Y GORSEDD

The Throne

Revised 1 November 2026

Mud yw'r bardd dan yr orsedd,
a'r drosedd ar ben ei fedd.
Dwylo halog ar yr iaith,
caethiwo'r Ddeddf a'r Gyfraith.
Mae'r maen dulas yn syflyd:
Y Gwir yn erbyn y Byd.

Mute lies the bard beneath the throne,
the crime set square upon his grave.
Unclean hands laid on the tongue,
the Law and the Cyfraith in bondage.
The bruise-dark stone is stirring:
the Truth against the World.

1. Y Cyhuddiad

The Charge1 A man in the dock, a hundred years dead. 2 The law, and the charge. 4 The motto he gave, and the book that took it for a title. 9 The challenge of 1921, and the closed room. 14 No line between Welsh and English. 17 The word Cymry. 19 What was taken. 21 One people’s case against the few who ruled it. 23 The boy who learned his letters off the gravestones.

There is a man in the dock who has been dead for a hundred years.“Tell me, Muse, of the man of many turns … many woes he suffered on the sea.”, Homer, Odyssey, i.1–4.Yr Awen, i. The Cymraeg for her is awen. In the thirteenth century the nine Muses are naw awen (Delw y Byd, p. 69; GPC, awen). Mud yw’r bardd: the bard is mute.

That is the first thing to notice. The second is the law, Y Ddeddf, because before the charge can be weighed, it matters which court is sitting, and whose law it displaced. The charge is forgery. The accused is a stonemason“The stone which the builders rejected”, Psalm 117:22 in the Septuagint, the Greek of the early church, lithon hon apedokimasan hoi oikodomountes [PRE-JUSTINIAN]; 118:22 in the later numbering, where the King James has “refused” [POST-JUSTINIAN]. Apedokimasan: they tested it, and rejected it. from the Vale of Morgannwg (Glamorgan)From here the names in Cymraeg are used. The English forms are the occupying administration’s translations, and the same instrument is declined again below, in refusing the regnal number. Where a name is quoted, or belongs to a title, a manuscript, an office or an institution (the Black Book of Carmarthen, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Christ College Brecon) it stands as printed. And note the shires themselves: sir is borrowed into Cymraeg from English shire, and the shire is the first item on Sir John Davies’s checklist for reducing Cymru. Where an older unit survives (Morgannwg, Ceredigion, Brycheiniog, Maesyfed, Meirionnydd) it is used in preference to the shire that replaced it.The Vale of Glamorgan: the green farming country of Cymru’s south-east corner, between the coal valleys and the sea., Edward Williams, who signed himself Iolo Morganwg, Iolo of Glamorgan. In his last years a court at Caerdydd heard him as the expert on which family papers were true and which were forged, and found as he said.See Y Dyn Bach, ¶450. He died in 1826. He was convicted, with the full apparatus of scholarship, in 1926. A century in the grave, and then the verdict: guilty of inventing a tradition. The dead make poor defendants, and the arrangement favoured the prosecution. A man who cannot speak cannot be cross-examined, cannot produce a document, cannot explain himself. The prosecution's best witness was the grave.“He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth”, Isaiah 53:7, in the English Bible of 1611. Convicted in silence because unable to answer; vindicated only afterward, by a generation the verdict never expected.

Over the poems at the centre of the charge stand the words Dafydd ap Gwilym a'i cant, Dafydd ap Gwilym sang it. An English ear, if it listens, will hear something else beneath the Cymraeg, but that is a sound for a later sitting of this court.

Iolo gave the Cymry a motto. He raised it over the Gorsedd of Bards he founded on Primrose Hill in 1792, and it has been spoken over every National Eisteddfod, the national festival of poetry and song, sinceOn the Gorsedd Beirdd Ynys Prydain, first held on Primrose Hill at the midsummer solstice, 21 June 1792, and the later Druid orders, see Ronald Hutton, Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain (Yale, 2009).: Y Gwir yn erbyn y Byd, the Truth against the World. It is a vow. It means the truth even when the truth has no army, no Crown, no chair at the university, no friend in the room. It means the truth standing alone against everything arrayed against it.

In 2007 a scholar took those words (his words, the banner he raised) and made them the title of the book that calls him a forger: The Truth Against the World: Iolo Morganwg and Romantic Forgery.Constantine, The Truth Against the World: Iolo Morganwg and Romantic Forgery, University of Wales Press, 2007, the book that takes his own banner-motto for its title, above the words Romantic Forgery; reviewed (English Historical Review CXXIV/506) as an account of Iolo "as the defender — and at times inventor — of a distinctive Welsh oral and literate culture," the verdict built into the very words chosen to praise him.

We are going to take his motto back.

Because the proper use of a trial is to find out who is actually in the dock. And when you read the evidence, all of it, the prosecution's own pages, the dates, the chain of custody, the company the prosecutors keep, the man in the dock turns out not to be the stonemason. It never was. The defendant in this trial is the court.

And the court asked to be answered. At Caernarfon in August 1921, reading out the verdict that became the book of 1926, Sir John Morris-Jones threw down a challenge to anyone to defend the old bard effectively.“Taflodd her allan i unrhyw un i amddiffyn yr hen Fardd yn effeithiol”: he threw down a challenge to anyone to defend the old bard effectively. W. A. Lewis, “Yr Eisteddfod”, Cymru LXI (November 1921), p. 141, read at the page image.

Look at the court that issued it. The chief judge had written his verdict down two months before he sat: the essay was “yn ddatguddiad ofnadwy”, a dreadful revelation, and Iolo “dyn trwyadl ddrwg”, a thoroughly wicked man. He sent it to Sir Vincent Evans, who printed it that same year.John Morris-Jones to Sir E. Vincent Evans, 9 June 1921, NLW MS 11333B (holograph); printed by Evans, secretary of the Cymmrodorion and of the National Eisteddfod Association, in Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, Session 1919–1920 (London, 1921), pp. 153–5, as an outline “not intended for publication”, read at the page images: “Y mae’r traethawd a anfonwyd i gystadleuaeth Caernarfon eleni yn ddatguddiad ofnadwy; yr oeddwn bron yn sâl wedi ei ddarllen, o ganfod dadlennu miloedd triciau dyn trwyadl ddrwg” (p. 155). Reprinted in Y Llenor XV (1936), p. 251. One essay was entered. Its author, G. J. Williams, was the chief judge’s own student, and that same year he went to work in the department of the second judge, W. J. Gruffydd.Dictionary of Welsh Biography, “Williams, Griffith John”: supervised by Morris-Jones at Bangor, 1919–20; lecturer in Welsh at Cardiff, in Gruffydd’s department, from 1921. A race with one runner, judged by his teacher and his next employer, its result in writing before the judging began. And a gorsedd, by its own law, may not sit under a roof. This verdict was read under one, in a Hall of Literature built apart from the main pavilion.Cymru LXI (November 1921), p. 140: the literary adjudications that year, all but the ode’s and the pryddest’s, were delivered “mewn ystafell arbennig o’r neilltu”, in a special room set apart. L. J. Roberts, “My Impressions of the Carnarvon Eisteddfod. II.”, The Welsh Outlook VIII, no. 10 (October 1921), p. 228: “the erection of a Hall of Literature, separate from the main pavilion, in the Eisteddfod grounds … At Carnarvon a separate time-table was given in the Eisteddfod programme to these events in the Literature Hall.” Both read at the page images. For the law of the open sky, yn wyneb haul a llygad goleuni, see chapter 3, Y Llys.

Then the essay vanished. It went back to its author to be reworked with the judges’ own suggestions. The man who had been sent the private verdict corrected its proofs. For five years nobody outside that circle read a page, though a reporter said it “would have been avidly read by a wide circle if it could have been published”. The chief judge’s whole explanation is that the revising “took time, and the printing of it more”.Morris-Jones, Rhagymadrodd to G. J. Williams, Iolo Morganwg a Chywyddau’r Ychwanegiad (1926), p. xiv: “gofynnwyd i’r awdur ei ddiwygio, a’i ail gopïo lle bai angen, ar gyfair ei gyhoeddi. Fe aeth hynny ag amser, a’r gwaith o’i argraffu fwy”; G. J. Williams’s own preface (1926), thanking the three judges for “llawer o awgrymiadau gwerthfawr” and Sir Vincent Evans for help “wrth gywiro’r proflenni”. L. J. Roberts, The Welsh Outlook VIII, no. 10 (October 1921), p. 228. So the challenge came to this: answer a case you may not read, before judges who convicted in writing before they sat. And the essay itself? Williams’s prize essay of 1918 is still in the National Library, three volumes, adjudication and all. The essay of 1921, the one that mattered, is listed neither in his papers nor in the Eisteddfod’s own deposit for that year. What the judges read, nobody can now check.National Library of Wales catalogue, searched 12 October 2026: Papurau’r Athro Griffith John Williams, A2/2, “Llawysgrif traethawd buddugol G. J. Williams yn Eisteddfod Genedlaethol Castell-Nedd, 1918, dan y ffugenw ‘Glascurion’, ynghyd â beirniadaeth Lemuel Hopkin-James”; none of the collection’s 150 catalogued files describes the 1921 essay. Eisteddfod Genedlaethol Cymru: cyfansoddiadau a beirniadaethau, 1921/1–19: entries and ten adjudications for that year, but not the Iolo essay or any adjudication on it.

One man answered anyway. W. Llewelyn Williams, King’s Counsel, was Llwydfryn of the Gorsedd, and that week he addressed it in the open, within the castle walls, while the verdict was read indoors.Y Cymmrodor 27 (1917), p. 169: “Gan W. Llewelyn Williams (Llwydfryn), A.S.”. Cymru LXI (November 1921), p. 142: “yr Orsedd ag anerchiadau Gwili a Thecwyn, Llwydfryn ac Elfed … o fewn muriau yr hen Gastell”. L. J. Roberts, The Welsh Outlook VIII, no. 10 (October 1921), p. 229: “the Gorsedd orator, Llwydfryn (Mr. Llewelyn Williams) is as rousingly eloquent as ever.” All read at the page images. He said he was not convinced. The chief judge asked him what evidence he had seen. The evidence was the essay the judges were keeping. Within a month Williams asked his countrymen in print to acquit, and the Cymmrodorion promised to publish his full defence.W. Llewelyn Williams, “Iolo Morganwg”, The Welsh Outlook VIII, no. 9 (September 1921), p. 198, read at the page image: “I have no hesitation whatever in asking my countrymen to acquit Old Iolo of the grave charges brought against him.” Report of the Council, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion 1921–22, p. xi, read at the page image: his death “deprived us of … the projected Essay in defence of Iolo Morganwg, which was to have appeared in one of our publications.” In April 1922 he died, and the defence died with him. The book of 1926 never names him. The national biography of Cymru still accuses him of a “refusal to face the facts”.He died on 22 April 1922. The scanned text of G. J. Williams (1926), preface and Rhagymadrodd included, does not name him. R. T. Jenkins, “Williams, William Llewelyn (1867–1922)”, Dictionary of Welsh Biography: “his refusal to face the facts in the cases of Owain Lawgoch and Iolo Morganwg.”

This is the defence.

Before the oath, one thing has to be settled, because everything after it turns on it.

There is no line in this court between Welsh and English. There is no such line in the blood either, and there never was one. The people on both sides of that border are mostly one people. The incomers, Goths, the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes,Goth: John Pinkerton’s word, in 1787, for the Germans and the Scandinavians together (Saxon, Angle, Dane, Viking and Norman) whom he set over the Celts as a better race. His word is kept for them here. See Y Celwydd, ¶128. who crossed the North Sea from what is now Germany and Denmark in the centuries after Rome left, did not replace the people who were already here. They married into them. What they left in the population today is a minority share, heaviest in the south and east and thinning as you travel north and west. Most of what is in an Englishman now was in this island for thousands of years before the word England existed.

The border was not discovered. It was drawn (in statute, by men who profited by drawing it) and both sides were then schooled into believing it had always been there.

And the two languages have been arguing about this since before either of them was written down. They argue in the names they use. The English word for us, Welsh, is from a Germanic root meaning foreigner, and in the Anglo-Saxon law-codes it hardened into the sense of an unfree man: a people called strangers in their own country by the people who had just arrived in it.

The word we use of ourselves is Cymry. It does not mean the people of Wales. It means fellow-countrymen, those of the same ground, and it was taken up in the very centuries this island was being cut in two, by people who needed a word that said we are still the same countrymen.Old English wealh, plural wealas, from Germanic *walhaz, originally a Celtic- or Latin-speaking foreigner, and in the Anglo-Saxon law-codes carrying the secondary sense of an unfree man. Cymraeg Cymro, Cymry, Cymru, from Brythonic *kom-brogos, “of the same country”, com-, together, with bro, home district. Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, s.vv.; the argument is taken up in full at Y Croesholiad, ¶162. Briton is the older name still, and it is ours, for the taking of it, see Y Dull Cymreig, ¶508. That is the whole of it. Not a border. Not a bloodline. Not a tribe. Fellow-countrymen. Nobody can be shut out of it. It does not ask where a man’s grandfathers came from. It does not ask which side of a line he was born on, because it is older than the line, older than the dyke, and nine hundred years older than the statute. It asks one thing. What ground are you standing on. Stand on this island and the word has you. So that is how this book speaks to whoever opens it. Not as Welsh and English, which is the border’s own vocabulary. As Cymry. Fellow-countrymen. All of us of the same ground.

So what divides us is not descent. It is memory. One half of this island kept the record of what was taken and has been called a liar for keeping it ever since. The other half had the record taken as well, and was handed a lie in its place: that it was the thief.

Canwn ag Eurwn deg araith heno,
Yn hynaws gerdd berffaith;
Tynnwn yr hen Fruthaniaith
I’r golau er moethau maith.

Let us sing, and gild fair speech tonight,
in a kindly, perfect song;
let us draw the old British tongue
into the light, for long delights.

Lewis Hopkin of Llandyfodwg, Iolo’s teacher, at the eisteddfod of Llantrisant, 1770

And ask what was taken: a law given in daylight, a poetry that was the country’s paper, books and bards and a reach of time measured in millennia, and an inherited unconscious we are told is not even ours. All of it is ours, ours together, and taken from all of us by the same hands. What was taken was a civilisation, and not only what it was, but everything it would have become. A thousand years of it, compounding, and none of it happened: the continuity broken and the progress halted, by barbarians. And the break was deliberate. The conquest of 1282 took the princes; it did not take the law, or the tongue, or the record. That was done later, on purpose, and mostly by men at desks. The law’s name for that is spoliator, the destroyer of the evidence, against whom every presumption runs. Each of those claims is argued in the pages that follow; none is asked of you on trust. One of them could have been settled long ago. There is a test of the paper and the pen-strokes of the disputed pages themselves that would show whose hand wrote what, and in a hundred years no one has run it. By the end of this book you will know why.

That is the deeper theft, and it is the one still working. A people who have been convinced they were the robbers will defend the robbery. They will stand guard over the thing that was taken from them and call the guarding loyalty. They will hear the theft named and take it for an attack. So let it be said plainly, and clearly in the daylight: half of us were robbed and remember it, and half of us were robbed and schooled to believe we were the robbers, when we never were.

So what follows is not a Welsh case against England. It is one people’s case against the thin stratum that ruled it, divided it, and took its name, and with the name very nearly everything else. This book is the reclamation of that. It gives the names back: the people are the Britons, their country Cymru, their tongue Cymraeg. The state that took them is called Westminster, and its kings by their houses. Welsh and Wales stand only where the English wrote them. The dock is full of named men, and they are named. Englishness is not the charge.And why they appear here without their numbers. A regnal number is issued by the government of the man it flatters: Harri ap Harri was called the Eighth by his own administration and by nobody else, and the worth of such an honour is whatever the honour says it is. The law of this country ran the other way about. It priced the whole court and forbade the court to price itself. The king’s ornaments stand at a pound each, “his vessels, his rings, and his horns”, and then the clause that carries the principle entire: “as he is not to appraise them.” He does not set a value upon his own things; the law does, and the law is the people’s. Nor can what is given be cashed: the trinkets the household bard takes from the king and the queen “he is neither to sell nor give away whilst he lives”, not payment and not property, but the marks of an office, held at a valuation nobody in that hall had written (the laws of Hywel Dda, as printed in the Myvyrian Archaiology). But the numbering is the smaller reason. The larger is that the seat these men were numbered upon was never theirs to sit on. A gorsedd is a throne, and the law that stood upon it was not outgrown but usurped, the assemblies banned in 1402, the law itself abolished in 1536. A number conferred upon a usurped seat is a title to nothing, and it is not repeated here.

This is why the naming matters. A people carry their past whether they are told the truth of it or not, it comes down in the body, in the temper, in the things a family cannot explain about itself. And there is a name for what was done to the other half of us, because the injury is a known one: a person who is harmed by someone more powerful will take on the harmer’s account of what happened and defend it as his own.Sándor Ferenczi, “Confusion of Tongues between Adults and the Child” (1932), naming what he called identification with the aggressor: the injured party takes in the aggressor’s guilt and viewpoint, and thereafter defends them as its own. Anna Freud carried the term into general use in The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936). The response is normal and protective, which is exactly why it holds for centuries. Call it what it is: what a mind does to survive being hurt by something it can neither escape nor fight. Do that to a whole people across ten generations and you have the thing described above: the guard mounted over the stolen goods, and the guarding called loyalty. But nothing can be healed that has been deliberately misremembered. Hand someone the wrong wound and they will tend it all their lives while the real one goes on bleeding underneath. Unless a people know who they are, they cannot begin to mend what was done to them. That is what this book is for, and it is why it could not be written for one half of this island only.

Before any of this, before the court and the charge and the hundred years, there was a boy in a Morgannwg churchyard learning his letters off the dead. His father cut gravestones, and the child they thought not worth the price of school taught himself to read from the chisel. “It was thought useless to put me to school,” he wrote in the plainest account he ever gave of himself; “I learned the alphabet before I can well remember, by seeing my father inscribe grave-stones.”Iolo, Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (1794), vol. I, Preface, pp. xiv–xv: “I was so very unhealthy whilst a child (and I have continued so), that it was thought useless to put me to school, where my three brothers were kept for many years. I learned the alphabet before I can well remember, by seeing my father inscribe grave-stones.” Everything they would later call forgery began with a child reading the only book his country had left open to him, its own graves. He cut other people’s words into stone for his bread. When he died no one cut his, and when a stone came at last it gave his birth-year as 1746; the stone may simply have used the old reckoning. The question is the one he would have asked of any stone he was given: what words belong on it, and who is worthy to carve them?Y Maen, i. Iolo, Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (1794), vol. I, p. xvii: “it is of no importance to any one to know how many stones I hewed, or on how many grave-stones I have inscribed vile doggrel.” Mae’r maen yn syflyd: the stone stirs.

2. Y Llw

The Oath24 The oath. 26 God the surety. 27 The three rules of the court. 28 The Law, the Crime, the Abolition.

3. Y Llys

The Court29 The deeper court. 30 Primrose Hill, 1792: the sword sheathed. 31 The summons, a year and a day before. 37 What a bard was. 39 A country kept in verse. 46 The twenty years’ schooling. 49 The bards had books. 53 The stonemason raises the court again. 54 What the verdict dissolved. 56 The statutes. 58 The empty seat.

And there is a deeper court in this than the one we are convening, the one the verdict was most concerned to bury. The word the establishment reduced to a fancy-dress poetry festival, Gorsedd, does not mean a festival, and never did.GPC, s.v. gorsedd 1: a mound; a throne; and a court of law, a tribunal, a judge’s seat, an assembly, the last attested as early as the ninth century. Gorseddog, in the thirteenth-century law-books, is a magistrate. Across the tradition Iolo carried and copied, a Gorsedd is a throne, a court, a tribunal of native law: Brenin, Arglwyddi Llys a Gorsedd, a Gwlad, King, Lords of Court and Throne, and Country. It claimed the powers of a court, nawdd and barn, protection and judgment,And the bond of bard and court is the medieval law’s own black letter, in all three surviving redactions of Cyfraith Hywel, Cyfnerth, Blegywryd, Iorwerth. The pencerdd, the chaired bard, is one of the fourteen who hold chairs at court, seated beside the court justice and lodged with the edling, the king’s heir; his harp is valued at six score pence, the price of the king’s own; and “even if the king forbids the giving of goods within his realm… the pencerdd will be free of the law”, immunity from royal prohibition itself. The bardd teulu, bard of the household troop, takes a harp from the king and a gold ring from the queen, “and the harp let him never part with”, a steer from every spoil and a man’s share beside every other man of the troop, and “sings the Monarchy of Britain in front of them in the day of battle.” Dafydd Jenkins, ed., The Law of Hywel Dda (1986). And the same office stood under the same kind of law across the Irish Sea: the ollamh, highest of the filid, held nemed, sacred, privileged, status, ranked with bishop and king’s son, his satire carrying force of law (Uraicecht na Ríar, 8th century). None of this needed inventing. and it sat under conditions that are a court of law's and not a concert's: it was not lawful to hold a gorsedd under a roof, nor by night, but only in the open, in the eye of the sun and the face of the light, where justice could be seen to be doneThe chair-roll Iolo preserved carries the doctrine as a motto: Coel clywed, Gwir gweled, hearing is belief; seeing is truth, the word of the chair of Bryn Gwyddon. Iolo Manuscripts (1848)..In medieval usage gorsedd is both the mound and the court held upon it, the word denotes at once a barrow and the seat of judicial assembly: T. M. Charles-Edwards, “Gorsedd, dadl, and llys: assemblies and courts in medieval Wales,” in Pantos and Semple, eds., Assembly Places and Practices in Medieval Europe (2004); so too the gorsedd place-names read by Ifor Williams. The name is the rule: a court whose word means mound cannot sit under a roof. And one open-air session stands in the surviving law’s own black letter: in a suit for land, the court convened upon the disputed land itself, Llyfr Iorwerth, the tractate on land. The codified sentence (not lawful under a roof, nor by night) is carried through Iolo’s manuscripts, as the written form of the same rule survives everywhere the record was not burned: the druids Caesar watched judging all Gaul’s disputes at a consecrated place reckoned the centre of the country (De Bello Gallico VI.13); Tacitus’ Germans, who “do not confine their gods within walls” and did their justice in the open armed assembly (Germania 9, 11–12); the judges of Israel sitting in the gate (Deuteronomy 21:19; Ruth 4, the gate the same in the Septuagint as in the Hebrew); the Anglo-Saxon hundred at its moot hill; the Norse thing at its unroofed thingstead; the Scottish court hills (O’Grady, Medieval Archaeology 58); Tynwald promulgating law on its open mound each midsummer to this day; and the Heliaia of Athens, the supreme court of the ancient world’s first democracy, named in its own tradition for the sun it sat under. For the porthor, the gatekeeper, among the officers of the royal llys: Dafydd Jenkins, ed., The Law of Hywel Dda (Gomer, 1986).Yn wyneb haul a llygad goleuni. The idiom wyneb haul, broad daylight, the open and the public, is centuries older than the rite that swears by it: first written witness 1545, Elis Gruffudd’s herbal (Cwrtmawr MS 1); then the husbandry texts of a. 1561, sheep-land and beehives set yn wyneb hayl (GPC s.v. wyneb); still living in Morgannwg speech, yng ngwinab yr ’oul. Llygad haul and wyneb goleuni are in print together a year before the first Gorsedd sat: the summons of midsummer 1791, on the last page of Dafydd Ddu Eryri’s Awdlau, calls the bards to give judgment yn Llygad Haul, ac yn wyneb y Goleuni. The dictionary’s first citation, the Gorsedd account prefacing the Heroic Elegies of Llywarch Hen, stands in a book dated 1792 on its title-page and not published until 1794. The pairing is Iolo’s own, c. 1785–90 (Cyfrinach xviii; Iolo MSS 61). He did not coin the daylight; he set it in the oath. And that legal culture is not an inference from late copies; it is as old as prose written in Cymraeg itself, literally, for the oldest surviving passage of prose in Cymraeg is a court record. Into the margin of the gospel-book kept at Llandeilo Fawr, in the heart of Deheubarth, a hand of the eighth or ninth century entered the Surexit memorandum: a dispute over land, settled without bloodshed, the settlement recorded, the witnesses named, judgment written into the margin of scripture, the two kept in one binding. The first thing Cymraeg did on parchment was minute a court.The Lichfield Gospels (the Llandeilo Gospels, “St Chad Gospels”), 8th century: the Surexit memorandum, the oldest surviving passage of prose written in Cymraeg, a land-dispute settlement with named witnesses, entered in the margin; the book at Llandeilo Fawr until the tenth century, at Caerlwytgoed (Lichfield) since. That is what Iolo raised again on Primrose Hill in 1792, not a pageant, but the standing claim that the Britons had once governed and judged themselves, under their own law, in their own tongue, before the invader's writ ran.

And see the raising itself, because it was a scene, and the scene is the argument. Midsummer, 1792: a bare hill above the capital of the state then hunting men of his politics, its informers already carrying his name. A ring of small stones laid out on the turf. A naked sword set on the stone at the centre and then, the whole meaning of the rite in a single motion, sheathed, because the pacifist who convened the court would suffer no drawn steel inside it.Reported of the second sitting, at the autumn equinox of 22 September 1792, as “the wonted ceremonies”, in The Diary of 26 September 1792 and the Morning Chronicle and other Llundain (London) papers; the report is printed entire, with the founders’ memorandum, by Thomas Shankland, “Hanes dechreuad ‘Gorsedd Beirdd Ynys Prydain’,” Y Llenor III (1924), 100–101. See also Hutton, Blood and Mistletoe (2009). A marked Jacobin stood on open ground, in daylight, in the eye of the sun, and convened the sovereign tribunal of a nation whose law the statute book said had ceased to exist. The costume was the camouflage. The act was jurisdiction. And Iolo set the other half of that motion in a song, of the men who held the state: Lle traethit cyfraith hedd, / Danfonech yno’r cledd, where the law of peace was spoken, you sent the sword.Iolo Morganwg, Breiniau Dyn (“The Rights of Man”), a song of eighteen stanzas in the measure of God Save the King, reprinted by the Chartists of Merthyr in Udgorn Cymru in 1841; the Welsh as edited from his drafts (NLW 13148A, pp. 286–300; NLW 4363B, 3199E and 6238A) by Cathryn A. Charnell-White, Welsh Poetry of the French Revolution 1789–1805 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012), no. 18, pp. 154–60. The English here and wherever the song is quoted is our own. This is stanza 13.

And none of it was done in secret. He had called the court a year and a day before, in print, in the form of the native law. At midsummer 1791 the last page of a book of odes by Dafydd Ddu Eryri carried the summons:

… gyrchu pen Bryn y Briallu yn ymyl Caerludd, yn mhen un dydd a blwyddyn, yn awr anterth, lle ni bydd noeth arf yn eu herbyn … er rhoddi Barn Gorsedd, yn Llygad Haul, ac yn wyneb y Goleuni …

… to come to the top of Primrose Hill beside Caerludd, at the end of a year and a day, at the hour of mid-morning,Awr anterth, the hour of mid-morning, is the hour the Welsh laws set for a court. John Davies of Mallwyd’s dictionary of 1632 quotes the Laws of Hywel Dda: “Amser i gadw gorsedd gyfreithlon ydyw, pan adnapper ei bod yn bryd anterth, canys na ddylir cynnal gorsedd y nos, na’i dechreu wedi hanner dydd” — the lawful time to hold a gorsedd is when it is known to be the hour of anterth, for a gorsedd ought not to be held at night, nor begun after midday. Under anterth the same dictionary divides the day in four, bore, anterth, nawn, echwydd, and gives Dafydd ap Gwilym for the hour: “O anterth, pridwerth Prydydd, / Hyd hanner dau amser dydd.” The gorsedd of 1632 is a court of law, a king’s, a bishop’s or an abbot’s; the summons of 1791 calls its court for the hour that law appointed. where no naked weapon shall be against them … to give the judgment of a Gorsedd, in the eye of the sun, and in the face of the light …

Nine names stand under it, and five of them are men of the north: Gwilym Owain, Glan y Gors, the Bardd Cloff, Hywel o’r Eryri, and Dafydd Ddu o’r Eryri, whose book it was.David Thomas (Dafydd Ddu Eryri), Awdlau ar destynau Cymdeithas y Gwyneddigion (London, 1791), 46, dated by its own words to the long day of summer 1791. The other four named are Iolo Morganwg, Daniel Dafydd, Dafydd Ddu Feddyg and Siôn Penllyn. A year and a day is the notice of the native laws. The court the verdict calls one stonemason’s fancy was summoned in print under the names of the Llundain (London) Gwyneddigion, the society that had ruled the south unfit for poetry.

That September one of those northern names wrote from Llanystumdwy to a friend in Llŷn, and set down what the order he was about to enter held a bard to be:

y Bardd a safai yn ei wisg unlliw rhwng y ddwyblaid arfog pan fyddynt ar fin tywallt gwaed calonau eu gilydd … yr olwg arno a ddychwelai y cleddyf ir wain a’r saeth ir cawell. Cenad heddwch rhwng Brenhin a Brenhin, a Gwlad a Gwlad ydoedd. Gweinidog heddwch y gelwid ef.

the Bard would stand in his robe of one colour between the two armed hosts when they were on the point of shedding each other’s heart’s blood … and the sight of him would return the sword to the sheath and the arrow to the quiver. He was a messenger of peace between King and King, and Country and Country. A Minister of peace he was called.

There was nothing in it, he added, that could not be shown yngolwg yr haul a phawb o’r Byd, in the sight of the sun and of all the world. The prosecution’s own historian of the Gorsedd printed that letter in 1924 and wrote under it that it gives the teaching of Iolo’s manuscript as it stood in 1790–91.Dafydd Ddu Eryri to John Roberts (Siôn Lleyn), Llanystumdwy, 13 September 1791, from Adgof uwch Anghof, 14–16; printed by Shankland, Y Llenor III (1924), 96–98, with the comment: “Rhydd y llythyr hwn ddysgeidiaeth Cyfrinach y Beirdd fel yr oedd yn llawysgrif Iolo yn 1790–1.” The sheathed sword was the doctrine, in writing, in the north, nine months before the hill.

Then the hill. A memorandum written into a copy of that same book of odes names the bards who stood on it at midsummer and again at the autumn equinox: Iolo; William Owen Pughe; Edward Jones, the harper who styled himself the King’s Bard; and David Samwell, the naval surgeon who had sailed with Cook and written down the songs of the Maori.“Memorandum. London 1792. In consequence of the Proclamation in the Welsh Language at the end of the poems in this Book, a Meeting of Welsh Bards took place on Primrose Hill near London for the first time on the 21st of June 1792 — and the second time on the same spot on the 22nd of September following. … The Bards present at the above two Meetings were Edward Williams who stiles himself in Welsh Iolo Morganwg, Gwilym Owen, Edward Jones Telyniwr, and David Samwell who is stiled in the Welsh Dafydd ddû Feddyg.” Printed by Shankland, Y Llenor III (1924), 100, read at the page. On Samwell: Martin Fitzpatrick, “The ‘Cultivated Understanding’ and Chaotic Genius of David Samwell”, in A Rattleskull Genius (2005): he “made the first serious transcription of Maori songs” (p. 393), and he “was responsible for the account of the meeting of the Gorsedd of the Bards on Primrose Hill on 22 September 1792 in Woodfall’s Diary” (p. 387, n. 19). Llundain kept its weather in the magazines. Midsummer was cool, sixty-four degrees at noon in the Strand, with “black and blue clouds, sun, slight showers, fine day”; the autumn sitting came the morning after “violent storms of rain and hail”, on a day of “white clouds, showers”.The Gentleman’s Magazine 62 (1792), the monthly weather tables, July and October issues, read on the page images: W. Cary’s London readings, taken in the Strand opposite Arundel Street, 21 June 50°, 64°, 50°, barometer 29.79; 22 September 45°, 56°, 43°, barometer 29.03, “rain”; and the country diary, 21 June “black and blue clouds, sun, slight showers, fine day”, 21 September “cloudy, violent storms of rain and hail”, 22 September “NW moderate, white clouds, showers”. Within four days of the second sitting the Llundain papers had it:

… according to ancient usage, which requires that it should be in the eye of public observation, in the open air, in a conspicuous place, and whilst the Sun is above the Horizon, the wonted ceremonies were observed. A Circle of Stones was formed in the middle of which was the Maen Gorsedd or Altar, on which a naked sword being placed, all the Bards assisted to sheathe it. The Ceremony was attended with a proclamation, the substance of which was, that the Bards of the Island of Britain … were the Heralds and Ministers of peace, and never bore a naked weapon in the presence of any one.

The same report gave the odes. Two had been recited in English, “the first that were ever recited in this Language at a Congress of Ancient British Bards”, and the bards set themselves the subject of the next, for the winter solstice: the resurrection of Rhitta Gawr, the giant who made his cloak from the beards of the kings he had beaten. Samwell gave them the couplet: “Now German Despots Freedom’s sons provoke / Arise old Rhitta—here’s another cloak.” And Iolo, “in a prophetic strain”, gave an “Apostrophe to Liberty”, and put the bards on the side of the slaves: “Join here thy Bards with mournful note, / They weep for Afric’s injur’d race, / Long has thy Muse, in worlds remote, / Sang loud of Britain’s foul disgrace.”Morning Chronicle, 26 September 1792, p. 3, “Solemn Bardic Day. Meeting of the Welch Bards on Primrose Hill”, as quoted by James Grande, Articulate Sounds: Music, Dissent, and Literary Culture, 1789–1840 (London: The British Academy, 2026), ch. “Bardic Hymns”, pp. 74–5, with “The Bardic Song shall now resound, / Trill thro’ these templed hills around”.The press report, “which appeared in the Diary of Septr. 26, 1792 and Morning Chronicle and other London Papers”, as printed by Shankland, Y Llenor III (1924), pp. 100–101, read on the page images; the couplet is signed “Dafydd ddu Feddyg”, Samwell’s bardic name. September 1792: the month the French monarchy fell, the year the Crown proclaimed against seditious writings. Four Britons laid a sword on a stone in a Llundain field and sheathed it together; declared their three orders “upon the most perfect equality with each other”; proclaimed the English tongue a bardic language “to be used in future for ever, as well as the ancient British or Welsh”; and sent the account to the Morning Chronicle.Y Maen, ii. His own rule, as printed from his papers in Y Beirniad (January 1861), pp. 257–60: “Defod yw gwneuthur cylch cynghrair ar ben bryn amlwg; a hwn a wneir â meini yn gylch”, the custom is to make a circle of covenant on an open hilltop, of stones set in a ring, with “maen gorsedd … a’r maen llog” at its centre. On his northern journey he went “a’r ceryg cysegredig yn ei logell”, with the sacred stones in his pocket (p. 260). The stone shifts on its bed. And the equality was not meant to stop at the men. In a postscript to a draft of his Short Account of the Ancient British Bards Iolo wrote that “Women as well as men, may be admitted of all orders”, and in his lifetime two women were made Ovates: Sarah Owen, William Owen Pughe’s wife, and the poet Anna Seward.NLW 13089E, p. 458. The two Ovates are named on the same page.

Stop here, because this is the part a modern reader slides past. We all do, this book's author included. We think we know what a bard is: someone who writes a poem after the event. A commemorator. Decoration at the feast. That is not what the law describes, and the difference is the whole case. In this civilisation the poem is not written after the event, the poem is how the event is done. There are no title-deeds: the pedigree the bard carries in trained memory is the deed, and a family that loses its poet is a family that has lost the proof of its land. There is no gazette and no college of heralds: the praise-poem is the public record of rank. There is no libel court: satire is the sanction, across the water the Irish law gave a satire the power to strip a man of his inheritance, a poem with the force of a court order. There is no university: the pencerdd, the chief of song, examines his pupils through the grades and takes his fee from each one who completes the training. There is no professional monopoly at law: except that there is, no bard may practise for gain in the pencerdd's territory without his licence; the chief of song holds a jurisdiction, with borders.

And (the one duty our stereotype has kept, because it is the most cinematic) there is no war correspondent and no regimental chaplain: the bard rides with the troop, draws a fighting man's share of the spoil, and on the day of battle stands in front of the men and sings Unbeiniaeth Prydain, the Sovereignty of Britain, the claim itself, the reason for the dying, recited aloud while it happens. But the battle-song is the corner of the office, not the office.

Every load our world carries on paper (record, right, rank, sanction, memory) this world carried on the trained human voice, graded, licensed, and protected by law to bear it. That is why the statute prices the chief bard's harp at the price of the king's own; why the chief of song sits beside the judge and cannot be touched even by a royal prohibition. The bards were the recording apparatus the whole society ran on, a civilisation whose paper was poetry.

It is genuinely strange to us, as strange as another planet, and we should let it be strange, because the mistranslation of that strangeness into our own small categories, poet, minstrel, entertainer, is exactly the reduction the occupying administration performed on purpose. Once you see it, the rest of this trial reads differently: an attack on the bardic order was never an attack on a literature. It was an attack on a country's entire apparatus of record.

And do not picture the poem as the possession of a caste, the way Latin once belonged to clerks. The strangest thing of all, set down by a hostile witness, Gerald of Wales, a Norman churchman touring the country in 1188, writing with the bafflement of a man reporting another planet, is that the whole population lived inside the medium. In their singing, he recorded, the Britons "do not sing in unison like the inhabitants of other countries, but in many different parts... you will hear as many different parts and voices as there are performers", a nation that harmonised by instinct, in company, as its ordinary way of making sound together. And: "Even the common people retain their genealogy, and can not only readily recount the names of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers, but even refer back to the sixth or seventh generation, or beyond them."Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambrensis), Descriptio Kambriae (1194), I.13 on the part-singing, I.17 on the genealogy of the common people, the occupier’s own ethnographer, recording both in open astonishment. Read those two observations as one fact, because they are one fact: part-song and universal pedigree are the same skill, a population holding its records in trained sound, from the cottage to the court. The bardic order was not the country’s poetry department. It was the licensed judiciary of a medium every soul in the country lived inside, the way every soul in ours lives inside writing: everyone reads; the lawyers construe.And this oral world is not a thing we can only imagine: it was recorded alive. In the 1930s Milman Parry and Albert Lord set down the songs of unlettered Balkan guslars composing epic in performance from inherited formulas, the fieldwork that proved how Homer himself must have worked (Albert Lord, The Singer of Tales, 1960). The oral-composing mind is a documented human capacity, not a romantic supposition. Literature knows such a world only as a thought-experiment, Borges imagined Tlön, a planet generated out of its own encyclopaedia, where the description of the world is the world, and we file it under fantasy. But this is the experiment run live, for centuries, on real ground: a country whose deeds, borders, ranks and rights subsisted in composed language, continuously recited, not a country that had songs, but a country kept in song, present tense, alive only while sung, and sung always. The song was not about the country; the song was where the country was stored. And a country stored in song has one strategic property no paper state possesses: it cannot be burned.And the living instance is still sung. Across Aboriginal Australia the songlines, “Dreaming tracks”, carry the country itself in verse: a knowledgeable singer crosses hundreds of miles by the sequence of a song that names each waterhole and landform in turn, and the same songs hold the law, the kinship and the boundaries of the land. Anthropology calls them plainly what they are, “oral maps” and “living law.” A whole continent’s record, kept in song and unburnable: the experiment this chapter describes, running now. The invader came to understand that too, which is why, in the end, the war had to be waged against the singers.Yr Awen, ii. Cynddelw, twelfth century: “Kyn canwyf o dwfyn, o dofyn awen”, before I sing from the deep, from deep awen (Gwaith Cynddelw Brydydd Mawr, i, p. 295; GPC, awen). Far down, the song is kept.

Follow it into the corners where you would swear poetry cannot reach, because the record keeps going. Medicine: in the laws of court the household physician and the household bard lodge together, the mender of bodies and the mender of the record, billeted under one roof by statute, and the medical corpus of this civilisation, the recipes of the Physicians of Myddfai, travels in the same great manuscript as the poems and the triads, the Red Book of Hergest.

Law: the jurists compress doctrine into triads, Tair Colofn Cyfraith, the Three Columns of Law, and understand what a triad is, because it is not a poetic flourish: it is a filing system. Three items to a record, the pattern locking the memory, thousands of records deep; and the Trioedd Ynys Prydain, the Triads of the Island of Britain, are exactly what they look like once you have seen it, the catalogue of the national story-archive, each triad three call-numbers into a repertoire the bard was examined on carrying.The physician and the bardd teulu lodged together: the laws of court, in D. Jenkins (1986). The triads as the bards’ own index: Rachel Bromwich, ed., Trioedd Ynys Prydein, the medieval bards “would have used the triads as an index of past history and legend.” Borges: “Parable of the Palace” (El Hacedor, 1960), quoted in the English of Dreamtigers, trans. Mildred Boyer and Harold Morland (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964); “The Mirror and the Mask” (El libro de arena, 1975), in The Book of Sand, trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni (New York: Dutton, 1977). Andrew Hurley’s later translations (Collected Fictions, 1998) word both differently.

