The Normans in Welsh History

R. Allen Brown Memorial Lecture THE NORMANS IN WELSH HISTORY Huw Pryce Although Allen Brown did not write extensively about Wales, he was certain that the Normans had made a big difference to its history by inaugurating a conquest that was completed, some two centuries later, by Edward I.1 Members of the Battle Conference, on its visit to Gregynog, about eight miles west of the motte of Hen Domen near Montgomery,2 will hardly need persuasion that Norman conquest and settlement were significant in Wales. After all, in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries the Normans and their allies established control over a substantial swathe of the country, extending in an arc along its eastern borders and southern coast, and created marcher lordships that enjoyed extensive autonomy until the reign of Henry VIII. Yet precisely how much difference the Normans made is a matter for continuing debate. Now, I should explain at the outset that my aim is not to try and assess the nature and impact of Norman conquest and settlement in Wales. Rather, what follows will focus on how historians have viewed the place of the Normans in Welsh history, and especially how and how far these conquerors have been integrated into narratives of national history. In other words, this paper is essentially historiographical in its approach. True, Allen Brown was somewhat impatient of the efforts of previous scholars, who, he believed, had muddied the waters by their partisan stance in relation to the Norman conquest of England. Yet, as he clearly saw, his own work responded to those earlier interpretations and in turn contributed to continuing debates about the extent and significance of the Normans in English history.3 Historiographical reflection is valuable, indeed inescapable, in any serious effort to offer new interpretations of a given subject. That, then, is one justification for my topic: by looking at the work of previous historians, we may gain a clearer understanding of the premises and frameworks underpinning more recent studies of the Norman impact on Wales. But there is more to the enterprise than that. While looking back to previous historians’ work provides a background and context for the present state of the subject, it does not follow that we should adopt a Whiggish view that tends to deprecate earlier scholars for their lack of rigour or understanding in order to celebrate the allegedly higher standards of our own day. Instead, an investigation of earlier interpretations of the Normans’ place in the history of 1 R. Allen Brown, The Normans, Woodbridge 1984, 5, 73, 153; idem, The Normans and the Norman Conquest, 2nd edn, Woodbridge 1985, 11, 226. I am grateful to all those at the Battle Conference who provided feedback on the lecture at Gregynog, to Neil Evans and J. Beverley Smith for their comments on a draft of the published version, and to Nancy Edwards for her encouragement and support. 2 Cf. Philip Barker and Robert Higham, Hen Domen Montgomery: A Timber Castle on the EnglishWelsh Border, London 1982. 3 Brown, Normans and Norman Conquest, 1–5. 2 Huw Pryce Wales provides valuable insights into changing assumptions about the Welsh past and Welsh notions of identity, and thus contributes to wider issues in historiography and intellectual history. The Normans are particularly interesting in this regard in that they did not themselves establish a modern nation state, or even a stateless nation (unless we count the continuing regional identity of Normandy itself),4 of the type that formed the prime focus of modern academic history as it developed in the nineteenth century. In treating them, historians have therefore tended to adopt two types of framework, both of which, however, rest on a shared premise privileging ethnicity as the predominant category of analysis. One of these focuses on the Normans themselves as a distinctive people whose expansion had an impact on north-western France, Britain and Ireland, southern Italy and Sicily, and the Middle East.5 The other, more common, framework, and the one with which I shall be principally concerned in the present discussion, is that of national history, in which the Normans were an intrusive element whose relationship to modern nations, be they states or not, was complex and often problematic. The nearest we get to identity between the two occurs, of course, in England; but, as I hardly need remind the audience at a Battle Conference, the extent to which the Normans created the English kingdom as it developed after 1066 remains highly controversial, even if controversy is less sharp than it was in the time of Freeman and Round, for example.6 Closer parallels for Wales may be found, of course, in Scotland and above all Ireland. In Scotland, extensive Norman settlement, at the instigation of the Scots kings, found its historiographical reflection in two broad schools of thought: one emphasizing the indigenous, Celtic element in the medieval Scottish kingdom and its modern successor; the other, Norman and Anglicizing tendencies. Linked to this was a periodization that drew a sharp dividing line between the Celtic and Norman eras in the age of Malcolm III and St Margaret. This historiographical polarization had a clear ideological complexion. In particular, some Lowland Scots historians of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries sought to distance themselves from supposedly backward Celts or Gaels by claiming a common Teutonic identity – represented in the Middle Ages by the Saxons, Normans, and even, so John Pinkerton believed, the Picts – with the English in a wider British polity.7 This identification with different groups in the past was even clearer in the case of Ireland. Admittedly, we might hesitate to call the invaders from the late 1160s onwards ‘Normans’, preferring to revert to the terminology of the contemporary 4 Cf. Charles Homer Haskins, The Normans in European History, New York 1915, 1–25; Marjorie Chibnall, The Normans, Oxford 2000, 161–73. 5 See, e.g., Haskins, Normans in European History; David C. Douglas, The Norman Achievement, 1050–1100, London 1969; Brown, Normans; Chibnall, Normans. Cf. also works which, while narrower in geographical scope, set Norman expansion in a wider context than that of the individual countries of Britain and Ireland, e.g. G. W. S. Barrow, Feudal Britain, London 1956; John Le Patourel, The Norman Empire, Oxford 1976; Robin Frame, The Political Development of the British Isles, 1100–1400, Oxford 1990; R. R. Davies, Domination and Conquest: The Experience of Ireland, Scotland and Wales, 1100–1300, Cambridge 1990; idem, The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles, 1093–1343, Oxford 2000; David Carpenter, The Struggle for Mastery: The Penguin History of Britain, 1066–1284, London 2003. 6 See, e.g., Marjorie Chibnall, The Debate on the Norman Conquest, Manchester 1999; Howard B. Clarke, ‘1066, 1169, and All That: The Tyranny of Historical Turning Points’, in European Encounters: Essays in Memory of Albert Lovett, ed. Judith Devlin and Howard B. Clarke, Dublin 2003, 11–36 at 12–25; Richard Barber, ‘The Norman Conquest and the Media’, ANS 26, 2003 (2004), 1–20; David Bates, ‘1066: Does the Date Still Matter?’, Historical Research, 78, 2005, 443–64. 7 Colin Kidd, ‘Teutonist Ethnology and Scottish Nationalist Inhibition, 1780–1880’, Scottish Historical Review, 74, 1995, 45–68; Matthew H. Hammond, ‘Ethnicity and the Writing of Medieval Scottish History’, Scottish Historical Review, 85, 2006, 1–27. The Normans in Welsh History 3 sources that refer to them as ‘English’. But the use of ‘Norman’ has a fairly long pedigree, going back, as John Gillingham has recently argued, to the late eighteenth century, and is still current among some Irish historians.8 This usage is best exemplified by the title of Goddard Henry Orpen’s classic work, Ireland under the Normans, 1169–1333.9 Orpen identified with the Normans, not because they facilitated political union with Britain – he was in fact strongly critical of kings of England for neglecting the interests of the resident settler lords in Ireland – but rather as the creators of the Anglo-Irish community to which he himself belonged, and thus of what he considered to be a more progressive kind of Irish nationality than that represented by the Gaelic traditions and perspective espoused by many of his critics, most notably Eoin MacNeill. For Orpen, then, the Normans were a good thing for Ireland, as he made clear in a letter written towards the end of the Irish Civil War in 1923 to the more nationalistically inclined Edmund Curtis, with reference to the latter’s History of Medieval Ireland: ‘I do not think you are always fair to the Normans, or give them due credit for the vast improvement produced in the state of Ireland, wherever and so long as their rule was effective.’10 The key point, then, is that some latter-day historians in Scotland and Ireland could identify with the settlers, and this helped to give the Normans historiographical sustenance as a positive force in national histories, even if this was strongly contested by other historians who identified with the ‘natives’. In assessing how and how far historians of Wales dealt with the Normans, this paper will adopt a broadly chronological – and necessarily highly selective – approach that falls into three main sections, beginning with the age of Elizabeth I, when the first histories of Wales were written, and continuing, via some of the works produced in the eighteenth and especially nineteenth centuries, through to the seminal contribution of J. E. Lloyd in the late Victorian and Edwardian era. I shall conclude by giving fairly brief consideration to some recent views of the Normans’ place in Welsh history that mark a decisive break with interpretations that had held sway for four centuries. Before going any further, however, I should, perhaps, make clear that this is not to deny that historical writing was produced in medieval Wales.11 Nevertheless, the nearest we get to history in the strict sense, as distinct, say, from annals and chronicles, is with works that were concerned, not with Wales and the Welsh as such, but rather with 8 John Gillingham, ‘Normanizing the English Invaders of Ireland’, in Power and Identity in the Middle Ages: Essays in Memory of Rees Davies, ed. Huw Pryce and John Watts, Oxford 2007, 85–97. 