Part 2

On the north and the west the sea is shallow; in some places it is under 10 fathoms for 10 miles from the shore, and under 20 fathoms for 20 miles. Tales of drowned lands are told—of the sands of Lavan, of the feast of drunken Seithenyn, and of the bells of Aberdovey. But the sea is a kind neighbour. Its soft, warm winds bathe the hills with life; and the great sweep of the big Atlantic waves into the river mouths help our commerce. Holyhead, Milford Haven, Swansea, Newport, Barry, and Cardiff—now one of the chief ports of the world—can welcome the largest vessels afloat. The herring is plentiful on the west coast, and trout and salmon in the rivers.

II THE WANDERING NATIONS

BY land and by sea, race after race has come to make the hills of Wales its home. One race would be short, with dark eyes and black hair; another would be tall, with blue eyes and fair hair. They came from different countries and along different paths, but each race brought some good with it. One brought skill in taming animals, until it had at last tamed even the pig and the bee; another brought iron tools to take the place of stone ones. Another brought the energy of the chase and war, and another a delight in sailing a ship or in building a fortress.

One thing they had in common—they wandered, and they wandered to the west. From the cold wastes and the dark forests of the north and east, they were ever pushing west to more sunny lands. As far back as we can see, the great migration of nations to the west was going on. The islands of Britain were the furthest point they could reach; for beyond it, at that time, no man had dared to sail into the unknown expanse of the ocean of the west. In the islands of Britain, the mountains of Wales were among the most difficult to win, and it was only the bravest and the hardiest that could make their home among them.

The first races that came were short and dark. They came in tribes. They had tribal marks, the picture of an animal as a rule; and they had a strange fancy that this animal was their ancestor. It may be that the local nicknames which are still remembered—such as “the pigs of Anglesey,” “the dogs of Denbigh,” “the cats of Ruthin,” “the crows of Harlech,” “the gadflies of Mawddwy”—were the proud tribe titles of these early people. Their weapons and tools were polished stone; their hammers and hatchets and adzes, their lance heads and their arrow tips, were of the hardest igneous rock—chipped and ground with patient labour.

The people who come first have the best chance of staying, if only they are willing to learn; hardy plants will soon take the place of tender plants if left alone. The short dark people are still the main part, not only of the Welsh, but of the British people. It is true that their language has disappeared, except a few place-names. But languages are far more fleeting than races. The loss of its language does not show that a race is dead; it only shows that it is very anxious to change and learn. Some languages easily give place to others, and we say that the people who speak these languages are good linguists, like Danes and Slavs. Other languages persist, those who speak them are unwilling to speak any new language, and this is the reason why Spanish and English are so widespread.

After the short dark race came a tall fair-haired people. They came in families as well as in tribes. They had iron weapons and tools, and the short dark people could not keep them at bay with their bone-tipped spears and flint-headed arrows. We know nothing about the struggle between them. But it may be that the fairy stories we were told when children come from those far-off times. If a fairy maiden came from lake or mound to live among men, she vanished at once if touched with iron. Is this, learned men have asked, a dim memory of the victory of iron over stone?

The name given to the short dark man is usually Iberian; the name given to the tall fair man who followed him is Celt. The two learnt to live together in the same country. The conqueror probably looked upon himself at first as the master of the conquered, then as simply belonging to a superior race, but gradually the distinction vanished. The language remained the language of the Celt; it is called an Aryan language, a language as noble among languages as the Aran is among its hills. It is still spoken in Wales, in Brittany, in Ireland, in the Highlands of Scotland, and in the Isle of Man. It was also spoken in Cornwall till the eighteenth century; and Yorkshire dalesmen still count their sheep in Welsh. English is another Aryan tongue.

The more mixed a nation is, the more rich its life and the greater its future. Purity of blood is not a thing to boast of, and no great and progressive nation comes from one breed of men. Some races have more imagination than others, or a finer feeling for beauty; others have more energy and practical wisdom. The best nations have both; and they have both, probably, because many races have been blended in their making. There is hardly a parish in Wales in which there are not different types of faces and different kinds of character.

The wandering of nations has never really stopped. The Celt was followed by his cousins—the Angle and the Saxon. These, again, were followed by races still more closely related to them—the Normans and the Danes and the Flemings. They have all left their mark on Wales and on the Welsh character.

