It is curious that this legal oppression of the Welsh language should have occurred under the Tudors, proud of their Welsh ancestry, and in times when the authority and favour of the politically powerful were given to what we might call 'The Brut and all that', and Arthurian 'history' was official. It was hardly safe to express in public doubt of its veracity.
The eldest son of Henry VII was called Arthur. His survival, whether he had fulfilled any Arthurian prophecies or not, might (it may be surmised) have much changed the course of history. His brother Henry might have been remembered chiefly in the realms of music and poetry, and as the patron of such ingenious Welshmen as that numerologist and musician, John Lloyd of Caerteon, whom Mr Thurston Dart has studied and is studying. [1] Music indeed might well be considered by O'Donnell lecturers as one of the points of closest contact between Wales and England; but I am quite incompetent to deal with it.
However, as things turned out, music and verse were only the toys of a powerful monarch. No Arthurian romance would avail to protect Welsh custom and Welsh law, if it came to a choice between them and effective power. They would weigh no more in the balance than the head of Thomas More against a single castle in France.
Governments – or far-seeing civil servants from Thomas Cromwell onwards – understand the matter of language well enough, for their purposes. Uniformity is naturally neater; it is also very much more manageable. A hundred-per-cent Englishman is easier for an English government to handle. It does not matter what he was, or what his fathers were. Such an Englishman' is any man who speaks English natively, and has lost any effective tradition of a different and more independent past. For though cultural and other traditions may accompany a difference of language, they are chiefly maintained and preserved by language. Language is the prime differentiator of peoples -not of races', whatever that much-misused word may mean in the long-blended history of western Europe.
Málin eru höfuðeinkenni þjóðanna – 'Languages are the chief distinguishing marks of peoples. No people in fact comes into being until it speaks a language of its own; let the languages perish and the peoples perish too, or become different peoples.But that never happens except as the result of oppression and distress.'
These are the words of a little-known Icelander of the early nineteenth century, Sjéra Tomas Saemundsson, He had, of course, primarily in mind the part played by the cultivated Icelandic language, in spite of poverty, lack of power, and insignificant numbers, in keeping the Icelanders in being in desperate times. But the words might as well apply to the Welsh of Wales, who have also loved and cultivated their language for its own sake (not as an aspirant for the ruinous honour of becoming the lingua franca of the world), and who by it and with it maintain their identity.
As a mere introducer or curtain-raiser, not as an expert, I will speak now a little further about these two languages, English and Welsh, in their contact and contrast, as coinhabitants of Britain. My glance will be directed to the past. Today English and Welsh arc still in close contact (in Wales), little for the good of Welsh one might say who loves the idiom and the beautiful word-form of uncontaminated Cymraeg. But though these pathological developments are of great interest to philologists, as are diseases to doctors, they require for their treatment a native speaker of the modern tongue. I speak only as an amateur, and address the Saeson and not the Cymry; my view is that of a Sayceand not a Waugh.
I use these surnames – both well known (the first especially in the annals of philology) – since Sayce is probably a name of Welsh origin (Sais) but means an Englishman, while Waugh is certainly of English origin (Walh) but means a Welshman; it is in fact the singular of Wales. These two surnames may serve both to remind students of the great interest of the surnames current in England, to which Welsh is often the key, and to symbolize the age-long interpenetration of the peoples speaking English and Welsh.
Of peoples, not races. We are dealing with events that are primarily a struggle between languages. Here I will put in an aside, not unconnected with my main theme. If one keeps one's eye on language as such, then one must regard certain kinds of research with caution, or at least not misapply their results.
Among the things envisaged by Mr O'Donnell, one of the lines of inquiry that seems indeed to have specially attracted him, was nomenclature, particularly personal and family names. Now English surnames have received some attention, though not much of it has been well informed or conducted scientifically. But even such an essay as that of Max Förster in 1921 (Keltisches Wortgut im Englischen) shows that many 'English' surnames, ranging from the rarest to the most familiar, are linguistically derived from Welsh (or British), from place-names, patronymics, personal names, or nick-names; or arc in part so derived, even when that origin is no longer obvious. Names such as Gough, Dewey, Yarnal, Merrick, Onions, or Vowles, to mention only a few.
This kind of inquiry is, of course, significant for the purpose of discovering the etymological origin of elements current in English speech, and characteristic of modern Englishry, of which names and surnames are a very important feature even though they do not appear in ordinary dictionaries. But for other purposes its significance is less certain.
One must naturally first set aside the names derived from places long anglicized in language. For example, even if Harley in Shropshire could be shown to be beyond doubt of the same origin as Harlech (Harddlech) in Wales, nothing instructive concerning the relations of the English and Welsh peoples arises from the occurrence of Harley (derived from the Shropshire place) as a family name in England. The etymology of Harley remains an item in place-names research, and such evidence as it affords for the relations of Welsh (or British) and English refers to the distant past, for which the later surname has no significance. Similarly with the surname Eccles, even when that place-name or place-name element is not under suspicion of having nothing to do with ecclesia.
The case may be different when a name is derived from a place actually in Wales; but even such names could migrate far and early. A probable example is Gower: best known to English students as the name of a fourteenth-century poet whose language was strongly tinctured with the dialect of Kent, the whole breadth of Ynys Prydain from the region of Gwyr. But with regard to such names, and indeed to others not derived from place-names, the Welsh origin of which is more certain or more obvious – such as Griffiths, Lloyd, Meredith, or Cadwallader – one should reflect that the patrilinear descent of names makes them misleading.
English or Anglo-Norman names were no doubt adopted in Wales far more freely and extensively than were Welsh names at any period on the other side; but it is, I suppose, hazardous to assume that everyone who bore a Welsh name in the past, from which eventually a surname might be derived – Howell or Maddock or Meredith or the like – was necessarily of Welsh origin or a Welsh-speaker. It is in the early modern period that names of this sort first become frequent in English records, but caution is, no doubt, necessary even in dealing with ancient times and the beginning of the contact between the two languages.
1
Some of his work is contained in B.M. MS. Add. 31922, together with compositions by Henry and his friends.