What about Ffred Fflintstone?

The Welsh according to the Financial Times are stone age.  It's hard to disagree until you realise the paper isn't referring to the Assembly or local government or the state of our national media.  Instead it's a response to the latest scientific offering regarding British DNA, albeit research that's a step-up from the Dafydd Iwan is descended from an old Welsh King of England hooey currently entertaining the public on S4C.

Meanwhile according to the Guardian the Oxford University study reveals that "30% of white British DNA has German Ancestry" (No it doesn't, it merely shows that in the dim and distant past many present day Germans and Britons shared common ancestors.) The Daily Mail says something similar about the French while the BBC gleefully trumpets the fact that the "Celts are not a unique genetic group."

Let's take a layman's look at the sample that allowed the researchers to conclude that the UK's population could be divided into 17 distinct groups, while recognizing that genetic variety in Western Europe is both very homogeneous and very recent.   Here's a large scale map.

It looks to me that some of the sampling was designed to prove a point.  The large number of samples in Devon and Cornwall, in Pembrokeshire and in North East Scotland (Picts) for example.  At the same time other interesting possibilities are ignored.  Mid Wales, Carmarthenshire and the South are hardly covered at all, a large area north of London - which stood out in Victorian examinations of negrescence - is empty of samples, as are large areas of Scotland and significant areas of the Welsh border (West Herefordshire and all of Shropshire).

What does the map say about Wales?  Well the North Wales grouping is certainly distinct but how far south does it spread?  This might have told us something about the extent of the Ordovici lands and there are also no samples from Lleyn (possible Gangani).  Blood groups long ago told us something about the differences within Pembrokeshire and no doubt the current study will revive the Little England meme, but is it true?  In reality the S Pembrokeshire cluster doesn't appear to coincide with S Pembrokeshire at all, it spreads north and west.  There is no obvious link with Devon or Flanders, the usual suspects in the populating of the area and I wouldn't be surprised if the two groupings ie North and South Pembrokeshire both predate the Roman never mind the Norman invasion.  If a wider sample had been taken in North Ceredigion, Carmarthen, Glamorgan and Gwent we might have a better understanding of the actual demographic history.

The Welsh border grouping seems heavily weighted to the Forest of Dean while excluding sampling in West Herefordshire and Shropshire. It's a puzzle why the southern (Dobunni?) area should then reappear in Cheshire.  Again Wales has been somewhat short-changed by limited sampling in a survey which has been described as perhaps the richest genetic survey of any country to date.

I'm surprised that anyone is surprised that there is no single Celtic grouping.  The Anglo-Saxon invasion lasted no more than a few decades yet it has left a distinct 10-40% trace - according to the survey - amongst the central and southern English.  The period from the re-populating of Britain following the Ice Age to the Belgae arriving just ahead of the Romans was around 9000 years, for sure there would have been many other population movements during this timespan and subsequently various groupings waiting to be discovered -  a single "Celtic" grouping would be highly unlikely.

A large part of the sampling was carried out in Continental Europe, see map, but again there seem to be some omissions.  Why nothing from Friesland, after all Frisian is the language most closely related to English?  Why no testing in southern Ireland, population movements are not all one way, see the Deisi.  There was also limited testing from much of Denmark.  Still the absence of what the survey calls FRA17 from all three Welsh groupings, and only the Welsh groupings, does indeed seem significant and nails the South Pembrokeshire is Little England meme - the absence of FRA17 and GER3 suggesting that all three observed Welsh groupings were amongst the earliest inhabitants of post-Ice Age Britain.

As far as Wales and the Welsh are concerned there is still much to learn about historical demographic events and this large survey is far from being the last word.

My country 'tis of thy people you're dying.

Morrissey is playing Cardiff on the 18th of this month but never mind that, one of the support acts is supposedly Buffy Sainte Marie - well if Bob Dylan can release an album of Sinatra covers then I guess Buffy can support Morrissey.   She's 74 now but here she is nearly half a century ago with her memorable curse against the exceptional, indispensable, inexcusable nation.  The Kinzua mud she mentions is a reference to a reservoir in Pennsylvania which saw the Seneca people dispossessed from lands granted to them by another broken treaty.  It was built during the period 1960-65.

Now that your big eyes have finally opened
Now that you're wondering how must they feel
Meaning them that you've chased across America's movie screens
Now that you're wondering "how can it be real?"
That the ones you've called colourful, noble and proud
In your school propaganda
They starve in their splendor?
You've asked for my comment I simply will render

My country 'tis of thy people you're dying.

Now that the longhouses breed superstition
You force us to send our toddlers away
To your schools where they're taught to despise their traditions.
Forbid them their languages, then further say
That American history really began
When Columbus set sail out of Europe, and stress
That the nation of leeches that conquered this land
Are the biggest and bravest and boldest and best.
And yet where in your history books is the tale
Of the genocide basic to this country's birth,
Of the preachers who lied, how the Bill of Rights failed,
How a nation of patriots returned to their earth?
And where will it tell of the Liberty Bell
As it rang with a thud
Over Kinzua mud
And of brave Uncle Sam in Alaska this year?

My country 'tis of thy people you're dying

Hear how the bargain was made for the West:
With her shivering children in zero degrees,
Blankets for your land, so the treaties attest,
Oh well, blankets for land is a bargain indeed,
And the blankets were those Uncle Sam had collected
From smallpox-diseased dying soldiers that day.
And the tribes were wiped out and the history books censored,
A hundred years of your statesmen have felt it's better this way.
And yet a few of the conquered have somehow survived,
Their blood runs the redder though genes have been paled.
From the Grand Canyon's caverns to craven sad hills
The wounded, the losers, the robbed sing their tale.
From Los Angeles County to upstate New York
The white nation fattens while others grow lean;
Ah the tricked and evicted they know what I mean.

My country 'tis of thy people you're dying.

The past it just crumbled, the future just threatens;
Our life blood shut up in your chemical tanks.
And now here you come, bill of sale in your hands
And surprise in your eyes that we're lacking in thanks
For the blessings of civilization you've brought us,
The lessons you've taught us, the ruin you've wrought us
Oh see what our trust in America's bought us.

