Yr Hen Iaith part forty eight: Colliding worldviews

We continue the history of Welsh literature to accompany the second series of podcasts in which Jerry Hunter guides fellow academic Richard Wyn Jones through the centuries. This is episode forty eight.

Colliding Worldviews: The Ymryson Between Edmwnd Prys and Wiliam Cynwal.

Sometime in the early 1580s, Sir Rhys Wyn – described as hen ŵr bonheddig, ‘an old gentleman’ – said that he’d enjoy shooting a bow if only he had one weak enough for him to use (it took considerable strength to draw a Welsh longbow!).

The bard Wiliam Cynwal assured the gentleman that he had a special bow which old Sir Rhys ‘could pull with his little finger’ (a dynnai . . . â’i fys bach), and he apparently promised to loan it to him. It later transpired that the poet had already lent his bow to somebody else. It could’ve ended at that: Sir Rhys Wyn would’ve had to content himself with a sport better suited to his age, and this simple misunderstanding would’ve gone unrecorded.

However, Edmwnd Prys was also part of the conversation, and he wouldn’t let the matter rest. As a result, this simple misunderstanding gave rise to a landmark literary debate. Educated at Cambridge and following a successful career in the church, Prys had been appointed archdeacon of Merioneth a few years before.

He was also an amateur poet and he obviously fancied himself the equal of traditionally trained professional bards, for he used this inconsequential misunderstanding to begin an ymryson with Wiliam Cynwal. Since the early fourteenth century, Welsh bards had used the strict-metre cywydd form to debate with each other (see part twenty eight in this series, ‘ “Shit-man” – bardic debates from the later Middle Ages’). While a total of eight poems survive from the fourteenth-century debate between Dafydd ap Gwilym and Gruffydd Gryg, the sixteenth-century ymryson between Edmwnd Prys and Wiliam Cynwal ended up including fifty-three compositions, totalling more than 4,000 lines of strict-metre poetry.  It could’ve gone on even longer, but ended with Wiliam Cynwal’s death in 1587 or 1588.

Milestone

Not only is this the longest ymryson ever recorded, it is also a milestone for another reason: there is an over-arching theme which drives much of the dispute’s question-and-answer, attack-and-defence to-and-fro, and that theme is the value and merits of specific kinds of learning. Edmwnd Prys represented the humanist values and ideals which he gained through his university education, and Wiliam Cynwal upheld traditional Welsh bardic learning.

While his date of birth is not known, Wiliam Cynwal, like Sir Rhys Wyn, was considered to be an old man in the 1580s. Time and again while reading this debate poetry, we get the impression that the old bard wants to conclude things as amicably as possible and be left in peace. But Edmwnd Prys is like a dog with a bone, and he keeps badgering the bard, questioning him and interrogating his learning, sometimes insulting him personally (as was common in medieval ymrysonau). At one point, after drawing attention to Cynwal’s age (Yr wyd, fardd . . . yn hen, ‘you, bard . . . ar old’), Prys aims a barbed couplet at him:

Hên o oed, hyny ydwyd,

O fewn cerdd gwr ifanc wyd.

‘Old in age, that you are,

[But] in poetry you are a young man.’

You might be old, he says, but you write poetry like a young and unexperienced man. Ouch! While Cynwal tries to occupy the moral high ground and use more courteous language for the most part, we can’t blame him for returning a few insults on occasion. If Prys called him ‘old’ repeatedly, Cynwal refers at times to the fact that the archdeacon was overweight.

Flattery

Like other humanists, Prys criticised the traditional bards for flattering their patrons excessively in their praise poetry. And, his self-image puffed up by his own Cambridge education, Prys continually claims that Cynwal’s poetry lacks dysg, ‘learning’.  For example:

Ni chefais, hwiliais bob hwyl,

Y ddysg y bvm i ddisgwyl.

‘I didn’t find [in your work], [although] I looked everywhere,

The learning that I was expecting.’

At one point the archdeacon tells the bard that he needs ‘to find a reason’ (i gael achos) ‘to sing learning in your language’ (i ganv dysg yn dy iaith), and at another he complains that there is ‘a lack of learning in you’ (eisiav dysc ynod). Prys tells Cynwal that he and his fellow poets don’t compare to William Salesbury, the famous Welsh humanist o ran dysc, ‘as far as learning is concerned’. The belligerent stance can be described as ‘us with our university education vs. you with your old-fashioned bardic learning’.

