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A Smidgeon of Welsh Blood
Welshmen had been trickle-migrating to England for
centuries but when Henry VII, born at Pembroke Castle,
defeated Richard III on the field at Bosworth and came
to London as King many of his countrymen followed him.
By the end of the 1600s sizeable communities of French
Huguenots and Sephardic Jewish families had settled in
London but by far the largest non-English community in
London were the Welsh. In fact so large was the Welsh
population in London that, along with the Huguenots,
it is claimed that there are few of us in London or the
South-East today who don’t have just a smidgeon
of Welsh blood pumping through our veins.
A Very Potted History of Wales
It seems rather apt for the land of poetry and song that the
very earliest remains of a man found in Wales should be
a jawbone. It was a Neanderthal jawbone – the first Homo
sapiens didn’t arrive until about 200,000 years. The first
human fossil ever found in the world, a skeleton dyed with
red ochre was found in Wales in the 1820s by a clergyman
amateur archaeologist:
The Red Lady of Pavilland
thought
by the clergyman to be a Roman lady is in fact a man who
lived 33,000 years ago. During the Iron Age the regions we
know today as Wales and England were dominated by the
Celtic Britons speaking the British or Brythonic language.
The Romans made relatively few inroads into Wales and
when they left the British Isles were wide open to the
Anglo-Saxons invasions, under the onslaught of which the
Brits, who today we tend to call the Celts were pushed
back to the fringes of these Islands, to Scotland, to Ireland
and to Wales.
The First Foreigners
After the King of Mercia built Offa’s Dyke in the 700s
folklore says that any Welshman found on the English side
would have his ears cut off. Forced into isolation a distinct
Welsh identity began to grow. The name Wales comes
from an Anglo-Saxon word
wealas
meaning foreigners.
The beleaguered Celts began to call themselves
cymry
–
fellow countrymen and the Welsh-speaking tribes called
their shared land
Cymru
. The age-old story of war and
marriage between ruling families rumbled on through into
the 9
th
and 10
th
centuries and the Celtic custom of dividing
a royal inheritance between all of the sons scuppered any
opportunity for truly centralised power. It made the Welsh
vulnerable to the English followed by the Vikings and later
to those very organised French Vikings – the Normans
who found it necessary to quell the troublesome Celts.
In 1188 a high born, half Norman young man called
Gerald accompanied the Archbishop of Canterbury
through Wales to recruit for the Third Crusade. In Gerald’s
account of the journey he was possibly the first to record
that the Welsh spoke poetically and sang beautifully but
he also demonstrates the age old distrust of the foreigner
accusing the Welsh of a whole litany of vices from rape
and incest to murder. To the Welsh it must stick in the
craw a bit that history remembers this young xenophobe
as
Gerald of Wales
.
By the time of Gerald’s visit centuries of fighting between
separate Kingdoms had exhausted the Welsh and they
gradually came under the sway of the English crown.
When Llewellyn the Last died in 1282 the final obstacle
The First Foreigners
A Story of the Welsh Presence in London