Welsh Journals

the same racial tension which no doubt explains the occasional revealing nickname: 'Sais' was a word one could spit out in fourteenth-century Wales with all the unreasoning vehemence of 'Fascist' today and the Ruthin man who was called Madog Drwgwrthgymro (which, I suppose, could be best translated in the current terminology of hatred as 'Saxon-lover') had his racial affections branded on him for life. But the most serious aspect of anti-English feeling in Wales lay not in temporary passions and short-lived tensions such as these, but in a more deep and reason- able conviction that Welshmen were treated as outsiders in their own country. It was a conviction which seems to have focussed in particular on two aspects of the English governance of Wales. In the first place it centred on the commercial privileges of the plantation boroughs. The measure of Welsh resentment which these urban privileges provoked has not, I think, been sufficiently appreciated. Let me here note two facts only: in the 1370's the men of Englefield were so outraged by the commercial privileges of the Flintshire boroughs that they collected a communal subsidy to petition the king to rescind those privileges;52 in the raids which opened the Glyn Dwr revolt in 1400 the prime targets of the rebels were the boroughs of the northern March. They were the bastions both of Englishness and of privilege; their existence crystallized the feelings of Welshmen that they were an underprivileged race. Those feelings were further fed by a conviction whether it was entirely true or not is beside the point that as Welshmen they were excluded from key offices in church and state on racial grounds. I cannot pursue this point here; but it is a sentiment which con- tributed in a very substantial measure to the background of the Glyn Dwr rebellion. It was in some measure the revolt of the have- nots, of people who felt they were second-class citizens in their own country. The crux of my case so far is that the distinction, or rather distinctions, between Welsh and English, were of fundamental importance in fourteenth-century Wales and that in some respects, at least, they were even sharpened during that period. That may be part of the truth; but it is certainly not the whole truth. For, unless one chooses to distort such evidence as we have, the greater part of the history of post-conquest Wales, it seems to me, is to be written in terms of compromise and co-existence rather than of tension and confrontation. This saga of compromise and co-exis- tence needs to be studied in detail and related at length; but I will make bold to suggest some of the main themes of the story as I see it. The first such theme is a chronological and geographical one. « Chester 25/24m. 17.