A History of Modern Wales 1536-1990

Philip Jenkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317872689
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Rich in detail but vigorous, authoritative and unsentimental, A History ofModern Wales is a comprehensive and unromanticised examination of Wales as it was and is. It stresses both the long-term continuities in Welsh history, and also the significant regional differences within the principality.

Chapter One
Introductory: Which Wales?

For a thousand years, English and other writers have been in no doubt of the existence of a distinctive Welsh people, originally demarcated by language, but also by real or alleged ethnic traits. The Welsh were strongly attached to their homeland, which at various times had a separate political identity. In 1536, Henry VIII’s Act of Union spoke of a ‘dominion, principality and country of Wales’; a century later, Milton assumed that the Council in the Marches exercised control over ‘an old, and haughty nation proud in arms’. But exactly what was this nation?

The land of Wales is clearly defined as a political entity, comprising the 13 traditional counties formed under the Tudors, and reorganised in 1974 into eight new units.¹ Beyond this, almost any statement about ‘Welshness’ or the nature of Wales is likely to be controversial. In history and social science, it is common to use phrases that seem to assume clear distinctions within the geographical unit. One area might be ‘more Welsh’, while another is part of the ‘anglicised lowlands’; and language is only one factor in this division. This makes it appear that there exists an ideal ‘true Wales’, pura Wallia, which different regions can resemble to a greater or lesser degree. On the other hand, a survey of the modern history of Wales suggests a more complex picture. Within the small area of Wales, there are important regional and cultural distinctions, and it is a matter of debate whether any one region or cultural pattern can claim a greater correctness or authenticity. These divisions have provided an essential context to the development of every aspect of Welsh life, especially in matters of politics and religion.

A Welsh Nation?

Can we speak of ‘Wales’ as anything more than an expression of geographical convenience? Henry VIII had officially snuffed out any legal distinctions or peculiarities that Wales might formerly have possessed, leaving a mere component of England, ‘incorporated, united and annexed’. Does ‘Wales’ mean anything more than a term like ‘East Anglia’ or ‘Wessex’, both geographical terms that preserve distant recollections of ancient statehood?

It is useful here to compare the experience of the three Celtic nations that would ultimately form part of the United Kingdom. Scotland, Ireland and Wales were all inhabited by people of largely Celtic stock, and in all three, there were substantial populations speaking Celtic languages. When that has been said, we have exhausted the common Celticity of the three societies. Of the three, Wales is the least understood by English historians, perhaps precisely because it was less visibly alien than Scotland or Ireland. The two latter countries were undeniably foreign in their social makeup. Scotland was clearly a different society, with its traditions of Roman law and feudalism; and the establishment of the Presbyterian religion for most of the period. The Scottish highlands were the home of a Gaelic society strongly derived from ancient Celtic traditions; but the Lowlands too demonstrated social and political features that left no doubt that this was a distinct national culture. Ireland was shaped by the conflict of race, religion and language, and was ruled by a colonial framework very different from England. In neither was language the sole criterion of identity: no rational observer would use the scarcity of Gaelic speech to justify calling Glasgow an ‘anglicised’ city; still less Dublin.

Yet in Wales, it was the Welsh language that gave the country what unity it possessed. As we will see, Welsh survived remarkably well through the political changes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and Wales entered the years of industrial revolution with perhaps 80 or 90 per cent of its people using Welsh as the normal medium of communication. Language was a substantial distinguishing mark, but it corresponded little with social or legal arrangements; and the vexed question of defining Wales politically meant that linguistic unity was not transformed into activism.

The lack of national unity was not counteracted by centralising institutions, either administrative or religious. Unlike Scotland, Wales had never been united under a Welsh kingdom or government – with the possible exception of short-lived conditions in the thirteenth century, or the time of the Glyndwr rising. In early modern times, a Council of Wales and the Marches survived until 1689, but this impinged little on the everyday affairs of any section of Welsh society after 1640. There was a Welsh Great Sessions, used by judges as a forum for presenting their views on society and politics; but it never produced a glittering local bar with its attendant culture, on the lines of Georgian Dublin or Edinburgh. In education, there was from Tudor times something like a Welsh ‘University College’; but this was Jesus College, Oxford, rather than any local institution.