9 Goddard Henry Orpen, Ireland under the Normans, 1169–1333, 4 vols, Oxford 1911–20. 10 Trinity College Dublin, MS 2452, no. 10 (19 Mar. 1923). The letter continues: ‘Perhaps I erred, on the other hand, by not displaying more sympathy with the Gaelic element, but I was writing mainly about Norman rule and trying to correct the travesties of history that had too often appeared before I wrote. On the other hand, you pass lightly over the dynastic and other conflicts that incessantly broke out among the Irish themselves, and gloss over their raids of plunder and destruction by such terms as the “Irish Resurgence” a risorgimento that led not to national unity, but to the chaos and retrogression of the 15th. century. Well they have got their “Great Deliverance” now, and all I can say is Heaven help Ireland!’ It should be stressed that Orpen and Curtis treated each other with mutual respect, and the latter was far more appreciative of Orpen’s work than MacNeill and other nationalist critics were. See further, F. J. Byrne, ‘MacNeill the Historian’, in The Scholar Revolutionary: Eoin MacNeill, 1867–1945, and the Making of the New Ireland, ed. F. X. Martin and F. J. Byrne, Shannon 1973, 15–36; Seán Duffy, ‘Historical Revisit: Goddard Henry Orpen, Ireland under the Normans, 1169–1333 (1911–20)’, Irish Historical Studies, 32, no. 126, 2000, 246–59; Robin Frame, Ireland and Britain, 1170–1450, London 1998, 2–4 (and, for subsequent historiography of ‘Norman’ Ireland, ibid. 4–7); Clarke, ‘1066, 1169, and All That’, 25–32. 11 See, e.g., R. Ian Jack, Medieval Wales, London 1972, 13–46; Thomas Jones, ‘Historical Writing in Medieval Welsh’, Scottish Studies, 12, 1968, 15–27; J. Beverley Smith, The Sense of History in Medieval Wales, Aberystwyth [1989]. 4 Huw Pryce the Britons and the island of Britain. This is true of the early ninth-century Historia Brittonum, and truer still of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1138), a work which became a cornerstone of medieval Welsh historiography thanks to its highly dramatic elaboration of the consoling and deep-rooted conviction, which persisted well beyond the Middle Ages, that the golden age of the Welsh lay in their distant British and ultimately Trojan past.12 Welsh historical writing of the Elizabethan age exemplifies key characteristics in the treatment of the Normans that continued to resonate down to the twentieth century. Some background to begin with. The earliest book on Welsh history was Humphrey Llwyd’s Cronica Walliae, written, despite its Latin title, in English, and completed in 1559.13 Prefaced by a description of Wales, it offered an account of Welsh history – or, more precisely, ‘the kinges and princes of Walles’ – from Cadwaladr in the seventh century to Llywelyn ap Gruffudd (d. 1282), ‘the laste of the Britishe bloodde that had the governaunce of Wales’.14 Llwyd’s aim, therefore, was to demonstrate that the Welsh, whom he believed, following Geoffrey of Monmouth, to be an ancient people ultimately descended from the Trojans, had had a distinctive political history of their own that ended with the Edwardian conquest. ‘After this’, Llwyd concluded, ‘there was nothinge done in Wales worthy memory, but that is to bee redde in the English Chronicle.’15 To achieve his aim Llwyd drew extensively on a version of the medieval Welsh chronicles usually known as Brut y Tywysogyon (The Chronicle of the Princes),16 conceived in the late thirteenth century as a continuation of the Welsh versions of Geoffrey’s Historia Regum Britanniae, together with English historians such as Matthew Paris.17 Llwyd’s work remained in manuscript, however, until 1584, when David Powel published it as The Historie of Cambria.18 Powel inserted additional material from other sources, mostly printed in a smaller typeface, including a final section on ‘The Princes of Wales of the English blood’ that took the story down from the Edwardian conquest to the author’s day;19 the book was also illustrated with woodcuts, taken from the first edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles, to represent various Welsh kings and princes.20 (Llwyd’s work was first published in its original form only in 2002.)21 It was thanks to Powel, therefore, that the history of medieval Wales 12 Cf. David N. Dumville, ‘Historia Brittonum: An Insular History from the Carolingian Age’, in Historiographie im frühen Mittelalter, ed. Anton Scharer and Georg Scheibelreiter, Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung 32; Munich and Vienna 1994, 406–34; Brut y Brenhinedd, Llanstephan MS. 1 Version: Selections, ed. Brynley F. Roberts, Dublin 1971, 55–74 (‘Appendix: The Historia Regum Britanniae in Wales’). 13 Humphrey Llwyd, Cronica Walliae, ed. Ieuan M. Williams, Cardiff 2002. 14 Ibid. 64. 15 Ibid. 224. 16 Cf. J. E. Lloyd, ‘The Welsh Chronicles’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 14, 1928, 369–91; Brut y Tywysogyon, or, The Chronicle of the Princes, Peniarth MS. 20 Version, trans. Thomas Jones, Cardiff 1952, pp. xxxv–xliv. For a recent critique of the title Brut y Tywysogyon, on the grounds that it appears in no medieval manuscript of the Welsh chronicles, see Brenhinoedd y Saeson, ‘The Kings of the English’, A.D. 682–954: Texts P, R, S in Parallel, ed. David N. Dumville, Basic Texts for Mediaeval British History 1, Aberdeen 2005, p. v. 17 Llwyd, Cronica Walliae, 12–59. 18 David Powel, The Historie of Cambria, Now Called Wales: A Part of the Most Famous Yland of Brytaine, Written in the Brytish Language aboue Two Hundreth Yeares Past: Translated into English by H. Lhoyd Gentleman: Corrected, Augmented, and Continued out of Records and Best Approoued Authors, London 1584; facsimile repr. Amsterdam 1969. 19 Ibid. 376–401. 20 J. E. Lloyd, ‘Powel’s Historie (1584)’, Archaeologia Cambrensis, 97 (1), 1942, 96–7. 21 See n. 13 above. The Normans in Welsh History 5 became more widely known, and his book remained very influential, with revised versions appearing as late as 1832.22 One important legacy of Llwyd and Powel was the notion that Welsh history was essentially that of its native rulers, whose reigns provided the basic chronological framework for the events narrated.23 Though, like Llwyd, he accepted the Edwardian conquest and the Union with England, and was indeed commissioned to write his Historie by Sir Henry Sidney, Lord President of Wales, Powel made it clear in his preface that he had strong patriotic motives for accepting the commission: namely, to remedy the neglect of the history of the Welsh, the earliest inhabitants of Britain, and also to defend the Welsh from what he called ‘the slanderous report’ of their actions by English historians.24 So, how did the Normans fit into the story presented by Llwyd and Powel? The first point to emphasize is that Norman conquests in Wales were not presented as a major turning point in the history of that country. Instead, following the lead supplied by the medieval Chronicle of the Princes, the key changes were, first, the ending of British rule over the whole island of Britain as a result of the AngloSaxon conquests, and, second, the extinction of native rule over Wales by Edward I. Nevertheless, the success of the Normans in conquering substantial parts of Wales was recognized, and, following the Chronicle of the Princes, the Norman threat was sometimes presented as a tribulation which the Welsh faced through putting their trust in a protective God.25 At the same time, the Normans had one great advantage that allowed them to be treated with some sympathy: they had caused the downfall of the English. Thus in his account of Æthelred II’s marriage to Emma of Normandy Powel offered an interpretation of the Norman conquest of England, which, while based on Henry of Huntingdon, adapted this source to echo a crucial leitmotiv of medieval Welsh historical tradition, attested as early as Gildas’s De excidio Britanniae in the sixth century, namely the Britons’ loss of their sovereignty of Britain to the Anglo-Saxons: 22 R. T. Jenkins, ‘William Wynne and the History of Wales’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, 6, 1931–3, 153–9 at 157–9. 