Writing Welsh History: From the Early Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century by Huw Pryce;

Author:Huw Pryce; [Pryce, Huw]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192692320
Publisher: OxfordUP
Published: 2022-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

Welsh History Writing, c.1820–c.1840

Printed accounts of the history of Wales produced in the 1820s and 1830s varied both in their content and in the manner of their publication. Histories of England continued to provide limited coverage. For example, Sir James Mackintosh supplied a summary of events in Wales since the late ninth century by way of introduction to his account of the Edwardian conquest, which he maintained had extinguished Welsh nationality; he also observed that the history of the Welsh ‘has not yet been extricated from fable’ and that the ‘Chronicle of Caradoc of Llanarvon [sic]’ translated in David Powel’s Historie of Cambria had, unlike ‘the Saxon Chronicle and Irish Annals’, lacked ‘industrious and critical editors’.24 Editorial work was undertaken, however, by the British government’s Record Commission, which resulted in the publication of sources relating to Welsh history, including the revised edition of Dugdale’s Monasticon Anglicanum (1817–30), the Record of Caernarvon (1838), and Ancient Laws and Institutes of Wales (1841), an edition of the medieval Welsh lawbooks by Aneurin Owen, son of William Owen Pughe.25

Historical works in Welsh were generally published as commercial ventures, without subscriptions. Two notable examples appeared in 1822 from the press of John Jones of Trefriw and Llanrwst, who had brought out Robert Jones’s account of Methodism two years earlier.26 One was a reissue of Theophilus Evans’s Drych y Prif Oesoedd (‘Mirror of the Primitive Ages’), the other a book completed in 1804 by the quarry-manager and antiquary William Williams (1738–1817) of Llandygái that was explicitly described as a continuation of Evans, a notion reflected in its title: Prydnawngwaith y Cymry (‘The Noonday of the Welsh’).27 Priced 2s. 6d., Williams’s work drew on previous accounts of the medieval Welsh kings and princes by Wynne and Warrington as well as quite possibly a text of Brut y Tywysogyon (‘The Chronicle of the Princes’) in order to provide ‘the common people of Wales’ with a concise history of their nation in Welsh, thereby fulfilling a need identified by the Baptist historian Joshua Thomas over four decades earlier.28 The work’s coverage followed the conventional parameters established by earlier English-language histories of Wales, being mainly devoted to the period down to the Edwardian conquest with only a brief narrative of subsequent events including the union with England, which, like Theophilus Evans, Williams welcomed while simultaneously indulging in anti-English rhetoric.29 Another author who catered for the popular interest in the history of Wales was William Owen (Sefnyn; 1785–1864), a sawyer who had served as a marine in the Napoleonic Wars and was, unusually among Welsh writers of this period, a Roman Catholic, whose numerous and highly uncritical historical works, mostly in Welsh, included a prize-winning essay on the massacre of the Welsh bards submitted to the Caernarfon eisteddfod in 1824 and a pamphlet on Owain Glyndŵr.30

The first English translation of Theophilus Evans’s ‘Mirror’ was published in Pennsylvania in 1834 with a preface commending the work’s appeal to descendants of the Welsh who had fled oppression in Britain for the liberty of the United States.

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