Regions

Early modern Wales therefore lacked most of the characteristic features of nationhood, even those of a nation in subjection. Moreover, one of the most obvious and powerful facts about Wales in this era was the force of regionalism. It may seem remarkable to apply such a concept to such a small territory, but geography and communications made such local divisions quite inevitable. One of the most powerful and persistent of these themes was the distinction between north and south Wales, a separation recognised by many administrative devices. The division seemed obvious after the Acts of Union, which created 12 Welsh counties (Monmouthshire was detached): what could be more natural than to create two symmetrical halves, each with six shires? In the early modern period, each region had its own Vice-Admiral, its own structure for the collection of taxes and excise; while legislation in the interregnum clearly saw the two halves as separate missionary territories.

But the administrative division between north and south also reflects fundamental geographical factors, based above all on ease of transport and communication. The civil war in Wales involved two distinct and barely related series of campaigns. In more recent times, schemes for national structures in Wales generally envisaged a twin structure for north and south. The Methodist seminaries of the nineteenth century were established at Bala in Merionethshire and Trefecca in Breconshire. In the 1870s, most schemes for the proposed University of Wales suggested twin colleges, on the model originally proposed by Owain Glyndwr. The location of the national eisteddfod alternates between north and south.

Wales was in fact an agglomeration of different societies and regions, and there was no urban centre to unite disparate areas. Wales had no natural capital, and until the mid-eighteenth century, the largest centres were market towns with populations of about three thousand. The only administrative centre of substance was Ludlow, the headquarters of the Council under the Tudors and Stuarts. Without a Welsh city, the country’s regions looked towards metropolitan centres across the border. Roughly, there were three regions, which had little contact with each other. Even less promising for any prospect of national development, these regions were defined and maintained in terms of English towns and trading patterns.

For north Wales, the vital capitals were Chester, and later Liverpool, while even Dublin was more familiar than any southern Welsh town. In the south, Bristol played a similar role as the centre of commerce, finance and social life. It acted as a real metropolis, an urban centre that drew into its orbit the surrounding counties of England as well as the shires of the south Wales coast. Shrewsbury was the regional capital for mid-Wales, and it dominated the crucial woollen industry. The three-fold division of Wales was reinforced by the nature of roads within the principality. There were traditionally three great roads. One led from Chester to Caernarvon; one from Hereford to Brecon and Carmarthen, and thence to St David’s. A third was the southern coastal route, through Cardiff and Swansea. The glaring inadequacies of most road transport in Wales put a premium on coastal traffic, where the routes also radiated from Bristol and Chester.

Marriages and social contacts occurred within such a metropolitan area, rather than on a ‘Welsh’ basis. Obviously, it was the upper ranks of society who tended to look further afield for marriage partners; but this suggests little awareness of a Welsh context. In Monmouthshire or Glamorgan, no gentry family in the century after 1660 formed a marriage alliance with anyone from the six counties of north Wales. By contrast, there were dozens of such links with the squires and ladies of Somerset, Gloucestershire and Wiltshire. Squires of Caernarvonshire and Denbighshire were equally close to the gentry communities of Cheshire or Staffordshire.

Over the years, this naturally meant that landed estates in Wales tended to pass to owners from elsewhere within these larger Anglo-Welsh regions. Thus we find Bagots and Pagets among the gentry of north Wales, Wyndhams in the south. In landowners’ correspondence of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we rarely find any suggestion of acquaintance with other Welsh families beyond the adjacent county. In contrast, they were part of widespread networks in England, within the wider metropolitan region. Below the level of the gentry, Bristol, Shrewsbury and Chester were the indispensable market towns, centres for trade, recreation or shopping; and marriage ties or migration often followed social contacts. The early industrialisation of south Wales was financed by capital from Bristol; the north looked to Cheshire and Lancashire.

