the final struggle
between the unhappy monarch and Henry Bolingbroke took place.  The
king, who had been in Ireland, landed at Milford Haven, to find that
Henry was with an army at Bristol.  By a forced march he reached
Conway; and then travelled from castle to castle in North Wales
looking for support.  He met Henry at Flint, surrendered, and was
first deposed and afterwards murdered.  Then Henry IV ruled in his
stead.  From the beginning of his reign the new king seems to {108}
have regarded Wales with a good deal of suspicion and dislike.  After
a long period of mild government, a note of severity again makes
itself audible in the statutes passed dealing exclusively with Wales.
There is a harsh and aggressive flavour in their very
titles--"Certain restraints laid on Welshmen," "The Lords Marchers to
keep ward in their castles," "Welshmen shall not purchase lands in
England," "Englishmen shall not be convict in Wales," "As to
minstrels and vagabonds in Wales," "Welshmen not to carry arms," "No
armour or victuals to be carried into Wales," "Welshmen not to have
castles," "No Welshman shall bear office in Wales," "Castles and
walled towns in Wales to be kept by Englishmen," "Englishmen married
to Welsh women not to have office in Wales," etc.  It was in such an
atmosphere of mutual suspicion and dislike that the rebellion of Owen
Glyndwr broke out.




{109}

CHAPTER VIII

OWEN GLYNDWR

In the long roll of Welsh history which we have been unfolding there
are many illustrious names--Cunedda Wledig, Howel Dda, Owen Gwynedd,
the Lord Rees, Llewelyn Fawr, and Llewelyn the last Prince of Wales:
but of all the men of the Middle Ages no one has so touched the heart
and fired the imagination of Wales as Owen Glyndwr.  For all Welsh
people he stands alone and supreme, the ideal Welshman of all time.
Both the beginning and the end of his life are shrouded in obscurity.
It was only for some half-dozen years that he occupied a foremost
place in the politics of his day.  He left behind him no solid gain
of any kind, but at best a vague tradition and an unrealised dream.
Yet in spite of all that his hold upon his countrymen has never
relaxed; and when the bonds in which the national spirit had been
confined for more than three hundred years were beginning to break
{110} in the first half of the nineteenth century, it was his name
that was invoked, and his dreams that were recalled.  Gardiner once
said that the two typical Englishmen of all time were Shakespeare and
Oliver Cromwell; the one in the realm of thought, the other in the
realm of action.  Wales owes no such divided allegiance: the Welsh
spirit at its best is typified in one man--Owen Glyndwr.  Owen was a
direct descendant of the princely house of Powys, a line of princes
which had played a none too illustrious part in the struggle for
independence.  The family was a wealthy one, and Owen spent his early
years in passing from one of his father's country houses to the
other.  The real home of the family was the exquisitely beautiful
Glyndyfrdwy, a narrow valley through which the limpid waters of the
Dee flow between thickly wooded banks, above which rise the
heather-clad slopes of the Berwyns.  Close at hand are Valle Crucis
and Dinas Bran; and not far off is the entrance to the fertile and
lovely Vale of Clwyd.  Even the year of Owen's birth is uncertain.
Tradition varies; but the best evidence at our disposal points to
1359 as the date.  Wealthy and well-connected young men in those days
used frequently to study law for some years {111} at the Inns of
Court, a training which was regarded as more aristocratic than
residence at the University of Oxford.  Owen seems to have gone up to
London, and to have spent some time in listening to cases argued in
Westminster Hall, then the home of the Common Law Courts.
Shakespeare is probably right when he makes Owen lay claim to the
possession of the best culture of the day--

  "I can speak English, lord, as well as you;
  For I was trained up in the English court;
  Where, being but young, I framed to the harp
  Many an English ditty lovely well,
  And gave the tongue a helpful ornament."


The pursuit of Law is not commonly associated by us with either
poetry or romance; nevertheless it is in the Courts that Owen seems
to have met his future wife, the daughter of Sir David Hanmer, one of
the Justices of the King's Bench.  The wedding probably took place in
1380, when Owen was only twenty-one years old.  The period of legal
training was followed by a course of training in the use of arms.  In
1385 Owen followed Richard II to Scotland, where he won much credit
by his prowess in the field.  But it is {112} a mistake to imagine
that he was ever a blind partisan of Richard.  Later, when it became
opportune to profess belief in the existence of Richard in order to
imperil the throne of his successor, Owen was perfectly willing to do
so; but in these early years, long before it had ever occurred to him
that he might lead a Welsh revolt against England, he was a follower
of Henry Bolingbroke, and, if tradition speaks correctly, one of his
esquires.  According to another account he also was, at one period,
esquire to his neighbour the Earl of Arundel, lord of Oswestry,
Chirk, and Cynllaith.  How many years were spent in this sort of
novitiate we have no means of ascertaining; all we know for certain
is that, before 1400, Owen was living the customary life of a Welsh
country gentleman, at his two houses of Glyndyfrdwy and Sycherth.

Wales at that time was seething with discontent; a discontent which
was partly political, and partly social.  The country was warmly
attached to King Richard, and looked upon Henry IV as a usurper and
an assassin.  It was also being borne in upon the people that England
was now determined to extirpate the Welsh language, and to destroy
finally every trace of Welsh nationality.  The fourteenth {113}
century had witnessed in many of the countries of Western Europe a
rapid development of the national spirit, and both England and Wales
were among those which had participated in it.  In addition to
political grievances, there were also social grievances, felt more
especially in the South.  But even when we have taken all these
things into full account, the universality, the spontaneity, and the
warmth of the rebellion of 1401 remain something of a mystery.  One
thing is certain, and that is that Wales was solidly behind Owen; and
that it was the North and the middle parts of the country, regions in
which political preponderated over social grievances, which led the
revolt.

The great rebellion began with a personal quarrel between Owen and
his arrogant neighbour Lord Grey of Ruthin.  In 1400 the king had
summoned Owen to assist him in his Scottish expedition.  The summons
had been entrusted to Lord Grey to deliver; but he, wishing to sow
discord between Henry and Owen, neglected to transmit it.  The king
was angry with Owen, and with greater justice Owen was angry with
Grey.  Owen's wrath took the eloquent form of a merciless raid upon
his enemy's estates, in the course of {114} which certain members of
his household were slain.  Grey, determined to retaliate, gathered
together his forces and marched against Glyndyfrdwy.  But the whole
country was now up in arms; and supported by a strong body of
followers, Owen was able to burn the town of Ruthin to the ground.
Owen then openly declared himself the deliverer of Wales from the
English yoke; and so serious a view did the king take of the
situation that, without delay, he marched into Carnarvonshire.  He
was greatly incensed; and his anger was proved by the burning,
without any provocation, of the house of the Franciscans at Llan
Vaes.  Owen, not strong enough as yet to meet the king in battle,
retired into the mountain recesses, and Henry had to content himself
with declaring all his lands forfeited.  Meanwhile the flame of
rebellion spread; and Owen was joined not only by people from every
part of Wales, but by young Welshmen from Oxford, from London, and
from beyond the seas.  He had now planted his standard of the red
dragon on the slopes of Plinlimmon; and there, safe from the clutches
of all invading armies, he proceeded with the task of organization,
making frequent dashes into the neighbouring counties, and capturing
towns, castles, {115} and abbeys.  The capture of the strong castle
of Conway by nephews of Owen in the spring of 1401 brought Henry
again to Wales, this time accompanied by Earl Percy.  Conway was
quickly recaptured.  Percy, after marching through Carnarvonshire,
reached the foot of Cader Idris, where he won a victory.
Nevertheless the crushing of the rebellion, and the capture of Owen,
seemed to be as remote as ever.  In the autumn of the same year the
energetic and persistent king came again, marched through
Merionethshire, harried Cardiganshire, and stabled his horses near
the high altar of the abbey of Strata Florida.  Owen meanwhile hung
on the skirts of his army, capturing stragglers, and cutting off
supplies; and again the baffled monarch was compelled to return to
his own country.

Up to the close of 1401 Owen had been nothing more than a guerrilla
leader who, had he been captured, might with perfect justice have
been put to death as a rebel.  And had that fate befallen him then,
his career would have but little interest save for the curious and
the professional student.  It was the next two years that proved that
Owen was a statesman of the first rank, as well as an able military
leader.  He began at once to look {116} out for suitable alliances,
and in making them he met with marked success.  His early enemy, Lord
Grey, fell a prisoner into his hands, and was converted into an ally
by marriage with one of Owen's daughters.  At the same time
successful negotiations were entered into with the native chieftains
of Ireland, the French king, the king of Scotland, and the
discontented Percies.  At the battle of Bryn Glas Edmund Mortimer was
captured.  He, likewise, was married to one of the Welsh leader's
daughters, and encouraged to desert Henry, and to claim the throne of
England for his own nephew the Earl of March.  For the third time
Henry marched into Wales, this time with an immense army.  But the
elusive and ubiquitous Glyndwr could nowhere be brought to bay; and
wind, rain, and floods played havoc with the English hosts.  Henry
had now quarrelled openly with the Percies.  Owen, Mortimer, and
Percy Hotspur met on the shore of remote and desolate Aberdaron; and
there they agreed upon a plan for the tripartite division of England
and Wales.

Owen was then at the height of his power, but in the very hour of
triumph he on two occasions only barely escaped death at the hand of
an assassin.  On the first occasion he {117} was walking with his
cousin Howel Sele in his park at Nannau near Dolgelly.  Suddenly a
doe appeared, and Owen called upon Howel to shoot.  But the faithless
Howel turned his bow against Owen; and the arrow glanced off from the
coat of mail which he invariably wore beneath his ordinary dress.
From that hour no man ever saw Howel Sele; but years afterwards a
human skeleton was discovered in a hollow tree close to the spot
where the encounter must have taken place.  The second attempt was
made by Davydd Gam.  He had come to Machynlleth to attend the
Parliament which Owen had summoned there.  Fortunately for him, as
well as for his intended victim, the plot was discovered, and Davydd
lived to meet a more honourable death on the field of Agincourt.

The alliance concluded at Aberdaron was destined to be short-lived;
for the Percies were crushed by Henry at the battle of Shrewsbury.
Owen has been repeatedly blamed for wasting time in ravaging South
Wales instead of keeping tryst with his allies, and joining them
before the king's forces had come upon the scene.  The censure is
probably undeserved.  It was vital to the success of their plans that
South Wales should be left {118} behind them incapable of further
resistance; and, furthermore, it is likely that the Percies had, at
the last moment, altered their plans and marched on Shrewsbury,
instead of meeting Owen in the vicinity of Ludlow.  But we cannot so
readily exonerate Owen from blame for neglecting to fall upon the
king's army, tired and disorganized as it must have been after the
battle.  Not to do so was the greatest blunder of his whole career.

Prince Henry, afterwards to become so famous as the victor of
Agincourt and the conqueror of France, had now been appointed
Lieutenant of Wales, and the war was carried on with increased vigour
and ruthlessness.  Henry ravaged North Wales, and burned to the
ground Owen's home of Sycherth.  Nevertheless the power of Owen
steadily increased.  In 1404 he summoned Parliaments to Dolgelly and
Machynlleth.  These Parliaments were not a revival of Llewelyn's
Council of Princes, but deliberate imitations of the English
Parliament.  He was now styling himself "Owen by the grace of God
Prince of Wales"; and he was treated by foreign potentates as
sovereign of an independent country.  He had his own Great Seal, his
Privy Seal, his chancery, and his courts of law.  He concluded an
{119} alliance with France in January 1405, and some time later a
force of fifteen hundred Frenchmen landed at Milford, and captured
Carmarthen.  They remained in Wales until early in the following
year; but the assistance which they rendered to the national cause
appears to have been negligible.  But the friendship between Owen and
Charles of France continued; and in 1406, in a letter addressed from
Pennal, we find Owen telling the French king what his aims were,
_i.e._, to create a Wales territorially free, to create an
independent Welsh Church, and to create two Universities, one for
North, and one for South Wales.

Owen had also succeeded in winning the support of the Pope, or rather
of one of the Popes; for those were the days of the Great Schism, and
there were rival claimants for the throne of St. Peter.  Owen decided
to withdraw the spiritual allegiance of Wales from the Roman Pope,
Gregory XII, and to transfer it to Peter de Luna, then dwelling in
Avignon, and calling himself Pope Benedict XIII.  In return, of
course, Owen expected the Pope to acknowledge the independence of
Wales.  John Trevor, bishop of St. Asaph, had already gone over to
the nationalist side; and Owen, {120} with the Pope's consent,
nominated Llewelyn Bifort to the see of Bangor.  Apparently this
prelate was never recognised by the English Church; but he was
present some years later at the Council of Constance, signing himself
as "Ludovicus Bangorensis."  In the North Wales dioceses, at least,
the national party was supreme between 1404 and 1408, and in a lesser
degree in those of the South as well.

The project of founding two national Universities, it seems, never
found any sort of realization in Owen's day, nor indeed for close
upon five centuries afterwards.  But the plan in itself is sufficient
to rebut the ridiculous calumny that Owen was an uncivilized
barbarian.  It is a pity that the age which saw the founding of
Universities at St. Andrews, Prague, Vienna, Louvain, Cracow,
Cologne, Padua, Heidelberg, Leipzig, Erfurt, Pesth, Würtzburg, and
Rostock, should not have witnessed the founding of one in Wales as
well.  What a difference the existence of such an institution would
have made in the national character, and in the whole outlook of the
people, we can only regretfully conjecture.  For centuries young
Welshmen flocked eagerly to Oxford, to Cambridge, and to some of the
{121} famous European seats of learning; but the culture of Wales ran
in other channels, undisciplined and amateurish, and, despite its
wonderful charm and fascination, lacking in classic restraint and
breadth of outlook.

Owen's success reached its culmination in 1405.  From that time on
his star was steadily on the wane, although for years he kept up a
brave, and sometimes successful, resistance.  A plan to secure the
person of the young Earl of March, and to proclaim him King of
England, miscarried.  Slowly but surely the pressure of Henry's
armies, and those of the Lords Marchers, was beginning to tell.  Most
of the grievances of the peasants had wisely been redressed, and they
longed for the time when they could till their fields in peace,
unmolested by the armies of either friend or foe.  Owen's high ideals
were beyond the comprehension of the selfish and illiterate labouring
classes upon whom he had depended for his strength; and they now
deserted in hundreds from his camp.  The general _débâcle_ was
assisted by the young Henry's policy of studied clemency.  He was no
foreigner, but a rival Prince of Wales; and he strove to prove that
he cared just as much as did Owen for the welfare of his Welsh
subjects.  The abbot of Valle {122} Crucis was perfectly right when
he told Owen that he had risen a century too soon.

In the closing years of his life Owen was no better than a fugitive.
Indeed, so completely had all traces of rebellion disappeared, that
no particular effort was made to effect his capture.  Where he lived,
and how he lived, was unknown to his contemporaries as it is to us.
Sometimes he would appear, clad as a common labourer; then vanish
again, and not be seen for months.  In its poverty and its loneliness
it is a pathetic close to so splendid and so romantic a career.  The
young Henry had succeeded his father as King of England in 1413, and
in 1415 he offered a free pardon to Owen.  The pardon was, however,
refused.  That is the last fact which we know about the fallen
leader.  When he died, or where he is buried, we do not know; but a
tradition, to which perhaps some credence may be given, tells us that
at the end he came home to his beloved Glyndyfrdwy, and that his
bones lie close by at Corwen.  All his friends had long since been
dispersed; some were dead, some languished in English prisons, others
were living abroad in exile.  Of the State which Owen had attempted
to construct not a vestige remained, and the ideals which he had
{123} cherished remained for centuries forgotten.  But in tradition
his name always loomed large on both sides of the border.  How
powerfully he had impressed the people of England is proved by the
place which is accorded to him by Shakespeare.  The Glendower of the
great dramatist is a compound of cunning and simplicity, of
amiability and uncouthness; but his considered verdict is that--

  "In faith he is a worthy gentleman,
  Exceeding well read, and profited
  In strange concealments; valiant as a lion,
  And wondrous affable, and as bountiful
  As mines of India."


Not a mean tribute from the victor to the vanquished rebel!




{124}

CHAPTER IX

WALES AND THE TUDORS

The seventy years which followed the death of Owen Glyndwr was, both
for England and for Wales, as miserable a period as any in their
whole history.  Owing to the untimely death of Henry V, the feeble
Henry VI became king; and he had not been long on the throne before
the bitter feud between Yorkists and Lancastrians broke out.  During
the Wars of the Roses the arm of government was paralysed, and the
strong did what appeared right in his own eyes.  Many Welshmen found
life in the English armies abroad more tolerable than life in Wales;
while of those who remained at home, too many became bandits like the
Highlanders in the reign of George II.  Both Yorkists and
Lancastrians had interests in Wales.  Edward IV was a Mortimer, a
descendant of Prince Llewelyn, and the seat of his strength was the
country around Ludlow.  The chief Lancastrian stronghold {125} in
Wales was the coast, from Pembroke to Anglesey.  Thus Wales was
divided against itself.  At Mortimer's Cross, in 1461, Welshmen
fought against Welshmen; and Owen Tudor was captured, and afterwards
beheaded at Hereford, in accordance with the fate meted out to the
vanquished in those barbarous days.  Harlech castle, which had been
the last fortress to fly the flag of Glyndwr, and which at a later
date was to be the last of Charles I's strongholds to surrender, held
out stubbornly for Lancaster.  "I held a castle in France," boasted
Davydd ap Sinion, its defender, "until every old woman in Wales had
heard of it.  I will hold a castle in Wales until every old woman in
France has heard of it."  The boast was a vain one.  Harlech fell;
but the siege had given to the world one of the finest marching songs
ever sung by man.

The eyes of Welshmen and Englishmen alike were now beginning to be
turned to that house of Tudor, whose head had lost his life after
Mortimer's Cross.  Owen Tudor had married Catherine, the widow of
king Henry V.  There had been two children of the marriage, Edmund
and Jasper, the former Earl of Richmond, and the latter Earl of
Pembroke.  Edmund had married Margaret Beaufort, heiress of John
{126} of Gaunt; and to them a son, called Henry, had been born.  This
young lad was now living in exile in Brittany, and it was there that
emissaries from England sought him out from time to time, telling him
how the country was groaning under the evils of the times, and how
all common men were yearning for the advent of a strong ruler who
would restore peace and ordered government.  The cruelties of the
usurper Richard III brought matters to a head.  At length the
cautious Henry was convinced of the possibility of success.  In 1485
he landed at Haverfordwest, and marched to Cardigan.  The greater
part of South Wales at once declared for him.  Then he marched north,
passing through Machynlleth, Newtown, Welshpool, and Shrewsbury.
North Wales was held by the Stanleys; and it was only at the last
moment that they declared for Henry.  The crisis was reached on
Bosworth Field, where, in the space of a few hours, Richard lost both
his throne and his life, and Henry was proclaimed king in his stead.
At long last the prophecies of the Welsh bards had been fulfilled: a
Welsh prince had ascended the throne of England.  A year later the
new king married Elizabeth of York, a descendant, as we have already
seen, of {127} the great Llewelyn.  From his mother, therefore, as
well as from his father, Henry VIII inherited Welsh blood; and it is
little to be wondered at that he paid so much attention to the
affairs of the Principality.  It was noted by all that the first
Tudor sovereign refused to rest his claim to the throne upon anything
except conquest.  Upon his entrance into London after the battle of
Bosworth he proceeded in state to St. Paul's, and there had a solemn
_Te Deum_ sung for his victory.  It was as much a Welsh conquest of
England as the expedition of 1066 was a Norman conquest of England.
A considerable part of Henry's army had been composed of Welshmen,
and one of the three standards displayed by him upon the field bore
the device of the famous red dragon.  His first-born son was
christened Arthur.