23 J. Beverley Smith and Llinos Beverley Smith, ‘Wales: Politics, Government and Law’, in A Companion to Britain in the Later Middle Ages, ed. S. H. Rigby, Malden MA and Oxford 2003, 309–34 at 311. This framework was not fundamentally undermined by Powel’s attempt to synchronize the reigns of Welsh rulers with those of English kings by adding the names of the latter to the head of each page beside that of the appropriate Welsh king or prince. 24 Powel, Historie of Cambria, ‘To the Reader’ (not paginated). For a judicious assessment of the work of Llwyd and Powel ‘as propaganda for a nascent Welsh protestant patriotism as well as for a resurgent dynasticism’, see Peter Roberts, ‘Tudor Wales, National Identity and the British Inheritance’, in British Consciousness and Identity: The Making of Britain, 1533–1707, ed. Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Roberts, Cambridge 1998, 8–42 at 23–9. Cf. also idem, ‘The “Act of Union” in Welsh History’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1972–3, 1974, 49–72, esp. 54–5; Glanmor Williams, ‘Haneswyr a’r Deddfau Uno’, in Cof Cenedl X: Ysgrifau ar Hanes Cymru, ed. Geraint H. Jenkins, Llandysul 1995, 31–60, esp. 34–9; Philip Schwyzer, Literature, Nationalism and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales, Cambridge 2004, 40 and n. 83. 25 e.g. Llwyd, Cronica Walliae, 129: ‘But the Britons, fearinge the great streingth of the Kinge [William II], put their hope onely in the almightie Lorde, turned to him in fastinge and prayer, and repentaunnce of their sinnes, and he, that never forsaketh the penitent and contrite herte, herde their prayer, so that the Normaines and Englishmen durst never enter the lande but suche as entred were all slaine and the Kinge returned with small honor after he had builte certaine castelles in the Marches.’ The passage in fact places greater emphasis on God’s support than its medieval source: cf. Brut, Pen. 20, trans. Jones, 20 (1095=1097); Brut y Tywysogyon, or, The Chronicle of the Princes, Red Book of Hergest Version, ed. and trans. Thomas Jones, 2nd edn, Cardiff 1973, 36–7 (1095=1097). See also Smith, Sense of History, 9. 6 Huw Pryce God intending to punish the great sinnes and enormities of the Saxons, did moue the king thereto, that like as they being instruments of Gods wrath, vnder the colour of friends and hired soldiours, had traiterouslie and cruellie slaine the Brytaines, and driuen them out of their land, so should the Normanes by colour of this affinitie, first enter the land as friends, and bring succour against the Danes, and afterward come as foes, and be the vtter destruction of the Saxons and Angles.26 Powel added, moreover, that the destruction of the Anglo-Saxon nobility meant ‘that all the ancient noble men, and gentlemen within this land, are descended either from the Normans and French, or from the Brytaines’.27 One of the sources which Powel inserted into Llwyd’s text was Sir Edward Stradling’s account of the conquest of Glamorgan by Robert Fitzhamon and his twelve knights.28 This brings us to another important aspect of historical writing about the Normans in the Elizabethan era, namely texts that focused on the Norman conquerors rather than on Welsh history more generally. This writing was motivated by two related concerns: a pride in the origins of settler families in areas of Wales conquered by the Normans, and a desire to explain the anomalous legal and constitutional status of the lordships of the Welsh march abolished by Henry VIII’s Union legislation. Stradling’s work, composed in the 1560s at the request of Sir William Cecil, appears to draw on legendary material already circulating in Glamorgan by the fifteenth century, but first given full literary expression by him and other writers in the sixteenth.29 The principal impulse behind the composition of this tale was to establish the antiquity of the Stradling family and of other families in Glamorgan claiming Norman or English ancestry,30 and, as Ralph Griffiths has demonstrated, the text bristles with anachronisms and cannot be taken as an accurate account of Norman settlement in Glamorgan, although the role of Robert Fitzhamon himself is not in doubt.31 The earliest attempt to cite and compare different versions of the legend was made by the antiquary Rice Merrick (d. 1587), whose work on Glamorgan, Morganiae Archaiographia, was largely completed in 1578 and was influenced by the example of William Lambarde’s Perambulation of Kent, published two years previously.32 Merrick provides a further instance of interest in Norman settlement, this time in a county context. Unlike Llwyd and Powel, moreover, Merrick held that the arrival of the Normans marked a significant turning point, for he explained that I have taken in hand to entreat of the private estate of Glamorgan, which in laws, customs and usages is known to be twice altered: first, upon the winning thereof from the Britons or Welshmen, the most ancient inhabitants thereof, by strangers, which is 26 Powel, Historie of Cambria, 75–6; cf. Llwyd, Cronica Walliae, 105. Huntingdon, 338–9, likewise states that God had decided to exterminate the English for their crimes, but lacks the implicit criticism of their treatment of the Britons, merely commenting that the latter had been ‘humbled when their sins accused them’. For the heavy debt of Llwyd (and hence Powel) to Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum, see Llwyd, Cronica Walliae, 39–42. 27 Powel, Historie of Cambria, 117. 28 Ibid. 121–41. For a modern edition of the text, see Sir Edward Stradling, ‘Winning of the Lordship of Glamorgan’, in Rice Merrick, Morganiae Archaiographia, ed. Brian Ll. James, South Wales Record Soc. 1, 1983, 150–64. 29 A version of the legend was included in Llwyd, Cronica Walliae, 126 (followed by Powel, Historie of Cambria, 119–21, immediately preceding Stradling’s version). 30 Powel, Historie of Cambria, 147–9; Llwyd, Cronica Walliae, 237–8. 31 Ralph A. Griffiths, ‘The Norman Conquest and the Twelve Knights of Glamorgan’, in idem, Conquerors and Conquered in Medieval Wales, Stroud 1994, 19–29. 32 Merrick, Morganiae Archaiographia, 15–23; for a full assessment of the work, see the Editor’s Introduction, ibid. pp. xi–xxxvii. The Normans in Welsh History 7 commonly termed the Conquest of Glamorgan: secondarily, by the famous King Henry the eighth, in the 27th year of his triumphant reign, when Wales was enabled with the benefit of the laws of England.33 Yet, while paying lip service to the idea that God had punished Iestyn ap Gwrgant’s dynasty for its sins,34 Merrick was much more critical of the Normans than Llwyd or Powel and also played down their long-term impact on the county. Thus the conquest of Fitzhamon and his followers was described as a ‘facinorous act’, ‘wickedly achieved’, resulting from ‘greediness of sovereignty and dominion’ and ‘wicked intentions’.35 The account also drew a parallel with earlier Saxon treachery which was more explicit than that drawn by Powel shortly afterwards, stating that the manner of the Normans’ acquisition of Glamorgan imitated ‘the Saxons’ fraudulent manner by them practised in achieving the sovereignty of Loegria, now called England, from the Britons, whom they pretended to aid and defend’.36 In the long run, however, the Normans had mostly integrated with the Welsh through intermarriage, so that ‘Such as remain at this day of the posterity of the conquerors (which are but few) inhabit either the towns or in the low country near the sea side, who in names and speech differ from the ancient Glamorganians’.37 Another theme of Merrick’s work is the organization and government of the marcher lordship of Glamorgan under the Norman lords and their successors, including their possession of jura regalia.38 The origins and status of marcher lordships were considered in much greater detail, and on a broader canvas, by the Pembrokeshire antiquary George Owen of Henllys, in ‘A Treatise of Lordshipps Marchers in Wales’, written in the mid-1590s.39 Owen had a personal interest in the subject, as he himself was not only the holder of the marcher lordship of Cemais in northern Pembrokeshire but also claimed, albeit on very flimsy evidence, Norman ancestry. However, such lordships had been deprived of their extensive liberties as the result of Henry VIII’s so-called Acts of Union in 1536–43, so that, Owen wrote, ‘it is now growne a doubte and question wch are and were Lordships marchers in Wales & wch were not’.40 In attempting to resolve that question he argued that the kings of England, finding it difficult to carry out a full-scale conquest of Wales, devolved the task to their great lords, who, although they held the lands thus acquired from the Crown, nevertheless were allowed to enjoy extensive regalian liberties in governing them.41 In short, Owen declared, ‘to hold a Lordshipp in Wales of the kinge in cheife in Ancient time was sufficient to make him a Lord marcher, and of 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 Ibid. 5. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 21–4. Ibid. 24–5. Ibid. 34–5. Ibid. 12, 28–9, 33–4, 35–41. George Owen, ‘A Treatise of Lordshipps Marchers in Wales’, in The Description of Penbrokshire by George Owen of Henllys, Lord of Kemes, ed. Henry Owen, 4 vols, London 1892–1936, III, 127–207 (with notes by Egerton Phillimore, ibid. 207–86). On Owen, see B. G. Charles, George Owen of Henllys: A Welsh Elizabethan, Aberystwyth 1973; Dillwyn Miles, ‘ “An Exquisite Antiquary”: George Owen of Henllys (1552–1613)’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1998, new series 5, 1999, 5–23. 