My country 'tis of thy people you're dying.

Now that the pride of the sires receives charity,
Now that we're harmless and safe behind laws,
Now that my life's to be known as your heritage,
Now that even the graves have been robbed,
Now that our own chosen way is a novelty
Hands on our hearts we salute you your victory,
Choke on your blue white and scarlet hypocrisy
Pitying the blindness for you've never seen
That the eagles of war whose wings lent you glory
They were never no more than carrion crows,
Pushed the wrens from their nest, stole their eggs, changed their story;
The mockingbird sings it, it's all that she knows.
"Ah what can I do?" say a powerless few
With a lump in your throat and a tear in your eye
Can't you see that their poverty's profiting you.

My country 'tis of thy people you're dying

Abbey Cwmhir History, Homes and People

According to the 2011 census the community of Abbeycwmhir consists of 96 households with a total population of 235.  Of these, 48 individuals regard themselves as English-only, 109 chose a Welsh-only identity, 15 claimed to be both Welsh and British and 59 British-only.  126 inhabitants were born in Wales and 101 in England.  Of the working population 39% were still engaged in agriculture while around 13% claimed to  have some knowledge of Welsh.

Given these figures it comes as something of a surprise to discover that these 96 households have managed to produce a 320 page book, size 9¾" x 7½" illustrated throughout and mainly in colour.  If Cwmhir can do it, so can any community in Wales.

The first half of the book is largely historical, with the second half given over to pieces submitted by the inhabitants of the households themselves - autobiographies, house and family histories in the main with the occasional mild rant against modernity.  Most were provided as part of a millennium project, although some were updated in 2008.  Here, for example, we come across the 12 year-old Dan Lydiate of Tynyberth, who was rather good at Rugby.  The book costs £18, which given the profusion of illustrations is fair value for money.

The history is a little bit too Gwynedd orientated for my taste but does at least recognize that the Abbey was founded in 1176 by the princes of Maelienydd.  In places the story gets confusing, I could have done with a tree to sort out the comings and goings of the various 19C and 20C Phillipses - the local squires.  The family kept a tight rein on the local community, most of whom were their tenants.  Children were provided with a school but in return were expected to curtsy and bow to their betters. Perhaps this paternalism is why the parish doesn't figure greatly in the rebellious annals of the West Radnorshire Rebeccaites.  Incidentally an uncle of mine was painting at the hall sometime after the Second World War.  Perhaps unfairly he felt the lady of the house was trying to overawe the workmen with her knowledge of a foreign tongue. Unfortunately she wasn't making much progress in getting her message across to a recently arrived maid with little English.  My uncle stepped forward and explained things in Eighth-Army Italian.  He wasn't thanked.

Reading this history is like panning for gold, luckily there are plenty of nuggets to be found.  A major gripe are the doubts cast on the Abbey being the burial place of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd.  Certainly Archbishop Peckham and a contemporary chronicler believed this to be the case.   The doubts cast on the story are opinions rather than facts - for example why should the English fear that the Abbey might become a shrine?  Llywelyn wasn't being returned to Gwynedd, rather to his cousin Mortimer's lands - who might well have feared for his own soul if he denied the prince a Christian burial.  The Americans may have feared to bury Bin Laden but perhaps he was more in touch with the medieval mind when he said that people prefer a strong horse.  Llywelyn had proved himself a weak horse, the English may have feared his bloodline but not his memory.

I could find nothing about the decline of the Welsh language in the parish, no-one was on hand to record the demise of the community's last Ned Maddrell.  In the 1901 census I once found three elderly Welsh speakers, born in the parish to parents who themselves had been born in the parish and who never appeared to have lived away from home.  They may well have been the last native speakers of the traditional dialect of the cantref of Maelienydd.

Getting on for 90 households have provided material for the second half of the book, which will certainly be of interest to social historians and, perhaps, gossips.  I can't claim to have any connection to the parish so I searched for the names of folk who I'd known from secondary school days.  Like nearly all my contemporaries they'd mostly left Wales, some barely remembered, others long forgotten.

Dai Hawkins' meanings of local farm names is a useful appendix, although he doesn't say why his explanations of Cefn Pawl and Hirddywel differ from those in Richard Morgan's little book on Radnorshire Place-Names.  There are sections on geology, pre-history, and the pub with the most annoying name in Wales - for some of us anyway -The Happy Union.

I'd say a must buy for anyone with Cwmhir connections and a worthwhile read for those interested in a rather atypical - it had no council houses - community in rural, English-speaking Radnorshire.

In a Vale of Windows

Bryndraenog is only two fields away from England, although as Mr Payne pointed out the Teme hereabouts is no real border, either geographically or historically.

Around the time Bryndraenog was built - the timbers were felled in 1436 -  the bard Ieuan ap Hywel Swrdwal came to sing a praise poem to the new building and it's owner Llywelyn Fychan.  Llywelyn Fychan did not trace his ancestry to the main descent group in Maelienydd, that of Elystan Glodrydd, but rather to  one Hywel Athro.  Perhaps Llywelyn was rhingyll or reeve to the local estates of Richard of York who had inherited the Mortimer lands in 1425 - Bryndraenog is at the entrance of a small valley called Cwmyrhingyll.  This is all discussed in the RCAHM volume Houses & History in the March of Wales Radnorshire 1400-1800, a book that really should be in every Radnorian's library. The volume also includes a partial translation of Ieuan ap Hywel Swrdwal's poem, but as there seems to be no translation of the entire poem readily available here's my rough translation:

The night the generous Son of Grace was born a star appeared as a sign to drag a thousand from the fiery pit and the blind from their darkness.  And a second time after Jesus, the journeying star of Owain: it was brighter than, woe for many, a myriad of smaller stars.  There is a star in Maelienydd, a proud maid of lime and wood, daughter of the king of sunshine, this court is the countess of summer.  Bright daylight, all praise to her, is seen at night in our land.  The duke has many houses, none of them surpass this, many do not know whether this is the moon or daylight?