Money: the laws price everything in the kingdom, the king’s harp at six score pence, a cat at as much wheat as will cover her, hung by the tail with her nose touching the floor, but a man himself is priced by his sarhad, his honour-price, graded by rank; and rank is worn as reputation, and reputation is kept in verse. Praise appreciated a man. Satire (remember the Irish áer that could strip an inheritance) was a run on his credit. The poem did not report the economy; the poem moved it, the way a signature moves ours.

And Borges, again, because he is the writer who could not stop imagining this world, an Argentine reaching across an ocean and a thousand years for it, wrote both endings. In the Parable of the Palace, set at a Chinese court, the emperor’s poet recites a composition, one line long, perhaps one word, in which “stood the enormous palace, entire and minutely detailed”; the emperor cries “You have robbed me of my palace!” and the executioner’s sword cuts the poet down, the word so exactly the equal of the thing that both cannot be owned at once.And in The Mirror and the Mask an Irish high king, after Clontarf, commissions the victory poem from his bard (whom Borges names Ollan, a shadow of the ollamh, the Irish master-poet) and does not simply ask for it but examines him across three years, each poem stranger and higher than the last, each answered with the insignia of a further grade: a silver mirror for the first, a masterwork that gathers up all his forebears; a golden mask for the second, stranger in form and matter, its grammar breaking under the weight; and for the third, a single line so numinous that both men know they have touched a beauty “forbidden to men,” a dagger. It is a degree ceremony (three ascending trials, three tokens, the shape of the bardic grades exactly) and it ends as such a summit must: the poet takes the dagger and dies, the king becomes a beggar on the roads of the Ireland he had ruled, and the line is never spoken again. His story is Irish, Clontarf, an Irish king, the graded ollamh at the summit of the filid, the Irish poet-class, and the same graded order stands in the native law and in the Irish alike: one institution across the whole Celtic west, still vivid enough in Ireland’s memory eight centuries on to carry a fable, and no forger’s invention. The modern imagination could conceive of the word bearing such power only as fable, set far away and long ago. What has been described here is a working constitution. The fable was set here.

Now measure the man such an office required, because this is where the modern picture (the amateur reciting for his friends, the competitor after a ribbon) collapses entirely. This was the longest education in Europe. Caesar, watching the order's Gaulish cousins, records pupils spending as much as twenty years in training, committing an immense body of verse to memory, and forbidden to commit the doctrine to writing, not for want of letters (they used Greek script for ordinary business) but as the order's own policy. Caesar gives two reasons, as he reads them: that the doctrine should not reach the crowd, and that a pupil who trusts the page lets his memory slide. There is a third, which we offer as our own: a record held in ten thousand trained memories cannot be seized at a border, burned in a library, or quietly edited by an invader, and every man who carries it must first be built into an instrument capable of carrying it.Caesar, De Bello Gallico VI.14: up to twenty years in training; a great number of verses; the doctrine not committed to writing though Greek letters were used in public and private accounts; the druids exempt from war-service and from taxation.Plato had already given the principle its charter-myth. In the Phaedrus (274–275) the god Theuth offers writing to the Egyptian king Thamus as a cure for memory; the king refuses the premise, writing is a pharmakon, poison and remedy at once, “an elixir not of memory, but of reminding,” breeding forgetfulness in those who trust it, for they cease to carry the record in themselves. The order’s refusal to write was that judgment made a discipline, and the whole of Iolo’s tragedy is the pharmakon’s other edge: once the record was committed to skin and paper it could at last be burned, seized, and locked in a cabinet.

And the English republic of letters had already signed the principle into its own canon. In 1769 Robert Wood's Essay on the Original Genius of Homer (the book that taught Europe to read Homer as an unlettered oral bard) put it in so many words: in that state of society "all a man could know was all he could remember," and "the memory is loaded with nothing that is either useless or unintelligible; whereas modern [education] employs us chiefly in getting by heart, while we are young, what we forget before we are old", a language grown "without the assistance of writing," its whole art "entirely addressed to the ear." England accepted, on those terms, that a trained memory had carried the Iliad. Two generations later the same establishment ruled that the Britons' trained-memory order could only be a forgery.Robert Wood, An Essay on the Original Genius of Homer (London, 1769), the founding text of the oral-Homer thesis, celebrated across Europe (it shaped Wolf's Prolegomena). The double standard is structural: the oral bard is genius in Ionia and fraud in Morgannwg.

And the society paid that education what it costs. The chief of song holds his land free of all dues to the king. Caesar's druids were exempt from tax and from military service. The Irish ollamh stood at law level with the bishop and the king's son. Understand what kind of aristocracy this is, because it is not ours: not lords by blood, not lords by the sword, lords by examination. A nobility of memory, entered only through the grades, each grade a further decade of a man's life surrendered to the training, and at the top of it a rank that royalty itself could not overrule. Europe has exactly one name for such a class, and only as a fantasy: the Guardians, the governing order Plato spent the Republic designing, selected young, tested for decades, freed of property and taxes so that nothing could buy them, trained until they could carry the state in their minds. Plato imagined it and admitted it might never exist. The Celtic west simply ran it, for a thousand years, which is why every Greek and Roman author who actually met the druids reached, a little bewildered, for the same word: philosophers.The order’s very name fused the tree and the knowing: druid derives from Proto-Celtic dru-wid-, “oak-knower” or “knower of the tree” (Cymraeg derw, oak; derwydd, druid), Pliny already caught the oak in it. And the faculty was not Britain’s alone: by the same trained recitation the Brahmins carried the Rgveda across some three thousand years, deliberately unwritten and almost undrifting, another priesthood that, like the druids, held it safer in the memory than on the page.

And there is a blunter answer to the charge than any of this, which is that its premise is false on the face of the manuscripts. The case against Iolo Morganwg requires that the bardic order was a spoken order only, that it left no books, so that a documentary bardism had to be manufactured before it could be produced. The poets say otherwise, in their own words, in medieval hands nobody disputes. The word for books occurs five times in the printed texts of the four manuscripts that carry the oldest poetry in Cymraeg, and every one of the five is a poet claiming a written authority: the books of Bede, which tell no lie; the books of awen, unfolded without dread; my songs above the books; scarce does the letter of books tell me; and, from a man composing on his deathbed, all who have heard my bard-books. That last is a single compound word in the Cymraeg (fy mardlyfreu, my bard-books, from bardlyfreu) and it is not a figure of speech available to a tradition with no books in it. Note the temperature of the second: to unfold the books of awen, without dread. Nobody says without dread of a thing that is safe to hold.The count is exhaustive across the four collections as Skene prints them, and all five occurrences have been listed and checked in his Welsh text: nyt dyweit geu llyfreu Beda; llyfreu awen heb arswyt; vygkerdeu uch llyfreu lleer; abreid om dyweit llythyr llyfreu; ar sawl a gigleu vy mardlyfreu. The second of them has also been read on the manuscript leaf itself; the other four have not. The books of awen stand at Oxford, Jesus College MS 111 (the Red Book of Hergest), col. 583 l. 11: datod llyfreu awen heb arswyt. Two of the five (the letter of books and the bard-books) belong to one poem spoken from a deathbed, “before the foam-frost comes upon my lips”, printed twice by Skene, as poem I of the Book of Taliesin and as poem XXIII of the Red Book, which ends in col. 1055; the songs above the books stand two poems earlier in the Red Book, in col. 1051 (Skene's poem XXI). Texts in W. F. Skene, The Four Ancient Books of Wales, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1868).

And the poem of the books of awen, the dialogue of Myrddin and his sister Gwenddydd, says that its speaker had read a particular book, by name, the Book of Cado, and a few columns later gives that speaker’s own name and patronymic: Myrddin is my name, son of Morfryn. Open the Book of Cado, and it quotes a counsel given by the son of Morfryn. The citation runs both ways. Two texts, printed in one collection by the same editors, each pointing at the other, and no edition we have found sets them side by side.Red Book of Hergest, col. 580 l. 25, a darllewys Lyuyr Cado, who read the Book of Cado; the name and patronymic at col. 584 l. 4, Myrdin yw vy enw uab Morvryn. J. Gwenogvryn Evans, ed., The Poetry in the Red Book of Hergest (Llanbedrog, 1911), p. 10 l. 25; Skene, Four Ancient Books, ii. 226. The Myvyrian Archaiology prints the line as stanza 71, recording the variant a lewys lyfyr Cado in a footnote. The counsel of the son of Morfryn is Llyfr Catwg Ddoeth §190, stanza 36, printed in the same Myvyrian. The two have stood a few hundred pages apart, in one work, since it was published. Skene indexed the Book of Cado and wrote no note on it.

And the book he copied in 1799 can be tested against the old books that came down without him. It shares two lines with them, both proverbs found elsewhere: “Trech anian nog addysg”, nature is stronger than teaching, in the Red Book’s gnomic verse (“trech anyan noc adysc”), and “Gwell bedd no bywyd”, better the grave than life, beside the Black Book’s “Guell bet no buhet”. Beyond those, almost nothing: about one line in two thousand. A forger’s patchwork is thick with borrowed lines; that is how forgery is made and how it is caught. This one borrows almost nothing from the books he is supposed to have plundered.Llyfr Catwg Ddoeth §§163–191 in the Myvyrian Archaiology (2,126 lines), set line by line against the Welsh text of Skene, Four Ancient Books of Wales (1868), vol. II, printed from the Black Book of Carmarthen, the Book of Aneirin, the Book of Taliesin and the Red Book of Hergest; run on 3 September 2026. No sequence of four or five words is shared; of three-word runs, eleven, eight of them the colophon Ac velly tervyna. The two lines: §165, “Trech anian nog addysg”, and the Red Book of Hergest, col. 1033, “trech anyan noc adysc”; §190, “Gwell bedd no bywyd gwydvawr”, and the Black Book of Carmarthen, the Oianau, fol. 27, “Guell bet. no buhet pop yghenauc”. A shared line shows contact, not which way it ran; what the count shows is the shape of the relation, and it is not the shape of a forgery.

Say at once what this does not prove, because the whole argument here is that a case must not be pushed past its evidence. It does not establish that the book named in the medieval poem and the text Iolo himself copied out in 1799 carry the same words; a later compiler who knew the Red Book could have supplied the stanza.The Myvyrian’s own footnote to Llyfr Catwg Ddoeth: “My vi Iolo Morganwg ai ysgrivenais allan o Lyvyr Mr. Siams Thomas o y Maerdy Newydd yn Morganwg. 1799”, I, Iolo Morganwg, wrote it out from the book of Mr Siams Thomas of Maerdy Newydd in Morgannwg, 1799. What it establishes is a citation running in two directions, not an identity. That is a great deal less than proof of descent, and a great deal more than a tradition without books is permitted to have.

Now the stonemason, one last time. A man who gives his nights for fifty years to transcribing the wreck of that order's archive; who trains himself to the old metres until the experts cannot tell his hand from the masters'; who at forty-five stands up on a hill outside Llundain and re-erects the order's court, open air, sworn on the sun. That man is not a poet amusing himself. He is doing, precisely and deliberately, what the last officer of a fallen order does: keeping the register open, holding the examination with no state left to certify it, carrying the archive in the one place it could not be confiscated. The question this trial should always have asked is not did the stonemason invent a tradition, but what happens to the Guardian class of a civilisation under occupation when its state is outlawed?, and the answer stood in the dock.

Now see what the verdict accomplished. To call the Gorsedd a forgery was not merely to insult a dead poet; it was to dissolve a court. It took a tribunal of native sovereignty, a living assertion that this people had a law and a throne of its own, and reclassified it as harmless Victorian theatre: bunting and robes, a thing for the tourist and the choir.The pageant gives us Plato's shadow-play, not the eye of the sun, and calls the man who turned round the forger. The most efficient way to abolish a court is not to storm it; it is to announce that it was always only a play. That is the erasure the word forgery performed, and it is why the stakes were never merely literary. A nation that remembers it once held its own gorsedd (its own throne, and court, and judgment) does not stay a quiet coalfield.

And the coalfield is not a figure of speech. Under the law the Gorsedd remembered (Cyfraith Hywel, the native law of Hywel Dda) the soil of Cymru was held by kindred and by common right: the gwely of the family, the cytir of the shared hill, tenure woven through blood and custom rather than granted by any crown. A holding kept by kindred and witnessed in the open cannot be mortgaged behind a closed door; the closed door is how such land was lost.See Y Gwir a'r Ddyled, ¶744. To enclose the commons of the Morgannwg valleys for the coal and iron beneath them, the state and the anglicised estates needed that memory dead, because a people who remember holding their land under their own judgment have a claim, and a people persuaded their court was always a costume drama have none.

And the killing of that memory was not left to persuasion; it was done by statute, in a single generation. In 1531 the Crown took the head of Rhys ap Gruffydd, and in 1531–2 an English statute attainted the blood.23 Hen. VIII c. 34, the attainder of “Rice or Richard Ap Griffith”, printed in Statutes of the Realm, III (1817), from p. 415, under “A.D. 1531–2”: he was beheaded on 4 December 1531, and the Act passed in the session that opened in January 1532, which the old reckoning, with the year turning on the twenty-fifth of March, still called 1531. In 1536 the first Act of Union outlawed the native law: English law to run in Cymru, the tongue of the courts to be English, no man to hold office under Harri ap Harri on his Cymraeg alone. In the same year the same king shut Talley, the Lord Rhys’s own abbey and the record-office of Deheubarth, turned out its canons, took its lands for the Crown, and left its walls to be pulled down. The second Act of 1543 finished the architecture, dissolving the old jurisdictions into English-model courts.The Act’s own words (27 Hen. VIII c. 26): Harri ap Harri declares himself, “of a singular Zeal Love and Favour”, “minding and intending to reduce them to the perfect Order Notice and Knowledge of his Laws of this his Realm, and utterly to extirp all and singular the sinister Usages and Customs differing from the same”, a nation’s jurisprudence entered the statute book as sinister usages, to be rooted out utterly, in love. Reduce is the operative verb, and it is not a soft one: reducere, to lead back, a country being led back was always yours, so the title is asserted without ever being argued. Justice to be ministered “according to the Laws Customs and Statutes of this Realm of England, and after no Welsh Laws”; all courts to be kept “in the English Tongue”; and “no Person or Persons that use the Welsh Speech or Language shall have or enjoy any manner Office or Fees within this Realm of England, Wales, or other the King’s Dominion, upon Pain of forfeiting the same Offices or Fees, unless he or they use and exercise the English Speech or Language.” Not office in Cymru, office anywhere the Crown held, or would come to hold. Note the mechanism those words set running: Cyfraith Hywel was not repealed into oblivion but criminalised in effect, to plead the native law in the new English courts was contempt of them. The law of the Britons did not die of age; it was made an offence to practise. Blood in 1531; law and record in 1536; the courtroom door in 1543, the whole apparatus of native judgment dismantled in twelve years.

And name the procedure for what it was, because the tidiness of statutes is the oldest laundering there is. Not one of the original inhabitants sat in the parliament that abolished the law of the Britons: the Act of 1536 created the country's first parliamentary seats in the same breath that it claimed the country, the consent manufactured after the theft.Mahmood Mamdani’s Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (2020) is the general statement of what this Act did. His argument is that “native” and “settler” are not descriptions of ancestry but political identities manufactured (by historical writing, by census-taking and by lawmaking together) and that the founding act of the modern state is to collapse the nation into the state, so that a majority is politicised into sovereignty and whoever is left over becomes, in his phrase, an equally manufactured minority. Both terms are made. The Act of 1536 performs both operations in one instrument. It dissolves the native law into English law; and in the same clauses it fixes Welshness itself as a legal disability, a thing a man must stop being in order to hold office in his own country. Mamdani dates the form to the close of the fifteenth century, and follows it out of Europe into the settler Americas and colonial indirect rule, back into Europe with Nazism and the Allied post-war settlement, and out again into Sudan and Palestine. He does not come here. The penal statutes of 1402 stand at the opening of the same century he closes with, and they had already made a whole order of men criminal for what they were, ninety years before the date he starts from, and close on three centuries before the earliest case he examines. The form did not arrive here from somewhere else. It was worked out here. And note what the Act had to do to draw its line at all. It could not draw it by descent, because descent would not draw it, the people on the English side of that line were, in the main, the same island stock as the people on the western side, and are still. So the law drew it itself, and then taught both sides to believe it had been found rather than made. That is Mamdani’s case at its hardest: not a border between two peoples, but a border manufactured through the middle of one. A nation's law is not a bylaw, to be repealed by its neighbour's vote; to extinguish it from outside, for the taker's gain in land and lordship, was not administration and was not reform. It was a crime, the confiscation of a people's entire jurisprudence at sword-point, minuted as governance. Murder does not become procedure because the murderer keeps minutes. Call the Gorsedd a forgery, and the claim dies with the court. The academy did the intellectual work of the enclosure acts: it disarmed a nation of its legal history and left it squatting on its own inheritance.Priya Satia’s Time’s Monster: History, Conscience and Britain’s Empire (2020) is a book about that sentence, not about the empire, but about the historians. Her case is that British imperial actors were not men without a conscience. They had one, and history supplied it with a way of postponing its verdict: a story of forward motion in which the ordinary moral objection to a seizure could be suspended against the expectation that the future would vindicate it. Nor were the historians bystanders who afterwards got the empire wrong. They advised the men who ruled, and were often those men; the discipline helped make the empire by making it ethically thinkable. It was the faculty the empire thought with. Which is why the verdict on Iolo has never been a footnote to the dispossession. It is the part of the dispossession that had to be written by scholars. And some of the claims that died in those valleys were older and more particular than common right. So the throne was turned into a pageant, and the man who raised it was turned into a fraud; and the two erasures are one. Iolo knew that trick of renaming. In the war years, writing against the loyal anthem that asked God to bless a king at war, he put it in one line: “What in low life we call murder, is in the language of Royalty called War.”NLW 21401E, nos. 1, 19, 20.

There is a psychological name for what that double erasure produced, and it is worth setting it down at the outset, because it is the grammar through which the whole trial must be read. When a people’s own law and its own courts are taken from it, the collective unconscious of that people does not accept the loss. It cannot. The psyche of a nation, like the psyche of an individual, will fill the empty seat with something. And what it produces, when the real Sovereign is absent and the direct claim is too dangerous to speak, is the figure the deep myths call the Trickster: the culture-bringer who works through indirection, who preserves the sacred inheritance under cover of making sparks, who keeps the fire alive precisely by refusing to name himself its keeper. The Trickster is not a fraud. The Trickster is what the Sovereign archetype looks like when it must operate in hiding.Jung, “On the Psychology of the Trickster Figure,” in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Collected Works 9i, 1959): the trickster as a collective shadow-figure and culture-hero, the archetype that carries the sacred inheritance under cover of misrule.

Cymru in the eighteenth century was precisely that condition. The native law abolished by Harri ap Harri, the sovereignty broken by conquest and the memory of it erased by administration, and the collective unconscious straining, across a century of societies and eisteddfodau and manuscript rescues, toward the Sovereign it had been forbidden to name. That strain does not produce a king; it produces something stranger and more dangerous: a man who becomes the tradition he was carrying. Understand that dynamic, and the whole trajectory of this trial is legible from the opening charge. The Trickster who sits in the empty throne long enough begins, very slowly, to believe it is his own.See Y Ceidwad a'r Orsedd, ¶411.

4. Y Diffynnydd

The Accused60 The man before his accusers. 61 Born at Pennon, 1747. 62 The boy kept from school. 68 Made a bard in the old manner. 81 The Bard of Liberty. 83 The Jamaica money. 85 The tea-sheet and the hymns. 88 Alice John. 96 The libraries ground down. 102 On foot from house to house. 108 His deathbed. 109 The shadow of the portrait.

Establish the man before you try his accusers.

Edward Williams was born at Pennon, in the parish of Llancarfan, on the twenty-first of March 1747, at six in the morning, “at the same instant as I have been told that the rising sun appeared.” His parents had met over an injury. His father, a mason, had a hand crushed under a stone, “every bone tore to pieces”, and the surgeons meant to take it off. He went to a gentlewoman at Boverton who was known for her cures, and her niece set the bones and saved the hand. Within a year he had married the niece. She was Ann Matthews, of a family that had lost its land.Iolo’s own memoir drafts for the preface of Poems, Lyric and Pastoral, NLW 21387E, no. 10 (written 1793), as transcribed by the Iolo Morganwg project, Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies (iolomorganwg.wales.ac.uk); not yet read on the manuscript. “I was born on the 21st day of March (New stile) 1747, at six o clock in the morning at the same instant as I have been told that the rising sun appeared.” In the old calendar, which Wales kept until 1752, that is the tenth of March, the date the Dictionary of Welsh Biography gives; Geraint H. Jenkins, Bard of Liberty (2012), p. 4, makes it “probably … Wednesday, 11 March 1747”, baptized two days later. The hand: “My father when single had his hand shatter most terribly by the crush of a large stone every bone tore to pieces, in every one of his fingers, amputation of the hand was deemed absolutely necessary by all the faculty … he applied to her [Mrs Seys], and my mother assisted by her aunts advice set the bones … this was the occasion that brought them first an acquaintance that in about a twelvemonth ended in Marriage.” Her father, Edward Mathews of Coychurch, “born to a competent Estate which he, falling a prey to some Misfortunes and many villanies was obliged to sell”; she was brought up at Boverton by Richard Seys, who had married her aunt (same draft). Her people were the Matthews of Llandaf and Radyr, and her books were the Spectator and the Tatler: the house he was born in had the old gentry’s reading on its shelf and none of their land under it.Charnell-White, “Women and Gender”, in A Rattleskull Genius (2005), pp. 363–366: “a member of the relatively new gentry, the Matthews families of Llandaf and Radyr”; her library “included copies of the Spectator and the Tatler”; “But for his maternal grandfather’s profligacy, Iolo would have been the social equal of those to whom he was required to defer”.

Edward was the eldest of four boys, and the only one who never went to school. “I was thro’ childhood so very sickly and weak that my death was almost daily expected,” he wrote, “for this reason I was never put to any school.” His mother taught him to read out of a book of songs, and he learned his letters earlier still, watching his father cut them in gravestones. At eight he could cut them himself. At nine he was taken to work. “My brothers were sent to school where they continued several years. I had a strong desire for knowledge and often expressed a wish to be put to school, but I was now able to get some money, and my father wanted it.” He never blamed his father for it. “I do not remember the time,” he wrote, “when I could not read both of my Nature languages.”Iolo’s own memoir drafts for the preface of Poems, Lyric and Pastoral, NLW 21387E, no. 10, as transcribed by the Iolo Morganwg project, Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies (iolomorganwg.wales.ac.uk); not yet read on the manuscript. “we were four children, boys, and I was the eldest”; the book of songs was “two volumes of songs titled the Vocal Miscellany … it was in the vocal miscellany that I first learned to read”; “I could about eight years of age cut letters in stone tolerably well”; “for this reason I must not in the least blame him for not complying with my wishes tho’ they were warmly seconded by my Mother.” “Both of my Nature languages”: no. 13, printed as the project transcribes it; he means native. The same draft, no. 10, says his parents “made English the language of domestic conversation”, in a parish where it was “never heard in common conversation”. Jenkins (2012), p. 17: “Thanks largely to his mother’s influence, English was Iolo’s first language”; Y Digymar (2018), p. 41: “Saesneg oedd iaith ei aelwyd”, English was the language of his hearth. Against it: Pennon was, in Iolo’s words, “a little obscure village, where the welsh only is spoken” (NLW 13141A, pp. 141–2; NLW 21387E, no. 22); his mother’s family were master-poets of Tir Iarll (Jenkins, p. 12); his first poems were in Welsh, and at seven he “began to read welsh” (no. 2). In no. 13 he calls both languages his own.

His mother died of consumption in August 1770. He had sat up with her for seven weeks: “she would not suffer me to quit the room.”Iolo’s own memoir drafts for the preface of Poems, Lyric and Pastoral, NLW 21387E, no. 10, as transcribed by the Iolo Morganwg project, Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies (iolomorganwg.wales.ac.uk); not yet read on the manuscript. “In August 1770, I my Mother died, and how irreparable was the loss of her to me! I had for seven weeks sat up with her ever taking a moments’ rest in bed, she would not suffer me to quit the room. her disorder was a consumption”. He was twenty-three. “I was when she died,” he wrote, “as ignorant of the world as almost a new born child.”NLW 21387E, no. 9.

He had known Lewis Hopkin, the carpenter-bard of Llandyfodwg, since he was about fifteen, and in all their meetings neither had once spoken of family. After the burial he walked up into the hills to Hopkin’s house, and wrote down what was said there in the speech of Morgannwg: “Yn 1770 bu farw y mam, claddwyd hi yn Llangrallo ym medd ei Thad cu, rhywfaint wedi hynny mi eytho i Hendre Ifan Goch, Ty Lewys Hopcin. Ydd oedd ef wedi clywed am gladdedigaeth y mam yn Llangrallo, fe ofynwys imi pwy’n oedd hi o Langrallo, gwedais wrtho taw merch Edward Matthews o Dŷ’n y Caeau oedd hi, y mae perthynes yntau ryngoch a mi, ebe fe, ag ydd ych fal yn dyfod o un o ferched y Ty Talwyn. Nid rhyfedd eich bod yn brydydd.” In 1770 my mother died, and was buried at Llangrallo in her grandfather’s grave; some time after, I went to Hendre Ifan Goch, Lewys Hopcin’s house. He had heard of my mother’s burial at Llangrallo, and asked me who she was; I told him she was the daughter of Edward Matthews of Tŷ’n y Caeau. Then there is kinship between you and me, said he, and you come, it seems, from one of the daughters of Tý Talwyn. No wonder you are a poet.Iolo, Llanover MS 54, pp. 363, 365, in his own hand, as printed by L. J. Hopkin-James, Hopkiniaid Morganwg (Bangor, 1909), p. 60, read on the page image; the same passage opens “Ydd oeddyn mewn cydnabyddaeth a Lewis Hopcin er ynghylch pumtheg oed”, we were acquainted from about fifteen years of age. Hopkin-James gives the grave elsewhere as that of her father, Edward Matthew; the Welsh says ei Thad cu. Hendre Ifan Goch stands in the hill parish of Llandyfodwg (Glynogwr), at SS 97278 88313 (Royal Commission, List of Historic Place Names, “Hendre-Ifan-gôch”). Hopkin was the son of Lewis Hopkin of Llanbedr-ar-fynydd (Peterston-super-Montem), of a family that had held Lluest Owen in Llantrisant (Dictionary of Welsh Biography, s.v. Hopkin, Lewis; Hopkin-James, on Lluest Owen); he lived at Hendre Ifan Goch until his death in 1771 and is buried at Llandyfodwg.

A year later the teacher was dead, and the pupil’s first book was his elegy, printed at Y Bont-faen in 1772 under his Welsh name, Iorwerth Gwilim:

Och Afar! Och ddaearu
Ein Pencerdd gwâr cerdd-gar cu!
…
Ie, Haul Deheubarth hoyw-lan,
A chlôd i Gymru achlân.

Alas the grief! Alas, to put in the earth our gentle, song-loving, dear chief poet! … yes, the bright and lively Sun of the south, and the glory of all Cymru.

And he mourned him for the whole guild: “’E gladdwyd eu pen cleu-ddoeth, / Uthred yw! a’u hathraw doeth”, their clear and wise head is buried, how dreadful it is, and their wise teacher.Iolo Morganwg, as Iorwerth Gwilim o Dre-fflemmin, Dagrau yr Awen, neu Farwnad Lewis Hopcin, Fardd (Pont-y-fon [Y Bont-faen]: R. Tomas, 1772), as reprinted by L. J. Hopkin-James, Hopkiniaid Morganwg (Bangor, 1909), pp. 358 and 363, read on the page images. Lewis Hopkin died on 17 November 1771 (ibid., p. 146). Deheubarth: the medieval kingdom of that name did not take in Morgannwg; Iolo uses the word in its wider sense, the south, as Salesbury did in 1547, “Deheubarth The southe parte” (Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, s.v. Deheubarth), and the next line widens it to all Cymru. The English is ours.

When Iolo Morganwg walked to a palace he packed his mallet and chisel, in case a mason should be wanted on the road. He was a stonemason, a shopkeeper, a farmer of the Vale, who taught himself the bardic tradition from gravestones and from the last living masters of Morgannwg, Lewys Hopkin, Siôn Bradford, Edward Evan, Dafydd Nicolas, men in whose mouths the craft was still oral and alive. In 1786 he was gaoled for debt at Caerdydd, and the debt and the gaol belong to the man from the start.See Y Ceidwad a'r Orsedd, ¶411.

And it was said in print, in Llundain, in a form anyone could check, before there was any Gorsedd to defend. In November 1789 the Gentleman’s Magazine ran a letter from Cowbridge presenting his poems. It was his own, over the initials J. D.,See Y Dyn Bach, ¶450. and it told its readers how he had been made a bard:

About the age of twenty he was admitted a Bard in the ancient manner; a custom still retained in Glamorgan, but, I believe, in no other part of Wales. This is by being discipled to a regular Bard, and afterwards admitted into the order in a Congress of Bards assembled for that purpose, after undergoing proper examination …

And it named the only other one living: “the Rev. Mr. Edward Evans, of Aberdare, a Dissenting Minister”, the Edward Evan named above among his masters. A man in a named town, in a known pulpit, whom any reader of 1789 could have ridden out to ask.The Gentleman’s Magazine LIX, part ii (November 1789), 976–977, headed “Mr. Urban, Cowbridge, Oct. 10.” The same letter distinguishes the bards so qualified from “the modern book-taught poets.”

And his masters can be named. In 1769, at an eisteddfod at Aber Cwm y Fuwch in the parish of Llandyfodwg, Iolo’s englynion were sung with three masters named over them: “Sion Bradford—Lewis Hopcin a Dafydd Nicolas yn Athrawon”, Siôn Bradford, Lewis Hopkin and Dafydd Nicolas, as teachers. He was twenty-two. Siôn Bradford of Betws Tir Iarll was a weaver and fuller who kept the old books of Tir Iarll; Dafydd Nicolas of Aberpergwm was a schoolmaster and a maker of songs, whom Iolo called the greatest poet he had known; his love songs were still sung in the Vale of Neath a lifetime after him, and in one, taken down from an old farmer’s wife who had known it since infancy, he calls his girl “Gwenn ber, ail Olwen”, sweet and fair, a second Olwen.His songs were still sung in the Vale of Neath a lifetime after him. Maria Jane Williams of Aberpergwm printed two in Ancient National Airs of Gwent and Morganwg (Llandovery, 1844): “Fanni Blodau’r Ffair”, pp. 32–33, “the original words are by the bard David Nicholas” (p. 81), and “Callyn Serchus”, Lovely Kate, pp. 14–15, “Noted down from the singing of an old farmer’s wife, in Glyn Nedd, who had remembered it from her infancy … The words are by David Nicholas, a poet of the last century well known in South Wales” (p. 78). The second verse of the first: “Fe ddychwel tonnau Nedd / I dref o’r ce’nfor draw, / Gwrthlifoedd garwa’ eu gwedd / I Fannuwch Denni daw, / Gorchuddia’r tonnau crych / Ei chorn uwch entyrch air, / Cyn oera’m serch at feinir ferch, / Fy Ffanni blodau’r ffair”, the waves of Neath will turn back home from the far sea, and rough tides run up to the Fan above Deni, and the curling waves cover its peak above the sky, before my love grows cold for the slender girl, my Ffanni, flower of the fair. Read on the National Library’s page images (hdl.handle.net/10107/5726885). T. C. Evans (Cadrawd), History of Llangynwyd Parish (Llanelly, 1887), p. 188: “Perhaps the best known of them are the ‘Aderyn Pur’ and ‘Fanny Blodau’r Ffair’.” The English is ours. The national biography, in entries signed by G. J. Williams, confirms all three. Of Bradford: “Iolo Morganwg was one of his pupils.” Of Nicolas: “the best bard in Glamorgan in the 18th cent, before the time of Iolo Morganwg.” And then, of Bradford, the same author tells the reader that “it is … essential that all that was written and printed about Bradford in the 19th century should be discounted”: a whole century of witness struck out in one sentence.The 1769 eisteddfod: Llanover MS 47, as printed by Hopkin-James, Hopkiniaid Morganwg, p. 144 (“Englynion a gant Iolo Morganwg, yn Eisteddfod Aber Cwm y Fuwch 1769. Sion Bradford—Lewis Hopcin a Dafydd Nicolas yn Athrawon”), not yet read on the manuscript. Dictionary of Welsh Biography, s.v. Bradford, John (1706–1785), and s.v. Nicolas, Dafydd, both by Griffith John Williams: https://biography.wales/article/s-BRAD-JOH-1706 and https://biography.wales/article/s-NICO-DAF-1705. The Nicolas entry also gives Iolo’s claim that Nicolas “was the greatest poet among those whom Iolo knew”, and says it is “fairly certain” that Iolo wrote the letter on the free metres that goes under Nicolas’s name.

Go back past the nineteenth century, then, to the eighteenth, and let Bradford speak for himself. In 1740 Theophilus Evans brought out the second edition of Drych y Prif Oesoedd, his history of the Britons, and at the front of it stand Bradford’s englynion in praise of the author, signed with his name and his parish:

Gwelwch deallwch da ’wyllys Cymro
Mewn camrau gwir ddilys,
Anwyl o’r ’Splennydd Ynys,
Geirwir llawn Agorwr Llys.

See and understand the good will of a Cymro, in sure and true steps, dear one of the Splendid Isle, truthful, full opener of the court.“Englynion o Fawl i’r Brytwn dyscedig, yr Awdur”, signed “Jevan Bradford o Blwyf y Bettws ym Morgannwg a’i cant”, the first of seven, in Theophilus Evans, Drych y Prif Oesoedd, 2nd ed. (Shrewsbury, 1740), leaf a2, read on the page image (Internet Archive, bim_eighteenth-century_drych-y-prif-oesoedd-yn_evans-theophilus_1740); the first letters of the third and fourth lines are lost in the binding of that copy, and are read from the reprint of 1902, which follows the 1740 text leaf by leaf and marks this one “a 2” (Internet Archive, drychyprifoesoed00evan): “Anwyl”, “Geirwir”. The second englyn calls the book “Hanesion gloywion ein gwlad”, the bright histories of our land; the fifth calls its author “Lamp hyfryd i’r byd o wybodaeth”, a lovely lamp of knowledge to the world. Bradford is also among the book’s subscribers. The English is ours.

And he did not conjure that craft out of solitude, whatever the verdict implies; he was recruited into a living, working network of it. The earliest letter that survives to him, written in another man's hand in November 1771, when Iolo was twenty-four, is from Siencin Morgan of Llantrisant, and it opens: "Y cyfeillgar Gymro Iorwerth Gwilim — danfonais rhai geiria i'ch anerch unwaith drachefan", the friendly Briton Iorwerth Gwilim: I have sent some words to greet you once again. It thanks him for a loanSiencin Morgan to Iolo, Penrhiw-fer, Llantrisant, 30 November 1771: NLW MS 21281E, letter 282 in the Iolo Morganwg project’s list of the correspondence, where the manuscript is photographed beside the printed text., "sef eich geirlyfyr, yr hwn sy yn fy ngyfrwyddo mewn amryw eiria or hen iaith Gymraeg", your word-book, which instructs me in many words of old Cymraeg, and settles the date of their next meeting, and urges Iolo to bring in Edward Evan of Aberdare and William Dafydd of Glynogwr, so that together they might "build up the old Welsh tongue" and "sustain the muse among us." Read it for what it is: two decades before the Gorsedd of 1792, a self-organising southern bardic guild is already meeting, lending its reference-books, recruiting, and it is recorded in someone else's hand, so it cannot be Iolo's fabrication. The bardic order he is accused of inventing whole-cloth in middle age was a living network he had been apprenticed into as a young man. And Siencin Morgan was no phantom correspondent got up for the occasion. Iolo names him again, years later and in an entirely separate context, his own genealogical notebooks, where “Llyfr Siencyn Morgan o Benn Rhiw Ferr,” the book of Siencyn Morgan of Penrhiw-fer, is set down among the Morgannwg manuscripts of the saints' genealogies of Britain that Iolo listed as his sources, alongside the Black Book of Pantlliwydd, kept by the Truman family who would shelter him in 1797–98. The man who wrote the earliest surviving letter was himself a named keeper of the record, a manuscript-owner in the very salvage network Iolo worked.Iolo Morganwg’s own genealogical notebook, NLW MS 13140A (formerly Llanover C.53), p. 129: “Achau Saint Ynys Prydain o Lyfr Siencyn Morgan o Benn Rhiw Ferr”, listed among his manuscript sources for the saints’ genealogies, beside Thomas Truman’s Llyfr Du Pantlliwydd and the book of Dafydd Morgan o Aberdar. A second, independent attestation of Siencin Morgan of Penrhiw-fer, distinct from letter #282.

The charge of forgery needs a solitary; the record gives us a guild. He worked a mason's long days and preserved the literature of Cymru in the hours he stole back from them. He did not merely record the tradition; he let it possess him. He published poetry in two languages. And say the plainest fact about him first, because the charge will need it answered: he was a deeply devout man, and he wrote near three thousand hymns, with three hundred tunes to sing them to, three times Pantycelyn.Nathan Munday, ‘Pursuing God’: Poetic Pilgrimage and the Welsh Christian Aesthetic (PhD thesis, Cardiff University, 2018), pp. 181–2: nearly three thousand hymns and three hundred hymn-tunes, three times the count of Pantycelyn, about four hundred of them printed in Salmau yr Eglwys yn yr Anialwch (1812). That is the number to set against every “pagan” still to come. He cut letters into stone for his living, and he cut new words into his language: more than a thousand of them stand to his name in the national dictionary’s own records, peiriant, machine, tirwedd, landscape, crebwyll, llyfryddiaeth, hwyrbryd, words in every mouth in Cymru that no one thinks of as his.Geraint H. Jenkins, Y Digymar Iolo Morganwg (Talybont: Y Lolfa, 2018), pp. 18–19: “Cyflawnodd wyrthiau ym maes achub a bathu geiriau Cymraeg, a gellir canfod dros fil o eiriau a fathwyd ganddo yng nghrombil bas data Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru”, naming among them anghytbwys, carcus, clwt, crebwyll, hwyrbryd, llyfryddiaeth, melodaidd, peiriant and tirwedd, with the caution that not every new word in his manuscripts can be proved his. Shakespeare’s seventeen hundred is the same kind of count, with the same caution: the earliest written uses the Oxford English Dictionary records. Shakespeare, by the same kind of count, is credited with some seventeen hundred in English. One is a national poet. The other is still filed as a forger. He assembled an archive of seventy-five volumes. He co-built the Myvyrian Archaiology (1801–07); some of it survives nowhere else on earthOwen Jones [Owain Myfyr], Edward Williams [Iolo Morganwg], and William Owen [Pughe], eds., The Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales, 3 vols. (London, 1801–07), the great printed rescue of the medieval corpus in Cymraeg; parts survive in no other witness.; a fact, as we shall see, that his own chief prosecutor would put in print. And the first prosecutor put it more plainly still: the Myvyrian Archaiology, wrote Thomas Stephens, “na fuasai … yn gweled gwyneb haul, heb ffrwyth ei lafur ef”, would never have seen the light of day without the fruit of his labour; Iolo was “y wenynen ddiwyd yn y cyfundeb”, the busy bee of the partnership.Thomas Stephens, Yr Ymofynydd, September 1852, p. 201, read at the printed page.

The guild he learned in, its meetings of 1733 and 1735, its roll, its grammar in print and its line back to the sixteenth century, is set out with its sources in Y Drychiolaethau, where the record answers the charge that he invented it.

He had his pride, and it had a temper. As a young mason in Llundain, wanting to hear Samuel Johnson talk, he took three English grammars up to him in a bookshop, “as a poor Welsh mechanic smitten with the love of learning”, and asked which to buy. Johnson looked him up and down and thrust them back: “Either of them will do for you, young man.” “I felt,” Iolo said, “my Welsh blood mount to my forehead … Then, Sir, to make sure of having the best, I will buy them all.” He paid, though he could ill spare it, and for the rest of his life, reaching for one of them, he would say: “Aye! this is one of the Dr. Johnson grammars.”Elijah Waring, Recollections and Anecdotes of Edward Williams (London, 1850), pp. 26–8.

