Wales

Powell

Around the year 945 the king of Deheubarth and most of Wales, Hywel ap Cadell, called Hywel Dda or Hywel the Good, summoned six lawful men of from each commote in Wales to a council at the white house on the river Taf at Whitland in Carmarthenshire. They sat for forty days and forty nights, on oath. What they produced was the first written codification of the customary law of the Welsh: a single redacted body of law that would govern Wales for the next four centuries, until Edward I imposed English common law in 1284. The Law of Hywel was Wales's first national document. It is also one of the most humane bodies of medieval law to survive anywhere in Europe.

Rees

At Christmas 1176, Rhys ap Gruffydd, the Lord Rhys, king of Deheubarth and the most consequential native ruler of twelfth-century Wales, hosted a competitive gathering of bards and musicians from every part of Wales at his hall in Cardigan Castle. The invitation had gone out a year and a day in advance, by formal proclamation. There were two chairs to be won, one for poetry, one for music, with prizes named. The competition has been remembered ever since as the first Eisteddfod. Eight hundred and fifty years later it is still meeting every summer in a different town in Wales, in the same competitive form, under the same kind of chair, and judged by the same metrical rules.

House of Aberffraw

On the eleventh of December 1282, in a wood near the town of Builth Wells in mid-Wales, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, last native Prince of Wales, was killed in a chance encounter with an English man-at-arms who did not recognise him until he had taken his head off. Llywelyn had ridden south from his Gwynedd stronghold with a escort to receive the homage of the Marcher gentry of Builth, who had sent word they would defect to his cause. He never reached them. Welsh political independence, which had survived seven hundred years of pressure from the Saxons and the Normans and the Plantagenets, ended in the wood at Cilmeri inside an hour. The country has not been native-held since.

Glyndŵr

In the middle of June 1401, on the eastern flank of Plynlimon (Pumlumon) in the mid-Wales uplands, about ten miles east of the village of Machynlleth, Owain Glyndŵr, then forty-two years old, with a Welsh force of about a hundred and twenty mounted-and-foot men of the northern Powys-and-Gwynedd cantrefs, ambushed and broke a Flemish-English military expedition of about a thousand five hundred men under the Marcher captain Sir Edward Tudor (a distant Welsh cousin of Glyndŵr's by the Tudor-Anglesey line). The Hyddgen ambush, fought on a high marsh-pasture between the Hyddgen Brook and the source of the Wye, was the first major military victory of the Glyndŵr rebellion since the Sycharth proclamation of September 1400, and is, by every careful judgment of Welsh-medieval historiography (R. R. Davies, Gwyn A. Williams), the tactical engagement that converted the Glyndŵr rebellion from a localised Powys boundary-dispute into a national Welsh military movement. Within twelve months of Hyddgen, the Glyndŵr rebellion controlled most of Wales west of Offa's Dyke.

Glyndŵr

By the spring of 1406 Owain Glyndŵr had been Prince of Wales in fact for six years. He had held parliaments at Machynlleth in 1404 and Harlech in 1405, with elected representatives from every commote of Wales. He had a French alliance with Charles VI sealed by treaty and reinforced the previous summer by a French expeditionary force that had landed at Milford Haven. From the village of Pennal near Machynlleth on the thirty-first of March 1406, Glyndŵr dictated to his clerk a letter to the king of France. It set out a complete programme for an independent Welsh state: two universities, a Welsh-speaking church, an archdiocese at St Davids, a sovereign Welsh polity. The letter survives in Paris. It is the most coherent vision of Welsh sovereignty ever written, and it is what the country would not have for another five hundred years.

Vaughan

On the twenty-sixth of July 1469, in the open country at Edgecote Moor in Northamptonshire, six miles north of Banbury, the Yorkist army of King Edward IV under his Welsh marcher captains William Herbert (Earl of Pembroke) and Sir Roger Vaughan of Tretower met the rebel Lancastrian-Neville force of Robin of Redesdale (a captain of Warwick the Kingmaker, who was for these months in revolt against his cousin the king). The Welsh-speaking marcher army, about ten thousand strong, was caught in the early morning by a flank attack from the Earl of Warwick's lieutenant Sir Geoffrey Gate, broke after the death of Pembroke, and was destroyed in detail through the morning. About two thousand Welshmen, principally of the Herbert and Vaughan affinities, were killed on the field. Roger Vaughan of Tretower was killed in the press. William Herbert and his brother Sir Richard Herbert were taken alive and beheaded the next day at Northampton on Warwick's order. The Welsh-language elegy Marwnad William Herbert by Guto'r Glyn, written within the year, called Edgecote the day Wales was widowed. The political consequence was the temporary collapse of Edward IV's regime, the brief restoration of Henry VI, and the Lancastrian return of 1470–71. The military consequence in Wales itself was the elimination of the generation of Herbert and Vaughan landed leadership in a single morning.

House of Tudor

Henry Tudor was a Welsh-born exile of the Lancastrian line, raised in Brittany on a French pension, the holder of a tenuous claim to the English throne through his mother Margaret Beaufort. By the summer of 1485 Richard III's two-year reign was visibly thinning at the top: the boy princes were dead in the Tower, the great Yorkist magnates were drifting. On the seventh of August 1485 Henry landed at Mill Bay near Dale in Pembrokeshire with two thousand French and Welsh exiles. He marched up through Wales under the red dragon standard of Cadwaladr, picking up men. On the twenty-second of August he met Richard on the field at Bosworth in Leicestershire. Within four hours of first light he was crowned King of England on a low rise above the field with a battle-circlet taken from his enemy's helmet.

