The happy assimilation myth and England’s reign of terror
Stephen Price
One of the worst things about social media is other people.
What started as a good thing, connecting us to one another, has morphed into a cesspit of misinformation, anger and time-wasting, and is conversely having the opposite effect of bringing us together by polarising us and, insanely, driving us further apart than ever.
That’s not to say it doesn’t have its joys. I’ve found new music, new friends, new recipes; been inspired to visit new countries, standing stones, restaurants, and I’ve also, god bless Mr Zuckerberg, discovered a wealth of history that wasn’t taught in schools. ‘Hidden’ histories of our Princes, our language, our people’s massacres and subjugation.
One account worth hanging around on social media for is The History of Wales – a daily source of multiple ‘on this day’ style posts that never fail to astonish. And with over 200,000 followers, I’m certainly not alone.
One of its most recent posts to stir within me feelings of both anger and revulsion came late last month.
The post reads: “On 28th January 1543, Bishop Rowland Lee died. He was Lord President of the Council of Wales and the Marches and Henry VIII’s enforcer of the Acts of Union between England and Wales. He was also described as a “great despiser of Welshmen”
“With the implementation of The Laws in Wales Acts 1535 and 1542, the legal system and administration of England were applied in Wales and English became the official language. The act also divided Wales into 13 counties each governed by a Justice of the Peace appointed by Henry.
“These were the existing counties of the principality and included Marcher Lordships being converted into the new counties of Monmouthshire, Brecknockshire, Radnorshire, Montgomeryshire and Denbighshire.
“Henry figured that bringing the Welsh into the Union would require strong measures and appointed the Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, Rowland Lee as Lord President of the Council of Wales and the Marches, tasked with bringing law and order to the Welsh regions.
“What ensued was a reign of terror. Lee, who believed the Welsh could not be trusted boasted of hanging 5000 Welshmen during his five years in charge, which resulted in him being referred to as the ‘hanging Bishop’. According to one account, his fervour for hanging was so great that he even hanged the body of a dead man, because of his disappointment at missing an opportunity to do so when he was alive.”
To think that this, and so many other important pieces of information not just from Wales, but from my own doorstep, is new news sets off a skin-prickling level of anger.
That we have all been denied not only this information in our history lessons, but countless others – battle after battle, act and land grab after land grab is one of the greatest shameful acts bestowed upon the Welsh people.
The killing of our princes, the killing of their children, the killing of our chiefs, the punishment of our children in schools for speaking their own language. The list is endless.
And that brings us back to line one, other people…
‘We’re all British’
One of the worst things you can do if you’re easily annoyed by idiocy and questionable information is to read comments online.
Facebook, X, YouTube, and sometimes even a news website’s comment section (God bless the down-voting facility).
Time and time again, on any post that is perhaps being read as ‘anti-English’ to English folk, or a post sharing quite simple historical truths, you’ll find more than a few commenters explaining that ‘we’re all British’, ‘So and so king was Welsh’, ‘It was Vortigern (Gwrtheyrn) wot did it’, and that, contrary to historical evidence, the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Normans et. al. were actually quite pleasant folk, and they all happily intermingled with the welcoming ‘warmongering’ Celts.
England is, you see, dear Welsh person, simply a joyous mix of Celts and a handful of folk from the continent according to the trusty internet. A very ‘now’ take on the sensibilities of how invaders and the invaded from over 1,000 years ago would have seen their brutal, often-short-lived take on reality.
A ring of castles across Wales is simply good foresight on the part of those that knew better. Good for tourism, don’t you know. Nothing colonial to see here.
To Wikipedia, where most Google ‘research’ into this happy assimilation will culminate for the online: “Eastern England was populated by Brythonic tribes such as the Iceni, Corieltauvi, and Catuvellauni. In the most common view, the Britons of Eastern England were assimilated by Anglo-Saxons in the first 200 years of invasion, from 450-600 AD, as their kingdoms were conquered. This view is often supported by the lack of Brythonic toponyms in the region, and by various mentions such as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for 491 AD: “Aelle and Cissa begirt Andredesceaster and slay all who dwell therein, nor was there for that reason one Briton left alive”.
