IN the following lectures no attempt will be made to give a systematic account of a political development, which is the ordinary theme of history. History is “past politics” in the wide sense of the word. It has to do with the growth and decay of states and institutions, and their relations to each other. The history of Wales in the Middle Ages, viewed from the political standpoint, is a failure; its interest is negative; and in this introductory lecture I intend to discuss “the failure of the nation” (to use the words of Professor Rhys and Mr. Brynmor Jones) “to effect any stable and lasting political combination.” Wales failed to produce or develope political institutions of an enduring character—failed to become a state. Its history does not possess the unity nor the kind of interest which the history of England possesses, and which makes the study of English history so peculiarly instructive to the student of politics. In English history we study primarily the growth of the principle of Representative Government, which we can trace for centuries through a long series of authoritative records. That is the great gift of England to the world. Not only has Wales entered on this inheritance; it helped to create it. It was Llywelyn ap Iorwerth who began the revolt against John which led to the Great Charter, and the clauses of the Great Charter itself show that it was the joint work of English and Welsh. Wales again exerted a decisive influence on the Barons’ War—the troubles in which the House of Commons first emerged. And Wales—half of it for more than six hundred years—half of it for nearly four hundred—has lived under the public law and administrative system which the Norman and Angevin kings of England built up on Anglo-Saxon foundations. This public law and this administrative system have become part and parcel of the life and history of Wales. The constitutional history of England is one of the elements which go to make up the complex history of Wales.

The history of Wales, taken by itself, is constitutionally weak; and its interest is social or personal, archÆological, artistic, literary—anything but political. And the fact—which is indisputable—that Wales failed to establish any permanent or united political system needs explanation.

The ultimate explanation will perhaps be found in the geography of the country. The mountains have done much to preserve the independence and the language of Wales, but they have kept her people disunited; and the Welsh needed a long drilling under institutions, which could only grow up in a land less divided by nature, before they could develope their political genius.

Wales, owing largely to its geography, had the misfortune never to be conquered at one fell swoop by an alien race of conquerors. Such a conquest may not at first sight strike one as a blessing, but it is, if it takes place when a people is in an early, fluid, and impressionable stage, as may be seen from a comparison of countries which have undergone it with countries which have not—a comparison, for instance, of England with Ireland or Germany. Perhaps the nearest parallel in the history of Wales to the Norman Conquest of England is the conquest of Wales by Cunedda, the founder of the Cymric kingdom, in the dark and troublous times which followed the withdrawal of the Roman troops from Britain. But though an invader and a conqueror, Cunedda was not an alien; he spoke the same language as the people he conquered and belonged to the same race to which the most important part of them belonged. And this militated against his chances of becoming a founder of Welsh unity. A race of conquerors distinct from the conquered in blood and language and civilisation, must hold together for a time; they form an official governing class, enforcing the same principles of government, and establishing a uniform administration throughout the country. And the uniform pressure reacts on the conquered, turning them from a loose group of tribes into a nation. This is what the Norman Conquest did for England. But if the conquerors are of the same race and language as the conquered, they readily mix with them; instead of holding together they identify themselves with local jealousies and tribal aspirations. This happened again and again in Germany. A Saxon emperor sends a Saxon to govern Bavaria as its duke and hold it loyal to the central government; the Saxon duke almost instantaneously becomes a Bavarian—the champion of tribal independence against the central government; and so the Germans remained a loose group of tribes and states—a divided people. This illustration suggests one of the reasons why Cunedda’s conquest failed to unite Wales.

Again the custom of sharing landed property among all the sons tended to prevent the growth of Welsh unity. Socially it appears far more just and reasonable than the custom of primogeniture. It is with the growth of feudalism (already apparent in the Welsh laws of the tenth century) that its political dangers become evident. The essence of feudalism is the confusion of political power and landed property; the ruler is lord of the land, the landlord is the ruler. If landed property is divided, political power is divided. When the Lord Rhys died in 1197 leaving four sons, Deheubarth had four rulers and formed four states instead of one; and civil war ensued.