Such being Henry VII's solicitude to demonstrate his Welsh origin, it
is disappointing to find that he did so little for the Principality
in the course of his reign.  On the whole the country was neglected.
By means of the Star Chamber, and the statutes against Livery and
Maintenance, Henry crushed the English nobles, the "over-mighty
subjects" who had been troubling the peace of the realm {128} so
sorely.  But although the Welsh, and especially the border lords,
were at least as turbulent and as contemptuous of all law, he allowed
them to remain unmolested; and one of them--Sir Rhys ap Thomas--came
to wield almost despotic power throughout South Wales.  This able,
ambitious, and politic man appears to have been a great favourite
with both the first two Tudor sovereigns.  He had enthusiastically
espoused the cause of Henry of Richmond when he was as yet a landless
adventurer; and it was mainly owing to his influence that Henry's
reception in South Wales had been so very cordial and unanimous.  So
powerful did he become after Henry's coronation, that an old Welsh
couplet tells us that: "The king owns the whole island--except that
part which belongs to Sir Rhys."  In Henry VII's reign his favour, if
anything, was enhanced.  Familiarly he was alluded to as "Father
Rhys."  The extensive Dinevor estates were his; while in addition he
held the offices of Chief Justice, and Chamberlain, of South Wales.
So great was his power that he could snap his fingers in the face of
the Court of the Marches, which sat impotent at Ludlow.  Sir Rhys
died in 1525, on the eve of momentous changes in English politics.
{129} His death marks the close of an epoch in the history of Wales.

In the year 1493 Henry sent his eldest son Arthur to hold his Court
at Ludlow.  The ancient castle there, with its round Temple chapel
within, whose well-preserved walls still look so grand and imposing,
is the centre of Welsh political life throughout the Tudor period.
It was the great age of government by council.  An attempt to
circumscribe the power of the Popes by such means had been one of the
burning topics of discussion within the Church all through the
fifteenth century.  The Yorkish and Tudor kings saw in the council a
perfect instrument of arbitrary power, by which the deficiencies of
the Common Law could be corrected, and by which the authority of the
central government could be made to prevail against feudal
lawlessness.  The Court of Star Chamber, long before its final
abolition by the Long Parliament, had won the hatred of all lovers of
justice and good government; but it must never be forgotten that, in
the early years of its existence, this same Council was the great
upholder of law, and the sole effective protector of the weak against
the strong.  The Tudor Councils--Star Chamber, High Commission, of
the North, {130} of the Welsh Marches--were above the ordinary law,
in the sense that they administered a sort of criminal equity.  It
was a drastic and a dangerous remedy to use; but it was none too
drastic for the evils of the day; and only the most pedantic
believers in liberty could condemn it.

Edward IV, and not Henry VII, was the first type of the new
Renaissance sovereign to rule in England; and he it was who first
created the Court of the Welsh Marches, in 1471.  But the troubles of
those chaotic years were greater even than such a body could deal
with, and consequently we find it doing practically nothing.  In 1501
William Smyth, Bishop of Lincoln and founder of Brasenose College,
became the first real Lord President of the Court of the Council of
the Marches.  Unhappily Prince Arthur died in 1502, and during the
remainder of his reign Henry paid no attention whatsoever to Wales.
The policy pursued by Smyth was one of conciliation; and as a result
of his government, there was at least a growth in loyalty, if not in
public order.  He retained his office until his death in 1514, but
does not appear to have resided at Ludlow after 1509, the year of
Henry VII's death.

{131}

On his death bed, we are told, Henry VII "gave in charge to his son
Prince Henry that he should have a special care for the benefit of
his own nation and countrymen, the Welshmen."  However that may be,
the new king seems to have paid no great heed to the injunction.  He
had never been sent by his father to keep Court at Ludlow; and he was
quite content to leave things to the care of the Council, and the
faithful Rhys.  But as he grew older, and as the fascination of
politics began to lay hold upon him, Henry began to think about the
neglected Principality.  Complaints were constantly reaching his ears
of the anarchy which prevailed there; how the whole land was infested
with bandits; how life and property were no longer safe.  In 1525 the
king visited Ludlow in person, taking with him the Princess Mary.
There the Princess remained until 1528, when she was recalled owing
to the divorce proceedings which had been instituted against her
mother.  Again, for a period, Wales appears to have been forgotten;
for Henry was fully engaged in the mighty task of "breaking the bonds
of Rome," and laying the foundations of the English Reformation.  So
bad did things become, that one of the king's justices was beset and
{132} murdered when on circuit in Merionethshire; and in 1529 there
was an insurrection at Carmarthen.  But it was the darkest hour, and
the dawn was at hand.

In 1534 Henry appointed Rowland Lee, Bishop of Lichfield, to be Lord
President; and for the next nine years he held his Court at Ludlow.
Of the administration of this able, jovial, energetic, and ruthless
man it is not necessary to say much; let it suffice that, in the
comparatively brief period during which he held office, he educed
order out of chaos, and caused the law to be feared and obeyed, not
only in the Marches, but in the remotest corners of Wales.  Gangs of
robbers were mercilessly hunted down.  High and low were punished
with exemplary severity.  The qualms which ecclesiastics affected to
feel against the shedding of blood counted for naught with the
martial prelate.  According to one authority he hanged as many as
five thousand malefactors, and that at a time when the total
population of Wales could hardly have exceeded 125,000.  For the
Common Law, and especially for the jury system, he avowed the most
extreme contempt.  How absurd, he used to remark, to expect thieves
to convict a thief!  Harsh he may have been; {133} but his harshness
achieved its purpose.  He found Wales turbulent, lawless, and
rebellious, a land in which it was well nigh impossible to pursue a
peaceful calling.  He left it orderly and tranquil, loyal to its
sovereign, and ready to play its part in what was to prove to be the
most glorious period in British history.

But it was not upon a policy of stern repression alone that Henry
depended for the pacification of Wales.  He was too great a statesman
for any such thing.  He knew full well that leniency on the part of a
feeble and ineffective government might be misrepresented and be
followed by disastrous consequences, but that going hand in hand with
a rigorous punishment of disorderly persons it would prove
successful.  It is the policy which liberal statesmen have always
advocated, and which tyrants have disregarded to their own undoing.
The policy of conciliation upon which the king now embarked is
sometimes referred to as the Act of Union with Wales.  This, however,
is misleading, for there is no Act upon the Statute Book which bears
such a name.  It is, nevertheless, generally descriptive of a series
of statutes, the first passed in 1535 and the last in 1542, which
gave to Wales a new constitution.

{134}

The first step was taken in 1535, when an Act was passed empowering
the Lord Chancellor to appoint Justices of the Peace for the counties
of Anglesey, Carnarvon, Merioneth, Flint, Cardigan, Carmarthen,
Pembroke, and Glamorgan.  At first sight there does not seem to be
anything very revolutionary in this; but those who held authority in
Wales at the time thought otherwise, and duly registered their
protest against the Act.  To them it was apparent that this was but
the thin end of the wedge, and that the outcome of it would be the
entrusting to the Welsh people full power to govern themselves.
Henry's next Act was an attack upon the privileges of the Lords
Marchers, a policy which was to be followed until the Marches had
been completely abolished.  The third, and most comprehensive, Act of
the same year had for its object the complete breaking down of all
barriers between England and Wales.  Henry's aim is perfectly clear:
he was no believer in Welsh self-determination; all that he desired
was that Wales should be swallowed up by England.  Welshmen were
undoubtedly to acquire all the privileges of Englishmen, but on one
condition--they were to become Englishmen.  The Preamble of the Act
of {135} 1535 states that the king desires to "extirp all and
singular the sinister Usages and Customs" which prevailed in Wales;
and in order that that might be accomplished, Wales was henceforth to
be "incorporated, united, and annexed" to England.  All laws were
thenceforward to be the laws of England.  This involved, among other
things, the adoption of the principle of primogeniture in place of
the old Welsh custom of equal division among all the sons.  The
Lordships Marcher were practically abolished, parts of them being
united to England, and the remainder distributed between the newly
created shires of Monmouth, Brecknock, Radnor, Montgomery, and
Denbigh.  Henry realised, as all statesmen of conquering nations have
realised, that the most powerful obstacle in the way of the
assimilation of a small nation by a larger one is the continued
existence of a native language.  Deprive a nation of its language,
and deprivation of national consciousness will be relatively easy.
But allow the language to live, and no power on earth can ever kill
the national spirit.  It is therefore not surprising to read in the
Act that "No Person or Persons that use the Welsh Speech or Language
shall have or enjoy any Manner Office or Fees within this Realm {136}
of England, Wales or other the King's Dominions, upon pain of
forfeiting the same Offices or Fees, unless he or they use and
exercise the English Speech or Language."  Except in Edward IPs two
Parliaments of 1322 and 1327 Wales had never been represented in the
English House of Commons.  Now it was enacted that every shire should
send one knight to Parliament, and that every county town, excepting
that of Merioneth, should send one burgess.  These representatives
were to be paid the usual fees for attendance.

In 1542 an Act bearing the simple title, "For certain ordinances in
the King's Majesty's Dominions and Principality of Wales," was
passed.  This statute reaches what was, for those times, the
portentous length of a hundred and thirty clauses; but it is neither
verbose nor ambiguous.  Indeed it is one of the most comprehensive,
and one of the most ably drafted, statutes ever enacted.  It finally
abolished the Lordships Marcher.  It gave Wales the geographical
limits which it has ever since retained, dividing the country into
twelve shires, and cutting off Monmouth.  It placed upon a statutory
foundation the Court of the Council of the Marches; a Court which,
save for a brief period of suspension during {137} the Commonwealth,
remained active down to 1688.  It created a new legal system for
Wales by instituting the Court of Great Sessions, a legal system
which persisted until 1830.  It introduced a system of local
government, dividing the shires into hundreds, and providing for
lords-lieutenant, sheriffs, coroners, constables, and bailiffs.

The chief interest in Welsh affairs after 1534 centres in the
Council.  It was not so prominent after the death of Rowland Lee,
when the country had become peaceful and law-abiding; but its general
supervision over all Welsh affairs, both legal and administrative,
was constant and unflagging.  At first the Council had no fixed
abode, and we hear of its sitting at Shrewsbury, Hereford, Worcester,
Gloucester, Tewkesbury, Hartlebury, Oswestry, Wrexham, and Bewdley;
but at last it came to be fixed at Ludlow.  Here, during the next
hundred years, assembled much that was intellectual, fashionable, and
splendid in Tudor and Stuart society.  It was, as we have seen, the
home of Prince Arthur, the eldest child of Henry VII, and of Mary,
the eldest child of Henry VIII.  Here, for twenty-seven years, lived
Sir Henry Sidney, soldier, scholar, and statesman.  Here his even
more {138} famous son, Philip Sidney, and his daughter Mary, spent
the early part of their lives.  It had among its guests for shorter
periods the poet Churchyard, the Puritan Richard Baxter, and the
Royalist Samuel Butler.  But the thing which has cast an undying
glamour over the place is the fact that, in 1634, John Milton
witnessed in the old castle the first performance of his masque
_Comus_.  The Presidents of the Council were, at first, all
ecclesiastics; but in the reign of Edward VI a layman, Robert Dudley,
was appointed; and except for an interlude during the reign of Mary
that remained the practice.  The chief function of the Council was to
supervise the work of all Welsh officials, and to hear all manner of
"extortions, maintenance, imbraceries, oppressions, conspiracies,
escapes, corruptions, falsehoods, and all other evil doings,
defaults, and misdemeanours of all sheriffs, justices of the peace,
mayors, bailiffs, stewards, lieutenants, escheators, coroners,
gaolers, clerks, and other officers and ministers of justice."  It
had power to issue proclamations, and to assess fines.  Unhappily it
had too, in company with the other prerogative courts of the Tudors,
the power to use torture in order to elicit confessions.  The Lord
President was, {139} almost invariably, Lord-Lieutenant of the twelve
Welsh shires.  In legal matters strictly so called the Council
exercised a concurrent jurisdiction with the Court of Great Sessions,
and an appellate jurisdiction in personal actions.  It is not true to
say that the Court of Great Sessions exercised no equity
jurisdiction; but it is a fact that by far the greater number of
Welsh equity cases were heard at Ludlow.

The part of the Act of 1542 which was entirely new was that which
created the King's Court of Great Sessions.  English law had been
introduced into Wales; but its administration was to be distinct and
separate.  The Great Sessions possessed all the powers of the King's
Bench and Common Pleas, and its practice was the same as that in use
at Westminster.  It was also endowed with complete criminal
jurisdiction.  Wales was divided into four Circuits--Chester, which
included Denbigh, Flint, and Montgomery; North Wales, which included
Carnarvon, Anglesey, and Merioneth; Brecknock, which included the
county of that name, together with Radnor and Glamorgan; and
Carmarthen, which also included Cardigan and Pembroke.  Each of these
Circuits had, at first, one judge; but {140} some time later an extra
one was added.  These judges were, on the whole, competent men; and a
large number of them afterwards attained to the highest legal
positions in England.  Among them we find such famous legal
luminaries as Bradshaw, Jeffreys, Willes, Lyndhurst, Kenyon,
Mansfield, Wright, Herbert, Dallas, Best, Jackyll, and Verney.  The
strongest objection which could be made to them was that few of their
number could speak Welsh, and that at a time when little else was
spoken at all in Wales.  All members of the English Bar were free to
practise in Wales; but counsel were mainly drawn from the Oxford and
the Northern Circuits.  The Court sat twice every year--spring and
autumn--in each county town, and the duration of the session was
fixed at six days.  After the abolition, in 1688, of the Council,
Chancery work began to be taken to London; and from the beginning of
the eighteenth century we find the English courts endeavouring,
mainly by the use of _certiorari_, to attract thither other cases as
well.  Frequent attacks were launched in Parliament against the
administration of justice in Wales; and several sound theoretical
arguments were advanced against the Great Sessions.  But in spite of
a commission of {141} enquiry, which sat in 1817, we have no real
evidence to justify our holding the system to have been a failure.
Nevertheless the Great Sessions were abolished in 1830, after
attempts to amend them had been made in 1769, in 1793, and in 1824.
It is worthy of note that their abolition was opposed by all the
Welsh Members of Parliament save one, by almost all the judges, and
by practically all counsel who practised in the courts.

We have already seen that the Act set up a system of local
government.  This comprised the various officers we have named; and
furthermore County Courts with jurisdiction over small amounts, and
Vestries in which the parishioners learnt the art of self-government.

That Henry VIII's Welsh policy was immediately successful, if we omit
that part of it which concerned religion, is abundantly evident.  Two
centuries later Edmund Burke, in the course of his great speech on
Conciliation with America, cites Wales as an example which proves the
truth of the rule which he is inculcating.  "Your ancestors," he
said, "did however at length open their eyes to the ill husbandry of
injustice.  They found that the tyranny of a free people could of all
tyrannies {142} the least be endured; and that laws made against a
whole nation were not the most effectual methods for securing its
obedience.  Accordingly, in the twenty-seventh year of Henry VIII the
course was entirely altered.  With a preamble stating the entire and
perfect rights of the crown of England, it gave to the Welsh all the
rights and privileges of English subjects.  Political order was
established; the military power gave way to the civil; the marches
were turned into counties.  But that a nation should have a right to
English liberties and get no share at all in the fundamental security
of these liberties--the grant of their own property--seemed a thing
so incongruous that, eight years after, that is, in the thirty-fifth
of that reign, a complete and not ill-proportioned representation by
counties and boroughs was bestowed upon Wales by Act of Parliament.
From that moment, as by a charm, the tumults subsided, obedience was
restored, peace, order, and civilization followed in the train of
liberty.  When the day star of the English constitution had risen in
their hearts, all was harmony within and without."  Burke's eloquent
contention is, in the main, perfectly right; yet we should be going
too far if we attributed the tranquillity which so {143} speedily
ensued to the grant of a constitution alone.  At least three other
factors have to be taken into account--(1) The termination of the
Wars of the Roses, which had been productive of anarchy in England as
well as in Wales.  (2) The fact that Rowland Lee had done his work so
thoroughly that evil-doers were cowed.  (3) The fact that Wales
looked upon the Tudor monarchs as Welsh people, and upon their
supremacy as a victory of Wales over England.  The Union marks the
beginning of a new and better chapter in the history of Wales.  The
Principality shook itself free from the fetters of the Middle Ages,
and took its place, shoulder to shoulder, with England as a
democratic self-governing country.  All previous efforts on the part
of Welshmen and Englishmen to set up a unitary State had been
failures.  From time to time some man of exceptional character, like
Llewelyn or Glyndwr, would arise, and, for a brief space, succeed in
uniting all the petty chieftains in obedience to himself.  But such
unity had always been precarious, depending entirely upon the
personality of the man who had brought it about, and with whose death
it vanished.  It is palpable that, throughout the Middle Ages, the
greatest Welsh defect was {144} the absence of political genius, the
very thing with which England was so abundantly gifted.  Institutions
like Llewelyn's Council of Princes were without ancestors and without
posterity; they were accidents and imitations, and not natural
products of Welsh political development.  Before such institutions
could become stable and strong, Wales had to be brought into the
closest union with England, and serve a long period of political
apprenticeship.




{145}

CHAPTER X

THE REFORMATION

Wales and England were now one in law; and it consequently followed
that all statutes passed by Parliament were applicable to the
Principality, unless expressly stated not to be so.  No reservations
had been made, as were afterwards made as to religion, laws, and
education, in the matter of the Scottish Union.  In every step,
therefore, of the Reformation Settlement, Wales was obliged to share;
and there can be no doubt at all that the Reformation was unpopular
in Wales, and that the Anglican Church, as it emerged at the close of
the reign of Elizabeth, had made for itself no place in the hearts of
the people.  At the same time it would be easy to exaggerate the
reluctance with which Wales accepted the many religious changes of
the Tudor period.  The picture which some recent writers have drawn
of a Wales deprived of the ancient religion to which it was devoted,
{146} and of a Church plundered while faithfully discharging its
functions, is as fanciful and as devoid of truth for Wales as it
would be for England.  The truth is that, long before the
Reformation, the Roman Church in Wales had lost all real hold upon
the minds and hearts of the people.  All that remained was a
sentimental loyalty, and an immense amount of the grossest
superstition.  When the harsh and tactless agents of Thomas Cromwell
visited the parishes and abbeys of Wales, defacing churches,
plundering monks, and destroying miracle-working images, the
prevailing feeling was not that religion was being insulted, but that
superstitious beliefs, tenaciously held, were being flouted.  Indeed
the very fact that Wales was so ill-prepared for the Reformation is,
in itself, the most convincing proof of the scandalous way in which
the ancient Church had neglected its duties.  So great was the
intellectual and moral torpor into which the people had sunk that it
took more than a century for the new doctrines to penetrate their
minds.  Theirs was the most abject and deplorable of all conditions
of slavery, the condition in which the slave does not even desire to
be free.  The new Anglican Church, which was mainly the creation of
{147} Elizabethan statutes, it is true, also failed.  Upon its
predecessor it was an immense improvement; but it lacked the intense
emotionalism which alone could stir the Welsh heart; and, moreover,
it came to Wales in alien guise, speaking a foreign tongue.  It was
not until the Bible in Welsh had saturated into the minds of all
classes, and until the intense appeal of Puritanism had been heard in
the land, that Wales became, what it continued afterwards to be for
two centuries and a half, a country in which religion was the primary
concern of all the people.

