Yr Hen Iaith part forty four: Richard Davies’ introduction to the 1567 New Testament.

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 44.

Jerry Hunter

Facts and Falsehoods

In his introduction to the 1567 Welsh New Testament, Richard Davies asks the reader ‘to call to mind the loss of their books which the Welsh suffered’ (galw ith cof y gollet a gavas y Cymru am eu llyfray). In recalling the invasion, war and conquest which had shaped so much of Welsh history, Davies draws attention to conflict’s catastrophic effects on culture.

After referring specifically to the ‘art’ (celfyddyt), ‘histories’ (historiae), ‘genealogies’ (Achay) and ‘Holy Scripture’ (Scrythur lan) which the Welsh once possessed, he provides a short summary of their catastrophic fate: ys llwyr ir anrheithiwyt oll Cymru o honynt – ‘all of Wales was [or all of the Welsh were] completely deprived of them’.

The word translated as ‘deprived’, anrheithiwyd, is a form of the verb anrheithio, used to describe the way in which one person or community is violently deprived of something by others. It can also be translated as ‘to plunder’, ‘to pillage’, ‘to ravage’ and ‘to despoil’. Richard Davies was a consummate literary artist, and in crafting his introduction to the first New Testament ever printed in Welsh, he chose his words carefully in order to stir Welsh pride and awaken Welsh outrage.

Enemy

While Richard Davies indexes a broad sweep of history which includes the Anglo-Saxon and Norman invasions, he describes the enemy who despoiled the Welsh culturally as England:

Can ys pan oystynget Cymru tan goron Loygr trwy nerth arfeu, diammay   ddistrowio llawer oy llyfray hwynt yn hynny o trin.

‘For when Wales was subjugated under the crown of England by strength of arms, it is certain that many of their books [the books of the Welsh] were destroyed in that battle.’

It is the context which makes this text truly remarkable: Richard Davies was an Anglican bishop bound to serve the English crown he describes so negatively here. His fiery introduction to the Testament Newydd provides multiple constructions of identity, placing the present reality of Tudor Wales – a reality in which the English Queen Elizabeth is gracing the people and language of Wales by ensuring that the Bible is published in their language – beneath a very different articulation of Welsh identity, one recalling the outrages visited upon a conquered people by the English aggressors.

We might say objectively from the standpoint of comparative literary history that Bishop Richard Davies overstates the nature of loss.

Destroyed

While Welsh manuscripts were surely destroyed during medieval wars and while the conquest of Wales and the later annexation during the Acts of Union undermined aspects of traditional Welsh culture, a wealth of medieval Welsh literature survives from the medieval period (as emphasized repeatedly in the first series of this podcast). By the same taken, Welsh literary culture proved to be dynamic and adaptive in the face of the many challenges posed to it during the Tudor period.

Davies focusses attention on past cultural loss because he is concerned specifically with the last of the lost Welsh cultural treasures which he lists –

Scrythur lan (‘Holy Scripture’).  This complex, multi-faceted articulation of Welsh identity contains important kernels of truth: conflict did shape Welsh history and the Welsh readers he was addressing were the descendants of Yr Hen Frytaniaid, ‘The Ancient Britons’, the original inhabitants of the Island of Britain.

However, Bishop Davies’ introduction is also re-writes one key aspect of history in an astounding way, for he portrays the ancestors of the Welsh as proto-Protestants. In this inverted religious history, the Protestant Reformation is touted as a way of returning to the Welsh an a ‘purer’ form of Christianity once embraced by their ancestors.

Richard Davies invokes an apocryphal story which held that the Ancient Britons had received a pure form Christianity shortly after the death of Jesus:

Y Brytaniait a gadwasai eu Christynogaeth yn bur ac yn ddilwgr, heb gymysc dechmygion dynol mal i derbyniesynt gan Ioseph o Aramathya dyscipl Christ[.]

‘The Britons had received their Christianity pure and uncorrupted, without being mixed up with human imaginings, as they had received it from Joseph of Arimathea, disciple of Christ.’

Purity

When the English were finally Christianised, he adds, it was with a form of the region ‘which had slipped some from the purity of the Gospel (a lithrasai beth o ddiwrth puredd yr Efengel). Two salient features of this legend are true: the Celts of this island were Christians while the Anglo-Saxons were still pagans, and the kind of Christianity later adopted by the ancestors of the English was different in some respects to that of the British Celts.

However the Protestant Welsh bishop is eager to equate this supposedly ‘pure’ form of early Christianity with Protestantism while criticizing the Roman Catholic church with which Henry VIII had broken. He thus weaves a pseudo-historical narrative, telling readers that the Ancient Britons lost their ‘pure’ religion once they came under the influence of the ‘corrupted’ church of the English:

… wedi yddynt cytcordio ar Sayson mewn crefydd a gau ffydd, cytsuddo gidachwynt ddwfnach ddwfnach a wnaythont o oes bigilidd mewn pob gauddywiaeth, delw-addolaeth  . . . a gau ffydd.

‘After they conformed with the English in religion and false faith, they sank together with them deeper and deeper from one age to another in all kinds of  false worship, idolatry . . . and false faith.’

Telling Welsh readers in no uncertain terms that it was amhuredd crefydd y Sayson (‘the impurity of the faith of the English’) which corrupted the ‘pure’ Christianity of their ancestors, this Anglican Bishop presented them with Scripture in the their language as a way to help regain that lost purity.

Mixing kernels of historical truth with embellishment and outright fabrications, this 1567 introduction stands out as perhaps one of the most memorable pieces of sixteenth-century Welsh prose. Because of his skill as a writer, Richard Davies is able to maintain multiple discourses which we only see as contradictory when we step back and take stock from the perspective of considerable hindsight.

Protestant propaganda

It is also worth stressing that this Protestant propaganda is woven with a passionate appeal to Welsh pride. The authorial voice created by Richard Davies calls alluringly to the reader: deffro ditha bellach Gymro glan, fy annwyl, a’m caredig frawd yng Nghrist Iesu . . . paid ag edrych i’r llawr, tremia i fyny tua’r lle i’th hanyw (‘awake now, good Welshman, my dear and my kind brother in Jesus Christ . . . don’t look down, look up to the place from whence you came’).

And, like so much Welsh literature from the period, this text is a striking combination of the old and the new. While the propagandistic Protestant version of Welsh history spun by Richard Davies is strikingly original (if shockingly dishonest in the eyes of twentieth-first century readers), he appeals to some of the oldest Welsh literary authorities, citing both Taliesin and Myrddin Wyllt.

This is also another way of appealing to Welsh pride; after noting that Myrddin is ‘one of the old bards of Wales’ (un o’r hen feirdd Cymru), Davies adds jokingly os hen bot ynghylch mil o vlynyddeu – ‘if being around a thousand years old is old’.

Herein lies another of the Bishop’s literary-historical tricks; while stressing the way in which wars with the English deprived the Welsh of their books and learning, he also refers proudly to aspects of the ancient Welsh literary tradition which have survived.

Darllen Pellach / Further Reading:

Glanmor Williams, ‘Richard Davies, Bishop of St. Davids, 1561-81’, Trafodion Anrhydeddus Gymdeithas y Cymmrodorion, 1948, 147-169.