Wales: England's Colony E-Book

Martin Johnes

• Herausgeber: Parthian Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

The Conquest, Assimilation, and Re-birth of a NationFROM THE VERY BEGINNINGS OF WALES, ITS PEOPLE HAVE DEFINED THEMSELVES AGAINST THEIR LARGE NEIGHBOUR. That relationship has defined both what it has meant to be Welsh and Wales as a nation. Yet the relationship has not always been a happy one and never one between equals. Wales was England's first colony and its conquest was by military force. It was later formally annexed, ending its separate legal status. Yet most of the Welsh reconciled themselves to their position and embraced the economic and individual opportunities being part of Britain and its Empire offered. Only in the later half of the twentieth century, in response to the decline of the Welsh language and traditional industry, did Welsh nationalism grow.This book tells the fascinating story of an uneasy and unequal relationship between two nations living side-by-side. It examines Wales' story from its creation to the present day, considering key moments such as medieval conquest, industrial exploitation, the Blue Books, and the flooding of Cwm Tryweryn.Wales: England's Colony? challenges us to reconsider Wales' historical relationship with England and its place in the world.

Leseprobe

Contents

About Martin Johnes

Title Page

Preface

Introduction

I Conquest

II Assimilation

III Re-creation

Afterword

Source of quotations

Select Bibliography

Index

Parthian Fiction 1

Parthian Fiction 2

Library of Wales

Modern Wales

Copyright

Martin Johnes grew up in Pembrokeshire, lives in Cardiff and works at Swansea University, where he is Professor of Modern History. His research explores questions of identity in sport, politics and popular culture and has included studies of football, archery, popular music, Christmas, disasters, and local government. His other books includeWales since 1939(2012) andA History of Sport in Wales(2005), and, with Iain McLean,Aberfan: Government and Disasters(2000). He can be found on Twitter @martinjohnes.

WALES:

ENGLAND’S COLONY?

The Conquest, Assimilation and Re-creation of Wales

Martin Johnes

Preface

There are many different ways to tell the history of Wales and its relationship with England. This book is my attempt.

The project’s roots lie with my own. I grew up in a small village in north Pembrokeshire, where I learned about being an outsider and an insider. My family were not local and we spoke English at home. At school and at play, I spoke Welsh. We went to church not chapel, althoughTop of the Pops was more my gospel. I had a teacher, Mr David Llewellyn, who encouraged my curiosity and instilled in me a sense that the local mattered, whether that be a slate quarry or a prehistoric monument. He also seemed in no doubt that Wales was worth fighting for. There was probably much to fight about, although politics was not much discussed in front of children. Margaret Thatcher was prime minister. Coal mines were something only visible on the news, although trucks of coal were seen on trips east during the long strike that I did not really understand. My mother worked for the National Health Service. My father was a self-employed engineer, working with farmers, dairies, small factories, and the oil refineries in the south. Swansea City were briefly in the first division, although I rarely saw them play. Everyone seemed obsessed by rugby, although Wales were not the team they had been in the seventies. The hills and sea were nearby and the landscape was littered with castles. No one went abroad, or to north Wales. We are all products of our upbringing and part of the battle of writing history is realising this; another part is trying to overcome it. The reader can decide my success or otherwise.

Thanks are due to all the following. Max Davies, Tim Green, Richard Longstaff and Amy Quant for translating the book into something that would work on screen. Richard Davies and all at Parthian for putting it on paper (and doing so quickly). Dai Smith for his editing and reminders to tell it how it was and not how we want it to be. Chris Williams for helping me become a historian in the first place. For advice and assistance: Nick Barnett, Sam Blaxland, Emma Cavell, Madeleine Gray, Tomás Irish, Leighton James, Bethan Jenkins, Simon John, Alex Langlands, Louise Miskell, Teresa Phipps, Nigel Pollard, Dan Power, Matthew Stevens, David Turner, and Daniel Williams. My students, past and present, for reminding me that teaching is a two-way process, and one much better captured by the Welsh word dysgu. Heather Moyes for attempting to curb any polemic and for living with the project with relative good humour. Bethan and Anwen Johnes for doing what teenage daughters do. And finally, the UK’s top politicians for distracting my writing with their attempts to destroy what the past bequeathed them.

Diolch i chi gyd.

