Welsh Journals

On being Welsh: A Historian's Viewpoint* by the President-elect, Professor R.R. Davies, CBE, FBA It is a well-established tradition for professors to be invited indeed on occasion to be statutorily required to deliver an inaugural lecture on assuming the tenure of their chairs. It is a sort of rite of passage. It provides an occasion for the new incumbent of the chair to deliver himself (or herself) of some comforting and uplifting generalisations and, in the unlovely management-speak of today, to issue a 'mission statement'. I trust that our Society is too venerable in its antiquity, and too civilized in its values, to surrender to the audit jargon that dominates so much of our public and academic life so unhealthily today. Nevertheless I welcome this invitation to deliver an inaugural address to the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, and that for at least two reasons. The first is to give thanks to the Society for extending the great honour of inviting me to serve as its President and that in its two hundred and fiftieth anniversary year. That sense of thanks is transformed into a sense of awe as I contemplate the names of the outstanding succession of Presidents who have served this Society, not least Emrys Jones whose distinction as a President is matched by his devotion and dedication to the Society. To live in Emrys's shadow is to be overshadowed. I am indeed a dwarf standing on the shoulders of giants: corach ar ysgwyddau cawr. The second reason for welcoming your invitation though, if truth be told, an invitation from the Honorary Secretary normally takes the form of a regal injunction is that it provides me with an occasion to share with you some thoughts about our raison d'être as a Society. Hence my title this evening. There are, no doubt, myriad reasons why members join this Society and attend its meetings and why it has managed to survive for two and a half centuries. But irreducibly and essentially the explanation must rest in their awareness of, and commitment to, a common Welshness, in all its multifarious forms. 'Never forget your Welsh' was the clever advert used to sell a particular brand of ale. 'Happiness', said another catchphrase, 'is knowing that you are Welsh'. For the dour, conscience-stricken north Welshman the vocation of being Welsh was much more of an ineluctable fate Ni allaf ddianc rhag hon', 'I cannot flee its grasp'. But whether angst or bravado or exultation is the controlling emotion, we all share, in very varying degrees, a sense of our Welshness. *An address delivered to the Annual General Meeting of the Society at the British Academy on 14 May 2002, with the President, Professor Emrys Jones, in the chair.