of Wales, when the halls of council of Wales, when the schools where the young of Wales are trained, when the temples where the manhood and womanhood of Wales pay homage to the Power that creates, and maintains, and guides, when all buildings and all products of the national mind shall show that there is a real vitality in the national art of Wales, in that art which shall mirror not only the bright fancy of the Celt, but that love of home, that love of things of the mind, that spirituality, and that serious outlook upon the mystery of life and the mystery of death which characterise the Cymry.

D

SUGGESTIONS AS TO THE FULLER STUDY

OF OWEN GLYNDWR.1

BY

"OWEN RHOSCOMYL."

THE air being now so full of the clash and movement of the "reawakening of Wales", the writing of this paper is only one of the things to be expected. For amongst the many names and catchwords which in a sort are shibboleth of the present unrest, that of Owen ab Gruffydd, lord of Glyndwrdy and Coron'd Prince of Wales, is one of the most frequent and potent; nay, one of the most graceful recognitions of our idols and ideals of recent years, was when, last year at Machynlleth, H.R.H. the Prince of to-day, referred with such good taste and feeling to "my predecessor in the princeship, Owen Glyndwr."

But the outsider to whom, before that, the deeds and person of great Owen had seemed to be for ever summed up and graven in a single line of Skakespeare-"The wild, irregular, Glendower "-may well be pardoned a little curiosity at suddenly finding that there are wide sweeps of vision beyond that line, that that line is but as a dewgemmed web sparkling in the sun across the entrance of a region well worth exploring. He may be excused a little eagerness if he discover that, looking at that line as at a star in the darkness of a still midnight, he see beyond it

1 Read before the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion at 20, Hanover Square, on Wednesday, the 12th of May, 1897; Chairman, Hubert Hall, Esq., Director and Hon. Secretary of the Royal Historical Society.

a distance that grows quick with life as it grows deeper; space that grows luminous with suggestiveness-into that space what dazzling planets may have swung and passed, leaving him wondering if into that space other planets may swing and follow in the impalpable track of the departed one. National heroes-wielders and moulders of nations are planets indeed. After Llewelyn follows Glyndwrdy; after Glyndwrdy-who?

But to come down again to the lower plane. The outsider, listening for a moment to the clamour of our speakers calling from platform and press, grows dubiously aware that Owen lived to other ends than merely that of furnishing a page or two for the stage; of perpetuating a sarcastic calumny upon the nation and a jest anent the national character. There begins to dawn upon him a suspicion of the truth that if Glyndwr had never lived, then the Welsh nation of to-day would possibly be different to what it is at present; and so in a moment of gratitude for a new interest, and of hope for a new enlargement of his mental horizon, he determines to learn all that is to be known of Owen. Straightway he applies to the nearest man with a reputation for "knowing all about Welsh history "—alack! how easily is such a reputation sometimes acquired, and what a melancholy bubble it ofttimes proves before the prick of a single question-and immediately, if he is fortunate, he is furnished with a list of works wherein he shall find all that he requires.

But when with fine zeal he has gone through them all, he will in the end discover that for all practical purposes he might as well have begun and ended with Pennant, who not only tells pretty nearly all that was to be told, but tells it, too, in a manner worth listening to. Nay, he will find that most later historians have calmly appropriated Pennant in bulk; have, in fact, merely unbacked and un

bound his book and "grangerised" it with a few patches of Latin irrelevancies; with pages of mild disquisitions. born of the holy horror of the holy orders at Owen's deplorable habit of breaking eggs merely because he had omelettes to make, and also with timid deprecations of distress that Owen should have so far forgotten the elegancies as to use fire and sword in making war. Such re-hashes of Pennant are scattered from one end to the other of Welsh-English literature; all elegant, deprecating, apologistic, and unspeakable.

And if from these unprofitable dilettante he turns to read what later English historians have said of Owen, he will probably find himself busy with Wylie's Henry IV. But he will see from the very first page that he must make allowances for an author who is frankly and openly a zealous partizan of Henry's; and that a man unacquainted with other sources would get a yet inadequate idea of Glyndwr did he stick to Wylie alone. Lastly, let him turn to the National Biography, and he will find himself still looking at Owen through obviously alien eyes; albeit those eyes are more appreciative than perhaps might have been expected. It is a little curious, however, to find that not even the printing of The Chronicle of Adam of Usk" has yet done away with the ridiculous story of the supposed mutilations after the battle of Pilleth. Adam hated Owen as he loved Sir Edmund Mortimer, the defeated one on that occasion; and even his patriotism would not have withheld him from publishing such a disgrace to "Owen and his starvelings" had the thing ever happened. For through his whole chronicle he differentiates between "Owen and his rebels" and the Welsh people at large, villifying the one and upholding the other in a wrong-headed way delightfully human to read.

But to come to the point. To print a history of Glyndwr

upon the basis of what has hitherto appeared in print of him, would simply mean a reprint of Pennant's work, with the addition of a few paragraphs of extra later information from those who followed and leaned upon him. To-day, however, we have different ideas of history to those which sufficed in the days when the curates brought forth their little picks and shovels to dig in the garden of Pennant and under the shade of a sun umbrella to apologise for the shockingly vigorous characteristics of the heroes they disinterred. Then a popular history meant a tabulated list of surface effects, chronologically correct and suavely and elegantly stated, but with scarcely an indication of the subtler under-workings which caused those effects.

Therefore the next history, while it cannot well get very far away from Pennant as to surface actions, must yet expound some of those actions differently, and also go a little deeper down and busy itself with exposing the underlying national conditions which made Owen's pinnacle possible. Further, it must trace whatever of permanence was in his work; that is to say, the after effect of his rising upon the subsequent condition and history of the nation. To take an instance-it must begin not only with a sketch of the political history of Wales from the death of Llewelyn Olaf, but also of Welsh social history, as shaken and acted upon, not only by the various attempts to throw off the Norman yoke, but particularly by the tremendous stroke of the "Black Death", which shook Wales to its foundations as nearly as it shook England and all the other countries of Christendom. Only of late years have historians recognised the importance of that visitation in English history, while as to Wales its effect has scarcely been hinted at.

And yet a study of the scanty material left to us in extents, inquisitions after deaths, court records, and so