The first Eisteddfod

A country that cannot hold itself together by force can still hold itself together by memory. The instrument of that holding is rarely a treaty or a wall. More often it is a gathering: a room, a date set a year in advance, a chair placed by a fire, and a rule that the best work in a known metre wins.

THE LORD OF DEHEUBARTH

Rhys ap Gruffydd is forty-four years old at Christmas 1176, and there is no native ruler in Wales his equal. He has held Dinefwr, the old caput of his line, since he was twenty-one. He has fought Henry II of England to a standstill and to a settlement, and the English king has confirmed him as Justiciar of South Wales four years before. The Brut y Tywysogion already names him yr Arglwydd Rhys, the Lord Rhys, as if the title were the only one he required. The country he rules, Deheubarth, is the south and west; the country he does not rule, Gwynedd in the north and Powys in the middle, is held by kinsmen and rivals who keep their own courts and their own bards. Wales in 1176 is three kingdoms and a hundred lordships. It has, for the moment, one acknowledged senior.

THE PROCLAMATION

A year and a day before Christmas, the heralds went out. Every bard and every musician of Wales was summoned to Cardigan, to the new stone castle Rhys has built above the Teifi. The summons was formal: a year and a day, the old bardic measure, the same notice a court would give for a case at law. There would be two chairs, one for poetry, one for music. There would be named prizes. The competition would be judged by the masters of each art, by metre and by hand. The Brut records the proclamation in a single line: gwledd arbennig, a special feast. Rhys has feasted his court before. He has not, before this, feasted Wales.

THE THIRD NIGHT

Cardigan Castle is full to the rafters. It is the third night. Rhys sits on a high stool by the fire in the great hall, in a russet mantle and a torc of yellow gold, with his eldest son Gruffydd at his right hand and his second son Maelgwn at his left. The hall is filled with bards: bards of Gwynedd in their thick wool, bards of Powys with their ash-handle harps, bards of his own Deheubarth, the men of his country, in the deep blue cloak of the southern poetic order. There are perhaps a hundred and twenty of them. There are nearly the same number of musicians. The fire is built up of oak; the smoke goes out by the louvre. Outside, the Teifi runs black under a sky of thin cloud. The wind is from the west and smells of salt off the bay.

A young bard of Gwynedd is on his feet, delivering an awdl in strict-metre cynghanedd on the naming of the rivers of Snowdonia. The hall listens the way only a hall of bards listens: not for the story, which they know, but for the consonantal chime under the line, the answering of stress to stress across the caesura, the cold mathematics of the metre done at speed in front of witnesses.

A YEAR AND A DAY

The man is twenty-three, Rhys notes, and has not yet lost his teeth. The form he is using is the third cynghanedd, which his master Cynddelw Brydydd Mawr would not have set him to until last winter; he is delivering it without a stumble. He will take the chair for poetry. Rhys lets the knowledge settle in him without moving his face. He looks down the hall to where the harper of Carmarthen is sitting with his instrument across his knees, and he knows already that the chair for music will go south. The country will see itself reflected in the result: one chair north, one chair south, the gift divided. The bards of Powys, who will take neither chair this year, will go home with the knowledge that the gathering happened, that they were called, that they came. That, too, is part of the work.

He has proclaimed this a year and a day in advance. The bards have come. They have come from every kingdom, from courts that do not write to each other, across borders that the kings of those courts cross only with armies. There has not been a gathering like this in living memory; there may not have been one ever. For these four days at Cardigan, Wales is not a fragment of countries. It is, audibly, in one room, a single bardic country. If he makes this a regular thing, every seven years say, the bardic order will hold the country together when the kings cannot. The bards remember names the kings forget. The bards travel between courts that do not write to each other. The bards are the country's nerve. This is a thing he is building. Tonight is the first night of it.

THE CHAIRS AWARDED

The young bard of Gwynedd finishes his awdl. The hall is quiet for the count of three before it claps; a hall of bards does not clap before it has finished counting the metre. Rhys nods to his master of ceremonies. The man of Gwynedd is called forward and seated in the chair for poetry. The harper of Carmarthen is called forward and seated in the chair for music. The named prizes are given. Rhys's clerk, at a board beside the dais, writes the result down in the brown ink of a Welsh monastic hand. The parchment will be copied, in time, into Brut y Tywysogion, the Chronicle of the Princes, where the entry for 1176 still stands: a special feast at Cardigan, two chairs, two victors, one north and one south.

AFTER THE FIRE GOES DOWN

The fire is let go down. The bards sleep in the hall, in their cloaks, along the walls. The harper of Carmarthen sleeps with his instrument across his chest. The young man of Gwynedd does not sleep at all; he sits up in his chair until the grey of the morning, the chair he has won, the first chair, and the hall keeps the smell of oak smoke and wet wool and the breath of two hundred and fifty men. Rhys goes up to his chamber and stands at the slit window above the Teifi for a while before he sleeps. He is thinking, already, of the next gathering, and the one after that. Eight hundred and fifty years from this night, in a field outside a town he has never heard of, in a language he would recognise as his own, the chair will still be awarded for an awdl in strict-metre cynghanedd, and the rule will still be that if no entry meets the bar the chair is withheld and draped in black, the withholding itself a tradition with a name: atalwyd. He does not know any of this. He goes to bed.

THE LONG SURVIVAL

Rhys ap Gruffydd died in 1197 and was buried at St Davids, where his effigy lies still. Deheubarth did not survive his sons; the kingdom broke between Gruffydd and Maelgwn, and within a century the native Welsh polity itself was gone, finished at Cilmeri in 1282 with the killing of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, last prince of Wales. What Rhys placed in his hall at Cardigan outlasted the kingdom by which he placed it there. The Eisteddfod survived in noble households after him, then through the Tudor period in the regulated bardic gatherings at Caerwys, then in revived national form from 1789 under the patronage of the London Welsh societies. The National Eisteddfod has met every summer since 1861, almost without interruption. The chair is still the chair. The metre is still cynghanedd. The ceremony is in Welsh from start to finish, every August, in a different town. Few European cultural institutions can trace an unbroken thread over eight hundred and fifty years through a single language. This one can; and the thread runs back, by the witness of the Brut, to one stone hall above the Teifi at Christmas 1176.

A king holds his country by holding land. A bard holds his country by holding a metre. The harder of those two holds, in the long run, is the metre, because land changes hands and the metre does not. What Rhys understood at Cardigan, and what his clerk wrote down in the brown ink of the Brut, is the oldest political instrument the Welsh have kept: a chair by a fire, a year and a day's notice, and a rule that the best work in a known form wins. The chair is still there. Every August it is carried into a field in Wales and set down, and the country gathers around it to see whether, this year, it will be filled.