The origins of Wales

So far in this book, the term ‘Wales’ has been used only as a convenient geographical term. It was in the course of the seventh century that Wales, in the modern sense as the country of the Welsh, came into existence. By this time the Britons had begun calling themselves Cymry, the people of Cymru, the British word for the country that then included not only modern

Wales but also the surviving British kingdoms Rheged and Strathclyde in what are now north-west England and south-west Scotland. After Rheged and Strathclyde fell to the Anglo-Saxons and Scots, Cymru and Cymry came to be applied only to modern Wales and its people, but traces of the original wider identity survive in the names of Cumbria (the Lake District) and the Clyde’s Cumbrae islands. Wales was divided into several kingdoms, which, though small, were far from impotent. The powerful kingdom of Mercia, which successfully bullied its Anglo-Saxon neighbours into submission in the eighth century, went to enormous trouble to fortify its Welsh border with a series of defensive earth ramparts. The most impressive and best preserved of these is Offa’s Dyke, named for King Offa (r. 757-96) who ordered its construction, which was an 18-foot (5.5-metre) high rampart running 64 miles (102 kilometres) from Llanfynydd near Wrexham to Kington in Herefordshire. The Dyke is often thought of as merely an impressive attempt by the Mercians to define the frontier, but there are no gates in it as might be expected if people were still going to be crossing it on normal business. The Mercians clearly feared the Welsh. The building of the Dyke is best understood in the context of the Pillar of Eliseg, near Llangollen, a weathered stone monument with an inscription commemorating the success of Eliseg, king of Powys in the mid eighth century, in winning back Welsh territory from the English by nine years of warfare. The Welsh later won back more territory from Mercia as the course of the Dyke now lies mostly in Wales. Small successes like this kept Welsh hopes alive. When he toured Wales in the late twelfth century recruiting for the Third Crusade, the churchman Gerald of Wales noted that the Welsh ‘boast and confidently predict that they will soon reoccupy the whole island of Britain’. However, by this time Norman lords had seized control of much of the south and the boast was sounding rather hollow. Gerald described it as an ‘illusion’.