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The Eisteddfod and Welsh Cultural Nationalism

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The Eisteddfod and Welsh Cultural Nationalism Chapter 11 A Century of Change: The Eisteddfod and Welsh Cultural Nationalism Marion Löffler The early modern history of Wales laid the foundations for the form its cultural nationalism took in the nineteenth century.1 Politically, the Principality of Wales was incorporated into England with the Acts of Union of 1536 and 1543, an event celebrated by many because it afforded Welshmen equal rights with their English neighbours as subjects of the English Crown.2 However, the pre- amble to the Act of Union of 1536 established English as “the natural Mother tongue used within this Realm,” ruling that from henceforth no Person or Persons that use the Welsh Speech or Lan- guage shall have or enjoy any manner Office or Fees within the Realm of England, wales, or other the King’s Dominion, upon Pain of forfeiting the same Offices or Fees, unless he or they use and exercise the English Speech or Language.3 In the wake of the union, native religious customs bound up with Catholicism disappeared as King Henry viii established the Anglican Church as a state church; the native legal system was superseded by English law; and the medieval bardic system decayed due to the increasing Anglicization of the Welsh nobility and gentry.4 However, in 1563, Queen Elizabeth I passed an Act for the Translating of the Bible and the Divine Service into the Welsh Tongue, which led in 1588 to the publication of the first complete translation of the Bi- ble into Welsh. On the basis of this translation, Welsh became the main medi- um of religion in Wales, and it developed a lively print culture. This latter phenomenon, which was absent for the other Celtic languages in the British 1 A wide range of Welsh-language literature on aspects of Welsh culture is available in pub- lished form, but in this essay, English sources have been favoured. I am grateful to the finan- cial support of The Leverhulme Trust, which enabled me to conduct research connected with the subject matter of this chapter. 2 Jenkins 2007, 129–30. 3 Bowen, 75; see also Löffler 1994, 34–36, 198. 4 See Lewis. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/97890044�5385_013 <UN> 234 Löffler Isles,5 was crucial for the development of a Welsh-language national cultural movement in the nineteenth century.6 The immediate roots of Wales’s nineteenth-century cultural nationalism lie in its cultural and religious renaissance in the eighteenth century, when patriotic Welshmen began to establish societies for the preservation of their culture and to gather and print medieval poetry and prose, and when Dissenting Protestantism and Methodism (then still a part of the Anglican state church) turned the Welsh towards reading as a form of religious observance.7 Socially, the men who participated in this cultural renaissance comprised members of the gentry and civil servants of the Crown, businessmen, artisans, Dissenting ministers and Anglican priests. Since Wales was an overwhelmingly rural country with no capital, no town with more than ten thousand inhabitants, and no institutions of higher education, these early efforts mostly emanated from or were connected with the capital, London, where expatriate Welshmen were concerned about their home country. The French Revolution boosted their efforts, as radical political ideas were linked to Enlightenment values, fos- tering a new pride in Welsh culture and history.8 In the course of the nineteenth century, Welsh cultural nationalism slowly relocated to Wales itself geographically, and away from radicalism politically.9 As the state administration of what by then had become the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland extended into every social domain, the Welsh, while keen to preserve their national characteristics through the Welsh lan- guage and through the Protestant Nonconformist denominations which had seceded from the Anglican state church, were also eager to prove themselves worthy members of the growing British Empire.10 Their concern with respect- ability and improvement became especially pressing after 1847, when a very unfavourable government Report on the State of Education in Wales blamed the Welsh language for the perceived immorality and ignorance of the Welsh na- tion.11 This explains the transition from romanticism to a ‘scientific modernism’ within parts of the movement, and perhaps also why Welsh men and women focused their efforts not on a sustained campaign for political independence, 5 “Bible, in the Celtic languages,” in Koch, vol. 1, 206–11. 6 Bowen, 149ff.; Löffler 1994, 47–51, 205–6; Jones and Rees. 7 G. Williams, 21–25; Morgan 1992, 43–100; Morgan 1981. 8 Kidd; Löffler 2012. 9 G. Williams, 25–28. 10 Morgan 1997. 11 I.G. Jones 1992; Tyson Roberts. <UN>.
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