40 Owen, ‘Treatise’, 173. 41 Ibid. 135–40. Owen took pains to provide reasons for the lack of royal charters granting those liberties: ibid. 140. For the views of marcher magnates from the late thirteenth century onwards that their regality derived from their predecessors’ conquests in Wales, see J. Beverley Smith, ‘ “Distinction and Diversity”: The Common Lawyers and the Law of Wales’, in Power and Identity in the Middle Ages, ed. Pryce and Watts, 139–52 at 147–50. 8 Huw Pryce necessitie the Lord thereof was forced to take vpon him the Regall authoritie of a Lord marcher’.42 Owen also offered some sensible comments on the origins of the terms ‘marchers’ and ‘marches’,43 and contrasted the way in which the Anglo-Saxon kings had integrated the Welsh territories they conquered, such as Archenfield, into the kingdom of England with the policy of the Norman kings, unable to concentrate on Wales because of their commitments in France, of allowing their nobility to undertake piecemeal conquests as best they could.44 To sum up so far, then, Welsh historiography of the Elizabethan period reveals two broad approaches to the significance of the Normans in the history of Wales. On the one hand, Llwyd and Powel, following the lead of the medieval Welsh chronicles, constructed a narrative framed by the Anglo-Saxon occupation of England in, so they believed, the seventh century and the Edwardian conquest of Wales, a narrative that tended to play down the impact of the Normans by emphasizing the continuity of native political rule from the late eleventh to late thirteenth centuries. On the other hand, antiquaries interested in areas of Wales which had formed lordships of the Welsh march paid greater attention to the Normans, though their restricted geographical and thematic focus meant that none of these writers offered an alternative interpretation of Welsh history as a whole which could challenge the national narratives that centred on the native kings and princes. The same is true of historical works written over the following three centuries.45 Admittedly, by the nineteenth century several writers gave greater prominence to the arrival of the Normans in their periodization of the history of Wales.46 Thus in 1857 R. W. Morgan designated the entire period from 1066 to 1485 as ‘The Norman Era’,47 while in 1869 Jane Williams entitled her chapters covering the years from 1091 to 1240 ‘The Cymry and the Normans’,48 and also presented the Norman conquest of Glamorgan as a major turning point in Welsh history more generally: Then, for the first time in the history of Cymru, the hereditary succession of the native landowners was wrenched away and broken up. A people, who had retained their tribal honours throughout four centuries of Roman domination, and preserved their sacred territory from the encroaching Teutons, while defending it also from invading sea-rovers for nearly seven centuries more, saw and felt in the conquest of Morganwg the worst 42 Owen, ‘Treatise’, 152. Owen’s interpretation of the origins of marcher liberties was very influential: Miles, ‘Exquisite Antiquary’, 16. See, for example, William Coxe, An Historical Tour in Monmouthshire, 2 vols, London 1801, I, 9–10 (a work kindly drawn to my attention by Nia Powell). For modern discussion of the origins of marcher lordships in Wales, see esp. J. G. Edwards, ‘The Normans and the Welsh March’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 42, 1956, 155–77; R. R. Davies, ‘Kings, Lords and Liberties in the March of Wales, 1066–1272’, TRHS 5th series 29, 1979, 41–61. 43 Owen, ‘Treatise’, 181–7. 44 Ibid. 190–1. Cf. C. P. Lewis, ‘Welsh Territories and Welsh Identities in Late Anglo-Saxon England’, in Britons in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Nick Higham, Woodbridge 2007, 130–43. 45 For a stimulating discussion of the main themes in Welsh historiography from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, see Dafydd Glyn Jones, Un o Wŷr y Medra: Bywyd a Gwaith William Williams, Llandygái, 1738–1817, Denbigh 1999, 294–319 (whose conclusions are summarized in idem, ‘Byw gyda Hanes’, in Cymry a’r Cymry 2000: Wales and the Welsh 2000, ed. Geraint H. Jenkins, Aberystwyth 2001, 87–98 at 88–90). Cf. also Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘Clio and Wales: Welsh Remembrancers and Historical Writing, 1751–2001’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 2001, new series 8, 2002, 119–36. 46 Theophilus Jones, A History of the County of Brecknock, 2 vols, Brecknock 1805–9, I, 66, 90–1, continued the tradition of earlier county historians such as Rice Merrick in making the arrival of the Normans a decisive turning point in one area of the Welsh march. 47 R. W. Morgan, The British Kymry, or Britons of Cambria, Caernarfon [1857], 159–230. 48 Jane Williams, A History of Wales derived from Authentic Sources, London 1869, 192, 215, 234, 263, 295 (chapters XV–XIX). The Normans in Welsh History 9 evils of subjugation; while fellow-warriors of the foes who triumphed there exultingly threatened to reduce the other districts of Cymru to a state of equal degradation.49 The furthest step in this direction was taken by the English historian B. B. Woodward, who not only referred to the reigns and Welsh campaigns of the kings of England in the titles of his chapters dealing with the period 1066–1189, but also justified the emphasis this implied by asserting that it was those kings, rather than the native rulers, who had primarily determined the course of events in Wales at that time. We have been compelled to employ the invasions and the deaths of the English sovereigns as the landmarks of our story, because by those events, rather than by the movements and succession of its native princes, the course of affairs in Wales was determined. The secondary importance of the character of these reguli (as the Norman chroniclers designate those whom the Welsh called ‘kings’) to that of the contemporaneous monarchs of Lloegria, must have been evident to our readers; and especially since the overthrow of the Saxon power.50 Overall, though, even among those historians who applied a Norman label to their periodization, the dominant chronological framework remained that set by the reigns of the Welsh rulers, and thus it was their conflicts with the Normans which continued to hold centre stage.51 Attitudes to those conflicts differed, however. Broadly speaking, one school of thought tended to view the invaders as preferable to the Welsh princes, while the other, which perhaps not surprisingly had more adherents, used the Normans as a foil for celebrating the courage and national spirit of the Welsh. (It should be added that all the historians in question, like their sixteenth-century predecessors, were strongly in favour of the Union with England under Henry VIII.) The proNorman attitude is best exemplified by two accounts of the history of Wales, one composed by John Jones, a Welsh barrister who had studied in Germany, the other by B. B. Woodward, already mentioned.52 While justifiably critical of some of his 49 Ibid. 193. For a recent assessment of Williams’s History, see Neil Evans, ‘Finding a New Story: The Search for a Usable Past in Wales, 1869–1930’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 2003, new series 10, 2004, 144–62 at 147–9. 50 B. B. Woodward, The History of Wales, London 1853, 274. The passage continues: ‘Their most marked influence upon the fate of their country was this, – the more patriotic (according to the common meaning of that much abused word) they were, the more surely they hurried Wales onward to its destruction; whilst the less anxious they were for nominal independence, and the more they affected the favour of the rulers of the Saxons, the more peaceful Wales was, and the less galling was the English yoke.’ 51 In addition to the works already cited, the point is illustrated by the two most important Welshlanguage histories of Wales in the nineteenth century. Although Thomas Price (Carnhuanawc) (1787– 1848) included sections entitled ‘Dyfodiad y Normaniaid’ (The Coming of the Normans) and ‘Arglwyddi y Cyffindiroedd, neu y Lords Marchers’ (The Lords of the Borderlands, or the Lords Marchers), he placed these within a lengthy chapter V entitled ‘Tywysogion Cymru’ (The Princes of Wales), thereby effectively subordinating them to a narrative focused on the native rulers: Thomas Price, Hanes Cymru a Chenedl y Cymry, o’r Cynoesoedd hyd at Farwolaeth Llewelyn ap Gruffydd; ynghyd a rhai Cofiaint Perthynol i’r Amseroedd o’r Pryd Hynny i Waered, Crickhowell 1842, 371, 472, 489, 494. At first sight, Robert John Pryse (Gweirydd ap Rhys) (1807–89) went further than Price by designating the whole period 1066–1282 as ‘Y Cyfnod Normanaidd’ (The Norman Period) and, in a manner reminiscent of David Powel’s page headings (n. 23 above), by juxtaposing the names of Welsh rulers with the Norman kings of their time in several chapter titles: Gweirydd ap Rhys, Hanes y Brytaniaid a’r Cymry, 2 vols, London 1872–4, II, 1, 20, 26, 33. Nevertheless, this labelling was not accompanied by a significant reorientation from the traditional emphasis on the native kings and princes in the chapters themselves. 