“Evidence of continuing Brythonic presence in Eastern England can be found in the Life of Saint Guthlac, a biography of the East Anglian hermit who lived in the Fens during the early 8th century. Saint Guthlac was described as attacked on several occasions by people he believed were Britons living in the Fens.[50] The 12th century story Havelok the Dane includes a Saxon king Alsi, of Brittonic origin, who ruled over Lincoln, Lindsey, Rutland and Stamford. In the year 1090 a monk in Ramsey wrote that “the savage and untamable race of the Britons was ravaging far and wide in the province of Huntingdon”. This suggests that Britons were still living in the Fens by 11th century and most likely practiced their own style of Christianity, which was considered pagan by local Anglo-Saxons.[50] Another story from Ramsey mentions raids of Britons not far from Royston in the 10th century.[51] In The Memorials of Cambridge we can find a line “If any of the gild slay a man, and he be an avenger by compulsion (neadwraca) and compensate for his violence, and the slain man be a twelfhynde man, let each of the gild give half a mark for his aid: if the slain man be a ceorl, two oras: if he be Welsh (Wylisc) one ora”, where “Wylisc” refers to a Briton. We may infer that, though a Welsh servile population existed in Cambridgeshire in the tenth century, it was not so numerous as elsewhere, and that there the Welshman’s life was more respected.”
Where to start? So assimilation on one hand, but conquering, othering, slaying, no evidence of original place names…
And then we go on to the Britons being called a ‘savage and untamable’ race, with a handsome bounty on their heads.
That, there, is the best they’ve got to offer for assimilation? Imagine the worst then!
In fact, don’t imagine, here’s Wikipedia’s list of ‘Anglo-Welsh Wars’. Centuries upon centuries of spilled blood, and like any other war, casualties reduced to numbers, to romantic tales of heroic princes who inspire pride among us today instead of the blistering anger and full comprehension of the sheer pervasive, suffocating terror of it all.
To paint a picture of England’s treatment of Wales and the Welsh for over a thousand years – our culture, our land and language – as a natural, charming event, a coming together of brethren, is rotten to its core.
Petition
A Senedd Cymru petition launched earlier this month, calling on the Welsh Government to ‘put a much greater focus on Welsh history’ in the GCSE (Curriculum Wales) course, although, of course, plans are in motion to do so already.
The petition, created by Elfed Wyn ap Elwyn states: “At the moment, school leavers in Wales will know more about the history of America and Nazi Germany than the history of their own country.
“The new GCSEs in History being introduced in September this year are likely to exacerbate this situation even further.
“We need your support to ensure that learning the story of our country is put at the forefront, giving our young people the opportunity to understand and appreciate Welsh history as a central part of their education.”
ap Elwyn adds: “The new GCSE History course was postponed for a year last year thanks to a successful campaign by history teachers across Wales who opposed the changes.
“At the time, it was hoped that the WJEC examination board and the Welsh Government would listen to their voice and review the course for the better. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened, and the situation continues without any meaningful changes.”
The petition follows years of campaigning across Wales, including calls from Dr Huw Griffiths, a Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, who has argued that Welsh history is being sidelined in secondary schools and a complete overhaul of Wales’ GCSE history qualification is urgently needed.
The prominent historian was one of 200 teachers that had a hand in compiling the content of Wales’ GCSE history qualification around ten years ago.
But Dr Griffiths says that despite his best efforts, the resulting qualification never had enough focus on Welsh history. He is now battling for this to change.
‘Battle’
With a new GCSE history qualification set to be introduced in Wales in September 2026, Dr Griffiths has called for a complete re-design of what 14 to 16-year-olds are taught about their own country’s history.