Martin Johnes

Cardiff & Swansea

Introduction

Anyone looking up Wales in the 1888 edition ofEncyclopaedia Britannicawould have found the simple entry ‘See England’. In contrast, had they turned to the entry for Scotland they would have found a passage running to seventy-four pages. The phrase ‘For Wales see England’ has become notorious. For some, it sums up how Wales is invisible to the wider world. More commonly, it is seen as an example of English arrogance and a tendency to dismiss the idea of Wales as a separate nation. Both these things have sometimes been true, but the entry also hints unintentionally at a different truth: understanding Wales without looking at England is impossible. From the very beginnings of Wales, its people have defined themselves against their large neighbour. As this book shows, that relationship has not only defined what it has meant to be Welsh, it has also been central to making and defining Wales as a nation.

This might be an uncomfortable idea since it could suggest that somehow Wales is not a nation in its own right. But all nations look to others to define themselves. As historian Linda Colley has put it, ‘Men and women decide who they are by reference to who and what they are not’. The sense of difference from someone or something else creates a common bond amongst what are often disparate people, and their loose sense of unity is turned into something more visceral. In some cases, an unequal relationship makes the sense of difference very powerful and puts it at the heart of an identity. Canada, for example, cannot be understood without reference to its relationship with the USA: so much of its culture and politics is defined by consciously being different to the country to its south. But even for nations not overshadowed by a powerful neighbour, a sense of difference from others is often central. The USA’s belief in its importance and power over other nations illustrates that. So, too, does the UK’s 2016 vote in favour of leaving the EU. Yet, as both these examples illustrate, a nation’s sense of difference can owe more to imagination than reality.

The idea that Wales has been defined by its relationship with England is also uncomfortable because the relationship between the two nations has not always been a happy one and never one between equals. Wales was England’s first colony. Its conquest was by military force and led to a process of colonisation whereby the Welsh were denied what today would be called civil rights. It was accompanied by implantations of foreigners, the abolition of some traditional customs, and the introduction of new taxes. The phrase ‘imperial exploitation’ might be a modern one but it is applicable to medieval Wales. England then formally annexed Wales through what today are known as the Acts of Union. Its separate legal status came to an end and assimilation into England gathered pace. Skip forward a few centuries and an enquiry into Welsh education revealed hostile prejudices towards the Welsh language and the Welsh character, illustrating how political assimilation had not brought cultural equality. Some schools in the nineteenth century physically punished children for speaking Welsh, leading to subsequent accusations that the language was beaten out of children. In the 1950s and 60s, there was an outcry when a rural Welsh-speaking community was destroyed to supply an English city with water. There was anger too at governance from London when Welsh industry went into retreat. In the 1980s, a year-long miners’ strike across the UK was widely interpreted within Wales as a desperate struggle to keep the Welsh coal industry alive in the face of English indifference. Some even maintain that the coal industry typifies how Wales has been robbed of its natural resources to feed the English economy. If this is the sum of Wales’ history, it is little wonder that some want to throw off ‘the English yoke’.

When we sit under a tree and gaze upwards, our eyes are drawn to the gaps where the sunlight shines through and not the mass of leaves closer to us. Much the same is true of gazing at the Welsh national past. The occasions of oppression and injustice stand out, diverting our attention from the much wider and more mundane mass of more harmonious relations. As historian Margaret MacMillan has pointed out, ‘It is all too easy to rummage through the past and find nothing but a list of grievances’. Welsh history is more complicated than a list of things the ‘nasty’ English did and none of the above examples were quite as straightforward as the headlines might suggest. The past is just too messy to reduce to stories of ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’. Even the central story of conquest is not all it might seem because medieval Wales was not a single political unit but a collection of rival kingdoms at war with each other as much as with England. Moreover, some of the Welsh had fought with the English rather than against them. Nor are the heroes of medieval Welsh history all they might first seem to be. Llywelyn Fawr, perhaps the greatest of the independent Welsh princes, and Owain Glyndŵr, the leader of Wales’ great rebellion, both also served in English armies. Glyndŵr’s revolt may still inspire patriots but it actually inflicted considerable economic misery on his people and nation. Nor are tales of exploitation any simpler. At the height of Wales’ economic boom, much of the wealth generated by coal stayed in Wales and the industry’s scale was only enabled by its position within the British Empire. Wales has been looked down upon and sneered at but the English elite responsible also did the same both to its own workers and cultures throughout the rest of the world.

The exploitation that might seem to be about nation was often really about class. There has never been a deliberate attempt by the English or British state or crown to exterminate the Welsh people or Welsh culture. Modern Wales was kept in the British union not by force but by the votes of the Welsh, the vast majority of whom never showed the slightest inclination to leave. Indeed, wars, religion and Empire created powerful common experiences and emotional bonds between England and Wales. The Welsh used and benefited from the opportunities that being part of the United Kingdom and its Empire afforded them, as much as they sometimes suffered from that same status. They lived and worked amongst the English and were their friends and lovers. The English sometimes laughed at the Welsh but the two also laughed together at other cultures. Medieval Wales was a colony through conquest, but modern Wales was British through choice rather than coercion. Most of the Welsh regarded themselves as partners in Britain, not victims of it.