Nor is it right to say that the dissolution of the monasteries
inflicted a cruel blow upon Wales.  It is perfectly true that, in the
Middle Ages, the Welsh monastery had been, on the whole, favourable
to the cause of national independence, in contradistinction to the
bishop, who was almost invariably an English agent.  But the day was
long past when the monastery was the school, the hospital, the
alms-house, and the common friend of the whole country-side.  It is
possible, though by no means certain, that the tenant of monastic
land enjoyed an easier existence than his neighbour on the land of a
lay lord; but that was the sole benefit which remained, a {148}
singularly poor excuse for the considerable endowments held by the
monks.  The truth is that the dissolution of the monasteries was a
good thing in itself; the blunder and the crime consisted in the use
to which the confiscated property was put.  This might have gone to
found schools, to endow charitable institutions, and to provide land
for the landless; instead of that it was recklessly bestowed upon
courtiers, upon the new families who were serving the Tudor
sovereigns so well, and upon nobles whose estates were already
sufficiently large.  There were no really wealthy monastic
foundations in Wales at all: their revenue was under £200 a year; and
they were consequently dissolved with the smaller monasteries.

The agents sent to Wales by Cromwell for the purpose of putting down
superstitious practices, and removing idolatrous emblems, performed
their task with the minimum of tact, and sometimes with shameful
rapacity and greed.  One of the worst was Bishop Barlow, who was sent
to the diocese of St. David's, the most hallowed ground in Wales.
Himself a time-serving cleric of the type of Cranmer, he had no
sympathy with persons who were unable to keep pace with his own
religious instability.  The religious sentiment, {149} which had
gathered for centuries about the Cathedral of St. David, meant
nothing to him.  He sought to transfer the see to Carmarthen.  At one
moment he insulted the memory of St. David, at another he denied that
such a man had ever existed.  He tore the roof from the beautiful
Bishop's Palace, and with the proceeds provided marriage portions for
his five daughters, all of whom were married to bishops.  So
consistent was he in his thieving, that it is with considerable
suspicion that one reads his lamentations about the "barbarity," and
the "idolatry," of the people for whom, he argues, it would be waste
of money to repair churches.

An equally thorough, but much more honest and satisfactory, agent of
the Reformation was Ellis Price, popularly known in North Wales as
the "Red Doctor."  He was a Welshman, and a kindly individual who
seems to have entertained much good-natured contempt for all forms of
religion.  He destroyed superstitious relics; but did not plunder
churches in order to enrich himself.  We possess the reports which he
sent to Cromwell; and no impartial reader can peruse them without
coming to the conclusion that the Welsh people were indeed sunk in
the deepest ignorance and {150} the most abject superstition.  One of
the idols with which Price had to deal has earned for itself a tragic
fame.  This was an immense wooden image of Derfel Gadarn, clothed in
complete armour, which stood in the church of Llandderfel in
Merionethshire.  So popular was this figure, says Price in a letter
to Cromwell, that people "come daily in pilgrimage to him, some with
kine, some with oxen and horses, and the rest with money, insomuch
that there were five or six hundred, to a man's estimation, that
offered to the said image the fifth day of this month of April.  The
innocent people hath been sore allured and enticed to worship,
insomuch that there is a common saying amongst them that, whosoever
will offer anything to the image of Derfel Gadarn, he hath power to
fetch him or them that so offer, out of hell."  Cromwell commanded
that the image should be sent to London, and an offer of the
parishioners to ransom it for forty pounds was rejected.  Its arrival
in the metropolis was opportune.  A Welsh prophecy had declared that,
one day, Derfel Gadarn would set a forest on fire.  The prophecy was
now to be fulfilled.  The great doll was hewn in pieces, and used to
burn a friar of the name of Forest, who had denied the royal
supremacy!

{151}

Whatever may have been the feelings with which the Welsh people
regarded the religious innovations, there can be no doubt at all that
they readily acquiesced in them.  In Wales there was no Pilgrimage of
Grace, nor any plots against the English Government.  The old
religion lingered on, no doubt, in obscure corners, just as it did in
the remote valleys of Cumberland; but it was abroad, and not in
Wales, that the Welsh defenders of Romanism distinguished themselves.
At Douai, and after its foundation in 1578 at the English College at
Rome as well, scholarly and devout Welsh Catholics like Morgan
Phillips, Owen Lewis, and Dr. Morris of Clynog, were busy training
priests for the English mission field.  So great became their
influence at Rome that the peace of the College there was troubled by
perennial feuds between English and Welsh.  It was the great age of
the Society of Jesus.  Those devoted, able, daring and unscrupulous
missionaries were winning fame for themselves in every corner of the
world; and they were at work in England and Wales.  But in the Welsh
Catholics they met, from the outset, with strenuous opponents, and a
long battle raged between them.  Two other Welsh Catholics, belonging
to a younger generation, {152} were John Roberts of Trawsfynydd, and
John Jones of Llanfynach, better known as Father Leander.  These two
had been contemporaries at St. John's College, Oxford, another
contemporary and friend of theirs being Archbishop Laud.  At that
time they were Protestants, at least in name; but subsequently were
converted by the Jesuits.  A natural antipathy seems to have existed
in the sixteenth century between all Welshmen and the Jesuits; and it
was not long before Roberts and Leander went over to the
Benedictines.  Roberts founded a Benedictine seminary at Douai; and
in 1605 the Benedictine College of St. Gregory was opened there, an
institution which for many years was to wield immense influence
within the Catholic Church.  At the time the Benedictine Order was
represented in England by only a single monk; and the reinforcement
which came from the Welshmen Roberts, Leander, and David Barker of
Abergavenny, was both timely and decisive.  But although ardent
Catholics, these Welsh exiles remained always loyal to the Tudors.
With conspirators and assassins they would have no dealings.  They
believed in the restoration of Catholicism in England, not by murder,
not by foreign invasion, but by peaceful {153} propaganda and by that
alone.  They are an interesting and an amiable circle; and time has
clothed them with that fascination with which it appears to be the
special and inalienable privilege of leaders of lost causes to be
endued.

It was not until Elizabeth had been for some years on the throne that
any attempt was made to provide the Welsh people with a substitute
for the religion of which they had been deprived.  The legal
continuity of the Church was maintained; but little else remained.
Benefices were poor, and the priests few and ignorant.  The people
sank deeper and deeper into spiritual indifference.  As late as 1585
a well-qualified observer could write that "Many places in Wales,
yea, whole counties, have not a single Christian within them, but
live like animals, most of them knowing nothing of righteousness, but
merely keeping the name of Christ in memory."  The scandalous extent
to which pluralism existed, despite the Pluralities Act of Edward VI,
left large numbers of parishes without any sort of spiritual
ministration.  Even the great Edmund Prys did not scruple to be at
the same time Rector of Maentwrog, Festiniog, Llandudno, and Ludlow,
as well as Archdeacon {154} of Merioneth, and Canon and Prebendary of
Bangor.  He soon resigned Ludlow, but only to acquire the additional
livings of Llanenddwyn and Llanddwywe, as well as a stall at St.
Asaph.  Fortunately for the country, a few Welshmen were
conscientious and enlightened believers in the Reformed Faith; and
they beheld with sorrow the plight to which Wales had been brought.
They perceived that the only way in which the people could be raised
and cleansed was by giving them the Bible in their own language.  So
far back as 1546 Sir John Price of Brecon had translated a few
Biblical passages into the vernacular, and in 1551 William Salesbury
translated the Gospels and the Epistles.  In 1563 Parliament passed
an Act commanding the Welsh Bishops, together with the Bishop of
Hereford, under penalties, to have a complete edition of the Bible in
Welsh ready by 1566.  A Welsh version of the new Prayer Book was
issued in 1567.  But it was not until the appearance of Bishop
Morgan's translation of the Scriptures, in 1588, that the Bible began
to be a popular book in Wales, and to influence the minds of the
people.  It would be difficult to overstate the importance of the
influence exercised by Morgan's Bible.  Not only did it, in time,
{155} rouse the people from religious lethargy, but it did for the
Welsh language what Luther's Bible did for Germany--it became the
canon of Welsh prose, fixing for centuries its idiom, its diction,
and its style.  Morgan was ably assisted in the work by men like
David Powel of Ruabon, Edmund Prys, and Dr. John Davies of Mallwyd.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Whitgift, was sympathetic, and Gabriel
Goodman, a native of Ruthin, who was at the time Dean of Westminster,
rendered financial assistance.

The publication of Bishop Morgan's Bible is the outstanding event of
the transition period, but Edmund Prys is the outstanding
personality.  He represents, in his own person, all that was good in
the Welsh Reformation, with also just a little that was bad.  This
interesting man was probably born at Tyddyn Du, in the lovely vale of
Maentwrog, in the year 1544.  He was therefore a child of the
Reformation.  Of his early years but little is known; and it is only
surmise which leads us to think that he was educated by Sion Tudor at
St. Asaph.  That he was of good birth is certain; and that he found a
kindly patron in Dean Goodman, ever ready to befriend a promising
young Welshman, is extremely {156} likely.  He became a sizar of St.
John's College, Cambridge, in the same year that Bishop Morgan
entered that college.  Cambridge was the intellectual home of
Protestantism in England; and at the time of Prys's residence at the
University, the famous Puritan leader, Thomas Cartwright, occupied
the Lady Margaret Chair of Divinity.  While yet an undergraduate,
Prys was ordained deacon, at Conington in Cambridgeshire.  At the
same time, too, he seems to have come into contact with Whitgift.  In
1568, at Ely, he was ordained priest, by Bishop Cox.  In 1572 he was
presented to the living of Festiniog and Maentwrog, the parish in
which he had been born; but apparently he did not deem it necessary
to visit the place.  He continued to reside at Cambridge, where, in
1574, we read of his being appointed _Preacher_ of St. John's.  Two
years later he was made Rector of Ludlow; but although he held the
living until 1579, he did not live there for more than a few weeks.
In 1576 he had been made Archdeacon of Merioneth, as well as Canon of
Bangor; and when to these were added, in 1580, the parishes of
Llanenddwyn and Llanddwywe, he seems to have settled down in Wales to
the life of a busy and conscientious {157} priest.  As Archdeacon he
had the whole country, from Criccieth to Machynlleth, under his
charge.

Edmund Prys appears to have discharged faithfully the duties
connected with his various offices down to his death in 1623.
Although a Justice of the Peace, the tall handsome figure of the
Archdeacon was welcome in the houses of all his poorer parishioners.
He was a great scholar, well versed, it was said, in eight languages.
Wales possessed, at that time, a notable band of Hebrew scholars, men
who knew not only Hebrew, but Syriac, Arabic, and Chaldaic as well.
It is, of course, as an author that the fame of Edmund Prys endures.
That he was master of a sound Welsh prose style is apparent from the
few fragments of his writing which remains; but he left no prose
works behind him.  It is as a poet, and especially as the composer of
a metrical version of the Psalms, that he will always be remembered.
He wrote much poetry of every description, the topics ranging from
Heaven to tobacco.  Most of it is interesting, and some of it
beautiful; but it seldom rises much above a common level of
mediocrity.  It is upon the Psalms, and upon them alone, that his
reputation rests.  Hymn singing in public worship was {158} the
peculiar product of the Reformation; for although a few magnificent
hymns had been composed in the Middle Ages, by men like St. Bernard,
they occupied no conspicuous place.  In churches and monasteries
chanting had been universal; but the popular hymn, which the whole
congregation sang in its own language, was unknown.  It would hardly
be going too far to say that, upon the use which it made of the hymn,
the early success of the Reformation depended.  German Protestants
marched into battle shouting the great hymns of Luther.  The French
Huguenots sang those of Clement Marot and Marguerite de Valois.  The
sombre Calvinist services of Geneva were transformed under the
influence of the hymns introduced by Beza.  In England a metrical
version of a few of the Psalms had been published by Sternhold, Groom
of the Robes to Henry VIII, in 1548.  Then in 1562 appeared the
version of John Hopkins, which, for a hundred and fifty years,
remained the only hymn-book possessed by the English Church.  For
years no special tunes were composed to be sung with the new hymns;
they were simply set to the airs of popular songs and ballads.
Edmund Prys published his Welsh Metrical Psalms in 1621.  Something
similar, {159} but on a much smaller scale, had been attempted
previously by Dafydd Ddu Hiraddug, and by Edmund Kyffin; but Prys
greatly excelled them in mastery of rhythm and rhyme.  The metre is
quasi-ballad, simple and direct, the very thing that would appeal to
the uneducated.  It is not surprising to hear that, in a very few
years, the plowman in the field, and the shepherd on the mountain
side, were singing lustily the Psalms of Edmund Prys.

Another Welshman of the period, who deserves special mention, is the
ill-fated John Penry.  He was born at Cefnbrith, on the slopes of the
Eppynt hills, in the year 1563; and thirty years later he died a
traitor's death at the hands of the executioner.  But though short,
his life was a very full and a very romantic one.  The belief that he
was, in early years, a Catholic is probably a mistaken one.  Almost
certainly his parents belonged to the Reformed Church; and it is
indubitable that John was sent by them to the ultra-Protestant
University of Cambridge.  There, at Peterhouse, he perfected himself
in all the learning of the day, and also pondered deeply over the
condition of his native land.  Penry was as religious as Prys, and
far more intensely nationalist.  The remedy which he conceived {160}
to be the only adequate one to meet with the ills of the time was the
appointment of "preachers of the Word," to visit the hamlets and
villages, and to awaken the conscience of the people by appealing to
them in their own tongue, and in words which they could comprehend.
Unfortunately this was the one course which Elizabeth and her
ministers were not prepared to sanction.  Since "order" was their
watchword in religion and in politics, they were afraid of
countenancing preachers who would, in all probability, set order at
defiance.  They knew full well what the effects of popular preaching
had been in the neighbouring country of Scotland; and they were fully
determined that no unauthorized word should be spoken within a church
in England or Wales.  Again and again Penry appealed to the
Government to employ lay preachers in Wales, sometimes writing
privately to Burleigh, sometimes addressing petitions to Parliament
through one of the Welsh members.  But it was all of no avail; and
from being a loyal subject Penry gradually drifted into a position of
bitter antagonism to the Government.  At no time did he become a
rebel, or do anything that could fairly be brought within the scope
of the Treason Acts; {161} nevertheless he undoubtedly did say and
write much which would, if it prevailed, have overthrown both Church
and State as conceived of by Elizabethan statesmen.  He became a
relentless opponent of episcopacy; and between 1588 and 1589 the
famous Martin Marprelate Tracts were published.  After that it was
dangerous for him to remain in England, so he fled to Scotland, and
while there became an avowed "Separatist."  In fundamentals the
Separatists did not differ very much from Anglicans; the most
important point of difference being their view of the proper
connection between Church and State.  The Anglican Settlement had the
effect of making the Church a mere department of the State, bound
hand and foot by Acts of Parliament.  Even episcopacy itself as an
institution was regarded as deriving its authority exclusively from
Parliament.  In 1588 Dr. Hammond, Chancellor of the Diocese of
London, wrote to Burleigh: "The Bishops of our realm do not (so far
as I have ever heard), nor may not, claim to themselves any other
authority than is given them by the statute of the 25th of King Henry
VIII, recited in the first year of Her Majesty's reign, neither is it
reasonable that they should make other claims, for if it had pleased
Her {162} Majesty with the wisdom of the realm to have used no
bishops at all, we could not have complained justly of any defect in
our Church."  The great crime of which John Penry and others were
guilty in the eyes of Burleigh and the Queen was not that he was
inculcating something contrary to Catholic tradition, but that he was
challenging the authority of the State to create its own tradition!
Penry, and indeed all the Separatists, stood for a policy
diametrically opposed to this.  They desired that the Church should
be free, with full power to determine its own constitution and its
own creed.  Theirs was a protest against Tudor absolutism and
uniformity, and in favour of a local government in ecclesiastical
affairs, which at a later date developed into Congregationalism.
Upon Elizabeth, Whitgift, and Cecil, Penry made no impression.
Failing to persuade, he proceeded to defy.  He drifted farther and
farther from the Established Church, until finally he was put upon
his trial for treason, condemned, and executed.

John Penry was a reformer from without; in Vicar Pritchard the Church
produced a reformer from within.  This interesting and amiable man,
commonly known as the "Old {163} Vicar," was born in 1579, educated
like most other Welsh scholars of the seventeenth century at Jesus
College, Oxford, and ordained by the Bishop of Colchester in 1602.
In the same year he was given the livings of Llandingal and
Llandovery; and to these he in 1613 added that of Llanedi.  To the
higher ecclesiastical dignities he never attained; but in 1626 he was
made Chancellor of the Diocese of St. David's.  His life was
singularly uneventful; and in 1644 he died, leaving in his will land
for the purpose of founding a Free Grammar School at Llandovery.  No
one felt more keenly, or with a greater sense of shame, the degraded
condition of the people of Wales at the time.  Although a staunch
Royalist and Churchman, he was filled with the stern Puritan love of
righteousness, and an ardent desire to convince his countrymen of the
evil of their ways.  Like Edmund Prys he bethought him of the
Welshman's intense love of poetry and music.  Why, instead of singing
profane ditties, should the people not sing songs of an edifying
character?  He decided to preach without intermission; but to make
verse the vehicle of his message.  It would be useless to contend
that the Vicar was, in any sense, a great poet; {164} but his
versification is at least competent; and the simple stanzas which he
composed have an easy swing and flow which makes them admirably
adapted for committing to memory by simple and unlettered folk.  His
collection of religious poems is called _Canwyll y Cymry_ (the Welsh
People's Candle); and it was published in four parts, in 1646, 1659,
1670, and 1672, all of them after the death of their author.  To us
the work is valuable for the light which it sheds upon the manners of
the day.  If the good Vicar is to be believed, Wales must have been
in a most deplorable condition, the people's ignorance gross and
sordid, and their morals simply bestial.  No Separatist ever painted
a darker picture of Wales in the first century of the history of the
Anglican Church than did this candid and friendly critic.  After a
life of faithful service, the Vicar died in 1644.

Before the close of the sixteenth century the future religious
boundaries of this country had been clearly marked.  The Elizabethan
Settlement of religion had aimed at constructing a Church which
should be wide enough to include the vast majority of English people.
It was frankly a compromise, created with that express purpose.  In
spite, {165} however, of the latitude allowed, it had become apparent
that for many people it was not wide enough.  At one end stood a band
of irreconcilable Catholics, who positively refused to conform,
preferring to endure all manner of penalties and disabilities.  At
the other extremity stood an ever-growing body of people who longed
for a more thorough Reformation, and who cast longing glances in the
direction of Geneva.  Already these people were beginning to be known
as Puritans; and before the close of her reign Elizabeth had passed a
statute to penalize them.  A few implacable extremists had been
deprived of their preferments in the Church as early as 1567, and had
begun to form a Nonconformist Church at the Plumbers' Hall, in
London, under the leadership of one Richard Fitz.  He was followed by
Robert Browne, Barrowe, Greenwood, Penry, and Robinson.  These men
were Independents.  Meanwhile Thomas Helwys had come from Leyden, and
had founded a Baptist Church in London.  But for a long time the
majority of Puritans remained within the Anglican Church; and it was
not until the Romanizing policy of Laud, crudely conceived and
savagely enforced, had declared itself that they came {166} out in
thousands, and formed Churches of their own.

