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
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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}