16 - Wales since the Annexation

Summary

‘For Wales – see England’. For much of the period since the Annexation of 1284, the constitutional history of Wales might be summed up neatly in this oft-quoted, and rather dismissive, line from the Encyclopaedia Britannica.¹ Edward I’s settlement set the parameters within which Wales was to operate in terms of government, the administration of the law and the role of the Church, for 250 years; and the so-called ‘Act of Union’ (1536 and 1543) carried the process further, assimilating governmental and legal practice in Wales further to the English model. Yet, as this chapter will suggest, ‘For Wales – see England’ does not tell the full story of Wales’s constitutional history. During the nineteenth century, as a viable strain of political nationalism grew up in the principality, its proponents looked to the example of Ireland as a pattern on which to model their demands. During the twentieth, it was Scotland that provided the inspiration for politicians now anxious for a greater measure of devolution – something finally achieved in 1997. If the first five centuries after annexation saw Wales sublimated to English constitutional imperatives, the nineteenth and the twentieth saw Wales define its own nationhood by active engagement with the other smaller nations within the United Kingdom. In this chapter these three phases of Welsh constitutional development will be examined in turn, and it will be suggested that the Wales which received a degree of institutional independence in 1997 was a very British creation.