MORNING SERIAL
THE Welsh nation may have been created by historical events and a sense of difference from England but it felt very real to those inside and outside it.
Yet even then racial hierarchies could be pushed aside in day to day interactions, as peoples met, married and traded with each other. The penal codes introduced during Glyndwr’s rebellion were harsh in principle but they were often overlooked in practice and most of the towns of Wales, so often potent symbols of Welsh exclusion, were actually full of Welshmen. Even some of the Marcher lords married Welsh women to facilitate better relations and alliances with the people they ruled and neighboured.
There were certainly cultural similarities rather than just differences between England and Wales. Both relied on family and the weather to survive. They lived in a Christian world and worshipped the same God. Their technologies, economies and beliefs had more in common than not. Perhaps this is the lesson that Wales today should take from its medieval past. In the face of racialised narratives, the mass of people can come together. Whatever the leaders of society are talking about, the rhythms of everyday life can produce less divisive, more peaceful realities.
II Assimilation
MILITARY conquest, legal apartheid and population plantations make it difficult to see medieval Wales as anything other than a colony. But this came to an end in the middle of the 16th century with the effective annexation of Wales through two “acts of union”.
In the centuries that followed, until the emergence of a radically different world with industrialisation in the late 18th century, there was little about Wales that seemed to be a colony. Beyond a legal administrative structure, Wales was not ruled differently to any part of England and the Welsh had the same legal rights as the English. Unlike the Scots or Irish, there was no English sense of Wales as a threat.
> Wales: England’s Colony? by Martin Johnes is published by Parthian in the Modern Wales series www.parthianbooks.com