Welsh Journals

A Constructive Policy for Wales By T. P. Ellis. § 34. AT the end of § 32 it was intimated that we would return, in due course, to a more detailed examination of the course of his- tory regarding the past institutions of Wales. The course of the Church's history has already been sketched, and here we come to the more distinctively political and social institutions. To do so may seem, perhaps, superfluous to those who know something of Welsh history; but these articles are intended as much for English residents in W"les, most of whom have little knowledge of that past, as ior those who may be fully acquainted with it. To begin with we have to go back to Roman and immediate post-Roman times, because that period has left an abiding effect upon Welsh political thought. The exact extent of Roman influence upon the wales of to-day is a matter which requires much more research than has yet been given to the subject before it is safe to dogmatize; but there are two points which are quite clear. The one is that the Wales of to-day formed part and parcel of the Roman province of Brittania. This political fact, impressed upon the land by three and a half centuries of rule, has resulted in the conception, ingrained in the Welsh people, that the Isle of Britain is one and indivisible. The political institution of the Romans was, of course, dictated by the geographical facts, to which reference has already been made, and by the racial affinity which then existed between the people inhabiting England and those inhabiting Wales. Consequently, owing to a realization of this unity, the separatist tendency of Irish Nationalism-Ireland, be it noted, was never brought under Roman imperial sway, and, consequently never realised Brittanic unity-is quite foreign to a sane Welsh national move- ment. The influence of Rome was, of course, far greater upon the settled population of the plains of Lloegr than it was upon the inhabitants of Wales; but the important point to note is that when Rome fell, the Romanized element of Britain, carrying into effect the apparent policy of Cunedda, fell back upon Wales before the coming of the sea-rovers, making of it a strategic centre, preserving Roman ideals, as they were preserved nowhere else. That element intensified in Wales the Roman conception of insular unity. In addition, Wales became a detached outpost, wherein Roman political thought continued to survive, when it had disappeared from the rest of the island. Another contribution, indirect to a large extent it is true, which Rome made to Welsh thought, was the intense respect for law and order which has been manifest throughout Welsh history. True there have been periods of intense disorder in Wales; they have been due to misgovernment, but at all times throughout Welsh history, the passion for justice and law has found constant expression. Those then are the contributions that it seems to me Rome furnished to Wales-an ingrained belief in the unity of Britain and a passion for law and justice. One may add also this, in so far as the material available permits us to make definite assertions, that while Home insisted upon imperial and pro- vincial unity, it allowed local administration to be carried on according to local sentiment and custom. This it did in Wales by giving the political entities of the tribes the status of municipia.' § 35. The second period in Welsh political history covers the long space of time from approximately 500 A.D. to the death of Hywel Dda (circa 950). The first fact which we have to notice in this period is that the racial and the geographical differences between England and Wales became intensified by the fact that the former passed under the sway of the sea-rovers. This differentiation found concrete expression ulti- mately in the building of Offa's Dyke. That great structure was a definite recognition of the fact by the Anglo-Saxons that there was a difference between the two peoples, and that Wales did not, and could not, belong to what may be described as an English state.' The Welsh princes of the time, nevertheless, recognised a vague kind of suzerainty under the general crown of Britain. We get, therefore, the peculiar result that while, throughout this period, the Welsh people were clinging to the conception of the unity of Ynys Prydain, the Anglo-Saxon people were in- sisting upon the practical fact that such unity did not, and could not, exist. Both, in a sense, were right; both, in a sense, were wrong; and the absolute triumph of either idea was impossible because the very facts which pointed to unity also pointed to differentiation. One of the immediate effects of this was to give an impetus to the idea of Welsh unity. The conception of the unity of Britain being, for the time, at a discount, brought more and more to the front this other conception. The idea of Welsh unity was, of course, not a new thing; but, in its inception, it was, as the name Cymry implies, not a geographical, so much as a racial, unity; and, in fact, the racial unifi- cation began, so far as we can see, not in Wales but in Strathclyde. The fact that the conception was, in origin, racial, a coalition of tribes, and not geographical explains in part the problem which this age presents to us, namely, that while there was an intense growth of Cymric feeling in Wales, it