Yet colonialism is not just about governance. It is also about culture and its legacy can outlast any coercive force which might have created it. Thus the echoes of imperial racism are all around us today, even if European empires are now gone. People may not speak the racist language of their forefathers, but the legacy of those attitudes still exists in continuing inequities and in the very existence of the idea of race, a concept that has no biological reality. In Wales, some maintain that conquest created a mindset of inferiority. The legacy of this is an assumption that Britishness is more important and more powerful, that Wales is too small or too poor to stand alone. It is this, such perspectives maintain, that underpins the Welsh desire to remain in the union. Thus the Britishness to which the Welsh are loyal is a form of false consciousness, something created by the colonialism of hundreds of years before. If this is true, it does not require anyone to have deliberately created or sustained the situation. It is simply a by-product of historical processes. Some call this ‘postcolonialism’. Others are happy to stick to the label ‘colonialism’.

However, to argue that the Welsh are the victims of the historical legacy of colonialism is to imply that they were (and are) unable to see what was (and is) happening. The historian, Russell Davies, has argued that

The tendency amongst some historians to blame all the woes of the Welsh on the wiles of the English has given rise to an interpretation of the Welsh in their history as helpless and hapless, the gormless and guileless victims of a Machiavellian neighbour. Ever since the ‘once upon a time’, ‘long ago’, in hopeless skirmishes near streams in the snow when our princes were betrayed, beaten and beheaded, a cycle of abuser-abused-abuser-abused punctuates this nostalgic history. In the melodrama, the Welsh are always the passive victims, the English pernicious victimisers. … Such views ignore the ability of some Welsh people to fashion a future for themselves.

Blaming England for all the ills, past and present, of Welsh society is to forget how many of the Welsh were willing partners in British industrial, imperialist, cultural and political ventures. To dismiss this as false consciousness is to dismiss the Welsh of the past as stupid, unable to see or understand their own condition. A reluctance to admit to this past owes much to present-day sensibilities. It frees Wales from guilt for the atrocities of the British Empire and from blame for its current economic woes and the fragile state of the Welsh language. In short, it is much easier to blame England for everything that is wrong with Wales.

Denying our own role in our history not only reduces the Welsh of the past to puppets, only able to react to others rather than think for themselves, it also undermines the confidence to act for ourselves in the future. As long as we see ourselves as powerless victims in the past, it will be very difficult to stop seeing ourselves as powerless victims in the present and future. Taking control of the future of Wales means understanding that we had power in the past too. There were certainly times when some of the Welsh were victims of violent oppression but there were times too when the Welsh were complicit in their nation’s assimilation into Britain and in the assimilation of many others into Britain’s Empire. The lack of national confidence that is so often bemoaned in Wales can be attributed to this present-day perception of national victimhood more than any actual historical oppression.

Although it is precisely what I have just done, there are problems with connecting things that happened in the past to the present day and in seeing this past in terms of oppression and ‘us’ and ‘them’. The Welsh of today are not the same Welsh of the past. Given that anyone living today would have had tens, and maybe hundreds, of thousands of ancestors alive in 1282, the year of the final part of the conquest of Wales, can anyone really claim their ancestors were the victims not the perpetrators? What proportion of someone’s ancestors need to be Welsh to say they descend from the oppressed rather than the oppressors? There must be thousands and thousands of Welsh men and women descended in part from settler populations, from English occupation forces, and from economic migrants. Are those people whose Welsh family histories do not stretch back centuries less Welsh than those who are more certain of their family pedigree? Moreover, if to be Welsh today is to claim ancestry with this past, where does that leave those in Wales whose very recent family heritage lies elsewhere? Such questions illustrate how history can hinder residents of present-day Wales in feeling that they belong. Trying to accumulate a score of grievances based on history is thus pointless and also undermining for the very national identity it seeks to bolster. If we go back far enough, there can be few Welsh with no English ancestors. If we go back even further, the terms are meaningless because Wales and England have not always existed. Even when the terms were in existence, they did not always mean the same as they do today. In the twenty-first century, Wales is a defined geographical entity and widely accepted as a nation but in the medieval period being a nation meant being a people more than a place. Today, to understand Wales in ethnic terms is to exclude many of Wales’ citizens.