In Wales Nonconformity, which for three hundred years was to play a
dominating part in the religion, education, politics, and literature
of the nation, began comparatively late; and it was not until after
the Civil War that it acquired much strength.  Indeed it has been
estimated that, at the Restoration, there were in Wales only a score
or so of Nonconformist chapels, each of them having a membership of
from two to five hundred.  Yet even in the days of small things the
Nonconformists played a prominent part; and they included in their
number the majority of the patriotic Welshmen of the age.  In Wales,
even more than in England, it may be said that it was not doctrinal
distinctions that led to the rise of Nonconformity; neither was it
the question of Church establishment.  All the early Welsh Puritan
leaders were strictly orthodox, according to the standard of the
Prayer Book; and the majority of them were well content that there
should be a State Church.  It was upon the question of preaching that
the first and greatest difficulties arose.  The views held so
emphatically by John Penry were taken up by his {167} successors;
while Elizabeth's attitude of hostility was even stiffened by Laud.
On the shoulders of that narrow and unamiable pedant must be laid the
greater part of the blame for the irreparable schism which occurred
in the English Church.  Laud's lack of understanding of the temper
and the needs of Wales is the less excusable inasmuch as he himself
had been, from 1621 until 1626, Bishop of St. David's.  During the
greater part of the time he was non-resident; but he kept always a
vigilant eye for recusants in his remote diocese.  He also built a
chapel in the Bishop's Palace at Abergwili, and actually came down
for its consecration.  Upon the Welsh Church, in other respects, his
episcopate does not appear to have left a trace.

The first Nonconformist Church in Wales was founded in 1639, at
Llanfaches in Monmouthshire; and its first Minister was the saintly
William Wroth who had been, for thirty-nine years, Rector of the
parish.  For some time prior to 1639 Laud had been uttering
complaints about Wroth's irregular preaching.  The utmost limit of
his "irregularity" would seem to have consisted in the delivery of an
occasional sermon in the open {168} air.  When remonstrated with he
offered a vigorous defence, saying: "There are thousands of immortal
souls around me thronging to perdition, and should I not use all
means likely to succeed to save them."  Such zeal must have been
highly offensive to the Archbishop; and one is not surprised to hear
that Wroth was deprived of his living.  This, however, was not going
to deter the zealous Rector from preaching; and since he would no
longer be allowed to do so in the Parish Church, he would do so
elsewhere.  Such was the parent Church of Welsh Nonconformity.

But William Wroth was not the only Welsh clergyman to be treated in
this fashion.  In 1638 William Erbery, Vicar of St. Mary's, Cardiff,
was likewise deprived of his living; and became the first Minister of
an Independent Church in that city.  His curate, Walter Cradock, was
deprived of his licence in 1633, and became one of the most
influential patriotic teachers of the period.  He it was who
converted the famous Vavasour Powell, and the even more famous Morgan
Llwyd.




{169}

CHAPTER XI

THE CIVIL WAR

The Great Civil War was the last occasion on which Welshmen have
fought upon the soil of their native land.  The old order was giving
place to the new.  Henceforward the heroes of Wales were not
soldiers, but poets, scholars, and, above all, preachers.  A last
flicker of the old martial spirit, the old lust of battle, is seen in
the struggle between King and Parliament.  To write the history of
Wales between 1642 and 1649 would simply be to narrate the incidents
of the Civil War, for no part of the country played a more prominent
part in the contest than did the Principality.  Here, however, it
must suffice to disentangle from the rest that which was peculiarly
Welsh, and to draw attention to a few Welshmen who rendered
themselves illustrious.

It is well known that, at the outbreak of the war, the cleavage
between the partisans {170} of Charles and those of Parliament
followed geographical, racial, and professional, rather than social,
lines.  To say that the upper classes were for the King, and the
lower classes for the Commons, would contain rather more fiction than
truth.  At most all that can be said is that the aristocracy, the
squirearchy, and the peasantry, were, on the whole, favourable to the
King; while the substantial farmers, and the trading and commercial
classes were mainly inclined towards Parliament.  Large numbers of
all these classes were, however, to be found on both sides.  But the
geographical division is far more clear and certain.  If a line be
drawn from Hull to Gloucester, and then on to Plymouth, it can be
said roughly that all the country to the east and south of it was for
Parliament, and everything to the west and north for Charles.  It is
further to be observed that High Churchmen and Catholics favoured the
Royalist cause, while the Dissenters were to a man upholders of the
Commons.  About the attitude of Wales there was, from the very first,
no question: it was well nigh unanimously Royalist.  Why that should
have been so it is difficult to explain; except on the facile
assumption {171} that the Welsh people were either preternaturally
enlightened or else preternaturally stupid.  The Tudors had been of
Welsh blood, and the intense loyalty which they evoked in Welsh
hearts was only natural; but the Stuarts were only remotely descended
from Welsh ancestors, and in most respects were more thoroughly alien
than pure Englishmen would have been.  Nor had they conferred any
benefits upon Wales.  Neither James I nor Charles I had ever as much
as professed to take any interest in the affairs of the country.  In
spite of this, however, in no part of their dominions did the early
Stuarts meet with a more blind and thorough-going loyalty.  The
cleavage which was shortly to appear in Wales between the upper and
the lower classes had not as yet manifested itself.  The day was not
far distant when the upper classes would be English in speech, Tory
in politics, and Anglican in religion, while the middle and lower
classes would be Welsh in speech, Liberal in politics, and
Nonconformist in religion.  In Charles I's reign, however, all were
united; and when the leaders of the nation declared for the King,
none of their tenants held back.  The day of the power of the
preacher had not {172} yet dawned; but the poet was widely
influential, and with hardly an exception the bards were enthusiastic
Royalists.  A few discordant notes were, of course, heard.  Two
Welshmen put their names to the death warrant of Charles.  One of
them had been a brave Roundhead soldier, and afterwards served the
Commonwealth in an important capacity.  The other stood high on
account of his wisdom in the councils of the victorious party.  There
was also Morgan Llwyd, the author of _Llyfr y Tri Aderyn_, a Fifth
Monarchy Man, and the finest Welsh intellect of the age.  But these
men were exceptions; and to paint them as representatives of a
democracy sighing for freedom, and for the blessings of Parliamentary
supremacy, is a grotesque travesty of the situation.  Leaders they
undoubtedly were, but leaders of posterity, rather than of their
contemporaries.

If it is difficult to account for the affection of Wales for the
Stuarts, it is easy to explain its dislike of Parliament.  As we have
had occasion already to observe, Parliament was not an indigenous
growth in Wales, but a foreign importation.  It was never evolved out
of the political consciousness of the people.  Moreover, all that the
Welsh people knew {173} about it up to that time was that it was the
foreign body which passed laws making such drastic alterations in the
customs of their country, forbidding them to speak Welsh, forbidding
them to go to Mass, and most unfairly and inexplicably ordering that
the whole of the father's estate was to go to the eldest son.
Puritanism was hateful to the people, as being even more remote than
Anglicanism from the old religious ceremonial for which they still
had a warm corner in their hearts.  Wales was, in those days, a merry
country, full of mirth and joviality.  Games and good cheer were
loved by all.  There was much superstition, much dissoluteness, much
profanity, but this only made the people the more resentful of the
chilling and sobering touch of Puritanism.  The old Wales of the
Middle Ages was still alive, and the fountains of imagination, art,
and romance had not yet been frozen.  There was no Welsh
printing-press in existence; and even if there had been, the people
were, on the whole, far too ignorant to understand a noble appeal to
their latent love of liberty contained in such a work as Milton's
_Areopagitica_.  Of the great principles for which both parties in
the war were fighting--respect for law and {174} supremacy of
Parliament, on the side of the Roundheads; control of the Executive
by the King, and supremacy of the Episcopal Church, on the side of
the Royalists--they knew nothing.  Such ideas were too complex for
them.  What they could understand was the ancient loyalty of subject
to Prince; and in following Charles they acted ingenuously, and
according to their lights.  Parliament, they instinctively felt, was
not fighting the battle of the poor man, nor of the squire; and Wales
was inhabited almost exclusively by these two classes.  In so far as
it was fighting for a class at all, it was fighting for the trader;
and trade was, as yet, of little account in the life of Wales.  It
was thus in the "Celtic Fringe," in Wales, in Scotland, in
Cumberland, and in Cornwall, that Charles found the fullest measure
of support; and it is interesting to remember that, when war broke
out between King and States-General in France a hundred and fifty
years later, it was among the Celts of Brittany that Louis XVI found
his most steadfast support.

In the years immediately preceding the outbreak of war a Welshman
stood high in the counsels of Charles I; and at one time it looked as
if this man might play the part {175} played in the French Revolution
by Mirabeau, namely, that of mediator between King and Parliament.
This able man was the Lord Keeper, John Williams.  He has suffered
the usual fate of all mediators, and been abused by the two parties
which he sought to reconcile; but an impartial judge will accord to
him a high place in the annals of British statesmanship.  He was born
in 1582 at Conway, of an ancient and respected Welsh family, and was
educated first at Ruthin, then at Oxford, where he had a singularly
brilliant academic career.  It does not seem to have been difficult
in those days for Welshmen to secure high positions in the Church: we
have already come across the case of Gabriel Goodman, who became Dean
of Westminster.  John Williams likewise became Dean of Westminster,
in 1620, and left there a fitting memorial of himself in the cedar
panelling which he caused to be put in the Jerusalem Chamber.  He was
Court Chaplain, high in favour with the royal favourite Buckingham,
and with both James I and Charles.  In 1621 he was made Lord Keeper
and Bishop of Lincoln.  That he seems to have shared to the full the
artistic tastes of the Court is proved not only by his work in {176}
the Jerusalem Chamber, but also by the beautiful chapel, with its
exquisite stained glass windows, which he built for Lincoln College,
Oxford.  In politics his influence, at this time, was a moderating
one; and his opposition to the reckless foreign policy of the hour
lost him the favour of Buckingham; while his opposition to the
tyranny of the High Commission won for him the enmity of Laud.  In
1625 he was deprived of his offices; and in 1637 this penalty was
followed by a heavy fine, imprisonment, and suspension from his
ecclesiastical functions, the charge being that he had revealed the
King's secrets, and tampered with witnesses.  Whether the accusation
was well-founded or not we cannot tell; but remembering the sordid
official life of so great a man as Bacon, we cannot safely dismiss it
as impossible, or even unlikely.

Williams was an ambitious man; and he felt the loss of royal favour
keenly.  Like Wentworth he determined to become an out-and-out
supporter of the King.  In 1640 he was released from prison; and as a
reward for his strenuous support of the royal prerogative, and of
episcopacy, was in the following year made Archbishop of York.  So
intemperate was he in his defence of the new position in {177}
politics which he had taken up that he was committed to the Tower, by
order of the House of Commons.  On the outbreak of hostilities,
however, we find him at large, assisting the King both with money and
advice.  The portrait of Williams which Clarendon paints is an
exceedingly unpleasant one.  He acknowledges him to have been a man
of wit and learning; but adds that he was "of a proud, restless, and
over-weening spirit, a very imperious and fiery temper, and a very
corrupt nature."  All this is probably true.  Let us, however, be
just to him and concede that he was sincere, kind-hearted, and loyal;
and that, on most occasions, the advice which he tendered was sound.
Wales, of course, had its own representatives in the House of
Commons; and these must have sat with the other Members through the
stormy scenes which preluded the passing of the Petition of Right,
and the even more stormy scenes which attended the Grand
Remonstrance.  But all through the long contest the Welsh Members
were, with hardly an exception, firm on the side of the King.  And
not only did they support the King in the lobby, they also followed
him on to the field of battle.  Two of {178} them--William Herbert of
Cardiff, and Charles Price of Radnor--died for the cause.  Nine
others bore arms for Charles--William Price of Rhiwlas, John
Bodville, Richard Herbert, Henry Vaughan of Derwydd, Sir Edward
Stradling, Richard Jones of Trewern, Francis Lloyd of Maesyvelin, Sir
John Stepney, and Herbert Price of Brecon.  Of all the Welsh Members
only Sir Thomas Middleton and Henry Herbert sided consistently with
Parliament.  Sir John Price of Newtown, after suffering much for the
King, went over to the side of Parliament; and Hugh Owen of Orielton
repeatedly changed sides.

In order to see clearly what part was played by Wales in the fight,
it is convenient to adhere to the customary division of the war into
three periods.  The first period opens with the battle of Edgehill on
October 23, 1642, and closes with the death of Pym in December 1643.
The second period begins with the entry of the Scottish army into
England in January 1644, and ends with the King's flight to the
Scottish camp in April 1646.  These two periods taken together
constitute what is sometimes called the First Civil War.  The third
period, or the Second Civil War, begins with the escape of Charles
{179} in November 1647, and ends with his execution in January 1649.

At the opening of the war, and indeed down to the spring of 1644,
Charles took up the offensive.  He held the whole of the North, as
well as all the West; and his strategy consisted in converging
attacks upon London.  During the whole of this period his firmest
base, and his best recruiting ground, was Wales.  Immediately after
the unfurling of his standard at Nottingham, on August 22, Charles
had marched to Shrewsbury, resolving, in the words of Clarendon, "to
sit down near the borders of Wales, where the power of Parliament had
been least prevalent, and where some regiments of foot were levying
for his service."  It was an excellent situation to occupy, in the
very centre of the border country, and with easy communications with
the two Royalist strongholds of Chester and Worcester.  Before the
end of September Worcester had surrendered to the Parliamentary
General Essex, and its garrison, led by Prince Rupert, had marched
through the Welsh border and joined the King at Shrewsbury.  The
King's expectation of help from Wales had, in the meantime, not been
disappointed.  The gentry had flocked to his {180} Court to assure
him of their devotion, and then returned to their homes to raise
recruits.  At least five thousand Welshmen responded to the appeal, a
number so unexpectedly large that Charles had neither sufficient arms
for them, nor sufficient money wherewith to buy provisions.  Indeed,
so badly was the King provided with weapons that, at the opening of
the campaign, he seems to have had in his possession only some eight
hundred muskets, five hundred pairs of pistols, and two hundred
swords.  Thus reinforced, and consoled for the loss of Worcester by
the news that Lord Herbert had captured Cardiff Castle, Charles
decided to make straight for London, rightly believing that the
capture of the metropolis would completely paralyze his opponents.
At Edgehill, not far from Banbury, his path was intercepted by the
Parliamentary army under Essex.  An indecisive battle was fought.
The King was obliged to abandon his intention of reaching London: but
Oxford was occupied; and it became thenceforward the Royalist capital.

In the following year, 1643, we again find the King attacking, this
time with three separate armies, one advancing from the North, the
other from Cornwall, and the third {181} from Wales.  Those parts of
the country were solidly Royalist except that Hull held out for
Parliament in the north-east, Gloucester in the west, and Plymouth in
the south-west.  The attempts of the Royalist forces of South Wales
to cross the border were foiled, with much bloodshed, by Essex at
Highnam; while their future advance was rendered more difficult by
the Parliamentary occupation of Chepstow and Monmouth.  South Wales
was thus shut in between the Parliamentary fortresses of Gloucester,
Chepstow, and Monmouth to the east, and Pembroke to the west.
Meanwhile Sir Thomas Middleton, and Brereton, were overrunning
Cheshire and North Wales, capturing one Royalist fortress after
another.  In siege warfare the Parliamentarians enjoyed an easy and
decisive superiority, for they alone possessed heavy artillery.  A
Royalist army arrived from Ireland, but it was defeated with heavy
loss at Nantwich; and soon only Chester held out for the King in that
part of the country.  Charles, who was gifted with a considerable
amount of military insight and acumen, perceived the importance of
Chester, not only as a rallying place for Wales, but also as a gate
to Ireland; and he sent Sir Nicholas {182} Byron to command the
garrison, and to take general charge of Cheshire and Shropshire.
Although Byron only just succeeded in holding his own, he at least
had the satisfaction of knowing that he was keeping a large
Parliamentary army occupied in watching him, and so making it
impossible for it to march against the King.  South Wales had been
entrusted by Charles to the care of Lord Herbert, eldest son of the
Marquis of Worcester, a man personally popular, but a Catholic, and
without military training.  As compensation, however, for his
defects, there was the fact that his father was reputed to be the
wealthiest man in the kingdom; and his son's army was fitted out, and
maintained, entirely at his own private cost.  It took him but little
time to raise an army of fifteen hundred foot and five hundred horse,
all well and sufficiently armed.  The close of the year 1643 saw the
King still in a good position; and as for Wales it was, with the
exception of two or three places in Pembrokeshire, solidly Royalist,
while only Gloucester prevented Charles from being master of the
whole Severn valley.

With the beginning of the year 1644, however, things began to alter.
Many of the {183} younger and more ardent Parliamentarians were
growing impatient of the dilatory method of their own leaders.  They
fancied that such men as Essex did not really desire to crush the
King once and for all.  New men, of the type of Cromwell, Ireton, and
Harrison, were coming to the front.  The result was that now, for the
first time, Parliament began to take the offensive, and to direct its
armies against those parts of the country which were most loyal to
Charles.  This explains the strategy of the next two years.  In 1644
the North was won, as the result of the victory of Marston Moor; and
in 1645 the Midlands were won, as the result of Naseby.  In Wales the
year 1644 opened with an attack by Lord Herbert upon the
Parliamentary stronghold of Pembroke.  The attempt was repulsed; and
in the succeeding weeks Laugharne, then a staunch Roundhead, made
sure of South Wales, capturing Haverfordwest, Tenby, Carew, and
Carmarthen.  An attempt to recover the lost ground was made by
Gerard, aided by some Irish levies; but so oppressive was the conduct
of these wild and undisciplined troops that the affections of the
greater part of South Wales were permanently alienated from the
Royalist cause.  {184} Some months later Gerard was relieved of his
command; but the evil had been done.  Meanwhile Laugharne was
pursuing his victorious course; and before the close of the year
Monmouth, Brecon, and Newcastle Emlyn had fallen into the hands of
Parliament.

By this time Rupert had had conferred upon him the title of President
of Wales.  In February he was at Chester, where applications for help
reached him from every quarter.  One of the most importunate appeals
came from Newark, and thither he decided to go, having appointed the
cultured, but ineffective, Sir John Mennes governor of the three
northern Welsh counties in his absence.  The Royalist cause in North
Wales was now beginning to be badly shaken.  In September the
Roundheads won a great victory at Montgomery, as a result of which
the castle fell into their hands.  Archbishop Williams, tired and
hopeless, was endeavouring to make Conway a refuge for fugitives
fleeing from the advancing foe.  After the defeat of Marston Moor the
disorderly remnants of the King's broken army flocked into Wales,
pillaging and rioting, and completing the work of alienating the
native inhabitants.