The education academic has suggested that the people of Wales themselves should have a hand in what content should be include in the next GCSE history qualification.
Dr Griffiths said: “We are fighting a battle to get Welsh history in our schools.
“As a country we should look together and decide what are the 10 or 15 key facts, events, dates, or figures that every pupil in Wales ought to learn about.
“Every child in Wales should know about Aneurin Bevan and events like the Aberfan disaster. Dates like 1812, 1822 and 1847 are important too.
“Children in Wales should know these things — about who we are as a people. It’s just bonkers that we don’t emphasise it in schools.”
As is reflected in my own school experience, where our Welsh language teachers gave us the only smattering of Welsh history, culture, poetry and the like that we had in the entire seven years of high school, Dr Griffiths says that Welsh language departments in both Welsh and English medium schools do a “far better job” of teaching Welsh history than school history departments do.
He has also compiled and studied the details of history curriculums taught in schools across the world and compared them with Wales.
Dr Griffiths said: “It’s an eye-opener. The amount of history being taught in other countries is vastly different to Wales.
“In Wales, children know far more about Nazi Germany and American history than they do about the Aberfan disaster. They know who Rosa Parks is, but they haven’t got a clue about important figures from their own country.”
Dr Griffiths has suggested several key Welsh historic topics that should be taught to children in Wales.
These include the death of the last Prince of Wales, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, and the 1847 Blue Books report — a three-part government publication about the state of education in Wales that was branded a disparaging and prejudiced attack on the Welsh people.
Dr Griffiths said: “If you were to ask the majority of young people in Wales what happened in 1966 they are far more likely to say that England won the World Cup.
“That shouldn’t be the answer, the answer should be Aberfan. There are certain dates in Welsh history that are very important.
“1282 was when Llywelyn, the last Prince of Wales, was killed. 1847 was the Blue Books report which had a massive impact on the Welsh language. These are the dates people in Wales should know about.
“We should take pride in the fact that Lloyd George brought the pensions in and changed British society as a result.
“Aneurin Bevan brought the NHS in. These people changed our society and we should feel pride towards this and make our young people aware of it.”
Plaid Cymru spokesperson for Education, Cefin Campbell MS said: “Understanding Wales begins with knowing our own history. Plaid Cymru has long championed putting Welsh history at the heart of our curriculum, so every young person grows up with a full understanding of our nation’s story.
“We’ve consistently pressed the Welsh Government to ensure it’s taught meaningfully and with pride in every school and forms part of our qualifications. In government, Plaid Cymru would make sure Welsh history is a core part of our curriculum and qualifications, supported, celebrated, and given the importance it deserves.”
Who writes our stories?
For too long, the narrative in the UK has suggested that ‘British history’ begins with the arrival in the UK of the Romans and then the Saxons.
That primitive cave-folk benefitted from roads in straight lines and had a few unnamed squirmishes where they were labelled the bad guys, and from there on in it’s over to the English Kings and Queens and World War II.
So while it might help some people to feel better about their country and their country’s ‘engagement’ with Wales to imagine it was all peaceful assimilation, joy and merriment, the sheer number of accounts of mass murder, mass land grabbing and pervasive shaming and subjugation suggest something a little less palatable, something a little less acceptable in our nation’s history books while others have been in control of the narrative.
Centuries upon centuries of sheer acts of terror, such as the 5,000 Welshmen hung by Bishop Rowland Lee, disprove any suggestion of anything other than our people’s ethnic and cultural cleansing.
That narrative, however, is over, and Wales has much to teach our children.
The consequences of not doing so up until today are plain to see.
The effect of a people knowing their own history? Infinite.
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I experienced Welsh education though a boys’ grammar shoo in the valleys of south Wales. At eighteen I went off to Trinity College Carmarthen, a bilingual and passionately Welsh environment, populated by a huge proportion of first language speakers. History of Wales was a compulsory subject and opened my eyes and those of many of my fellow students to much written in this article. It also clarifies my differing opinion to many people I now mix with on our position in the UK and with regard to England.