Llywelyn Fychan, my draught of mead, the son of Ieuan owns it, the stout, generous line of Ieuan of our land, in the eighth degree from the line of Hywel Athro.  Great is his praise on the top strings, the line of Meurig, miracle of the bards.  There's no praise of the privileged ranks without the topstring of Bugeildy.  How pleasant, by St Chad, to come to him through yonder Teme.  He'll win words of greeting, a famous man with a pleasant office; he'll know amusement, joking tales, he'll know the refined words of wise men. I'll study when I alight, eyeing the shining white lime and see, between me and home, a looking-glass from heaven's goldsmith.  There's patronage here for me, in a vale of windows.  Like the city of Rome, a countless number of patterned glass and stone.  None who comes could swear, was it a man or an angel who built his house?  If it was a man he built well.  Joints, trusses, a knot of Tristan, packed crossbeams, a virtuous Christian, the good craftsmanship of the new hall's sanctuary. a chapel amidst great bays, a court like the houses of Cheap, its face covered in lime.  A holy framework, by the rood, a young man's ancient fortress; the sun's candle, chieftain of the close, the wise son of Ieuan's Celliwig; heaven's kinswoman, white-smocked, a stone cloister, St David's glebe;  allow the lord, a collared hart, the life of Noah in his new hall.

Nothing Special

A bit of autobiography

Growing-up in Radnorshire in the early 1950s you wouldn't have heard much Welsh.  Indeed I can actually remember the occasion when I became aware of  the existence of the language.  Travelling on a Crosville bus between Llandrindod and Crossgates, my mother plonked me down beside another little lad in order to gossip with the boy's mother on the opposite seat.  Being a friendly sort I tried to make conversation, without any success, prompting the mother to explain that her offspring didn't speak English - which she then proved by launching into an incomprehensible stream of sound to which the previously mute boy happily responded.

A little while after this incident I discovered  that I, too, was a Welsh child of sorts.  Our cottage might not have had electricity or even running water, except for a near-by council standpipe, but we did have a splendid battery powered Ever Ready radio - my family's first step on the road of consumerism.  Wikipedia tells me that the date was 22 October 1955 and my father went crazy when Derek Tapscott scored a goal.  The radio confirmed that Wales had beaten England 2-1 and as a suddenly aware young Welshman I was over the moon.

 Simple Faithful Folk

My mother was born in Abertysswg but moved to Radnorshire, where her mother had relatives, during the swift disaster of 1926.  Later the family moved-on to Harrow - described in 1932 as "largely Cymric" where she and her siblings joined the YCL - for the socials she told me.  The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact didn't prevent her joining the WAAFs, aged just 19, in the summer of 1939 and by 1940 she was serving at RAF Uxbridge.  Churchill and his wife were frequented visitors.  Her opinion of Winston - a drunk, and Clemmie - too interested in the younger officers.  I wish I'd talked to her more about her early life but isn't that always the case.

It's fascinating how as the older generation kick-the-bucket the elites, who now control so much of academia as well as the main stream media, feel able to rewrite the history of the Second World War.  Stalin is painted as worse than Hitler, the role of the Soviet Union diminished to the point where you would think their only contribution was the post-victory rape of every female in Berlin.  Just look at the comments on any Second World War You Tube video for a taster of how these views have entered the mainstream..  Let's forget Anglo-American bombing aimed primarily at the German working class - the main group who actually opposed the rise of Nazidom - and the callous nuclear weapons dropped on an already defeated Japan.

This is a picture of the Ford plant in wartime Cologne.  The factory - at the centre of the snap - remained undamaged while the slave-labour barracks (below it) had been thoroughly bombed.

We're told that this was as the result of the fortunes of war rather than any deliberate plan to preserve the Ford company's property.

Radical Wales seems to be particularly proud of the film Pride, based on a London based lesbian and gay group who raised funds for the mining families of Onllwyn during the great strike of 1984-85.  How safe, how cosy, but then we've always been partial to a pat on the back from our betters.  The main character is an American, which can't have hurt sales to the USA.  Wisely no mention was made of the fact that said hero was General Secretary of the YCL - which even in its revisionist 1980s guise wouldn't have been much of a selling point.

I seem to remember that the miners of Donbas collected millions of pounds for the striking miners, all forgotten now by a radical Wales that can't even be bothered to find out what is happening in present day Ukraine.  Please let's never again mention that Donetsk was founded by a Welshman, it will only serve to remind us of the parochialism and irrelevance of our modern day national movement.  Heaven knows what Gwyn Alf would have made of it all.

Welsh Jokes

I can't remember the Welsh being objects of ridicule in the past, although that certainly seems to be the case today.  Disliked perhaps, but never a joke.  Perhaps it was the influence of Lloyd George and Nye Bevan, seen as being responsible for two of the great social reforms of the 20C - pensions and free health care.  I think it is something different though, and I'm talking about the disregard of the nobs rather than some UKIP bloke from Wolverhampton.  No, I think the old-school-tie brigade have lost their fear of the Welsh working class.  Up until the last great miner's strike there was still a possibility that the established order might topple.  Nowadays that's - perhaps foolishly - not seen as being the case and the Welsh have suffered more than most from Hooray Henry disdain.

The Kurds

When the siege of Kobani started I thought the Americans were engaged in PR bombing to impress the media gathered on the Turkish border overlooking the town. In reality the American action was far more subtle, an average seven bombing runs a day was just enough not to dissuade ISIS reinforcements from reaching the town.  Like wasps attracted to a jam jar they were being lured to their death, pehaps as many as 2000.  Of course this meant that the YPG/YPJ fighters were also being used.  Still treated as terrorists by the US and the EU, they fought the war mainly with AK47s, being largely denied supplies of even anti-tank weapons and night-vision equipment.  Perhaps 500 Kurds died in Kobani, many of them the young women who temporarily became objects of media attention in the West.   Take a look at some of their faces here, they deserve that at least.

Writing the Welsh Out of Popular History

The other night's moon halo occurred exactly 554 years after the battle of Mortimer's Cross, an event marked by the appearance of a similar atmospheric phenomenon, a parhelion.