In 1645, however, there was a distinct {185} improvement in the
King's fortunes in Wales.  Gerard captured Haverfordwest, Picton, and
Carew in May, and routed the Parliamentarians of Pembrokeshire.  But
in June came the King's crushing defeat at Naseby, where the greater
part of the Royalist infantry had been Welsh.  From the scene of his
defeat Charles once more came to Wales to look for another army.  But
the last great pitched battle had been fought; henceforward the war
was made up of sieges and skirmishes.  Gerard was still successful;
and in quick succession defeated Sir John Price at Llanidloes,
Middleton near Oswestry, and Laugharne at Newcastle Emlyn.  As a
result of these victories the castles of Llanidloes and Cardigan
again became Royalist.  This time, however, Charles found the Welsh
people less eager to listen to his appeals, so bitter was their
resentment at the treatment which they had experienced at the hands
of the dissolute troopers of Rupert and Gerard.  Nevertheless from
the Monmouthshire and from the Glamorganshire squires came renewed
promises of aid.  But even the influence of their landlords failed
now to induce the common people to enlist in the King's army.
Moreover such recruits as were forthcoming {186} at all were only to
be secured by agreeing to certain conditions.  They were to have
their own Welsh officers; there must be no demand for payment of
arrears; and the obligation to entertain soldiers at free quarters
must be limited to a single night.  Evidently the ancient spirit of
sturdy independence was beginning to be roused from its long sleep!
Charles had been waiting impatiently at Raglan; then, bitterly
disappointed, he proceeded to Chester, and from its walls witnessed
the rout of his cavalry at Rowton Heath.  At the beginning of 1646
Chester surrendered to Parliament, and in the whole of Wales Harlech
Castle alone remained faithful to Charles.

In April 1646 Charles surrendered himself to the Scottish army, and
the First Civil War came to an end.  Harlech was still holding out,
and it was only in March 1647, just a year after the surrender of
Chester, and seven months after Raglan, the last English fortress to
fly the Royal standard, had capitulated, that it opened its gates to
Mytton.  The year 1647 was occupied in fruitless negotiations between
King and Parliament, and in bitter controversy and recrimination
between Parliament and Army, Presbyterians and Independents.  {187}
So divided had the Roundheads become that Charles again took heart,
and in 1648 embarked upon the adventure which was to cost him his
life--the so-called Second Civil War.  Nowhere had the new religious
and political controversies raged with greater rancour than in Wales.
The supremacy of the Army, and the triumph of the Independents, were
contemplated with unconcealed aversion and dismay.  Even men like
Laugharne, who had been prominent in the war against Charles, now
went over to his side.  On February 20, Colonel Poyer, Governor of
Pembroke Castle, refused to lay down his command in favour of a
successor who had been appointed to take his place.  Other bodies of
troops joined Poyer, who drove the Parliamentary army out of
Pembroke.  This was the signal for a general revolt throughout Wales.
One-half of the Model Army, under the command of Horton, was sent in
hot haste to the Principality; and in May it defeated Laugharne and
his rebels at St. Fagan's.  Before the end of the month Cromwell
himself appeared on the scene.  The rebels were chased from the open
country, and shut up in the castles of Pembroke, Tenby, and Chepstow.
The two {188} latter places were taken without much difficulty, but
Pembroke, where Poyer himself commanded, held out until July.  Its
gallant commander was put to death, to expiate the offence of
apostasy, an offence rendered exceptionally heinous by the fact
that--to quote the words written by Cromwell at the time--it had been
committed "against so much light."

Meanwhile events had been moving quickly in North Wales as well.
Byron, with the assistance of Colonel Robinson, had gained possession
of Anglesey; but the central figure of the rising in North Wales was
the celebrated Sir John Owen of Clenenau.  He was a turbulent man,
who had done to death the sheriff of Merionethshire with singular
brutality.  But his undoubted bravery, his bluff manners, and his
loyalty made him a popular and a typical figure.  Mytton, the
successful captor of Harlech, was sent against him, and at the battle
of Llandegai Owen was decisively vanquished.  With his defeat, and
the capture of Pembroke, the Second Civil War in Wales came to a
close.  Owen had been made prisoner, but through the intercession of
Ireton his life was spared.

From the barren, if picturesque, annals of {189} bloodshed, a war in
which, so far as Wales was concerned, no great principle was at
stake, it is a relief to turn to the settlement of the country under
the Commonwealth and Protectorate, and to the work of the few great
Welsh Parliamentarians.  Colonel John Jones the "Regicide" is
deserving at least of passing mention.  Brought up in one of the
wildest and most remote corners of the Merionethshire mountains, he
advanced, by sheer force of character and intellect, to a position of
trust in the counsels of Parliament.  As soon as war broke out he
joined the ranks of the Parliamentary army.  We find him representing
Merionethshire in the House of Commons in 1647, and again from 1647
to 1653, when he was elected for Denbighshire.  No man threw himself
with greater zeal into the task of organizing the new army.  He was
not one of those who, having taken the initial step, cast reluctant
glances back.  For him there was but one goal--the complete and final
victory of Parliament.  When this object was attained, he did not
hesitate to sit in the Court which sat in judgment upon Charles, nor
did he shrink from signing his death warrant.  His friendship with
Cromwell was cemented by his marriage to the {190} Protector's
sister.  In Wales, during the war, and in Ireland after its
termination, he was an acute and able agent of Parliament, and on one
occasion the House of Commons passed a special resolution, thanking
him, and voting him a present of £2000.  When the Restoration came,
John Jones made no effort to escape from the almost certain doom
which awaited him by a timely flight abroad; on the contrary he
remained openly in London.  He was consigned to the Tower, tried,
condemned, and put to death with all the horrible barbarities
prescribed by the law in the case of traitors.

The other great Welshman of the day was Morgan Llwyd, and with him
the whole history of the Commonwealth in Wales is bound up.  The
victorious Parliament and army, as one might suppose, regarded Wales
with no friendly eye; and during the ensuing years the Principality
was governed sternly and unsympathetically.  The position of Wales
varied with the many constitutional experiments of the period.  The
Agreement of the People, of 1649, proposed to give the country
thirty-five representatives out of a total of four hundred.  In the
Assembly of 1653 Wales had six representatives.  Under {191} the
Instrument of Government, of 1653, thirty-eight Members, out of four
hundred, were allotted to it.  But in the hour of its triumph
Parliament really counted for little in the affairs of the nation,
and the representatives of Wales, mostly strangers, hardly counted at
all.  It was the great day of officialdom, and the land groaned under
their heavy hand.

The new Government, and even the great Protector himself, despite his
Welsh descent, cared nothing for Wales as a separate nation; and the
national spirit would have fared badly but for a small band of true
patriots, the foremost of whom was Morgan Llwyd.  This wonderful man
was born at Cynfal, a substantial farmhouse situated in one of the
most romantic of Merionethshire glens, in the year 1619; and he died
in 1659.  His life, short as it was, marks the transition from the
old Wales to the new, from the condition of poverty, strife, and
degrading superstition, to that of freedom, peace, and progress.
With the execution of John Roberts of Trawsfynydd, in 1610, perished
the last champion of Popery in Wales.  With the death of Morgan's own
grandfather Huw Llwyd, somewhere about 1630, ended the {192} famous
line of poet-magicians who dominated the Welsh mind during the Middle
Ages.  This Huw Llwyd was, in many respects, a very remarkable man.
For many years he had fought on the Continent, in the religious wars
of the age; then in his declining years had come to Cynfal, to be the
admiration and the terror of his simple neighbours.  A belief in
witchcraft was then fairly general; and Huw was credited with the
possession of unusually extensive authority over the agents of the
lower world.  In this there was nothing incompatible with a
reputation for strict morality, and even sanctity, as one of the very
traditions which have been handed down clearly shows.  One day Huw
was enjoying himself in a tavern in the neighbouring village of
Maentwrog.  Through the window he descried his friend Archdeacon
Edmund Prys go by.  Putting his head through the window, he warmly
invited him to come in and enjoy the good cheer.  The reverend man
seems to have been scandalized at the thought; and to show his
displeasure he immediately caused two, long horns to grow out of the
luckless Huw's head, so that he was unable to withdraw it from the
window.  Not to be outdone, Huw, that same evening, ordered {193}
certain of the devils over whom he had control, to dip the Archdeacon
in the mill stream which ran past his house.  Such were the merry
pranks which parsons and poets played upon each other in early
seventeenth-century Wales!

From this atmosphere of superstition Morgan escaped early, being sent
to school with Walter Cradock at Wrexham, then the most enlightened
centre in the whole country.  From his able teacher he learned all
the new ideas of freedom both in religion and in politics; and it is
not surprising that, when the Civil War broke out, he should have
joined the Parliamentary army, and served as chaplain for several
years.  While in London he united himself with that wonderful sect
called the Fifth Monarchy Men.  These men believed that the world was
destined to be governed by five great monarchies in succession.
Four--Assyria, Persia, Greece, and Rome--had already been, and were
humbled in the dust.  The fifth was to be a heavenly kingdom.  Christ
would himself appear on earth, would free His saints from bondage,
and would establish a universal and immutable empire.  They believed
His advent to be now at hand, and waited for it anxiously day by day.
{194} Their duty, as they conceived of it, was to prepare the way for
His coming; and it necessarily followed that an acknowledgment of any
earthly monarch must be profane and blasphemous.  Fanatical they
were, unreasonable they may also have been; but there were no more
unflinching upholders of the liberty of the subject, and no better
friends of religious toleration.  The most influential man in the
sect was Harrison, and with his appointment, in 1649, as Governor of
South Wales, Morgan Llwyd settled down as pastor at Wrexham.

In February 1650 an Act was passed "for the propagation of the Gospel
in Wales."  Power was given to commissioners to hold an enquiry into
the lives of all the Welsh clergy, and to deprive all such as were
found to be immoral, incapable, or hostile to the new Government.  A
large number actually were ejected, and their place taken by a new
and specially certified body of preachers.  These commissioners were
extremely unpopular in Wales, for the country was strongly
anti-Puritan; and much of the unpopularity was visited on the new
preachers, who were frequently waylaid and beaten.  Not much progress
appears to have been made; for as {195} late as 1656 we find Berry,
who was Major-General, first for North Wales, and afterwards for
South, writing to Thurloe--"One great evil I find here, which I know
not how to remedy, and that is the want of able preachers.
Certainly, if some course be not taken these people will some of them
become heathens."

The "Propagation Act" was repealed in 1653; and that brought to a
head the antagonism which for some time had existed between Cromwell
and the Fifth Monarchists.  The Long Parliament was expelled by
Cromwell in 1653; and its successor--the Short Parliament--displayed
so marked a leaning in the direction of extreme republicanism, that
it soon shared the same fate.  Harrison, Vavasour Powell, and Morgan
Llwyd were now in open opposition to the Protector; and the two
Welshmen toured the Principality inciting the people to rise against
him.  They stood for complete separation of Church and State, for
religious toleration, and for a form of pure democracy in which there
would be no room for such an office as that of Protector.  Their
protest against the Protectorate was published in 1655, under the
title of "A Word for God."  Morgan Llwyd and Powell were the only two
leading Welsh preachers to sign it.  That {196} the majority of Welsh
Roundheads were entirely favourable to Cromwell is proved by the
counter protest which was at once issued, a document which was signed
by almost all the leading men, including Walter Cradock.  We must
allow that Harrison and his followers were unfair to Cromwell in
impugning his honesty.  The great Protector was always sincere; but
he had learnt, what successive generations of politicians have all in
turn had to learn, that the ideals of Opposition cannot always be
made to square with the facts of Office.  The Commonwealth was
shipwrecked on the rock of national opposition; the vast majority of
the nation were, and continued to be, Royalists and Episcopalians.

From that time until his death Morgan Llwyd ceased to play any part
in politics.  He had always been studiously inclined.  In 1653 had
been written his great classic, _Llyfr y Tri Aderyn_ (Book of the
Three Birds).  In the closing years of his life, the mystic
tendencies which had always been strong in him got the better of
everything else.  He translated the writings of Jacob Behmen; and
tramped about the hills and valleys of Wales, preaching to the
peasantry in their own homes.  His influence was immense; {197} and
without founding school, or sect, or party, he left a name and an
inspiration which remained fresh and potent for generations.

Morgan Llwyd did not survive to see the Restoration; and well was it
for him that he did not, for it would have filled him with the most
poignant anguish.  Most of all would he have been grieved by the
manifest signs of joy with which the event was greeted in Wales.  The
dream of a moral, a religious, an educated, and a democratic Wales
was shattered for the time being; it was not to be revived for
another hundred years and more.  Once again the country sank back
into its intellectual torpor, its superstition, and its immorality.
The old order was restored:--"The squire dispensed justice, the
parson preached loyalty, the bard in remote Nannau praised the life
of Charles the First and bewailed his death, and the peasant was told
that the world was put right again."  In many parts of the land
Parliamentarians were pitilessly persecuted.  In Merionethshire,
where the influence of Morgan Llwyd had been most strong, and where
Maes-y-Garnedd, the home of Colonel John Jones, stood in the shadow
of the mountains, a sturdy spirit of independence had already been
fostered.  Determined {198} not to remain at home to be oppressed, a
large number of them left Bala in 1682, and sailed for the Quaker
colony of Pennsylvania.  There, from time to time, they were joined
by other Welsh people.  To the district which they occupied they gave
the name of "Meirion," and they became the ancestors of many of the
most distinguished citizens of Philadelphia.




{199}

CHAPTER XII

THE REVIVAL

In the making of modern Wales two men stand out pre-eminent, and
without rivals--King Henry VIII, and the Revivalist Howel Harris.
The former gave to Wales the opportunity of playing an equal part
with England in the life of the Empire.  The latter roused Wales from
its mediæval lethargy into clear realization and appreciation of the
opportunity which lay within its grasp.  In the darkest hour of its
history, in 1916, the British Empire entrusted its fortunes to the
care of a Welshman.  That Welshman had been made possible by Henry
VIII: he was produced by Howel Harris.

Enough has been said already to prove that Nonconformity did not
appear in Wales for the first time in the eighteenth century.  The
Act of Uniformity of 1662 occasioned the ejection from their livings
of some two thousand clergy, more than a hundred of whom are said to
{200} have been Welsh.  Yet in spite of that, and in spite of the
persecution made possible by the Clarendon Code, Dissent continued to
exist.  The Toleration Act of King William made matters easier; but
even then Nonconformity did not thrive.  There was nothing peculiarly
Welsh about any of the sects; they were merely branches in Wales of
bodies English or Continental in origin, thought, and outlook.  Long
before the time of the Methodist Revival these sects had ceased to be
missionary enterprises.  They had lost all their evangelical ardour,
and were occupied mainly with rancorous disputations about recondite
points of theology.  For the moral and religious condition into which
Wales had fallen, they were almost as much to blame as the
Established Church.  Even if we accept the most favourable accounts,
the condition of the people must have been extremely bad.  Few of the
lower classes knew how to read.  In many churches whole months would
elapse without any sermon at all; while in others the parson would
read a learned English discourse to a sparse congregation knowing
nothing but Welsh.  Wesley declared that the people were "as little
versed in the principles of Christianity as a Creek or Cherokee {201}
Indian."  That the people were completely indifferent to any
religious impulse, and that they lived, for the most part, the life
of mere animals, is proved by an overwhelming mass of evidence.  Of
course too much must not be made of the testimony of extreme
Puritans, who were scandalized by what they considered desecration of
the Sabbath, and by such things as wrestling, dancing, cock-fighting,
and drinking.  But when all allowance has been made for this
prejudice, a terrible indictment can still be drawn up; for the vast
majority of the people must have been totally illiterate, extremely
superstitious, and without a thought save for the gratification of
their bodily needs and desires.  North Wales was almost wholly
Anglican, there being not more than ten small Nonconformist
congregations.  In the South Dissenters were more numerous.  But at
the highest computation we cannot put the total number of
Nonconformists in Wales at more than an eighth of the total
population.

The awakening came with Howel Harris, a man, like Luther, of
tempestuous passions, strong character, wide vision, and magnetic
personality.  A clear hint had already been given by the Rev.
Griffith Jones, Vicar of {202} Llanddowror, of the method which would
have to be employed for the regeneration of Wales.  In spite of every
discouragement from his fellow clergymen, he had begun the practice
of preaching, in a popular style, in the open air, at fairs and wakes
and wherever people were gathered together for dissipation.  Griffith
Jones, however, was an educator rather than a revivalist, and as such
we shall have more to say about him in another place.  Of the Revival
itself he was a precursor, rather than a leading figure.

Howel Harris was born in 1714, at Trevecka in Breconshire.  He was
educated at the Llwynllwyd Grammar School, and was intended for the
Church.  But the death of his father made it necessary that he should
earn his own living; and for some years he became a schoolmaster.
During this period he studied hard, and, what is of more importance
in his case, pondered over the evil condition of the people among
whom he dwelt.  An intense desire was awakened within him to save
souls.  In 1735 he matriculated at St. Mary Hall, Oxford; but his
sojourn at the University was only a few weeks in duration, and he
returned to his own home more eager than ever to preach the Gospel.
He was {203} not ordained, neither was he a licensed preacher of any
Nonconformist body.  On the contrary he was then, and remained all
through life, a member of the Church of England.  But he began to go
on preaching tours into every part of Wales; and this work he
continued, without intermission, for the next sixteen years.  The
life was a strenuous, and even a dangerous, one.  On one occasion he
writes: "It is now nine weeks since I began to go round South and
North Wales, and this week I came home.  I have visited in that time
thirteen counties, and travelled most of 150 miles every week and
discoursed twice every day--sometimes three or four times a day.  In
this last journey I have not taken off my clothes for seven nights,
travelling from one morning to the next evening without any rest
above 100 miles, discoursing at midnight, or very early, on the
mountains in order to avoid persecution."  The closing words have a
very modest sound; but it must not be thought that Harris fled from
danger; on the contrary it would be nearer the truth to say that he
wantonly incurred it.  The "persecution" of which he speaks was no
figurative expression, but a hard and stern reality.  Indeed this
period of his life is one {204} of the most wonderful romances of
modern times.