One of the errors we have today is viewing the past through the lens of a nation state which is a relatively modern form of organisation. In fact people lived mingled either in separate villages or in split villages. This was the case in Europe right up until the Nazis. Exactly which Lord they paid their dues to also changed. Sometimes Welsh families faked Norman ancestry like the Herberts to hold onto their lands. At other times dispossession occurred like the Prince of Gwent who was turfed out of his lordship of Penhow. There is an irony in this in… Read more »
Roll on a Plaid Cymru Government in May. Addressing this shameful situation will then be in the hands of Welsh people. How novel.
It saddens me that very few of us can connect with the traces of our remarkable history that surround us. The hillforts, Roman roads and structures, castles, abbeys, cathedrals, chapels and early industrial heritage. As well as the placenames and stories that these embody. 20th Century history, fine. But please let us not cut our children off from the broad sweep of our history over many centuries and the tapestry of stories that make it relatable and enriching.
If Reform win in May all of this will be ejected. It will be English Kings and Queens followed by Waterloo, Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher, not forgetting the special ‘take our country back’ project on Oswald and Enoch. To finish, our children will have a module on ‘Brexit benefits and the return of sovereignty’. A perfect history for Welsh children to know where they stand in the world.
Just ask yourself one question why was Welsh history stopped being taught in schools and replaced with so called British history which in reality is ENGLISH PROPAGANDA HISTORY because Welsh history showed what England did to our country our people our ancestors it shows them in a bad light shows the present Welsh people what the English are not the normal English people they are decent people but the Royals and the English political establishment
A much bigger problem than even the lack of education in schools is the museums. My overarching memory of visiting the so-called National Museum of Wales is stuffed animals. Gaps in education can be easily filled by a few wet days in museums, but only if the museums are telling the stories that need to be told in a modern and engaging way.
I assume you mean the museum in Cathays? Most of Amgueddfa Cymru’s sites have more to say about the people who lived within what is now Wales.
Which museum tells the story of Bishop Lee in 4DX?
None as far as I know, so ask for that. Do you know of any artefacts linked to him as museums usually want those for their displays?
So an exhibition of Nazi Germany is only worth it if there’s enough gas masks and photos of folks lining up to board a train? Artefacts complement history telling, they’re not a prerequisite otherwise the bad guys from history who are careful to clean up after themselves get away with it. A museum should be more than a storage unit.
Artefacts seem to be a defining characteristic of museums rather than other forms of recording history. Display boards can certainly be used to explain historical events within museums, but I can’t think of any recognised museum that consists only of those. Maybe there are some small local ones. But without artefacts (including the building) a ‘museum’ would just be a very large book. If you want to say that events such as Bishop Lee’s reign of terror deserve public commemoration, perhaps through a monument or at least a plaque, maybe located within a museum, I’m inclined to agree, although there… Read more »
Isn’t this is the same argument made by those unhappy when museums try to tell the story of slavery.
No. I have been to a number of exhibitions on slavery. They have all included some kind of artefact: chains, drawings, maps, etc. Sometimes the building itself is significant.
I would have no objection to a temporary board display about Bishop Lee within a museum even if artefacts are absent. But such boards alone would not make a museum.
We have different views on what a museum can and should be.
It would be helpful if you explained what you want.
There’s a permanent exhibition in the National Museum called the Evolution of Wales that starts from the Big Bang and covers 4.5 million years without any artefacts at all.
Wrong. It’s some years since I went there but it has many artefacts from stones to bones.
I meant billion not million but that refers to the period before the earth was created. There are no artefacts from this time, so the story shouldn’t be told.
I should have said objects not artefacts. But you still haven’t explained what you want to see.
I want to understand how we got to where we are.
