Chapter Fourteen - Wales and the News

Summary

Introduction

For almost all of the period 1640–1800 there existed no press on Welsh soil, and comparatively little news media was printed in the Welsh language. This did not, however, mean that Wales was an information backwater. This chapter will show that the Welsh were adept at seeking out news sources and sharing news. There was a very keen appetite for manuscript and printed material. From the late seventeenth century this included news media printed in Welsh as well as English. English newspapers, pamphlets and periodicals were keenly received by gentry households and their contents disseminated, as were the bespoke manuscript newsletters and letters of news which were one of the main sources of domestic news for early modern Welsh and English elites. For less wealthy news consumers there were ballads and almanacs, and (particularly in border areas) the oral dissemination of news by those travelling, selling and working for the gentry. This chapter will explore Wales and its relationship with the news media in six sections. It begins with a summary of Welsh and English historiography, before examining the available primary sources, many of which would bear further study. Section three outlines depictions of Wales in the news, particularly at times of crisis, and posits some tentative arguments about the Welsh response to these often-crude stereotypes. Sections four and five take a brief chronological look at the developments in Welsh relationships with the news during two main periods: 1640–95 and 1695–1800.

Historians, Wales and the News

Scholarly studies of Wales and the news have been few and far between. This is particularly the case in relation to the sixty years between 1640 and 1700. Lloyd Bowen's articles on seventeenth-century Welsh news networks and the intersection between news and language are notable foundations on which to build. Sam Garland's PhD research using the north-east Welsh Mostyn newsletter collection demonstrated the interactions between scribal and printed forms of periodical news, and my own recent book explored the connections between north-east Welsh news culture and historical traditions of political and religious loyalism (Garland 2016; Ward Clavier 2020). Several scholars have considered Welsh news and print culture in relation to specific events or discrete periods. The early covert printing presses of Welsh Catholics have featured in research on the Catholic resistance after 1568.