In 1791 he went up to Llundain to see his poems through the press. They were to come out by subscription, the names gathered for him by the gentry of the Vale and the ladies of Bath, and he began in good heart: “I am upon the whole in good spirits, the prospect, for once in my Life, seems to open fair before me.” He lodged with William Owen Pughe, the lexicographer, at Pentonville. And he put a condition on the money from the start. That summer, when Bristol rejoiced at the defeat of Wilberforce’s bill against the slave trade, he wrote an open letter declaring his “fixed resolution not to disgrace my list with the names of any villainous abettors of the slave trade”, and the Bristol booksellers came off his printed proposals. At home in Flimston, Peggy kept the other account. “Dear Ned,” she wrote that September, “you promised to send soon to us I think it high time for me to reminde you of that promise haveing eaten the last bit of bread we had a Tuesday night.”Iolo to John Walters, 24 February 1791, NLW 21285E, no. 798; the open letter on the slave trade and the Bristol booksellers struck off; Pughe’s house; Peggy to Iolo, 22 September 1791, NLW 21283E, no. 603: Mary-Ann Constantine, “‘This Wildernessed Business of Publication’: The Making of Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (1794)”, in A Rattleskull Genius (2005), pp. 129–31.

Llundain was harder than he had thought. “I was treated with so much superciliousness by one to whom I had Letters of Recommendation from Cowbridge that I resolved not to give any other person of an opportunity of behaving to me so again,” he told Peggy on 20 June 1792. “I have found London very different from Bath and Glamorganshire, I wish I had printed at Bath … But it is now too late to repent.” The next day he held the first Gorsedd on Primrose Hill. That summer he broke. He slept in the fields and took more laudanum, and in July he wrote to her that “it is rather odd for a person to be mad and at the same time in full possession of all his senses, memory, and understanding, but something very much like this I experience at present.” By November he had no money for paper. He asked John Carne, one of the Glamorgan gentlemen who had gathered names for him, and Carne refused: “I have been much hurt that you have so long disappointed your Subscribers.” The Bowdlers of Bath sent money by return, and the printing went on.Iolo to Margaret Williams, 20 June 1792, NLW 21285E, no. 809, and 20 July 1792, no. 810; John Carne to Iolo, 5 December 1792, NLW 21280E, no. 48: Constantine (2005), pp. 133–4. On the laudanum, Geraint Phillips, “Math o Wallgofrwydd: Iolo Morganwg, Opiwm a Thomas Chatterton”, NLWJ XXIX (1996), 391–410.

In the spring of 1793 he wrote the “Ode on Converting a Sword into a Pruning Hook”, and sent it to Peggy on 6 April. Two days later Lila died, and he went home and stayed the summer, working on the triads. When he came back in the autumn the work went to Joseph Johnson, the radical bookseller of St Paul’s Churchyard, who took it over, and by the end of October it was nearly done: “I have my poems all printed the history of my life in the press.” The pressmen had to be kept at it, and he paid for that too, “more than four shillings worth of ale, porter, and Gin” in a week, “to get out the poems”.The ode and the death, the summer at home, Johnson; Iolo to Margaret Williams, 30 October 1793, NLW 21285E, no. 822: Constantine (2005), pp. 135–6.

Poems, Lyric and Pastoral came out early in January 1794, with Johnson at the head of the London booksellers on its title-page. Iolo was sure of it: “I have written for the nation at large, I may say for the world.” The reviews were good. The rest of the year he spent on the next book, a history of the bards, in the reading rooms, and it cost him his health. “I have had for more than half a year a very bad headach,” he wrote in August; his eyes were so bad that he was “obliged to use green glasses”; and in the British Museum he worked through catalogues of the old libraries, “each as large as the largest church bible”, and found more of what he wanted at the Welsh Charity School.Publication and the reviews, Constantine (2005), pp. 136–7; Iolo to Margaret Williams, 18 January 1794, NLW 21285E, no. 825, ibid., p. 136; Iolo to Margaret Williams, 27 August 1794, NLW 21285E, no. 841, read whole in the online edition of the correspondence, iolomorganwg.wales.ac.uk.

In February 1795 he gave it up. “I am now convinced that I shall never receive much of the money due to me,” he told Peggy on the twelfth, and a week later wrote that the booksellers and “the most eminent writers of the present time” were agreed that “the times are not favourable for publishing any thing now”: “if I live to see peace, I will print my book at Paris.” He had “printed off some sheets of the history of my life, but I can not complete it at present.” In June he walked home to Flimston, and he never lived in Llundain again.Iolo to Margaret Williams, 12 February 1795, NLW 21285E, no. 848: Constantine (2005), p. 137. The letter of “Feb. 19th 1794”, NLW 21285E, no. 850, read whole in the online edition of the correspondence, iolomorganwg.wales.ac.uk: Iolo headed it 1794, but it is postmarked 1795 and speaks of the treason trials of Hardy and Horne Tooke, heard in October and November 1794, so it was written in February 1795. “In 1795 Iolo returned permanently to Glamorgan”: A Rattleskull Genius (2005), p. 207.

He was a radical. A Jacobin and a democrat, Paine's Rights of Man, against monarchy, against war, against empire, who argued for self-government in Cymru and was watched by Pitt's surveillance state for his trouble.On Iolo’s Jacobin politics (Paine, anti-monarchism, self-government in Cymru, and the surveillance he drew) see Geraint H. Jenkins, Bard of Liberty: The Political Radicalism of Iolo Morganwg (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012). The Llundain radicals had a name for him, “a fiery Welsh Painite”, and it took nerve to wear it: to be a free-born Briton openly spreading the principles of liberty, anti-slavery and peace, in the teeth of the war years, was to volunteer for the government’s attention.Geraint H. Jenkins, Bard of Liberty (Cardiff, 2012), pp. 1–2, the “fiery Welsh Painite” reputation Iolo built from 1791, and the courage it took to disseminate such principles in wartime, his own boast being “I have as much Cimbric patriotism as any man living” (Iolo to William Owen Pughe, 28 April 1805, CIM, II, 668). He has left us the sound of what that cost. On the King's birthday, 4 June 1794 (the state trials looming, habeas corpus a fortnight suspended) he was caught in the loyalist mob of John Reeves’s Association as it pressed every passer-by to cry Church and King, damn your soul. He jabbered Cymraeg, squeaked out "Church sans King" in as broken a manner as he could, and passed for a Dutchman with all but one or two of his own countrymen, who laughed at him. The butchers parading with their marrow-bones and cleavers, he wrote, might have split his skull. "I long to suffer in the cause," says the same letter, "but as a man of peace."Iolo to the Revd Hugh Jones of Lewisham, "London, June 4th (alias Dagon-mass day) 1794" (NLW 21285E, no. 838). The same letter carries his constitutional credo: "I care not whether the supreme power... be vested in one or in many persons... I only wish to see principles, and not empty sounds and forms, govern." The watching needed no informer: he made no secret of any of it. When the sale of Paine’s book was forbidden, the story Morgannwg kept is that he answered with a card in the window of his Y Bont-faen (Cowbridge) shop, The Rights of Man Sold Here, and that two “defenders of law and order” called in and ordered a copy each; whereupon Iolo handed each of them a Bible, and, on their demurring, replied that the Bible was the very best book on the rights of man.David Davies, The Influence of the French Revolution on Welsh Life and Literature (1926), 153, Davies gives it on report ("it is said", "we are told"): the anecdote is old and worn smooth with telling. See also Elijah Waring, Recollections and Anecdotes of Edward Williams (London, 1850), 108–9; G. Marshall, doctoral thesis (University of Bristol, 2024), 60. The open sale itself is documentary: NLW MS 21414E/17A. And there is a second witness, in print and from outside Morgannwg: Robert Southey set the story down in his own notebook. His shop catalogue, Southey wrote, entered Burke’s Reflections “as the Gospel according to St. Burke; and a collection of Jacobinical pamphlets as Directions for Duck-milking, a title which made all the Welsh farmers send for the book”; and the government’s self-appointed spy in the town, catching sight of “a book labelled Rights of Man”, paid his five shillings for it, opened it, and “exclaimed, ‘Damn the rascal—the Bible, by God!’” Southey’s Common-Place Book, ed. John Wood Warter, Fourth Series, “Original Memoranda”, p. 364, read at the printed page (Internet Archive, southeyscommonp01wartgoog, leaf 379). His toast, as Southey wrote it down on the same page, was “The three securities of liberty. All Kings in hell; the door locked; the key lost.”Southey’s Common-Place Book, Fourth Series (London, 1851), p. 364, read on the page image (Internet Archive, southeyscommonpl04edunse, leaf 376). And when Paine turned the same artillery on Christianity itself in The Age of Reason, the shopkeeper broke with him: he drafted a reply, and in the draft Citizen Paine is a "second Iscariot."The drafted reply to Paine's The Age of Reason, with the "Iscariot" epithet: NLW 21392F, no. 9; NLW 21396E, nos. 18–22, 34–5; NLW 21400C, no. 11. He was a Unitarian: rational dissent, anti-Trinitarian, the man who questioned every dogma including, relentlessly, his own. The recognised type is NewtonAnd Newton’s own archive met Iolo’s fate: his roughly million words of alchemical manuscript were judged “not fit to be printed,” kept from the world for two centuries, and scattered at Sotheby’s in 1936, where Keynes, reading them, pronounced Newton “not the first of the age of reason” but “the last of the magicians.” The papers that showed what the age’s greatest natural philosopher actually believed were kept back for two hundred years by his heirs and by the university that declined them: a Llanover cabinet in an English country house., the secret anti-Trinitarian who held that the ancients possessed a lost and advanced wisdom, in an age dogmatically committed to calling the ancestors primitive.

And he took a title for it: to his own name he added the style he had invented, Bard of Liberty, and signed it where it would sting. Visiting the Baptist minister William Winterbotham, gaoled in Newgate for preaching sedition, he wrote “Bard of Liberty” in the prison visitors’ book. Someone in the ministry read that book, and the officer at the lodge was ordered to mark the man who had signed it. When he came again he wrote nothing after his name, and they knew him by comparing the hand. The exchange that followed went into the record entire. “So!” said the official, “you are the Bard of Liberty, are you?” “Yes, sir, I am.” “Then, Mr. Bard of Liberty, you are to understand that the only liberty allowed you here, will be to walk out the way you came in.” “O, very well, Mr. Gaoler, by all means; and I wish no Bard of Liberty may ever meet with worse treatment, than being told to walk out of a prison.” He went home that night and answered it in the manner of Horace, with seven “Newgate Stanzas.”Iolo visiting the gaoled Baptist minister William Winterbotham in Newgate, early 1795, and signing himself “Bard of Liberty”; the exchange with the gaoler and the seven “Newgate Stanzas” composed that night in the manner of Horace’s “Integer vitae”: Elijah Waring, Recollections and Anecdotes of Edward Williams (London, 1850), 47–8. Waring: “Every visitor was required to write his name, and place of abode, in a book at the porter’s lodge … This record met the ken of some ministerial Argus, and the officer at the lodge was ordered to mark the individual … It was not long before the visit was repeated, and the visitor was identified, on comparing the hand-writing, though he did not this time add anything to his signature.” The book itself is not named in the catalogues of Newgate’s records at the London Metropolitan Archives (CLA/035, CLA/029); Waring’s page is its only witness. The bravado was no pose; it ran in his own verse, “Nor jails I dread, nor venal Court… J. Reeves, and all his gang, defeat; / And if a Tyrant King I meet, / Clench fist and knock him down”, and in his own account of himself: “there is very warm blood in my heart, and every drop of it solemnly dedicated to the cause of Truth. Furnish Smithfield once more with a stake and faggot if you please. I will not flinch nor recede an inch from it, but walk, and that hastingly, to it, with a Song of triumph on my tongue.” Smithfield was where Llundain had burned its heretics. And the same heat turned outward as pity, for a British bard, he held, was the man best fitted to feel for the victims of poverty and war and slavery: The Bard can feel.The defiant stanzas against John Reeves’s loyalist Association for Preserving Liberty and Property: Waring (1850), 52. “There is very warm blood in my heart…”: NLW 21396E, no. 12. “The Bard can feel”, “Ode to Benevolence,” Kentish Gazette, 31 January–3 February 1776, over the pen-name “Flimstoniensis.”

The brothers who had the schooling left Cymru. Miles and John, bricklayers, sailed for Jamaica in 1777, and Thomas, a mason, followed in 1785. All three grew rich there, and all three owned slaves. Edward wrote to tell them what he thought of “that most horrid traffick in human blood”, and for more than seven years they did not answer his letters. When John died in 1803 his estate was valued at £7,676, and thirty-six human beings were counted in it at £3,880.Iolo’s own memoir drafts for the preface of Poems, Lyric and Pastoral, NLW 21387E, no. 8, as transcribed by the Iolo Morganwg project, Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies (iolomorganwg.wales.ac.uk); not yet read on the manuscript. “My Brothers Miles & John are Bricklayer[s] they went over to Jamaica in 1777… My Brother Thomas, a Stone Mason, went also to Jamaica in 1785… I am however sorry to hear that they are slave-holders, one of my first letters to them expressed my strong disapprobation of that most horrid traffick in human blood… they have for more than seven years declined answering my lett[ers]”. Jenkins (2012), p. 5, has 1778 for Miles and John, and p. 230: John died in December 1803 “leaving an estate worth £7,676, including thirty-six slaves valued at £3,880”. The inventory of 19 July 1804 gives “Negroes” at £3,880 and the whole at £7,676 11s 0½d: Andrew Davies in A Rattleskull Genius (2005), p. 308.

And he was a moral man, provably, when it cost him. Those brothers offered him their money. In 1799 Thomas wrote telling him to draw on him for forty or fifty pounds, and in the same year their agent came to Y Bont-faen authorised to settle fifty or sixty pounds a year on him for life. He was in poverty and he refused it, slave money. He would take it, he answered, when his brothers had first freed their slaves and settled fifty pounds a year on each of them, "and not till then."Thomas Williams to Iolo, 10 February 1799 (NLW 21284E, no. 738): “If you should be in Surcomstance that forty or fifty pounds Starling would be of Great Servis Draw on me to that amount”. Iolo to William Owen Pughe, 8 September 1800 (NLW 13221E, no. 13): a Mr Harriot from Jamaica had come to Y Bont-faen the year before, “legally authorized to execute a deed which would settle 50, or 60, £ a year on me for life”, and “The answer that I gave him was that if my Brothers would first liberate their Slaves and settle on each of them 50£. P ann for life I could then accept of their offer, and not till then.” Both letters as printed by Andrew Davies, “‘Uncontaminated with Human Gore’? Iolo Morganwg, Slavery and the Jamaican Inheritance”, in A Rattleskull Genius (2005), pp. 301–302. Robert Southey, who knew him, wrote it down too: “Poor Williams angrily refused a pension from some wealthy brothers in the West Indies, because he would not partake of the gains made by slavery.”Southey’s Common-Place Book, ed. John Wood Warter, Fourth Series, “Original Memoranda”, p. 364, read at the printed page. He kept a shop whose window offered "East India Sweets, uncontaminated with human gore", East India sugar, not slave-grown.The paper in the shop window is Elijah Waring’s report: Recollections and Anecdotes of Edward Williams (London, 1850), p. 108. The licence to sell tea, coffee and chocolate at Y Bont-faen is of September 1795 (NLW 21410E, no. 28): Davies in A Rattleskull Genius (2005), p. 297. And the shop’s own handbill survives, in verse and in his own hand: “The Christian free sugar from East India comes, / And brought from where Truth is not yet in the bud, / Rank Church-and-king sweets for the lovers of blood.”NLW 21410E, no. 29 (a), as printed by Andrew Davies, “‘Uncontaminated with Human Gore’? Iolo Morganwg, Slavery and the Jamaican Inheritance”, in A Rattleskull Genius (2005), p. 297. The verse opens “There are currants and raisins, delicious French plums”. A man who turns down his family's fortune in his own poverty rather than touch blood is not a man you reach for the word fraud to describe. His scruples were expensive and he kept them. And the story Morgannwg kept says the scruple had legs: entering Bristol, he heard the bells pealing to celebrate the defeat of Wilberforce's abolition bill, and turned in disgust and walked home to Flimston, ninety-four miles.A. Emrys-Jones, The Life and Works of Edward Williams (Iolo Morganwg), the Bard of Glamorgan (Manchester, printed lecture): the Bristol bells and the ninety-four-mile walk home; given on report, as the tradition carried it. Elijah Waring, the Quaker friend who published his recollections in 1850, set down what happened when Thomas Redwood, Waring’s “valued old friend”, put the Jamaica money to him in its most inviting light. He broke in: “Sir! The Almighty Himself could not make me take that money.” Asked what he could mean by questioning the Divine Omnipotence, he answered: “I meant what I said … The Almighty can do nothing contrary to his attributes; Justice and Mercy are his great attributes, and both are violated by slavery; but both are upheld by my objections.”Elijah Waring, Recollections and Anecdotes of Edward Williams (1850), pp. 62–3. And when the money did come, it did not come as the thing he had refused. His brother John’s will left a hundred pounds apiece to Iolo and to each of his three children, Taliesin, Ann and Margaret. When he first had word of it, his thought was not of the money but of the people on the estate: “I wish I could get into possession of some of [my] late Brother’s Negroes,” he wrote to William Owen Pughe in 1805, “that I might exhibit an example of such [?] conduct as should be intended by me to shame those who have it in their power to lead the way in liberating from their long miseries and captivity the large portion of human beings that groan under the [?] of oppression.”Iolo Morganwg to William Owen Pughe, 28 April 1805, NLW 13221E, no. 26, pp. 127–30; the bracketed queries are the editor’s, where the hand is not legible. The will: Andrew Davies, “‘Uncontaminated with Human Gore’? Iolo Morganwg, Slavery and the Jamaican Inheritance”, in A Rattleskull Genius (2005), p. 307. He put to William Matthews, the Bristol Quaker, a Society for General Liberation, and he would have sailed for Jamaica to do it himself, had he not been warned that his creditors would follow him.William Matthews to Iolo Morganwg, 11 April 1805, NLW 21281E, no. 278; Theophilus Jones to Iolo Morganwg, 17 October 1804, NLW 21281E, no. 261: Andrew Davies, “‘Uncontaminated with Human Gore’? Iolo Morganwg, Slavery and the Jamaican Inheritance”, in A Rattleskull Genius (2005), pp. 309–10. Ten years passed. The trade was abolished in 1807, and by 1815 his brother’s lands held no slaves. Only then, with his son Taliesin ill and his creditors pressing, were the legacies forced out of John Duncan, the second husband of John’s widow, by Iolo’s own argument that the will contradicted itself; and on 21 February 1815 the Bristol lawyer Alfred Estlin posted him “a Bankers’ Draft for £146. 10., being the amount of your Legacy and Interest”, and sent his children theirs.Alfred Estlin to Iolo Morganwg, 21 February 1815, NLW 21281E, no. 151; Iolo Morganwg to Taliesin Williams, 1 February 1815, NLW 21286E, no. 928 (“Voluit et contradixit”); on the lands, Andrew Davies, “‘Uncontaminated with Human Gore’? Iolo Morganwg, Slavery and the Jamaican Inheritance”, in A Rattleskull Genius (2005), p. 313, from other letters, “though exactly what happened to the land is unclear”. What became of his own share no paper says. His creditors, he told Taliesin, were “very clamorous as the affair has taken wind”; Taliesin, who drew the money at Castell-nedd, sent his father eleven pounds; and the children’s legacies set up Taliesin’s school at Merthyr Tudful and, it seems, their sisters’ shop at Cefn Cribwr. The historian who followed every letter of it concludes that “it is unclear what happened to the money after it was drawn”. The record shows a man who would not take slave money while there were slaves to make it, who wanted the slaves before he wanted the money, so that he could set them free, and whose children, when the money came free of them, were set up in life by their uncle’s legacy.Iolo Morganwg to Taliesin Williams, 2 March 1815, NLW 21286E, no. 930; the £11 and the school (Iolo to Taliesin, 27 April 1815, NLW 21286E, no. 934); the shop: Neville Granville, Cefn Cribwr: Chronicle of a Village (1980), pp. 75–7; all as given by Andrew Davies, “‘Uncontaminated with Human Gore’? Iolo Morganwg, Slavery and the Jamaican Inheritance”, in A Rattleskull Genius (2005), pp. 311–12, where the conclusion quoted stands. His own country remembered it. “Gwelwch yr hen Iolo Morganwg yn gwrthod etifeddiaeth eang, am ei bod mewn cysylltiad â chaethwasanaeth … Nid y Parch. George Whitfield. Yr oedd efe yn gaethfeistr … Ysgrifenodd Iolo Morganwg yn gryfach ac yn helaethach yn erbyn llofruddiaeth yn y ffurf a elwir rhyfel, na neb o’i gydwladwyr”: see old Iolo Morganwg refusing a large inheritance because it was bound up with slavery … Not the Rev. George Whitfield. He was a slave-owner … Iolo Morganwg wrote more strongly and more fully against murder in the form called war than any of his countrymen.Y Beirniad (Llanelli), Ionawr 1861, p. 263. And in 1879: “anhawdd genyf gredu fod Clarkson na Wilberforce wedi aberthu cymaint dros egwyddor a Iolo Morganwg”, I find it hard to believe that Clarkson or Wilberforce sacrificed as much for principle as Iolo Morganwg.Y Beirniad (Llanelli), Hydref 1879, pp. 316–317.

Two documents make that character physical, and lifelong. The first is an object, a single sheet that condenses the whole man. In 1782, newly married and keeping a shop at St Mary Church, Edward Williams sold tea, coffee and chocolate; and on the third of August that year his Llundain wholesaler wrote to him on the back of his own printed trade-sheet, "Original Tea-Warehouse… Edward Eagleton, Tea-Man, at the Grasshopper, No. 9, Bishopsgate-Street", offering the cheapest, most curious and richest high-flavour'd teas imported by the East India Company.The printed circular survives beneath Iolo’s hand: NLW 21282E, no. 142, Edward Eagleton to Iolo Morganwg, 3 August 1782. The same plate is independently attested outside Cymru: Nottinghamshire Archives DD/E/183/30, a receipted billhead of 27 November 1784, “Edward Eagleton, Tea Man, No. 9, Bishopgate Street, London”, for Turkey coffee and fine cocoa. It was a standing trade form, sent to customers, not a handbill picked up in the street. It came to him through the post: the foot of the sheet still carries the address in the sender's heavy hand, ending Morgannwg (Glamorganshire), and the torn white scar where the seal was broken. Thirty years later Iolo turned it over and wrote across it in every direction, and what he wrote was the preface to his Unitarian hymn-book, the Salmau yr Eglwys yn yr Anialwch.Edward Williams [Iolo Morganwg], Salmau yr Eglwys yn yr Anialwch (Merthyr Tydfil, 1812), the Unitarian psalms, whose preface he drafted across a trade circular of 1782 that he had by then kept for thirty years. And down its right-hand edge, over the printed border, he did something else. He was weighing geiriadur, a word-list, against a word of his own, trawddiadur, arguing that a grammar was a better thing than a word-list and setting down the “gwir arwyddoccâd y gair”, the true signification of the word; beside it he worked out ymtrawdd and trawddadroedd, and glossed Cymraeg against Latin, rhôl against rotula, rhestr against volumen.NLW 21282E, no. 142, read on the image. The hand is cramped and the last two lines sit on the printed border; the words are legible, the order of the final two lines is not certain. Making Welsh technical words was open, published work in his day (Pughe and Walters did it, and nobody called it fraud); what the margin shows is the method, and that he did it in private. That is a lexicographer at work, in the margin of a supplier’s circular, for nobody. He had not scavenged the paper and he was not too poor to buy any: it was his own post, from his own supplier, and he had kept it as he kept everything, against the day it might be wanted. It is the habit that left seventy-five volumes of notebooks behind him, and it is worth naming plainly, because the men who called him a forger built their case out of the archive that habit produced. A man who manufactures documents keeps what serves him. A man who cannot throw anything away keeps a tea merchant's price list for thirty years.

And the title is not decoration; it is a charge. The Psalms of the Church in the Wilderness takes its phrase from the speech of Stephen, the church in the wilderness, delivered to the temple authorities in the minutes before they stoned him for saying that God does not live in their building.Acts 7:38 [PRE-JUSTINIAN, the Septuagint text Stephen’s speech quotes throughout, and the reading preferred here]; the form Iolo read is the post-Justinian received text. Compare Revelation 12:6 and 12:14, dissent’s standing self-description as the true church driven into the wilderness. That is the argument Iolo was making, and the Cymraeg he scrawled across the tea-sheet makes it again, and makes it larger than the editors of his Correspondence allow. Their note records only that the drafts rail against the "Deudneudwyr," the men of Gogledd Cymru, and against Owain Myfyr. What is actually on the sheet is a man standing above the quarrel and condemning both sides of it: "y naill blaid… mor elyniaethol… tuag at y llall… mor ffyrnig", the one party so hostile toward the other, so ferocious, set against reason. Factions do not talk like that. A man talks like that who thinks both parties have abandoned the thing they claim to serve.

Hold the sheet to the winter light. The face is a tea bill; the reverse is a hymn-book preface written by a Unitarian in a hostile country. And the two faces are thirty years and a whole conversion apart. In 1782 the man buying from this warehouse was selling chocolate, and there was no chocolate in that decade that was not slave-grown. By the seventeen-nineties he was selling only sugar "uncontaminated with human gore." The scrap does not show us a saint who arrived furnished with his scruples. It shows us the shop he kept before he had them, preserved by his own hand, and written over at sixty-five by the man he had made of himself. That is a harder thing than innocence, and a better one: a moral position is worth more when you can watch it being arrived at.Elijah Waring, Recollections and Anecdotes of Edward Williams (London, 1850), p. 108, for the paper in the shop window: “East India Sweets, uncontaminated with human gore”.

The second is an act, and it lands at the far end of his life, when there was nothing left to gain by it. In 1818, aged seventy-one, Iolo writes to the magistrates of the Y Bont-faen Petty Sessions as the dogged advocate of Alice John, a girl of twenty-two, blind for eight months, abused and refused parish relief by an overseer named John Hooper. "I never said or heard of such cruelties practised towards the poor," he writes, "as I have known… in this infernalized parish of Flemston."Iolo to the Y Bont-faen magistrates on behalf of Alice John, 1818; and, for his own poverty, Iolo Morganwg to Taliesin Williams, NLW 21286E, no. 998, dated by Iolo “May 30th 1825”; the edition dates it 30 May 1826, and the letter bears that out: he asks for paper to write letters “in readiness against the next general election”, and that election was held in June 1826 (“I have not a single pair of small clothes that I am not ashamed to see about all in rags”; the hat, the quire of paper for the psalms, and Longman’s pension, in the same letter): The Correspondence of Iolo Morganwg, ed. Geraint H. Jenkins, Ffion Mair Jones and David Ceri Jones, 3 vols (Cardiff, 2007). A man who spends his failing strength and his scarce paper, at seventy-one, fighting a corrupt parish officer for a blind pauper girl is not living in the moral universe of a career fraud. The scruple was no single gesture. It was the shape of the man.

He had known John Hooper a long time, and once had sport with him. About 1799 he drew up a mock advertisement: “Cyhoeddir ar frys / Dwy Bregeth gan Siôn Hwper o Drefflemin”, published in haste, two sermons by Siôn Hwper of Flemingston, the first on a text “o’r ddeunawfed bennod o Lyfr y Scowldïod”, from the eighteenth chapter of the Book of Scolds: “Baw i chwi! Baw yn eich danned[d]”, dirt to you, dirt in your teeth; the second from the twentieth chapter of the same book: “Dodwch eich trwyn yn ’y nhin i”, put your nose in my arse. Twenty years on the joke was over, and he took the man to the magistrates.‘Pregeth Siôn Hwper’, NLW 21283E, no. 611, [?October 1799] (Correspondence, II, letter 520, p. 225), as printed by Ffion Mair Jones, ‘The Bard is a Very Singular Character’: Iolo Morganwg, Marginalia and Print Culture (Cardiff, 2010), Appendix VI, no. 21, p. 328, who identifies Siôn Hwper as John Hooper of Flemingston, overseer of the poor.

And it cost him to the last. In May 1826, the year he died, he was so poor he had "not a single pair of small clothes" he was not ashamed to be seen in, "all in rags," short even of the quire of paper he needed to finish his psalms. When his publisher Longman pressed him to petition for a pension, the old Jacobin put it off rather than beg from George Guelph (George IV), whom he had spent his life opposing. A career fraud takes the money. This one, starving, hesitated over the source of it.Iolo Morganwg to Taliesin Williams, NLW 21286E, no. 998, dated by Iolo “May 30th 1825” and by the edition 30 May 1826: the clothes, the rags, the quire of paper and Longman’s pension are all in that one letter. The Correspondence of Iolo Morganwg, ed. Geraint H. Jenkins, Ffion Mair Jones and David Ceri Jones, 3 vols (Cardiff, 2007).

And it was not the first time Llundain had come asking: in 1800 Richard Phillips of St Paul's Churchyard, the radical publisher of the Monthly Magazine, wanted Iolo in his yearly Public Characters, a dozen pages of his life and the bardic institution, solicited from the living man whom posterity would file as a provincial obscurity.William Owen Pughe to Iolo, 28 August 1800 (NLW 21282E, no. 342): "Phillips of St Pauls' Church Yard... wants much to have you in it, connecting with a sketch of your life an account of the bardic institute and Welsh literature in general."

And the archive holds the coda, and it must be looked at straight: among his papers lies a petition to the King for “a small pension or annuity,” drawn in what was probably his final year, the petitioner “now in the 81st year of his age, and rendered an absolute Cripple by the continuance for more than six years of a severe and inveterate Rheumatic Gout”, and the grounds given are not his own want but his blind wife, Peggy, Margaret Roberts, and his infirm daughter.Petition of Edward Williams to George IV for a small pension or annuity, [?1826] (NLW, Iolo Morganwg papers, no. 67). The catalogue marks it “?Draft”; no pension was ever granted. And the infirm daughter was no late plea: a medical case-statement among his papers, “Case of Margaret Williams aged 20, July 3rd 1802,” is endorsed in his hand “Case of my Daur Peggy” (no. 38), twenty-four years of it by the time this petition was drawn. The catalogue marks it, with a query, as a draft; whether it ever left his desk is not known. No pension came. Pride held past starving-point; what bent it at the last was not his own hunger but her blindness.

And hear him in his own voice, because the accused is usually kept silent and he need not be. In the preface to his Poems, Lyric and Pastoral of 1794, in print, over his own name, more than thirty years before his death, Edward Williams set down the principle he worked by: "I was from the beginning determined not to put the least imposition on the public, but to give them the real unsophisticated productions of the self-tutored Journeyman Mason.Edward Williams [Iolo Morganwg], Poems, Lyric and Pastoral, 2 vols. (London: J. Nichols, 1794), his own printed preface, over his own name, thirty-two years before his death." Read that against the charge. The man later convicted of imposture declared, in print, that he refused even the polishing hand of better-schooled gentlemen rather than impose anything false on his readers. He told them, too, how that self-tutored mason had been made, off his father’s gravestones, as the opening pages set down. He learned to read on the dead, in a country where, as he also recorded, "there was not at this time a single bookseller, except itinerant, that sold Welsh books in all Wales."

And the voice is unmistakably the man the record describes, radical, rational, and proud of the south. He printed his politics plainly, in a surveillance state watching him for exactly this: power, in his verse, is a fortress "well-castled by Bishops and Kings," and he writes "spite of all that Kings command." He printed his religion as plainly, "No creeds can this priestless Religion define," the rational Dissenter's faith, and, note the word from the mouth of the man they would call an impostor, he reserves imposture for the dogma of others: "Let Bigots preach up what imposture hath taught." And he printed, in 1794, the very thesis his northern judges would one day use against him: that the Cymraeg of Morgannwg, the Silurian, is "the most ancient" in its "dialect and orthography," and "differs in many particulars from the Biblical dialect of modern writers."Edward Williams, Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (London, 1794), I: “On Religion; an Epistle to a Friend … Written in 1779”, pp. 104–6 (“No creeds can this priestless Religion define”, p. 105; “’Tis Priestcraft in grain, its dominions are wide, / Well-castled by Bishops and Kings” and “Let Bigots preach up what imposture hath taught”, p. 106, stanzas 6 and 8); “Winter Incidents”, p. 126 (“And, spite of all that Kings command, / Find in my cot his native land”); Preface, p. xx: “The originals of these Triades are in the Silurian (which is the most ancient) dialect and orthography. I mention this to obviate the carpings of those who, properly speaking, know no dialect. The Silurian differs in many particulars from the Biblical dialect of modern writers.” Each read at the page image. The man they would convict for forms that looked too old to a northern grammarian had already explained, in print, that the southern forms were the old ones. A century later his county taught its own dialect from his prose: the handbook for teachers of Welsh in the schools of Glamorgan and Monmouth cites Iolo, a dozen times, as its evidence for the living speech of Gwent and Morgannwg, nog for na, hyd fyth, anraith, “Ydd ennillwys genedl y Cymry eu braint a’u coron”.John Griffith, Y Wenhwyseg: a key to the phonology of the Gwentian dialect, for the use of teachers of Welsh in Glamorgan and Monmouth schools (Newport, 1902), pp. 5–27, entries marked “(Iolo M.)”.

Nor were the people he came from the primitives their occupiers would later certify. In a letter of 1779 Iolo records the testimony of the scholar Evan Evans, Ieuan Brydydd Hir: that within living memory "the Latin language was taught in all the common schools in west Wales, and that the common farmers, labourers and shepherds could converse in Latin though not in English."Iolo recording Evan Evans’s testimony, letter of 1779: The Correspondence of Iolo Morganwg (2007). Set that against the Blue Books of 1847, Victoria’s school-inspection report, which would tell the nation that Cymraeg was "a vast drawback… a manifold barrier to the moral progress and commercial prosperity of the people." The Cymry gave those volumes their other name, and it is the one that stuck: Brad y Llyfrau Gleision, the Treachery of the Blue Books.David Williams, The Rebecca Riots (Cardiff, 1971): the education reports “were, by analogy, called ‘Brad y Llyfrau Gleision’, the treachery of the blue books.” Jan Morris, Wales: Epic Views of a Small Country (1986), of the patriots who held the report biased in its approach, unfair in its methods and insulting in its conclusions: they “called the whole affair Brad y Llyfrau Gleision, the Treachery of the Blue Books, a name that has stuck.” The name is a title before it is a verdict: Robert Jones, R. J. Derfel, put it on his verse drama against the reports after Yr Amserau had refused to print parts of it, “ataliwyd ei chyhoeddi, ac argraffodd y gerdd gyfan dan yr enw Brad y Llyfrau Gleision, 1854” (D. Gwenallt Jones, “Derfel, Robert Jones”, Y Bywgraffiadur Cymreig). The title-page reads Brad y Llyfrau Gleision. Gan Robert Jones, (R. J. Derfel,) Manchester. Argraffwyd dros yr awdwr gan I. Clarke, Rhuthyn. MDCCCLIV (NLW, digitised copy). The English title is used where the volumes are named, because that is the title printed on them. The name in Cymraeg is not a translation of it. It is the verdict on them. Here, on the ground, in the mouths of shepherds, is a native population whose ordinary intellectual baseline ran to classical Latin and the learning of the Continent, and pointedly not to the English vernacular of the men who would shortly pronounce them backward. The culture the verdict calls primitive was, within living memory, conversing with antiquity in its own fields.

Now the one fact on which the whole case turns, and it is not a metaphor; it is a physical event happening across Morgannwg in his lifetime. The literature of Cymru had no library, no archive, no state to keep it. For centuries it had lived in the private collections of the Cymraeg-speaking gentry, the old patrons of the bards. And through the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth the survivors were malevolently ground down by debt, by enclosure, and by the consolidation of the land into great, anglicised, often absentee estates.The record of the taking is set out in the notes that follow (Raglan 1646, Hafod 1807, Black’s report of 1840) and at Y Dull Cymreig, ¶508, Y Penseiri, ¶615 and Y Dyn Bach, ¶450; on the Glamorgan gentry’s absorption into one British ruling class, see Philip Jenkins, The Making of a Ruling Class: The Glamorgan Gentry 1640–1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). And in the south the truth was barer still: the land was wanted for the coal beneath it, and the taking went unfettered. Whatever stood in the way (a Cymraeg-speaking smallholder, a common right, an inconvenient tenant, an old title in Cymraeg) was removed by whatever means came to hand, and the government of the day lent its enclosure acts, its courts, and its constables to the removing.

And weigh what that ground was worth, before the trial begins. Merthyr was the greatest industrial phenomenon on earth; railways all over the world and steamships on every sea depended upon Cymru's raw materials; and the man who owned the ground under Cardiff was reckoned the richest man alive.Jan Morris, Wales: Epic Views of a Small Country (London: Viking, 1984; Penguin edn, 1986), pp. 290–291; Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments in Wales, An Inventory of the Ancient Monuments in Glamorgan, vol. III, p. 185. The whole count is at Y Dull Cymreig, ¶508. That is the prize.

The Loughor Valley was not bought from a willing people; it was prised out from under them. And the record Iolo saved knew what that valley had been, and a hundred years later a man on Victoria’s civil list would take a knife to the page that said so. We will meet him. Taliesin’s own line keeps the address, in the Book of Taliesin, Gwaryeis yn llychwr, kysceis ym porffor: “I have played at Loughor and slept in purple.”Cad Goddeu, The Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales, i, 32 (ed. 1870); quoted with the valley’s traditions by W. Ll. Morgan, An Antiquarian Survey of East Gower (London, 1899), 22. And Iolo’s papers keep the court that went with the line. Urien Rheged held his llys at Aberllychwr, in a Rheged that ran y rhwng afon Tawy ac afon Tywy, sef Gwyr, Cedweli, a Charnwyllon, ac Iscennen, between the Tawe and the Tywi, Gower, Cydweli, Carnwyllon and Is-cennen; and gwedi marw Arthur ydd aeth Taliesin yn Ben Bardd Urien Rheged yn Aberllychwr yn Rheged: after Arthur died, Taliesin became chief bard to Urien Rheged, at Aberllychwr, in Rheged. His roll of the chairs of the Island of Britain gives that chair its word: Cadair Urien Rheged, yn Aberllychwr, a Thaliesin yn Ben Athraw: Myn y gwir ei le. The Chair of Urien Rheged, at Aberllychwr, Taliesin its chief teacher. The truth will have its place.Iolo Manuscripts (Llandovery, 1848), Welsh text, pp. 71 and 73, read on the page images; the same page 71 carries Iolo’s note naming his source and the leaf missing from it. The chair-roll: Welsh text, p. 63; the volume’s own English, p. 448: “URIEN RHEGED, at Aberllychwr (Loughor), under the Presidency of Taliesin—Truth will have its place.” Both read on the page images. The same roll gives Bryn Gwyddon its Coel clywed, Gwir gweled.

And the ground still holds the court older than the castle. Across the road from the castle mound stands Pen Twyn, an oval hill the parish has always called the Mount of assembly; the antiquarian who surveyed Gŵyr in 1899 could find “nothing to connect it with the tradition excepting that from time immemorial proclamations have been made from this place”, and did not hear what he had written: the proclamations are the connection. A mound, in the open air, from which the law was spoken to the people since before anyone could say when, the thing these pages have been calling, all along, by its name in Cymraeg.W. Ll. Morgan, An Antiquarian Survey of East Gower (London, 1899), 25. The same page’s footnote carries stanza 27 of the Englynion y Gorugion of the Bardd Glas, in Iolo’s own translation: “The achievement of Owain, the son of Urien, was the appointing, in Aberllychwr, against injury, [of] rhaith”, the sworn jury of native law, instituted at Loughor in the verse’s memory. That is what stood beneath the manorial waste.