52 A brief foretaste of this attitude is Theophilus Evans’s declaration, in the second edition (1740) of his ‘A Mirror of the First Ages’, that the conquest of Wales by Edward I was a thousand times better for the general benefit of the country than the rule of the native princes: Drych y Prif Oesoedd, ed. 10 Huw Pryce predecessors for their fanciful interpretations,53 Jones himself was prone to eccentricity – illustrated, for example, by his evidently bowdlerizing reference to ‘the invasion of England by William the Bastard, so called from his being commander in chief of the Bastardi, who were armed with bows and arrows, and spears’.54 Jones was also unusual in that, unlike previous historians of Wales, he viewed the Normans as an essentially progressive force, praising their contribution as ‘artificers and husbandmen’ and church builders. Conversely, while expressing some patriotic sentiments in places, he criticized the native princes for their ‘false ideas … of a great government, namely, that it consisted in extent of jurisdiction, and thus overlooking the obvious criteria of population and produce’ as well as the greater willingness of the Welsh ‘to rebel under their princes than to receive benefits from the hands of enlightened Normans’.55 Likewise he declared that the Flemings settled in Pembrokeshire by the ‘liberal monarch’ Henry I ‘have been of great benefit to the principality, by introducing the practice of good husbandry’.56 Writing some thirty years later, Woodward was even sharper in his criticism of the Welsh, charging them with a penchant for falsehood and disunity, and argued that their eventual conquest was both inevitable and desirable.57 Lack of unity in the face of a foreign enemy is also a key theme in the work of those historians who portrayed the history of Wales in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries as a patriotic struggle for freedom against Norman aggression and oppression. On the whole, the emphasis here was on Welsh responses to the Normans rather than on the Normans themselves; moreover, while the latter were always cast as the enemy, this did not meant that they were subjected to unremitting condemnation. True, the later nineteenth-century historians Jane Williams and Gweirydd ap Rhys vented their spleen on ‘the rapacious Normans’, ‘Norman oppressors’, and ‘the oppression, arrogance and deceit of the Normans’,58 while both authors’ vehement anti-Catholicism found further grounds for hostility. Thus, according to Jane Williams, the Normans drove out the native clergy, attacked ‘the independence of the ancient British Church’ through establishing ecclesiastical courts ‘wholly Samuel J. Evans, Bangor 1902, 140. This negative assessment is lacking in the corresponding passage of the first edition (1716), where, instead, the author complains that Edward’s conquest had brought the Welsh ‘through deceit and falseness under English law for the first time’: Theophilus Evans, Drych y Prif Oesoedd, Yn ôl yr Argraffiad Cyntaf: 1716, ed. Garfield H. Hughes, Cardiff 1961, 100–1. On Evans’s work, see further Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘Historical Writing in the Eighteenth Century’, in A Guide to Welsh Literature, c. 1700–1800, ed. Branwen Jarvis, Cardiff 2000, 23–44 at 27–9; Gwyn Thomas, ‘Two Prose Writers: Ellis Wynne and Theophilus Evans’, ibid. 45–63 at 54–62. 53 John Jones, The History of Wales, Descriptive of the Government, Wars, Manners, Religion, Laws, Druids, Bards, Pedigrees, and Language of the Ancient Britons and Modern Welsh, and of the Remaining Antiquities of the Principality, London [1824], pp. iii–iv. For a brief account of Jones, see The Dictionary of Welsh Biography down to 1940, ed. John Edward Lloyd and R. T. Jenkins, London 1959, 477. 54 Jones, History of Wales, 61. 55 Ibid. 66, 139. On the other hand, Jones highlighted the importance of the pedigrees of the Welsh ‘as the more ancient natives of the island’, and also conceded that the Welsh princes’ practice of breaking treaties with the English Crown was ‘morally excusable: for the kings of England by imposing on the princes by force, tyrannical conditions of tenure, had no right to expect the performance of treaties; because there can be no binding contract in any case where either of the parties is not in the full liberty and exercise of volition.’ Ibid. pp. viii, 67–8. 56 Ibid. 68. Cf. also the statement that, in implied contrast to the Normans and Flemings, ‘[t]he Welsh had not sufficient industry to cultivate their possessions’: ibid. 71. 57 Woodward, History of Wales, 239–40, 259, 274–5. For Welsh treachery and disunity, see also ibid. 232, 236, 251. 58 Williams, History of Wales, 193, 195 (and cf. ibid. 184, 199, 210, 234, 255); ap Rhys, Hanes y Brytaniaid a’r Cymry, II, 21 (and cf. ibid. 3, 22, 28, 31). The Normans in Welsh History 11 subservient to the interests of Rome’, and established religious houses which, ‘being supplied with foreign monks or canons, introduced for the first time into Wales transubstantiation, purgatory, communion in one kind, the idolatrous worship of saints and images, and the antichristian acknowledgement of the universal supremacy and infallibility of the Roman See’.59 Nevertheless, like a number of their predecessors, both Williams and Gweirydd ap Rhys also deplored the failure of some Welsh kings and princes to resist the Normans.60 The tendency of native rulers to dissipate their energies in internal dissension to the detriment of the national cause had been criticized, for example, by William Warrington, writing almost a century earlier: ‘These intestine divisions, too descriptive of the manners of the Welsh, were the means of accelerating the ruin of their states; destroying by degrees their union and their strength, and affording opportunities to the English kings of detaching the Welsh chieftains from the interests of their country.’61 Likewise Warrington and several of his successors branded as traitors those native rulers who sought Norman help against their Welsh enemies.62 Yet there was also another, more positive, side to the story: the heroic tale of Welsh bravery in resisting a foreign foe. This comes through particularly strongly in Thomas Price’s Hanes Cymru, an important Welsh-language history of Wales published in 1842.63 A particularly interesting aspect of his interpretation is the way it presents relations with the Normans as evidence of the superiority of the Welsh over the English – a notion already found, as we have seen, in the historians of the Elizabethan era. In part, this was simply a matter of saying that the Welsh had been far more determined and successful than the English in defending their land and liberty: thus the English were accused of ‘shameful submission to foreign oppression’ caused by their ‘cowardice and lack of energy’, whereas the Welsh were distinguished by their ‘patriotism and courage’, and did not lose their possessions without a fight.64 Even the propensity of the Welsh for disunity was almost turned into a virtue, inasmuch as it allowed Price to claim that it was not through their innate power that the Normans were able to establish themselves in Wales but rather because the Welsh princes employed them in their civil conflicts.65 But the most striking element in his anti-English sentiment picks up one of the cornerstones of Welsh historiography, mentioned earlier, namely the idea that the British ancestors of the Welsh had been unjustly deprived of their sovereignty in Britain by the Saxons, the last British king being forced into exile in Brittany. Powel had already strongly implied that the Norman conquest of England was divine vengeance for this, but Price gave the idea a further twist by asserting that William the Conqueror’s 59 Williams, History of Wales, 206. Cf. ap Rhys, Hanes y Brytaniaid a’r Cymry, II, 243; E. J. Newell, A History of the Welsh Church to the Dissolution of the Monasteries, London 1895, 175–9, 193, 418–19. Although earlier historians of Wales had also expressed hostility to Catholicism, this hostility was usually directed at Augustine of Canterbury rather than at the Normans: see, e.g., Llwyd, Cronica Walliae, 185; Jones, History of Wales, 134–5. 60 Williams, History of Wales, 198; ap Rhys, Hanes y Brytaniaid a’r Cymry, II, 10, 38. 61 William Warrington, The History of Wales, London 1786, 403; cf. ibid. 360. 62 e.g. ibid. 365; ap Rhys, Hanes y Brytaniaid a’r Cymry, II, 5, 18; cf. Jones, History of Wales, 71. 63 For Price, see Dictionary of Welsh Biography, ed. Lloyd and Jenkins, 791–2; J. E. Lloyd, rev. Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Price, Thomas [pseud. Carnhuanawc] (1787–1848)’, in ODNB. Hanes Cymru appeared in fourteen parts between 1836 and 1842, and was published as a single volume in the latter year. 64 Price, Hanes Cymru, 474, 492, 500. Again like Powel, Price also argued that the willingness of the Normans to marry Welsh, but not Anglo-Saxon, noblewomen, demonstrated the honourable standing of the Welsh nation: ibid. 501 (a point for which Price was praised in ap Rhys, Hanes y Brytaniaid a’r Cymry, II, 22, n. †). 