Welsh Journals

MERRY, WELSH, OR BOTH? A PHILOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE ON THE COMPANY OF WELSHMEN THAT Welsh soldiers participated extensively and with distinction in the Hundred Years' War is well-known. Their involvement ranged from that of roving freelance mercenaries, pillaging their way across France in the fourteenth century to the despair and terror of the local populace, to membership of the formal corps d'armes of the Company of Welshmen. It is with this latter group that I am concerned. The Company of Welshmen was one among the numerous campagnies of diverse origins which served the French kings; several eminent historians writing about the period, from either a French or a Welsh perspective, discuss these Welshmen. Notable amongst scholars to have treated the subject are A. D. Carr and Michael Siddons and, in an earlier generation, the Celticist Th. M. Chotzen, in a substantial monograph on Dafydd ap Gwilym. Philippe Contamine also has things to say about the Company of Welshmen in his magnum opus on warfare in the later Middle Ages.2 It would be presumptuous for a non- historian to take issue with authorities of this calibre. What this note is concerned with is not the fact of Welsh involvement, nor the historical details of when, where and why the Welsh went to France, but with the identity of the Company of Welshmen; more precisely, with the name itself by which modern scholarship knows these men. For all of the historians just mentioned, the Company of Welshmen, la Compaignie des Galoiz, is a named group, so-called not only because of the demonstrable nationality of its members, but also because of contemporary documents which lend support to the designation used. Yet the philologist approaching the Company of Welshmen is bound to feel a little uneasy. In the first place, and perhaps this will seem a minor quibble, the actual attestations of the term, in historical documents, seem (to judge from what has been written about the Company) very few in number. Named and documented Welshmen are cited in fourteenth-century muster lists, but 'See Edouard Perroy, La Guerre de Cent Ans (Paris, 9th edn, 1945), pp. 128-31 (a general review of the Compagnies, without mentioning the Welsh); A. D. Carr, Owen of Wales: The End of the House of Gwynedd (Cardiff, 1991), ch. IV: 'The French connection', with no explicit reference to the Company of Welshmen; Philippe Contamine, Guerre, etat et socie'te a la fin du moyen age. Etudes sur les armees des rois de France, 1337-1494 (Paris/The Hague, 1972). 2A. D. Carr, 'Welshmen and the Hundred Years' War', ante, 4 (1968-69), 21 -46; idem, 'A Welsh Knight in the Hundred Years War: Sir Gregory Sais', Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1977, pp 40-53; Michael Siddons, 'Welshmen in the Service of France', Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, 36 (1989), 161-84; Th. M. Chotzen, Recherches sur la poisie de Dafydd ap Gwilym, barde gallois du XI Ve siecle (Amsterdam, 1927); Contamine, Guerre, bat et socie'te, pp. 73, 162, 576-77.