None of this was the natural death of an old culture; it was cultural genocide, completing its inventory in the muniment room.The phrase is exact, and it is not reached for; the book defines it, in Lemkin’s sense, at Y Ddedfryd, ¶781. Ali Abdullatif Ahmida’s Genocide in Libya: Shar, a Hidden Colonial History (2020) studies a case where the killing was physical, the Italian fascist camps in eastern Libya between 1929 and 1934, in which about a third of the population of that region died, and about two thirds of those interned, and it is cited here for its method, not for any equivalence of suffering. Shar is the Arabic sharr, evil: the survivors’ own vernacular name for the whole catastrophe, taken from a sentence spoken to him in an interview. He could not write the history out of the archive. The files had been destroyed or could not be found, and he was put out of the Italian archives; and having been put out of them he drew the further conclusion, that an archive is not a deposit of facts but a state’s account of itself, which in the case of Italian colonial fascism covered up a genocide. So he worked from oral testimony and vernacular poetry alongside what documents he could reach: the memory a people keeps in its own language when the written record is held by the men who did the thing. That is the evidentiary position of every source from Cymru cited here, and it was that here first, from the moment the state that dissolved our law took custody of our record. It is the reason the bardic material is treated as testimony and not as decoration. So the manuscripts were physically perishing: eaten by rats, rotted by damp, scattered to dealers, and burned, at Hafod, on 13 March 1807, when the mansion caught fire and its library, Edward Lhuyd’s manuscripts among it, went up in a single night. And the fire had a military ancestor. Raglan, where the Herberts had kept open house for the bards for two centuries, the greatest library in Cymru, fell to the parliamentary army in August 1646, and the library went with it. In the account the Iolo family later gave, it held Dafydd ap Gwilym, Taliesin, Siôn Cent and Dafydd Ddu o Hiraddug on its shelvesThe bards’ own record returns Raglan’s hospitality: the chair-roll of the Iolo Manuscripts lists Cadair Castell Rhaglan yn nawdd yr Arglwydd William Herbert, the Chair of Raglan Castle under Lord William Herbert’s protection, and gives the chair its word: Deffro! mae ddydd, Awake! it is day. The library the army burned had sat under a chair sworn to daylight., a loss the antiquaries recorded as irreparable to the literature of the Britons. The burning of the Britons’ record was a documented act of war a century and a half before it became an accident of damp.The Herbert library at Raglan, two centuries of open house for the bards, holding Dafydd ap Gwilym, Taliesin, Siôn Cent, Dafydd Ddu o Hiraddug, looted and burned by the parliamentary army, August 1646: John R. Kenyon, Raglan Castle (Cadw, 2003). The greatest single recorded loss of manuscripts in Cymraeg before Hafod.

And the state knew. When the Public Record Office was founded, the first thing the Master of the Rolls did for Cymru was send a surveyor, W. H. Black, appointed in September 1839, instructed to report the condition of every repository in Cymru: its security “from fire, from damp, and from depredation,” its bulk counted roll by roll, nothing vague admitted. His report is the government’s own audit of the native legal record, and it reads like a coroner’s finding. The records of the greatest legal business in Cymru lay at Caerfyrddin “in extreme confusion,” and the surveyor spent about three weeks with the hall-keeper taking down every press, cleansing the rolls of their accumulated dirt, and replacing them in order under his own direction. At Presteign the ancient plea rolls had been heaped on the floor of a damp vault until they putrefied, and the stench drove the hall-keeper’s family from the next room. Of the old palatinate archive of Penfro (Pembrokeshire) he wrote one sentence that is the whole case: none of its records are now extant, “such has been the havoc of time and war in the Welsh territory.” That is the state’s own baseline, dated 1840: the native record already ruined (by war, and then by custody) in an official report; thirteen years after the old stonemason died copying what he could reach, and nine years before a Merthyr chemist first cast doubt on him in print for carrying what the presses had lost.First Annual Report of the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records (London, 1840), Appendix, No. 30, Instructions to Mr. Black for the Survey of the Welsh Records, 11 September 1839, and No. 31, Report on the Records of Wales and Chester: the Caerfyrddin presses “in extreme confusion” and the three weeks’ re-ordering; the Maesyfed (Radnor) vault at Presteign; “such has been the havoc of time and war in the Welsh territory.”

Iolo walked into that. On foot from house to house, he talked his way into the libraries and copied by hand whatever he could reach, because the originals were rotting where they sat and he could neither buy them nor carry them off. His transcripts are, in places, the only surviving copies of what those libraries held. And copying was only the first lifeboat; the second was print, for a transcript in a drawer can burn as readily as the original did, but a printed book exists in hundreds of copies at once, beyond the reach of any single fire.

He kept a horse; he would not ride it. He had ridden once in his life, galloping to his father’s sickbed, and never again. But the horse loved him, and would follow him on foot “frequently as far as Cardiff, where the Bard took care to feed his faithful satellite, often with a loaf of bread, which he would cut up and give the animal bit by bit, at the baker’s door. He willingly paid the turnpike tolls, rather than deny the affectionate creature the gratification of keeping him company.”Elijah Waring, Recollections and Anecdotes of Edward Williams (London, 1850), pp. 19–20.

That is why getting the texts into the Myvyrian Archaiology mattered as much as rescuing them by hand: it put them where no candle could reach. He knew exactly what he was racing: writing to Owain Myfyr in July 1800 of "my sheets of transcript, the labours of many years," lying "for the most part unbound and in great disorder", and, he adds in Cymraeg, a llawer un ohonynt yn llosgi'n ulw, many of them burning to a cinder. A descendant of the Truman family of Pantlliwydd, Llansannor, said that when Iolo's liberties were seriously curtailed he "needed to escape there periodically, and carry away as much as he could clear [?] on his shoulders."Iolo to Owain Myfyr (Owen Jones), 26 July 1800, The Correspondence of Iolo Morganwg, ed. Geraint H. Jenkins et al., three volumes (University of Wales Press, 2007). The “shoulders” sentence is not Iolo’s own phrase: it is the recollection of a descendant of the Truman family of Pantlliwydd, Llansannor, quoted here as the family’s tradition, not as his. It is printed by Geraint H. Jenkins, Bard of Liberty: The Political Radicalism of Iolo Morganwg (Cardiff, 2012), p. 150 and n. 147, from Cardiff Central Library MS 3.1: Jenkins sets it before the harder years of 1797–8, and does not say what was carried. The [?] is Jenkins’s, marking a word he could not read for certain. Of his own load he said what it cost. From Beaumaris in August 1799 he wrote that he had been “every day & almost every night, Sundays not excepted, writing continually, from four o’clock in the morning till twelve at night & often later”, until his ankles and legs swelled “like those of a man in the dropsy”; he walked up to forty miles a day, and came home that winter “with a very heavy luggage of 60lb weight at least”.Iolo to Owen Jones (Owain Myfyr), Beaumaris, 13 August 1799, BL Add. 15030, f. 5; Iolo to William Owen Pughe, 14 November 1799, NLW 13221E, p. 59; both as printed by Geraint Phillips, “Forgery and Patronage: Iolo Morganwg and Owain Myfyr”, in A Rattleskull Genius (2005), pp. 416–417. The forty miles a day is Phillips’s reckoning. Llanelli said in 1862 what that labour had done: “Yr ydym yn meddwl fod Iolo Morganwg ei hun wedi gwneud mwy i achub hen ysgrifau o fin dinystr … na’r holl orseddau a’r cadeirfeirdd perthynol iddynt, yn holl gyfnod hanes Cadair Tir Iarll”, we think Iolo Morganwg himself did more to save old writings from the edge of destruction than all the gorseddau and chaired bards in the whole history of the Chair of Tir Iarll; and what did he get from the old gorsedd, it asked, “ond yr enw yn unig”, but the name alone? Seven years later a writer in the same quarterly who had no patience with his Druidism, and who blamed the Britons themselves, Iolo among them with Pezron and Macpherson, for bringing Celtic learning into contempt, still gave him the first place: “Y penaf o’r cyfryw fel casglydd oedd Iolo Morganwg. Ymroddodd yr hen wron yn hollol i hela a dadenhuddo pob math o lyfr, ar bapyr neu ar groen”, the chief of them as a collector was Iolo Morganwg; the old hero gave himself wholly to hunting out and uncovering every kind of book, on paper or on skin.Y Beirniad (Llanelli), Ebrill 1862, “Dylanwad Eisteddfodau Cymru”, p. 298; Ebrill 1869, “Yr Hen Lawysgrifau”, pp. 365 and 372: “Y Cymry eu hunain a achosodd yr holl ddrwg … Gwnaeth Pezron yn Llydaw, Macpherson yn yr Alban, a Iolo Morganwg yn Nghymru,” (p. 365); of Iolo and Pughe together, “er eu holl benchwibandod, yn teilyngu coffadwriaeth barchus gan bawb sydd yn caru Cymraeg”, for all their flightiness, deserving respectful remembrance from all who love Welsh (p. 372). All read on the National Library’s page images (IIIF 2181013, 2183767, 2183774). Y Beirniad of Llanelli, 1859–1879, the Independents’ quarterly, not the later journal of that name. Dadenhuddo: dad- with enhuddo, to cover over (GPC, s.v. enhuddiad). His accusers worked a century later, from the catalogued ashes, and from those ashes they pronounce, with confidence, on what Iolo could not possibly have had a source for. But the ashes had earlier visitors. Evan Evans, Ieuan Brydydd Hir, reached many of the same Morgannwg gentry libraries in the 1750s and 1760s, a generation before Iolo's main circuit, and his own manuscript catalogues, now in the National Library, record what was then still standing: a living bardic tradition, named keeper-families, texts in private hands, the same collections Iolo would later copy from. Edward Lhuyd's Archaeologia Britannica of 1707 had done the same work a generation earlier still, cataloguing the manuscripts of Cymru then in circulation before the eighteenth-century attrition had done its worst. These are not Iolo's witnesses; they are independent ones, working their own circuits, who saw the same tradition before the fires came. The prosecution's frame, that the lost libraries are Iolo's convenient invention, forgets that those libraries had other visitors, and those visitors left their own notes.

The man closest to the living archive is judged a liar by men working from its remains, whose own achievements exist because of his groundwork, and the thing they are most certain of is the contents of books that no longer exist. He had more access than any of his judges. More proven integrity than any of them who took the Guelphs' coin. More right to the tradition than any man who sat over him: he inherited it; they studied it from the outside. And he was convicted by a knighted grammarian and a scholar on a research fellowship who never, in their lives, met his like. Against the knighthood and the fellowship, set the whole of his own estate, which he put into a triad of his own, as Elijah Waring, the Quaker friend who wrote down his recollections, remembered it: “There are three things I do not want; a Horse, for I have a good pair of legs; a Cellar, for I drink no beer; and a Purse, for I have no money.”Elijah Waring, Recollections and Anecdotes of Edward Williams (1850), p. 54.

And look at the kind of mind the record shows, because it is the precise opposite of the careless romancer the verdict requires. When Iolo turned his attention to a thing, he measured it. For fifteen years he ran controlled trials of Indian corn in his Morgannwg garden, Virginian seed against New England seed, season by season, soil by soil, manured with coal ashes, the failures recorded as exactly as the successes, and wrote it all up for the Board of Agriculture. The historian of his farming, who opens his verdict with “Despite his reputation as a forger and fantasist”, still finds him “a highly professional, hard-headed, indeed scientific agricultural observer”, and “a moderately successful farmer” who “did not lose his farms because of incompetence or mismanagement, but because he had taken on the onerous burden of his father-in-law’s debts”; and the published survey of the farming of south Wales by his friend Walter Davies, Gwallter Mechain, “bears the unmistakable stamp of Iolo’s researches”.David Ceri Jones, “Iolo Morganwg and the Welsh Rural Landscape”, in A Rattleskull Genius (2005), pp. 231, 249–250. Jones adds that Sir John Sinclair’s refusal to employ him “is therefore all the more extraordinary and must surely have been attributable to the radical reputation that Iolo had acquired during his time in London” (p. 249). He asked the same Board, in 1796, for “a few cheap tracts on husbandry in their language”, because “the Welsh peasantry are more generally able to read their own language than the same class in England”: half a century before the Blue Books told the world the opposite.NLW 13115B, p. 78: David Ceri Jones, in A Rattleskull Genius (2005), p. 248. When he described the route of a proposed tramroad through the Vale, he did it parish by parish, hamlet by hamlet, river-confluence by river-confluence, and drew his own corrected map in "faint red ink (I had no better at hand)." This is a patient, exacting, empirical temperament, a man who checks. He counted everything, even, as the last pages will show, on his deathbed, the century, right to the year: he knew a century turns on the one, not the nought. The accusation asks us to believe that the same mind which tracked maize varieties across a decade and a half went, in its antiquarian work alone, slapdash and inventive. It is not a credible psychology. And the investigative habit was there from the start: as early as 1779, in his early thirties, he was pressing the scholar Evan Evans on whether the old manuscript histories were "still extant… in whose hands," tracking the fifty stone circles of Cymru and the adder-stone he took for "proof… the Welsh are of the same origin as the Celtic Gauls," and closing, conspiratorially, "Do not mention it to any one."The maize trials written up for the Board of Agriculture; the tramroad survey drawn in “faint red ink”; and the 1779 letters pressing Evan Evans on the surviving manuscripts (“Do not mention it to any one”): Iolo’s agricultural papers and The Correspondence of Iolo Morganwg (2007). The man the verdict calls a fantasist spent his youth interrogating provenance and keeping confidences, the posture of an intelligence-gatherer, not a forger.

Nor is it the psychology of a man careless about credit. In 1794, the very years they say he was busy passing his own inventions off as ancient work, Iolo went to war, in writing, against a real plagiarist. He told Edward Jones, harper to George Guelph (George IV), that he would give him "such a literary drubbing as ever any scoundrel had," because Jones had been passing for "the supposed author of what you only begg'd and filch'd from every corner."Iolo to Edward Jones (Bardd y Brenin), 1794: The Correspondence of Iolo Morganwg (2007). Iolo’s demand was that the proper credit be restored to John Walters and William Owen Pughe, the men whose work Jones had taken. The man later convicted of faking authorship spent his strength publicly forcing a thief to give other men their due. A forger does not police attribution; he depends on its collapse. On New Year’s Day 1794 he put his claim to Edward Jones, the harper, in the old fable of the jackdaw in borrowed plumes: “I shall myself claim a few of those feathers in which the impudent Jack Daw struts about. You have been meddling with edge tools.”Iolo Morganwg to Edward Jones (Bardd y Brenin), 1 January 1794, NLW 21286E, no. 1022 (letter 1022, transcribed by the Iolo Morganwg project, CAWCS).

And he did it to the very end. In the last weeks of his life, in the January and February of 1826, too weak to stand, he was still at the work. He wrote by candle in the middle of the day and set the paper itself on fire.Iolo to Taliesin, Flimston, 17 January 1826, continued 19 January and 4 February: NLW 21286E, letter 1005: “I have been extremly sick and much worse have hitherto ever been ever since you and Nancy left us, and absolutely unable to write any how, treying to do all in my power by using a candle in the middle of the day, and by doing set this paper on fire. I have to day cobled it up as well as I can.” He wrote that he would "never more in all probability be able to walk but on crutches," and he spent what strength remained not on his own comfort but on the bardic chair he was trying to leave behind, and on a warning that another man's hand, William Owen Pughe's, had introduced "corruptions" into the language.The same letter, NLW 21286E, no. 1005, postscript of Saturday 4 February 1826: “You will do me the greatest kindness if you will procure a pair of Crutches for me … I shall never more in all probability be able to Walk but on Crutches.” The corruptions are in the address to the Cymreigyddion which Iolo copied out, corrected, for Taliesin in that letter: “Heblaw llygredigaethau anferthfawr Wm. Owain y mae rhai eraill yn ymdannu ym mhell ac yn agos dros y Gymraeg”, besides the immense corruptions of William Owen, there are others spreading far and near over the Welsh language (the online edition’s English, iolomorganwg.wales.ac.uk, letter 1005). The man they would brand the great corrupter of the Britons' tradition spent his deathbed trying to keep it clean, and naming the corruptions of someone else.

There is one shadow that the portrait casts, and it is the portrait's own shadow, not the prosecution's invention. What the tradition had been, before the fires came, was plural: held by many houses, many masters, many copyists, a living network distributed across the gentry halls of Morgannwg. By the time Iolo walked those halls, the network had narrowed to almost nothing, and what remained of it narrowed further to the width of one man's shoulders, the literal weight of manuscripts he could carry. A tradition held by many hands can lose parts without losing itself. A tradition contracted to one keeper is a different thing: the keeper and the kept become, insensibly, one; and the keeper's own hand (careful, scrupulous, devoted) begins to leave its mark not only in the margins but in the text itself, in the way a river leaves itself in every bend it cuts. This is not yet the charge. It is the shadow every faithful keeper casts: a loyalty so complete that, from outside, it starts to look as if the keeper owns the thing he keeps.See Y Ceidwad a'r Orsedd, ¶411.

5. Y Cwmni

The Company110 Poets in the dock. 113 Brodsky: who enrolled you? 115 Augustine and the bishops of the Britons. 118 One Latin Bible. 119 The dark year of 536. 120 The Life of Dewi. 124 Pelagius. 127 The company the court keeps.

The poet in the dock is one of the oldest configurations of state power in the West, and the verdict has never once survived history's appeal: every such sentence is, in the end, reversed. The only open question is how long the present bench wishes to go on looking ridiculous.

Socrates, 399 BC: corrupting the youth, the hemlock. Galileo, 1633: forced to his knees to abjure, and the earth moved anyway. Baudelaire, 1857: Les Fleurs du Mal fined, six poems banned until 1949. Wilde, 1895: hard labour for being cleverer than his judges. Lady Chatterley, 1960, where the prosecutor asked the jury whether this was "a book you would wish your wife or your servants to read", and convicted nobody but himself and the century he spoke for. Not one of those verdicts stands today.Nor is the court a Western peculiarity: the Qing dynasty's “literary inquisition” (wenziyu) prosecuted thousands for seditious poetry across two centuries, the same configuration, state power trying verse as crime, at the other end of the earth. See R. Kent Guy, The Emperor's Four Treasuries (Harvard, 1987). Iolo saw the same court take one of his own friends. Gilbert Wakefield, the Unitarian scholar, was charged with seditious libel in January 1798 for condemning Pitt as a warmonger and an enemy of the poor, and was sentenced to two years in Dorchester gaol and a fine of £500. Iolo called him a “fearless, but not virulent, assertor of what I believe to be Truth”.Iolo Morganwg, testimony to the piety of Gilbert Wakefield, 3 November 1809, NLW 21408E, no. 10. Wakefield’s trial and sentence: Geraint H. Jenkins, Bard of Liberty (2012), p. 149.

And the Britons had met this court before, and not one poet at a time, but the whole order at once. In 1402, in the panic after Owain Glyndŵr rose, the parliament of Henry Plantagenet of Anjou outlawed the bards’ trade by statuteThe penal statutes of Henry Plantagenet of Anjou against the Britons, 1402 (4 Hen. IV, cc. 26–27): bards, “rhymers, minstrels and other vagabonds” forbidden their circuits, and the assemblies where they gathered banned, the bardic order made a criminal class four centuries before the forgery charge.: the penal laws forbade wasters, rhymers, minstrels and other vagabonds from making their circuits in Cymru, and banned the assemblies where they gathered. Not a bard convicted, the bardic order itself made a criminal class, its judicial and genealogical work reclassified as vagrancy, its gatherings as sedition. Four centuries before anyone called Iolo a forger, an English parliament had already ruled that the men who carried the poetry of Cymru were, as a class, offenders.And the 1402 statutes outlived their repeal: with the circuits banned, the bardic order survived only inside private gentry households, whose libraries are the very collections Iolo would later copy. The statute built the archive-conditions the prosecution would one day read as suspicious.

And Joseph Brodsky, Leningrad, 1964, on trial for being a poet without a licence:

JUDGE: And who enrolled you in the ranks of poets?
BRODSKY: No one. Who enrolled me in the ranks of the human race?

That is the hinge of our trial too.The exchange survives because the journalist Frida Vigdorova sat in the Leningrad courtroom taking the trial down verbatim until ordered to stop; her smuggled transcript carried it to the West in 1964. Who appointed the men who tried Iolo? Who enrolled the Gwynedd grammarians as the licensing authority for genuine bardic tradition, gave them the warrant to certify which songs are real and which Briton is permitted to have sung in the old measure? No one ever produced that warrant. The bench simply assumed it. This is no quarrel with textual criticism. This book is built of it. The quarrel is with the confusion of criticism and jurisdiction: a scholar reads the text; he does not license the singer. And a court that cannot produce its own commission has no standing to try anyone.

And the bench that could not produce its own commission had been sitting a very long time before 1402, and the first one in the record was not English. In 597 a Roman prior named Augustine landed in Kent under a commission from Pope Gregory, and within a few years summoned the bishops of the British church to submit to him: a church older than his mission, apostolic by its own tradition, keeping its own reckoning of Easter, its own tonsure, and its own Latin Bible. They refused, and their refusal is the first recorded assertion in these islands of a native jurisdiction against an imported one. Bede, writing the winners’ account a century and a half later, has Augustine warn them that if they will not have peace with their brothers they shall have war from their enemies; and when some twelve hundred monks of Bangor Is-coed were cut down at Chester about 616 (praying at the edge of a battle they were not fighting) Bede enters the massacre in his history as the prophecy coming true.Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum II.2, the conference with the British bishops, their refusal, and the slaughter at Chester (c. 613×616), which Bede presents as the fulfilment of Augustine’s warning. Augustine was prior of the monastery of St Andrew on the Caelian Hill in Rome, dispatched by Gregory I in 597, and “of Canterbury” only for the see he planted on landing: a Rome-sent emissary demanding the submission of a British church that had been there for centuries before him. Read what that sentence does, because the whole procedure this court is trying is already finished inside it. A historian of the winning side records the killing of the losing side’s scholars, and files it as divine approval. The extinction of the native jurisdiction, minuted as providence. And even the winners’ historian could not name the place without conceding that the Britons’ name for it was the right one: the City of the Legions, he writes, “which the English call Legacaestir, but the Britons more correctly Carlegion.”Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica II.2: “ad ciuitatem Legionum, quae a gente Anglorum Legacaestir, a Brettonibus autem rectius Carlegion appellatur”. Rectius: more correctly. In the same sentence he calls the Britons gens perfida, the perfidious nation. Bede does not say who set that army on them. Geoffrey of Monmouth does, and the detail is worth having even from a witness the English schools have spent eight centuries discrediting: it was Æthelberht of Kent, the king who had received Augustine and given him his see, who stirred Æthelfrith of Northumbria to march on Bangor. The mission and the massacre run back to one court.Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae XI.12–13: Æthelberht, unable to bring the Britons to submission, incites Æthelfrith against them, and the monks of Bangor are killed. Bede, writing nearer the event, gives the warning and the killing but not the instigation. And one word carries both halves of the case. The teaching of Pelagius the Briton is perfidia; the Britons cut down at Chester are the gens perfida. The charge against the native church and the charge against the native scholars are the same word, in the same hand, two books apart.Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica I.10: “Pelagius Bretto contra auxilium gratiae supernae uenena suae perfidiae longe lateque dispersit”, Pelagius the Briton spread the poison of his perfidy far and wide; and II.2, the gens perfida at Chester. The same root for the doctrine and for the dead.

The Welsh side kept its own account of that meeting, and of who sent the army. Bede himself records the test the Britons set. Before the second meeting they asked a holy man, a hermit, how they would know whether Augustine was a man of God. Let him arrive first, the hermit said: if he rises when you come in, he is the servant of Christ and you should hear him; if he stays in his seat and scorns you, scorn him. “Factumque est, ut uenientibus illis sederet Augustinus in sella”: and so it was that as they came in, Augustine sat in his chair.Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum II.2: the Britons go “ad quendam uirum sanctum ac prudentem, qui apud eos anachoreticam ducere uitam solebat”, to a holy and wise man who lived among them as an anchorite, who tells them: “si uobis adpropinquantibus adsurrexerit, scientes, quia famulus Christi est, obtemperanter illum audite; sin autem uos spreuerit, nec coram uobis adsurgere uoluerit, cum sitis numero plures, et ipse spernatur a uobis”, if he rises as you approach, know that he is the servant of Christ and hear him obediently; but if he scorns you and will not rise before you, though you are more in number, let him be scorned by you. Read in the Latin. Theophilus Evans, telling it in Cymraeg in 1740, says he would not stir from it, “mwy na phe buasai wedi ei hoelio wrthi”, no more than if he had been nailed to it. And the Welsh histories name the man who set the army on. Geoffrey of Monmouth writes that when Æthelberht, king of Kent, Augustine’s patron, saw that the Britons would not submit to Augustine, he “was highly provoked, and stirred up Edelfrid, king of the Northumbrians … to march to the city of Bangor, to destroy the Abbot Dinoot, and the rest of the clergy who held them in contempt.”Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae XI.12–13, in The British History of Geoffrey of Monmouth, translated by A. Thompson, revised by J. A. Giles (London: James Bohn, 1842), p. 236; the Latin is the source of Brut y Brenhinedd. Dinoot is Dunod, abbot of Bangor, who had told Augustine that the Britons owed him no subjection, “neither would they preach to their enemies; since they had their own archbishop, and because the Saxon nation persisted in depriving them of their country” (the same page). Evans lays it on Augustine himself, who “a annogodd un o freninoedd y Seison, a elwid Ethelbert, Brenin Caint, i gynnull gwŷr ac arfau i ddial ar y Brytaniaid”, urged one of the kings of the Saxons, called Ethelbert, King of Kent, to gather men and arms to take revenge on the Britons; and Brochfael’s envoys of peace, he says, were cut down “ar arch Awstin ddigllawn”, at the order of the angry Augustine. Bede called the massacre a prophecy. The Welsh called it an order.Theophilus Evans, Drych y Prif Oesoedd (2nd edn, 1740; reprint of 1863, pp. 197–199): the hermit, “ancr neu henafgwr crefyddol”, and “ni bu gwiw gan y gwr ysgog o’i gadair, mwy na phe buasai wedi ei hoelio wrthi”. Read in the 1863 reprint.

The same century had already shown what the procedure looks like when it is turned on a text instead of on men. In 553 the emperor Justinian issued the constitution known as Novel 146, Peri Hebraion, and legislated which versions of their own scriptures the Jews of the empire were permitted to read in their own synagogues, prescribing the Greek, allowing a rival Greek as an alternative, and banning their interpretive tradition outright. A government, standing wholly outside a tradition, licensing that tradition’s own book. Ten centuries before an English parliament licensed a people’s tongue and called their jurisprudence sinister usages, an emperor had established that this is a thing a state does, and put it in the law code on which Europe would afterwards build its own.Justinian, Novella 146, Peri Hebraion (8 February 553), in Corpus Iuris Civilis, vol. III, Novellae, ed. Schoell and Kroll, prescribing the Septuagint for synagogue reading, permitting Aquila’s Greek as an alternative, and forbidding the deuterosis, the received interpretive tradition, altogether. The Act of Union’s own phrase for the law of the Britons is “sinister Usages and Customs” (27 Hen. VIII c. 26).

And the standardising went further than the licence, and its effect is the exact shape of the charge in this trial. Before Jerome there was no single Latin Bible. There were many (the Old Latin versions, plural and various) and it is the plural text that the British church had, and kept, cut off by the Goth invasions from a continent that was adopting the new standard. Gildas quotes it. The old British gospel-books carry readings the standard had abolished, and textual scholars have remarked on their archaism for two hundred years. And once a standard exists, everything older than it is reclassified: the elder readings, the ones that had been the church’s Bible for three centuries, became corrupt. The prosecution will need that word again. The corrupt text was the elder witness. It did not become wrong; it became non-standard, and non-standard, in the hands of a licensing authority, is only another way of saying false.Gildas, De Excidio Britanniae, quotes a Vetus Latina text rather than the Vulgate; the insular gospel-books preserve readings the Vulgate displaced. Jerome’s commission of 382 was precisely to reduce the many to one. The word for what the many became, once the one existed, was corrupt, and the same word, in the same office, is doing duty in this case fourteen centuries later.

Now set that century in its weather, because the weather is on record, and it changes what the century means. In 536 the sky went out. Procopius, in Constantinople, wrote that “the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during this whole year,” and seemed continually in eclipse. Cassiodorus, in Italy, saw a sun gone bluish, bodies that threw no shadow at noon, a summer without heat, a frost out of its season. And in the east the Syriac chronicle kept the measure of it longest, the sun darkened a year and a half, eighteen months, and through them shining but four hours a day, and that light “only a feeble shadow.” The tree-rings and the ice-cores have since named the cause beneath it, volcanic dust, and a second eruption a few years behind the first. Then the bread failed. The Irish annals keep no thesis and spare no grief. They set down the flattest words in these pages and set them down again as the years starve past, “Failure of bread,” and after them the mortalities, the bléfed of 545, the great mortality of 549, the sámthrosc of 554, and in 556 the buide Chonaill, the yellow plague that the tradition of the Britons remembers too.Procopius, Wars IV.14 (the sun like the moon through the whole year of 536); Cassiodorus, Variae XII.25 (the bluish sun, the shadowless noon, the seasons out of their order); John of Ephesus and Michael the Syrian to the same effect in the east: the eighteen-month darkening and the sun shining but four hours a day, “a feeble shadow,” are Michael the Syrian, Chronicle (late 12th c.), preserving the lost contemporary account of John of Ephesus; see A. Arjava, “The Mystery Cloud of 536 CE in the Mediterranean Sources,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 59 (2005). Physical confirmation: L. B. Larsen et al., “New ice core evidence for a volcanic cause of the A.D. 536 dust veil,” Geophysical Research Letters 35 (2008); M. G. L. Baillie, Exodus to Arthur (London, 1999). The annal entries are the Annals of Ulster: “Failure of bread” (twice); U545.1, “the first mortality called bléfed, in which Mo-Bí Clárainech died”; U549.3, the great mortality; U554.2, “a pestilence i.e. leprosy called the sámthrosc”; U556.2, “a great mortality this year, i.e. in chron Chonaill (in buide Chonaill).” Read it as weather and it is a hard century. Read it as a family in a dark field, at a noon that throws no shadow, waiting on a harvest that will not come while the same three words are written down again, and it is the end of one world and the freezing start of another. That is the world in which a Roman prior demanded the submission of the British church, and in which Æthelfrith of Northumbria killed a house of British scholars at Chester. Not a settled Christendom tidying its jurisdictions. A collapsing one, fighting over what was left.

And now read the holiest document of that century in Cymru against that weather, because it has been read the other way for nine hundred years. The rule of Dewi Sant is the pride of the British church: the brethren of Mynyw lived on bread and salted herbs and water, wore skins, and put themselves into the traces of the plough. Rhygyfarch ap Sulien of Llanbadarn set it down about 1090, five centuries after the fact, and to a purpose, defending the independence of his father’s see against Norman Canterbury, and his Latin is very exact about what it is describing. Boum nulla ad arandum cura introducitur. Quisque sibi et fratribus divitie, quisque et bos: no oxen are kept for the ploughing; each man is riches to himself and to his brothers, and each man is his own ox. The food is pane et oleribus sale conditis, bread and herbs seasoned with salt, and the bread itself is measured out, since too much even of bread alone breeds softness, per impari corporum vel etatum statu, by the unequal state of bodies and of ages, with anything better reserved for infirmis… vel etate provectis, vel etiam longo itinere fatigatis: the sick, the aged, and those broken by a long road.Rhygyfarch ap Sulien (Ricemarchus), Vita Sancti David, c. 1090; Latin and English in W. J. Rees, ed., Lives of the Cambro British Saints (Llandovery: Welsh MSS Society, 1853), Latin at 127–8, English at 429–30. The same Life has the brethren “vilibus induebantur vestibus, maxime pellinis”, clothed in cheap garments, chiefly of skins, and records the synod called against the revived Pelagian teaching, “collectis itaque centum decem et octo episcopis”, a hundred and eighteen bishops gathered. Rhygyfarch was son of Sulien, bishop of St Davids, and wrote while the see was under Norman pressure to submit to Canterbury.

Read that as a rule and it is heroic asceticism. Read it as a description and it is a famine list. The cattle are gone, so the men pull the plough. The grain is short, so it is weighed out by body and by age. What little is better goes to the weakest first. That is not a monastery inventing hardship for the good of its soul; that is a monastery surviving one, with a whole country outside the wall doing the same and nobody to write it down. Five hundred years later the hardship has become the holiness, and the catastrophe has vanished inside the virtue, which is what happens to a catastrophe when the only people who can write are the ones who need a saint.

And mark which way that reading runs, because it runs the same way every time. Rhygyfarch’s Life is a partisan document composed five hundred years after its subject, by an interested party, to win a jurisdictional fight, and the establishment reads it as history. Iolo’s transcripts were made from manuscripts that were in his hands, and the establishment reads them as forgery. The distance from the source is not the variable. The interest of the writer is not the variable. There is only ever one variable, and we have been naming it from the start.

And there is a harder question in that Life than the food, because the same document tells us exactly what made him. Rhygyfarch’s David does not become the saint of the Britons by the plough-traces or the salted herbs. He becomes it at Llanddewi Brefi, at a synod called for one purpose. Pelagiana heresis sue obstinationis nervos, veluti venenosi serpentis virus, intimis patrie compaginibus inserens, reviviscebat, the Pelagian heresy was reviving, working the sinews of its obstinacy into the innermost joints of the country like the venom of a poisonous serpent. A hundred and eighteen bishops are assembled, with an innumerable multitude of presbyters, abbots, kings, princes, laymen and women, until the crowd covers all the surrounding ground. The earth swells under him into a hill, he is heard to the back of it, and then comes the sentence that matters: heresis expellitur … Deinde omnium ore benedictus atque magnificatus, cunctorum consensu episcoporum, regum, principum, optimatum, et omnium ordinum tocius Britannice gentis, archiepiscopus constituitur, nec non civitas ejus tocius patrie metropolis dedicatur, the heresy is expelled; thereupon, blessed and magnified by every mouth, by the consent of all (of bishops, kings, princes, nobles, and every order of the whole British people) he is made archbishop, and his city is consecrated the metropolis of the whole country. Rhygyfarch does not leave the connection to be inferred. He supplies it himself, in one word, and then names who paid: deinde, thereupon; cunctorum consensu, by the consent of all, the same assembly that had just watched him do it. The expulsion and the elevation are not two unrelated events in that text. The second follows from the first in the writer’s own word for it; a reader may take deinde as sequence or as payment, and it is read here as payment, as the two stand together in the Life.Rhygyfarch, Vita Sancti David, cc. 49–53; Latin and English in W. J. Rees, ed., Lives of the Cambro British Saints (Llandovery: Welsh MSS Society, 1853), Latin at 136–139, English at 439–442. The synod of Brefi is conventionally placed in the middle of the sixth century. No annal names it or gives it a year: the Breviate text of the Welsh Latin annals records a Synodus victorie apud britones, a synod of victory among the Britons, just before the death of Gildas, and the Cottonian chronicle a Synodus urbis legionum ordinata a sancto david, the synod of the City of the Legions, in a span its editor dates 553–576 (Henry Gough-Cooper, ed., Annales Cambriae A, B and C in Parallel, Bangor, 2016, annal b597 and the Cottonian text before a114). The Life is the only witness to Brefi by name. The Latin runs: heresis expellitur, sanis pectoribus fides roboratur; omnes consentiunt… Deinde… cunctorum consensu episcoporum, regum, principum, optimatum, et omnium ordinum tocius Britannice gentis, archiepiscopus constituitur, and the see of Mynyw is made tocius patrie metropolis. These are two sentences and not one; the second opens on deinde, thereupon. The elevation is not merely juxtaposed with the expulsion but consequent upon it, and carried by the stated consent of the assembly that had just witnessed it. The whole metropolitan claim that Rhygyfarch is writing in 1090 to defend rests on the expulsion he has just narrated.

So ask what was expelled. Pelagius was a Briton, and the first thinker these islands put into the European record. What he held is not obscure and was never obscure: that a man answers for his own acts; that guilt is not transmitted at birth; that no other man’s fault stands between a person and his own conduct. That is the exact refutation of corruption of blood, the doctrine of English treason law that a father’s condemnation poisons his children unborn, which we will meet at the heart of the attainder.See Y Dull Cymreig, ¶508. It is also, precisely, the doctrine that makes a church unnecessary as the broker of a man’s standing. That is why it could not be allowed to stand. And the machinery used on it is in the word: heresis, Greek hairesis, a choosing, which becomes a crime only inside a system that has already ruled there are exactly two things to choose between.That system is taken apart in Y Croesholiad, ¶162. Brefi is the first time in the record it is run on this island, and it is run by Britons on a Briton.Pelagius, c. 354–418; he carried the argument from Britain through Rome and Carthage to Jerusalem, and was condemned in 418, at Carthage and by Rome together, and again at Ephesus in 431. Almost nothing he wrote survives except inside the quotations of the men refuting him, together with his commentary on the epistles of Paul, the ordinary fate of the losing side of a doctrinal case, and the same evidential position in which the Britons’ material keeps turning up. Britain held to the teaching stubbornly enough that Germanus of Auxerre was sent across to put it down in 429, and came a second time about 445. The man himself is taken up again at Y Ceidwad a'r Orsedd, ¶411. The stonemason wrote the same rule from the other side, of power where Pelagius had written of guilt, in a draft for the preface to his Poems that he left out of the book in 1794: “I care not to what titles any one is born, but to the power none can be born. Power can never be the birthright of any.”NLW 21387E, no. 11.

Now put the date back beside the weather. The synod belongs to the same middle decades of the sixth century as the failed light, the failure of bread, and an emperor in Constantinople legislating which versions of their own scriptures the Jews of his empire might read in their own synagogues. Brefi is that operation at the western edge of the world, and turned inward. What Chester would finish with a sword two generations later, Brefi had already begun by argument, and the British church did it to itself. The independence of the British church was not lost in one blow from outside. It was prepared from inside first, by a synod that made obedience the test and made the man who enforced it archbishop; and the reward has been read as holiness for nine hundred years.

Whether Dewi Sant did any of this is a separate question, and the honest answer is that the only witness is Rhygyfarch, writing five hundred years later to win a jurisdictional fight, and we have just established what that testimony is worth. So take it either way. Either the saint of Cymru made his name expelling the teaching of the one Briton who ever told this island that a man owns his own acts, or a Norman-era propagandist invented that expulsion as the founding charter of his father’s see, because in 1090 the crushing of a heresy was the best title to a metropolitan claim that could be had. Both readings convict somebody. Without that doctrine there is no answer to an attainder, which convicts a man’s children for his act, nor to a charge of forgery passed down from one accuser to the next.

This is the company the establishment keeps when it puts a poet in the dock for the crime of his imagination. It is not good company. We are the appeal.

6. Y Celwydd

The Lie128 Pinkerton. 129 The Gothic doctrine. 133 Turner’s answer. 137 Morris-Jones concedes, 1918. 139 Spenser. 140 Ware’s answer.

The word forgery has a history of its own, and it is older than the charge against Iolo. The attack came first. In October 1793 the Critical Review, noticing William Owen's Heroic Elegies of Llywarch Hen, the book that carried Iolo's account of the bards, went after the Triads in print: "The Triades, we look upon as a fabulous authority … that weak production. It is indeed singular, that the Welch and Irish antiquaries should continue such a lax mode of writing, and vague references to manuscripts of uncertain ages."The Critical Review, or, Annals of Literature, New Arrangement, vol. 9 (London, October 1793), p. 169. That was months before the volume that carries his provenance. So the provenance, always read as a man volunteering his sources unprompted, turns out to be a man under public accusation, answering in the open. And he answered by naming names (including, in Latin and in print, the man he believed was behind it: "Aut Pinkerton, aut Diabolus") either Pinkerton, or the Devil. John Pinkerton, the Scottish antiquary whose published position was that the Celts were a separate and inferior stock, incapable of the civilisation their own monuments recorded.Iolo quotes the notice (“a weak production”, “such a lax mode of writing”) and answers “thou, Critical Reviewer (aut Pinkerton, aut Diabolus)” in the second volume of his Poems, Lyric and Pastoral, 1794, in the account of the Triads where the provenance statement stands. For the doctrine Iolo was answering, see Pinkerton, A Dissertation on the Origin and Progress of the Scythians or Goths (1787) and An Enquiry into the History of Scotland (1789), where the Celts are held to be a distinct and inferior race. Iolo’s “Aut Pinkerton, aut Diabolus” names the suspected hand behind the review. And Pinkerton had already been answered, in the very book the review was attacking. The front of Pughe’s Heroic Elegies carries an unsigned footnote about an antiquarian who fits him exactly. It says this man was born where he could claim to be a Goth, and so “pronounced the inhabitants of other parts, who were made out to be Celts, as by nature an inferior race of men; and that they spoke a jargon so rude and confined, as must be inadequate to express ideas truly Gothic”; and that he had, “Cromwell-like, assumed unlimited authority to impose dogmas of his own invention”. Its answer was the language itself: Cymraeg has “above a hundred thousand words, regularly formed from monosyllabic roots”. So the order runs like this. The book said that the Celts were being written off as an inferior race. The review then called the book’s sources fabulous. And Iolo, the year after, named the man he believed was behind the review.William Owen [Pughe], The Heroic Elegies and Other Pieces of Llywarç Hen (London, dated 1792), pp. xxi–xxii. The footnote names no one; the identification with Pinkerton is ours, from Pinkerton’s own words quoted below. It stands at the end of Pughe’s own account of Llywarch, on the page headed with that account’s title, not in the “Sketch of British Bardism” that follows and is given to Iolo (Jenkins, Bard of Liberty, p. 205); and its “above a hundred thousand words” is the claim of Pughe’s own Dictionary, which was advertised as containing “above 100,000 words”. It is most probably Pughe’s, who wrote to Iolo in 1802 of the day “when Pinkerton and his disciples will be in the shades of oblivion”. It is not put in Iolo’s mouth here. He had grounds. The year before, the same journal had taken Pinkerton's part by name against a critic of his Dissertation: "The general acquiescence alone of the learned, respecting the Dissertation on the Scythians, ought to have taught Mr. Webb the modest opinion, that he was in the wrong."Critical Review, New Arrangement, vol. 6 (October 1792), p. 132, reviewing Webb’s Analysis of the History and Antiquities of Ireland. The defendant named his accuser, and the doctrine his accuser wrote from, where anyone could read it. In the two centuries since, none of the prosecution’s books we have read quotes it.

