THE ORIGINS OF WALES

S WAS mentioned in Chapter Four, the name Wales is derived from an Anglo-Saxon word weahlas, meaning ‘foreigners*. The native British who were driven westwards or contained within their western territories called themselves originally merely by

Their tribal names, but later, when the ‘English* presented a common enemy, they began to use the collective term Cymri (‘fellow-countrymen*) for themselves. The term, derived from an earlier form Combrogi, originally applied to all British-speaking tribes on the western Atlantic seaboard (the southwest peninsula was known as West Wales for many centuries), and still survives in the name of Cumbria. Gradually, however, as the British states collapsed, the Cymri became identified with the territory which they still call Cymru, but which the English call Wales.

Unlike Ireland, which had a long and uninterrupted period of self-rule before the first Viking invasions, Wales has been affected by successive waves of invasion, interaaion and direct rule, from the Romans, through the early English, the Anglo-Normans, the mediaeval English and, many would argue, the modern English. Despite all these influences, Wales has retained a very strong sense of her national, Celtic identity, not least because the Welsh language has survived and even flourished in some respects, in the face of intense competition from the pressures of English and American English.

It would be unfair to ignore the fact that some of the early invasions were Celtic. In the previous chapter, I mentioned the Irish (Scotti) incursions and settlements on the Welsh Atlantic seaboard. Dyfed was ruled by a dynasty originally from Ireland. Gwynedd is interpreted by some as the Welsh form of the Irish name Feni, the dynastic family to which many of the mediaeval Welsh households are supposed to have traced their ancestry. The Feni were displaced from northwest Wales by the Gododdin, under their leader Cunedda, who came to Gwynedd with his eight sons and one grandson when the kingdom of Manaw Gododdin, east of Strathclyde, collapsed during the end of the Roman occupation. The great poem The Gododdin, its author Aneirin and the equally famous poet Taliesin were almost certainly from what is now northeastern England or southeastern Scotland, the ancient territory of Manaw Gododdin, but now are all of them intensely identified with Welsh culture.

There has been much debate about when these movements took place, even about whether Cunedda actually existed. The Roman leader, Magnus Maximus, known in Welsh legend as Macsen Wledig (‘the Powerful*), abandoned the legionary garrison at Segontium in AD 383, which has led quite a few historians to speculate that Cunedda may have reached Gwynedd during the period 380 to 400. Most later writers, however, place the migration around 440, which would make Cunedda a contemporary rather than a predecessor of Vortigern.

During the period when the earliest English kingdoms were shaping themselves towards a kingdom of England, so too were the kingdoms of Wales forming dynasties, sometimes on the model of the Irish Ard Righ, with a High King, like Hywel Dda (see below) for example, exercising authority over many smaller kingdoms or chieftainships, sometimes making treaties and alliances with the English, sometimes openly at war with them. In the end, as with Ireland, the Norse and, finally, the English imposed overlordship on the Celtic state, but for some centuries there was a succession of Welsh dynastic royal families.