A Short History of Wales E-Book

Owen Edwards

• Herausgeber: Enhanced Media Publishing
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

The history of Wales begins with the arrival of human beings in the region thousands of years ago. In  A Short History of Wales Owen Edwards takes the reader on a concise tour of this fascinating nation’s past, from the time Neanderthals lived in what was known as Cymru, at least 230,000 years ago, to the events and forces that shaped the modern state of Wales.

Leseprobe

A Short History of Wales

By Owen Edwards

Table of Contents

Title Page

A Short History of Wales

CHAPTER I | WALES

CHAPTER II | THE WANDERING NATIONS

CHAPTER III | ROME

CHAPTER IV | THE NAME OF CHRIST

CHAPTER V | THE WELSH KINGS

CHAPTER VI | THE LAWS OF HOWEL

CHAPTER VII | THE NORMANS

CHAPTER VIII | GRIFFITH AP CONAN AND GRIFFITH AP REES

CHAPTER IX | OWEN GWYNEDD AND THE LORD REES

CHAPTER X | LLYWELYN THE GREAT

CHAPTER XI | THE LAST LLYWELYN

CHAPTER XII | CONQUERED WALES

CHAPTER XIII | CASTLE AND LONG-BOW

CHAPTER XIV | THE RISE OF THE PEASANT

CHAPTER XV | OWEN GLENDOWER

CHAPTER XVI | THE WARS OF THE ROSES

CHAPTER XVII | TUDOR ORDER

CHAPTER XVIII | THE REFORMATION

CHAPTER XIX | THE CIVIL WAR

CHAPTER XX | THE GREAT REVOLUTION

CHAPTER XXI | HOWEL HARRIS

CHAPTER XXII | THE REFORM ACTS

CHAPTER XXIII | EDUCATION

CHAPTER XXIV | LOCAL GOVERNMENT

CHAPTER XXV | THE WALES OF TODAY

An outline of Welsh history

FOOTNOTES

Further Reading: More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son

A Short History of Wales by Owen Edwards. First published in 1906. This edition published 2017 by Enhanced Media. All rights reserved.

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ISBN:  978-1-387-01365-4.

CHAPTER I

WALES

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Wales is a row of hills, rising between the Irish Sea on the west and the English plains on the east. If you come from the west along the sea, or if you cross the Severn or the Dee from the east, you will see that Wales is a country all by itself. It rises grandly and proudly. If you are a stranger, you will think of it as “Wales”—a strange country; if you are Welsh, you will think of it as “Cymru”—a land of brothers.

The geologist will tell you how Wales was made; the geographer will tell you what it is like now; the historian will tell you what its people have done and what they are. All three will tell you that it is a very interesting country.

The rocks of Wales are older and harder than the rocks of the plains; and as you travel from the south to the north, the older and harder they become. The highest mountains of Wales, and some of its hills, have crests of the very oldest and hardest rock—granite, porphyry, and basalt; and these rocks are given their form by fire. But the greater part of the country is made of rocks formed by water—still the oldest of their kind. In the north-west, centre, and west—about two-thirds of the whole country,—the rocks are chiefly slate and shale; in the south-east they are chiefly old red sandstone; in the north-east, but chiefly in the south, they are limestone and coal.

Its rocks give Wales its famous scenery—its rugged peaks, its romantic glens, its rushing rivers. They are also its chief wealth—granite, slate, limestone, coal; and lodes of still more precious metals—iron, lead, silver, and gold—run through them.

The highest mountain in Wales is Snowdon, which is 3,570 feet above the level of the sea. For every 300 feet we go up, the temperature becomes one degree cooler. At about 1,000 feet it becomes too cold for wheat; at about 1,500 it becomes too cold for corn; at about 2,000 it is too cold for cattle; mountain ponies graze still higher; the bleak upper slopes are left to the small and valuable Welsh sheep.

There are three belts of soil around the hills—arable, pasture, and sheep-run—one above the other. The arable land forms about a third of the country; it lies along the sea border, on the slopes above the Dee and the Severn, and in the deep valleys of the rivers which pierce far inland,—the Severn, Wye, Usk, Towy, Teivy, Dovey, Conway, and Clwyd. The pasture land, the land of small mountain farms, forms the middle third; it is a land of tiny valleys and small plains, ever fostered by the warm, moist west wind. Above it, the remaining third is stormy sheep-run, wide green slopes and wild moors, steep glens and rocky heights.