Here it is, from his own pages. In 1787, in a dissertation on the Goths, Pinkerton set down what the Celts were: "This must be the case in all savage tongues, which must be poor and confused. But the Celtic, i will venture to say, is of all savage languages the most confused, as the Celts are of all savages the most deficient in understanding. Wisdom and ingenuity may be traced among the Samoieds, Laplanders, Negroes, &c. but among the Celts, none of native growth."John Pinkerton, A Dissertation on the Origin and Progress of the Scythians or Goths (London, 1787), p. 102. The lower-case “i” is his own habit throughout. In the same paragraph he closed the study of their language: "Enough of Celtic etymology! let us leave it to candidates for bedlam, and go on."Pinkerton, Dissertation (1787), p. 102. Ten pages earlier he had made the condition permanent: "they are savages, have been savages since the world began, and will be for ever savages while a separate people; that is, while themselves, and of unmixt blood."Pinkerton, Dissertation (1787), p. 92. Two years later he gave the cure: "The Celts being indeed mere savages, and worse than the savages of America, are remarkable even to our own times for a total neglect of agriculture themselves, and for plundering their neighbours. The Irish Celts, Scotish Celts, and Welch Celts, have all a like claim to this character; and when it begins to pass away, it is only a sign that by intermarriages the Gothic blood begins to exceed the Celtic: and that the Celts are no longer Celts, tho so accounted."Pinkerton, An Enquiry into the History of Scotland Preceding the Reign of Malcolm III (London, 1789), vol. I, p. 172. A people incapable by blood, and curable only by ceasing to be itself. That is the doctrine, and it should carry his own word: the Gothic doctrine. It is not a finding about any manuscript. His Goths were every people he admired: “the Thracians, Illyrians, Greeks, Italians, Germans, Scandinavians, were all Scythæ, or Goths.”Pinkerton, Dissertation (1787), Part I, ch. IV, p. 52. That takes in the Saxon and the Angle out of Germany, and the Dane, the Viking and the Norman out of Scandinavia: every people that ever came to this island with a sword, gathered under one name and set over the Briton. This book keeps his word for them, and uses it as he never meant it to be used. The Cymry never needed it. Their chroniclers named each people that came for what it was. The English were Saeson. The Norse were Llychlynwyr, and y Cenhedloedd Duon, the Black Gentiles, to whom Maredudd ab Owain paid a penny for every person in 988–989, the year after Llanbadarn, Mynyw, Llanilltud, Llancarfan and Llandudoch were laid waste. The Normans were y Ffreinc, the French. And any of them who came burning were paganiaid, the heathen: in the Brut, St Garmon orders the Britons to drive out “y paganyeit saeson”, the heathen Saxons.Brut y Tywysogion, in The Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales, 2nd edn (Denbigh, 1870), year 987–989 and 1072–1074: “ac y diffeithawd y kenedloed Lan Badarn, a Mynyw, a Llan Ulltut, a Llan Garban, a Llan Dydoch … ac y talawd Maredud yn deyrnget yr kenedloed duon geinawc o bop dyn”; and “y diffeithawd y Ffreinc Geredigyawn”. In English, Thomas Jones (ed.), Brut y Tywysogion or The Chronicle of the Princes, Peniarth MS. 20 Version (Cardiff, 1952), s.a. 987–989 (“the Black Host”) and 1072–1074 (“the French ravaged Ceredigion”). The Latin annals call them gentiles nigri, and say the penny a head ransomed captives (Wendy Davies, An Early Welsh Microcosm, citing Annales Cambriae, p. 21). St Garmon: Brut Tysilio and Brut Gruffudd ab Arthur, Myvyrian Archaiology (1870), p. 579, variant B. And on the same page as the Samoyeds he set down his own rule of evidence, in capitals: "AUTHORITIES ARE FACTS IN HISTORY, and to argue against them is to lose labour, as we must return to them at last."Pinkerton, Dissertation (1787), p. 102. He used it to prove that the Germans were not Celts. Watch what became of it when the authorities were Britons.

When they were Britons, he did not examine them. He dismissed them in passing. In 1789, in a footnote on Urien, king of Cumbria, in whose court "flourished the three great Bards Taliesin, Aneurin, and Llywarch Hen", the whole of their poetry was disposed of in four sentences: "Evans gives specimens of their poetry; and they are all in rime, in the same form with those he gives of the 13th century! It was a common trade with the bards to forge poems in the names of celebrated prædecessors; and these pretended pieces are palpably of the Eleventh and Twelfth centuries. Was Mr. Evans ignorant that rime was not used till a late period? That Mr. Gray should be imposed on by such pieces would be surprizing, did not all know that historic Antiquities are not studied in Britain."Pinkerton, Enquiry (1789), vol. I, pp. 96–97, note h, read from the page images. The Evans is the Revd Evan Evans (Ieuan Fardd), Some Specimens of the Poetry of the Antient Welsh Bards (London, 1764); the Gray is Thomas Gray, whose odes from the Cymraeg, printed in his Poems of 1768, were made from Evans’s book. The next year, in the preface to his edition of Barbour's Bruce, all Celtic poetry was set aside inside a parenthesis, on the way to something else: "the Celtic, and Finnish, concerning whose poetry all we know at present is, that what some regard as ancient is certainly very modern."John Pinkerton, ed., The Bruce; or, the History of Robert I. King of Scotland, by John Barbour (London, 1790), vol. I, preface, p. xi. Two pages on, having argued that rhyme came late into Europe, he closed the Britons’ case in a sentence: "Whence they who believe in the riming Welch poetry, ascribed to Taliessin and other bards of the sixth century, may enjoy their own credulity."Pinkerton, ed., The Bruce (1790), vol. I, preface, p. xiii. In a note to the same volume Arthur went the same way. "Arthur is now known to be a non-existence"; the chapter of Nennius that names him is "an addition"; "Arthur was the Fingal, the Roland, of Wales", Fingal being the hero of Macpherson's Ossian, the most notorious literary fabrication of the age.Pinkerton, ed., The Bruce (1790), vol. I, p. 26, note to Book I, v. 549. An ancient authority is a fact in history when it speaks of the Goths. When it speaks of Arthur, it is an interpolation. Not one line of Cymraeg was examined in any of it. And three years before, in 1786, the same man had confessed in print that the “Second Part” of the Scots ballad Hardyknute, published by him in 1781 as old, was his own work (see Y Ffeil I). The doctrine was in print years before the charge, and the charge followed the doctrine. Four years later the stonemason printed an Arthur of his own, and it was neither Pinkerton’s nothing nor Geoffrey’s romance. In a note to his Poems of 1794 he set Geoffrey of Monmouth’s fables aside, made Arthur a son of Meurig, king of Morgannwg, chosen to lead the British armies against the Saxons, on the word of the old register of Llandaf and the British books of pedigree, and closed: “This opinion, however, will have no great weight with some Welshmen, who love their own nation and country better than truth.”Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (1794), vol. I, p. 195 (note on Arthur, to “To Ivor the Liberal”).

Ten years later the word was said outright, first in private. On 6 September 1799 Pinkerton wrote to Malcolm Laing to praise his dissertation on Ossian, and added: “M‘Pherson did well to build his Erse forgery without rhyme, which was not known in Europe till about the ninth century. (The Welch pieces attributed to Taliessin, &c. &c. are mere forgeries, as may be proved from this circumstance alone.)” One circumstance, and no manuscript read.Pinkerton to Malcolm Laing, Odiham, Hants, 6 September 1799, in The Literary Correspondence of John Pinkerton, Esq., ed. Dawson Turner (London, 1830), vol. II, pp. 91–2; its index: “Taliessin, the Welsh poetry attributed to him a forgery”. Nothing in either volume of the correspondence, nor in Laing’s edition of The Poems of Ossian (Edinburgh, 1805), withdraws the charge or answers Turner’s Vindication of 1803. In January 1800 the Critical Review, the journal that had gone after the Triads in 1793, reviewed Sharon Turner's History of the Anglo-Saxons, and found its "most extraordinary feature" to lie "in blending the dubious credit of certain Welch poets, parts of whose works (or pretended works) have been recently published, with the indubitable and sacred sources of English history."The Critical Review, or, Annals of Literature, vol. 28 (London, January 1800), p. 20. Turner had written, "I honour the veracity of the Welch bards, and admit their facts into history"; the reviewer quoted it as proof of his credulity.Critical Review 28 (January 1800), p. 20. He opened his own case with a disclaimer: "nothing can be more remote from our ideas than any kind of prejudice against the Welch nation, language, or literature."Critical Review 28 (January 1800), p. 21. On the next page he charged the whole order of bards with fraud for money, on no evidence but his own word: "as we may affirm, that the bards were never celebrated for their strict regard to morality, he who suspects that a more illaudable species of imposition, and the lust of gain, sometimes operated on such occasions, will not be found too severe a censor."Critical Review 28 (January 1800), p. 22. Then the verdict: "the use of rhyme presents mathematical demonstration that those poems are glaring forgeries"; and at the close, "we may conclude with mathematical certainty that they are modern fabrications. They may therefore repose under the grey stone of Ossian."Critical Review 28 (January 1800), pp. 22, 24. The same year Malcolm Laing, in the dissertation against Ossian that he annexed to his History of Scotland, ended a footnote on rhyme with the Cymraeg: "In Welsh poetry it was unknown to Giraldus Cambrensis in the twelfth century, a sufficient proof that the rhymes of Taliesan and the Welsh bards are a more recent forgery." The authority he cites, one line above in the same note, is "Pinkerton's Pref. to Barbour."Malcolm Laing, The History of Scotland (London, 1800), vol. II, p. 436, note 54, read from the page image; “Taliesan” is his spelling. Turner quotes the sentence in his Vindication (1803), p. 265 n. That is the word forgery, laid on Taliesin by name and on the British bards as a class, in 1800, and by its own footnote it rests on Pinkerton.Y Maen, iii. “Under the grey stone of Ossian”: their stone, not his, another man’s grave, made to hold a nation’s poems. They lean their weight on the stone.

The review is unsigned. The man it attacked named its author in print. The genuineness of the poems, Turner wrote in 1803, "has been publickly impeached by Mr. Pinkerton in his preface to Barbour, and in a Review (not distinguished by the urbanity of its style or the correctness of its criticism) of my Anglo-Saxon History, published in the Critical Review for January, 1800."Sharon Turner, A Vindication of the Genuineness of the Ancient British Poems of Aneurin, Taliesin, Llywarch Hen, and Merdhin (London, 1803), preface, p. iii. The review bears him out. It sets aside the two accounts of how rhyme began, the Saracens of Sicily and the Italian monks, as "the only opinions which now divide the learned on this subject"; Pinkerton's preface of 1790 had called them "the only two opinions, which now divide the literati upon this subject."Critical Review 28 (January 1800), p. 22; Pinkerton, ed., The Bruce (1790), vol. I, preface, p. xiii. So two men, answering two unsigned attacks in the same journal, named the same hand: Iolo, in Latin, in 1794, and in 1803 an English historian whose own book had been savaged. He was no stranger to the evidence of the Britons: in 1801 the editors of the Myvyrian Archaiology, Iolo among them, had thanked him among "those learned men, who have kindly imparted advice, and who have encouraged the appearance of the Welsh Archaiology before the world."The Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales, vol. I (London, 1801), The General Advertisement, p. vi. The Llundain Cymry named him in private. Of Turner's book and a second defence published the same year, William Owen Pughe wrote to Iolo in December 1802 that they heralded "the dawn of a splendid day of Cymbrian lore, when Pinkerton and his disciples will be in the shades of oblivion."William Owen Pughe to Iolo Morganwg, 9 December 1802, The Correspondence of Iolo Morganwg, vol. II, p. 446. The second defence is Peter Roberts, Sketch of the Early History of the Cymry, or Ancient Britons (1803). Pinkerton had written of the day the Gothic blood would exceed the Celtic. Iolo, in his own notebook, set the man down as a Goth who "loves to drink Celtic blood out of the skull of an enemy."NLW MS 13097B, p. 287.

And the charge was answered, on the evidence, within three years. Turner put the poems to the tests any court would put. Where had they come from? Not, like the finds of Chatterton and Macpherson, from one man's lucky discovery: "No friendly chest—no ruinous turret—no auspicious accident—has given them to us. No man's interest or reputation is connected with their discovery." They had lain for centuries in the manuscripts, neglected by the very people who kept them, and "Such indifference as this, about documents so curious, never yet has attended any forgery."Turner, Vindication (1803), pp. 5–6: he names “Chatterton and Macpherson, or the Pseudo-Shakespear” on p. 5; the chest and the turret are on p. 6. Who gained by them? The warriors of the Gododdin "form part of no genealogies—They had not even been Welsh princes." No one forges nine hundred and twenty lines on a lost battle for the glory of nobody: "It must have been forgery for the mere toil of forgery if it was so."Turner, Vindication (1803), p. 152. And set beside Ossian, the poem proves itself: "the poem of Aneurin is one of the greatest humiliations of national vanity that could be exhibited. It celebrates a conflict so disastrous to the Britons, that very few escaped. It inflicts on them the disgrace of going drunk into the battle."Turner, Vindication (1803), p. 153. A forger makes a Fingal, who cannot lose. No one forges his own people's defeat. He named the standard he was applying, "A series like this, we should exact and search for, if Pindar or Æschylus had been put upon their trials"Turner, Vindication (1803), p. 85., and he asked the question no English reviewer had asked. Above a thousand manuscripts in Cymraeg survived, of "poems, romances, chronicles, grammars, treatises on music, agriculture and astronomy, theological, ethical and medical works", and they were "as little known in England, or in Europe, as the compositions of the Chinese." "With the writings of most of the nations on the continent we are familiar; but we have permitted ourselves to be ignorant of the literature of our neighbours, who are only parted from us by the Severn and the Wye. Has this been our fault or theirs?"Turner, Vindication (1803), p. 7.

And there is a simpler test, which needs no argument about verse at all. Macpherson was asked to produce his originals and refused. Chatterton was asked and refused, and was dead by his own hand at seventeen. Iolo was asked, and answered, books, owners, parishes, dates, printed while the owners were alive to be questioned. Macpherson, who refused, had a Prime Minister for his patron, grew rich, and was given a post in the colonies and a seat in Parliament. Iolo, who answered, was called a criminal.W. Llewelyn Williams, The Welsh Outlook, September 1921, p. 198: “Both Macpherson and Chatterton refused to disclose the originals: Iolo gave full details at a time when the owners of the MSS. were alive.” The two thousand pounds, Lord Bute’s payment of the printing costs and the appointment are his; he calls it consular, and the post was the secretaryship to the Governor of West Florida, which Macpherson held from 1764. 

The English school had a name for him by 1871. Ab Ithel’s biographer set the two sides down: Iolo was “according to one account, the sponsor and editor of these remains, and according to another, the author and sophisticator of them. He is regarded by the school of Nash and of Stephens as a sort of unvenerable old Chatterton, who imagined what he did not falsify.” He had already said what that school did to Britain: under its hands “her bards and annalists reduced to shadows, every manuscript being a forgery, and every legend a lie.”James Kenward, Ab Ithel: an account of the life and writings of the Rev. John Williams ab Ithel (London: W. Kent, 1871), p. 193; p. 18, of Thomas Wright; p. 197: “his learning, his enthusiasm, his simplicity, his prejudices, his poverty, his want of ambition, his indolence, his love of liberty, and proved detestation of falsehood, were all too strongly marked to admit of doubt”. The historian of France went to look. Henri Martin read Iolo’s papers at Llanover in 1861 and wrote to Ab Ithel: “In the face of these various documents, written by various hands, it can no longer be said that the theological Triads were invented by Iolo Morganwg, … as Iolo himself had notified with his invariable candid sincerity”; and of the two texts he compared, “Iolo had faithfully preserved them both in their integrity.” Adolphe Pictet of Geneva, who had translated the Triads, blamed the neglect on “une singulière indifférence des Anglais pour les études celtiques”.Henri Martin to Ab Ithel, 19 August 1860 and 12 September 1861, in Kenward, Ab Ithel (1871), pp. 202–4; Adolphe Pictet, Le Mystère des Bardes (Paris, 1856), p. 8, quoted by Kenward, p. 201. Read in the text of Kenward.

On Laing he was brief: "I am much surprised, that any gentleman of character, should speak so positively upon Welsh poetry without knowing any thing about it." Rhyme could not have been unknown to Giraldus "when Meilyr, Gwalchmai, Cynddelw, Owain Cyveiliawg, Llywarch P. Moch, David Benvras, and Elidyr Sais, all men of great genius and reputation, were using it in all their poems in Giraldus's life time."Turner, Vindication (1803), p. 265 n. And the Giraldus they leaned on said the opposite of what they made him say: "It was not poems with rime, which Giraldus called rude and rustic, but it was the poetry which was without alliteration."Turner, Vindication (1803), p. 266. The reviewer had printed the passage himself. What Giraldus praised in the British poets was the ornament "which joins in accord the first letters, or syllables, of the words", and he put it down not to art but to "long usage, which has grown up through many ages."Giraldus Cambrensis, Description of Wales, in the reviewer’s own translation: Critical Review 28 (January 1800), p. 23. In full: “But, above all rhetorical ornaments, they chiefly make use of annomination, and principally of that kind which joins in accord the first letters, or syllables, of the words … A Welch poet, therefore, would thus express himself: ‘Digawn diw da y vnic, Wrth bob crybwyll parawd.’” That ornament is cynghanedd. The witness called to prove the poems late had described the art that proves them old.

The last ground was taken away in 1918, by the man who would lead the prosecution of Iolo eight years later. Sir John Morris-Jones opened his study of the Taliesin poems by crediting Turner's Vindication as "the first substantial contribution to the discussion of the authenticity of these poems", "called forth by an attack on that work in the Critical Review of January 1800, and by the pronouncements of Pinkerton and Malcolm Laing against the genuineness of the poems." "Sharon Turner effectively exposes his critics' ignorance of the subject."Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, Y Cymmrodor 28 (1918), p. 13. Of the Gododdin: "there is no answer to Sharon Turner's simple statement that Aneirin's heroes 'form part of no genealogies'."Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 26, citing Turner, Vindication (1803), p. 152. And he showed that the old poems do not rhyme on the late European pattern at all. Their rhymes "are usual in Irish verse, and follow definite rules: the rhyming syllables end in different consonants, but they must be consonants of the same class, so that the rhyme is not a mere assonance"; and proest, half-rhyme, "often takes the place of rhyme in these poems."Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 124. Of their metres: "Some of the metres were obsolete in the twelfth century, and all are old; but what possible reason can there be for supposing that they are not older than the eighth century? Had not Gildas' praecones metres?"Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 226. And the Nennian collection that the reviewer said knew nothing of them names the bard: its "Saxon Genealogies", "our oldest and best authority", set Taliesin "in the time of Ida of Northumberland, 547-559."Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 224. A system of rhyme so old that no later Briton remembered it is a survivor's mark; a forger has nothing to copy it from. The same deafness undid Gwenogvryn Evans one hundred and fifteen years after the Critical Review, when he emended the poems to fit a rhyme he could not hear; of the rules he broke Morris-Jones wrote, "Of these things Dr. Evans had not dreamt."Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 124. Evans’s emendations are taken up in John Gwenogvryn Evans, ¶632 and Y Ffeil. So the first accusers of the British poems cannot plead the temper of their age either. They were answered in their own decade, in print, on the evidence, by an Englishman who had read it, and they did not withdraw. In 1918 the future prosecutor of Iolo himself recorded that the main points of Turner's Vindication "remain unanswered."Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 83.

And the word was in service, in exactly this office, long before anyone thought to point it at a Briton. In 1596 Edmund Spenser, the poet of The Faerie Queene, and an English undertaker planted on three thousand stolen acres in Munster, wrote A View of the State of Ireland (often called A View of the Present State of Ireland), a policy paper on how to break a Gaelic country. He had to deal in it with the inconvenience that the natives kept their own record, and he dealt with it in a single clause: their history rests on nothing but “bare traditions of times and remembrances of Bardes, which use to forge and falsifie every thing as they list, to please or displease any man.” There is the charge, entire, two centuries before Iolo, and note its form. Not that a particular bard forged a particular text. That forging is what bards do, as a class, by nature, which is the sentence that makes evidence unnecessary for ever afterwards.Edmund Spenser, A View of the State of Ireland (written 1596; first printed by Sir James Ware, Dublin, 1633), here from the 1809 London edition, p. 62. Spenser held Kilcolman, County Cork, under the Munster plantation, land taken from the people whose record he was in the act of voiding. In the same decade the Llundain stage was fixing the popular version of the same doctrine: Shakespeare’s Welshman is a parson with an accent, Sir Hugh Evans of The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597), whose learning is a joke about pronunciation. The bards’ own rule answers him point for point, down to his ‘any man’. In Cyfrinach Beirdd Ynys Prydain, the book of the bards’ craft that Iolo’s son printed from his father’s papers in 1829, it stands: Teilyngdawd y Beirdd Cymreig, yn amgen Beirdd o’r Byd, yw dywedyd cyfiawn a chyflawn wirionedd yn eu Cerddi: hynn oedd arfer ddiysgog yr Hen Feirdd; y rhain ni wnaent, er neb o’r Byd, Gelwydd a Thruth, na Hud a Thwyll yn eu Cerddi, the worth of the Welsh bards, beyond the bards of the world, is to tell just and whole truth in their songs; that was the unshaken custom of the old bards, and they would not make, for anyone in the world, lie or fable, nor illusion or deceit, in their songs.Cyfrinach Beirdd Ynys Prydain (1829), p. 28.

Three pages earlier in the same book, Spenser had already given the whole game away, because he could not resist a sneer at his own side. English scholarship, he wrote, is no better: it is “as impossible to proove” the English “Tale of Brutus, whom they devise to have first conquered and inhabited this land.” So the man who ruled that the bards forge everything also ruled that the English origin-story is unprovable invention, and exactly one of those two rulings was taken up by the institutions and carried for four hundred years. The Britons' claim to Brutus became myth, and the bards became forgers. The English went on telling the same story about the same Brutus for another century, and were never charged with anything at all, though the ruling that it was unprovable invention came from the same hand, in the same book, three pages away.Spenser, View (1809 edn), p. 59, the Irish origin-legends are no more incredible “then our vaine English-men doe in the Tale of Brutus, whom they devise to have first conquered and inhabited this land, it being as impossible to proove.” His own Faerie Queene (1590), II.ix–x, supplies Britain with a full chronicle of ancient kings from Brutus down, the same matter, in the same years, from the same pen, presented as national glory rather than as native delusion. And in the poem he tore the Britons’ history in half. Two history books are read side by side. The Britons’ book stops dead in the middle, at Uther, “As if the rest some wicked hand did rend”, as if someone had ripped the rest out, or the writer never got to finish it (II.x.68). The fairy book, the Queen’s own family, runs on complete, king after king, right down to the Queen herself (II.x.70–76). The same man who said the bards forge everything wrote the Britons’ history torn off, and the Queen’s whole. Iolo himself was harder on that story than the English were. Writing to William Meyler, the bookseller of Bath, of Owain Myfyr, President of the Gwyneddigion, whose favourite historian was Geoffrey of Monmouth, Iolo said: “he is no scholar, no judge of poetry, and will not thank Mr Davies for abusing his favourite historian Geoffrey, which I call in Welsh, Galfrid gelwydd têg”: Geoffrey of the fair lie.Iolo Morganwg to William Meyler, [?1 January 1792], Cardiff MS 3.99 (a copy in Edward Davies's hand); Correspondence, I, p. 447 ff.

And the answer to the charge was printed on the very same page as the charge, by the Irish antiquary who edited him. Against the passage Sir James Ware set a note citing Dr David Powel on Caradoc of Llancarfan: that “in Wales they preserved gentlemens armes and pedigrees.” Not songs. Not remembrances. Arms and pedigrees, the technical record of title and of descent, kept as a profession, by men trained to keep it. The accusation and its refutation have been sitting on the same leaf for four hundred years, and every edition since has faithfully reprinted both. The prosecution never had to suppress the answer. It only had to go on printing it where nobody was ever required to read it.Ware’s note on the same page: “Doctor Powell, in his notes upon Caradoc of Lhancarvan, saith, that in Wales they preserved gentlemens armes and pedigrees.” David Powel, The Historie of Cambria (1584), from Caradoc of Llancarfan’s chronicle. The Britons’ standing answer to the standing English charge, filed as an editorial footnote underneath it, which is where a great deal of what this case needed was found.

7. Y Porth

The Dock141 The prosecutors, latest first. 142 Thomas. 143 Constantine. 144 Jenkins. 147 The man he named did the same. 149 Griffith John Williams. 150 The bench of 1921. 152 Morris-Jones; Sir John Humphreys Davies. 155 Evans. 156 Rhŷs. 157 Ab Ithel. 158 Stephens, the first. 161 The court does not dispute the hand.

So turn from the poets to the court, and take them roughly in the order they joined the case, latest first, because the later you reach a wrong verdict, the less excuse you have for keeping it. Not everyone in this dock is here for the same thing. Three are here for the label they carry forward, not for malice; the Roll says which.

J. E. Thomas (2011). The verdict repeated. A Sir Benfro (Pembrokeshire)-born professor emeritus publishes a history of protest in Cymru and describes the defendant in passing: "a major liar and forger"; "arguably the best known liar of his generation"; a "poseur" whose Gorsedd worked "the deflection of the energies of the Welsh… away from the desperate situation of poor people towards a fantasy world of pseudo history and culture." What Iolo’s own papers record, the Pitt interview, becomes something Iolo "claims." The book offers no new evidence for the charge; it takes the 1926 verdict as settled and carries it into a new century. And the deflection charge is upside-down, as the book’s own pages show: it records that Volney's Ruins of Empire was running in Cymraeg by 1793, before the first popularly effective English edition, and that the translation was reprinted word for word in Udgorn Cymru, the same Chartist trumpet that carried Breiniau Dyn. It was Morgan John Rhys, the Baptist of Llanfabon, who printed it, in the fourth number of his Cylch-grawn Cynmraeg, the first political magazine in the language; and Iolo was writing to him while he edited it.Gwyn A. Williams, ‘Beginnings of Radicalism’, in The Remaking of Wales in the Eighteenth Century (1988): “In the fourth number, he printed chapter fifteen of the celebrated Les Ruines of Constantin de Volney … Its key chapter appeared in Welsh four years earlier than in English”; and “it was reprinted, word for word from his journal, in Udgorn Cymru, the Chartist newspaper of the 1840s.” His authority is his own ‘Morgan John Rhys and Volney’s Ruins’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, xx (1962). Iolo and Rhys: Jenkins, Bard of Liberty (2012), p. 81, “While Rhys was editor of the short-lived Welsh-language political quarterly Cylch-grawn Cynmraeg (1793–4), Iolo corresponded with him”; the letter is CIM, I, pp. 585–9. The man who wrote the debtors' petition, the tramroad exposure, the absentee-wealth tax and the marching-song of the first mass democratic movement in Cymru's history, each of them met later on, was not deflecting the energies of the poor. He was arming them. The energy was not deflected; it was delivered.J. E. Thomas, Social Disorder in Britain 1750–1850: The Power of the Gentry, Radicalism and Religion in Wales (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011), pp. 120–1: “a major liar and forger”; “arguably the best known liar of his generation”; the “deflection” thesis; “Iolo Morganwg claims he met him” [Pitt]. The self-refutation stands in the same volume: Volney's Ruins in Cymraeg by 1793, ahead of the effective English edition, reprinted in Udgorn Cymru in the 1840s. He named the work himself, in a letter to Hannah More, the evangelical writer whose name stands among the subscribers to his Poems: “I have commenced an odd kind of apostleship. It is to instruct those of my own class in the manners of the great, holding them up, not as examples, but as objects of detestation.”Iolo Morganwg to [Hannah More], [?May 1795], Correspondence, I, p. 756.

Mary-Ann Constantine (2007). The admirer. Where the first prosecutor used contempt, she brings fascination, and fascination is harder to answer, because it looks like the opposite of a charge. Her method turns Iolo into an archetype so absorbing that the forensic question, is it true?, quietly dissolves into isn't he extraordinary? The truth-question dies of admiration. She titled her book with his own motto, and in 2013, in the introduction she wrote with Dafydd Johnston, she set the Welsh writing of his radical decade in "prime Romantic-period territory", safely within Britain.Mary-Ann Constantine and Dafydd Johnston, “Introduction: Writing the Revolution in Wales”, in Mary-Ann Constantine and Dafydd Johnston, eds, ‘Footsteps of Liberty and Revolt’: Essays on Wales and the French Revolution (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), p. 4: “a wealth of the kind of marginal, non-canonical texts that used to disqualify Wales from ‘real’ Romanticism – pamphlets and sermons, letters and printed ballads – now make Welsh literature of the 1790s and early 1800s prime Romantic-period territory.” Her book is full of sympathy for the Cinderella nation; it does not give her back her shoes. We will put her method to the question at length, because it is the most sophisticated form the verdict ever took, and the most disarming, because it feels like love.

Geraint H. Jenkins (2005–07). The safe rehabilitation, the Iolo Morganwg project at the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, Aberystwyth, and the most revealing of the lot, because you can read the verdict in the project's own furniture. They gave him back his genius, his radicalism, all 1,230 of his letters in immaculate scholarly dress.Geraint H. Jenkins, Ffion Mair Jones, and David Ceri Jones, eds., The Correspondence of Iolo Morganwg, 3 vols. (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007), all 1,230 surviving letters, from the Iolo Morganwg project at the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, Aberystwyth. And then, in the flagship volume of that same rehabilitation, A Rattleskull Genius (2005), which Jenkins edited and introducedJenkins, ed., A Rattleskull Genius: The Many Faces of Iolo Morganwg, University of Wales Press, 2005, the publisher's own description frames him as "a remarkable stonemason, agricultural consultant, self-proclaimed heir to Wales's bardic tradition, autodidact, artisan poet and scholarly forger": five honest trades and one verdict, in that order, in a single sentence., the word is still bolted on, fixed to him even inside the praise: the introduction laments that "his astonishingly original gifts as a forger" have gone unacknowledged, and recalls how Morris-Jones, "discomfited by having been hoodwinked for so long by the forgeries of a humble stonemason," cast him as a Mephistophelean figure who "contaminated the literary tradition of Wales." Read the two words that carry Morris-Jones’s contempt, as Jenkins reports it, humble stonemason, and you have the whole class case in a subordinate clause. The project's own biography of him is filed, on its own website, under a single word: ffugiwr. The forger.Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, University of Wales, Iolo Morganwg and the Romantic Tradition in Wales, 1740–1918 project, its biographical section titled, in full, “The Forger” (Y Ffugiwr), iolomorganwg.wales.ac.uk/bywyd-ffugiwr.php (checked 2 October 2026). Not a chapter about the forgeries. The name given to the man's whole life. Everything restored except the one thing that matters, the presumption of innocence. A rehabilitation, with the conviction still on the title page.

The project's own head has since written, in Cymraeg, that had Morris-Jones had his way Iolo "would have been publicly hanged on Bryn Owen (Stalling Down) by Y Bont-faen and buried in a bottomless pit"; that the 1926 foreword was an odious thing, exulting that "the deceiver has been caught"; that Iolo was the most penetrating literary critic the Britons raised between the Middle Ages and Morris-Jones himself; and that the scholar who convicted him admired him more the longer he looked, and died with the life half-written, stopped at 1788. Four planks of this appeal, granted by the project’s own head; and the word is still on the door.Geraint H. Jenkins, Y Digymar Iolo Morganwg (Talybont, 2018): "Petai Morris-Jones wedi cael ei ffordd, byddai Iolo wedi cael ei grogi'n gyhoeddus ar Fryn Owen ger y Bont-faen a'i gladdu mewn pwll diwaelod" (p. 17); the 1926 foreword "rhagair anghynnes wrth-Ioloaidd" ("y twyllwr wedi ei ddal") (p. 68); "Iolo oedd y beirniad llenyddol praffaf a fagwyd yng Nghymru rhwng yr Oesoedd Canol a chyfnod Syr John Morris-Jones" (p. 18); of G. J. Williams: "Po fwyaf yr astudiai Iolo a'i waith, mwyaf yn y byd yr edmygai ei gamp" (p. 26), his volume 1 (1956) reached only 1788, and the work was never completed. Read in the book itself. Two hundred years on it is on the cover of the book made to honour him: The Honest Forger, new poems and photographs for Iolo Morganwg, 2026.The Honest Forger: New Poems and Photographs for Iolo Morganwg (2026), ISBN 9781068694615, published for the bicentenary of his death; the publisher’s listing (ffolio.wales, read 11 October 2026).

And his own flagship volume refutes the charge it carries. A Rattleskull Genius concedes, in its own pages, things the verdict needs to be false: that real "compositions by Dafydd ap Gwilym" were "preserved in the manuscripts" Iolo worked from, a genuine substrate, not a void filled with invention; that Iolo coined words openly, amlen, blaenor and canolog among them, words the language still uses, which is the work of a maker of language and the opposite of a forger; and that he was so poor that at times "only his considerable gifts as a mason saved him from the workhouse", a strange profile for a man supposedly growing fat on fraud.Geraint H. Jenkins, ed., A Rattleskull Genius (2005): Ceri W. Lewis, p. 76, “he had studied compositions by Dafydd ap Gwilym preserved in the manuscripts of Tomas ab Ieuan”; Richard Crowe, p. 322, “He sometimes coined terms openly in order to allow science, history, philosophy and other branches of learning to be treated in Welsh. Some of them, such as amlen (envelope), blaenor (elder) and canolog (central) have become an integral part of the modern Welsh language”; Jenkins, p. 22, “at times, only his considerable gifts as a mason saved him from the workhouse.” Read closely, the prosecution's own rehabilitation is a brief for the defence. He accounted for that poverty himself, in one of the drafts of a life he never finished, and put it down to his ambition as a mason: “In my trade I was always pushing forward. Having acquired what knowle[d]ge of one branch that I though[t] necessary, I would aspire to something higher. This passion kept me always poor.”NLW 21387E, no. 35.

And the man he named did the thing Iolo was convicted of. Pughe’s Llywarch Hen of 1792 is “festooned with references to alternate readings”, some marked as taken from the Red Book of Hergest. They are not from the Red Book. They match another man’s transcript, and the modern study that found it says Pughe’s “desire for authoritative substantiation led him to exaggerate the extent of his research”, and then excuses him: he “must have assumed”. In the same pages it calls Iolo, in passing and without argument, “the literary forger”.Rhys Kaminski-Jones, “William Owen Pughe and Romantic Rewritings of the Poetry of Llywarch Hen”, The Review of English Studies 73, no. 308 (2022), 100–120, section I and n. 1; and n. 20: the source of these readings “has long been a mystery to scholars, including the poems’ first modern editor, Ifor Williams”. A book of ballads in 2012 does it in a footnote, for no reason the page needs: “Iolo Morganwg, the famous Glamorgan literary forger”.Ffion Mair Jones, Welsh Ballads of the French Revolution, 1793–1815 (Cardiff, 2012), p. 61, n. 37. The 2023 edition of the Stanzas of the Graves, the same book that records him stopping at the garbled text, passes him three times without argument: a saint’s church “presumably invented by Iolo Morganwg”; “Iolo Morganwg’s fictions about Meiriadog must be ignored”; and, for his not copying more of the Beddau, a guess at his motive: “Quite likely the enthusiasm for Englynion y Beddau expressed by Lewis Morris and his admirers was enough to lead him to adopt a contrary opinion about these mostly northern texts!”Patrick Sims-Williams, The Medieval Welsh Englynion y Beddau: The ‘Stanzas of the Graves’ (Woodbridge, 2023), p. 161 n. 245 (“LBS III 504 notes a Llan Morfael, presumably invented by Iolo Morganwg”); p. 219 n. 621; p. 92. Ifor Williams, the first modern editor of these poems, had already said it plainly, in Cymraeg, in 1935. Pughe’s footnotes, he wrote, quote readings “o ryw Lyfr Du a Llyfr Coch”, from “some Black Book and Red Book”, that are not in the Black Book of Carmarthen and not in the Red Book of Hergest. In plain words: Pughe told his readers that these words came from the two most famous old manuscripts of Cymru, and they do not. He does it about sixty times in one book.Ifor Williams, Canu Llywarch Hen (Caerdydd, 1935), Rhagymadrodd, p. ix: “dyfynna o ryw Lyfr Du a Llyfr Coch ddarlleniadau nas ceir yn Llyfr Du Caerfyrddin nac yn Llyfr Coch Hergest.” The count is from the 1792 Heroic Elegies itself: its notes cite “Ll. Du” 37 times and “Ll. Coç” about 23 times. Williams caught him at it a second time. The Historia Brittonum names five early poets: Talhaearn, Neirin, Taliesin, Bluchbard and Cian. Pughe printed the list as six. He added a poet called Tudain, turned Neirin into Aneurin, turned Bluchbard into Llywarch, the very poet his book was about, and dropped Cian, all “heb air o esboniad”, without a word of explanation. Williams’s word for it is llurgunio: to mangle.Williams, Canu Llywarch Hen, p. xx n. 1, on Heroic Elegies p. xvii: “Gwthiodd Tudain i mewn; troi Neirin yn Aneurin, a Bluchbard yn Llywarch heb air o esboniad … a gadael Cian heb ei grybwyll.” The five names are in Historia Brittonum §62. Neither scholar calls Pughe a forger. Yet to say that an old manuscript holds words it does not hold is the whole of the charge against Iolo. When Iolo’s own colleague did it, it was “mangling” in 1935 and “exaggerating” in 2022. When Iolo was accused of it, it was forgery.

And not everyone was fooled even at the time: in 1911 T. Marchant Williams called the critics "insolent pedants" and gave their campaign its right nameT. Marchant Williams, “The Conspiracy against the Gorsedd,” The Nationalist 4, no. 36 (1911): 4, the charge named for what it was, in its own decade. The whole phrase is “the smirching touch of ungrateful and insolent pedants”; the article has not been seen here, and it is quoted as Geraint H. Jenkins quotes it, “On the Trail of a ‘Rattleskull Genius’”, in Jenkins (ed.), A Rattleskull Genius (Cardiff, 2005), p. 3 and n. 11., "the Conspiracy against the Gorsedd."

Griffith John Williams (1926). The forensic prosecutor, the man who built the case the others inherited. And the man who (we will show) printed the evidence that cleared the defendant, and convicted him anyway.

W. J. Gruffydd and T. Gwynn Jones (1921). The rest of the bench. Morris-Jones did not sit alone. The prize at Caernarfon that crowned the case was set, judged and awarded by the three of them together, and when nobody entered against the winning essay, the chief judge explained why: everyone who knew the subject, he wrote, understood that its author's position was anorchfygol, unbeatable. Both had appeared alongside the young prosecutor’s first findings against Iolo two years earlier, in a journal Morris-Jones edited.

Sir Vincent Evans (1921). The secretary, and the reason the verdict was private before it was public. He held Morris-Jones’s judgment of Iolo, dyn trwyadl ddrwg, a thoroughly bad man, in a letter written two months before the bench sat. Five years later the printed book thanked him for correcting its proofs. He had been secretary at the Eisteddfod table since at least 1894, with Rhŷs in the chair.

Sir John Morris-Jones (knighted 1918). The architect. The knight. The grammarian who pursued Iolo for thirty years and convicts himself out of his own published mouth. We will return his own grammar to him as the instrument of acquittal.

Sir John Humphreys Davies (1917). The man who set it going. Principal of Aberystwyth and editor of the letters of the Morrises of Anglesey, he set the literary tradition of Morgannwg as a research subject for a young graduate, and in that graduate’s own words, a’m dododd ar ben y ffordd, he put me on the road. That is where the case begins. What he himself thought of Iolo is not known: no statement by him on the subject has been found, and his own papers are unread.

J. Glyn Davies (1911). The technical case, from a man who never blamed Iolo. He was the first to print the words palpable forgeries against the Appendix poems. He laid them at the door of the bards of Morgannwg of the sixteenth century, two centuries before Iolo was born, and he never found the author either. The charge was taken up; the attribution was quietly changed.

