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  • Ancient and Modern Britons
  • Jane Aaron (bio)
Between Wales and England: Anglophone Welsh Writing of the Eighteenth Century by Bethan M. Jenkins. University of Wales Press, 2017. £34.99. ISBN 9 7817 8683 0302

The refrain to a patriotic jingle published in 1904 – 'Every Briton is brave for Wales his country' – reads oddly in translation unless one bears in mind the fact that in the Welsh original ('Dewr yw pob Britwn dros Gymru ei wlad')1 the term 'Britwn' signified a Welshman, an Ancient Briton. The disjunction between the modern and ancient significations of 'Briton', and the complexities of identity and national allegiance to which it could give rise, are at the heart of Bethan M. Jenkins's new study. Britain was forged anew after the 1707 Act of Union with Scotland, when the 'Parliament of Great Britain' was established to unite the parliaments of Scotland and England. For the Welsh, however, and particularly for Welsh antiquarians, such as the three authors who constitute the main focus of Between Wales and England – Lewis Morris (Llewelyn Ddu o Fôn, 1701–65), Evan Evans (Ieuan Fardd or Ieuan Brydydd Hir, 1731–88), and Edward Williams (Iolo Morganwg, 1747–1826) – the word 'Briton' still signified those people conquered by Rome, from whose British, or Brittonic, [End Page 79] language Welsh had evolved. As Bethan Jenkins points out, 'when Evans speaks of British poetry he invariably means Ancient British, that is the Welsh' (p. 89); similarly, Edward Williams remarked in 1792, in his correspondence, that 'by Britons, we the Welsh always mean ourselves' (p. 130).

Between Wales and England queries the accepted view, promoted by Linda Colley in her influential Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (1992), that Great Britain coalesced around its Protestant religion which unproblematically united England, Scotland, and Wales, though not, of course, Ireland. It introduces in opposition to Colley's findings the arguments of the twentieth-century Welsh philosopher J. R. Jones, in Prydeindod (Britishness, 1966), that language, rather than religion, is the key issue in the formation of national identity. Rather than unifying Wales with England and Scotland, that issue, of course, divided them. The people of the island Julius Caesar knew as Britannia, a Latinised derivative of the British and subsequently Welsh term, Prydain, were indeed united by one language, but that language was not English. Attempts had been made to eradicate the Welsh language: the sixteenth-century Welsh Acts of Union which 'annexed' Wales 'to and with this realm of England' had ordained that 'from henceforth no person or persons that use Welsh speech or language shall have or enjoy any manner of office or fees … unless he or they use and exercise the speech or language of English'. But it survived, in part, ironically, because of the Protestant revolution which, with its emphasis on the necessity of worshipping in the vernacular, led to the publication of a Welsh translation of the Bible in 1588. Consequently, at the close of the eighteenth century 71.8 per cent of the Welsh population were still Welsh-speaking, and 44.2 per cent had no English.2 For them the absence of any reference to Wales in the Act which unified Scotland and England into Britain was as paradoxical as it would be if New Zealand were to rename itself Aotearoa today while at the same time obliterating from its records any acknowledgement of its Maori past.

Lewis Morris, Evan Evans, and Edward Williams were all bilingual writers, publishing in both Welsh and English. Bethan Jenkins's thesis is that J. R. Jones's question 'what becomes of one's identity when writing in a language not one's own?' (pp. xv–xvi) was for each of them a vital concern. 'What have I, who am a Welshman, to do with English Poetry?' asked Evan Evans in 1772. If there was an answer to that question, it lay within that slippery term 'Briton' and its ancient and modern meanings. In its opening chapter, Between Wales and England provides a full historical introduction to this complex situation, before proceeding to devote one chapter [End Page 80] to each of its three key subjects; their English-language works are assessed...

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