65 Price, Hanes Cymru, 492. 12 Huw Pryce Breton followers had recovered lands from which their forefathers had been exiled – ‘Yes, I say, it is a very special example of restoring the scales that these Bretons … returned to their native country, and contributed so effectively to placing the yoke of slavery on the necks of the English, as payment for violence and exile’.66 In the summer of 1876, over thirty years after it first appeared, Price’s book was read by a fifteen-year-old from Liverpool called John Edward Lloyd.67 Three and a half decades later, in 1911, Lloyd published his own magnum opus, A History of Wales from the Earliest Times to the Edwardian Conquest, a landmark work, which, to quote Rees Davies, ‘may be said, without exaggeration, to inaugurate the history of Wales as a modern academic subject’.68 One of Lloyd’s principal achievements was to draw on a much wider range of sources, and to analyse these much more critically, than any of his predecessors. Yet in reading Lloyd it is important not to lose sight of the continuities and parallels with earlier works: especially his belief in the ancient origins of the Welsh, albeit as witnessed by prehistoric archaeology rather than Galfridian myth-making; his assumption that the history of Wales was synonymous with the history of the Welsh people and in particular its native leaders; and an acceptance of the Union with England, albeit a Union set in the wider context of the British Empire that left considerable space for the institutional expression of a distinctive Welsh identity. Arguably, then, Lloyd’s vision of Welsh history was, in Hayden White’s terms, essentially comic: yes, hopes of political independence had ended in 1282, or possibly with the failure of Owain Glyndŵr’s rising; nevertheless, all had turned out well in the end, for the struggles of the medieval period helped to preserve a distinctive national spirit that would not only go on to survive the next major period of change in Welsh history, namely industrialization and the rise of nonconformity from the late eighteenth century onwards, but also to flourish as never before in the late Victorian and Edwardian world Lloyd inhabited and indeed celebrated.69 So, how were the Normans accommodated in this interpretation of Welsh history? Lloyd first wrote about their impact on Wales while an undergraduate in Oxford, when, in March 1885, he read a paper on Wales and the marches in the reign of Stephen to the History Society, chaired by E. A. Freeman, an occasion described as follows by one of the participants: The point of interest was, what the chairman would say concerning so Celtic a subject as the doing of Gruffydd ap Llewelyn or Madoc ap Meredydd. Would he say that the time of the Society was wasted in recounting border frays between lawless marchers 66 Ibid. 478. This line of thought was developed further by R. W. Morgan, who claimed that the Normans had British roots as a result of intermarriage between the houses of Rollo of Normandy and Ralph of Brittany, and thus regarded their victory at Hastings as the recovery of their ancestral land from the Germanic oppressors: British Kymry, 159–60. 67 University of Wales, Bangor Archives, J. E. Lloyd Papers 336 (1876 diary, 14 June, 4 Aug.). Cf. Lloyd Papers 17, p. 5, for Lloyd’s possession of a copy of Carnhuanawc’s Hanes Cymru formerly owned by his maternal uncle Edward Jones (1830–63). 68 R. R. Davies, ‘Lloyd, Sir John Edward (1861–1947)’, in ODNB. 69 For recent discussions of Lloyd’s interpretation of Welsh history, see Neil Evans, ‘ “When Men and Mountains Meet”: Historians’ Explanations of the History of Wales, 1890–1970’, Welsh History Review, 22, 2004–5, 222–51 at 228–37; Huw Pryce, ‘Modern Nationality and the Medieval Past: The Wales of John Edward Lloyd’, in From Medieval to Modern Wales: Historical Essays in Honour of Kenneth O. Morgan and Ralph A. Griffiths, ed. R. R. Davies and Geraint H. Jenkins, Cardiff 2004, 14–29; idem, ‘From the Neolithic to Nonconformity: J. E. Lloyd and the History of Caernarfonshire’, Transactions of the Caernarvonshire Historical Society, 66, 2005, 14–37. Cf. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Baltimore MD and London 1973, chapter 4, esp. 163–78 (apropos of Ranke). The Normans in Welsh History 13 and Welsh savages? For there are three things Freeman hates, – Froude, hunting, and Celts. When the applause consequent on the reading of the paper was over, he began to inveigh against the method usually adapted by Eisteddfod writers in dealing with the history of Wales, and favourably compared with theirs the truly historical method taken by Mr Lloyd. … The learned professor ended by saying it was the most pleasant evening he had spent for a long time.70 Unfortunately no record survives of what precisely Lloyd said that evening. Presumably the paper drew on his prize-winning Eisteddfod essay on the history of Wales, a revised version of which he completed at the end of the same month.71 This outlined themes that would recur in his interpretation of the Normans’ place in Welsh history in publications over the following quarter of a century, including an important lecture on ‘Wales and the Coming of the Normans’ delivered in 1900, and culminating in the great History of 1911.72 One was the role of Gruffudd ap Llywelyn, the king who died in 1063, in uniting Wales under his rule, and who thereby, Lloyd asserted in 1900, ‘did much to infuse into his fellow countrymen a greater confidence in themselves, and so helped them after his death to offer a united resistance to the invader. His successes fired them, as the Elizabethans were fired by the triumphs of Drake and the sea-dogs.’73 Another theme was the partial nature of the conquests, which led to a division of the country into two zones held, to quote Lloyd, by ‘the Norman castle holders and the native princes’.74 Yet a comparison with the History published in 1911 also suggests that Lloyd came to play down the significance of the Normans’ longer-term impact on Wales. In 1885 he not only pointed up the co-existence of Norman or marcher lords and Welsh rulers but also argued for their mutually beneficial interaction: Instead of sinking into the degradation of a subject race, as they would infallibly have done under an English conquest, the Welsh learned to look upon themselves as the equals of their conquerors, and the Normans, with that power of adaptation which is so marvellous a feature in their history, accepted the position, and became the civilisers, as well as the conquerors of Wales.75 The 1911 History also contrasts the English unfavourably with the Normans, but in a rather different way that emphasized the greater threat posed by the latter: ‘instead of a sluggish, home-keeping race, who had for ages given up colonisation, Wales must now face … the flower of a people pre-eminently gifted as colonists, men not in the least afraid of the difficulties and dangers of Welsh campaigning’.76 70 J. E. Lloyd Papers 252 (1885 diary, 2 Mar.); Owen M. Edwards, ‘An Oxford Letter’, University College of Wales Magazine, 7, 1884–5, 269–72 at 269–70. 71 John Edward Lloyd, ‘History of Wales’, Transactions of the Royal National Eisteddfod of Wales, Liverpool, 1884, Liverpool 1885, 341–408; cf. J. E. Lloyd Papers 252 (1885 diary, 31 Mar.). 72 He also dealt with the Normans’ impact on Wales in the third of his bilingual textbooks on Welsh history down to 1282 written for school children: John Edward Lloyd, Trydydd Llyfr Hanes, Caernarfon 1900, 11–53. 73 J. E. Lloyd, ‘Wales and the Coming of the Normans’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1899–1900, 122–79 at 123. 74 Lloyd, ‘History of Wales’, 386–95, quotation at 394. 75 Ibid. 395. Cf. Lloyd, Trydydd Llyfr Hanes, 51–3: ‘Thus the great struggle between the Welsh and the Normans ended in the two nations agreeing to live side by side. … From this time forth Wales may be divided into Welsh Wales and Norman Wales. … The barons and the princes often fought fiercely after this, but it was as neighbours they quarrelled, over trivial points, and not as the leaders of two races bent on mutual extermination. The Welshman felt he had much to learn from the Norman, especially in military science; nor was the Norman too proud to acknowledge that the advantage rested with the Welsh in some respects, notably in regard to his literature.’ 76 Lloyd, History of Wales, II, 373. 