John Gwenogvryn Evans (1852–1930). The Crown’s inspector, and the authority the professors still lean on. He held the manuscripts of Cymru in his own hands by government appointment, catalogued them, renumbered them, and in six million characters of print gave Iolo nothing but footnotes and asides, one of which concedes that he could read a difficult manuscript accurately. What he then did to the Book of Taliesin is what Iolo stands accused of. His counts are a hundred and five, and they are set out in full at the back, in Y Ffeil.

Sir John Rhŷs (1840–1915). The maker of the men. Professor of Celtic at Oxford, and bursar and then Principal of a college that lived in part on the tithe of Cymru. Every officer in this case was taught, examined, recommended, voted for or paid by him. He is not in this dock for a book. He is in it for a system.

John Williams "Ab Ithel" (1862). The decisive link, and the most telling, because he fired the shot thirty-six years after Iolo was dead. He published Barddas and pressed its contents as ancient, authentic doctrine, and the fabrication, if there is one in that book, was committed in the act of publishing, by a man Iolo could not contradict from the grave. Remember that name. We will need it when we ask the only question the prosecution never asks: who actually put these things before the public, and when, and over whose objection?

But Ab Ithel was not first. Thomas Stephens (1849) was, thirteen years earlier, in The Literature of the Kymry, the first book to doubt him in print. He is not in this dock by accident of scholarship: he is here because his case was bought, and we will show by whom and to what end when we reach the money behind the eisteddfod that made him.See Y Gadwyn, ¶269. For now, mark his name and his date (1849, not 1862) because the order matters: the chemist fired before the publisher did.

And here is the answer, and it is the most important fact in the case. Who put these things before the public, and when? Not Iolo. The great druidic cosmology he is damned above all for inventing, the doctrine printed as Barddas, he never published in his life. It was issued in Ab Ithel’s edition for the Welsh Manuscripts Society in 1862 and, after his death, in 1874John Williams [Ab Ithel], ed., Barddas, 2 vols. (Llandovery / London: Welsh Manuscripts Society, 1862, 1874), the druidic cosmology Iolo is damned above all for inventing, published 36 and 48 years after his death, over papers he never passed for the press.And the society that published it was no private press. Look at whose names stood on its title pages. At the head, Queen Victoria. Beneath her, the heir to the throne of Russia. Then Lord Llanover in the chair, and Cawdor, Dynevor and Carbery among the vice-presidents, the men who owned the ground Iolo had walked on. That is who was printed above the book that fixed the charge of forgery on a dead stonemason: a queen, a foreign prince, and his own country’s landlords. Kwame Nkrumah gave that arrangement its name a century later, and he was not thinking about Cymru. A country can be independent on paper, he wrote in Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism (1965), and keep every outward show of sovereignty, while the decisions are taken somewhere else, not least by the officials placed where they can take them. Cymru had no sovereignty left to lose and the Society never claimed any. What it had was a name in Cymraeg, a subject out of Cymru, and Britons doing the work, with two imperial houses printed over their heads. The shape does not wait for a country to be free before it appears. It only gets a name afterwards, and it took a president of Ghana to put a name to something that had been sitting on the front page of a book in Cymraeg since the 1840s. The Russian is the Czarevich, the heir, on the title pages of 1848 and 1853, and not the Emperor; Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte stood not among the patrons but as Ab Ithel’s dedicatee and a subscriber for two copies., thirty-six and forty-eight years after Iolo was in his grave. He never saw the book, never passed it for the press, never had the chance to say that is not what I wrote. The Iolo Manuscripts of 1848 were assembled by his son TaliesinTaliesin Williams [ab Iolo], ed., Iolo Manuscripts (Llandovery: Welsh Manuscripts Society, 1848), edited by Iolo’s son, and published the year after Taliesin’s own death., and appeared the year after Taliesin himself had died. The "forgeries" the twentieth century convicted him of went unproved until Griffith John Williams went looking for them a hundred years on, by which time the papers had passed from Iolo to Taliesin to the Welsh Manuscripts Society and Ab Ithel, and then into the locked Llanover cabinet for nearly seventy years, before reaching the National Library in 1916.

Hold what that means. The prosecution’s case rests on a failure of authentication and of provenance that no court would accept: they take a dead man's private notebooks, wait for his enemies to edit them into a posthumous theology, and then convict the corpse of the book he never lived to see printed. It is the equivalent of executing a witness for a deposition he did not sign. A signature on a manuscript a man wrote is evidence. A doctrine published over his name by other men, decades after his death, is an editor’s report of what a dead man is supposed to have meant, second-hand, from interested parties, about a witness who can no longer be cross-examined. Before anyone says "Iolo forged this," they must first prove that this is in Iolo's hand, and not his son's, or his editor's, or his enemy's. Strip out everything that fails that test, and most of the cosmology the verdict rests on walks out of the dock with him. You cannot hang a man for a book he never published. And a rule for this court, stated before any evidence is heard, because this court has to keep it too: where a motive is shown, it will be said; where only a benefit is shown, it will be called a benefit; and no conspiracy will be asserted where a monopoly, an incentive or a habit would do.

Say it plainly at the start, so no one waits to hear it. This court does not dispute the hand. Let the palaeographers keep every disputed leaf, for the hand was never the charge. We try the word laid over it, the word forgery, and the one question a hundred years never asked. A man forges for money or for fame. This man made no money by it and claimed no fame for it: the poems went out under another man’s name. The whole trial comes back to that missing motive.See Y Ceidwad a'r Orsedd, ¶411.

8. Y Croesholiad

The Cross-Examination162 The crime begins. 163 “Unclean hands.” 165 He was watched. 167 The four charges at their strongest. 170 The peach in the Red Book. 179 The coiner’s workshop. 181 The charge in its modern words. 186 The laudanum. 187 Constantine. 190 Two Greek words for other.

The law has had its say. Now the crime, Y Drosedd, and it begins with one man, who hunted a dead stonemason for thirty years and at the end of it convicted himself out of his own mouth.

Sir John Morris-Jones (Môn-born, Oxford-trained, Professor at Bangor, knighted in 1918) pursued Iolo Morganwg for the better part of three decades. He opened in 1896 with five articles in Cymru, an attempt, by his own later account, to trace dechreuad a thyfiant y twyll, the beginning and the growth of the deception. That description is his, not ours.J. Morris-Jones, five articles against the Gorsedd in Cymru (1896), the journal of O. M. Edwards. The articles themselves have not been read here, and as things stand they cannot be: the 1891–99 series of Cymru is not digitised. Welsh Journals serves the run only from 1900; archive.org holds the volumes for 1891 and 1892 and no others; HathiTrust has no full view. Checked 18 September 2026. What stands in their place is the articles as they were quoted at the time: two hundred and fifty-three reports in the Cymraeg and English press of that spring, many printing his sentences entire; his two interviews of 17 and 24 February 1896; his own summary of the five in Y Beirniad I (1911), pp. 66–72; and his verdict on them in the 1926 preface, p. xi, where he says that in trying to trace dechreuad a thyfiant y twyll he was “hollol ar gyfeiliorn”, completely mistaken. The interview of 18 February 1896 is quoted at length later in this section. He closed in 1926 with the preface to Griffith John Williams's case, tracing the whole edifice to "the imagination of Iolo Morganwg." And he ended that preface on the sentence that gives him away. It would be, he wrote, "an age or two yet" before the literature and history of Cymru were "clean of the trace of his unclean handsJohn Morris-Jones, preface to Griffith John Williams, Iolo Morganwg a Chywyddau’r Ychwanegiad (London: Cymdeithas yr Eisteddfod Genedlaethol, 1926), signed Rhagfyr 1926: “lân o ôl ei ddwylo halog ef”, clean of the trace of his unclean hands.", lân o ôl ei ddwylo halog ef. Mark the word he reached for. Not mistaken, not unreliable, halog, unclean: a defilement to be scoured out of the record. A scholar does not describe an error like that. An inquisitor describes a heresy like that. And when he believed the case was won, the register was not a scholar's either: "yn awr y mae'r twyllwr wedi ei ddal," he wrote, now the deceiver has been caught, the satisfaction of a man closing a prosecution, not weighing a question. Twyllwr, deceiver: the man he had caught had used that word first, and against higher judges. In Cerdd Cymru, the song he made for the gorsedd on Mynydd y Garth in 1797, he turned on the kings of the world: Lladd gwir yw’ch cais, a’i alw’n dwyll, / Yn chwedlau amhwyll ofer, killing truth is your aim, and calling it deceit, in foolish idle tales.Cadrawd (ed.), Gwaith Iolo Morganwg (1913), p. 19.

And watch what the verdict is then forced to do with the man, because his life will not fit the crime. An abolitionist who would sell no slave-grown sugar;His shop at 14 High Street, Cowbridge, advertised East Indian sugar “uncontaminated with human gore”: Elijah Waring, Recollections and Anecdotes of Edward Williams (London, 1850), p. 108. His biographer: “As far as we know, this was the first fair trade shop in Wales.” Jenkins, Bard of Liberty (2012), p. 125. a preserver who spent decades unpaid, copying libraries by hand before they burned; a man whose scruples cost him everything and who kept them to the end. That is not the shape of a career fraud, and the prosecution knows it. So, to hold the verdict together, Morris-Jones reaches for the last instrument of a failing case: he offers, as “the kindest theory”, that the accused was nad oedd ef yn foesol gyfrifol, not morally responsible for what he did.Morris-Jones, Rhagymadrodd to G. J. Williams, Iolo Morganwg a Chywyddau’r Ychwanegiad (1926), p. xvi: “a’r ddamcaniaeth garedicaf am Iolo yw nad oedd ef yn foesol gyfrifol am ei weithredoedd. Ond mater o hanes yw ei weithredoedd eu hunain”, and the kindest theory about Iolo is that he was not morally responsible for his deeds. But his deeds themselves are a matter of history. When a prosecutor must certify a man of proven integrity as mad in order to go on convicting him, it is no longer the man who is on trial; it is the theory, and the theory has just confessed that it cannot survive the facts about its own defendant. You medicalise the witness when you can no longer answer him.

The diagnosis collapses on one plain fact: Iolo was not imagining his enemies. He lived in a surveillance state that really was hunting men exactly like him, the Britain of Pitt's Terror, with habeas corpus suspended, the Gagging Acts passed, the treason trials running, and Cymru’s dissent a marked target.Iolo sat on the public benches at the Old Bailey on some days of the trials of 1794, and called himself “an eye and an ear witness” to Pitt’s lapse of memory at Horne Tooke’s trial: Iolo to Margaret (Peggy) Williams, 19 February 1794 [1795], CIM, I, 661. His wife Peggy had begged him: “For God sake … have nothing to say to them [i.e. Jacobins] leste you should repente to late”: Peggy to Iolo, 1 January 1793, CIM, I, 542–3. Iolo's own close friend, the Unitarian minister Thomas Evans, Tomos Glyn Cothi, was prosecuted, gaoled for two years, and set in the pillory at Caerfyrddin for the crime of a liberty song. Iolo himself was watched and his shop searched; he stood in the gallery of the Old Bailey and saw, as he put it, Pitt's perjury at the trial of Horne Tooke. He named the men laying traps for him, Edward Jones, George Guelph (George IV)’s harper, and John Reeves, founder of the loyalist informer network of George Guelph (George III)George William Frederick, king 1760–1820, whose reign covered the whole of Iolo’s working life, the war with the American colonies, the treason trials of 1794, and the gagging acts that followed them., "daily laying snares… to get me into Newgate, the Tower, Botany Bay," and he once escaped a Church-and-King mob of butchers with their cleavers out. And the mobs themselves were on the books. The first burning of Paine’s effigy in Cymru, at Caerdydd (Cardiff) in the Christmas week of 1792, was got up and paid for by the town corporation itself. The itemised bill survives in the borough records: three shillings for the effigy’s hat, seven-and-six for its shoes, a guinea “to making the efegi of Tom pain,” and five shillings to one Watkin Williams for serving as hangman, the magistrates asked to stand half the cost. The loyal crowd was commissioned, costumed and receipted by the authorities it appeared to rise for.The corporation’s itemised bill: John Hobson Matthews, ed., Records of the County Borough of Cardiff, II (Cardiff, 1900), 326–7; discussed, with the parallel burnings at Llantrisant, Llanymddyfri (Llandovery), Caerfyrddin and Talley in early 1793, in G. Marshall, doctoral thesis (University of Bristol, 2024), 235–41. A man with that life who reports being followed is not exhibiting a "persecution style"; he is reporting the weather. To file his fear under paranoia, you first have to delete the police. He had said what the police were for in his own song: Fel angau’n brathu’r ais, / I wisgwyr coron trais / Yw clywed hanner llais / Am freiniau dyn, like death stabbing the ribs it is, to the wearers of the crown of force, to hear half a word of the rights of man.Iolo Morganwg, Breiniau Dyn, stanza 4 (Charnell-White 2012, no. 18); the English is our own.

And he answered the charge himself, in his own hand, more than a century before they laid it. In a draft of 1801 he wrote, with the flat patience of a man who had heard it all before: "They call me a hot head… but I am not."Edward Williams, draft letter to “Rev’d Sir”, dated “Novr. 11th 1801”, signed “Edwd Williams”, heavily corrected; the line is in the postscript, foot left. The image is from the online edition of his correspondence, iolomorganwg.wales.ac.uk. The defendant pre-empted the court's diagnosis by a hundred and twenty-five years. The prosecution's cleverest move (call him a penboethyn, a hothead, not morally responsible, and his testimony need never be answered) turns out to be an insult he had already faced down while alive. They did not discover his madness. They inherited his enemies' slur and gave it a footnote.

But set the rhetoric aside for a moment, because beneath it there is a real forensic case, and a fair trial states the charge at its strongest before it answers it. Griffith John Williams did not merely call Iolo names; he went to the notebooks and built four concrete charges, and they deserve to be put plainly. First, the coinages: the strange words in the disputed Dafydd cywyddau (the -tardd, -adur and -aidd compounds, brwys and twys back-formed from brwysg and twysg) appear in only three places in the whole of Cymraeg: in Iolo's own grammar notebooks, where he writes out the rules for manufacturing such words (Llanover MS C42, his "nine rules for the formation of compoundsNLW, Iolo Morganwg (Llanover) MS C42, Iolo’s own grammar notebook setting out his rules for coining compound words (the -tardd, -adur, -aidd forms): the coinages appear there, in his signed poems, and in the disputed cywyddau, and, the argument runs, nowhere in the surviving old record."); in his own signed early poems; and in the cywyddau he ascribed to a poet dead since about 1370. Second, a single word, pesg, "peach", which, the argument runs, could not have entered Cymraeg early enough to sit in a fourteenth-century poem, and so must be a back-room invention. Third, the shared mistakes: anachronistic errors such as the misuse of yw'm and yw'th to force a cynghanedd, and the impossible form deffraw, recur across both the disputed cywyddau and Iolo's own signed verse, but never in genuine Dafydd, and a real old source would not carry one particular modern man's private habits of error. Fourth, and strongest, the surviving sources: where Iolo named the book he had supposedly copied from, and that book still exists, his extra lines are not in it. He cited "Llyfr D.H." for the Damon a Phyddias cywydd; it survives as Llanover B3, the poem is there, his added lines are not, and it is signed to Tomas Prys, not Dafydd o'r Nant.Dafydd o’r Nant is Dafydd Williams, vicar of Penllin, by Y Bont-faen: “Dafydd Williams, ficer Penllin, yn ymyl y Bont Faen, neu Ddafydd o’r Nant fel y gelwir ef”, G. J. Williams, “Traddodiad Llenyddol Morgannwg”, Y Llenor III (1924), p. 38. The Bryn Buga cywydd traces to Edward Lewis's book, Llanover B6: thirty-odd extra lines absent, the poem given to Siôn Mawddwy. The Greal cywydd, the "Cwrrach Hen," is British Museum Additional MS 14,969: the extra lines absent again.The manuscripts Griffith John Williams set against Iolo: NLW Llanover B3 (the Damon a Phyddias cywydd, signed to Tomas Prys), Llanover B6 (the Bryn Buga cywydd, to Siôn Mawddwy), and London, British Library, Additional MS 14,969 (the Greal, “Cwrrach Hen”), the strongest leg of the case, argued from sources that still exist. The source he hid behind exists, and it does not say what he said it said.

That is the case, put at its strongest, and it is worth putting at its strongest, because three of its four legs come away in the hand. The coinages and the shared errors both rest on a negative, that the words appear in no surviving old manuscript, drawn from a manuscript record that Thomas Cromwell's commissioners and the Civil War had burned, dissolved and scattered across three centuries; and absence from the survivals is not proof of absence from the lost, as Williams himself was honest enough to concede elsewhere in the same book. And deffraw is not one man's private habit at all: Middle Cymraeg wrote -aw where the modern language writes -o, and the Morgannwg copybooks Iolo spent his youth transcribing went on rendering the old ending as a matter of house style long after Gwynedd had modernised it. His signed poems and his copies of the medieval poets carry the same spellings because they passed through the same regional hand. What the prosecution reads as the fingerprint of a forger is the orthography of Morgannwg.Ab Ithel himself, writing on the Tywyn stone in 1850: “The plural termination in the early poems of the ‘Myvyrian Archaiology’ is most commonly eu, and not au, as at present. Nevertheless there are instances of the latter … It is necessary to bear in mind that our ancestors had no fixed or uniform system of orthography.” Archaeologia Cambrensis I (1850). The same operation had already been run on the Bible itself, and on the British church’s own copy of it, see Y Cwmni, ¶110: once a standard exists, everything older than it is reclassified as corrupt. The pesg argument is where sound-law wielded with northern over-confidence runs into its own reductio. The hostile objection can be stated precisely: if the word came from Middle English peske or Old French pesche, why does it end in a hard -g rather than preserving the palato-alveolar fricative of the French source? The answer is that it did not come from the fricative form at all, not from Old French pesche, nor from the -ch- that gave English peach. It came from the hard -sk- form, Vulgar Latin pessica, whether taken in directly or through the English peske that the Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru itself records, which is only that same Latin word in transit, both of them -sk-, both yielding Cymraeg -sg- by the identical law that turns schola into ysgol. The prosecution never looked far enough back. Cymraeg is saturated with the Mediterranean stratum, ffenestr from fenestra, eglwys, pont, llyfr, and pesg belongs to exactly that layer. The route is on record.

And the intermediate form is no Cymraeg convenience invented to save the case: Vulgar Latin *pessica, persica with its r assimilated to the following sibilant, is the common ancestor the whole of Romance requires, reconstructed, not inscribed, but converged upon independently by every daughter tongue; the same circumstantial case that carries every etymology in the dictionary. Italian pesca, Old French pesche (whence modern French pêche, and English peach itself) all descend from precisely that r-less form, every one of them by the same loss of the Latin r before the sibilant. Cymraeg pesg takes exactly that Vulgar Latin form, reaching the language, as the Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru records, through the Middle English peske that is only the same word in transit, and applies its own -sc- → -sg- rule; and the doublet is instructive, for where a source kept the r Cymraeg kept it too, persona gives person, not *pesson. The word a northern grammarian ruled impossible is the same word Italy, France and England were all forming, by the same sound-change, from the same Vulgar Latin, at the same time. Cymraeg is not the exception; it is the fourth witness. And it is no back-formation of Iolo's own: the lexicographer John Minsheu had already printed the Cymraeg pesk for the fruit, “a Peach, a kinde of fruit … Br. Pesk”, and pren-pesk for the tree, “Peach-tree … Br. Pren-pesk, à Pren, i. arbor, & Pesk, i. Persica”, in his Ductor in Linguas of 1617 (entry 9073 and the one after it), a hundred and thirty years before Iolo Morganwg was born. What Williams called an impossible form followed, step for step, the most secure phonetic sequence in the record. The hard -g is not an anomaly: it is precisely what the law requires when the word comes from Latin rather than French. To call pesg an impossible form is to make the piscis→pysg derivation equally impossible, and Williams never tried that. He simply failed to ask where the word came from before he declared it impossible.John Minsheu, Ductor in Linguas (London, 1617), entry 9073 and the entry after it; Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, s.v. pesg, for the Middle English peske.

Or they could have simply opened the Red Book of Hergest, compiled around 1400, found the medical recipes of the Physicians of Myddfai, and read §108: "Arall yw, kymer dyrneit o risc y persig wrth y dayar sech", take a handful of the bark of the peach near the root. They will all come out. A treatment for intestinal worms.Physicians of Myddfai, recipe §108, in Oxford, Jesus College MS 111 (Red Book of Hergest, Llyfr Coch Hergest, c. 1400): “kymer dyrneit o risc y persig wrth y dayar sech”, take a handful of the bark of the peach near the root; read in the Red Book’s text as transcribed in Welsh Prose 1300–1425, and the 1861 edition reads the same. Another early copy, British Library Additional MS 14912, has o’r risc and wrth y ddayar sech. Printed by John Williams ab Ithel, ed., The Physicians of Myddfai (1861), the same Ab Ithel who issued Barddas a year later: the prosecution’s own publisher put persig into print four and a half centuries after the Red Book, and one year before declaring the southern tradition invented. Critical edition: Diana Luft, Medieval Welsh Medical Texts (Cardiff, 2020), recipe 6/26. The page itself was read on the Bodleian’s images of Jesus College MS 111, f. 234v, col. 943, on 23 October 2026.

Three and a half centuries before Iolo Morganwg was born.

And mark the two shapes of the word, because a careful prosecutor will reach for the difference: the Red Book's scribe writes persig, the learned form with its Latin r still standing; the south's pesg is the same fruit worn smooth in the working mouth, a doublet, the word twice taken, once by the scriptorium and once by the orchard. The charge needs both forms to fail, and it answered neither: the Red Book proves the peach stood in the lexicon of Cymraeg three and a half centuries before Iolo drew breath, and the sound-laws prove pesg a lawful native shape for it. And should the prosecution ask why the orchard's form never reached parchment before the modern century, the question answers itself: the scriptorium wrote its own register, not the field's. The absence of pesg from the elite record proves nothing against it; it marks only the distance between the men who wrote and the men who grew, a mouth is not a manuscript, and most of Cymraeg lived its whole life without ever being let near vellum. Iolo went to the mouths. He told William Owen Pughe, his fellow worker on the Myvyrian, how he had gathered the language: “I have rambled over all Wales with all my ears open to every local word”.NLW 13222C, p. 162, Iolo Morganwg to William Owen Pughe, 15 February 1803.

And the recipe carries a double irony the prosecution never noticed. The Physicians of Myddfai were physicians to Rhys Gryg, prince of Deheubarth, at Dinefwr, persig survives in a text made under the patronage of the very throne whose dissolution this trial opened with. And when the corpus was printed in 1861, its editor was John Williams Ab Ithel, the man in our dock,See Y Porth, ¶141. one year before he issued Barddas. The prosecution's own publisher had already put into print, over his own name, the word that destroys the pesg charge. And the recipe he printed was a worm-cure, aimed, as it turned out, at the worm in his own coming argument.

The conduit for that vocabulary was not a medieval market-stall. Morgannwg was the Romanised garden of Britain: four centuries of Roman villa agriculture, followed by eight more of the great monastic granges (Llanilltud Fawr, Margam, Castell-nedd), where horticulture, law and letters were practised in Latin by Cymraeg-speaking cultivators. Its Latin was a living agricultural vocabulary, in the names of the crops, the tools, the seasons, the estates. The Britons did not need English to reach Rome. They had been talking to Rome since before there was an England. It was that world, the Britons’ own and no dark wilderness, that the illiterate tides of the Goth migrations arrived to dismantle, and that their inheritors, the northern standardisers, would finish by rebranding as primitive. The word pesg lived in that world, a direct Latin inheritance, for twelve hundred years before any northern grammarian decided it was impossible.

And the survival of that Latin-literate tradition into the modern era is not speculation. When Iolo set down, in 1779, Ieuan Brydydd Hir's testimony that within living memory the shepherds of the west could converse in Latin, he was recording the last memory of exactly that twelve-hundred-year Romano-British agrarian tradition. Not the tradition of monasteries and scriptoria (those Harri ap Harri had dissolved two centuries before) but the deeper, older layer beneath them: the Latin that had passed from villa to farm, from grange to cottage, carried in the mouths of the people who worked the soil. That is what the verdict erased when it pronounced pesg an impossible form in the south: not a borrowed word in an eighteenth-century study, but a word preserved for a millennium in a medieval orchard, by the very line of Latin-literate keepers the critics pronounced primitive. To call pesg a forgery is to have forgotten the garden. The northern academy forgot the garden. They were meant to.

But read back what their argument requires them to assert. First: that the word was forged, meaning it originated nowhere except an eighteenth-century study. That requires the entire Romano-British and monastic Latin tradition of Morgannwg to have left no vocabulary behind in the speech of the people who worked the land it ploughed. Second: that the south could only have met the continent through English, that a sea-facing, Roman-villed, monastery-run garden of a region had no route to Latin except via the English market-stall. Lay those premises out in a row and read them as a confession: an inventory of what the prosecution had to suppress in order to reach its verdict. The assumptions that make pesg impossible make twelve centuries of the Britons' civilisation impossible at the same stroke, and the prosecution never noticed, because the northern academy had already done its work: the garden was so thoroughly forgotten that even the men prosecuting Iolo could build their case on the rubble without knowing they were standing in it.

The Marcher contact argument. That Morgannwg had been under Anglo-Norman lordship since Robert FitzHamon's conquest in 1093, with the Bristol Channel carrying trade vocabulary to the same gentry houses Iolo copied from, is supplementary evidence at best; it was never needed. A grammar built on the northern literary record cannot legislate what words the south kept from Rome. And the coinages prove a maker, not a faker: the British bardic craft was generative to its roots: dyfalu, describing a thing by piling comparison on comparison, and the coining of new compounds were the art itself, and Dafydd coined too; a man who recovers the rules of that generation is reconstructing a system, not committing a fraud.Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, s.v. dyfalaf: dyfalu, sense c: “to make a simile or comparison … describe any object (horse, plough, ship, a maiden’s tresses, &c.) by means of numerous comparisons (an ingenious literary device in which the medieval ‘cywyddwyr’ revelled and excelled)”. Its other senses are to guess or imagine, and to mock. What is left, when the three are set at their true weight, is the fourth, the named sources that survive and do not contain his lines. It is the strongest-looking of the four, and it deserves an honest answer rather than a denial; but the honest answer is that even this never rises to proof. It must assume, first, that because his added lines are absent from one surviving copy, they existed in no book at all. Yet Iolo named his sources: the lost Morgannwg collections of Morgan Llywelyn, Siôn Bradford and Lewys Hopkin, real men, whose real books are gone, and which no one can now open to prove they did not hold the lines.

Absence from a book that survived is not presence disproved in a book that burned. Next, where the comparison was made, and in whose keeping: the drafts and collations that ground it lay nearly seventy years in the locked Llanover cabinet, in the hands of the very interest that wished Iolo discredited, unexamined by anyone who might speak for him.See Y Gadwyn, ¶269. And the surviving copies themselves are not sealed archival files preserved in a vacuum, but privately kept books that passed through a century of uncatalogued hands. No one can prove that the leaves of 1926 were all the leaves of 1780, and in an age when sheets were routinely lost, extracted, and sold out of private libraries, lines absent from such a book are a record of attrition, not a proof of fraud. And notice, last, that the finding was tested nowhere outside the circle that reached it, the prize that crowned it at Caernarfon in 1921 was set, judged, and awarded by Morris-Jones together with his two closest allies, W. J. Gruffydd and T. Gwynn Jones, and when nobody entered against him the chief judge explained the empty field: everyone who knew the subject, he wrote, understood that Williams's position was anorchfygol, unbeatable.Morris-Jones, Rhagymadrodd to G. J. Williams, Iolo Morganwg a Chywyddau’r Ychwanegiad (1926), p. xiv: “Ni ddaeth neb i’r maes yn erbyn Mr. Williams, am y rheswm syml y deallai pawb, a wyddai ddigon am y mater i feddwl am gynnig, fod ei safle’n anorchfygol”, nobody came into the field against Mr Williams, for the simple reason that everyone who knew enough of the matter to think of entering understood that his position was unbeatable. The same page gives the reason the prize was set: others “yn gwrthod yr unig gasgliad posibl”, were rejecting the only possible conclusion; “Am hynny”, therefore, the National Eisteddfod Association offered £40 at Caernarfon in 1921. A charge built on a negative drawn from burned books, resting on evidence the accusers held unwitnessed for two generations, and never cross-examined by a living soul, convicts nobody. It waits, like every such verdict, for its appeal. This is the appeal.

And consider their own governing image, because it convicts them when you turn it over. Morris-Jones, in his preface, described Williams walking into the National Library and finding himself megis yng ngweithdy bathwr arian drwg, as in the workshop of a coiner of false silver: the moulds, the tools, the pieces at every stage of their making, the Dafydd cywyddau "yn tyfu ac yn ymberffeithio dan ei law," growing and being perfected under his hand.Both phrases are Morris-Jones’s, in his Rhagymadrodd to G. J. Williams, Iolo Morganwg a Chywyddau’r Ychwanegiad (1926), describing what Williams found: p. xiv, “fe’i cafodd ei hun megis yng ngweithdy bathwr arian drwg, lle gellid gweld ei foldiau ac offerynnau ei grefft”, he found himself as in the workshop of a coiner of false money, where his moulds and the tools of his craft could be seen; p. v, “y mae cywyddau a briodolai i Ddafydd ap Gwilym ac eraill i’w gweled yma ar wahanol gyfnodau yn eu gwneuthuriad, yn tyfu ac yn ymberffeithio dan ei law”. It is a powerful picture, and it is meant to be damning. But look at it again. A coiner's workshop and a salvage-copyist's desk are, to the eye, the same room, both littered with drafts, variants, half-finished readings, the same text in three states at once. Stages of making and stages of restoring leave identical debris on the bench.Mortimer Wheeler set the discipline's first rule against exactly the prosecutor's error: “the archaeologist is digging up, not things, but people.” The image proves activity, not crime; and Williams chose the single reading of it that required a verdict. Archaeology reads a workshop floor the opposite way, and it has a named method for it: the chaîne opératoire, the reconstruction of the whole sequence of manufacture from its debris, the cores, half-struck flakes, rejects and duplicates a maker leaves behind. Faced with that litter the archaeologist does not cry fraud; he refits the flakes back to the core, recovers the very gestures of a mind at work, and prizes the unfinished debris precisely because it is unfinished.The chaîne opératoire (André Leroi-Gourhan’s formulation): standard practice in lithic analysis, where knapping debris is refitted to its core to recover the maker’s sequence of gestures, the working floor read as biography, never as fraud. Williams saw such a floor, one poem in three states, and dug up a thing, a coiner's den, where the method at his elbow would have dug up a person, a mind mid-making. The litter of making is the signature of a maker, not a faker. Set the other reading beside it, and the workshop is no longer a forger's den but a rescuer's desk.Alchemists were prosecuted as coiners for centuries: the workshops were furnished identically, crucible and mould and metal mid-transformation, and courts could not tell restoration from fraud by the mess on the bench alone.Alchemy's “gold” was never bullion. It was the symbol of matter, or the self, brought to its perfected state, the Great Work a discipline of purification written in metallurgical code because the code was safer than the doctrine. Newton's own alchemical papers, as Y Diffynnydd, ¶60 noted, waited two centuries to be read.

And mark what they said of the poems themselves. Morris-Jones calls composing the cywyddau "rhan fechan, a chymharol ddiniwed", a small and comparatively harmless part of a forgery he says Iolo spent "over forty years devising to deceive the country"; and Williams, in the very same book, grants the young poet "calon i deimlo anian," a heart to feel nature, verse that held its own against trained philologists for a century.Morris-Jones, Rhagymadrodd (1926), pp. v–vi: “nid yw cyfansoddi’r caniadau hyn a’u priodoli i hen feirdd ond rhan fechan, a chymharol ddiniwed, o’r ffug y bu ef yn ddiwyd am dros ddeugain mlynedd yn ei ddyfeisio i dwyllo’r wlad”, composing these poems and attributing them to old poets is only a small and comparatively harmless part of the forgery he was busy for over forty years devising to deceive the country. G. J. Williams, Iolo Morganwg a Chywyddau’r Ychwanegiad (1926), p. 3: the early cywyddau show him “nad bardd cyffredin, fel ei athrawon, mohono, ond iddo etifeddu yr hyn nad etifeddodd ond ychydig o’r hen feirdd, sef calon i deimlo anian”, no ordinary poet like his teachers, but heir to what few of the old poets inherited, a heart to feel nature. Forger and hero, in one book, from the prosecution’s own pen. A prosecution that must certify its defendant a genius in order to prove him a fraud has already lost its mind.

Take the prosecution's charge as its modern books put it, two of the forms in its own words, and put each to the test of plain logic.

“As in many of his forgeries he develops a core of genuine material into a new creation.”Dafydd Johnston, ‘Radical adaptation: translations of medieval Welsh poetry in the 1790s’, in Mary-Ann Constantine and Dafydd Johnston, eds, ‘Footsteps of Liberty and Revolt’: Essays on Wales and the French Revolution (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), ch. 9, pp. 172–3, said of Iolo’s English version of a poem of Dafydd ap Gwilym to Ifor Hael. That is the definition of every poet, every translator, every ballad-singer who ever lived. It is an innocent act fitted with a criminal noun. The deed described is craft; the word chosen is forgery. The whole conviction lives in the gap between the two, and the gap is rhetorical, not factual.

“Iolo was a great poetic forger who loved to hide behind various alter egos, but he never ascribed his work to another living poet.”Marion Löffler, ‘The “Marseillaise” in Wales’, in Mary-Ann Constantine and Dafydd Johnston, eds, ‘Footsteps of Liberty and Revolt’: Essays on Wales and the French Revolution (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), ch. 6, pp. 105–6, where it is the ground for giving one stanza of ‘Cân Rhyddid’ to Tomos Glyn Cothi. It is an admission dressed as a charge. A man who observes a rule has a code. He is a practitioner of a system he holds to be legitimate, not a thief, because thieves do not keep ethics. And note the circularity that turns the whole machine: they assemble the "forgery profile" from the attributions, and then use the profile to condemn the attributions. The evidence and the verdict are the same object, wearing each other's clothes.

"Romantic forgery", the genre that does the convicting. The argument runs: Macpherson forged Ossian; Iolo resembles Macpherson; therefore Iolo forged. That is guilt by association, promoted to a filing category. Resemblance is not evidence. The genre is the verdict, smuggled in as a shelf label, so that the substrate question, was there genuine ancient material under any of it?, is answered "no" before a single manuscript is opened, because the category has already decided it.The phrase is the title of Mary-Ann Constantine, The Truth against the World: Iolo Morganwg and Romantic Forgery (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007).

The diagnoses: alter egos, a persecution style, paranoia, madness. The genetic fallacy in a clinician's coat. A persecuted man's manuscript can be perfectly genuine, and Iolo was persecuted; he was a surveilled radical in a police state, not a fantasist imagining enemies. If you wish to prove a document false, produce the false document. Diagnosing the author's nerves is what you do instead of producing it, when you cannot. And when the attacks came he laughed at them. In November 1821, told that the young poets around Dafydd Ddu Eryri in Gwynedd, whose book of odes had carried the summons to Primrose Hill, were attacking him under the name of the Eryron, he wrote to Evan Williams, his publisher in the Strand, of “the bardlings of Snowdon, or ‘Eryron’ as they presumptuously style themselves”, that they “are spitting their venom at me. Poor devils! … I have always been more disposed to cheerfullness than to sullenness, and those ‘Eryron’ supply me with excitements to mirth and laughter rather than to anger or resentment.”Iolo Morganwg to Evan Williams, November 1821, Correspondence, III, p. 601.

And the tincture beneath the slur deserves one plain sentence, because the prosecution never risked one. Iolo took laudanum, for his asthma, through most of his adult life, in an age when opium was sold over every counter in Britain; the sceptic school itself has written the dependence up in full.Geraint Phillips, “Math o wallgofrwydd: Iolo Morganwg, opiwm a Thomas Chatterton,” National Library of Wales Journal 29 (1996), 391–410, the sceptic school’s own study of the dependence, entered here as the defence’s exhibit. What it has never written is the inference, because there is none to draw: the same age’s laudanum ran in Coleridge, in De Quincey, in Wilberforce, and no one voids Kubla Khan, or the abolition of the slave trade, on the chemistry of the man who made them. A drug explains a man’s nights. It does not compose cywyddau in a dead master’s hand, and it has never yet turned a copyist into a forger. The tincture is one more clinician’s coat on the same genetic fallacy.

And the novelist convicts the scholar. In her own fiction, All the Souls, set in the Breton ballad country, Constantine writes a folklorist who collects the anaon, the dead, and writes them upMary-Ann Constantine, All the Souls (Bridgend: Seren, 2013), her own novel, in which a folklorist collects the anaon, the Breton dead, and lets them speak. "in French to give it more authority." She dramatises the colonial move; she lets the dead speak on the page. In her scholarship Iolo's dead are not called. The generosity she extends to the Breton dead she withholds from the Britons, and the next paragraphs put the question of why.The split is a documented occupational pattern: James Clifford records the ethnographer who gives the native a voice in the fieldnotes and silences it in the monograph, The Predicament of Culture (Harvard, 1988).And the method here, reading a scholar's fiction against her scholarship, is itself established critical practice: Edward Said read Auerbach's Mimesis against its author's own philology in The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983). Testing whether the practice matches the theory is criticism, not ad hominem.

The same introduction calls Cymru "the Cinderella nation, misrepresented and overlooked", and then rescues it by absorption: the dangerous, ancient, sovereign claim is domesticated into a charming regional variant of a metropolitan movement; the edges are filed; Cinderella is admitted to the ball, but in a dress the rescuer chose, through a door the rescuer guards.Mary-Ann Constantine and Dafydd Johnston, “Introduction: Writing the Revolution in Wales”, in Mary-Ann Constantine and Dafydd Johnston, eds, ‘Footsteps of Liberty and Revolt’: Essays on Wales and the French Revolution (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), p. 2, of the “four nations” criticism of the Romantic period (England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales): “Of the four, Wales has been the Cinderella nation, misrepresented and overlooked.” To call Cymru the Cinderella nation while reading her oldest records only for what they say about Romanticism is a rare academic performance. Rescue that requires reclassification in the rescuer's terms is annexation with a kind face. And the leash on it is the bounded genuine core: she will grant, generously, that Iolo worked up real medieval material, precisely so that the question of an older, ancient substrate need never be opened. Concede the kernel you can control, and you foreclose the one you cannot.

And here is the fingerprint. Constantine knows that “forgery” is not a stable category: her own note sends readers to an essay titled "The Relativity of the Concept of 'Forgery'", and says her book "discusses a number of other European forgery debates." The Breton aristocrat La Villemarqué, whose Barzaz-Breiz (1839) one biographer treated as an extended imposture, its texts ranging "from tidied-up versions of actual songs to pieces wholly invented for the occasion," she and her co-editor call "cavalier" and "at best, extremely belated", and then follow the rediscovery of his notebooks to "a more nuanced understanding of the processes involved."Théodore Hersart de la Villemarqué, Barzaz-Breiz (Paris, 1839). Mary-Ann Constantine and Éva Guillorel, Introduction to Miracles and Murders: An Introductory Anthology of Breton Ballads (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2017), p. 10 (Francis Gourvil’s biography of 1960; “cavalier”; “at best, extremely belated”; “a more nuanced understanding of the processes involved”) and n. 31 (Gaela Keryell, “The Relativity of the Concept of ‘Forgery’”; and The Truth Against the World, which “discusses a number of other European forgery debates”). The words “it is not fashionable to praise either Percy or La Villemarqué” and “scientific folklore … as if there could ever be such a thing” are David Atkinson’s, in his Foreword to the same book, p. viii, not Constantine’s. For the viscount, forgery is relative, context-bound, almost a category error. Then she turns to Cymru’s stonemason who did the very same thing, worked genuine material up into new creations, and her title for him is flat and absolute: Iolo Morganwg and Romantic Forgery. So put the question the title raises: why is forgery relative in Brittany and absolute in Cymru? The texts are the same. The method is the same. The only things that change are the rank of the hand that held the pen and the nation that stood to gain a past. Forgery turns out to be a charge reserved for those a metropolitan scholarship has already decided do not get to keep their dead.

And there is one more word to put to this court, because the whole apparatus of otherness that has been used against this man rests on a distinction that English cannot make and Greek cannot avoid. Greek has two words where we have one. Allos is another of the same kind: one more of these. Another day, another loaf, another man. It adds, and it cannot exclude, to say allos is to say that the new thing belongs to the same family as the old. Heteros is the other of exactly two: the second of a pair, the one that is not this one. It divides, and it cannot help dividing, because it only exists by having something to be opposite to. Two men in a room are allos and allos. Two sides in a court are heteros and heteros. Nothing else in either word is different; but everything that can be built on them is.The distinction survives in English through borrowing only, and only from the divisive half: heterodox, heterogeneous, heterosexual, every one of them a word for a difference in kind. English took no working word at all from allos. The pattern shows in translation, too: at Joshua 4:9 the Greek of the Septuagint has Joshua set up állous, other stones, twelve more of the same, where the later standard Hebrew has no such stones at all. Origen, about 240, marked the place with an obelus, and the mark means one thing and one thing only: the two witnesses differ here. It is not a confession that something was added. Which stream moved is a question the mark leaves open, and the honest answer three hundred generations later is that we do not know. What we do know is what happened next: one of the two was made standard, and the other became the corrupt one.

