Welsh Journals

536 THE MASSACRE OF THE WELSH BARDS. who have been told that such an event has actually happened, will believe in the historical truth of the allegation that King Edward I. ordered a massacre of the Welsh bards, everyone of whom falling into his hands, so runs the accusation, he caused to be hanged by martial law as a stirrer-up of the people to sedition.* It is not natural that Englishmen should. Such an act, if proved, would stamp its perpetrator as a monster, and one whom the world would never cease to regard as such to the end of all time, let his other exploits be as brilliant and his general character as admirable as they may. It is quite true the circumstance could be paralleled, if not actually justified, from history; but then not from such modern history as that which includes the period covered by the reign of the first Edward, when the world had fairly emerged from a barbarous Medisevalism and was almost, so to speak, within striking distance of the printing press. It was, I repeat, not natural that English¬ men should believe anything so atrocious of their king.f Welshmen, however, had no such reasons for challenging the truth, if truth it were, of the tradition ; and it is this adoption of an English view in preference to the Welsh, on almost every occasion that the two views happen to clash, that has struck me as a strange, I might almost say a disagreeable, peculiarity in Stephens. I do not mention this as a reason to account for the popularity of the work and its ready acceptance as an authority, but simply as a fact which may be of use to us now and hereafter to help us in determining the bias of the writer's mind, and to enable us with the less scruple to place the heaviest discount on his deductions whenever the weight of evidence is not clearly on his side. To the same end also I mention one other matter: and that is the deadly hatred of popular tradition which the book discloses on page after page of its flabby and clumsy English. To me it seems as if the author at every turn of his story had said to himself: "Here is a popular tradition coming, let us go and kill it." Now popular tradition may be good in itself, or it may be bad, according to circumstances. He who despises it simply because it is popular tradition is as little to be trusted as the man that hath no music in his soul. Popular tradition is the music of the ages, the idealised * See Notes " De hospitantibus ignotus ultra duas noctes," and " De seductori- bus regis Dominis et regni, Domine regine, " post. t There may, however, be some Englishmen who do not think the massacre at all out of keeping with the known character of the monarch. In war time, aye, and not seldom in peace time also, the English Justinian was cruel, blood-thirsty, ferocious. His butchery of the helpless Moslems of Nazareth, his wholesale hangings of English Jews, his executions, accompanied by the most unheard of circumstances of atrocity, of Prince David of Wales and the Scottish patriot Wallace, are enough to stamp his memory with everlasting infamy. Those who wish to see this phase of the king's character in its true light should compare him with each of the patriots Wallace, Bruce, and Llewelyn.