These trends were accentuated rather than reduced by the improving communications of the nineteenth century. Major railways ran from east to west, and the vital communication routes of this era were three rail lines running westwards from Newport, Shrewsbury and Chester. These facilities provided the basis for growth in communications and urbanisation, but again these developments were conditioned by the needs of the English metropolitan regions. Tourism from the English midlands and north-west created a holiday coast from Conway to Prestatyn, which in turn permitted the emergence of urban centres like Llandudno and Colwyn Bay. Naturally enough, these new towns looked east to the English heartland, rather than south into Wales. By the nineteenth century, Liverpool had become perhaps the greatest Welsh city of all: the culmination of a trend at least as old as the middle ages.

Counties and Hundreds

These economic regions can be seen as the essential building blocks which made up the Welsh nation; but other views are possible. For a Welsh person living in, say, 1700, there were other units which might be taken to mark the boundaries of life and experience, and ‘Wales’ was probably not one of them. As we have seen, there were rudimentary ‘national’ institutions like Jesus College, but these were as nothing in prestige or significance besides those of the county. The Welsh county might have been an upstart creation of the 1530s, but it rapidly acquired real significance.

Quarter Sessions, the county Bench and lieutenancy, the Grand Jury – all were county events and institutions, deciding issues central to the life of the landed community, of clergy and burgesses, and to the making of policies that affected virtually everyone within the shire. Even the ‘Welsh’ Great Sessions manifested themselves as a county event, when the assizes were the scene of local pageantry and festivities; and the assize sermon was a high point of local ecclesiastical society. The power of the county is also suggested by negative evidence, in that religious and political dissent grew on the fringes of the shires, far from the agents of justice. In the seventeenth century, the greatest Jesuit centre stood on the boundary between the shires of Monmouth and Hereford; while the headquarters of one widespread Baptist network was at Rhydwilym, on the frontier between Pembroke and Carmarthen. In this sense, the experience of Welsh people in the early modern period was essentially identical to those of their English neighbours.

But we can refine our vision still further. Wales was made up of fundamentally different economic regions. Each region comprised different counties; and furthermore, even the county might be too gross a unit for accurate perception or analysis. Most counties included at least two sharply distinct regions that were physically separated by only a few miles, though they were sharply demarcated by economy, population structure, social arrangements and sometimes language. One region might be ‘anglicised’, another ‘pure Welsh’. Each had its own community, often with natural linkages lying beyond the official boundaries.

Even the island county of Anglesey, which seems to have the best-defined natural boundaries, has in its southern tier a very distinctive social and economic unit: the hundreds of Menai and Dindaethwy are strongly linked to the northern coastal strip of Caernarvonshire to form a ‘Menai region’. Again in Caernarvonshire, the eastern part of the county was sharply differentiated from the western regions of Llyn and Eifionydd. Denbighshire politics were long shaped by the need to reconcile the divergent interests of eastern and western halves, with their respective capitals at Wrexham and Denbigh. In Glamorgan, the river Ogwr marked the internal border between east and west. The central government had to exercise care in allotting patronage so that neither region felt slighted.

Which territorial area best defined people’s awareness? Even for the greater gentry like the Mansells and Mostyns, their correspondence suggests that the truly local community was an area within a radius of only five to ten miles around the great house: that is, well below the scope of the county. Between the parish and the county was the hundred, an often neglected unit that fitted rather well with Welsh realities. Hundreds were rarely formed in a wholly arbitrary way under Henry VIII. They usually followed some traditional Welsh boundaries, or else the model of a feudal lordship, and their limits were often natural frontiers. In northwest Wales, the hundreds were usually the ancient commotes; while in the south, a special commission decided boundaries under Henry VIII. In Pembrokeshire, the hundreds followed the old cantref boundaries, with finer divisions being drawn according to manors and lordships rather than parishes. In the whole of Wales and Monmouthshire, there were 90 hundreds with an average size of about 89 square miles. The average hundred in the later seventeenth century had about 4500 people, rising to 6500 in 1801. For the historian, it is the hundreds which perhaps offer the most manageable units for examining the diversity of local communities and cultures.