Now watch what each word can be made to do. Build a religion on allos and you get no heresy, because there is no machinery in the word for it: another reading is one more reading of the same kind, and the tradition simply gets larger. Build it on heteros and heresy is inevitable, because you have already divided the world into two and named yourself the first half. Heterodoxia, the other opinion, is not a description of a belief; it is a position on a board with only two squares. That is the flattening. Every plural thing defended here, the many Latin Bibles before the one, the many bardic copies before the standard text, the three laws of Magna Carta’s clause 56 before the one law of the Act of Union, was allos until an authority arrived that could only count to two. Then the same material, unchanged, became heteros: not one more of these, but the wrong one of two. No new evidence is required for that conversion. It is done entirely by the arithmetic of the counting house. Iolo would not do that sum. When people called him a heretic, Elijah Waring recorded, his reply was “I accept the nick-name, in common with Paul of Tarsus”: the apostle who told a Roman governor that he worshipped ‘after the way which they call heresy’, where the word in Paul’s Greek is hairesis, a choosing.Elijah Waring, Recollections and Anecdotes of Edward Williams (1850), p. 49. Paul’s words are Acts 24:14, in the King James Bible of 1611 [POST-JUSTINIAN].

And the two words are sitting, right now, in the two names of this country, the pair the reader met before the oath, and they have been sitting there for fifteen hundred years. The name the English use is Welsh, from Germanic *walhaz, meaning foreigner, a word that in the same centuries slid, in the same tongue, into the sense of slave. It is heteros, exactly: the other of two, the not-us, defined wholly by exclusion from the speaker, and applied to a people in their own country by the people who had just arrived in it. The name we use of ourselves is Cymry, from Brythonic *Combrogī, fellow-countrymen: those of the same bro, the same home ground. It is allos, exactly: another of us, one more of the same kind, and there is no position in the word from which anybody can be shut out. The two names are not two labels for one nation. They are two theories of what a person is, and they have been arguing on this island since before either language had a written form.Old English wealh, plural wealas, from Germanic *walhaz, originally a Celtic- or Latin-speaking foreigner (the same root gives Wallonia, Walloon, Vlach, and the -wall of Cornwall), and in the Anglo-Saxon law-codes carrying the secondary sense of an unfree man. Cymraeg Cymro, Cymry, Cymru, from Brythonic *kom-brogos, “of the same country”, com-, together, with bro, region, land, home district, the word still alive in bro and broydd. Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, s.vv.

Which is why the charge, though Morris-Jones and G. J. Williams framed it in Cymraeg (twyll, ffug) needed something no language supplies: the habit of two. Forgery, as the prosecution uses it, is a heteros word: it requires that there be exactly two things, the genuine and the false, and that every document in the world be assigned to one of them. Put the same manuscripts in front of a tradition whose own name for itself cannot exclude anybody, and the question stops being which of two, and becomes what have we got, and where did it come from, and what does it say. Call that the softer standard if you like. It is the harder one, because it makes you read the thing.

9. A’i Cant

He Sang It194 The exhibit that breaks. 195 Dafydd ap Gwilym a’i cant. 197 To sing is to make. 199 He set it on his own printed work. 201 The prosecutor’s own grammar. 204 What an English ear hears.

Now the exhibit the prosecution leaned on hardest, and the one that breaks in their hands.

Over the disputed Dafydd ap Gwilym poems Iolo wrote: "Dafydd ap Gwilym a'i cant", Dafydd ap Gwilym sang it. This, says the case, is the forger signing his fraud, fathering his own inventions on a dead master.The Standard Babylonian Gilgamesh names its own redactor in its colophons: Sîn-lēqi-unninni, the scribe who reworked older Sumerian tales into the received epic. Cuneiform tradition credits him openly, and calls it editorship, not forgery.

Dafydd ap Gwilym a’i cant. Let us be exact about those words, because exactness is fatal here. A'i is the relative particle with the infixed pronoun, "it." Cant is the old -t preterite, third person singular, of canu, to sing or compose, the medieval form behind modern canodd. The root runs back through Proto-Celtic to the Indo-European *kan-, the same root that gives Latin cano and English chant. "X a'i cant" means "X sang it," and it is not Iolo's phrase. It is the universal colophon of the entire manuscript tradition of Cymru, the standard tag set at the foot of poem after poem, century upon century, to mark a poem with its author's name. It runs the length of the medieval record, from the great court poets of the Gogynfeirdd to the latest gentry copybook; a scribe no more signed with it than a clerk signs by writing Yours faithfully. It is the furniture of the page.Llyfr Aneirin, c. 1250: Aneirin a’i cant

And the verb beneath it carries a second weight, for those willing to hear it. Canu is not only the bard's word; it is the Bible's. It is the verb of the Psalms, Cenwch i’r Arglwydd ganiad newydd, “Sing unto the Lord a new song” (Psalm 96:1, in the Welsh Bible of 1620 [POST-JUSTINIAN]). To set a'i cant at the foot of a poem is to place its maker in the line of sacred song: the singer who praises and preserves, not the forger who counterfeits. The very word the prosecution reads as a confession of fraud is, in its own tongue, the verb of psalmody.Psalm 96:1, Y Beibl Cyssegr-lan (1620) [POST-JUSTINIAN]; the English is the Authorised Version of 1611 [POST-JUSTINIAN].

Its most famous appearance is the most famous line of attribution in all the literature of Cymru. In the Book of Aneirin, a manuscript of around 1250, stands the rubric: "Hwn yw e Gododin. Aneirin ae cant", "This is the Gododdin. Aneirin sang it", ae being the old spelling of a'i. The formula was on parchment nearly five hundred years before Iolo was born. When he wrote it over a poem, he was doing precisely what every British scribe for five centuries had done: labelling a copy with the name of the man he held to be its author. The act is a label, and nothing more.The Book of Aneirin (Cardiff MS 2.81, now at the National Library of Wales), c. 1250, the rubric on its first page: “Hwn yw e gododin. aneirin ae cant.”, as printed by J. Gwenogvryn Evans, The Text of the Book of Aneirin (Pwllheli, 1908), p. 1; e is the old spelling of y.

And he used it on his own undisputed work, in print, before any of the disputed poems appeared. His very first book, Dagrau yr Awen (1772), an elegy for his own teacher, the bard Lewys Hopkin of LlandyfodwgEdward Williams [Iolo Morganwg], Dagrau yr Awen, neu Farwnad Lewis Hopcin (Bridgend: R. Thomas, 1772), his first book, an elegy for his teacher, carrying the same a’i cant colophon over his bardic name that the prosecution later reads as fraud. (carries on its title-page the same formula over his bardic name: Iorwerth Gwilim o Dre-fflemmin ym Morganwg a'i cant, 1772) Iorwerth Gwilim of Flimston in Morgannwg sang it. No one has ever called that a forgery; it is simply how a Briton signs a poem.Yr Awen, iii. The title of his first book is Dagrau yr Awen, the tears of the awen. It is wept for. So the prosecution is forced to hold two incompatible positions about one phrase in one man's hand: innocent scribal convention when Iolo sets it over his own elegy in 1772, proof of fraud when he sets it over Dafydd ap Gwilym a few years later. The formula did not change. Only the need to convict him did.

There is a fair objection to all of this. Nobody has ever accused Iolo of inventing the words a'i cant. What the critics say is that he wrote poems himself and then put Dafydd ap Gwilym's name under them, so that an honest old formula was being used to tell a lie. If that is the charge, then the question that matters is who told the public these poems were Dafydd's. It was not Iolo. The drafts in Iolo's hand, the proof on which everything rests, show him doing only what a scribe does: writing the inherited tag beneath a poem, marking it with the name he held to be its author. But the public attribution, the act that actually told the reading world these poems were Dafydd's, was made in print, in the Barddoniaeth Dafydd ab Gwilym of 1789, a volume edited and seen through the press not by Iolo but by Owain Myfyr and William Owen Pughe. Whatever was asserted to the public over Dafydd's name was, in the one place it was made public, the editors' page, not his. The man they hang for the published claim did not publish it. When it came to his own book, he would not put his name to another man’s improvements. The poet Christopher Anstey offered to improve the poems in Iolo’s volume of 1794, and he refused, so as “not to impose on the public by giving them any thing that was not absolutely my own”.NLW 21387E, no. 9.

Now the turn, where the prosecution's own house falls on it. Who is the modern authority for that exact parsing, a'i cant, the inherited authorship-formula? The grammar of record is Sir John Morris-Jones, A Welsh Grammar, Historical and Comparative, Oxford, 1913. The architect. The knight. The man who led the case.John Morris-Jones, A Welsh Grammar, Historical and Comparative (Oxford, 1913), §195 i (1), p. 372: the old preterite “cant survived in the phrase X. a’i cant ‘[it was] X. who sang it’, ascribing a poem to its author”. By the prosecutor’s own grammar of record, Iolo’s tag is the phrase that ascribes a poem to its author.

So we need not even call our own witnesses. By the prosecutor's own grammar, when Iolo wrote "Dafydd ap Gwilym a'i cant," he used the standard, inherited colophon that the prosecutor's own book says every copyist used. And the dependence runs deeper than the parsing. The same A Welsh Grammar quotes among its exemplars lines from the very cywyddau of the Appendix that the verdict would condemn, read aloud, as sound Cymraeg, to generations of his students by the man who would lead the case, without doubting their authenticity for a minute. The grammar of record is built, in part, on the evidence of the condemned. The law they tried him under quotes him as the standard.John Morris-Jones, A Welsh Grammar, Historical and Comparative (Oxford, 1913), quoting cywyddau of the 1789 Appendix among its exemplars; taught to his classes as sound Cymraeg. Recorded by the head of the modern Iolo project: Geraint H. Jenkins, Y Digymar Iolo Morganwg (Talybont, 2018), "heb amau eu dilysrwydd am funud," without doubting their authenticity for a minute. The conviction and the acquittal rest on the same man's authority, and only one of them is consistent with his grammar. The exhibit meant to hang Iolo is the formula his own judge codified as innocent.John Morris-Jones himself, in the preface he wrote to Griffith John Williams’s book of 1926 (p. xi), recorded his own case of 1896 as wrong, “yr oeddwn yn hollol ar gyfeiliorn” (“I was entirely mistaken”), and printed again there the rule he had set down in 1911 and the case never applied to itself: “Ni ellir penderfynu'r pwnc heb chwilio'r ysgrifau gwreiddiol” (“The question cannot be settled without examining the original manuscripts”).

And the formula has been mistaken for a confession before. In 1896 Morris-Jones named four bards of Morgannwg as the forgers of the metres printed in Cyfrinach y Beirdd.See Y Ffeil, VI. Open the book, and all four are in it, signed: Dafydd Williams o Benn Llin a’i cant, thirty-five times over; Thomas Lewys o Lechau a’i cant, sixteen; Samuel Jones a’i cant; Morgan Powel a’i cant. Four men, each with his parish, each claiming his own work, in the volume the professor called a fraud. He had not caught anyone hiding. He had found four signatures and read them as a crime.Cyfrinach Beirdd Ynys Prydain (Abertawy, 1829), ed. Taliesin Williams, counted through the full text, read whole. The most-attributed bard in the book is Edward Dafydd of Margam, thirty-seven times; Dafydd Williams of Penllyn stands second. The formula a’i cant is the ordinary Cymraeg ascription of a poem to its maker and is used throughout the volume for medieval and seventeenth-century bards alike.

There is one thing more, and it is for the ear, not the page. Say the Cymraeg aloud: A'i cant, he sang it, and an English ear hears, beneath it, I can't. It is an accident of two languages, and it is the only honest summary of the trial: a dead man, bound under a century of earth, required to defend his own hand and unable to lift it. They demanded his silence, and then entered the silence as his confession.

10. Gwirddysg

True Learning: the Texts Themselves205 The texts. 206 The case at its hardest. 208 Transmission, craft, salvage. 211 The line count. 217 His sources, named. 221 Myfyr’s accusation, 1806. 227 The sources he printed. 236 Twenty-four books found of thirty-one. 243 Macpherson, Lönnrot, La Villemarqué, Hanka. 252 Llawdden. 266 What rests on what. 268 What would break the case.

The academy retreats to the texts because it believes the grammar sheets are too technical for an appeal. They are not.

The case, reduced to its hardest core, is this: the disputed Dafydd ap Gwilym poems carry linguistic features (spellings, verbal forms, turns of phrase) that belong to the eighteenth century, not the fourteenth. What the case is not built on: there was no analysis of paper or ink, no chemical dating. The conviction was, from Griffith John Williams onward, a philological one, the language, and Iolo's working drafts in his own hand. The argument is: late language, therefore late composition, therefore fraud.

Grant every fact of it. Grant the late features. Grant the drafts. And watch the conclusion fail to follow, because the same facts are equally explained three other ways, and not one of them is a crime.

First, transmission. A living tradition updates its own language. A poem composed in 1340 and copied by hand in 1500, in 1650, in 1789 carries, at each stage, the spelling and verbal habits of the man holding the pen. That is not corruption; it is how every manuscript culture on earth has always worked. Eighteenth-century features in a poem Iolo copied prove only that an eighteenth-century man copied it. To call that forgery is to call every scribe who ever modernised a spelling a forger.

Second, craft. If Iolo composed some of them in the manner of Dafydd, he did what every apprentice in every art is set to do, write in the master's voice to learn the master's hand. An unpublished poem-in-the-manner is a study, not a fraud; the drafts in his desk are a workshop, not a conspiracy. And he never himself put the disputed corpus before the public as Dafydd's: he sent copies to the editors who asked for them, and the claim was made on their page. The exercise is the evidence of a craftsman, not a criminal. Nor was there anything in it for him to gain, and that matters, because forgery is a crime of profit and Iolo made none. The 1789 volume that carried the Dafydd poems to the public was printed entirely at the expense of Owain Myfyr and William Owen Pughe, "not one of the Gwyneddigion," Iolo noted, "contributed a single farthing," and he least of all.Iolo Morganwg to William Meyler, 1 January 1792: “Messrs Owen Jones and William Owen were at the whole expence of printing Dafydd ab Gwilym. Not one of the Gwyneddigion contributed a single farthing.” The Correspondence of Iolo Morganwg, ed. Jenkins, Jones and Jones (2007), no. 1213. A man who fakes to enrich or to aggrandise himself does not hand the cost, the credit, and the proceeds to other men. There was no market, no payment, and no claim staked, only a drawer of studies and a literature being pulled from the fire. He held that the whole craft is learned. In the memoir he drafted of his own youth he threw out the old Latin tag that a poet is born and not made: “A Poet is as much made as a Printer or Printer’s Devil.”NLW 21387E, no. 10 (memoir draft; transcribed by the Iolo Morganwg project, CAWCS). A printer’s devil was the youngest apprentice in a printing-house.

Third, salvage. And this is not an analogy. It is the documented situation.See Y Diffynnydd, ¶60. Iolo worked on a literature that was physically burning: its gentry keepers dying out, its manuscripts rotting and scattering, Hafod’s hundred or so volumes gone in one night. A conservator restoring a fire-damaged fresco sketches, tests pigments, and paints the missing passages in the master's style to make the whole legible again; we do not call him a forger, we call him a restorer, and we thank him. Now watch every feature the prosecution treats as proof of fraud turn into the ordinary residue of exactly that work. His own hand on everything? He was a copyist; the original stayed in the library, and then burned. No surviving original to check him against? Because the fires took it after he copied it; the absence they enter against him is the wreckage he was racing. Reconstructions, filled gaps? That is what you do to make a half-eaten, mould-blotted text legible again. Drafts and variants, the "workshop"? The working papers of a decades-long rescue. A man copying a burning library necessarily leaves behind the precise evidence-pattern they have named forgery. They mistook the rescuer's soot for the arsonist's matches. He had a plainer name for that residue himself: a “terrible mound of trifling scraps”.James Grande, “London Songs, Glamorgan Hymns: Iolo Morganwg and the Music of Dissent”, Studies in Romanticism, 58:4 (2020), 481–503.

But the strongest-looking weapon in the prosecution's forensic arsenal was the direct manuscript comparison, and it deserves a direct answer. Griffith John Williams took the books Iolo claimed to have copied (Llanover B3, Llanover B6, British Museum Additional MS 14,969) and pointed to the discrepancy. Here is the poem in the old book; it is forty lines long; Iolo's copy has sixty; the extra twenty are inventions. It is a neat, clinical, persuasive argument. It is also wrong about how the manuscripts of Cymru behave.

To treat a medieval poem in Cymraeg as having one fixed, immutable line count is to import the conventions of the modern copyright office into a fluid, multi-recension manuscript culture. In the actual history of how texts in Cymraeg were handed down, parallel copies of the same poem routinely exhibit wild, unpredictable fluctuations in length. Three examples from the catalogues of the libraries that hold the evidence make the point.

The Book of Aneirin (Cardiff MS 2.81, c. 1250). Within a single manuscript (not across two books, within one) two thirteenth-century scribes transcribed the Gododdin. Scribe A recorded eighty-eight stanzas; Scribe B, writing on the same parchment shortly thereafter, recorded forty-two.The Book of Aneirin (Cardiff MS 2.81, c. 1250): two thirteenth-century scribes copying the Gododdin into one manuscript, Scribe A, 88 stanzas; Scribe B, 42, carrying named warriors and details found nowhere in A. Line-counts in the manuscript culture of Cymru fluctuate wildly; a fixed length is a modern fiction. Scribe B's version contains entire stanzas, lines, and historical details (named warriors, battle events) found nowhere in Scribe A's longer text. If Scribe B's pages had been lost to damp (and they nearly were: the relevant leaves carry physical damage), and an antiquarian had later produced a transcript containing those unique stanzas, the twentieth-century academy would have branded him a forger without hesitation. They would have pointed to Scribe A's eighty-eight stanzas as the authoritative text and asked: why are these lines missing from the oldest surviving copy? The question would have been unanswerable, and the answer would still have been: because the oldest surviving copy was never the only copy that had ever existed.

The Hendregadredd Manuscript (NLW MS 6680B). It and the Red Book of Hergest are the two great sources for the poetry of the Gogynfeirdd, the court poets of the princes of the Britons, and the two books had very different lives. The Red Book sat in Jesus College, Oxford, open to searchers from the early eighteenth century. Hendregadredd vanished from the Hengwrt library, few scholars ever saw it, and it came to light only in 1910, in a cupboard of a disused bedroom at Hendregadredd, near Porthmadog; the Davies sisters bought it for the nation at auction in 1923. One man had copied it while it could still be seen. John Davies of Mallwyd made a transcript of its main contents in 1617, and the editors of the Myvyrian Archaiology, Iolo among them, printed the court poets from his copy, so the Hendregadredd poems went into print in 1801 beside the Red Book’s. For more than a century every line of that printed text which the Red Book lacked stood on a copy of a book nobody could produce, and was open to the answer: we have the Red Book of Hergest; your lines are not in it; therefore you invented them. A cupboard in a disused bedroom proved them genuine. The only thing that had ever been wrong was the assumption that the surviving copy was the only copy. It is the exact logic that convicted Iolo, run in reverse by an accident of furniture.Daniel Huws, “Llawysgrif Hendregadredd”, Cylchgrawn Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru / National Library of Wales Journal 22, no. 1 (1981), p. 1, read on the page images: “Dwy ffynhonnell bwysig sydd i farddoniaeth y Gogynfeirdd: Llyfr Coch Hergest a H. Gan i Dr. John Davies, Mallwyd, wneud adysgrif o brif gynnwys H yn 1617, ac i olygyddion y Myvyrian Archaiology ddefnyddio adysgrif Dr. Davies ar gyfer eu testun hwy o waith y Gogynfeirdd, daeth corff barddoniaeth H i brint yr un pryd â barddoniaeth y Llyfr Coch”, there are two important sources for the poetry of the Gogynfeirdd, the Red Book of Hergest and H; because Dr John Davies of Mallwyd made a copy of the main contents of H in 1617, and the editors of the Myvyrian Archaiology used his copy for their text, the body of H’s poetry came into print at the same time as the Red Book’s. The Red Book in Jesus College library from the early eighteenth century; H “diflannodd o lyfrgell Hengwrt a dod i’r wyneb mewn gwardrob yn Hendregadredd yn 1910”, vanished from the Hengwrt library and came to the surface in a wardrobe at Hendregadredd in 1910.National Library of Wales, MS 6680B; the Library’s own account, “The Hendregadredd Manuscript” (library.wales, digital exhibitions, The Middle Ages), for its finding in 1910 in a cupboard at Hendregadredd and its purchase for the Library by the Davies sisters of Gregynog at auction in 1923.

The cywydd itself. For the fourteenth-century measure Iolo is accused of forging, variation was not a corruption but a property of the form. The central device of the cywydd was dyfalu, the rapid-fire accumulation of metaphorical descriptions, modular by nature, expanded or contracted by every scribe and performer who handled the poem. And Dafydd's own modern editors document the same fluid record: copies that lose whole couplets other witnesses preserve, the edition notes one early text missing two couplets that survive only in later hands, poems that arrive with their opening lines already gone, copyists who visibly wrote from memory; and, in the editors' own words, "substantial variation in line order in different versions of some cywyddau, variation which could not have occurred to the same extent in a purely written tradition", the trace, that is, of performance: a Morgannwg scribe recorded one recital, and a Gwynedd scribe another. When Williams found that Iolo's copy of a poem was longer than Llanover B6, he was not finding a coiner's workshop. He was finding the ordinary residue of a performance tradition that had never agreed on a final text, and treating the shorter surviving copy as the binding original.The modern critical edition concedes the ground: Dafydd Johnston, “The Manuscript Tradition” (dafyddapgwilym.net), the Vetustus text of poem 33 missing two couplets that survive in later copies; a cywydd entering the record already “lack[ing] its opening lines”; copyists whose texts “display a tendency to lose lines and to confuse their order… the copyist was writing from memory”; and the editors’ own verdict, quoted in the text: “the substantial variation in line order in different versions of some cywyddau, variation which could not have occurred to the same extent in a purely written tradition.” A companion essay on the same site, Johnston’s “The Principles of the Edited Texts”, p. 7, estimates that “between 10% and 15% of DG’s lines” carry variation in their wording that leaves the sense intact; and poems survive in genuinely different versions.When an ancient score is found damaged, the musicologist does not despair of it: knowing the mode, the scale and the cadential grammar, he reconstructs the missing bars, because the system dictates what can and cannot stand there. The oldest melody we possess, the Hurrian Hymn to Nikkal, Ugarit c. 1400 BC, was recovered exactly so, from a broken cuneiform tablet, by scholars who knew the Babylonian tuning the text names; the same principle completes Mozart's Requiem and reads the Delphic Hymns and the Seikilos epitaph. And the cywydd is a tighter system than any key: cynghanedd fixes the consonants of every line, the metre the syllables, the rhyme the close, and these were no vague tradition but a written code, set down in the earliest Cymraeg bardic grammar by Einion Offeiriad c. 1320 under the patronage of Sir Rhys ap Gruffudd of the Deheubarth line, and reformed into the twenty-four strict measures at Dafydd ab Edmwnd's Caerfyrddin eisteddfod a century on. A gap in such a poem is boxed on four sides by a published grammar; the lawful fillers are few. To complete such a line from the rules of the measure is not to forge a poem but to restore a score, and to write those rules down, as Iolo did his own “nine rules for the formation of compounds,” is the work of a grammarian, not a coiner.Name the rules, for they are exact and few. The cywydd deuair hirion runs in couplets of seven-syllable lines that rhyme, but one rhyme-word must be accented and the other unaccented, the stress falling on the last syllable of one and the penult of the other. And every line must carry cynghanedd, the strict chiming of consonants, in one of its four lawful forms: groes, where the whole run of consonants before the break repeats in order after it; draws, the same with a bridge of consonants leapt over; sain, the line falling in three, its first two parts rhyming and the third answering the second in consonant; and llusg, where a syllable within the line is rhymed by the penult of the closing word. A line that breaks these is not a poor cywydd line; it is not a cywydd line at all. Within so narrow a gate the lawful moves are countable, and a master makes them without thinking, which is the deepest point of all. Iolo was no antiquarian fitting a pastiche together from a rulebook; he was a working bard, steeped in the measure from boyhood in a living Morgannwg craft, the rules run so far beneath conscious reach that to compose in them was to breathe. That fluency is not the fingerprint of a forger labouring to counterfeit an idiom. It is the mark of a native whose own unconscious was entwined in the tradition he stands accused of faking, and a man does not forge his mother tongue.

And anyone may prove the deepest fact of the measure at a desk, tonight, with a pencil. Take a finished cywydd couplet and try to change one word of it. Seven syllables strike out half the language at a stroke; the rhyme must answer its partner, one ending accented and the other not, and most of what remains dies there; the chime of the consonants kills nearly all the rest. Hammer at the line long enough and the form stops refusing you: what is left, at the end of all the refusals, is one word, often the very word the poet set. There is rarely room in that gate for two right answers. So when a line of Dafydd ap Gwilym came down broken and a restorer set the missing word, he was not free to invent; the measure had chosen it four centuries before, and his craft was to hear the choice. The word he set is the word Dafydd set, they arrive at the same place because the gate leaves almost nowhere else to arrive. Dafydd ap Gwilym a'i cant: whoever completes the couplet lawfully has sung it with him. That is what strict metre is for. It is why a corpus could ride a thousand years of mouths without rot, a misremembered word breaks the chime and rings false to every trained ear in the room, the line testing itself like a coin rung on stone. The charge of forgery assumes the forger was free. The form all but abolishes freedom. Iolo believed the old bards had been just as strict about the truth of what they sang. In a note to his “Ode to the British Muse”, printed in 1794, he wrote: “Truth was held so sacred by the ancient British Bards and Druids, that they would never admit into their poetical compositions any thing whatever of a fictious nature; their fundamental maxim was to search for truth, and to adhere to it, with the most rigid severity”.Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (1794), vol. II, pp. 1–2 (note to “Ode to the British Muse”).

In Iolo's specific case, the parallel-recension answer is not theoretical: it has a name. Iolo worked from the papers of Llywelyn Siôn, the sixteenth-century scribe of Morgannwg, whose surviving corpus already includes multiple working books, fair copies, and draft compilations of the same poems, the working practice of a school that preserved a distinct, archaic southern textual tradition rather than reproducing a single centralised standard. His lost papers are documented by reference in the surviving ones as having existed. A parallel, longer Llywelyn Siôn recension containing stanzas that Llanover B3 happens not to preserve is not a speculation; it is the kind of thing Llywelyn Siôn's working practice regularly produced and that three centuries of attrition regularly destroyed. The prosecution required the court to believe the surviving copy was the only copy that had ever existed. The history of the manuscripts of Cymru does not permit that belief. Williams mistook the pruning for the original boundary.Thirteen of Llywelyn Siôn's manuscripts survive, among them the great “Long Books”, Llyfr Hir Amwythig (Llanstephan MS 134), Llyfr Hir Llywarch Reynolds (NLW MS 970), Llyfr Hir Llanharan, a professional copyist's output of the same material in multiple states. See the Dictionary of Welsh Biography, s.v. Llywelyn Siôn.Inferring a lost original from surviving copies is not special pleading; it is standard science. Biologists reconstruct extinct ancestors no one has seen from the divergence of their descendants, and the same method has been applied formally to manuscripts: the Canterbury Tales Project ran Chaucer's fifty-eight witnesses through phylogenetic software and recovered the lost archetype behind them (Barbrook et al., Nature 394, 1998). Every discipline that deals in descent accepts unseen ancestors. Only the philology of Cymraeg, in 1926, ruled them inadmissible.

And we need not infer that this was the ordinary practice of his circle, his circle's own letters say so, in plain words, while he was alive and decades before any charge. In March 1783 John Walters the younger writes to him with a manuscript and a request: "Will you do me the additional favour of revising it where the MSS differ… arrange the whole poem according to your judgment, supplying the deficient stanza from your own Welsh copy."John Walters the younger to Iolo Morganwg, 4 March 1783, Correspondence, no. 525: “Will you do me the additional favour of revising it where the MSS differ and send me immediately, together with the promised notes, the most approved readings? If you will undertake this trouble, be so kind as to arrange the whole poem according to your judgment, supplying the deficient stanza from your own Welsh copy.” Read what is being asked, openly, in a friendly letter, for the press: collate the variant manuscripts, exercise your judgment, and supply the missing stanza from your own copy. The very acts the 1926 court would reclassify as forgery (choosing readings, arranging, filling gaps) are here a normal, collegial favour, requested in writing by a fellow scholar. And Iolo answers in the same key six months later, to Owain Myfyr: he will send "5 or 6 pieces of Dafydd ab Gwilym, which you have not", and at once asks for "my own Welsh cywyddau" back.Iolo Morganwg to Owen Jones (Owain Myfyr), 20 September 1783, BL Add MS 15024, ff. 196–7, Correspondence, no. 6: “particularly 5 or 6 pieces of Dafydd ab Gwilym, which you have not. You have one on the next page. If you have any kind of friendship for me, send me my own Welsh cywyddau with the post as soon as possible”. The Dafydd poems and his own compositions travel the same post, named in the same sentence, with nothing furtive about either. Secret frauds do not leave correspondence like this. Editorial circles do: the working traffic of men doing openly what editorial circles did.

And the traffic ran both ways, with the buyers begging. In August 1800 William Owen Pughe wrote to Iolo carrying Owain Myfyr's judgment on the triads he had sent up for the national collection: "These things are worth all that you have printed", and pressed him for "a complete translation of all the triads, with remarks and notes," with a preface to be drafted "directly."William Owen Pughe to Iolo Morganwg, 28 August 1800, NLW 21282E, no. 342: “Myvyr’s judgement of them was ‘These things are worth all that you have printed’”; “I should like that you would immediately set about a complete translation of all the triads, with remarks and notes”; “a sketch of such a preface directly, without loss of time.” The editors of the Myvyrian, in writing, soliciting more of the very material the next century would call forged, urgently, with the press waiting. If Iolo was manufacturing, Llundain held the order-book.

Nor was the man at the centre of it a naïve rustic stumbling into deception. He was, demonstrably, a sophisticated analyst of forgery itself, years before he is supposed to have committed any. In October 1782 Daniel Walters writes to him debating the Chatterton affair (the Rowley poems, the age's most notorious literary-authenticity scandal) and argues against a theory Iolo had advanced: an "idea of a third person," that someone other than Chatterton had produced the Rowley verses.Daniel Walters to Iolo Morganwg, 1 October 1782, NLW 21283E, no. 513: “Your remarks upon the Chattertonian controversy are shrewd and ingenious but yet, I confess, my sentiments do not perfectly coincide with yours on that subject. I cannot admit your idea of a third person.” A decade before the Gorsedd, Iolo is not a forger waiting to be born; he is a critic dissecting the period's premier forgery from the outside, with a thesis subtle enough that his correspondent takes the trouble to refute it. The prosecution files him as a copyist of Chatterton. The record shows him analysing Chatterton. And in the same letter Walters quoted back to him a line Iolo had passed on as the remark of “an ingenious Welsh author”, newly married as he was: Bêdd yr Awen yw gwely priodas, the marriage bed is the grave of the Muse.Iolo Morganwg to Owen Jones (Owain Myfyr), 20 September 1783, BL Add. 15024, ff. 196–7 (letter 6); Daniel Walters to Iolo Morganwg, 1 October 1782, NLW 21283E, no. 513 (letter 513; both transcribed by the Iolo Morganwg project, CAWCS). Iolo gives it to Owain Myfyr in his own letter of 20 September 1783 as “what an ingenious Welsh author has observed I find to be in fact very true”; whose coinage it was, neither letter says.

It is worth knowing, too, where the suspicion was born at home, because the academy tells the story as though "contamination" were a discovery of disinterested twentieth-century philology, reached by neutral men weighing forms. It was not. It began as a personal rupture. In 1806, mid-quarrel with Owain Myfyr (his wealthy patron, the financier of the Myvyrian) over money, printing costs, and credit, Iolo writes: "Nothing ever astonished me so much as the many false accusations against me… I thank God that I carefully kept [your letters] to appear as evidences against you before the public." The break was bitter, financial, and personal, and it was over the very collection later combed for "interpolations." The charge of contamination did not descend from a calm philological height. It rose out of a falling-out between collaborators who had turned on one another, and was hardened, a century afterward, into a verdict that wears the philological calm as a costume.Iolo Morganwg to Owain Myfyr (Owen Jones), Gileston, 5 April 1806, NLW 21285E, no. 880, an incomplete draft or copy, as transcribed by the Iolo Morganwg project.

The accusation itself survives. Myfyr's last letter, of the eleventh of March 1806, says that a northern poet had found the poems of the appendix "more correct in cynghanedd," and that "perhaps there are not many that can detect the fraud."Owain Myfyr to Iolo, 11 March 1806 (NLW 21281E, no. 260), as printed by Geraint Phillips, “Forgery and Patronage: Iolo Morganwg and Owain Myfyr”, in A Rattleskull Genius (2005), p. 421. The northern poet is Dafydd Ddu Eryri. That is the whole of it: a judgment of taste, reported at second hand, seventeen years after the book was printed, in the letter that ended a friendship of thirty years and more, from the man who had promised him fifty pounds a year for life, "You shall never fag any more at your Trade", and stopped paying it.Phillips, pp. 419–420: the promise of March 1802, and its withdrawal by March 1804. The prosecution's own volume concedes that it was the only time, "only Owain Myfyr accused him directly of committing literary forgery", and that in 1789 neither Myfyr nor the one other man who doubted "had irrefutable grounds for doubting Iolo's integrity."Phillips, pp. 421–422. Iolo wrote one word on the letter, four times, Rhyfedd! Rhyfedd! Rhyfedd! Rhyfedd!, and answered that he could name the manuscripts he had copied from, "for any one that may wish to examine them."Iolo’s endorsement on the letter, and his draft replies of 2 and 5 April 1806 (NLW 21285E, nos. 879, 880): Phillips, p. 422. Ten days before Myfyr’s last letter, on St David’s Day 1806, Iolo had written to William Owen Pughe, his fellow editor of the Myvyrian, about what his work for Cymru had cost him: “It is for Wales, for the Welsh nation, for the Welsh language and literature to [atten]d which, I have sacrificed all the comforts of life.”Iolo Morganwg to William Owen Pughe, 1 March 1806, Correspondence, II, pp. 764–5.

The same year the north said it too, in a private letter. In 1806 William Williams, Gwilym Peris, wrote to David Thomas, Dafydd Ddu Eryri, the poet and teacher of Arfon, that nobody seemed brave enough to confound the theories of William Owen Pughe and Iolo, who had bewitched the minds of ordinary people and cast down “bob hanes derbyniol”, all accepted history, so far that it might be as well to burn every history book; the nonsense of the London Welsh had to be stopped before it went on “i ddiddymu ein derbyniol hanesion”, to destroy our accepted histories.Prys Morgan, “Iolo Morganwg and Welsh Historical Traditions”, in Geraint H. Jenkins (ed.), A Rattleskull Genius: The Many Faces of Iolo Morganwg (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005), p. 252, read in the scanned text, citing John Jones (Myrddin Fardd) (ed.), Adgof uwch Anghof (Caernarfon, 1883), pp. 92–5, where the letter is printed. The 1883 book itself has not been seen. Read what the charge is. Not that Iolo had forged a page, but that he had unsettled the history they had accepted.

And six years before any man accused him, he had put the matter in writing to the patron who would. Sorting his own collection of the proverbs of Morgannwg into the ancient and the plainly modern, he wrote of "the difficulty, I will say, impossibility, of imitating the ancients in language and stile beyond the power of detection"; and of the poet he is said to have counterfeited: "who can copy after him? not a man living."Iolo to Owain Myfyr, 17 June 1800 (BL Add. MS 15030, f. 12): Phillips in A Rattleskull Genius (2005), p. 419.

He kept the bad old poems too, and laughed at them as he kept them. Of a medieval poet’s praise of the Virgin he wrote: “nid achos ond chwerthin am benn y mabiaith gwrthbwyll a pha un y mae’n Hen Athraw bolfras yn son am ei Fair Forwyn”, there is cause for nothing but laughter at the frivolity with which our big-bellied old professor speaks of his Virgin Mary; and then: “Y mae’r Awdl honn, er maint a ddywedais am ei hammherffeithrwydd, yn deilwng o’i chadw”, this ode, for all I have said of its faults, deserves to be kept.His note on the ode, printed and translated by Ffion Mair Jones, ‘The Bard is a Very Singular Character’: Iolo Morganwg, Marginalia and Print Culture (Cardiff, 2010), p. 103.

We need not even press this from outside, because the prosecution's own flagship volume makes the case for us. A Rattleskull Genius (2005) (the very book that keeps the word forger fixed to him) concedes, in its own pages, every plank of his defence. It admits that Iolo's cottage held "genuine transcripts" among the disputed drafts, and that he was so swamped by them that he was "unable to differentiate between genuine transcripts and forged documents" himself. It grants what we grant: the cottage held genuine copies and worse, side by side. The labour of the case is to sort them on evidence, and the verdict did not sort; it condemned the lot. It admits the substrate: "Wales possessed authentic ancient lyrics and epics, even if Iolo thought she needed more", that is salvage and supplement, not invention from nothing. It admits, against Iolo's own throwaway line, that "South Wales was in fact a notable cradle" of the tradition, his Silurian thesis, granted by the prosecution. And it lets him speak as the drowning salvor he was, in his own words: "all my Irons burn ere I can work them," and the "vast heap of crude papers… which I cannot think of without a degree of dread." It dates the beginning of his "public career as a forger" to four cywyddau he sent to Llundain in March 1779, and says in the same sentence that the four "have not been identified."Geraint Phillips in A Rattleskull Genius (2005), p. 409. The career begins with four poems that no one can produce. And of the fables and traditions printed from his papers in 1848 it says, seventy-nine years after the verdict, that the matter "remains a major puzzle," that "it is not clear how much of it was created by Iolo."Brynley F. Roberts, “‘The Age of Restitution’: Taliesin ab Iolo and the Reception of Iolo Morganwg”, in A Rattleskull Genius (2005), p. 478. A conviction that cannot say what was forged is only a reputation. Read the book whole and the verdict inverts: Rattleskull is the most complete acquittal of Iolo ever assembled. It simply declines to read its own evidence.

The charge that he invented his sources dies on a page he printed himself. In the second volume of his Poems of 1794, beneath the Bardic Triades, Iolo set down his provenance in full and in public: the Triads "are from a Manuscript collection, by Llywelyn Sion, a Bard of Glamorgan, about the year 1560. Of this Manuscript I have a transcript; the original is in the possession of Mr. Richard Bradford, of Bettws, near Bridgend, in Glamorgan" (Pen-y-bont ar Ogwr, in Morgannwg), son, he adds, of the late John Bradford, "who, for skill in Ancient British Bardism, left not his equal behind." Weigh what that is. A named scribe, a named date, a named living owner, a named house, printed, in his lifetime, for anyone to check, in a county a day's ride from his accusers. If it were a lie, it was the most checkable lie a man ever told; his enemies, who were many, had only to call at Bettws to expose him, and not one of them did. You do not publish the address of your forgery's owner. You publish the address of your source.And the address had form. In the chair-lore Iolo preserved, the Chair of Tir Iarll was held “ar wyrdon y Bettws fynychaf”, most often on the green of Bettws, the open-air chair meeting in the very village whose manuscript-keeper he named. The source’s address and the chair’s address are one. Iolo Manuscripts (1848). He gave the same kind of account in private, to the man who had just accused him. Answering Owain Myfyr on 5 April 1806 about the wisdom of Cattwg he had supplied for the third volume of the Myvyrian Archaiology, he wrote: “I had copied Cattwg from a manuscript in the possession of my friend and near neighbour Mr James Thomas of Maerdy Newydd. What succeeded I collected from a number of old manuscripts.”Iolo Morganwg to Owen Jones (Owain Myfyr), 5 April 1806 (draft), NLW 21285E, no. 880.