That battle resulted in the defeat of the Lancastrians and the subsequent execution of their commander Owain Tudur. The majority from what would later became Radnorshire fought on the victorious Yorkist side and their leaders benefited greatly as a result: Ieuan ap Philip was constable of Cefnllys, a fortress which he rebuilt and ruled with the help of a still existing copy of Hywel's laws.  Llywelyn ap Rhys was constable of New Radnor castle and Dafydd Goch - he was from Y Fron close to modern day Crossgates - was granted the small Marcher lordship of Stapleton by Presteigne. In this way the descendants of the old princes of Maelienydd continued to rule their ancestral lands, at least at the local level, maintaining the language, literature, law and traditions of the Welsh.

Check out popular English histories of the War of the Roses and you'll find little about the Welsh just as books on Tudor times rarely mention Wales; and this reminds me of something published the other day on the Daily Wales blogsite.  The article, see here, entertained its readers by including nearly every smidgen of historical balderdash ever dreamt-up about/by the Welsh.  Welsh Israelites - tick; Welsh Indians - tick; the Old British church - tick; Coelbren y Beirdd - tick.

Now what is interesting about this flummery - and  there's nothing new about any of it - is why these legends came about and what effect they had on reality.  Gwyn Alf Williams, for example, wrote a marvellous book about the Welsh Indians, see here although he certainly didn't belive that such a tribe ever existed outside the minds of men.  The Daily Wales article, however, sees the dismissal of these myths as part of some English plot to write the Welsh out of history - their fire may be wildly off target but their heart is in the right place.

Anyone who watches Time Team should play a game and count-up the number of occasions that great leveller Tony Robinson (sorry Sir Tony Robinson) mentions the Anglo-Saxons.  British survivals in Lindsey, Elmet, amongst the Magonsaete and as ancestors of the royal houses of Wessex and Mercia etc. are ignored.  Even when the programme makes a rare foray into Wales you'll more likely hear Baldrick droning-on about Anglo-Saxons.  It's a very one dimensional view of post-Roman Britain.

Then what about King Arthur?  The Matter of Britain is one of the foundation stones of vernacular literature from Germany to Portugal, yet despite obvious Welsh characters and backgrounds any Welsh transmission is downplayed, perhaps the result of lowly tavern minstrels. Never mind that a princess of Deheubarth was rolling around in the bed of the King of England, who by the way was really a Frenchman.

And so it goes on with the BBC the worst offender.  Here's a revealing factoid I've mentioned before in connection with Janina Ramirez' series on the Hundred Years War: Kent was the English shire asked to raise the most men - 280 - for the army that went to Crecy, for many English counties the number was less than 60.  The figure for the cantrefi that went to make up the future county of Radnorshire was 430.  Did the Welsh get a mention, did they hell.  As for Dimbleby's Seven Age's of Britain, who can forget his statement that Britain was pagan until a few Irish monks turned up in Scotland in the mid 500s.  Heaven knows where he thought St Patrick came from.

Fergal Keane's Story of Ireland was little better, the conquest of Ireland being achieved by the English or, at best, the Anglo-Normans. A better term for these half-Welsh conquerors, few of whom would have even been able to speak English, is Cambro-Normans. Frustrated by their failure to make progress in Wales these descendants of Princess Nest turned to a more profitable field of conquest. I suppose Irish pride is better served by blaming the English rather than admitting the role of men like Robert Fitz Stephen who boasted of his Trojan, that is his Welsh blood:

"We derive our descent, originally, in part from the blood of the Trojans, and partly we are of the French race. From the one we have our native courage, from the other the use of armour. Since, then, inheriting such generous blood on both sides, we are not only brave, but well armed."

And so it goes, Ieuan Brydydd Hir got it right some 240 years ago:

The false historians of a polished age
Show that the Saxon has not lost his rage,
Though tamed by arts his rancour still remains:
Beware of Saxons still, ye Cambrian swains.

Jessica's Radnorshire Roots

Not having access to a television - well at least one where I have any control of the remote - I'd never heard of the actress Jessica Raine, she was the star of the BBC series Call the Midwife.  I came across her name while checking out some Kington history, Raine is an ex-pupil of the town's Lady Hawkins school.

Like another ex-pupil, the singer Ellie Goulding, there seems to be some ambiguity about Jessica's nationality, she being described in various mainstream articles as a Welsh actress.  The cause of this mix-up in Goulding's case was the inability of Warburton's Wales's national newspaper to distinguish between Kington and Knighton.  In the case of Raine it seems to stem from an early interview where she said she was from near Hay-on-Wye, no doubt correctly surmising that this was the only place anywhere near her home in Eardisley, Herefordshire a London journalist might conceivably have heard of.

Ms Raine herself has had something to say about borderland ambiguities, remarking on the "Welsh twang" of her local accent and that she "grew up in Herefordshire on the borders with Wales, so it was neither one nor the other."  All quite interesting but more was to follow when I discovered that her real surname was Lloyd and that she was connected to the Lloyds of Baynham Hall, Michaelchurch-on-Arrow, a branch of the well-known family of Radnorshire bonesetters.

In the days when agriculture was less mechanized than it is today a bad back could easily bring ruin to a family.  Radnorshire farmers had little faith in the medical profession to be of any assistance, whereas bonesetters were trusted and sought after.  An interesting article here.  Many of these local bonesetters were descendants of Hugh Lloyd 1770-1856, as indeed is Ms Raine.  In 1969 Jessica's father unveiled a memorial tablet in Michaelchurch parish church to commemorate the original Hugh Lloyd.  The memorial repeats the verse on the bonesetter's original tombstone.

A talent rare by him possessed
T'adjust the bones of the distressed
Whenever called he ne'er refused
But cheerfully his talent used
But now he lies beneath this tomb
Till Jesus comes t'adjust his own.

A few year's ago I may have done something to cast doubt on the family's connection with that figure of local folklore Silver John, see here.  It was not my intention as there is usually some element truth in these old legends.

Welsh DNA

Dafydd Iwan "descended from Welsh kings who ruled England" said the headline in the Daily Post, which seems all to typical of the high falutin' claims that usually ensue when DNA meets MSM.