The migration is still going on. Trace the history of an upland Welsh parish, and you will find that, in a surprisingly short time, the old families, high and low, have given place to newcomers. Look into the trains which carry emigrants from Hull or London to Liverpool on their way west—they have the blue eyes and yellow hair of those who came two thousand years ago. But this country is no longer their goal, the great continent of America has been discovered beyond. Fits of longing for wandering come over the Welsh periodically, as they came over the Danes—caused by scarcity of food and density of population, or by a sense of oppression and a yearning for freedom. An empty stomach sometimes, and sometimes a fiery imagination, sent a crowd of adventurers to new lands. And it is thus that every living nation is ever renewing its youth.

III ROME

IT is not a spirit of adventure and daring alone that makes a nation. Rome rose to say that it must have the spirit of order and law too. It rose in the path of the nations; it built the walls of its empire, guarded by the camps of its legions, right across it. For four hundred years the wandering of nations ceased; the nations stopped—and they began to till the ground, to live in cities, to form states. The hush of this peace did not last, but the memory of it remained in the life of every nation that felt it. Unity and law tempered freedom and change.

The name of Rome was made known, and made terrible, through Wales by a great battle fought on the eastern slopes of the Berwyn. The Romans had conquered the lands beyond the Severn, and had placed themselves firmly near the banks of that river at Glevum and Uriconium. Glevum is our Gloucester, and its streets are still as the Roman architect planned them. Uriconium is the burnt and buried city beyond Shrewsbury; the skulls found in it, and its implements of industry, and the toys of its children, you can see in the Shrewsbury Museum.

The British leader in the great battle was Caratacus, the general who had fought the Romans step by step until he had come to the borders of Wales, to summon the warlike Silures to save their country. We do not know the site of the great battle, though the Roman historian Tacitus gives a graphic description of it. The Britons were on a hill side sloping down to a river, and the Romans could only attack them in front. The enemy waded the river, however, and scaled the wall on its further bank; and in the fierce lance and sword fight the host of Caratacus lost the day. He fled, but was afterwards handed over to the Romans, and taken to Rome, to grace the triumphal procession of the victors.

The battle only roused the Silures to a more fierce resistance, and it cost the Romans many lives, and it took them many years, to break their power. The strangest sight that met the invaders was in Anglesey, after they had crossed the Menai on horses or on rafts. The druids tried to terrify them by the rites of their religion. The dark groves, the women dressed in black and carrying flaming torches, the aged priests—the sight paralysed the Roman soldiers, but only for a moment.

Vespasian—it was he who sent his son Titus to besiege Jerusalem—became emperor in 69. The war was carried on with great energy, and by 78 Wales was entirely conquered.

Then Agricola, a wise ruler, came. The peace of Rome was left in the land; and the Welshman took the Roman, not willingly at first, as his teacher and ruler instead of as his enemy. Towns were built; the two Chesters or Caerlleons (Castra Legionum), on the Dee and the Usk, being the most important from a military point of view. Roads were made; two along the north and south coasts, to Carmarthen and Carnarvon; two others ran parallel along the length of Wales, to connect their ends. On these roads towns rose; and some, like Caerwent, were self-governing communities of prosperous people. Agriculture flourished; the Welsh words for “plough” and “cheese” are “aradr” and “caws”—the Latin aratrum and caseus. The mineral wealth of the country was discovered; and copper mines and lead mines, silver mines and gold mines, were worked. The “aur” (gold) and “arian” (silver) and “plwm” (lead) of the Welshman are the Latin aurum, argentum, and plumbum.

The Romans allowed the Welsh families and tribes to remain as before, and to be ruled by their own kings and chiefs. But they kept the defence of the country—the manning of the great wall in the north of Roman Britain, the garrisoning of the legion towns, and the holding of the western sea—in their own hand.