To illustrate the distinctions in social structure, let us briefly compare two hundreds within the single county of Glamorgan: Ogmore in the lowland ‘Vale’, and the upland area of Llangyfelach.² Both hundreds had similar populations in the seventeenth century-Ogmore had three thousand people, Llangyfelach closer to 3600 and both used Welsh as their normal means of communication. (English had made somewhat more progress in Ogmore, but it was not a dominant force until the later eighteenth century). Neither had a town or city of any size, though both stood near moderate market towns: Swansea in the west, Cowbridge in the Vale. Both had coastlines, though neither had a major port; and major roads passed through both.

The two hundreds were separated by barely 20 miles, but in social structure they were different worlds. Llangyfelach was a hilly area with a pastoral-industrial economy, and from about 1700 it was a prominent centre of rapid industrialisation. Most of Ogmore depended on mixed agriculture, and was little affected by industry. The economic contrast was clearly reflected in social stratification. In 1670, the hundred of Llangyfelach had at most four gentry by customary English standards of wealth or income, while 90 per cent of the people lived in houses of one or two hearths. The largest house in the hundred had only six hearths, and no family had an income in excess of £300. However, there were many other people who were viewed as gentlemen by local and traditional standards. They often acted as leaders of the community in struggles with the feudal lords, the Dukes of Beaufort; who in turn condemned these ‘Welch ragamuffins’. Llangyfelach fits closely with the experience of upland societies throughout Europe as portrayed by scholars like Braudel: this was a world of poor clergy, religious dissidence, weak political control, a variety of economic resources, and (above all) an absence of landed nobility.

By contrast, Ogmore was a wealthy gentry-dominated society. In 1670, about 80 per cent of people lived in houses of one or two hearths. At the other extreme were 16 or so gentry families, several living in houses with ten or more hearths. The richest magnate was Sir Edward Stradling with seats at St Donats Castle (30 hearths) and Merthyr Mawr (13). There were probably eight families in the hundred with incomes in excess of £500, and these would certainly have been recognised as gentry by any contemporary English observer. By the nineteenth century, the area was dominated by the Earls of Dunraven, with their seat at Dunraven Castle.

The presence or absence of a gentry decides the means by which historians can study that area. History is shaped by the nature and availability of sources, and the attitudes of historians attracted to that kind of material. In Ogmore, the gentry have left abundant estate records and correspondence, and our historical view is a story of squires, ladies, castles, and ‘high’ politics. Llangyfelach strikes us through the institutions and facilities that tended to leave their records there, and it thus appears to be a land of nonconformist chapels, copper-works and coal mines. Tourists and travellers went to Ogmore as a haven of the picturesque, and their records provide much evidence of social life and ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• In preparation
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Maps
• List of Tables
• Preface
• CHAPTER ONE Introductory: Which Wales?
• PART ONE Welsh Society
• CHAPTER TWO Early Modern Society
• CHAPTER THREE Yr uchelwyr: the Welsh gentry
• CHAPTER FOUR Welsh Language and Culture
• PART TWO Church and State 1536–1800
• CHAPTER FIVE The State
• CHAPTER SIX The Religious Revolution
• CHAPTER SEVEN The Seventeenth Century Crisis
• CHAPTER EIGHT Religion and Revivalism 1680–1780
• CHAPTER NINE Welsh Politics in the Eighteenth Century
• PART THREE Industry and Nonconformity
• CHAPTER TEN The Nonconformist Triumph 1780–1914
• CHAPTER ELEVEN The Coming of Industry
• CHAPTER TWELVE Consequences
• CHAPTER THIRTEEN The Politics of Protest 1790–1860
• CHAPTER FOURTEEN The Old Order
• PART FOUR Modern Wales
• CHAPTER FIFTEEN Inventing a Nation: Wales 1840–1880
• CHAPTER SIXTEEN Liberal Wales 1868–1920
• CHAPTER SEVENTEEN ‘Red Wales' – The Socialist Tradition
• CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Economy and Society 1920–1990
• CHAPTER NINETEEN A Nation Once Again?
• CHAPTER TWENTY Historical Writing in Wales
• Maps
• Index