The unity of Welsh history is not to be found in the growth of a state or a political system. But may we regard the history of Wales as a long and heroic struggle inspired by the idea of nationality? A caution is necessary here. It is one of the besetting sins of historians to read the ideas of the present into the past; and to the general public historical study is dull unless they can do so. It is very difficult to avoid doing so; it needs a severe training, a long immersion in the past, and a steady passion for truth above all things. In no case perhaps is this warning so necessary as in matters involving the idea of nationality. This is characteristic of the present age, but it has not been characteristic of any other to anything like the same extent. We live in an atmosphere of nationality; we have seen it create the German Empire and the kingdom of Italy, and the Welsh University; we see it now labouring to break up the Austrian Empire, and perhaps changing the unchanging East. But the whole history of Europe shows that it is an idea of slow and comparatively late growth. The first appearance of nationality as a conscious principle of political action is found in England—and possibly in France—at the beginning of the thirteenth century, and in Wales about the same time; in the other countries of Europe much later. And it was very rarely till the very end of the eighteenth century that it became a dominant factor in politics. Of course our ancestors always hated a foreigner—but they did not love their fellow-countrymen. The one thing a man hated more than being driven out of house and home by a foreign invader, was being driven out by his next-door neighbour; and, as his neighbour was more likely to do it, and when he did it, to stay, he hated his neighbour most. A certain degree of order and settled government was necessary before the national idea could become effective.

In mediÆval Wales it never succeeded in uniting the people; the petty patriotism of the family stood in the way of the larger patriotism of the nation; local rivalries and jealousies were always stronger than the sense of national unity. The attempt of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth to create a National Council, like the Great Council of England, died with him. In the final struggle with Edward I., when for a few months the idea of Welsh unity was nearest realisation in action, the men of Glamorgan fought on the winning side. Read the “Brut y Tywysogion” and consider how far the actions there related can have been inspired by the feeling of nationality. Here is the account in the “Brut” of what was happening in Wales in 1200 and the following years, the period represented by our map.

One may almost say that Wales is Wales to-day in spite of her political history. Wales owes far more to her poets and men of letters than to her princes and their politics.

Giraldus Cambrensis laid his finger on the spot, when he said: “Happy would Wales be if it had one prince, and that a good one.” A necessary preliminary to the union of Welshmen was the wiping out of all independent Welsh princes except one. Till that happened local feeling would always remain stronger than national feeling; the disintegrating forces of family feuds and personal ambitions and clannish loyalty would always outweigh the sense of national unity.

The Lords of the Marches were slowly doing this for Wales; they were wiping out all the independent Welsh princes except one. We may see the process going on in the accompanying map, which gives the chief political divisions of Wales at the beginning of the thirteenth century, and we will turn for a few minutes to consider the fortunes of some of these petty states and the manner of the men who ruled them.

The great Palatine Earldom of Chester, a kingdom within the kingdom, was ruled before 1100 by Hugh the Wolf, of Avranches, who conquered for a time the north coast of Wales. In Anglesey he built a castle, and kennelled the hounds he loved so well in a church, to find them all mad the next morning. The stories of his savage mutilation of his Welsh prisoners show that he merited the name of “the Wolf.” Yet he was the friend of the holy Anselm, and died a monk. The struggle between Chester and Gwynedd for the possession of the Four Cantreds, the lands between the Conway and the Dee, was almost perpetual during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the fortune of war continually changing. With the extinction of the old line of the Earls of Chester (1237) and the grant of the earldom to Prince Edward (1254), a new era opened for Wales.

Further south, in the Middle March, along the upper valleys of the Severn and the Wye, the great power of the Mortimers was growing. They had already stretched out a long arm to grasp Gwerthrynion. But the greatest expansion of their power came later, under Roger Mortimer, grandson of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, friend of Edward I. in the wild days of his youth, persistent foe of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd; and soon the Mortimer lands embraced all Mid-Wales and reached the sea, and a Mortimer was strong enough to depose and murder a king and rule England as paramour of the queen. Savage as the Mortimers were, they were mild compared with one of their predecessors. Robert Count of Bellesme and Ponthieu, the great castle builder of his time, became Earl of Shrewsbury and Arundel in 1098. Men had heard tales of his ferocity on the Continent—how he starved his prisoners to death rather than hold them to ransom; how, when besieging a castle, he threw in the horses to fill up the moat, and when these were not enough he gave orders to seize the villeins and throw them in, that his battering rams might go forward on a writhing mass of living human bodies. These tales seemed incredible in England, but the men of the Middle March believed them when they were “flayed alive by the iron claws” of the devil of Bellesme. In his rebellion against Henry I. the princes of Gwynedd supported him, till their army was bought over by the lying promises of the king; but the day when the Earl of Shrewsbury surrendered to King Henry and the whole force of England was a day of deliverance alike to England and to Wales.