Innumerable examples could be given of the things which Harris
endured at the hands of his opponents; and it must be confessed that
his own aggressiveness, and the unseasonable moment selected by him
for delivering his message, make one feel that his sufferings were,
at times, almost deserved.  On one occasion a Justice of the Peace,
one Marmaduke Gwynn by name, came to hear him, armed with a copy of
the Riot Act, but was so impressed with what he heard that he invited
him to be a guest at his house.  Sometimes his success was complete.
"Yesterday," he writes, "was a glorious day: I was at a great feast,
and chose to oppose the devil on his own ground; and we discoursed
within a few yards of a public house, where diversion was to be.  I
never tasted more power.  I believe some were cut through; many wept,
and one fainted; others felt a great trembling, and all were filled
with awe."  His enemies did not hesitate to issue false reports about
him.  "Last night and to-day," he says, "I met with no opposition;
many are deterred from coming to hear by a report passing for truth,
that I really correspond {205} with the King of Spain, and that £40
are offered for taking me."  At Llanbrynmair he finds the people
living "like brutes, knowing nothing"; yet so convincing was the
message which he delivered, that he left behind him there the nucleus
of one of the first and strongest Methodist congregations.  On the
road from Cemmaes he was roughly hustled and beaten, and followed by
a gang of men who cried, "Down with the Roundheads."  A woman threw
mud at him, calling him a "damned devil"; and he was hounded out of
the parish with dogs.  At Machynlleth he was beset by an infuriated
rabble, headed by an attorney's clerk with mouth "so full of the
language of hell as if his name had been legion"; and with him a
gentleman and a clergyman whose language was, apparently, in no wise
different from that of the clerk!  Some years later this same clerk
relented; but the parson, to the end of his days, never ceased to
allude to the new preachers, in his sermons, as "those wicked
Methodists."  At Crickhowell Harris was so roughly handled that he
was obliged to seek refuge in a friend's house, his clothes torn, his
face covered with blood, his head cut in thirteen places, and his
body bruised.  South Wales seems to {206} have been decidedly more
wicked than the North, and Glamorgan worst of all.  An attempt to
shoot Harris was made at Swansea and Llandilo; and at Carmarthen a
man drew a sword, with the intention of killing him.  But the North
was bad enough.  At Bala (so soon afterwards to become the Oxford of
Welsh Nonconformity) he had a very unpleasant time on his second
visit to the place.  The Vicar raised a great club which he was
carrying, and threatened to strike him with it.  Not content with
that, the reverend man caused a barrel of beer to be placed in the
open street, where all comers might freely drink, in order that their
will to harm the Revivalist might be strengthened, and their valour
enhanced at the cost of their discretion.  Nevertheless, in spite of
all persecution, the whole country was soon ablaze with the Revival;
and people came in hundreds and thousands to hear the preachers.
Howel Harris was not alone in the field.  About the same time, and
quite independently of him, Daniel Rowlands, the eloquent curate of
Llangeitho, had begun to preach, and a warm friendship was struck
between the two men.  Griffith Jones gave the new movement
encouraging recognition; and Whitefield who, {207} by his intense
ardour and matchless eloquence, was infusing new life into the
religion of England extended the right hand of fellowship.  In 1740
Harris made an invaluable convert in the person of William Williams
of Pantycelyn, in all probability the greatest hymn writer the world
has ever seen, a man who gave imperishable expression to the
theology, the ethics, and the ideals of the Revival.  Williams was
ordained by the Bishop of St. David's; and became curate to that
charming and picturesque Welsh historian, Theophilus Evans.  But the
learned author of _Drych y Prif Oesoedd_ had no liking for his
curate's superabundant zeal; and when restraint was put upon his
preaching, Williams joined the Methodists.

In 1743 was held at Watford what was probably the first Welsh
Methodist Association; and, in the same year, another at Carmarthen.
During the first few years there was active partnership between the
Welsh Methodists and those of England; and plans were discussed for
their unification.  Fortunately these plans always failed to commend
themselves to the majority, and the two bodies remained apart.  By
degrees Harris became estranged from all his early {208} friends and
coadjutors.  For this he himself was, no doubt, chiefly to blame.  He
was not an easy man to work with, being jealous, obstinate, and
masterful.  Furthermore, his theological opinions were undergoing a
change, and he had become subject to frequent ecstasies and visions,
all of which he regarded as special revelations and tokens of Divine
favour.  The upshot of it all was that Howel Harris decided to live a
life apart, and to form at Trevecka a sort of religious community
which he called a Family.  Something must be said about this scheme,
which engrossed the last twenty-two years of his life (1751-1773)
before we return to follow the growth of Methodism in general.

As early as 1736 Harris seems to have cherished the desire to found
at Trevecka a community, after the pattern of that of Frank at Halle,
or of the Moravians at Herrnhut and Fulneck; but for several years he
was altogether absorbed in the work of evangelization.  Now, however,
he took up the idea with renewed zest.  In preparing the house at
Trevecka for the reception of the Community, he had the assistance of
his friend and adviser Madame Griffith.  Residents began to arrive in
1752, and continued to do so, {209} from time to time, for many
years.  But the average membership remained throughout somewhere near
a hundred.  Every member was expected to put all his worldly
possessions into a common fund.  The concerns of the Family were both
religious and industrial.  Three services were held every day, and on
Sundays four.  But industry held almost as important a place in the
scheme as religion; and it is this that makes Harris so prominent a
figure in the economic and social, as well as in the religious, life
of Wales.  The first faint indications of the coming Industrial
Revolution were beginning to be descried in England; but as yet Wales
was almost wholly agricultural and pastoral; and, of course, what
industries there were, were carried on in the cottages of the people.
In a few short years the enormous mineral wealth of the country would
be discovered; and the introduction of the factory system, and the
construction of turnpike roads, would alter the whole face of
society.  More than a century earlier, an Industrial Community had
been founded by the Vaughans of Bredwardine, but that had long sunk
into oblivion: it was the Trevecka Family that really brought the
main ideas of the Industrial Revolution to the doors of {210} the
Welsh people.  The industrial pursuits of the new Community were
interesting and varied.  They picked wool, carded flax, and knitted.
A woollen factory was instituted, and a printing-press installed.
Harris and his followers were equally interested in the development
of the land.  He introduced new, and better, methods of growing
turnips and corn, and also an improved system of crop rotation.

Our account of this versatile man would not be complete without a
word about a most curious, and wholly unexpected, episode in his
life.  In 1756 the Seven Years' War broke out, and a French invasion
of England was deemed to be imminent.  Loyal citizens everywhere
rushed to arms; and the Breconshire Agricultural Society, with which
Harris was intimately connected, offered to form themselves into a
troop of light horse.  Five members of the Family joined the regular
army.  They served in Nova Scotia, besieged Louisberg, and fought
with Wolfe at Quebec.  Four were killed, or died of fever, and one
only lived to return to Trevecka.  In 1759 Harris joined the local
militia; and was made, first an Ensign, and soon afterwards a
Captain-Lieutenant.  In this capacity he accompanied {211} the troops
to Yarmouth; and he did not return home until 1763, when the Peace of
Paris put an end to all danger of invasion.

The last ten years of his life Harris spent quietly with the Family,
his calm existence varied only by the assistance which he gave to
Lady Huntingdon in founding her Methodist College at Trevecka Isaf.
To the end he remained a member of the Episcopal Church; and at his
funeral, in July 1773, fifteen clergymen administered the Sacrament
to a multitude of twenty thousand people, who had come to show their
affection and respect.

By this time congregations of Methodists had grown very numerous in
Wales, and the problem of administering to their spiritual needs was
becoming a difficult and a pressing one.  It was obvious that the few
clergy who had joined the Association could not cope with the
situation.  Large numbers of lay preachers had arisen; but none of
them were ordained, nor did they claim the right to administer the
Sacraments.  The English Church was confronted with the alternative
of either making its doors wider, so as to make it possible for the
newly converted multitudes to find a congenial home within it; or of
keeping its doors rigidly narrow, and so {212} keeping the people
out.  The latter course was the one adopted.  The leaders of the
Church remained stiff, unsympathetic, and aloof.  For years the small
band of Methodist clergy strove hard to obtain recognition, having to
perform the difficult task of restraining the eagerness of their own
more extreme followers.  To most of them, if not to all, the thought
of a break with the Church was extremely repugnant; and they were
prepared to go great lengths to make such a thing unnecessary.  But
on one point they remained firm: the people must have the preaching,
and the religious services which they found to be of most spiritual
value to them.  If the Church could provide this, so much the better;
if it refused, then secession must be bravely faced.  In 1802 the
Rev. Thomas Charles (better known as Charles o'r Bala) issued his
_Vindication_, in which he repudiated the name "Dissenter," proved
the absolute identity of the Methodists with the Church in creed, and
made a last appeal for recognition.  The appeal met with no response;
and at the Association which met at Bala in 1811 Charles himself,
while still protesting his preference for episcopal ordination,
ordained eight preachers, of whom the great John Elias was {213} one.
This implied a definite breach with the Church.  The great body of
Methodists formed themselves into a new Church, with its own
constitution and its own Confession of Faith.  It became known as the
Calvinistic Methodist Church.  But even then six Methodist clergymen
refused to quit the Establishment.

Throughout the nineteenth century Nonconformity flourished abundantly
in Wales.  The Revival had not only produced the Calvinistic
Methodists, but had given a new and powerful impetus to the older
sects; and between them they claimed the allegiance of the vast
majority of Welsh people.  The young Welshman, and even more so the
foreigner, finds it a little difficult to understand the enormous
place which the Chapel filled in the life of Wales during the greater
part of the century.  Those little plain square buildings, scattered
so profusely all over Wales, so ugly in the eyes of the tourist, yet
so sacred to those who dwell around them; what was the secret of
their power and their charm?  To-day there are many competing
institutions--the school, the college, the club, and the library; but
in those days the chapel was everything.  In the pulpit the artistic
soul of Wales found its full expression, as it {214} has never quite
succeeded in doing anywhere else.  Its poetry (if we except its
hymns), good as much of it is, never even approaches the very best.
Its painting and its sculpture are almost non-existent.  Even in
music Wales has not given to the world anything of real distinction,
and of abiding value.  But between 1780 and 1880 it produced
successive generations of preachers, who brought pulpit oratory to a
point that has never been surpassed, even if it has been equalled, by
any other nation before or since.  Even to-day, when oratory has
declined, and when there are so many competing attractions, there is
nothing that the Welshman loves so well as a Preaching Meeting.  Five
thousand people will still come together eagerly to the village green
on one of these great occasions.  At six o'clock in the morning two
sermons, averaging each an hour in length, will be delivered.  These
will be followed, at ten o'clock, by two others of the same length.
In the afternoon two more will be delivered.  The day will close with
yet another two, or sometimes three, such sermons; and the multitude
will disperse over hill and moor to their scattered homes, discussing
the great feats of oratory to which they have {215} listened, quoting
and conferring with discrimination, and singing, for the twentieth
time that day, some favourite hymn.

The accounts which we possess, written by eyewitnesses, of some of
the effects produced by the great preachers make marvellous reading.
In the hands of a John Elias, a Henry Rees, or a John Jones, the vast
congregation, standing before them throughout the long summer hours,
would be like clay.  From tears to laughter, from ecstatic joy to the
profoundest sorrow and the most poignant terror, it would be moved by
a word, or even a gesture.  So realistic and dramatic was the
preaching of John Elias that, on one occasion when he was describing
the Almighty letting the arrow fly from his bow, the whole vast
audience parted in two in order to allow passage for the shaft.  So
powerful was the voice of Owen Thomas that, preaching at Bangor his
accents could be distinctly heard in Anglesey across the Menai
Straits.  Needless to say, scenes of the most uncontrolled enthusiasm
would prevail.  Fear of Hell, and hope of Heaven would alternate in
the hearts of the congregation; but in all the utterances of the
greatest preachers the dominant note was the compelling love of God
in Christ.

{216}

In the chapel, and in the federation of chapels, the Welshman learnt
the difficult art of self-government.  The rule of the parson had
been an autocratic one; that of the Nonconformist bodies was, from
the first, democratic.  Every official, including the Minister
himself, was chosen by a direct vote of the whole congregation.  Even
in a further, and a different, sense Nonconformity was democratic.
Its members were mainly drawn from the middle and lower classes; and
its Ministers, until well advanced in life, were simple workmen--John
Elias a weaver, Christmas Evans a farm servant, John Jones a
quarryman, Williams o'r Wern a carpenter.  The doors of the
Universities were closed against them; and Glyndwr's University of
Wales was still an unrealized dream.  They were the poor preachers of
a poor people.

Did Nonconformity justify its existence?  Was the life of Wales
cleansed and elevated?  The answer of the impartial historian must
surely be an emphatic affirmative.  Between the itinerary of the
preacher Giraldus Cambrensis, and that of the preacher Howel Harris,
a period of some five hundred and fifty years intervened; but it is
difficult to see that the Welsh people were at all higher, {217}
mentally or morally, at the later date than they were at the earlier
one.  But add another hundred years, and no chance visitor would
suppose that he was seeing the same people.

The indirect effects of Nonconformity were, in their own way, as
important as the direct.  The Welshman, hitherto so careless and
docile in his politics, became thoughtful and independent, having
accustomed himself to government by discussion and voting in his
chapel.  He had learned to read in the Sunday School; and it was not
long before he added to his Bible and his commentary a newspaper and
a literary and political magazine.  Every chapel would have its
Literary Society; and by that means new ideas in poetry and music, in
science and in philosophy would slowly be disseminated among the
people.  A modern scholar probably did not go too far when he
declared that "Nonconformity found Wales derelict; it has reared up a
new nation.  It found Wales pagan; it has made her one of the most
religious countries in the world.  It found Wales ignorant; it has so
stimulated her energies that by to-day Welshmen, largely by their own
self-sacrifice, have provided for themselves the most complete
educational system in Europe."




{218}

CHAPTER XIII

THE DAWN

The new spirit which began to manifest itself in Wales in the
eighteenth century took various forms.  Of these, by far the most
important was religion, and with that we have already dealt.  The
other forms were education, industrialism, politics, and literature;
and among these, education claims the first place.  It is impossible
to make any clear distinction between religion and education; for the
chapel, by its Sunday School, its Literary Society, its Bible Class,
and its preaching was, for many years, a far more important agent of
education than any school or college.  Again it is not easy to
determine whether that peculiarly Welsh institution, the Eisteddfod,
belongs more properly to the domain of education, or to that of
literature and art.

Ever since the first coming of Christianity into the country Wales
had had its schools.  {219} In an earlier chapter we dwelt upon
differences between the Celtic Church and that of Rome; and one of
the most conspicuous of these differences was its greater insistence
upon the value of culture and knowledge.  There were Grammar Schools
in Wales in the sixth century, just a hundred years before the
establishment by Augustine of the first English school at Canterbury.
In the turbulent times of the Middle Ages these schools deteriorated
sadly; still the lamp of learning was never wholly extinguished.
Such as they were, the mediæval schools were connected with the
monasteries, and with the dissolution of those foundations they too
ceased to exist.  A few Welshmen were always to be found at Oxford,
and we have seen how they flocked back to their native land to
participate in the rising of Glyndwr.  The Tudor union of the two
nations made intercourse much more easy; and, during the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, the number of Welsh students at the old
Universities greatly increased.  They were further encouraged by the
establishment of Jesus College, Oxford, a wholly Welsh foundation.
But it is needless to say that it was only the sons of the gentry,
and young men about to enter upon an {220} ecclesiastical career, who
were able to avail themselves of these advantages.  The great bulk of
the middle class, and the whole of the lower classes, remained
without any sort of direct education.

The Reformation period witnessed the founding of many new Grammar
Schools, both in England and Wales.  The new Established Church
prided itself upon the possession of "sound learning"; and the
schools were under its auspices.  But these schools were all in the
towns; and the instruction given in them was entirely in English, and
by teachers who knew not a word of Welsh.  The country districts
remained untaught, as too did the vast majority of the people who,
knowing no English, were unable to profit by the new schools.

Good people in London seemed to have felt an occasional qualm at the
thought of the ignorance which prevailed across the Welsh border.
For example, we hear of Oliver Cromwell and Richard Baxter playing
with the idea of a Welsh University.  In the last years of the
seventeenth century an effort was made to provide Welsh children with
instruction in the English language, and to circulate the Bible, the
Prayer Book, {221} and certain other books in Welsh.  Archbishop
Tillotson, Stillingfleet, Thomas Gouge, and James Owen founded a
society for that purpose; and it was so far successful that about a
thousand poor Welsh children were taught every year.  In 1701 the
work of the society was taken over by the Society for the Propagation
of Christian Knowledge.  Lending libraries were formed, charity
schools established, and much good work done.  All these efforts,
however, were eclipsed by the famous "Circulating Schools" of the
Rev. Griffith Jones.

This remarkable man, the "morning star of the Revival" as he has been
called, was born in 1684, at Cilrhedyn, and educated at the
Carmarthen Grammar School.  After holding the living of Llandeloi for
five years, he became Vicar of Llanddowror.  He was fully impressed
with the desirability of providing education for the poorer Welsh
children, and especially for those whose homes lay in the country
districts.  As it was clearly not feasible to provide a sufficient
number of stationary schools, he hit upon the happy device of having
circulating ones.  Much help was given to him, and much encouragement
in his enterprise by Sir John Phillips, the {222} pioneer of the
Charity Schools movement; by the Society for the Propagation of
Christian Knowledge, and by Madame Bevan of Llacharn.  The success of
the undertaking was startling, and well-nigh instantaneous.  Within
ten years a hundred schools had been established; while within thirty
years the number had swollen to between three and four thousand.  The
total number of scholars amounted to a hundred-and-sixty thousand.
For the instruction of the teachers a seminary was established.
Apart from subscriptions given by benefactors, the whole cost was
borne by a collection made in church during the Communion Service.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of this
enterprise.  It helped to preserve Welsh as a literary language.  It
taught a considerable part of the population to read the Bible.  It
prepared the way for the Revival which was at the door, and gave to
the Revivalists a solid foundation upon which to build.  Griffith
Jones died in 1761; but the schools went on.  In 1780 they were
suspended, owing to a lawsuit; but in 1809 the scheme again came into
operation.

The next momentous step forward in Welsh education was the starting
of Sunday Schools, by Charles of Bala.  This was one of the {223}
direct results of the Revival.  From that day to the present the
influence of these schools has been incalculably great.  Children had
their place in them; but their primary function was the education of
adults.  The term "school" when applied to them is somewhat
misleading; they were rather small study-circles, presided over by a
democratically chosen leader, and, with the Bible as text-book,
discussing almost every question pertaining to this world and the
next.  Sunday Schools were quickly adopted by all the Nonconformist
bodies, and by the Episcopal Church as well; and among the former at
least church membership implied membership of the school.  Owing to
this the minds of the people of Wales became saturated with the
Scriptures.  The geography of Palestine was more familiar to them
than that of England.  Bible stories, Bible arguments, and Bible
metaphors were become interwoven with the very texture of their
thought.  Huxley once pointed out that no man who possessed a good
knowledge of the Bible could be considered uncultured; and Ruskin
maintained that to know by heart some of its greatest passages was to
make the writing of an undistinguished style impossible.  {224} To
these admirable results must be added, in the case of Wales, the
training in reasoning, in dialectic, and in controversial fair-play
which the Schools supplied.

Coming to the nineteenth century, we find efforts to improve
educational facilities in Wales so numerous and so varied as to be
positively bewildering.  The important date to remember is 1846.
Prior to that landmark, efforts of a voluntary kind had been made by
the National Society, and by the British Society.  In that year a
Royal Commission was appointed to make a thorough investigation into
the condition of education in the Principality.  When the Commission
issued its report, a year later, a great outcry was raised in Wales;
for it was discovered that it had gone much beyond the limits
assigned to it for enquiry, and had made strictures, many of them
demonstrably false, and others offensively expressed, upon the moral
and religious condition of the people.  The enquiry has been known in
Wales, ever since, as "Brad y Llyfrau Gleision" (The Treason of the
Blue Books).  Nevertheless the Commission had done good work in that
it had aroused interest in the question of education, and had
impressed upon Parliament, and public men generally, the {225}
necessity of dealing with it.  There was, in consequence, a decided
quickening of the educational life of Wales; and, down to 1870, a
steady increase in the number of schools, as well as an improvement
in the quality of the teachers.  In 1870 the separate history of
elementary education in Wales comes to an end; for it was then
assimilated in almost every respect to that of England.

