Welsh Journals

When we assess Lhwyd's place in the development of British scholarship from antiquarianism to archaeology, we must remember that the seventeenth century saw divines like Archbishop Ussher and Bishop Lightfoot working out an exact chronology of the world and of man based on the dates in Genesis; and it was these calculations which produced the date of 4004 B.C. for the origin of the world and of man. This chronology was widely accepted: 4004 was printed in the margin of the Authorized Version of the Bible. In As You Like It (IV, 1), Shakespeare makes Rosalind say 'The poor world is almost six thousand years old.' The young Lhwyd, who went from Wales to Jesus College, Oxford in 1682, was brought up in a climate of thought which believed that the past of man was not lengthy. Shakespeare and Sir Thomas Browne merely reflected the widespread view of the shortness of the human past that was made explicit by Ussher and Lightfoot. Sir Walter Raleigh's date for the creation was 4032.5 Lhwyd was brought up in a world which, although it thought the past of man no longer than six thousand years, yet was rejecting the Troynovantian prehistory of Britain set out by Geoffrey. Although in the seventeenth century men like Sir John Price, Sir Winston Churchill, William Wynne, Daniel Langhorne, and Robert Sherwood were all for Greeks and Trojans in British prehistory, Polydore Vergil had done his work and the Historia Regum Britanniae was no longer regarded as true. It is true that as late as 1674 the Oxford Almanac had Brute heading the list of kings of Britain, but two years later he had been replaced by William the Conqueror.6 This was eight years before Lhwyd came to Oxford as an undergraduate. The age of Elizabeth had seen in Wales, as well as in England, a great awakening of interest in history and antiquities. It may well be true, as Walters has said, that 'Antiquarian study in this country may be considered to begin with John Leland who was born in 1506'7; but the first serious antiquarian publication was Camden's Britannia in 1586, and it is interesting that it was while engaged on work for the revised 1695 edition of the Britannia, organised by Edmund Gibson, that Lhwyd began his extensive field-work. Humphrey Lhwyd, David Powel, and George Owen were Elizabethans; Humphrey Lhwyd was described by Anthony(a) 8 Toulmin and Goodfield, 1965; Daniel. 1966. II Kendrick, 1950. p. 111. 7 Walters. 1934, p. 1.