This was all publicity of course for an upcoming project, backed by S4C, the Post and the Western Mail:

Other celebrities will be tested including Kath and Bryn and also members of the general public who will have paid up to £200 for the privilege - I'm guessing the celebs will get a freebie.  So what we have here will be a self-selecting sample and a good deal of what the project may well tell us we already know.  South Wales is full of folk with ancestors from Ireland, the West of England and further afield for example.

Mind you even more rigorous sampling gets things wrong, remember the Blood of the Vikings series which picked out Llanidloes as a likely place to find Welsh DNA.  Of course the town is slap bang in the middle of the 16C Arwystli plantation, typified by surnames such as Wigley, Ashton, Chapman, Jarman, Peate etc.  You could end up with Y-chromosome results more typical of Derbyshire and Lancashire than Montgomeryshire.

Of course a large sample of Welsh DNA is to be welcomed and hopefully that is what the project will achieve. It could find out more about the supposed Balkan hotspot around Abergele or the hinted "Pictish" DNA in Central Wales or who knows what else.

A large pinch of salt however, conclusions in this branch of science are open to frequent revision.  Time was  there was no Neanderthal blood in modern humans, then there was, then there wasn't, now there is.  Same goes for the out-of-Africa theory.

Meanwhile things could get a bit bothersome for S4C as a result of the controversy between the scientists behind the project and those at UCL.  It's already been the subject of an editorial in the magazine Nature and UCL have dedicated a section of their website to the matter.  Scroll down on this page to 24 September 2014 for a taster.

Anyone interested in joining the project can do so here.  Hopefully they'll get involved in the hope of uncovering something about the prehistory and unrecorded history of Wales and the Welsh people rather than just to bore the pants off us all with daft claims of being descended from Svein the Viking.  

The Old Block

Feeling a bit of sympathy for Andy Mountbatten - hasn't the guy done his level best to win Central Asia for the West?  And how is he repaid?  By having his face splashed all over the front page.  What is the point of the cleptocracy owning the media if they can't keep an officer and a gentleman out of the papers.

Anyway this blog needs to get in touch with its yé-yé girl roots, so for Andy and especially his dad here's the best-connected woman in the history of pop to sing a little ditty:

Radnorshire's lost plygain tradition

If you were to sum up Wales with one of those fashionable hundred-object lists then surely a recording of this plygain carol would have to be included.

There was a time when the plygain tradition held sway in Radnorshire. Ffransis Payne recounted the evidence of a Glascwm farmer, born circa 1820, who recalled the Christmas morning plygain service held in the parish church. The church bells were rung from 3am until the service commenced at 05.30, then traditional carols and hymns would be sung in the highly illuminated building - a lesser known element of the tradition -  and all this in the Welsh language.

Rhayader's plygain was abandoned, seemingly because of drunkenness, while in Llanbister the service was called pelygen.  After the tradition retreated from the state church it lived on in the chapels and even farmhouses.  In St Harmon the local chapel was still holding plygain services in the 1870s and the Primitive Methodists of Presteigne persisted until the 1890s, although this last example would have certainly been conducted in English.

The Black Belt, Hillbillies and Reds

My previous post on the national question in the USA, see here, was written before I saw this fascinating map detailing individuals' perceived ethnic origins as recorded by the 2000 US census. The map shows the largest group in each county.  It illustrates some of the issues discussed before - the French element in New England and Louisiana and the Hispanic element in the South West, these being cultures which did not migrate to the United States but were already in situ when the US expanded to take over their lands.  We can also see the scattered remnants of the original inhabitants of the continent and how, for example, Hawaiians have been overwhelmed while indigenous Alaskans still have some degree of territorial integrity.

Turning to the mainstream - those who willingly migrated or were forcibly removed to America - it's interesting to note that the most widespread ethnicity mapped are not the English but the Germans.  In fact it's possible to travel from the Atlantic to the Pacific without leaving a German predominant county.

Two other groups stand-out, the African Americans of the deep South (there are around 100 counties with an absolute black majority) and the group, mainly in the South, especially Appalachia, who do not list any ethnicity other than being American.

In 1928, at the behest of activists like Harry Haywood, the Comintern accepted that the African Americans of the Black Belt constituted a nation as defined by Stalin "a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture."  This led to the CPUSA defining the inhabitants of the Black Belt as an oppressed nation with the right to national self-determination, up to and including secession from the United States.  This line was largely abandoned in 1935 but is still held by small leftist and black nationalist groups.  Communist activity in pre-Second World War America has largely been forgotten - there were 2000 CPUSA members in Alabama alone - so it is easy to underestimate the strength of this idea at a time when sharecropping was still a major economic factor affecting millions.

There are those who would argue that the poor whites of southern Appalachia also have the characteristics of a distinct nation. The problems associated with internal colonialism and post-industrialisation echo those of South Wales.  I'd argue that the mockery directed at rednecks and hillbillies also has echoes in Wales, these being communities elites feel able to denigrate without any of the comeback associated with political correctness.

The small independence movements in Texas and Alaska don't seem to have much interest in their Spanish speaking or native American minorities, instead they are usually dismissed as being right-wingers unhappy with Washington rule.  As Washington rule is so closely allied with clepto-capitalism that's not necessarily a bad thing and perhaps we need to be reading Ralph Nader's book Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State.

Oh and here are some Americans dancing in the days before the corporations started filling their food with high fructose corn syrup.

 

Around Radnorshire - Llanfair Llwyth Yfnwg

While looking at Estyn reports on Radnorshire schools I was taken by this comment in the inspection for Gladestry primary "all learners speak English, although some use the local dialect." How often has mention of the local dialect turned up in an official government publication? What next, official status?

Readers may be disappointed that there's not a lot about the "Radnorshire" dialect on this blog.  The dialect is characteristic of the north and the east of the county rather than the south and west and I do get annoyed at folk, not natural speakers, who put-on "thees, thous, bists and wunnas" as a form of mockery. At the same time a broad Radnorshire accent is a wonderful thing and listening to elderly dialect speakers negotiating a supermarket makes a welcome change from the more usual London and Midlands voices.  