Gradually the power of Rome began to wane, and its hold on distant countries like Britain began to relax. The wandering nations were gathering on its eastern and northern borders, and its walls and legions at last gave way. It had not been a kind mother to the nations it had conquered—in war it had been cruel, and in peace it had been selfish and stern. The lust of rule became stronger as its arm became weaker. The degradation of slavery and the heavy hand of the tax-gatherer were extending even to Wales. The barbarian invader found the effeminate, luxurious empire an easy prey. In 410 Alaric and his host of Goths appeared before the city of Rome itself; and a horde of barbarians, thirsting for blood and spoil, surged into it. The fall of the great city was a shock to the whole world; the end of the world must be near, for how could it stand without Rome? Jerome could hardly sob the strange news: “Rome, which enslaved the whole world, has itself been taken.”

Rome had taken the yoke of Christ; and many said that it fell because it had spurned the gods that had given it victory. Three years after Alaric had sacked it, Augustine wrote a book to prove that it was not the city of God that had fallen; and that the heathen gods could neither have built Rome in their love nor destroyed it in their anger. He then describes the rise of the real “City of God,” in the midst of which is the God of justice and mercy, and “she shall not be moved.”

IV THE NAME OF CHRIST

THE name of Christ had been heard in Britain during the period of Roman rule, but we do not know who first sounded it. There are many beautiful legends—that the great apostle of the Gentiles himself came to Britain; that Joseph of Arimathea, having been placed by the Jews in an open boat, at the mercy of wind and wave, landed in Britain; that some of the captives taken to Rome with Caratacus brought back the tidings of great joy.

We know that the name of Christ, between 200 and 300 years after His death, was well known in Britain, and that churches had been built for His worship. Between 300 and 400 we have an organised church and a settled creed. Between 400 and 500 there was searching of heart and creed, and heresies—a sure sign that the people were alive to religion. Between 500 and 600 there was a translation of the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into the better-known Latin. The whole of Wales becomes Christian; and probably St David converted the last pagans, and built his church among them.

Between 450 and 500 a stream of pagan Teutons flowed over the east of Britain, and the British Church was separated from the Roman Church. By 664 British and Roman missionaries had converted the English; and the two Churches of Rome and Britain, once united, were face to face again. But they had grown in different ways, and refused to know each other. Their Easter came on different days; they did not baptize in the same way; the tonsure was different—a crescent on the forehead of the British monk, and a crown on the pate of the Roman monk. In the Roman Church there was rigid unity and system; in the British Church there was much room for self-government. The newly converted English chose the Roman way, because they were told that St Peter, whose see Rome was, held the keys of heaven. Between 700 and 800 the Welsh gradually gave up their religious independence, and joined the Roman Church.

But there was another dispute. Were the four old Welsh bishoprics—Bangor, St Asaph, St David’s, Llandaff—to be subject to the English archbishop of Canterbury, or to have an archbishopric of their own at St David’s? By 1200 the Welsh bishoprics were subject to the English archbishop, and Giraldus Cambrensis came too late to save them.

But through all these disputes the Church was gaining strength. Churches were being built everywhere. Up to 700 they were called after the name of their founder; between 700 and 1000 they were generally dedicated to the archangel Michael—there are several Llanvihangels {1} in Wales; after 1000 new churches were dedicated to Mary, the Mother of Christ—we have many Llanvairs. {2}

Times of civil strife, or of popular indifference, came over and over again; and the old paganism tried to reassert itself. And time after time the name of Christ was sounded again by men who thought they had seen Him. In the twelfth century the Cistercian monk came to say that the world was bad, that prayer saved the soul, and that labour was noble. {3} He was followed by the Franciscan friar, who said that deeds of mercy and love should be added to prayer, that Christ had been a poor man, and that men should help each other, not only in saving souls, but in healing sickness and relieving pain. In the fifteenth century the Lollard came to say that the Church was too rich, and that it had become blind to the truth, and Walter Brute said that men were to be justified by faith in Christ, not by the worship of images or by the merit of saints. In the sixteenth century came the Protestant, and the sway of Rome over Wales came to an end; Bishop Morgan translated the Bible into Welsh, and John Penry yearned for the preaching of the Gospel in Wales. The Jesuit followed, calling himself by the name of Jesus, to try to win the country back again to Rome. Robert Jones toiled and schemed, and some laid down their lives. The Puritan came in the seventeenth century to demand simple worship, and Morgan Lloyd thought that the second advent of Christ was at hand. The Revivalist came in the eighteenth century, and, in the name of Christ, aroused the people of Wales to a new life of thought.