We all want to do that, which is why we need to examine real history in all its complexity rather than falling back on nationalist or other mythology.
But how to deal with the challenge of perspective. Who decides what to include and what to exclude. With the best intentions any book on “all human history” will be curated through the lens of the author who must decide what to include and what to exclude in the 600 pages their publisher has asked for. An author in China is going to make different choices to an author in Texas. They can both include only completely uncontroversial and verifiable facts but the result will still be two completely different understandings of the world if they were read by an… Read more »
I have no objection to museums that aim to ‘to tell all the stories that significantly impacted the lives of humans which inhabited that plot of land since that plot of land existed’. Wales already has local museums in its cities and many towns. But I have concerns about the word ‘all’. Choices always have to be made about what to include or exclude. If we are to try to tell the history of Wales that has to seek to include the experiences of everyone who has lived here, insofar as that is possible. That means not just selecting those… Read more »
Which is why I used the word “all”. It should be everything we know that was significantly consequential to humans living in that area at any point in time.
And more recent stories don’t turn older history into mythology. Mythology is stories with no basis in fact. Prioritising recent history over older history is no different to doing the reverse. Just another bias.
I agree with you about ‘all’, insofar as that can be done.
National history becomes mythology not when it deals with distant events but when it presents a story that treats a nation as if it were an organic being rather than a social creation that is continually evolving and changing.
This is where museums come into their own. Telling every locally significant story as fully and dispassionately as possible is essential. If the stories don’t fit the museum then get a bigger museum. It’s when decisions are made about what to include and what to exclude that distorted narratives arise even with the best of intentions.
The Labour party in Wales will not be on the right side of history. They have systematically denied our schoolchildren access to Welsh history. We all know about the ‘Welsh Not’ and rightly decry its appalling impact on the Welsh language. However, the so called Welsh Labour party’s crimes against our culture and understanding of our history are hidden in plain sight. The Labour party’s love of itself and manic desire to keep hold of power in Cymru has led to the teaching of history through British eyes. We all know if children were taught Welsh history they’d be more… Read more »
The whole concept of ‘national history’ – of any nation – is questionable. It can easily ignore or at least minimise the interactions between peoples and states that are one of the main drivers of history. It can be a dangerous concept when the ‘nation’ (a recent notion against the whole sweep of human history) is seen as an organic being that somehow persists through time despite continuous change in its composition. Daniel Defoe described the English as a ‘mongrel race’ three centuries ago and the same is true for the people of Wales today. We should celebrate that, not… Read more »
The story of enforcer Bishop Lee and his tyrannical boss Henry seems quite fascist to me. Why only frame the worst of humanity in a modern context? If you want to avoid repeating it, learning how it has repeated over the eons is important.
For me, fascism describes a specific set of modern political movements, rather than being a general term of condemnation of extreme brutality, which certainly has a long history.
Examples like Bishop Lee illustrate that for Wales. England endured the harrying of the north after the Norman conquest. Genocide has a long history from conflicts in the ancient world, through European colonialism, Nazism and today Gaza.
What’s the point of “every child should be studying the roots of fascism if we are not to repeat the errors of the past” if we define fascism so narrowly that it couldn’t happen today. The failed Austrian artist would’ve trodden a very different path if modern global media and social networks existed. Still a tyrant, still suppressing human rights, still cementing power by any means possible, still controlling the media, still blaming and punishing minorities, still subverting democracy. But apparently no longer a fascist.
I just don’t think it’s very useful draining a word of its socio-historical context. What do we gain by doing that? We would just have to invent new language to describe movements and states with the specific features that fascist Italy or Nazi Germany had but the Tudor state lacked. Fascism is a analytical term to help us grasp the world. If we throw all forms of state violence into it we just blur our understanding. How far social media changes our understanding of the far right is a good question. But overuse of the term ‘fascism’ is not that… Read more »
What does Trump have to do to be a fascist? I’m interested in your checklist.