From north-west to south-east the line of high hills runs. In the north-west corner, Snowdon towers among a number of heights over 3,000 feet. At its feet, to the north-west, the isle of Anglesey lies. The peninsula of Lleyn, with a central ridge of rock, and slopes of pasture lands, runs to the south-west. To the east, beyond the Conway, lie the Hiraethog mountains, with lower heights and wider reaches; further east again, over the Clwyd, are the still lower hills of Flint.

To the south, 30 miles as the crow flies, over the slate country, the Berwyns are seen clearly. From a peak among these—Cader Vronwen (2,573 feet), or the Aran (2,970 feet), or Cader Idris (2,929 feet)—we look east and south, over the hilly slopes of the upper Severn country.

Another 30 miles to the south rises green Plinlimmon (2,469 feet); from it we see the high moorlands of central Wales, sloping to Cardigan Bay on the west and to the valley of the Severn, now a lordly English river, on the east.

Forty miles south the Black Mountain (2,630 feet) rises beyond the Wye, and the Brecon Beacons (2,910 feet) beyond the Usk. West of these the hills fade away into the broad peninsula of Dyved. Southwards we look over hills of coal and iron to the pleasant sea-fringed plain of Gwent.

On the north and the west the sea is shallow; in some places it is under 10 fathoms for 10 miles from the shore, and under 20 fathoms for 20 miles. Tales of drowned lands are told—of the sands of Lavan, of the feast of drunken Seithenyn, and of the bells of Aberdovey. But the sea is a kind neighbour. Its soft, warm winds bathe the hills with life; and the great sweep of the big Atlantic waves into the river mouths help our commerce. Holyhead, Milford Haven, Swansea, Newport, Barry, and Cardiff—now one of the chief ports of the world—can welcome the largest vessels afloat. The herring is plentiful on the west coast, and trout and salmon in the rivers.

CHAPTER II

THE WANDERING NATIONS

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By land and by sea, race after race has come to make the hills of Wales its home. One race would be short, with dark eyes and black hair; another would be tall, with blue eyes and fair hair. They came from different countries and along different paths, but each race brought some good with it. One brought skill in taming animals, until it had at last tamed even the pig and the bee; another brought iron tools to take the place of stone ones. Another brought the energy of the chase and war, and another a delight in sailing a ship or in building a fortress.

One thing they had in common—they wandered, and they wandered to the west. From the cold wastes and the dark forests of the north and east, they were ever pushing west to more sunny lands. As far back as we can see, the great migration of nations to the west was going on. The islands of Britain were the furthest point they could reach; for beyond it, at that time, no man had dared to sail into the unknown expanse of the ocean of the west. In the islands of Britain, the mountains of Wales were among the most difficult to win, and it was only the bravest and the hardiest that could make their home among them.

The first races that came were short and dark. They came in tribes. They had tribal marks, the picture of an animal as a rule; and they had a strange fancy that this animal was their ancestor. It may be that the local nicknames which are still remembered—such as “the pigs of Anglesey,” “the dogs of Denbigh,” “the cats of Ruthin,” “the crows of Harlech,” “the gadflies of Mawddwy”—were the proud tribe titles of these early people. Their weapons and tools were polished stone; their hammers and hatchets and adzes, their lance heads and their arrow tips, were of the hardest igneous rock—chipped and ground with patient labour.

The people who come first have the best chance of staying, if only they are willing to learn; hardy plants will soon take the place of tender plants if left alone. The short dark people are still the main part, not only of the Welsh, but of the British people. It is true that their language has disappeared, except a few place-names. But languages are far more fleeting than races. The loss of its language does not show that a race is dead; it only shows that it is very anxious to change and learn. Some languages easily give place to others, and we say that the people who speak these languages are good linguists, like Danes and Slavs. Other languages persist, those who speak them are unwilling to speak any new language, and this is the reason why Spanish and English are so widespread.