We next come to the group of lordships held about this time by William de Braose, lord of Bramber in Sussex. They stretched from Radnor to Gower, from the Monnow to the Llwchwr, and included the castles of Builth, Brecon, Abergavenny. But he held these lands by different titles, and they were never welded together. William de Braose began his public career by calling the princes of Gwent to a conference at Abergavenny, and massacring them. He was on intimate terms with King John, who gave Prince Arthur into his keeping; but this was a piece of work which even De Braose recoiled from, and he refused to burden his soul with Arthur’s murder. A few years later John suddenly turned against him, and demanded his sons as hostages. His wife, Maud de St. ValÉrie, who lived long in the popular memory as a witch, sent back the answer: she would not entrust her children to a man who had murdered his nephew. The king chased Braose from his lands, caught his wife and eldest son, and starved them to death in Windsor Castle. The Braose family continued to hold Gower, but the rest of their possessions passed to other houses—Brecon to the Bohuns of Hereford, Elvael to Mortimer, Abergavenny to Hastings, Builth first to Mortimer and then to the Crown.

Glamorgan, during our period, was attached to the earldom of Gloucester. From Fitzhamon the Conqueror it passed, through his daughter, to Robert of Gloucester, and early in the thirteenth century to the great house of Clare, Earls of Gloucester and Hertford, who held the balance between parties in the Barons’ War. With the organisation of Glamorgan and with its great rulers we shall deal later. At the time represented by our map, it was in the hands of King John, who obtained it by marriage. John divorced his wife in 1200, but managed to keep her inheritance till nearly the end of his reign; and Fawkes de BrÉautÉ, the most infamous of his mercenary captains, lorded it in Cardiff Castle.

Further west, between the Llwchwr and the Towy, lay the lordship of Kidweli, held by the De Londres family, who had accompanied Fitzhamon in the conquest of Glamorgan, and were lords of Ogmore and founders of Ewenny. One episode in the history of this family may be mentioned—the battle in the Vale of Towy in 1136, when Gwenllian, the heroic wife of Rhys ap Gruffydd, led her husband’s forces against Maurice and De Londres, and was defeated and slain by the Lord of Kidweli. Her death was soon avenged by the slaughter of the Normans at Cardigan. The present castle of Kidweli dates from the later thirteenth century, before the war of 1277, after the lordship had passed to the Chaworths.

In the extreme west, in Dyfed, the land of fiords, Arnulf of Montgomery had early founded the Norman power, but he was involved in the fall of his brother, Robert of Bellesme, and Henry I. tried to form the land into an English shire, and planted a colony of Flemings in “Little England beyond Wales.” But it was too far off for the royal power to be effectively exercised there, and the Earldom of Pembroke was granted to a branch of the De Clares, who had already conquered Ceredigion, and built castles at Cardigan and Aberystwyth. The De Clares also held Chepstow and lands in Lower Gwent. The Earldom itself was smaller than the present shire of Pembroke, and William Marshall, who succeeded the De Clares through his marriage with the daughter of Richard Strongbow (1189), owed his commanding position in English history of the thirteenth century far more to his personal qualities, his courage and wisdom and patriotism, than to his territorial possessions.

It was by driving the De Clares out of Ceredigion in Stephen’s reign that Rhys ap Gruffydd laid the foundation of his power, and raised Deheubarth to be the foremost of the native principalities. The Lord Rhys was clever and farseeing enough to win the confidence of Henry II., and received from him the title of Justiciar—or King’s Deputy—in South Wales. As long as Owain Gwynedd lived the unusual spectacle was seen of a prince of South Wales and a prince of North Wales working harmoniously together. But after Owain’s death (1170) Rhys fought with his successors over the possession of Merioneth, while Owain Cyfeiliog, the poet-prince of Powys, did all he could to thwart him. In 1197 the death of Rhys, “the head and the shield and the strength of the South and of all Wales,” and the civil wars among his sons, opened his principality again to the encroachment of foes on all sides, and removed one danger from Powys. Powys, however, was being steadily squeezed by the pressure of Gwynedd on one side, and the growing power of Mortimer on the other, and its princes resorted to a shifty diplomacy and a general adherence—open or secret as circumstances dictated—to the English Crown, till they sank at length into the position of petty feudatories of the English king.