An increase in the number of schools and scholars involved an
increase also in the number of teachers; and to supply them proved to
be one of the most difficult of problems.  The salary paid was so low
that no man who had been to a University could be expected to accept
it.  As yet there were no secular colleges in Wales, and but few
secondary schools.  A few truly excellent secondary schools there
were; establishments like Ystrad Meurig, from which, for a
considerable period, Bishops used to ordain young men without any
additional training.  The result was that schoolmasters were
generally grossly incompetent, being one-legged army sergeants, or
retired sailors, with no knowledge of Wales, and but little knowledge
of anything.  And not only were they ignorant, but they were also
snobs of the most contemptible kind, {226} toadying to the vicar and
the squire, whose henchmen they were, and never hesitating to express
their detestation and scorn of everything Welsh.  A poor farm boy,
who afterwards became one of Oxford's most brilliant scholars, has
left, in his inimitable _Clych Atgof_, a half-amusing, half-pathetic
account of his troubles in early life with teachers of this kind.

In 1846 there was only one normal college in the whole of Wales.  To
this were added two Church of England teachers' training colleges,
the one at Carmarthen, the other at Bangor; and, in 1862, was
established a second normal college.  Sir Hugh Owen, one of the most
illustrious names in the list of great Welshmen, had begun to agitate
for a connecting link between elementary schools and places of higher
education.  No schools were then founded; but a "North Wales
Scholarship Association" was formed; and this afforded much valuable
assistance prior to the coming of the County School.  The Magna Carta
of secondary education in Wales was the Intermediate Education Act of
1889.  This Act provided for the levying of a half-penny rate in all
the Welsh counties by the County Councils.  In every county a joint
education committee was to be appointed to {227} deal with existing
endowments and buildings; and, where necessary, to provide new
schools under the management of the recently appointed local bodies.
In order that greater uniformity might be acquired, a Central Welsh
Board was constituted, to which was entrusted the duty of supervising
the schools generally, inspecting them, and examining the pupils.
The Board continues to exercise some of its functions, but now shares
a dual control with the Welsh Department of the Board of Education, a
Department which was created as a concession to nationalist
aspirations.  From the commencement the success of the new
Intermediate Schools was phenomenal.  Schools starting with ten
pupils would, in a dozen years, have two hundred or more.  Of large
gifts given by the rich there were very few.  Apart from grants made
by the Government, the schools depended upon the small, but generous,
contributions of the poor.  In the early days of their history they
were admirably served by as devoted and far-sighted a body of
teachers as any schools have ever been fortunate enough to possess.
Only in recent years has the voice of hostile criticism been heard.

Side by side with reforms in elementary {228} and secondary education
marched the reform of higher education.  The Established Church had
depended upon Oxford and Cambridge for the training of its clergy;
but the Dissenting Churches soon discovered the need of colleges of
their own.  The first to be founded seems to have been the Academy of
Brynllywarch, in 1662.  Eventually this was moved to Carmarthen,
where it became the progenitor of the present College.  We have
already had occasion to allude to the founding of a college at
Trevecka, by Lady Huntingdon; but this was moved to Cheshunt in 1792.
A Welsh Methodist college was, however, opened there in 1842.  In
1836 Dr. Lewis Edwards opened a Methodist college for North Wales at
Bala.  The Episcopal Church, feeling the need of a college at which
living would be cheap, opened a college at Lampeter, and that became
the first Welsh college possessing the power to confer degrees.
Other denominations possessing colleges, many of them dating back to
the eighteenth century or even earlier, reorganized them, and, in
some cases, transferred them to new localities.  In this way the
Congregational colleges at Brecon and Bangor, and the Baptist college
at Bangor came into existence.

{229}

But excellent as was the work done by these seminaries in preparing
men for the Christian Ministry, educationally the central theme of
interest is the movement which culminated in the foundation of the
University of Wales.  The idea was as old as Owen Glyndwr; it had
been discussed by Cromwell; but it was not until 1853 that a powerful
popular agitation was started on its behalf.  A memorable meeting was
held in London in the following year, attended by Hugh Owen, George
Osborne Morgan, Lewis Edwards and others, at which the idea was fully
debated.  Nothing further, however, was done until 1863, when another
meeting was held, at which a resolution in favour of a national
University was carried, and an executive committee appointed.  An
attempt to persuade the authorities of Lampeter to unite in forming
one unsectarian University failed; and the committee proceeded with
the heavy task of collecting money.  From 1871 until his death Sir
Hugh Owen gave the whole of his time to this work.  The appeal met
with a warm response; and in 1872 Aberystwyth College was opened,
having been secured literally with the pennies and the shillings of a
hard-working peasantry.  From the start it was felt to be a real
national {230} possession; and that feeling was deepened by the
appointment of the saintly scholar-preacher, Dr. Thomas Charles
Edwards, to be its first Principal.  For ten years the College
received no grant at all from the Treasury; yet it continued to
flourish in ever-increasing measure.  So successful was the venture
that, in 1883, a similar College, for the use of South Wales, was
opened at Cardiff; and in 1884 this was followed by one at Bangor.
But so far the Colleges had no charter of incorporation, and were
without the power to confer degrees.  A further agitation in favour
of an incorporation of the three Colleges in one University of Wales
was set on foot.  In this agitation the chief part was played by the
Cymmrodorion, a society which, in the course of its long history, has
conferred untold benefits upon Wales.  When due investigation had
been made, and the proposed charter had been fully discussed in
Parliament, it was granted; and in 1893 the Welsh University came
into being, with Lord Aberdare as its first Chancellor.  Its success
has been wonderful and sustained, and it is only with difficulty that
the Colleges have been able to cope with the many hundreds of
students who flock to them.  So great has {231} the pressure been,
that it has since been found necessary to found a fourth constituent
College, at Swansea.  In most respects the Colleges are similar; but
a particular branch of knowledge may be provided for in one, and not
in the others.  Thus Cardiff possesses a Medical School, Aberystwyth
a Law School, and Bangor a Theological School.  Aberystwyth is also
the home of the Welsh Director of Musical Studies, and of the Wilson
Chair of International Politics.

The work of the Universities has been helped and stimulated by the
establishment of a National Museum at Cardiff, and a National Library
at Aberystwyth.

* * * * *

The political awakening in Wales came considerably later than the
religious and the educational awakening; and when it did come it was
largely as a consequence of the others.  We have seen how, in the
period of the Civil War, the Principality was almost wholly Royalist;
and when two distinct political parties came to be formed at
Westminster, in the closing years of the seventeenth century, it gave
its steady support to the Tories.  It is with shame that the
historian is forced to admit that Welsh lawyers like the infamous
{232} Judge Jeffreys were among the most brazen and unscrupulous
agents of Stuart tyranny.  But just as there were a few
Parliamentarians in Wales in the reign of Charles I, so also in the
reign of James II there were a few prominent Welshmen, who gave
strong support to the Revolution and the Bill of Rights.  With the
reign of Anne Wales settled down to the quiet Toryism from which it
was not roused for over a hundred years.  It is interesting to note
that, as in the case of France, the first note of discord was heard
among the men-of-letters.  We hear it in the writings of Jack
Glan-y-Gors, and in those of Iolo.  But their rebellious sentiments
found no echo in the hearts of the people; and the great leaders of
the Revival were either strictly non-political, or else Tory.  Nor
did the French Revolution do much to rouse the country.  An almost
solitary exception was the philosopher-preacher Richard Price, the
supporter of the American rebels, and the defender of the rights of
man.  He does not occupy a prominent place in history; but the man
who occasioned the _Reflections on the French Revolution_ of Burke,
and who earned an able vindication from the pen of John Morley,
certainly merits a passing allusion.

{233}

The Reform Act of 1832, which raised the number of Welsh Members from
twenty-seven to thirty-two, seems to have made no alteration in the
politics of the country; but soon afterwards the topics which were
going to be fought over so passionately before the close of the
century, began to emerge and to define themselves--the right of the
Welshman to live his own life in his own way, to speak his own
language, and to worship in his own chosen mode.  It meant the
recapturing of the lost dignity of Welsh nationality.  In the
eighteenth century Welshmen had, almost contentedly, sunk into a
position of inferiority, and had never dreamed of asserting their
claim to a place of equality in the Empire in which they were now, by
law, partners.  The cleavage between the newly anglicised gentry, and
the middle and lower classes, had become wider; and after the
Revival, to the difference of language, was further added the
difference of religion.  That any Welshman should aspire to occupy a
position of trust and distinction would be scouted.  Goronwy Owen, a
curate in the Church of England, and the greatest Welsh poet, and
possibly the greatest prose stylist too, of the eighteenth century,
writes in one of his charming letters in 1753: "Do {234} you ever
expect to see a Welshman a Bishop?  Sooner would I give credence to
the Brut which promises the second coming of Owain Lawgoch than
expect ever to see a Welshman holding an office of the least
distinction in either Church or State."

South Wales was rapidly becoming industrialized; and the Chartist
Movement found there, and even more in the small manufacturing towns
of the Severn valley, places like Llanidloes, and Newtown, the home
of Robert Owen, many followers.  All through the centuries, owing to
its geographical position, Wales had been influenced by two things,
isolation and contact; isolation from all kindred beyond the seas,
and contact with its unfriendly neighbours on the land side.  In the
ancient Hellenic world the sea united; but for the Celtic races it
has been a barrier to divide.  Between the Celt of Ireland and the
Celt of Wales intercourse was always slight and intermittent; while
between the Welshman and the Breton there was hardly any intercourse
at all.  Unlike his Breton kinsman, the Welshman has never taken
kindly to the sea; he has looked at it, and then raised his eyes to
the mountains.  He became a farmer, and not a fisherman or a sailor;
and when he did look out at the great {235} world he did so through
the English window.  This geographical isolation led also to a human
isolation, which is a very marked characteristic of the Welsh nation.
Fortunately the nation had been fully formed before the close of the
eighteenth century, otherwise the combined influence of English
political, social, and religious ascendancy might have swept away
every vestige of the fine cultural inheritance of the past.  In the
great fight which began in 1832, and which occupied eighty years,
Wales came out victorious in religion, in politics, in education, and
in social matters.  Even industrialism, the most potent foe of
nationality, was kept at bay; and between it and the Welsh spirit the
contest still goes on.  With the Industrial Revolution itself,
enormous as its influence was, we need not concern ourselves here;
for in Wales it followed practically the same course as in England.
The mineral wealth of Wales had been tapped by the Romans; but a new
impetus was given to mining by the invention of the steam engine, of
improved machinery, and by the new means of transport which came into
being in the first half of the nineteenth century.  In many parts of
the land agriculture had to yield place to quarrying and mining; for
there was slate in Carnarvon and Merioneth, copper {236} in Anglesey,
zinc in Denbigh, lead in Flint and Montgomery, gold in Merioneth,
silver in Cardigan, and iron and coal in both North and South Wales.
At first iron was regarded as the most important, coal being valued
only for the part which it played in smelting operations.  With the
coming of Guest to Dowlais, and of Crashay to Merthyr, towards the
close of the eighteenth century, the industry began to expand rapidly
in Glamorganshire and Monmouth.  It was not until the middle of the
following century that the coal industry became important in itself;
but once its importance was recognised, it was worked with the utmost
energy, and exported to every part of the world.  To-day upwards of a
quarter of a million men work in the pits, and more than half the
total population of Wales is contained in the mining valleys.  The
majority of these labourers are not Welsh; for to the pits, and to
the great ports on the Bristol Channel, immigration has been taking
place regularly, and on an enormous scale.  Except for the thinly
populated counties of Cardigan, Pembroke and Carmarthen, South Wales
is no longer Welsh in any sense of the word, and it has ceased to
sympathize with the political, the cultural, and the religious ideals
of the North.  This is the most difficult {237} problem with which
Welsh statesmen are to-day confronted.

While the Chartist Movement was in full swing, the Rebecca Riots
broke out.  The new roads which had just been constructed were
maintained by tolls, which were levied at turnpike gates placed at
short intervals along them.  As there were no railways, and as the
small farmers of Cardigan and Carmarthen had often to carry great
quantities of lime, for the fertilization of their land, over thirty
or forty miles, the tax became an extremely burdensome one.  Finding
that protests availed nothing, some of the younger men, in 1843,
disguised as women, broke the obnoxious gates in pieces.  Their
unruly conduct had two beneficial effects--it drew attention to a
real grievance, and it taught the Welsh people to look to Parliament
to redress their wrongs.

About this time newspapers began to be founded; and their effect upon
the political life of the country was immediate and immense.  Without
exception they were democratic, and nationalist in the wider sense.
The history of the Welsh Press is a heroic record.  These little
papers hardly ever secured a sufficiently big circulation to make
them self-supporting.  Their owners, themselves far from rich, were
true patriots, and {238} were content to suffer financial loss year
after year.  _Seren Gomer_ was first started in 1814, and revived in
1818.  In 1835 appeared _Yr Haul_, and _Y Diwygiwr_.  But it was not
until _Yr Amserau_ began to appear in 1843, under the editorship of
the great poet-preacher Gwilym Hiraethog, that Welsh journalism quite
realized what it was capable of doing.  At last the Welsh people had
found an adequate mouthpiece.  Soon the "Letters of the Old Farmer"
began to appear in _Yr Amserau_; and throughout the troubled, but
inspiring, period of Mazzini, Garibaldi, and Kossuth, this paper
continued to give Wales a democratic and strong liberal lead.  It
fought energetically for the repeal of the Corn Laws; and it was the
first paper to tell the people clearly--"The enemy is the landlord."
From that day, down to the outbreak of the Great War, the political
history of Wales consists of an unceasing struggle for the freedom of
the tenant, and for the freedom of Nonconformity.  Meanwhile other
papers and journals were being established.  Dr. Lewis Edwards
founded _Y Traetliodydd_; and the articles contributed by him to it,
when collected and published in a volume, became the Welsh
counterpart of Macaulay's Essays.  An able journalist, signing
himself "S.R.", {239} vigorously championed the cause of the poor and
the oppressed in his _Cronicl_.  He was a Free Trader, he condemned
war, he opposed landlordism, and he advocated a penny postage before
anybody else had done so.  But perhaps the greatest of all the
journalists was Thomas Gee of Denbigh.  In 1854 he issued a Welsh
Encyclopedia, a mammoth work first issued in parts, and afterwards
bound in many volumes, which brought the most up-to-date knowledge
into the homes of the people, in their own language, and at a price
which they could afford to pay.  Three years later he started a
weekly paper called _Baner Cymru_, with which _Yr Amserau_ was
amalgamated in 1859.  The paper won instant popularity; and when the
weekly letter of its political correspondent--"Y Gohebydd"--began to
appear, its success was assured.  No paper did more for the political
emancipation, and education, of the people, and to direct their
thoughts towards the House of Commons.  It would not be long before
they claimed to send Welsh speaking democrats to represent them.  The
supremacy of the squire and the parson was approaching its end.

The closing years of the nineteenth century, and the early years of
the twentieth, saw a wonderful literary efflorescence in Wales.
{240} The _Cymru_ and the _Geninen_ set and maintained a high
standard of accuracy, learning, and art.  Owen M. Edwards edited
cheap reprints of all the Welsh classics; and himself wrote travel
books, whose graceful style, delightful humour, and frequent passages
of moving eloquence, entitle them to rank with the _Reisebilder_ of
Heinrich Heine.  The beautiful, but not always idiomatic, prose of
the Welsh Bible, had become much more ornate, stiff, and difficult in
the hands of Ellis Wynne, whose _Bardd Cwsc_ is, nevertheless, the
finest work of creative genius in the Welsh language.  Goronwy Owen,
and Dr. Lewis Edwards, employed a much more flexible style; but it
was not until the rise of Owen Edwards that the full possibilities of
Welsh prose, as a vehicle for expressing modern ideas, became
manifest.  Welsh poetry there had always been an abundance of;
starting with the obscure bards of the sixth century, and the
Arthurian legends, passing through the warlike minstrels of the
Middle Ages, to the sweet, but shallow, love poems of Davydd ap
Gwilym.  Then came a long period of monotonous and mediocre
versifying; until real poetry again began to be produced by Goronwy
Owen.  A touch of sublimity in an occasional poem of Ishryn, {241}
and the true lyric flavour of much of Ceiriog, place these two men in
the front rank of Welsh poets.  The older poetry is couched in
intricate and artificial metres, the twenty-four varieties of which
every bard was expected to show an acquaintance with.  But of late
there has been a tendency to discard these, and to write more freely
and naturally.  There are some genuine poets in Wales to-day; but
their home seems to be the college lecture-room and not the old home
of the bards, the Eisteddfod.

Never has Welsh so flourished as a literary language as at present.
At least nineteen weekly Welsh papers are published in Wales,
eighteen monthlies, and six quarterlies; in addition to which
Liverpool has its own Welsh weekly, the United States one, and
Patagonia one.  The output of Welsh books is not very large, but it
cannot be computed at much less than a hundred in the course of every
year.  And Welsh is not only widely read, it is also widely spoken.
In North Wales, and in at least two counties in the South it is still
the language of the home, of the playground, and of public worship.
And wherever the Welshman goes he carries his language with him.  In
America, in Patagonia, in Africa, and in Australia, there are Welsh
colonies, with {242} Welsh societies and Welsh chapels.  In the
United States alone the number of Welsh chapels is close upon four
hundred.  In Great Britain, outside Wales, the tale is the same.  The
numerous Welshmen who have left their own quiet homes in order to
push their fortunes in the great cities have never forgotten the
traditions of their youth.  London has over thirty Welsh places of
worship, Liverpool about the same number, Manchester nine, Birmingham
four, and Bristol three, while many other English, Scottish, and
Irish towns have at least one each.

The political calm of Wales was broken in 1859, the year of the last
but one of the great Revivals.  There was a General Election, and the
tenant farmers of Merioneth decided, for the first time, that they
would refuse to vote for the landlord's nominee, and would run a
candidate of their own.  Ruthless evictions followed; and ere long it
had become the settled policy of most of the great estate holders to
examine into the political, and even the religious, views of their
tenants, and to expel all Radicals and Nonconformists.  Persecution,
however, only stiffened the determination of the people; and the
contest went on.  The Reform Act of 1867 helped the democratic
movement; and in the following {243} year Henry Richard was returned
at the head of the poll at Merthyr Tydvil.  Richard was one of the
most able, and most interesting men of the day, and would have been
an ornament to any representative assembly.  As an advocate of peace
he became known all over Europe; and was the first Welshman, in
modern times, to occupy an international position.  At the same
Election seven Liberals were returned for Wales.  Fresh evictions
followed, and Welsh farmers emigrated in scores to the United States.
But a measure of relief was at hand: in 1872 the Ballot Act was
passed.  From that day Liberalism swept onwards from victory to
victory.  In 1886 Tom Ellis, the noblest and most far-sighted of the
men sent by Wales to Parliament, was elected for Merionethshire.
Four years later David Lloyd George became Member for Carnarvonshire,
and in the same year Samuel Evans (afterwards to become a famous
President of the Probate, Divorce, and Admiralty Court) was elected
for Glamorgan.

Wales had now won full political recognition, and its members were in
a position to bargain with the Liberal leaders for the inclusion of
such measures as Welsh Disestablishment and Disendowment in the party
programme.  After long waiting, and much acrimonious {244}
discussion, that measure became law in 1914.  It was a great act of
justice, and its benefits have been felt by the formerly Established
Church no less than by the Free Churches.  Indeed, one of the most
wonderful and hopeful things in the recent history of Wales is the
way in which the new Welsh Church has organized itself, and adapted
itself to the new situation.  It is now a truly national body, with
its own Archbishop and a thoroughly democratic constitution, in which
the lay element counts for at least as much as the clerical.