There are clearly many aspects of Trump’s rule that were also displayed by the classic fascist regimes of the 1930s, notably around violent repression and racist scapegoating. But as yet Trump has nothing like the concentrated power that Hitler possessed. The US could not yet be described as a totalitarian state, as there are still many dispersed centres of power. Fascist regimes have typically come to power through routes that include mobilising armed gangs outside the state apparatus to terrorise opponents. The Proud Boys are a parody of the SA or the Blackshirts. Trump instead seems to be creating a… Read more »
When in your view did Hitler become a fascist? Was it only when the number of disappeared exceeded six figures that historians could assign the label or in retrospect was he always a fascist. Does a fascist really have to be “successful” to be a fascist? What label would you prefer to use for someone who’d happily wipe out a minority group if only they had the chance that they never got. And if you can’t accept Henry as one of Europe’s earliest fascist leaders (clearly Rome had a few) would you at least accept the genocide label for the… Read more »
It’s not about whether Trump himself is a fascist. No real objection to that. My questions were about whether the regime he has so far constructed in the US should be described as ‘fascist’. You haven’t responded to the points I raised querying how far along that path he has managed to go. Perhaps proto-fascist would describe it. The anti-Trump movement in the US has adopted the ‘No Kings’ slogan and Trump is clearly challenging the balance of power within the US republic. But the sources of power of a monarch differ from those of a fascist leader, even if… Read more »
I agree that the name proto-fascist serves the purpose of a warning about where the direction of travel will end if it’s not stopped. But surely a more powerful antidote to the “it couldn’t happen here” narrative is to acknowledge that Mussolini didn’t invent fascism, he simply gave a name to a problem that’s afflicted humans since the dawn of time. Perhaps you’d prefer to find a different way of saying it but until we can show that this is what humans do to each other and have always done to each other then there will be those who argue… Read more »
If we apply the term ‘fascism’ to any case of violence then it loses its analytical value, which is what I’m interested in rather than seeing it as a moral term of condemnation. That matters because we need to distinguish where threats are coming from. The threat posed by armed bands of thugs is not the same as that posed by the risk of a military coup or of the gradual increase of repressive powers by the state, and so on. If we want to change the world such differences matter as we need to know where to place our… Read more »
Before you can change the world you need to understand the world.
Exactly what I have been saying. That is why we need to use words with precision.
You can’t understand anything by compartmentalising. What would Trump have done in the 30s. What would Henry do today. Until you see the pattern you’ll never be able to spot the next one.
Pointless questions. The Tudor monarchy no longer exists.
The Nazi party no longer exists so at least that won’t ever happen again.
Fascism is a real possibility in today’s world. The restoration of early modern monarchy is not.
If the point is about what humans will do given unfettered access to power they are part of the same story.
‘Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ To quote Lord Acton. Calling this ‘fascism’ doesn’t add anything.
Instead it causes confusion. The European empires had unfettered access to power in their colonies and employed brutal violence against those they dominated. Are you claiming that Victorian England or Third Republic France should be deemed ‘fascist’?
Perhaps it’s inevitable that history will rhyme indefinitely until finally we eliminate ourselves.
Here’s the thing. The term “Welsh government” is used, but it’s not, it’s an English/British government with the word “Welsh” dropped in for effect. If we did have our own non unionist government I would imagine that the situation would be vastly different.
Welsh history isn’t being taught for one very good reason. If people knew the history of Wales the fragile union would be finished in a generation.
The Victor’s write the history books.
Da iawn Steve. Wedi arwyddo!!!
Well said.
Loved everything except God bless Mr. Zuckerberg. Even if in jest that mans name shouldn’t be lauded. Fascist through and through
5,000 hanged out of a population of roughly 250,000 – that’s 2%!
Enough to be labelled genocide these days? And yet so many of us knew nothing about it. The erasure of our history, culture and identity continues.