Writing a Small Nation's Past by Neil Evans Huw Pryce

Author:Neil Evans, Huw Pryce [Neil Evans, Huw Pryce]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472406606
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing Ltd
Published: 2014-01-28T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

Venturing into the ‘Jungle’: Late Medieval Wales in the Edwardian Age

Ralph A. Griffiths

David Powel’s Historie of Cambria and the Chronicles of Raphael Holinshed were published midway through Elizabeth I’s reign. They set the tone and treatment of Wales’s later medieval history for the next 300 years. Their narratives following the death of Llywelyn the Last in 1282 are episodic and sparse, scarcely more than a tally of intermittent insurrections linked by prophecy, until the creation of a conjoined realm of England and Wales in Henry VIII’s reign made a separate Welsh narrative thereafter seem inappropriate.1 In the later nineteenth century, Welsh cultural and political assertiveness demanded a more coherent explanation of the late medieval past. To produce one was not easy, partly because of the nature of chronicle-writing in England in the fourteenth, fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and the virtual absence of such writings in contemporary Wales, and partly because the growth of official and antiquarian publishing in Britain in the nineteenth century concentrated on earlier medieval history.

Moreover, those who sought a new framework were faced not only with the challenge of producing a convincing interpretation of the two and a half centuries between the late thirteenth and the mid-sixteenth centuries, but also with ‘blazing a track … through jungle’, to use H.W.C. Davis’s vivid phrase penned from the comfort of an Anglo-Norman historian’s study stocked with recent publications on the earlier Middle Ages.2 It was a ‘jungle’ of archives and records which were not easily accessible, still less understood. And to nineteenth-century Britons, living in an imperial age, jungles were landscapes that might stimulate the imagination and give rise to further myths and misunderstandings. So it proved as efforts began to be made to cut paths through the ‘jungle’.

The generation from the 1880s to the 1920s applied both political and cultural ambition, and personal and scholarly commitment, to identifying the means by which these puzzling centuries could be more plausibly understood. Several strands in this complex endeavour stand out, and the achievements were notable, albeit with tensions and disappointments along the way. The disappointments – contrasted with the beacon that is J.E. Lloyd’s History of Wales on earlier centuries, first published in 1911 – stemmed partly from the magnitude of the task and the differing approaches taken, and partly from the severe disruption caused by the First World War. Identifying the most significant strands should take account of the enlightened, voluntarist tradition of antiquarian scholarship as well as more recent official and public sponsorship, and also of intellectual contacts – even comradeship – in the emerging professional environment of historical research in British universities that put Wales and its history close to its heart.3

First and foremost was the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, which had been revived in 1873. By the 1890s this was an energetic if arcane fellowship of London-based lawyers, politicians, intellectuals and civil servants – with hardly a woman among them – who were fascinated by, inter alia, what they understood to be the progress of Welsh history towards Henry VIII’s union with England and all that flowed from that.

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