House of Tudor

On the third of November 1534, in the House of Lords at the Palace of Westminster, the Act of Supremacy passed its third reading and received Royal Assent the same day. The fourteen-clause Act, drafted by Thomas Cromwell on the direct political commission of Henry VIII (the second Tudor monarch, then forty-three years old, in his twenty-sixth year on the throne), declared Henry to be the only Supreme Head in Earth of the Church of England, dissolved the jurisdictional connection between the English Church and the Roman See that had stood since the Augustine mission of 597 (nine hundred and thirty-seven years), and gave the Crown the direct legal authority over the doctrine, the ecclesiastical discipline, and the monastic properties of the English Church. The Act was the political-legal end-point of the six-year king's-divorce-case of Henry from Catherine of Aragon (1528–34); the 1531 Convocation Submission of the Clergy; the 1532 Submission of the Clergy Act; the 1533 Act in Restraint of Appeals; and the 1534 Act of Succession. The political-religious consequence ran through the Tudor century: the Dissolution of the Monasteries 1536–41 (the largest single transfer of land-ownership in English history before the 1845 Irish-Land-Act-and-Famine settlements); the execution of Sir Thomas More (1535) and Bishop John Fisher (1535); the Pilgrimage of Grace 1536; the 1547 Edwardian Reformation; the 1553–58 Marian Counter-Reformation; the 1559 Elizabethan Settlement. The break with Rome is, by every careful judgment of the Reformation historians (G. R. Elton, Diarmaid MacCulloch, Eamon Duffy), the foundational political-religious event of the modern English state.

Morgan

In 1567 William Salesbury and Bishop Richard Davies had published a Welsh New Testament that was largely unreadable; the Welsh was over-Latinised, the spelling inconsistent. Wales needed a complete, idiomatic Bible in its own tongue or it would lose the language inside two generations. The man who delivered it was William Morgan, the rector of Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant, a village on the Welsh side of the Shropshire border. He worked at the translation through ten winters in the parsonage. In 1587 he took the manuscript to London and stayed at Christopher Barker's press for over a year, correcting every sheet himself. The book that came off the press in September 1588 saved the Welsh language. Cornish, which had no Bible, has six hundred speakers today. Welsh has nine hundred thousand.

Pritchard

From about 1614 to his death in 1644, the Reverend Rhys Prichard, vicar of Llandovery in the eastern marches of Carmarthenshire, wrote in his spare time a long sequence of metrical Welsh verses, simple in form, organised in stanzas of four lines, that were intended to be memorised and sung by his parishioners as a way of fixing Christian teaching in the heads of an illiterate population. He never published them in his own lifetime. After his death, the verses were collected by his son and friends and printed at London in 1659 as Cannwyll y Cymry, the Welsh-Man's Candle. By the reckoning of the Welsh historians of print, the Cannwyll was, after the Welsh Bible of 1588 itself, the most widely owned and most reprinted Welsh-language book of the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; over forty editions were printed before 1850. By the tradition of the chapel-Welsh culture of the eighteenth century, Yr Hen Ficer (the Old Vicar) was the household name for Prichard, and his verses were sung at hearths in every parish of South and central Wales for two hundred years.

House of Herbert

On the twentieth of February 1633, on his deathbed at the rectory of Bemerton in Wiltshire, George Herbert, forty years old, the rector of the small parish for the past three years, formerly Public Orator of the University of Cambridge, formerly a Member of Parliament, sometime favourite of King James and the Earl of Pembroke (his cousin), gave his manuscript of devotional poetry to his friend Edmund Duncon and asked him to take it to Nicholas Ferrar at Little Gidding. Tell him that Mr Duncon shall deliver to him a little book, in which he may find a picture of the many spiritual conflicts that have passed betwixt God and my soul, before I could subject mine to the will of Jesus my Master, in whose service I have now found perfect freedom; desire him to read it; and then, if he can think it may turn to the advantage of any dejected poor soul, let it be made public; if not, let him burn it; for I and it are less than the least of God's mercies. Ferrar received the manuscript four days after Herbert's death on the third of March. He read it, in his own retreat at Little Gidding, and decided to publish. The Temple was printed by Buck and Daniel at Cambridge in autumn 1633. It went through eleven editions in the next forty years and is, by the careful judgment of every Anglican literary historian, the foundational text of Anglican devotional poetry.

Williams

Roger Williams was born in London in 1603, the son of a merchant tailor of Welsh paternal extraction. He was educated at Charterhouse and Pembroke College, Cambridge, took orders, and emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1631 with his wife Mary. Within four years he had been twice charged before the Boston General Court for the radical doctrines that the magistrate had no power over conscience and that the King of England had no title to give away land that belonged to the native peoples. He was sentenced to deportation in October 1635 and ordered held in custody at Salem until the next ship in the spring. On the night of the fifteenth of January 1636, in deep snow, in fourteen weeks of an unusually severe winter, he walked out of his house ahead of the marshal who was coming to take him into custody, and into the woods south of Salem. He spent fourteen weeks of that winter under the hospitality of Massasoit and the Wampanoag and of Canonicus and the Narragansett. In June he founded a settlement at the head of Narragansett Bay, named it Providence in thanks for the deliverance, and bound it to the principle that civil authority extended to civil things only and that no person should be coerced in religion. Rhode Island was the first political community in the English-speaking world built on that principle.