14 Huw Pryce However, while Lloyd acknowledged that ‘[t]he struggle with the Norman’ was ‘the topic of primary interest in Welsh history’ for thirty-five years, and delineated the extent of Norman conquests in south Wales by the reign of Henry I more fully than any previous scholar,77 the conquerors were essentially subordinated to a broader narrative of Welsh national identity and independence rather than being the subject of study in their own right – a point for which Lloyd was in fact criticized by T. F. Tout.78 More specifically, Lloyd minimized the Norman impact on Wales as a whole: though their conquests were extensive, they failed to make fundamental changes to Welsh society. True, he devoted over 100 pages of the History to the period from 1063 to 1135 in two chapters each bearing the title ‘The Norman Conquest’.79 However, the first of these chapters opened with a section, based on his 1900 lecture, which emphasized the role of Gruffudd ap Llywelyn in unifying the Welsh and thus, Lloyd believed, equipping them to resist the Norman threat; while the second was immediately followed by a chapter boldly entitled ‘The National Revival’, which related the Welsh successes against the Normans in Stephen’s reign. These interpretations of both Gruffudd’s rule and the Welsh risings from 1136 onwards are now open to serious question,80 but their role in Lloyd’s narrative is clear, as they served to diminish the significance of the Norman conquests by confining them between two supposed high tides of Welsh national unity. The point was driven home several chapters later, when Lloyd concluded that, at the end of the twelfth century, ‘in essentials Wales still retained its ancient social structure, remaining a tribal and pastoral community in spite of the great wave of feudalism which beat upon its eastern flank and daily threatened to engulf the older social system’.81 Lloyd’s treatment of the Normans in Wales is consistent, then, with his aim of showing that the Welsh had a political history of their own in the Middle Ages, represented by the struggles of the native princes to establish unity and maintain independence from England, struggles that helped to explain the survival of a distinctive sense of national identity into the present. As he explicitly stated in 1932, he sought to ‘delineate the course of events which has created the Welsh people’,82 thereby implying that other peoples who had inhabited the land of Wales were of only peripheral significance. If so, he may have regarded changes brought about by Norman and other settlers as merely alien intrusions that did not count as part of Welsh history. More generally, his emphasis on both political events and, more importantly, the deep roots of Welsh nationality may have predisposed Lloyd to play down the evidence for change within medieval Welsh society – including change precipitated or accelerated by Norman conquest and settlement. Rather, in his view, the decisive changes had occurred back in prehistory, as a succession of 77 78 Ibid. 373 (quotation), 423–30. T. F. Tout, review of Lloyd, History of Wales, EHR 27, 1912, 131–5 at 135; compare Rudolf Thurneysen’s criticism of Lloyd for exaggerating the degree of conflict between the Welsh and the AngloNormans, in Historische Zeitschrift, 110, 1913, 405–8 at 408. 79 Lloyd, History of Wales, II, 357–461 (chapters XI–XII). Together these chapters (written mainly in 1906: J. E. Lloyd Papers 212) occupied almost 14 per cent of the History. 80 For recent accounts of Gruffudd, see K. L. Maund, Ireland, Wales, and England in the Eleventh Century, Woodbridge 1991, 64–8, 126–40; Mike Davies, ‘Gruffudd ap Llywelyn, King of Wales’, Welsh History Review, 21, 2002–3, 207–48. Lloyd’s notion of a ‘national revival’ is challenged in David Crouch, ‘The March and the Welsh Kings’, in The Anarchy of King Stephen’s Reign, ed. Edmund King, Oxford 1994, 255–89 at 268–9. 81 Lloyd, History, II, 605. 82 John Edward Lloyd, Wales and the Past: Two Voices, Cardiff 1932, 9. The Normans in Welsh History 15 racial migrations led, through a process of integration, to the creation by the Roman period of the essential features that would characterize the Welsh throughout the Middle Ages: he more than once observed that the Welsh described by Gerald of Wales at the end of the twelfth century were fundamentally the same as the Celts inhabiting the mountainous interior of Britain described by Caesar a millennium earlier.83 In sum, then, Lloyd put the Normans more firmly on the historiographical map of Wales than before, yet, like his predecessors, he concentrated attention on the Welsh response to the conquerors and was reluctant to accord the latter a central role in his narrative as actors who had made a positive contribution in their own right.84 As we shall see shortly, this perception has only been significantly challenged in the last thirty years or so. True, attention continued to be paid through the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the Norman and other settlers in individual counties, especially Glamorgan,85 and also more widely in the march of south Wales – the pioneering work of William Rees is a notable case in point, although this focused mainly on the period after the Edwardian conquest.86 Moreover, already in the early twentieth century one of Lloyd’s younger contemporaries, E. A. Lewis (1880–1942), had argued, in a manner reminiscent of John Jones a century earlier, that Norman conquest ‘gradually revolutionised the primitive conditions of Welsh economy’ and that ‘tribal Wales … had definitely passed into feudal hands’.87 For Lewis, the Normans made a welcome contribution to the history of Wales in general through the introduction of the manor, industry, trade, towns, and Cistercian monasteries; likewise, he asserted that the plantation boroughs established in north Wales by Edward I were ‘apostles of a new liberty and the avenues of economic development’.88 While Lloyd shared similar progressionist assumptions, he seems 83 Lloyd, ‘History of Wales’, 365, 383–5; idem, Early Welsh Agriculture, Bangor 1894, 3; and cf. n. 81 above. 84 Lloyd did acknowledge, though, that the conquerors had made a significant impact on south Wales through their foundation of castles, towns, and religious houses and on Wales as a whole through their subjection of the Welsh bishoprics to the authority of Canterbury: History of Wales, II, 423–59. 85 See, e.g., Cartae et alia munimenta quae ad dominium de Glamorgancia pertinent, ed. G. T. Clark, 6 vols, 2nd edn, Cardiff 1910 (and discussion of the editor’s scholarly contribution in G. T. Clark: Scholar Ironmaster in the Victorian Age, ed. Brian Ll. James, Cardiff 1998, esp. chapters 5–7); John Stuart Corbett, Glamorgan: Papers & Notes on the Lordship and its Members, ed. D. R. Paterson, Cardiff 1925; Lewis D. Nicholl, The Normans in Glamorgan, Gower and Kidweli, Cardiff 1936; J. Beverley Smith, ‘The Lordship of Glamorgan’, Morgannwg, 2, 1958, 9–37; idem, ‘The Kingdom of Morgannwg and the Norman Conquest of Glamorgan’, in Glamorgan County History, III: The Middle Ages, ed. T. B. Pugh, Cardiff 1971, 1–43. 86 William Rees, ‘The Mediaeval Lordship of Brecon’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1915–16, 165–224; idem, South Wales and the March, 1284–1415, Oxford 1924, esp. 1, 25–6. See further Gwynedd O. Pierce, ‘Obituary: William Rees (1887–1978)’, Welsh History Review, 9, 1978–9, 486–92; Evans, ‘When Men and Mountains Meet’, 240–2. Lynn H. Nelson, The Normans in South Wales, 1070–1171, Austin TX 1966, a work influenced by Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis on the frontier in American history, is also probably better seen as a further instance of marcher historiography than as an attempt to integrate the Normans into the history of Wales more generally. 87 Edward A. Lewis, ‘A Contribution to the Commercial History of Mediaeval Wales’, Y Cymmrodor, 24, 1913, 86–188 at 87–8, 90. See further Evans, ‘When Men and Mountains Meet’, 237–40. 88 Lewis, ‘Contribution to Commercial History’, 87–90; quotation from idem, The Mediaeval Boroughs of Snowdonia, London 1912, 275–6. William Rees later took a similar view in a brief essay, in which he stated that the Norman impact ‘left a deep imprint on the course of the development of the country’, through introducing ‘large-scale farming … towns and trade’ and reorganizing the Welsh Church: William Rees, ‘The Norman Conquest’, in Wales through the Ages. Volume I: From the Earliest Times to 1485, ed. A. J. Roderick, Llandybïe 1959, 81–7 at 81. The decisive influence of the Normans on the development of the Church in Wales had already been accepted by Lloyd (above, n. 84), and this interpretation was elaborated in the detailed introduction to Episcopal Acts and Cognate Documents Relating to Welsh 16 Huw Pryce to have seen economic progress as a purely modern phenomenon, originating with the Industrial Revolution; the Middle Ages mattered above all as a crucible for the forging of an enduring Welsh nationality.89 By contrast, Lewis, as an economic historian, was readier to detect medieval foundations for the thriving commercial and industrial Wales of his own day. Yet it was only in the last decades of the twentieth century that historians began to provide a sustained analysis of the Norman impact on Wales, a development signalled by the decision of the editors of a series called ‘A New History of Wales’ to include a volume by David Walker entitled The Norman Conquerors, which was published in 1977.90 Another indication of changing perceptions came in 1985, when Gwyn A. Williams opened the chapter covering the High Middle Ages in his history of Wales with the bold declaration that ‘The Normans made the Welsh a European people.’91 However, the most comprehensive and nuanced attempt to allow the Normans and their marcher successors a central role in Welsh history appeared two years later, in 1987, with the publication of Rees Davies’s magisterial Conquest, Coexistence, and Change: Wales, 1063–1415.92 This was the first large-scale synthesis of medieval Welsh history since the second volume of Lloyd’s classic work, and, as befitted the