The Prince of Gwynedd alone upheld the standard of Welsh nationality, the dragon of Welsh independence; only in Gwynedd and its dependencies did the Welsh public law prevail over feudal custom. And what was the result? Exactly what Giraldus Cambrensis had foreseen and longed for. The eyes of Welshmen everywhere began to turn to the Lord of Eryri, the one hope of Wales. It was an alluring—an inspiring prospect, which opened before the princes of Gwynedd—to head a national movement, drive out the foreigners, and unite all Wales under their sway. Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, at the end of his long reign, deliberately rejected the dream. That is the meaning of his emphatic declaration of fidelity and submission to Henry III. in 1237. “Llywelyn, Prince of Wales, by special messengers sent word to the king that, as his time of life required that he should thenceforth abandon all strife and tumult of war, and should for the future enjoy peace, he had determined to place himself and his possessions under the authority and protection of him, the English king, and would hold his lands from him in all fealty and friendship, and enter into an indissoluble treaty; and if the king should go on any expedition he would, to the best of his power, as his liege subject, promote it, by assisting him with troops, arms, horses, and money.” Llywelyn the Great refused to dispute the suzerainty of England. This may appear pusillanimous to the enthusiastic patriot, but subsequent events proved the old statesman’s wisdom and clearsightedness. His successors were less cautious, were carried away by the patriotism round them and the syren voices of the bards. And to Llywelyn ap Gruffydd the prospect was even more tempting than to Llywelyn ap Iorwerth. The Barons’ War weakened the power of England, and the necessities of Simon de Montfort led him to enter into an alliance with Llywelyn. The expansion of Gwynedd was great and rapid. Llywelyn’s rule extended as far south as Merthyr, and made itself felt on the shores of Carmarthen Bay. The Earl of Gloucester found it necessary to build Caerphilly Castle to uphold his influence in Glamorgan. But it was just the expansion of Llywelyn’s power which forced Edward I. to overthrow him once for all. “We hold it better”—so ran Edward’s proclamation in 1282—“that, for the common weal, we and the inhabitants of our land should be wearied by labours and expenses this once, although the burden seem heavy, in order to destroy their wickedness altogether, than that we should in future times, as so often in the past, be tormented by rebellions of this kind at their good pleasure.”

The “Principality” now became shire land—under English laws and English administration. The rest of Wales remained divided up into Marcher Lordships for another two hundred and fifty years, under feudal laws—a continual source of disturbance and scene of disorder. These were the lands in which the King’s Writ did not run, where (to summarise the description in the Statute of 1536) “murders and house-burnings, robberies and riots are committed with impunity, and felons are received, and escape from justice by going from one lordship to another.”

Yet the Marcher Lords did something for Welsh civilisation in their earlier centuries. Guided by enlightened self-interest, they often founded towns, granting considerable privileges to them in order to attract burgesses—such as low rents, and freedom from arbitrary fines. Fairs, too, were established and protected by the Lords Marchers. The early lords of Glamorgan seem to have been specially successful in this respect; in the twelfth century immigrants from other parts of Wales are said to have come to reside in Glamorgan, owing to the privileges and comparative security which were to be found there. Nor perhaps has it been sufficiently recognised how soon the Lords of the Marches began drilling their Welsh subjects in Anglo-Norman methods of local self-government. Most of the greater Marcher Lords possessed estates in England; not a few of them, such as William de Braose, served as sheriffs in English shires; some, such as John de Hastings, were judges in the royal courts. They introduced into Wales methods of government which they learnt in England, and institutions with a great future before them, like the Franco-Roman “inquest by sworn recognitors,” from which trial by jury was developed, were soon acclimatised in the Marches of Wales.