The names of the Gladestry school's catchment area would surely have given Housman a run for his money in the quietest-places-under-the sun stakes: Gladestry, Colva, Michaelchurch-on-Arrow, Burlingjobb, and across the border, Huntington and Brilley.  The quarry at Dolyhir not so much.  I was surprised by the presence of Herefordshire pupils in a Welsh school but seemingly this is quite common, with over 2000 children from England attending state schools in Wales and even more making the journey east.

Census figures which show the Welsh language making ground in East Radnorshire -  the 2011 figures are more realistic than those of 2001 -  have always seemed a bit suspicious. I've put it down to monoglot parents over-estimating the linguistic abilities of their offspring.  Yet perhaps this viewpoint is too pessimistic given the report's description of language use in the school: "Their use of English and Welsh in both oral and written work is extremely advanced and nearly all transfer between the languages confidently and easily."

I'm sure there may be one or two locals who see the revival of the old Welsh placenames of the area as the perverse invention of some rabid nationalist in the county's Highways Department.  Infact the earliest reference to Llanfair Llwyth Yfnwg (Gladestry) dates back to 1291.  Lewis Glyn Cothi came here in the 15C to praise its inns - serving the ales of Llwydlo (Ludlow) and Gweble (Weobley) - and to receive the gift of a mantle from Elis Hol, comparing it in some striking dyfalu to the Golden Fleece and the mantle of Tegau Eurfron.  And of course we are just a mile or so from Hergest, a place of real importance to everything that makes Wales an idea worth defending.

Brulhai (Brilley) was the home of Phelpod ap Rhys, a cyfarwyddyd (storyteller) with a whole world of stories within his head, a master of the seven arts who knew all the chronicles of the island.  Glyn Cothi calls this district Bro Gintun (the vale of Kington) and so did the muleteers of the pre-railroad age bringing coal from South Wales: yn mynd a llawer llwyth o lo, ar hyd y fro i Gyntyn.

The area was still Welsh-speaking in the 18C when a local was taken to court for slander "Di gyrn di dorrws y twlle sydd in di hatt di" - "your horns tore the holes in your hat."  Note the southern verb ending  - ws.  But by the start of the 19C language shift was probably complete, although the Radnorshire antiquarian Mr Cole reported that his grandparents - who farmed Redborough between Llannewydd (Newchurch) and Llanfihangel Dyffryn Arwy (Michaelchurch on Arrow) - still knew Welsh in the middle of that century.  Only Burlingjobb lacks a Welsh name, although 16C spellings such as Byrchop and Berchoppe suggest that, at that time, the name had been cymricised to something like Bersiob.

With the Welsh language spoken in the village school's two classrooms and on public display, at least on the Radnorshire side, we can say that these are small victories in a war whose major battles are being fought, and probably lost, far to the west.

Herefordshire's Welsh Field Names

After bragging-up access to historical records in Wales as compared to England, I have to admit that this is not the case with 19C field names, where we certainly lag behind some of the border counties - see Herefordshire, Cheshire and Shropshire.

The Herefordshire and Cheshire databases are searchable, so to get a quick idea of the distribution of Welsh survivals what better element to look-up than the word cae - field.  I was surprised that this element is found fairly widely in two Cheshire parishes - Malpas and Shocklach.  The Shropshire maps aren't searchable, so I'll leave them alone and instead  look forward to the publication of the planned volume on Welsh placenames in that county.

The map shows those Herefordshire parishes which in 1841 had at least six fields containing the cae element. Most have far more - 83 such fields in Michaelchurch Escley, 61 in Clifford, 47 in Rowlestone, 45 in Craswell and so on, nearly 600 in total.  As you can see there is a pretty close correlation with the parishes where Welsh patronyms were common in the 16C - see post below.  I don't believe there is any great antiquity to most of these field names, instead they reflected a fairly recent acquaintance with the Welsh language.

Despite the widespread occurrence of Welsh surnames there's little evidence for any surviving Welsh national feeling in this Cambria irredenta. I did identify a greater tendency in the 2011 census to opt for a British identity rather than an English only identity in a selection of these parishes - see below.  Perhaps that that reflects some ethnic ambiguity?

On the whole though, while I dislike the use of the term anglicised for any population within Wales, its use here is appropriate -  just like the Germanised Slavs who make up a fair proportion of the  population of eastern Germany.

Let England keep these parishes, although you would think that the locals might take some interest in their own history.

Herefordshire average:  English-only 64% Welsh-only 4% British-only 16%

Clifford:  English-only 52% Welsh-only 8% British-only 28%

Cusop:  English-only 51% Welsh-only 15% British-only 19%

Dorstone:  English-only 54% Welsh-only 7% British-only 26%

Newton:  English-only 55% Welsh-only 9% British-only 27%

Abbeydore:  English-only 55% Welsh-only 5% British-only 23%

Longtown:  English-only 53% Welsh-only 11% British-only 21%

Llangarron:  English-only 56% Welsh-only 8% British-only 24%

Welsh Newton:  English-only 47% Welsh-only 8% British-only 30%

Ganarew:  English-only 50% Welsh-only 12% British-only 26%

Rowlestone:  English-only 50% Welsh-only 8% British-only 26% 

Four Welshwomen in Spain

I don't think that anyone can really argue that Welsh historians are not guilty of writing women out of our country's history, and that's certainly the case with these four youthful participants in the Spanish Civil War.  Margaret Powell and Thora Silverthorne do make an appearance in Rob Stradling's Wales and the Spanish Civil War, but only as a footnote to explain the lack of "gender inclusiveness" in his prose.  Meanwhile Fifi Roberts, whose story is perhaps the best remembered, makes the text but not the index.  Esyllt Scott-Ellis is not mentioned at all, prossibly because the author was unaware of her Welsh links.

Margaret Powell 1913-1990 was born on a farm in Llangenny near Crickhowell.  Some reports say that her father died when she was a child and that her brothers ended up being sent to Canada as part of Barnardo's unlamented scheme to populate the Empire.  Her daughter doesn't mention this in her brief summary of Margaret's life so perhaps it isn't the case.  What is clear is that Margaret trained as a nurse and midwife in London, was anxious to go out to Spain where she worked on the frontline during the Aragon offensive - assisting in a thousand operations and eventually ending up as a document-less refugee in the French camps.  In 1950 Margaret married the Communist journalist Sam Lesser, they lived in Moscow between 1955 and 1959 where her husband was the Daily Worker correspondent.

