I have two personal connections with this book. Firstly, this copy belonged to my Dad. According to the note inside the cover he bought this in 1994, which was the year it was first published in English in paperback by Penguin.
This is one of the few books I took from the vast collection of books that Dad left behind when he passed away unexpectedly seven years ago. There was a bookmark in it at page 505, which for a while I thought was the point where he had stopped reading. But actually it was a marker for a short bit about the Christian revival of 1904 - an event my Dad was very interested in.
So, I'm not sure if my Dad ever finished reading the whole book. But I have. I was prompted to read it by my second personal connection with the book - recently I've got to know Anna, one of the daughters of the late author, John Davies.
Anna is standing for election to the Senedd and is top of the electoral list for Plaid Cymru in our area. We were out canvassing one morning and she mentioned seeing a copy of her father's book in a second hand shop. I asked what the book was, thought that it sounded familiar, and later went and dug it out of the stack of inherited books in my office.
Anna gets an anonymous passing mention in the author bio.
Anna has also told me that it was the first book that Penguin published in Cymraeg. (And it was also a lot longer than originally planned!)
The opening few chapters are easy to read at pace because, truthfully, there isn't much that is easily verifiable in Wales's history up until the Norman invasion. The paucity of Celtic relics from Wales compared to Anglo-Saxon relics from England is down to the Christian faith of the Welsh who unlike the pagan Saxons didn't fill the graves of their dead with stuff that could be dug up years later by archaeologists. So the story rattles along quite quickly.
The few written records of Welsh history from before and during the Norman occupation of Wales are frequently fanciful. John describes the unreliability of one chronicler, Nennius, in a slightly waspish fashion saying: "where it is possible to prove the correctness of Nennius's material, it is clear that his ignorance was monumental."
There are several similar sardonic comments. Regarding the legend that St David raised up a small hill to stand on so he could more clearly address his followers, John points out that in the very hilly area of Ceredigion, "it would be difficult to conceive of any miracle more superfluous". When discussing the 19th century growth of holiday resorts on the North Wales coast, he unambiguously says Rhyl "attracted a less middle-class type of tourist" than Llandudno.
While this is a history of Wales, it's not really a beginner's history. I was glad to have a rough sense of Welsh history already, as several people and events are referred to in throwaway fashion - the reader is expected to know what happened to David, brother of Prince Llewelyn the Last, with two oblique references to his execution in Shrewsbury, without any more detail given. This trait gets more frequent as the book progresses.
I think the favourite factoid I learned from this book was that to encourage Welsh people to emigrate to America in the 18th century, a story was invented of a Welshman called Madog who sailed west centuries before Columbus and landed in the New World. Madog's descendents were a Welsh-speaking tribe living in the American hinterland, known as the Madogwys. This led to a Welsh explorer setting out to find the Madogwys and along the way he became the first European to map the Missouri River.
That story is amusing but it shows how powerful stories can be. Earlier in the history, John writes about the growth in Welsh poetry and how the poets reframed the subjugating defeats of Welsh leaders in "a cry against the extinction of identity and against the tyranny of fact." It's an evocative turn of phrase and captures how people have always wanted to describe the world as it should be, rather than how it is.
In later chapters, where there are more reliable sources to draw from, the overall narrative gets a bit bogged down in numbers. It's instructive to compare the numbers of people employed in the coal industry between one generation and the next but there are several such comparisons - numbers of Welsh-born inhabitants, number of Welsh speakers, number of people employed on the land, number of tons of coal extracted and exported, and so on. It all gets a bit statty and less easy to read.
Overall the theme of the book is about identifying the historical processes that resulted in Wales being Wales, an entity different yet thoroughly influenced by England. This uniqueness has survived numerous obvious and non-obvious pressures, from outright conquest through to the conforming pressure of militant socialism in the miner's unions.
The history of the Welsh language is similarly a history of pressure, again not always from obvious sources. I was unaware of how anti-Cymraeg the unions were in the 19th and 20th centuries. I was struck by the irony that top-down repression of Cymraeg was less effective than the movement that preached solidarity among the workers, effectively the people of Wales robbing themselves of their language.
This (first) edition of the book was published in 1994 and the last chapter covers the discussions about a Welsh parliament in the 1960s and the failed devolution referendum of 1979. There was a second edition published in 2007, by which time Wales had an Assembly and its own devolved government. Proof perhaps that history hasn't stopped. I would like to see what got added to the second edition.
The final few paragraphs of the version I read - before devolution happened - outline the hope that the Welsh nation will continue to endure, as it had despite everything. The last page or so are very Yma O Hyd in theme and I found it uplifting. It made me happy to think that only a handful of years after the author concluded writing his history, steps had been taken to further safeguard and establish the nation of Wales.