author of an earlier major book on the march of Wales,93 Davies adopted a more inclusive view than Lloyd by allotting considerable space in his account to the marcher lordships and their settler communities and by treating these as integral parts of Wales. In other words, his concept of Wales was essentially geographical, and its history was thus more than that of one ethnic group, the Welsh. Indeed, he listed ‘the making of the March of Wales’ and ‘the impact of Anglo-Norman colonization’ among the issues on which he had deliberately chosen to focus in order to try and reflect the ‘shift in the gravity of historical interest’ since Lloyd’s day.94 Why, in conclusion, did it take so long for the Normans to be viewed as a positive element that could be integrated into broader accounts of Welsh history? One way of approaching the question is to turn it round and ask why the framework devised by Llwyd and Powel in the sixteenth century, with its emphasis on the struggles of native kings and princes, proved so durable. The issue requires far fuller consideration than is possible within the scope of the present discussion. However, part of the answer lies in the framework’s adaptability, exemplified, for instance, by the utilization of additional primary and secondary sources as well as by the willingness of some later historians to follow David Powel’s example and extend the coverage of events down to their own time.95 Yet such adaptation, even when, as with J. E. Lloyd, Dioceses, 1066–1272, ed. James Conway Davies, 2 vols, Cardiff 1946–8. Cf. also Glanmor Williams, The Welsh Church from Conquest to Reformation, Cardiff 1962, 3: the subordination of the Welsh bishoprics to Canterbury and the English Crown ‘was a change big with consequences for Church and people in Wales, comparable in scope and magnitude with those later to be brought about by the Reformation or the Methodist Revival’. 89 Cf. Lloyd, History, II, 764; J. E. Lloyd, A History of Wales, London 1930, 53, 59–60; Pryce, ‘From the Neolithic to Nonconformity’, 23–4. 90 David Walker, The Norman Conquerors, Swansea 1977. 91 Gwyn A. Williams, When was Wales? A History of the Welsh, Harmondsworth 1985, 62. 92 R. R. Davies, Conquest, Coexistence, and Change: Wales, 1063–1415, Oxford 1987; reissued as The Age of Conquest: Wales, 1063–1415, Oxford 1991; revised edn, Oxford 2000. 93 R. R. Davies, Lordship and Society in the March of Wales, 1282–1400, Oxford 1978. 94 Davies, Conquest, p. vii. 95 See n. 19 above. Owen M. Edwards, Wales, London 1901, was the first book on the history of Wales in which more space was allotted to the period after 1282 than to that before it: J. G. Edwards, ‘Sir John Edward Lloyd, 1861–1947’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 41, 1955, 319–27 at 321. The Normans in Welsh History 17 it involved analysing the evidence with unprecedented thoroughness and rigour, did not suffice in itself radically to subvert the established narrative; indeed, a more critical approach to the sources could help to give that narrative greater legitimacy. Arguably, then, the most important reason for the longevity of the framework established in the age of Elizabeth was the continuing appeal of its key premise that what historians of Wales needed to explain was the survival of a distinctive Welsh identity within the wider ambit of the British state. Comparison with Wales’s neighbours points up two further factors that help to account more specifically for the historiographical sidelining of the Normans. First, Norman conquest and settlement were, on the whole, not seen as a political and constitutional turning point in the way they were in England as well as, to a lesser extent, in Scotland and Ireland: the alleged transformation of Scotland from a Gaelic to a ‘feudal’ polity was attributed to the invitation of Norman settlers by the sons of Malcolm III and St Margaret, while the arrival of ‘Normans’ in Ireland in the late 1160s was perceived as inaugurating centuries of subjection to the English Crown. Historians of Wales, by contrast, seem to have regarded the Norman conquests of the late eleventh and earlier twelfth centuries as too piecemeal and geographically limited to have made a decisive difference, and invested other periods of Welsh history with greater significance, notably the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in Britain, the Edwardian conquest, and the Union with England under Henry VIII. A second consideration is this: the absence in Wales from the early modern period onwards of historians who strongly identified themselves as successors of the Norman settlers and who were therefore ready to give the invaders a starring role in accounts of their nation’s past that would challenge narratives which put the Welsh centre stage.96 There was no Welsh equivalent of the Anglo-Irish Orpen or of the Lowland Scots claiming Teutonic kinship with the English in order to distance themselves from what they came to regard as the ‘embarrassing millstone of backwardness’ represented by Highland Gaelic culture.97 This contrast serves to highlight the relatively high degree of consensus among those who wrote about the medieval Welsh past, a consensus arguably facilitated by the way in which that past was denuded of any potentially subversive implications through an acceptance of the Edwardian conquest and Henrician Union and thus of the ties that bound Wales to England. The reluctance to accord the Normans a prominent place in the history of Wales as a whole thus points up the durability of the historiographical legacy inherited from the sixteenth century. That recent decades have seen a more welcoming attitude to what Elizabethan writers termed ‘strangers’ may be attributed to a number of factors, although the relative significance of these is difficult to assess. Clearly the change was linked to the way in which the scholarly study of history increasingly became a matter for professionals in universities and, more pertinently perhaps, to the diversification of the historiographical agenda as the traditional emphasis on political and constitutional history was complemented by social and economic analysis that opened up the possibility of looking at Norman conquest from a broader perspective than merely the struggle with Welsh rulers for control of people 96 The early modern antiquaries Sir Edward Stradling and George Owen are only partial exceptions, since, although both claimed settler ancestry (above, pp. 6, 7), they strongly identified with Welsh culture (and in any case neither wrote a history of Wales as a whole). Cf. Geraint Jenkins, Richard Suggett, and Eryn M. White, ‘The Welsh Language in Early Modern Wales’, in The Welsh Language before the Industrial Revolution, ed. Geraint H. Jenkins, Cardiff 1997, 45–122 at 79; J. Gwynfor Jones, ‘The Welsh Language in Local Government: Justices of the Peace and the Courts of Quarter Sessions, c. 1536–1800’, ibid. 181–206 at 193–4; Charles, George Owen of Henllys, 107–16, 123–6. 97 Kidd, ‘Teutonist Ethnology’, 68. 18 Huw Pryce and territory, important though that was. Another crucial development that needs to be taken into account is a wider readiness on the part of historians of Wales to reconceptualize ‘national’ history as something far less exclusively the preserve of the Welsh than it had previously tended to be. This may simply reflect the exercise of scholarly detachment, but could also be related to attempts to promote a sense of civic – or, as one scholar has recently advocated, ‘post-national’ – identity among the people of Wales that is based on shared institutions rather than a common ethnicity.98 If so, in allowing a greater measure of self-government than at any time since the Middle Ages, devolution for Wales may facilitate a more inclusive idea of nationality, defined by citizenship rather than membership of one particular ethnic group, and thus help to encourage a greater appreciation of the role of immigrants, including the Normans, in the country’s history.99 Be that as it may, it would, I hope, have given Allen Brown satisfaction that the prospects today look brighter than ever for giving the Normans their due as key players in Welsh history. 98 Cf. R. Merfyn Jones, ‘Beyond Identity? The Reconstruction of the Welsh’, Journal of British Studies, 31, 1992, 330–57, esp. 352–7; Chris Williams, ‘Problematizing Wales: An Exploration in Historiography and Postcoloniality’, in Postcolonial Wales, ed. Jane Aaron and Chris Williams, Cardiff 2005, 3–22, esp. 15–16; and, for recent comment on the challenges posed by this greater pluralism and diversity among the peoples of Wales for an understanding of the Welsh past, see Geraint H. Jenkins, A Concise History of Wales, Cambridge 2007, 305–6. 99 Cf. also recent work on immigrants and ethnic minorities in modern Wales, e.g. Paul O’Leary, Immigration and Integration: The Irish in Wales, 1798–1922, Cardiff 2000; A Tolerant Nation? Exploring Ethnic Diversity in Wales, ed. Charlotte Williams, Neil Evans, and Paul O’Leary, Cardiff 2003; Irish Migrants in Modern Wales, ed. Paul O’Leary, Liverpool 2004. For a broader perspective on the contrasts between ethnically and territorially exclusive forms of citizenship, see Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, Cambridge MA 1992.