Invoking the ‘seven arts’ central to the elite education which both he and Salesbury had enjoyed, Prys brags that ‘we, professors of art’ (ni, athrawon art) know ‘completely a multitude of languages and the seven arts’ (lliaws iaith oll a saithart).

 Cywydd

Wiliam Cynwal counters that Prys does not know everything imparted by a formal bardic education. While his opponent has mastered the cywydd form, Cynwal reminds him that there are pedwar mesur ar hugain, twenty four traditional metres, stating pointedly: Ni wyddost mo’u rhinweddau! (‘You do not know their virtues!’)  While the clergyman Edmwnd Prys had received his degrees at Cambridge, Wiliam Cynwal had been awarded an official bardic degree at the 1567 Caerwys Eisteddfod. He highlights this fact, playing on the different kinds of gradd, ‘degree’, which the two men held: Er graddio . . . / . . . dy bregeth wych, / Ni raddiwyd . . . / . . . dy brydyddiaeth (‘Although your brilliant sermon has graduated, your poetry has not graduated’). Cynwal also states that y gwr heb radd, ‘the man without a (bardic) degree’ will make mistakes while composing strict-metre poetry: naddai dwyll gygnhaneddion (‘he’ll fashion lines of false cynghanedd’). A poet without bardic training, he jibes, is ‘like a blind painter’ (fel paintiwr dall).

Wiliam Cynwal’s contributions to the extensive debate are also driven by a traditional cultural orientation dictating what is proper. Engaging in an ymryson was something which bards did. As I wrote in part twenty eight of this series: ‘engaging in a bardic debate demonstrated that the participants were in fact bards, a status with considerable implications in medieval Wales.’ Cynwal thus insists that Edmwnd Prys has his role in society as a clergyman and that he has no right to assume the bard’s role:

 Pregethwr wyd, pleidiwr plwyf,

 Parod ddadl, prydydd ydwyf.

‘You are a preacher, the advocate of a parish,

A ready argument, I am a poet.’

While these thousands of lines of poetry have many high points, some philosophical and complex and some blunt and humorous, one of my favourite parts comes when Wiliam Cynwal uses great wit to tell Edmwnd Prys that he should stick to his own societal role. Cynwal imagines a scenario in which he attempts to take the archdeacon’s place in church –  Bed awn . . . / [ . . . .] /  i bwlpit . . . /  i bregethu brigowthen (‘If I should go to a pulpit to preach sense’) – concluding that:

Fo chwarddai rai a’r a wn

Am ‘y mhen am ‘y mhiniwn.

‘Some people would laugh

At me for my opinion for what I know.’

Of course, we conclude: he was not trained to deliver sermons in church, and so the scene would be ridiculous. Then Cynwal drives his point home with a resounding couplet:

Bydd rhai a chwardd, breisgfardd brav,

Bavn doeth, am dy ben dithav.

‘There are those who will laugh, frail fat poet,

Wise peacock, at you for your part.’

As my co-presenter Richard Wyn Jones concluded, the bard Wiliam Cynwal is telling the archdeacon to ‘stay in his lane’. We can also paraphrase Cynwal’s main reply to Prys like this: ‘you are not a proper bard and so you shouldn’t even be in an ymryson with me in the first place.’

This long poetic debate gives us a fascinating look at how two very different worldviews collided in the 1580s. With hindsight, we might view it as a long and very heated discussion about the future direction of Welsh poetry. And, it should be remembered, this entire debate took place through the medium of strict-metre poetry. Edmwnd Prys might not have had a right to engage in this kind of ymryson, but he did it anyway and he did it with astounding energy and determination.

Further Reading:

Gruffydd Aled Williams (gol.), Ymryson Edmwnd Prys a Wiliam Cynwal (Cardiff, 1986). Note that the long introduction to this masterful edition contains an extremely useful discussion.

“Shit-man” – bardic debates from the later Middle Ages’: part twenty eight in Yr Hen Iaith series in Nation.Cymru.