The historian gazing backwards at Wales notices Welshness because it is something familiar to him or her. We thus probe and interrogate it but in doing so perhaps elevate its importance beyond what it meant at the time. The literate elites of past centuries certainly talked about Wales but did it mean anything much to the peasant in the fields, the ironworker at the furnace or the family at the fireside? It’s probable that their sense of place was rooted in where they lived, the fields, furnaces and firesides. Some premodern people travelled vast distances but most did not. Their world was a narrow one and thus their loyalty was probably to their community. But that does not mean they had no sense of a wider world. They knew of God and biblical tales. They probably knew of their rulers, although there is no real way to tell. The nineteenth century saw all that change. It brought education, railways and even standardised time, but, even then, nationality was probably not the priority for the people of Wales that it has been for many of the historians of Wales.

History may be complicated but it is one of the central reasons why Welshness survived at all. In the medieval period, the Welsh (or at least the literate ones) had a sense of their antiquity, claiming links back to ancient Greece and the first inhabitants of Britain. But they also had a strong sense of dispossession, lamenting their loss of much of the island to the Saxons. After their eventual conquest, this sense of loss intensified and led to a feeling of being a defeated people. But from the eighteenth century to the present day, the medieval period became key to the survival of Wales because it provided stories of a time when things were different, of a time when the Welsh were self-governing, of when they rose up against their chains of servitude. This was not something that people necessarily thought should be recreated but it did sustain a sense of nationhood. As England and Wales came closer and closer together in political, economic and cultural terms, history offered a sense of consolation, a common inheritance, and a continuing sense of difference. This overlaid internal divisions and offered a sense of being more than just a region or culture. As with so many nations, the exact truths of the national history were irrelevant. It is what people thought had happened that mattered. Indeed, Ernest Renan, a nineteenth-century philosopher, even claimed that getting history wrong is part of being a nation. History has mattered because it has inspired the Welsh to retain their sense of difference and distinctiveness. It gave them stories to understand who they were and to be inspired and angered by. It ensured that the Welsh never started to think of themselves as English. These stories belong to everyone in Wales today, regardless of their personal heritage. They are about a place and a culture, not ancestry, race or DNA.

History may have sustained Welsh identity but what it should mean for the present is open to interpretation. There are those who think the political future of the United Kingdom should be based on lessons from its past, whether they see that history in terms of English colonialism or shared ventures. There are those who are angry about things that happened, or things they think that happened. History can thus raise awkward questions or possibilities for the present and future. At its most extreme, tales of violence from the past might encourage violence in the present. In 1913, one school history book told readers:

If you and I had fought by the side of Llewelyn the Last, doubtless we should have felt very bitter, when we saw our friends killed, our farms taken from us, and our families cruelly treated by a king who could not excuse himself by saying that he was bringing us the blessings of a better civilisation.

But it is not justifiable for the Welsh to feel bitter against the English now. The conditions are quite changed. The English government is no longer free to oppress a Welshman, to injure his friends, or treat his family cruelly. The law protects a Welshman from a bad Englishman in exactly the same way as it protects an Englishman from a bad Welshman. In law, Welshmen and Englishmen are absolutely equal.

Wales is, we say, united with England; and union is strength.

This book was trying to reconcile the past and present and to draw lessons from history. Yet its reading of what those lessons were was based more on its understanding of the present. The same book also told readers that Glyndŵr’s rebellion took place in very different circumstances because then individuals had no power and thus had to resort to violence, whereas now power lay with the people through an elected Parliament. The past is always read through the prism of the present and thus the present reads into it whatever suits it. The reality is that there are no clear lessons from the past, only tantalising hints to be plundered and moulded to suit pre-existing political beliefs. Every society needs to know its past but it also needs to be wary of basing its future on that past.

I hope that this book does not just speak to Wales. It is in the English conquest of Wales that the origins of a multinational and multicultural British state lie. If England wants to understand itself better, it would do well to look at its first colony. Here lie the origins of its confusion, of why it has been left behind by devolution, of why it struggles to understand the difference between Englishness and Britishness. It has forgotten what its early kings knew, that the places to its west and north were different. It has also forgotten that the response of those kings was to think England was the most important component of this island, with a natural right to superiority over the other inhabitants. What was once conscious has become unconscious. Just as the source of Britain’s relative wealth lies in its imperial past, the inequalities within Britain lie deep in its history too. Britain was never the coming together of equals that the voluntary union of England and Scotland has fooled people into thinking. Those that look back further realise that Britain was made by conquest. Perhaps then it is not surprising that Britain went on to think it had a right to conquer much of the rest of the world. The history of Wales does not offer answers to England’s problems, but it does help an understanding of them.