The most important long-term consequence of Celtomania was that it reawakened a sense of pride in the modern Celtic-speaking peoples in their culture, language and identity by increasing its status. Romantic is better than backward. This did not happen overnight. Because of the relatively high levels of illiteracy in Celtic-speaking areas, and a lack of institutions to disseminate ideas, this new awareness of Celtic identity spread only slowly and until the middle of the nineteenth century it was confined largely to an educated elite. Celtomania also changed the way the modern Celts were viewed by others. This was a highly selective process, and it was the twentieth century before the Celtic-speaking peoples saw much in the way of material or political benefits from it. Being thought to be romantic rather than savage did not protect the Highlanders from the Clearances, and Celtomania was at its height when France’s revolutionary government introduced legislation intended to undermine Breton identity in its drive to create a unitary French state.
The revival of Celtic identity began with the Welsh. At the beginning of the eighteenth century Welsh culture was at a very low ebb. Little was being written in Welsh, there was not a single printing press in the whole country and the language itself was in decline. It seemed to many as if the Welsh were being inexorably assimilated by the English and might eventually lose their identity altogether. Lhuyd’s Archaeologia Britannica had been an attempt to bolster the non-English identity of the Welsh and, as he had hoped, it did lead to a revival of interest in the Welsh language. The first definitive grammar of the Welsh language was published in 1725 and the first dictionary three years later. Literacy in Welsh gradually increased, in large part through the efforts of SPCK (Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge) and the system of travelling schools set up by Gruffydd Jones in the 1730s. Growing demand for books in Welsh led to the establishment of the first printing presses in Wales at Newcastle Emlyn in 1717 and Carmarthen in 1721.
The bardic traditions of medieval Wales were long dead by the eighteenth century, but the publication of collections of early Welsh literature, such as Evans’s Poetry of the Ancient Welsh Bards, inspired a new generation of poets to revive the art. They found that there was a real popular demand for poetry and song in the Welsh language. Informal, and sometimes riotously drunken, meetings of poets led to the staging of the first formal eisteddfod (assembly of poets) since the Middle Ages at Corwen in 1789. Wales was still a land of hamlets and small market towns in the early eighteenth century and the largest, and best-educated, urban Welsh community was in London. These expatriates founded learned societies, such as the Society of Ancient Britons (1715) and the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion (1751), to promote Welsh language and culture, not only among the Welsh but among English intellectuals too. This was aimed at increasing English recognition that the Welsh were a distinct and separate people in their own right. By the early nineteenth century, the Methodist Revival had absorbed much of the energy that had driven the Welsh ‘renaissance’ and cultural renewal did not develop into political nationalism. Although the decline in the Welsh language had been only temporarily arrested, the Celtic revival had given the Welsh a new confidence in their identity and their assimilation by the English no longer seemed inevitable.
World History
