9 - Wales before Annexation

Summary

In 1936, the writer J. R. R. Tolkien lamented in a lecture on the Anglo-Saxon work Beowulf that the ‘fairy godmother’ most visibly presiding over the poem’s interpretative fortunes was not, as one might have expected, Poesis but, rather, those honorable, but less directly to-the-point ministering spirits, Historia, Mythologia, and Philologia.¹ Of course, these and other noble ladies had long guided the fortunes of a host of similar texts and disciplines. Particularly tenacious at the time Tolkien was writing – and it is worth remembering that he was born in South Africa in 1892 – was the grip maintained by that exacting mistress Teleologia on the field of English constitutional history.² Stubb’s Select Charters was first published in 1870 and his Constitutional History in 1873; his influential writings traced the origins of representative government in England back to liberty-loving Teutons in the forests of ancient Germania. As late as the 1950s, the righteous – and implicitly racialized – inevitability of this line of descent was still being taught as history to English school children.³ Stubbs’s own works remained part of the Oxford curriculum through the 1970s. In like manner, historians working in the pre- and post-war periods, often from the lofty academic common rooms of All Souls College Oxford, charted the progress of colonial cultures from darkest ignorance to the light of self-governance under the benevolent guidance of Mother England. Westminster became in their works a model for human society as a whole, the telos of a new world order grounded in justice and fair play.⁴