After the short dark race came a tall fair-haired people. They came in families as well as in tribes. They had iron weapons and tools, and the short dark people could not keep them at bay with their bone-tipped spears and flint-headed arrows. We know nothing about the struggle between them. But it may be that the fairy stories we were told when children come from those far-off times. If a fairy maiden came from lake or mound to live among men, she vanished at once if touched with iron. Is this, learned men have asked, a dim memory of the victory of iron over stone?

The name given to the short dark man is usually Iberian; the name given to the tall fair man who followed him is Celt. The two learnt to live together in the same country. The conqueror probably looked upon himself at first as the master of the conquered, then as simply belonging to a superior race, but gradually the distinction vanished. The language remained the language of the Celt; it is called an Aryan language, a language as noble among languages as the Aran is among its hills. It is still spoken in Wales, in Brittany, in Ireland, in the Highlands of Scotland, and in the Isle of Man. It was also spoken in Cornwall till the eighteenth century; and Yorkshire dalesmen still count their sheep in Welsh. English is another Aryan tongue.

The more mixed a nation is, the more rich its life and the greater its future. Purity of blood is not a thing to boast of, and no great and progressive nation comes from one breed of men. Some races have more imagination than others, or a finer feeling for beauty; others have more energy and practical wisdom. The best nations have both; and they have both, probably, because many races have been blended in their making. There is hardly a parish in Wales in which there are not different types of faces and different kinds of character.

The wandering of nations has never really stopped. The Celt was followed by his cousins—the Angle and the Saxon. These, again, were followed by races still more closely related to them—the Normans and the Danes and the Flemings. They have all left their mark on Wales and on the Welsh character.

The migration is still going on. Trace the history of an upland Welsh parish, and you will find that, in a surprisingly short time, the old families, high and low, have given place to newcomers. Look into the trains which carry emigrants from Hull or London to Liverpool on their way west—they have the blue eyes and yellow hair of those who came two thousand years ago. But this country is no longer their goal, the great continent of America has been discovered beyond. Fits of longing for wandering come over the Welsh periodically, as they came over the Danes—caused by scarcity of food and density of population, or by a sense of oppression and a yearning for freedom. An empty stomach sometimes, and sometimes a fiery imagination, sent a crowd of adventurers to new lands. And it is thus that every living nation is ever renewing its youth.

CHAPTER III

ROME

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It is not a spirit of adventure and daring alone that makes a nation. Rome rose to say that it must have the spirit of order and law too. It rose in the path of the nations; it built the walls of its empire, guarded by the camps of its legions, right across it. For four hundred years the wandering of nations ceased; the nations stopped—and they began to till the ground, to live in cities, to form states. The hush of this peace did not last, but the memory of it remained in the life of every nation that felt it. Unity and law tempered freedom and change.

The name of Rome was made known, and made terrible, through Wales by a great battle fought on the eastern slopes of the Berwyn. The Romans had conquered the lands beyond the Severn, and had placed themselves firmly near the banks of that river at Glevum and Uriconium. Glevum is our Gloucester, and its streets are still as the Roman architect planned them. Uriconium is the burnt and buried city beyond Shrewsbury; the skulls found in it, and its implements of industry, and the toys of its children, you can see in the Shrewsbury Museum.

The British leader in the great battle was Caratacus, the general who had fought the Romans step by step until he had come to the borders of Wales, to summon the warlike Silures to save their country. We do not know the site of the great battle, though the Roman historian Tacitus gives a graphic description of it. The Britons were on a hill side sloping down to a river, and the Romans could only attack them in front. The enemy waded the river, however, and scaled the wall on its further bank; and in the fierce lance and sword fight the host of Caratacus lost the day. He fled, but was afterwards handed over to the Romans, and taken to Rome, to grace the triumphal procession of the victors.

The battle only roused the Silures to a more fierce resistance, and it cost the Romans many lives, and it took them many years, to break their power. The strangest sight that met the invaders was in Anglesey, after they had crossed the Menai on horses or on rafts. The druids tried to terrify them by the rites of their religion. The dark groves, the women dressed in black and carrying flaming torches, the aged priests—the sight paralysed the Roman soldiers, but [...]