Welsh Journals

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LOCAL AND NATIONAL HISTORY IN WALES* THE founding fathers of modern British history, it might generally be agreed, were that race of diligent and scholarly antiquarians who made their appearance in the first Elizabeth's reign. They had their lively and enthusiastic representatives in Wales. Indeed, in the person of a Welsh squire, Sir Edward Stradling of St. Donat's in Glamorgan, William Lambarde, whose Perambulation of Kent (1576) takes pride of place among our county histories, had a potentially close rival for the honour. A letter written to Stradling in 1574 suggests that he was engaged on an ambitious work 'wherein the state of Glamorgan for a long time in many things is preserved from oblivion'. There are some indications that Stradling's history had been encouraged by and was intended for that prince of antiquaries, William Camden; but, unfortunately, it has not survived. On the other hand the writings of a younger Welsh contemporary, George Owen of Henllys in Pembrokeshire, have come down to us very fully and will bear favourable comparison with the works of comparable antiquaries elsewhere in the queen's realm.2 It is in this same generation, too, that the first of the modern histories of Wales as a whole, David Powel's History of Cambria, made its appearance in print in 1584. Influential as this work was in its own time and after, it now has limited scholarly value; it merits notice, nevertheless, as an earnest of widespread interest, however misinformed and unsceptical, in the Welsh past.3 This interest in Welsh history continued to flourish with greater or less vigour throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some of it was of the highest scholarly calibre. The explorations of that prodigious polymath, Edward Lhuyd (1660-1709)-linguist, litterateur, lawyer, topographer, archaeologist, geologist, naturalist, and historian-could, if they had been succeeded by investigations of the same excellence, have produced an early history of Wales on impeccably scholarly lines. Or, on a more modest scale, if each of the Welsh counties had produced an historian like Breconshire's Theophilus Jones (1759-1812), whose two-volume account of his The substance of this article was first delivered as a paper to the Anglo-American Conference of Historians on 15 July 1967. 1 J. M. Traherne, Stradling Correspondence (1840), pp. 167-68. 2 See The Description of Pembrokeshire, ed. Henry Owen (4 vols., 1902-36), and The Taylors Cussion, ed. E. M. Pritchard (1906). For a general account, see Thomas Kendrick, British Antiquity (1950).