Another Welsh Communist nurse was Thora Silverthorne 1910-1999 from Abertillery. Better remembered than Margaret Powell there's a good summary of her life here. Thora worked hard to unionise the nursing profession, setting up her Association of Nurses in opposition to the Royal College, it later merged with NUPE.  When Thora died there were obituaries in the Guardian and the Independent.

It was interesting to learn that while Thora couldn't speak Welsh her elder sister did.  This seems to have been commonplace in industrial South Wales with figures like Nye Bevan and Gwyn Thomas speaking no Welsh while their older siblings did.  I remember being amazed in the 1970s to discover that my mother's elder sister could still understand Welsh even though she had lived in Hertfordshire since the 1930s.  Why did families suddenly stop passing on the language to younger siblings around the time of the First World War?

Nowadays we are supposed to equate Communists like Margaret and Thora with the Fascists and Nazis.  Shrill East European governments with murky histories and bought-and-paid-for journalists and authors demand that we accept that the Stalinists were even worse than Hitler.  I'm increasingly suspicious of such claims, even of those crimes admitted by Khrushchev and Gorbachev.  Indeed I fear for a future which sees the likes of Margaret Powell and Thora Silverthorne as villains, rather than the heroes they certainly were.

As mentioned above, the story of Fifi Roberts, the twenty year old daughter of a Penarth sea-captain,  is fairly well-known.  Fifi accompanied her father's vessel, the Seven Sea Spray, when it broke the blockade of Bilbao in April 1937.  This made Miss Roberts something of a celebrity, both in the Basque country and in newspapers around the world.  What is less well known is that Florence also sent reports on her visit to the News Chronicle, including some from Guernica soon after the town had been bombed - you can see her photographs and hear her recollections of the visit here.

Esyllt Scott-Ellis 1916-1983, better known as Priscilla or Pip, was a daughter of the 8th Lord Howard de Walden of Chirk Castle, remembered now as a leading patron of Welsh drama and literature.  Inspired by events in Spain and with some very basic nursing training this twenty-year-old aristocrat went out to Spain and was soon witnessing the battle for Teruel and the subsequent Aragon Offensive.  During the Second World War she was evacuated - as part of a British medical team - from Dunkirk. She later married the actor and author Jose Luis de Vilallonga and lived for many years in Argentina.  Before Plaid supporters get too excited about this largely forgotten member of a family with links to pre-war Welsh nationalism, they'll need to recall that Pip was a volunteer for Franco.  Heaven knows what Tim Williams would make of that!

Cynefin

Anyone with an interest in local history is well-served in Wales as old newspapers, wills, bardic genealogies etc are available on-line and free of charge.  Only photocopied parish registers and civil registration records have been handed over to the fee-devouring private sector.  The latest treat we are promised are on-line tithe maps together with the schedules detailing field names etc.  The map for Llanelwedd has already been uploaded, see here, accompanied by a short article, here. 

The tithe maps and schedules date back to the 1840s, a time when language shift in most of Radnorshire was either in progress or had only recently been completed.  The extent and nature of Welsh language field names should provide clues to the situation in the county's varied parishes, as well as information on dialect, social history and nature.

November 1st. International Day of Solidarity with Kobane

In the documentary Carnets d'un combattant kurde a young Kurdish fighter mused on the beauty of the mountains, for her the most beautiful places are those where there is hope.  Rojava is surely such a place, This was International Women's Day in the capital Qamishlo:

One Language under God?

The USA is certainly an exceptional country, indeed it is so exceptional that the National Question is seemingly of no importance whatsoever.  Lesser countries may have to confront their national problems: Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom, but the USA?

Only one of the 50 states has an official minority language - Hawaii - but with less than 1% of the population speaking the indigenous tongue that official status would seem to be largely symbolic.  A fifth of the US population speak a hearth language* other than English, but then why should recent immigrants expect any official recognition for the language of a country they have left behind?  According to the US Census Bureau's Community Survey more than 2200 claim Welsh as their hearth language, a figure that sounds as credible as the 22000 Irish and the 1400 Scottish Gaels. It is ridiculous to suggest that these languages or even those more widely spoken like Russian, Chinese or Italian should have official status.

Of course the speakers of Native American languages are not recent immigrants, but there's no official status for any of them either - a total of 374000 being estimated as speaking an indigenous language at home, nearly half of them speakers of Navajo - in Arizona and especially New Mexico where they make up 4% of population.  It's sad to relate that many well-known tribes have less hearth speakers than the figure claimed for the Americanwyr Cymraeg - Blackfoot, Paiute, Mohawk, Seneca, Kiowa, Comanche, Cree, Shawnee, Pawnee etc.

Now there's a final category who are often overlooked - these being folk who speak a European language but whose ancestors never migrated to the United States, rather the United States came, uninvited, to them.

There are a number of French speakers in New England, especially Maine (5%).  Were these people recent migrants to the US from French Canada?  The border between Maine and Canada was not finally agreed until 1842 and it seems safe to assume that some at least of the 18% of the population of Aroostock County who speak French will be descended from folk who never migrated to the USA.  More well-known than the New England French are those of Louisiana, with 3.5% of the state's population speaking the language at home - mainly in a concentrated area, with some parishes having up to 30% of hearth speakers.  Again this national group, including the Acadians expelled from Canada by the British, never migrated to the USA. In recent years, in contrast to the oppressive policies of the earlier 20C, there have been moves to encourage the use of French in Louisiana schools, aided by teachers from Francophone countries.

We hear a lot about the border fence and the problems associated with latino migration to the American South West.  What is often forgotten is that these states were originally part of the Spanish Empire - New Mexico and Arizona joining the Union as recently as 1912.  Texas became a state in 1845 and California in 1850, both as the result of war with Mexico.  I've no idea what continuity there is between the original Spanish speaking population of these areas and the present day, no doubt the majority are more recent migrants; but given the continuous history and the substantial numbers involved  - California 28%, Arizona 21%, New Mexico 28%, Texas 29% - there seems little reason why Spanish shouldn't regain its former status as an official language.