* * * * *

Thus from being the last refuge of hunted tribesmen, a land swept
time after time by the tide of invasion, Wales has come to be
actively and amicably associated with England in her high destinies.
Everywhere Welshmen are participating to the uttermost in the wider
life of the Empire.  In all the professions, in literature, in the
arts, in trade, in the Civil Service, in the Army, in the Navy, and
in the Diplomatic Corps they are winning distinction for themselves.

The outlook in Wales is full of promise.  The old period of
antagonism between Welshmen and Englishmen seems, happily, to have
come to an end.  The democracy has won the day; and all obstacles in
the way of the {245} development of what genius lies hidden in the
people have been removed.  Home Rule is sometimes spoken of, but it
is generally by theorists and doctrinaire pedants.  Most patriotic
Welshmen would be content with a slightly increased measure of local
autonomy.  The vast majority of the nation are satisfied that
equality of opportunity for all the inhabitants of the British Isles,
irrespective of race, has been achieved, and that in literature, in
art, in music, in scholarship, in the professions, in politics, and
in commerce there is nothing to hinder a Welshman from winning any
distinction he may merit.  The discordant cry of the extreme
nationalist is occasionally heard, with its glorification of all that
is vulgar and unworthy of preservation in the Welsh tradition.  But
this wins little sympathy.  As a whole the people have seen a fairer
vision than that of an independent Wales: the vision of a
Commonwealth living a life of ordered prosperity; upholding and
illustrating the great principles of justice, equality, and freedom,
to secure which so many eyes have been dimmed with tears and so many
fields sodden with blood; a Commonwealth in which Wales, in virtue of
its splendid tradition of passionate idealism and of tireless
spiritual effort, shall enjoy a foremost place.




{246}

APPENDIX

ILLUSTRATIVE PASSAGES FROM WELSH LITERATURE

The following passages are intended to illustrate within short
compass the spirit of the Welsh classical prose writers.  For the
selection the author is indebted to Mr. John Lloyd's admirable
anthology _Llyfr Darllen ac Ysgrifennu_; but the translation into
English is his own.  The attempt to translate Welsh poetry is too
difficult to be essayed except by a man of peculiar gifts; and Wales
is still waiting for its Edward FitzGerald.

The first passage is from the _Mabinogion_, a twelfth-century
compilation containing a large number of ancient tales of love,
romance, and war.


"How long soever they may have been on the way, they came at last to
Dyfed, and went in quest of Arberth.  They kindled a fire, and began
to eat and to hunt, and in that manner spent a month.  They assembled
their dogs about them, and so remained a year.  Now one morning
Manawyddan and Pryderi arose to go out hunting, and got their dogs
ready to depart from the court.  {247} And some of the dogs behaved
in this fashion: they walked ahead, and reached a small bush close
by; and as soon as they had reached the bush they instantly fled
quickly back, their hair on end, and returned to their masters.  'Let
us approach the bush,' said Pryderi, 'that we may see what it
contains.'  They approached the bush, and when they had approached,
beheld a white tree boar rising out of it.  Then the dogs, encouraged
by the men, rushed upon it.  And the boar, for its part, left the
bush, and went some distance away from the men.  When the men were at
some distance it would bark at the dogs; but when the men drew near
it again fled, and ceased to bark.  And they followed the boar until
they beheld a great and noble fortress newly built, where before they
had never seen either stone or building.  And the boar ran swiftly to
the fortress, the dogs following it.  And when the boar and the dogs
had entered the fort they wondered at seeing a fortress where
previously they had seen no building.  And from the top of the throne
they gazed, and listened for the dogs.  But long as they waited they
heard not a sound of the dogs.  'My lord,' said Pryderi, 'I will go
to the fortress to enquire for the dogs.'  'Truly thou art {248}
ill-advised,' answered he, 'to go to this fort which thou hast never
before seen; and if thou wilt follow my advice go thou wilt not.  He
who hath laid a charm upon the land must have built this fortress
here.'  'Yet truly loth am I to lose my dogs,' answered Pryderi.  But
in spite of the counsel which he had received from Manawyddan,
Pryderi would go to the fortress.  When he came to it he saw nothing
within, neither man nor animal, neither boar nor dogs, house nor
courtyard.  But in the centre of the fortress he beheld a well of
marble, and by its side a golden vessel standing upon a marble slab,
and chains stretching upwards towards the sky, the ends of which he
could not see.  Great was his delight at the beauty of the gold, and
at the fine workmanship of the vessel.  And he came to the vessel and
laid hold of it.  And as he laid hold of the vessel his hands stuck
to it, and his feet to the slab upon which the vessel stood; and he
was bereft of speech, so that he could utter no word.  And thus he
remained.

Manawyddan waited for him till the close of the day.  And in the
evening, believing that he should receive no more tidings of Pryderi,
nor of the dogs, he returned to the court."

{249}

The next passage is from _Gweledigaethau y Bardd Cwsc_ (Visions of
the Sleeping Bard) of Ellis Wynne.

"On a fine afternoon of ripe and sultry summer, I betook me to the
summit of one of the mountains of Wales; and with me a telescope, to
help my failing sight to see things distant near at hand, and things
small large.  Through the clear air, and the quiet haze I could
discern, far across the Irish Sea, many a delightful sight.  At last,
after feeding my eyes upon every sort of delight around me until the
sun had almost reached his fortress in the west, I laid myself down
upon the grass, musing upon the superior beauty and comeliness of the
distant lands of whose kindly plains I had caught a glimpse; and
envying the happy lot of those who behold their full beauty and had
seen the course of the world.  And so, by much travail of my eyes,
and afterwards of my mind, I became weary, and in company with
weariness came my Master Sleep stealthily to bind me; and with his
leaden keys he locked the windows of my eyes securely, and also all
my other senses.  Yet was it useless for him to attempt to lock up
the Soul, which can live and travel without the body; for my spirit
escaped on wings of fancy out of the locked body."

{250}

The third extract is from Daniel Owen, greatest of Welsh novelists.

"The office in which the Old Soldier held his school was a long and
narrow building.  Around it was a hard and bent form; and connected
with it a desk which rested against the wall.  One of the first
things I noticed was that there was hardly a square inch of the
desk's surface upon which a picture, a figure, or a name had not been
carved.  At the far end of the schoolroom, close to the fire, was the
master's desk; and beneath it was a hole which, as I afterwards
learnt, was for the master to insert his wooden leg into when he sat
down.  On my first entrance into the school I saw a strange and novel
sight.  All the boys were present, some on top of the desk, some on
each other's backs playing horses and prancing round the school.  One
boy--a cripple with a crutch--was trying to mimic the master, sitting
at the desk, his crutch thrust through the hole, and calling vainly
for order.  The scene changed every minute; and everyone shouted for
all he was worth except one boy, who stood on top of the desk by the
window, dividing his attention between the play and the road by which
the master would approach.  I felt strangely at the time, and
believed that I {251} had come amongst a most wicked set of boys, and
that my mother, if only she knew what they were like, would never
allow me to come again.  On the other hand I thought it was the best
place for fun that I had ever seen.  But my predominant feeling at
the time was a kind of painful strangeness and shyness; for Wil Bryan
had left me by myself, and had joined eagerly in the games.  While I
was possessed by these feelings I saw the boy at the window put his
two fingers to his mouth and give a shrill whistle; and in a
twinkling every boy was in his place breathing quickly.  I knew
perfectly well that I should look foolish enough standing like a cold
monument all by myself by the door when the Soldier came in.  He
passed me without pretending to see me.  He looked angry and
disturbed; and I perceived at once that the watchman had not sounded
the warning sufficiently soon, and that the master had heard all the
deafening uproar.  He went immediately to his desk, whence he
produced a long and powerful cane.  I saw the boys bending in
readiness, while the Soldier went about the school thrashing cruelly
everybody without distinction.  I was the only boy who did not taste
the cane, and yet I was the only boy that wept, for I was greatly
frightened."




{252}

NOTE ON BOOKS

Until comparatively recently Welsh historical works were uncritical;
and although many of them contain much invaluable information, they
must be read with caution.  Welsh historical scholarship has,
however, made great strides recently, and now there are a few
excellent books available, more especially for the Middle Ages.  For
the later period the most valuable material is still scattered about
in old numbers of such publications as the _Cymmrodor, Transactions_
of the Cyminrodorion Society, and the Cambrian Archæological Society,
_Cymru Traethodydd_, _Y Geninen_, _Eisteddfod Transactions_, etc.;
and locked up in theses written for the post-graduate degrees of the
Welsh, and other, Universities.  A historian with ability to digest,
and above all ability to write, is badly needed to deal with this
immense volume of material.

The best general introduction is O. M. Edwards's _Wales_, in the
"Story of the Nations" Series.  It is delightfully written, and is
always interesting and suggestive.  Another good book is
Rhŷs and Brynmor Jones's _The Welsh People_.  Gilbert
Stone has written an interesting book, _Wales_, especially valuable
for the pre-Norman period.

For the Middle Ages the standard work is Lloyd's _History of Wales_,
in two volumes.  It is scholarly and accurate, but unfortunately only
takes us down to the Edwardian Conquest.  Haverfield's _Roman
Britain_ is useful.  Seebohm's _Tribal System in Wales_ adopts some
exploded theories, but is still essential.  Little's _Mediæval Wales_
is brilliant and suggestive.  Barbier's _Age of Owen Gwynedd_ is
interesting.  Morris's _Welsh Wars of Edward I_ is valuable for much
besides military affairs.  Hugh Williams's learned work on
_Christianity in Early Britain_ should be consulted.  Other books of
interest are Peake's _Bronze Age and the Celtic World_, and Lewis's
_Mediæval Boroughs of Snowdonia_.  Always brilliant, though not
always reliable, is Rhoscomyl's _Flame Bearers of Welsh History_.

Good biographies of mediæval Welshmen are few.  Henry Owen's _Gerald
the Welshman_ is good; also Bradley's _Owen Glyndwr_.  Tout's _Edward
I_ should be consulted, also Wade Evans's _St. David_.

For later times we begin with Llewelyn Williams's {253} _Making of
Modern Wales_.  It is scholarly, original, and well written; but in
parts should be read with great caution.  Bowen's _Statutes of Wales_
is invaluable.  Other works of value are Skeel, _Council of the Welsh
Marches_, J. H. Davies's _Introduction_ in his edition of the works
of Morgan Llwyd; Morrice's _Wales in the Seventeenth Century_; D. R.
Jones's _Y Deffroad Addysgawl; The Welsh University_ (College
Histories Series); Elvet Lewis's _Nonconformity in Wales_.  There are
some good biographies, notably: Pollard's _Henry VIII_; Pierce's
_John Penry_; David Jones's _Life and Times of Griffith Jones of
Llanddowror_; Ambrose Jones's _Griffith Jones_; Hughes's _Life of
Howel Harris_; Jenkins's _Thomas Charles of Bala_; Gwynn Jones's
_Cofiant Thomas Gee_ Owen Thomas's _Cofiant John Jones Talsarn_;
Williams's _Thomas Charles Edwards_; McCabe's _Robert Owen_; W. E.
Davies's _Sir Hugh Owen_.

Welsh history, like that of most countries, requires a study of
contemporary literature, both prose and poetry, for its true
understanding.  The following works will be found most useful:
Gildas; _The Mabinogion_; Geoffrey of Monmouth's _Histories_;
Theophilus Evans's _Drych y Prif Oesoedd_; Ellis Wynne's
_Gweledigaethau y Bardd Cwsc_; Vicar Pritchard's _Camvyll y Cymry_;
Morgan Llwyd's _Llyfr y Tri Aderyn_.  The letters of the brothers
Morris, and of Goronwy Owen are illuminating.  For social life the
novels of Daniel Owen are invaluable.  The numerous poets published
by O. M. Edwards in _Cyfres y Fil_, together with the Introduction
contained in the majority of them, are of the utmost importance.  Dr.
Edward's _Traethodau Llenyddol_ contains many interesting historical
essays.  Shakespeare's historical plays ought not to be neglected.

For Welsh literature and language the following books should be
consulted: Morrice's _Manual of Welsh Literature_; Robert Owen's _The
Eymry_; Griffith's _Llenyddiaeth Cymru_; Renan, _Poetry of the Celtic
Races_.

Almost every Welsh castle and monastery has its local historian.

English historians, as a rule, have dealt inadequately, and often
ignorantly, with Wales.  Bearing this in mind, the student would do
well to turn to the _Political History of England_, Green, Clarendon,
Gardiner, and Lecky.




{254}

INDEX

NDX Aberconway, 80, 83

Aberdovey, 75

Aberystwyth, 67, 229, 231

Act of Uniformity, 199

---- of Union, 133

---- the Reform, 233

---- for Propagation, 194

Age, Old Stone, 10

---- New Stone, 11-13

---- Bronze, 14

Angharad, 38

Arles, 41

Arthur, King, 47

---- Prince, 127, 129


Bangor, 56, 71, 74, 230-231

Bardd Cwsc, 240

Barlow, Bishop, 148

Beaufort, Margaret, 125

Belesme, Robert of, 65

Benedictines, 41, 104, 152

Bible, Welsh, 154-155, 223

Bifort, Llewelyn, 120

Black Death, 102-103

Bleddyn, 39

Blegwryd, 48

Bosworth, 126

Bow, Long, 102

Braose, Reginald, 76

Britain, 8, 9, 11, 14, 23, 34-35, 40

Brythons, 20, 32, 36


Cantrefs, the Four, 83, 87-88, 90, 92

Caratacus, 25, 26, 29

Cardiff, 67, 230, 231

Cardigan, 37, 69, 72

Carmarthen, 37, 132

Carnarvon, 29, 96, 97

Catholics, Welsh, 151-153

Ceiriog, 240

Celts, 12, 15-20

Charles, Thomas, 212, 222

Charter, Great, 75

---- Town, 96

Chartists, 234

Chester, 26, 36, 67, 70, 181, 186

Christianity, 33, 40-44

Church, Welsh, 42, 44, 80, 119, 244

Cistercians, 80, 105

College

---- Aberystwyth, 229, 231

---- Bangor, 230-231

---- Cardiff, 230-231

---- St. Gregory's, 152

---- Jesus, 219

---- Normal, 226

---- Rome, 151

---- Swansea, 231

---- Theological, 228

Corwen, 70, 122

Council of Princes, 75, 76, 79

Count of Saxon Shore, 35

Court, County, 96, 141

---- of Great Sessions, 137, 139-141

Cradock, Walter, 168, 193

Criccieth, 81, 96

Cromwell, Oliver, 187, 195, 220

---- Thomas, 148-149

Cunedda, 35, 76

Cymmrodorion, 230


Danes, 8, 37-38

David, Saint, 47, 149

Davies, John (Mallwyd), 155

Davydd Gam, 117

---- ap Gwilym, 240

---- ap Llewelyn, 79, 81-83

---- ap Sinion, 125

Deganwy, 36, 82

Deheubarth, 37, 63, 68

Deorham, 36

Dolgelley, 117, 118

Druids, 27

Dyfed, 37, 97


Edward I, 37, 83-100

---- II, 64, 67, 101

---- IV, 124, 130

Edwards, O.  M., 60, 95, 226, 240

---- Lewis, 228, 240

Eisteddfod, 72, 218

Elizabeth, Queen, 153

---- of York, 76, 126

Ellis, Tom, 243

Evans, Theophilus, 207


Feudalism, 49

Fitz Osbern, 67

Flemings, 67

France, 1, 13, 16, 103, 116, 119

French, 98, 119

Friars, 80, 105-106


Gaul, 16, 17, 20, 23

Gee, Thomas, 239

George, D. Lloyd, 199, 243

Giraldus Cambrensis, 56-60

Gladys, 76

Glyndwr, Owen, 109-123

Goidels, 15

Griffith ap Conan, 68

---- ap Llewelyn, 38, 39

---- ap Llewelyn Fawr, 79, 81, 82

---- ap Rees, 68, 69

Grosmont, 78

Gwent, 37

Gwenwynwyn, 73, 76

Gwledig, 35

Gwynedd, 37, 39, 49, 63, 68


Harlech, 96, 125, 186

Harold, 38, 39

Harris, Howel, 199, 201-211

Harrison, 194-195

Henry I, 65

---- II, 69, 70, 71

---- III, 77, 81, 82, 87, 89, 90

---- IV, 107, 114-115

---- V, 118, 121

---- VII, 126-131

---- VIII, 76-144, 199

Hereford, 67

Howel Dda, 38, 45, 48

Huw Llwyd, 191-193


Iberians, 13, 15

Islwyn, 240


Joan, 74

John, King, 74

Jones, Griffith, 201, 206, 221-222

---- John (Colonel), 172, 189

---- John (Leander), 152

Journalism, 237-239


Lake Dwellings, 12

Lancastrians, 124

Laud, Archbishop, 152, 167

Laws, 44, 45-55

Lee, Roland, 132

Llewelyn the Great, 72-80

---- ap Griffith, 83-94

---- ap Seisyll, 38

Llwyd, Morgan, 172, 190, 191, 194, 195-197

Lollards, 107

Ludlow, 129, 137


Macsen Wledig, 35

Maelgwn Gwynedd, 36

March, Earl of, 116, 121

Marches, 67, 75, 134, 135

---- Council of, 130, 136, 137-139

Methodists, 207, 211-213

Minerals, 14, 32, 235-236

Mona (Anglesey), 27, 70, 188

Monasteries, 41, 104, 105, 147

Montfort, Simon de, 89

Montgomery, Roger of, 67

---- Treaty of, 90, 91

Morgan, Bishop, 154

Morris, Dr. (Clynnog), 151

Mortimer, Edmund, 116

---- Ralph, 76, 83


Nonconformists, 165-168, 199, 213-217

Normans, 8, 62, 63, 65, 68, 69


Offa, 37

Owen, Goronwy, 233, 240

---- Gwynedd, 69-70

---- Goch, 83

---- Hugh, 226, 229

---- John (Clenenau), 188

---- of Wales, 103

Oxford, 114


Parliament, 101, 118, 136, 237

Peckham, Archbishop, 93

Penry, John, 159-162

Pope, 50, 80, 119

Powel Vavasour, 168, 195

Powys, 37, 63

Prayer Book, 154

Preaching, 160, 213-215

Pritchard, Vicar, 162-164

Prys, Edmund, 153, 155-159, 192

Puritanism, 165, 173, 194, 201


Rebecca Riots, 237

Rees, Lord, 57, 71-72

Reformation, 85, 145

Revolution, French, 232

---- Industrial, 209, 234-237

Rhodri Fawr, 37

Rhuddlan, Treaty of, 92

Rhys ap Thomas, 128

Richard, Henry, 243

Rowlands, Daniel, 206


Saints (Welsh), 44

Salesbury, William, 154

Schools, Circulating, 221-222

---- County, 226-227

Schools, Grammar, 219-220

---- Sunday, 217-218, 222-224

Shires, 37, 96, 101, 134

Shrewsbury, 66, 67, 89, 94, 117

Statute of Labourers, 102

---- of Staple, 102

---- of Wales, 96

Strathclyde, 36


Towns, 96

Tudor, Edmund, 125

---- Jasper, 125

---- Owen, 125

Tudors, 125

Turberville, Thomas, 98


War, Hundred Years, 102

---- Civil, 169-198

---- of Roses, 124-127, 143

Welsh Language, 22, 135-136, 220, 241

---- University, 119, 120, 220, 229-231

Whitby, 44

William I, 62, 64, 66

Williams, Lord Keeper, 174-177, 184

Williams, of Pantycelyn, 207 ENDX










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