* Hearth language is a useful term from the 19C, meaning the language used by a family in their own home.

Rojava

The Empire rather lost control of the narrative last week.  The western media had a grandstand view of the fighting in Kobane and, for once, perhaps inspired by the woman fighters of the YPJ, they actually reported what they saw rather than what they were told.

This forced Washington's hand and, despite the objections of its Turkish ally, the United States engaged in some PR bombing of the ISIS forces massed in and around the town.  At first this was half-hearted but for the last few days it has been carried out successfully because of co-ordination with the forces on the ground defending the Kobane.

It's said that the western media's attention span doesn't extend much beyond ten days and already the Kobane grandstand is emptying.  So what happens next?  The United States has so far failed to arm the Syrian Kurds, indeed they still regard them as a terrorist group.  With the media gone will they accede to Turkey's demand that a buffer zone be set up in northern Syria - a zone which coincidentally would see the suppression of the secular and democratic cantons of Rojava.  Cantons based on the confederalist theories of the imprisoned PKK leader Öcalan -  an experiment in decency and common-sense that the Islamist Turkish government is determined to snuff out. 

While the Iraqi army and even the Peshmerga fled when confronted by the Islamic State's 7C terrorist playbook, it was the armed forces of Rojava - the YPG and the YPJ - who were largely responsible for rescuing the Yazidi Kurds from Singal mountain. Alone among the forces confronting ISIS these Rojavans - they also include some local Arabs and Assyrians - have a record for fighting rather than capitulating and are the least likely group to indulge in murderous sectarianism.

Meanwhile the US and EU are allied with the sponsors of Islamic terrorism - the Turks, the Saudis and the Gulf Arabs.  You can tell an empire by the company it keeps, whether it is East European neo-Nazis, Central American death squads or the godfathers of the headchoppers. The life loving girl fighters of the YPJ must be like garlic to sour old vampires like McCain and Hillary.

Musical Interlude

Paul Gubarev is currently hospitalized following an assassination attempt, a few weeks ago he and his family were enjoying this cheerful ditty celebrating the Russian lands from Alaska to Odessa.

We're All Fascists Now

The IWA site Click on Wales currently hosts articles on fascism from three of the country's more interesting pensmen Tim Williams, David Melding and Robert Stradling - oh and some of the comments are quite thought-provoking as well.

Now these articles do not discuss the current resurgence of murderous far-right nationalism in Eastern Europe - nurtured and sponsored in the main by the United States and the governments of the EU - nothing so controversial.  No, these articles are concerned with the Wales of 70 and 80 years ago and, you've guessed it, our old pal Saunders Lewis.

Tim Williams has a special talent for getting up people's noses even when he is right.  Surely he is correct when he says that Wales is "wending its inexorable way towards a monoglot English-speaking status." It's not the statement so much as the relish which we imagine he feels at the prospect.  I doubt that even a 1930s Catholic would disagree with his statement that Catholicism was "not on the side of human freedom and progress."  In pre-liberation theology times wasn't that rather the point?  But in any case this plain speaking is hardly likely to endear him to two of the country's larger population segments.

David Melding ably demolishes Williams' attempt to equate fascism with right-wing Catholicism.  Fascism for example worshipped the modern in a way which was anathema to the likes of  a "crank" such as Saunders Lewis.  In a way is Tim Williams something of a crank himself?  While Saunders Lewis wanted to turn the clock back to a rural, Catholic, monoglot elitist past, Williams' sympathies lie with the despised people he sees as having created modern Wales "and the political tool of the majority - industrial Wales and the Labour party."  A valley Wales which to all intents and purposes is as dead as perchentyaeth* and the itinerant bard tramping the countryside between the halls of his patrons.

Robert Stradling contrasts the Wales of the 1930s, proletarian and socialist, with an Ireland largely sympathetic to the right-wing Catholic dictatorships, and possessing the largest fascist party in Europe not in power.  Thinking perhaps of Lewis and his allies Stradling quotes Gwyn Alf Williams "it was as well for Wales that there was an English channel in 1940."  This is a common viewpoint that seems to think that a Nazi victory would have led to a Welsh puppet regime. I doubt this would have been the case - many in the English elite would have been eager to co-operate with a victorious Germany and the anglophile Hitler would have been happy enough to indulge them.  More likely Wales would have been the scene of some violent resistance in the Valleys, bloodily suppressed by London's quislings.  Where would Saunders Lewis have stood?  Well we have his own words, as reported in the Western Mail, to help us decide:  "It is possible, he added, that there would be bloodshed in South Wales if there was a Fascist Government. In such a case the Nationalist Party must take sides with the popular masses of Wales against Fascist dictatorship."

Is there a purpose, beyond entertaining history buffs such as myself, in this continuing discussion of the minutiae of Welsh history.  It's doubtful, although I would love to read a work about real Welsh fascists, rather than the imaginary ones puffed-up for shabby political advantage.   I've blogged about some here and here.  This is quite interesting as an illustration of current academic standards east of the Dyke.

Far better to discuss the present-day, the way in which Communism and Nazism are now treated as two sides of the same coin for example.  What in the 1980s were considered to be the viewpoints of over-the-top cold-war ideologues and emigres with unsavory backstories are now the mainstream. It won't be long before Hitler and Nazism are declared the lesser evil, all of which suits those elites who see the now disorganised working class as a latent threat to their hegemony.

Today the Ukraine is like some 1940s re-enactment park, except the refugees, the shelled working-class districts and the tortured bodies are real enough.  All this hushed-up by a neo-conservative mass media and given the green-light by the likes of Merkel.  Meanwhile the European and Anglo-American elites plan their Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, a perfect recipe for the corporate state.

The question we should be discussing isn't whether Saunders Lewis was fascist but are we?

*  To those unfamiliar with this term I don't believe it to mean home ownership which seems to be the wikipedia version of the word.  Rather it is the obligation towards wider society placed upon those privileged to enjoy wealth.