And with the physicians of Myddfai. The medical book of Rhiwallon and his sons was printed in 1861 from Iolo’s copy, and his copy names the chain and a living owner: “Myfi William Bona ai ysgrifenodd o Lyfr Sion Jones, Feddyg o Fyddfai … 1743. A minnau Iolo Morganwg, ai cyfysgrifenais yn ofalus o Lyfr y William Bona uchod, yn awr ym meddiant Thomas Bona, Feddyg o Blwyf Llanfihangel Iorwerth, yn swydd Gaerfyrddin, ym Mesyryd y flwyddyn 1801.” William Bona wrote it from the book of John Jones, physician of Myddfai, in 1743; I, Iolo Morganwg, copied it carefully from that book, now in the possession of Thomas Bona, physician, of the parish of Llanfihangel Iorwerth, in the autumn of 1801.Meddygon Myddfai: The Physicians of Myddvai, ed. John Williams ab Ithel, trans. John Pughe (Llandovery: Welsh MSS Society, 1861), p. 298; the preface, p. xix, says it is “his copy, now in Llanover Library, that forms the text of our volume”.

He did it again with the bardic grammar. The transcript behind the ancient grammar-tradition later printed by the Welsh Manuscripts Society carries Iolo's own source-note, naming the book, the owner and the parish: the Book of Iago ab Dewi, "in the possession of the late Benjamin Simon, of Porth Myrddin, in the Parish of Abergwili, near Caermarthen." The national dictionary of biography waves this away (the claims Iolo makes on Iago ab Dewi's behalf are "untrustworthy") and then, in the same entry, records that among Iago ab Dewi's manuscripts was a copy of the bards' grammar, and that his collection was dispersed at his death, part of it carried off into the library of Lewis Morris, the architect of the doctrine of northern purity.Dosparth Edeyrn Davod Aur (Llandovery: Welsh MSS Society, 1856), the preface; Dictionary of Welsh Biography, s.v. “Davies, James (Iaco ap Dewi; 1648–1722)”.

And the National Library's catalogue of his papers gives the heading over the material, with a date and a name: "O Lyfr Iago ab Dewi yn awr gan Mr. Thomas Evans o Frechfa, 1799", from the Book of Iago ab Dewi, NOW in the possession of Mr. Thomas Evans of Brechfa, his friend Tomos Glyn Cothi. A real book, which the national dictionary confirms existed and was scattered; a named holder; a dated custody; a documented friend, the year he copied from it. Follow the sentence to its end: the source existed; the north took the books; and the southerner who cited them was called a liar.NLW catalogue of the Iolo Morganwg composite volumes: “O Lyfr Iago ab Dewi yn awr gan Mr. Thomas Evans o Frechfa, 1799.” Thomas Evans of Brechfa = Tomos Glyn Cothi. The custody: Iago ab Dewi (d. 1722, Llanllawddog); then Benjamin Simon of Abergwili; then Tomos Glyn Cothi, by 1799; from whose book Iolo made his transcripts.Iolo's source-note, preserved in the preface to Dosparth Edeyrn Davod Aur (Welsh MSS Society, 1856): the Book of Iago ab Dewi, held by Benjamin Simon of Abergwili; the transcript passed from Iolo to Lewis Richards of Darowen (1821) and then to the Revd W. J. Rees of Cascob (1832). DWB, s.v. “Davies, James (Iaco ap Dewi; 1648–1722)”: the “untrustworthy” verdict, the copy of the bards’ grammar among his manuscripts, the dispersal to Siôn Rhydderch and Lewis Morris, and the unique survivals in NLW Llanstephan MS 133.

He gave the same sources in print. Telling the story of the Caerfyrddin eisteddfod of 1451 in Y Greal in 1806, he ended with where it came from: “Hyn a gefais o hanes eisteddfod Caerfyrddin a gynhaliwyd yn y flwyddyn 1451, wedi ei gasglu gan Iago ab Dewi o hen lyfr yn Abermarlais, ac o lyfr Thomas Evan o Vrechfa yn Nglyn Cothi”, this is what I have of the history of the Caerfyrddin eisteddfod held in the year 1451, gathered by Iago ab Dewi out of an old book at Abermarlais, and from the book of Thomas Evan of Brechfa in Glyn Cothi.Iolo Morganwg in Y Greal, 1806, as reprinted in Cyfaill yr Aelwyd I (1881), p. 571; read on the page image (the Harvard copy, scanned by Google, from HathiTrust). Thomas Evan of Brechfa is Tomos Glyn Cothi. And what he could not find, he would not print. Late in life he wrote of the Myvyrian: “in my collections, I strenuously opposed the absurd fables of the darker ages, which are most obviously falsehoods of the darkest hue. This gave offence to my coadjutors … Such are the fictions of Geoffery of Monmouth, that of King Arthur, and his knights of the round table, and many things more of the same character.”Iolo Morganwg, a statement “in his own handwriting” quoted by Elijah Waring, Recollections and Anecdotes of Edward Williams (1850), pp. 111–12, read on the National Library’s page images. The words left out after “coadjutors” are “who charged me with rejecting supposititious documents, which never existed, which I, with diligence, could never find, or hear where they were to be found; and which they cannot but know do not exist anywhere”; the first two lines of that stand at the foot of p. 111, the rest at the head of p. 112. The man convicted of inventing the past was, in his own circle, the one throwing the fables out.

Take that family one step further and the charge turns inside out. John Bradford, Siôn Bradford, died in 1780, and his son Richard held the books afterwards, which is why Iolo’s note of 1794 gives the son’s address. One of those books was in Llywelyn Siôn’s hand, of the years before 1613. It held a cywydd with no poet’s name on it. Old Bradford had written Dafydd’s name at the foot himself.

Iolo copied the poem, and he wrote that down. The name was Bradford’s, not the manuscript’s. He wrote it privately, for his own use, years before anyone had accused him of anything. A forger handed a page that already says what he needs does not correct it. As W. Llewelyn Williams asked in 1921: “… why go out of his way to state that it was Bradford that put Dafydd’s name to the poem which up to that time was anonymous? Is not the whole note that of an honest man?”W. Llewelyn Williams, The Welsh Outlook VIII, no. 9 (September 1921), p. 199.

And there is a date in the prosecution’s own book that ends it. Owain Myfyr had already copied that cywydd in 1768 or earlier, twelve years before Bradford was in his grave, and a generation before Iolo is supposed to have invented it.W. Llewelyn Williams, The Welsh Outlook, September 1921, p. 199, on the Appendix Cywydd y Breuddwyd and Iolo’s note of Siôn Bradford’s addition; Griffith John Williams, Iolo Morganwg a Chywyddau’r Ychwanegiad (1926), p. 153, for the date of Owain Myfyr’s copy. Siôn and John Bradford are one man; Richard Bradford of Bettws, named in the printed provenance of 1794, was his son. 

And the source he named for the Dafydd poems answers the same way. Iolo said the disputed cywyddau had come down to him through the old Morgannwg copy-books, among them the book of Morgan Llywelyn, and the case treats that named source as one more convenient fiction, a dead man invented to vouch for forged verse. But here the prosecution disproves its own charge: Griffith John Williams, hunting the forgery, himself found Morgan Llywelyn’s name, signed and dated 1753, in a Morgannwg manuscript that outlived him.Oxford, Jesus College, MS 13: “Ar dud. 282b ceir ‘M. Llewelyn his Book 1753,’ ac ar dud. 283a ‘M. Llewelyn me tenet, Glyncorrwg.’ Ar dud. 284b ceir ‘Morgan Llywelyn.’ Dyma’r unig lawysgrif a welais â’i enw ynddi”, the only manuscript he had seen with the name in it. G. J. Williams, Iolo Morganwg a Chywyddau’r Ychwanegiad (1926), p. 168. He hedged whether Morgan Llywelyn owned it (“Ni wn ai efô oedd perchen”), and then, at p. 140, used it as “llyfr Morgan Llywelyn, sef Jesus College MS. 13” to show lines missing from it. The source Iolo cited existed. That his particular copy-book did not survive is no evidence it never held the poems. It is the burned library once more, absence sworn in against a copyist who cannot call the ashes to the stand. And he never named one source only. He said where every poem had come from: nine out of the book of Morgan Llywelyn of Castell-nedd, one out of Lewys Hopkin’s, one out of a manuscript held by the Rev. Thomas Richards of Llangrallo. Three Morgannwg men of his own lifetime, in parishes anyone could ride to. A liar does not do that. One letter to any of those houses would have destroyed him, and the man most certain to write it, Owain Myfyr, was the man he was writing to. “If Iolo’s statements were untrue … he was risking instant exposure and humiliation.”W. Llewelyn Williams, The Welsh Outlook, September 1921, pp. 199–200, giving the owners of the manuscripts and the number of odes taken from each: the Rev. Thomas Richards and Lewys Hopcin at the foot of p. 199, Morgan Llewelyn of Neath and his nine odes at the head of p. 200. 

And the prosecution went and checked. This is a number that none of the prosecution’s books we have read quotes, and it is in the case against him. Iolo named thirty-one old manuscript books as the places his material had come from. Griffith John Williams, hunting the forgery, set out to find them, and his second section is the history of what he found. He located all but seven. Twenty-four of the thirty-one books a man is accused of inventing were tracked down by the man accusing him. A forger’s sources do not survive being looked for; that is the whole point of inventing them. These did. And the seven that did not turn up are not a confession. The review gives no sign that they are anything but the ordinary attrition of manuscripts of Cymraeg in private hands across two centuries of sales, damp, fires and emigrations, the same attrition that has eaten the libraries of every county in Cymru. Put the audit the other way round and read what it actually says: the prosecutor checked whether Iolo’s sources existed, and twenty-four times out of thirty-one they did.Review of G. J. Williams, Iolo Morganwg a Chywyddau’r Ychwanegiad (1926), in Y Llenor 6 (1927), p. 59: “Rhoddir rhestr o 31 o hen ysgriflyfrau a ddefnyddiasai Iolo, a gallodd Mr. Williams leoli’r cwbl ond 7 ohonynt”, a list is given of 31 old manuscript books Iolo had used, and Mr Williams was able to locate all but 7 of them. Both figures read off the page image, where they stand as old-style numerals. The reviewer is describing the book’s second section, “hanes y llawysgrifau y cyfeiria Iolo atynt”, the history of the manuscripts Iolo refers to. Which seven were not located is in that section and is not reproduced here; the 1926 book is not digitised.

Nor is the southern provenance a convenient story; it is where Dafydd actually lived. Dafydd ap Gwilym spent time in the south-east under his patron Ifor Hael of Gwern-y-Cleppa, in Gwynllŵg (the documented reason his verse is steeped in Morgannwg and in Ifor) and Iolo, at sixty-six, was still walking out to sketch the ruins of that very house. "D. G. was a South Walian," he wrote; "South Wales obtained the last and corrected copies of his works."Iolo’s English note on the works of Dafydd ap Gwilym, printed by G. J. Williams, Iolo Morganwg a Chywyddau’r Ychwanegiad (1926), p. 161: “D. G. was a South Walian, born in Cardiganshire, but for nearly the whole of the poetical part of his life he resided in Glamorgan. thence it is that South Wales obtained the last and corrected copies of his works.” A fuller Morgannwg recension of Dafydd is exactly what the facts of the poet's own life predict, and exactly what the academy, having crowned the northern copies as the standard, was bound to read as "addition."

To reach forgery, deliberate fraud, the prosecution must exclude all three. It must prove the late language is not transmission, the drafts are not craft, the reconstruction is not salvage, and that what remains can only be malicious invention. It has never done this. It cannot, because the evidence does not contain it. The most the texts can honestly bear is we cannot always tell which, and "we cannot tell" is not a synonym for "guilty." In any court that deserves the name it is the definition of reasonable doubt. And there is a further doubt beneath that one, the plainest in the whole case: the standard the charge invokes, a text descended pure and unaltered, is one no medieval work on earth can meet. A poem carried by four scribes across four centuries is four times rewritten before it reaches us; transmission is alteration, and always has been. To demand of Iolo's copies a cleanliness the entire manuscript record lacks is to make a crime of the ordinary condition of every old text that survives, "changed in the carrying" has been read as "forged" for no other work on earth. The verdict of forgery is not only unsafe; it is false. It claims a certainty the evidence cannot supply, and it has been read out, for a century, as though it could. To sustain a conviction of fraud, the prosecution would have to prove that transmission is impossible, that craft is a crime, and that salvage is arson. It has proved none of the three. It has pointed at the dust on the copyist's sleeves and called him the thief.

And meet the prosecution's sharpest forensic exhibit head on: that the disputed poems carry small linguistic habits (grammatical tics, particular spellings) that also surface in Iolo's own signed verse, as though his fingerprints lay on the work. They do lie on the work. That is exactly what restoration leaves behind. When a man pieces a damaged poem back together (fills a worm-eaten line, supplies a lost rhyme, mends a broken measure) he closes the gap with the only tongue he owns: his own. The fresco again, but look closer this time: the conservator's plaster shows in precisely the places where the original had crumbled, and that is how you know him for a conservator. Find the restorer's hand in the patches and you have found a restorer, not a forger, the two are told apart not by whether the modern hand shows, but by whether there was a genuine original beneath the repair. The shared tics prove Iolo handled the text. They do not prove he invented it. To read a conservator's fill as a counterfeiter's signature is to convict every hand that ever saved a broken thing.

And there is a flaw beneath all three explanations, because it touches the single exhibit on which everything rests. Strip away the rhetoric and the case reduces to one forensic claim: that the disputed drafts are in Iolo's own hand. Everything else is built on that one identification, and that identification was made by the prosecution, from the archive the prosecution's own side controlled, and no independent examination of it has ever been published. And put the name to it: the identification was Griffith John Williams's own, the prosecutor's, and the hand that damns Iolo was pronounced his by the one man who most needed it to be. A court that permits the prosecutor to identify the evidence has already written its verdict; and that private, unwitnessed naming of the hand is the exact reverse of the open, sunlit, adversarial judgment the Gorsedd was raised to keep.

And the case does not even need the point: grant that the hand is his (as the verdict will) and it changes nothing. A copyist's hand is on every copy, a restorer's on every repair. The identification was never the crime; calling it forgery was. No qualified document analyst from outside the circle ever set the disputed pages beside secure, undisputed Iolo holograph in an adversarial proceeding, none, at least, that any published record shows; and, more telling still, none ever set them beside the hands of the men who worked that same archive after his death, his son Taliesin and the editor Ab Ithel, either of whom, in the years the papers passed through his hands, had unwitnessed access in which a page could be written, completed, or altered. Handwriting comparison is a real discipline, and here, on any record the guild has ever produced, it was never done adversarially.

And note the distinction the argument requires. If a future palaeographical examination were to confirm Iolo's hand on the disputed pages (which has not yet been done in any open proceeding) the case would not end there; it would simply reach the question at the heart of this case: whether a hand being his makes the act forgery, or salvage. A copyist's hand is on everything he copied. A restorer's hand is on every gap he filled. The question is never solely whose hand but what was the hand doing, and that question is answered not by ink chemistry alone, but by the full record of what the libraries held, who else saw them, and what was racing the fire.The identification of the disputed hands is G. J. Williams's own (Iolo Morganwg a Chywyddau'r Ychwanegiad, 1926, and the biography of 1956). No published examination of the disputed folios by an independent document examiner exists; a century after the verdict, no multispectral imaging, no ink analysis and no blind palaeographic comparison of them against the secure holograph or against the later hands with access has been published. The court notes the silence; it does not request the favour.

And the prosecution knows this, because in a neighbouring case it ruled the other way. The Breton collector the Vicomte Hersart de La Villemarqué published the Barzaz-Breiz in 1839 and was condemned as a forger for a century. Then, in 1964, the ethnologist Donatien Laurent found La Villemarqué's original collecting notebooks, and in his study of 1989 proved the substrate was realDonatien Laurent, Aux sources du Barzaz-Breiz: la mémoire d’un peuple (Douarnenez, 1989), on the collecting notebooks Laurent found in 1964, proving La Villemarqué’s substrate genuine and the reworking “common practice at the time”: forgery reclassified as an age’s ordinary method, for the acquitted Breton, not the Briton., the viscount had gathered genuine oral material, and that the reworking, the tidying, the improving, was "common practice at the time." The very same profile (a real substrate, heavily reworked, even denied) was reclassified from forgery to the ordinary practice of an age. The features never changed. Only the survival of the sources did.And the Breton line does not stop at the acquittal. Iolo’s Gorsedd itself crossed to Brittany and was constituted there as the Goursez Vreizh at the turn of the twentieth century, Jean Le Fustec its first Grand Druid, Yves Berthou his successor. In the very decades Cymru’s academy was preparing to file the institution’s origin as a fraud, it was being worked as a living national institution in Breton hands. Give Iolo La Villemarqué's notebooks and he walks free tomorrow. Deny La Villemarqué his, and he hangs beside Iolo. The verdict was never about what they did. It was about what survived.

Which leaves the one question that matters: why this defendant, and not the others? Set them in a row.

• James Macpherson, Ossian (1760s): genuine Gaelic ballad-matter worked up, with much of his own, into an "ancient" epic. Attacked, and seminal, the book Napoleon carried and Goethe translated, the founder of a European movement, studied with reverence.
• Elias Lönnrot, the Kalevala (1835): real oral songs stitched and supplemented into a national epic that did not exist before he made it. Outcome: father of Finnish literature, national hero, his name on the institutions.
• Sir Walter Scott, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802): real border ballads "improved" for effect, with verses of his own written silently into them, and Scott denied it ("No liberties have been taken either with the recited or written copies of these ballads, farther than that, where they disagreed, the editor, in justice to the author, has uniformly preserved what seemed to him the best or most poetical reading of the passage"), and the scholar who traced his sources a century later judged otherwise: "That an indefinite quantity of the ballad, and improvements on the rest, are Scott's, I cannot doubt, from evidence of style."Walter Scott, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (Kelso, 1802), I, p. cii, read at the page image (archive.org, minstrelsyof01scotiala). Andrew Lang, Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy (London, 1910), p. 150, on Kinmont Willie, read in the scanned text (archive.org, sirwalterscottbo00languoft). Outcome: a baronet, a literary titan, the inventor of the historical novel.
• Hersart de La Villemarqué, Barzaz-Breiz (1839): condemned as a forger for a century, then acquitted when his notebooks proved a real substrate beneath the reworking.The Book of Enoch was excluded from the canon as invention, yet Jude quotes it as genuine prophecy (Jude 1:14–15, in the Greek of the New Testament), and the Qumran caves (1947) yielded Aramaic fragments older than any surviving Christian manuscript. The “forged” book was already cited as true inside the very canon that disowned it.Even John Williams, Ab Ithel (a founder of the Cambrian Archaeological Association, whose own 1862 Barddas helped seed the forgery charge) pronounced in the preface to that very book (vol. I, p. xvi), having been through his papers, that Iolo was “incapable of perpetrating literary deceit or forgery”. A hostile witness's admission carries more weight, not less.
• Vuk Karadžić, the Serbian oral epics (1814–36): genuine songs collected, reworked and standardised into a national canon. He had what the others could only borrow, a prince's patronage and a nation on its way to sovereignty. Outcome: national hero, father of the modern Serbian language, the model Iolo's judges required him to have been.
• Václav Hanka, the "Manuscripts" of Dvůr Králové and Zelená Hora (1817–18): a genuine forgery this time, medieval Czech epics manufactured nearly whole. Outcome: the poems entered the schoolbooks and, in the words of one who grew up on them, "once we read [them] we felt deep in our hearts that we were Czechs"; they fed the revolution of 1848; the scholars who doubted them were hounded by the patriotic press, and died, probably before their time; and the forger's great defender argued that Hanka was far too small a man to have written anything so fine. He died in honour. Bohemia got its nation.
• Iolo Morganwg, Cymru: the same method as the first five, and nothing like the sixth's crime. Outcome: the forger. The permanent academic outcast, the word still on his biography two hundred years on.

Read the column of outcomes and the rule writes itself. Macpherson's Scotland, Lönnrot's Finland, Scott's Scotland, La Villemarqué's France, Karadžić's Serbia, Hanka's Bohemia, every one either a sovereign nation or a nation the imperial centre was content to let romanticise itself, because a proud Scotland or a poetic Finland threatened nothing. Each collector was, in the end, knighted, canonised, or forgiven. The word forger was laid on several of them. It stayed only on the Briton. Macpherson, called a forger in his lifetime and ever since, lies in Westminster Abbey; Hanka, a forger in fact, died honoured. Only Iolo’s biography still carries the word on its door, and Cymru is the one nation in the row whose law had been abolished outright by the state that sat in judgment on it: invaded, attainted, enclosed, and being anglicised in real time. The verdict does not track the parchment. It tracks the politics. Forgery is nation-building that lost, and Iolo is called a forger for the same reason Scott is called a genius: not for what either did to a ballad, but for which flag flew over the men who judged him.Thrasymachus's definition in Plato's Republic, that justice is nothing but the advantage of the stronger, is usually read as cynicism. Read straight, it is the operating principle of every verdict this court examines: not error, but power calling its own interest justice. He had said in public what he was building. At the Caerfyrddin eisteddfod of 1819 he rose after the bishop and spoke, in English, and Seren Gomer printed his speech in Cymraeg: Iaith Cymru yw yr unig iaith ag sydd wedi gorfucheddu marwolaeth yr Ymerodraeth Rufeinig, a’i holl ieithoedd ereill … dydd adgyfodiad dysgeidiaeth yn ein hiaith frodorol, the language of Cymru is the only language that has outlived the death of the Roman Empire and all its other languages … the day of the resurrection of learning in our native tongue.Seren Gomer, 28 July 1819, p. 280. The English rendering is our own.

And the Bohemian case closes the proof, because there the machine ran in reverse. A real forgery was defended for two generations by the argument that its maker was too mediocre to have made it (the same quality-argument that, pointed the other way, convicted the Briton of everything) and the philologists who finally proved the fabrication were abused as traitors to the nation. Where the nation is rising, quality acquits; where the nation must be kept down, quality convicts. The parchment was never the variable. And the comparison is not this court's discovery: it stands, fully drawn, in the prosecution's own flagship volume, filed, like everything else that acquits the defendant, where no one was made to read it.R. J. W. Evans, “‘The Manuscripts’: The Culture and Politics of Forgery in Central Europe,” in Jenkins (ed.), A Rattleskull Genius (2005), 51–70: the Dvůr Králové and Zelená Hora manuscripts in the schoolbooks (“once we read [them] we felt deep in our hearts that we were Czechs”) and behind 1848; the doubters Vašek and Šembera, “incontestable patriots”, hounded by the press, both dead “probably prematurely”; Palacký’s defence that Hanka, “much given to petty forgery, was quite incapable of achievements like RKZ”; the forensic verdict of 1975 suppressed as a state secret, and the manuscripts’ rehabilitation after 1989 “precisely because they had been repugned by the Communists.”

And the row is older than every man in it, for the founding act of European law sits at its head. When Justinian codified Roman jurisprudence, his compiler Tribonian was commanded, by the emperor's own founding constitution, to cut, reconcile and emend the ancient jurists into a living system. Scholarship has hunted the Digest's interpolations, Tribonian's hand inside Ulpian, ever since, exactly as the prosecution hunted Iolo's hand inside Dafydd. The deed is the same deed. Done under an emperor's warrant it founded the civil law of a continent and is called jurisprudence; done under no warrant but the fire's, in an occupied country, it is called forgery. The difference was never the act. It was the flag over the compiler.Justinian, Deo auctore (530) and Tanta (533), the constitutions prefacing the Digest, expressly licensing Tribonian’s commission to harmonise and emend the excerpted jurists; the hunt for “interpolations”, the compiler’s hand inside the ancient texts, has been a scholarly industry ever since.Antiquity's most consequential interpolation decided a land claim: in the arbitration over Salamis, the Athenians were accused, Aristotle and Plutarch both record it, of inserting a line into Homer's Catalogue of Ships to prove the island had always ranked with Athens. The tribunal awarded Salamis to Athens. A forged line in a national epic, deployed to win territory, used first by the founders of Western civilisation, and never held against them.

And the academy has since built a whole category over that row, and never noticed what the category proves. The invention of tradition, the phrase is the title of the celebrated Cambridge volume of 1983, and the Gorsedd’s standard treatment there is Prys Morgan’s essay “From a Death to a View: The Hunt for the Welsh Past in the Romantic Period”, established, with perfect frankness, that every nation in Europe was manufacturing its past in those same decades: the Highland tartans and the Hanoverian pageantry stand in the same volume as the eisteddfod.Prys Morgan, “From a Death to a View: The Hunt for the Welsh Past in the Romantic Period,” in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); in the same volume, Hugh Trevor-Roper on the invented Highland tradition of Scotland. Read whole, it is the row above argued at book length. What the school has never explained is the sentence we keep arriving at: if inventing tradition was the ordinary business of every nation in Europe, why does only the instance of Cymru keep the criminal noun? The category built to file Iolo acquits him (where the invention of tradition is universal, it is not a crime) and the school that coined the category went on calling him the forger anyway. The frame was meant to shelve him. Read honestly, it frees him.

One seat in that row stands empty, and it is the judge’s. England invented its past as well, and its inventors sat in the highest places of English law. Before 1066, the story ran, the English had been free men under Saxon law, until the Normans bolted a yoke across their necks; Christopher Hill, who followed the story from the Levellers to the Chartists, called it a myth of “great historical significance”. Its scripture was The Mirror of Justices, a lawbook of about 1290 in which King Alfred hangs forty-four false judges in a single year. Granville Sharp, whose name stands on the subscribers’ list of Iolo’s poems, argued from it.Christopher Hill, “The Norman Yoke”, in John Saville, ed., Democracy and the Labour Movement (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1954), pp. 11–66, at pp. 11, 19, 45. Sir Edward Coke leaned on it, and on two other medieval fakes, on almost every page of his Institutes, and with its help walked Parliament back to King Arthur. In 1602 he walked further. The third volume of his Reports opens with Dyfnwal Moelmud writing two books of the laws of the Britons “in the British tongue”, and with the Druids of Gaul, keepers of “the administration of the laws and government of the commonwealth”, declared “nothing else but a very colony taken out from our British Druides”. Iolo’s lawgiver and Iolo’s Druids, at the head of the English law reports.Edward Coke, “To the Reader”, preface to The Third Part of the Reports (1602), where Dyfnwal is “Mulumucius of some called Dunvallo M.”; read at the page images of the English edition, The Reports of Sir Edward Coke (London, 1777), vol. II, unnumbered preface (Internet Archive, leaves 19, 20 and 23). On Coke’s use of the Mirror: J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), pp. 40–41, 43. Twelve years on, Sir Henry Spelman shut the door on anyone who would “fetch our Laws from Brutus, Mulmutius, the Druides, or any other Brutish or British Inhabitants”. Brutish or British: the sentence was a pun before it was a verdict. The same scholarship that, in J. G. A. Pocock’s words, “abolished Brutus and Arthur as lawgivers for all time” left the Anglo-Saxons “a people of the dawn about whom legends clustered”.Spelman, “The Original of the Four Terms of the Year”, in Reliquiae Spelmannianae, p. 103, quoted in Pocock, Ancient Constitution, p. 96 n.; Pocock, p. 64.

And the English judged their own gently. Pocock finds Coke credulous, a man who “ought … to have smelt one or two of the horde of rats which populate the pages of the Mirror”, yet “the prisoner of intellectual conditions imposed upon his age”.Pocock, Ancient Constitution, pp. 67–68. F. W. Maitland, editing the Mirror in 1895, found that its author “will not merely invent laws, but he will invent legislators also”, and that “the right to lie he exercises unblushingly”; in the same breath he dismissed Geoffrey of Monmouth, the Britons’ historian, as a liar. Then he imagined himself a jury, put the man he took for its author, Andrew Horn, chamberlain of the City of London, in the dock, and gave him “the benefit of the doubt”.F. W. Maitland, introduction to The Mirror of Justices, ed. W. J. Whittaker (London: Selden Society, vol. 7, 1895), pp. xxvi, xxvii, l–li; pp. xxvi and li read at the page images. The Englishman who invented his nation’s lawgivers was a prisoner of his age, and went free. The Briton who carried his nation’s laws into print was a forger, and still is.

This is why the bare label endures even now, in the hands of scholars who are themselves Britons, radical, and fond of him, who have restored his politics, marvelled at his range, and called him, in the very same sentence, a "scholarly forger." That gentle, qualified retention is not a softening of the verdict; it is its most durable form. They give back everything (the genius, the radicalism, the thousand letters) and keep the one word that matters, the word that says whatever else, do not quite trust him. Morris-Jones's contempt could be answered. This cannot, because it no longer feels like an attack. But it convicts on the same unsafe evidence, and the kindness does not make the evidence any better.

Here is how it works, in an edition of 2006. The fifteenth-century poet Llawdden sang of a hall “o lan Llychwr”, on the bank of the Llwchwr. Iolo wrote down that Llawdden was born at Glyn Llychwr, in the parish of Llandeilo Tal-y-bont, and said exactly where it stood: “about half a mile to the Right, when within ¾ of a mile from Swansea to Pont ar Ddulais.” The editor of the poems went and looked, and found it. The tithe list of Llandeilo Tal-y-bont, dated 14 December 1840, has a farm called Glyn Llwchwr, a house and gardens and five fields, on the east side of Pontarddulais, where Iolo said it was. The editor granted that Iolo’s note had “tinc o ddilysrwydd”, a ring of truth. And then told the reader not to trust it: Iolo, the edition says, went for a walk, saw the hamlet, matched it to the poem’s glan Llychwr, and changed the word in his own copies of the poem “yn fwriadol”, on purpose, to Glyn Llychwr, because “byddai’r camau hyn yn nodweddiadol o arferion Iolo”: these steps would be typical of Iolo’s habits.Huw Meirion Edwards (ed.), Gwaith Llawdden, Cyfres Beirdd yr Uchelwyr 31 (Aberystwyth, 2006), pp. 6–7 and nn. 21–26; the poem is no. 29, ll. 16 and 24. Iolo’s notes: LlGC 13158A (Llanover C71), p. 188, and LlGC 21281E, no. 164. The tithe apportionment of Llandeilo Tal-y-bont, 1840: “Glyn Llwchwr”, parcels 1329, 1332, 1333, 1334, 1344 and 1346 (“House and Gardens”), occupier John Griffith. The same tradition, in print outside Iolo’s own papers, though after the Iolo MSS of 1848, which it may follow: Richard Williams, Montgomeryshire Worthies (2nd edn, Newtown, 1894), p. 168, “born at a house called Glyn Llychwr, near Pontardulais, in the parish of Llandilo Talybont.” The place is real. The local tradition is recorded. Iolo put it on the ground within half a mile. The only evidence offered for on purpose is the verdict itself: he did it because he is the kind of man who does it. That is the kindness at work, the edition finds him right on the ground, and still tells the reader not to rely on him.

And the case against him was built without it. The note in which Iolo puts the birthplace on the ground, the walk over “large and rich meads” from Pontarddulais, the tower “on the brink of Lloughor river”, ten ages from eighty-one to ninety-three read off seven gravestones, the church reckoned by eye at about 1300, the tradition “Llawdden a native of this Parish and buried here”, is the piece the editor says has a ring of truth. G. J. Williams never mentioned it. The edition’s own footnote says so, and thanks another scholar for finding it, eighty years after G. J. Williams wrote.LlGC 21281E, no. 164, on a sheet with a letter to Iolo from Rees Evans dated 10 November 1803, as printed in Edwards, Gwaith Llawdden, p. 6, in full: “From Pont ar Ddulais over large and rich meads to Landeilo Tal y Bont. Good and large double Church-Bridge. The Tower on the brink of Lloughor river, here deep and smooth, very fine near the Church. on 7 grave stones are the ages of 90 – 93 – 84 – 86 – 85 – 84 – 82 – 82 – 81 – 87 – Church appears to have been built about 1300c fine larger old yews. all married there ait Tradition – Llawdden a native of this Parish and buried here. Cwrt y Carnau at a small distance and in this Parish, – Llynn Llychwr the Birth place of Llawdden standes about half a mile to the Right, when within ¾ of a mile from Swansea to Pont ar Ddulais.” Edwards, p. 6 n. 22: “Ni chyfeiria G.J. Williams at y darn hwn yn op.cit. a diolchaf i’r Athro Geraint Jenkins am dynnu fy sylw ato.”

There is more to it than a farm name. The poem behind Iolo’s note is Llawdden’s praise of Ieuan Gwyn ap Gwilym Fwyaf of Pryscedwyn and his wife Goleuddydd, in that same parish of Llandeilo Tal-y-bont. Its editor puts it about 1420, in Llawdden’s early years, and it survives in nine manuscripts. Reading it, G. J. Williams concluded that Ieuan had kept Llawdden when the poet was a youth, and that Llawdden therefore probably came from Gŵyr; he called the poem the foundation of all the stories. The prosecutor put the poet in the parish by manuscript evidence, with no Iolo in it at all. And the house kept poets. Two generations on, Lewys Glyn Cothi sang Ieuan Gwyn’s grandson in the hall at Bryscedwyn and called it llety’r beirdd, the poets’ lodging, llety’r beirdd Wyl Deilo, the poets’ lodging at the feast of Teilo, the saint of the parish church.Edwards, Gwaith Llawdden, poem 29, Moliant Ieuan Gwyn ap Gwilym Fwyaf o Bryscedwyn a Goleuddydd, and pp. 3–4; the nine manuscripts include Peniarth 99, p. 269. The date is the editor’s, p. 239: Lewys Glyn Cothi (fl. 1447–89) sang to Ieuan Gwyn’s grandson, so Llawdden “gall mai tua 1420” sang to the grandfather, whose birth Bartrum sets about 1370. G. J. Williams (1926), p. 91: “Gellir casglu i Ieuan ap Gwilym noddi Llawdden pan oedd yn llanc, ac felly ei bod yn debig iddo hanfod o Wyr”; “y cywydd hwn ydyw sylfaen yr holl chwedlau”. Lewys Glyn Cothi, poem 94, Moliant Dafydd ap Tomas, in Dafydd Johnston (ed.), Gwaith Lewys Glyn Cothi (Cardiff, 1995), pp. 213–15: “Llety plas Tomas ar hyd dydd – i bawb, / llety’r beirdd dragywydd”; “llety’r beirdd Wyl Deilo”; “mae’r osai cadarn ym Mryscedwyn. / Neuadd yw”.

The reason given for setting all this aside is that poets conventionally claim early patronage far from home, and that Llawdden more likely only visited. Read the poem. He was there, he says, er yn herlod bach, since he was a small lad; the man’s gold was his er yn fab, since boyhood. Until he sees “the man from the bank of the bright Llychwr”, he says, there is no joy in him: ni bydd llawenydd ynof.Peniarth MS 99, p. 269, in the hand of John Davies of Mallwyd, before 1620, read at the page: “ni bydd llawenydd ynof / ni’m cair hanner awr i’m cof”; so too Robert Vaughan’s copy, LlGC 19905B (Edwards, p. 119). Iolo’s own copy, LlGC 13125B, reads awenydd, the inspired one, for llawenydd, joy; it is the text G. J. Williams printed as the poem (1926, pp. 89–91).  As the exile goes home to cast off sickness and the young salmon seeks its own water, so he will go to the court on the bank of the Llychwr i gael dadeni, to be born again, for yno y’m lloched, there I was sheltered. He calls Llandeilo a tylwyth, a kindred. And he comes, he says, â mawl i ddiolch fy maeth, with praise, to thank the house for his maeth. Maeth is built on the root of magu, to rear, the old British root mak-, which is also the Cornish maga and the Breton magañ. It means the rearing of a child by those who are not its parents: fosterage, the hearth that raises you. Put mam in front of it and you have mamaeth, the foster-mother. Take the same root another way and you have magol, the place a person was born or reared: native. In Cymraeg the land that reared you is your native land, and the one word is built on the other. A man does not thank a house for his hearth because he called there once with his teacher.Edwards, Gwaith Llawdden, poem 29, ll. 18, 32, 37–44, 54, 66; the topos argument at pp. 4–5 (“math o dopos ydynt”; “y mae’n fwy tebygol mai ymweld yn unig … a wnaeth”). Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, s.v. maeth: “Cynhaliaeth, lluniaeth, porthiant … meithriniad plentyn gan un (rai) sydd heb fod yn rhiant (rhieni) iddo, magwraeth”, sustenance; fosterage, rearing, nurture; and s.v. magol: “y ganed neu y maged person ynddi, genedigol”; s.v. magaf: magu: “Crn. C. maga, Llyd. C. maguaff, Llyd. Diw. magañ: < Brth. *mak-”; s.v. mamaeth: “[mam + maeth] … foster-mother”.

The 2006 edition sums up Iolo’s whole account of Llawdden in one sentence: G. J. Williams, it says, showed it to be “rich invention, with the occasional crumb of truth”. Those are not G. J. Williams’s words. Neither dychmygwaith nor briwsionyn is anywhere in his book, and the footnote quotes nothing. What G. J. Williams did write was a rule: reject all of it, “without any hesitation”, unless older manuscripts confirm it.Huw Meirion Edwards, Gwaith Llawdden (Aberystwyth, 2006), p. 1 and n. 3; G. J. Williams, Iolo Morganwg a Chywyddau’r Ychwanegiad (1926), p. 93 (“Heb unrhyw betruster”).

So apply his rule, and watch it fail. Older manuscripts put Llawdden at Gruffudd ap Nicolas’s eisteddfod: a copy made between 1605 and 1612 sets his quarrel in the hall at Dinefwr, and G. J. Williams himself wrote gwyddom, we know it. They put him at Machynlleth: a manuscript of 1586. They give him his axe, which Iolo gave him too: Guto’r Glyn, in Llawdden’s own lifetime, sang of “Llawdden â’i fwyell eiddaw”, Llawdden with his axe, and Thomas Wiliems’s dictionary keeps the saying “ôl bwyall Lowdden ar gerdd”, the mark of Llawdden’s axe on a poem. They put the patron’s house where Iolo put it: the two oldest copies of the poem, both made before 1666, head it “o fro Ŵyr”, of Gower, in “plwy Llandeilo”. And the tithe of 1840 has the farm, Glyn Llwchwr, where Iolo said it stood. By his own test G. J. Williams was wrong, again and again, and he threw it all out anyway. Count it. Where Iolo can be tested he was right eight times, half right four more, and wrong three: a pedigree, a chair he gave to the wrong man, and Machynlleth into old age. Call that a crumb of truth if you like. It is most of the loaf.Edwards, Gwaith Llawdden (2006), p. 12 and nn. 39–41 (Guto’r Glyn; Thomas Wiliems), p. 119 and pp. 277–84; G. J. Williams (1926), pp. 86 and 127; Mostyn 131 (LlGC 3039B), 1605–12; BL Add 14866, 1586–7; the Llandeilo Tal-y-bont tithe apportionment, 14 December 1840.

Now set the two men side by side. Iolo never went to school. Five of the ten surviving copies of Llawdden’s poem, in four of its nine manuscripts, are in his hand, and he walked the parish and wrote down what he saw. G. J. Williams had a degree, a paid scholarship to read Iolo’s papers, a Fellowship won on the strength of his articles against him, and a chair. His pages on Llawdden name no field and no farm. He printed the poem from Iolo’s own copy, called it near enough to the old one, and said nothing of the old one’s glan and llawenydd where Iolo’s has Glyn and awenydd. And it was G. J. Williams who wrote Iolo’s entry in the national biography.Edwards, Gwaith Llawdden, p. 1 and n. 3 (“Gw. l.c.; TLlM 53”), p. 12 and nn. 39–41 (Guto’r Glyn; Thomas Wiliems, TW i, 218), p. 119 (the titles in LlGC 19905B, Robert Vaughan, 1640–66, and Peniarth 99), and pp. 277–84 (the manuscripts: five of the ten copies, in four of the nine manuscripts, in Iolo’s hand). G. J. Williams, Iolo Morganwg a Chywyddau’r Ychwanegiad (1926), pp. 85–95: p. 86 (“ôl bwyall Llawdden”), p. 89 (“a chytuna’r ddau gopi yn weddol, ag eithrio un cwpled”), p. 93 (“Heb unrhyw betruster”), p. 127 (“Gwyddom … fod cysylltiad rhwng Llawdden â’r Eisteddfod honno”). Mostyn 131 (LlGC 3039B), 1605–12; BL Add 14866, 1586–7. Llandeilo Tal-y-bont tithe apportionment, 14 December 1840. The count is ours, from Edwards’s edition and G. J. Williams’s own pages; the rest of Iolo’s account has no older witness either way. Dictionary of Welsh Biography: “Williams, Griffith John”, by Aneirin Lewis; “Williams, Edward (Iolo Morganwg)”, by G. J. Williams. Iolo had drawn that unschooled youth himself, and without flattery: “very pensive, melancholy, and very stupid, as all but my mother thought”. His mother was right.Bethan M. Jenkins, Between Wales and England (2017), p. 115.

And here is the same habit at work on four lines of verse. When Llawdden was dead (so the papers Iolo left have it) a poet stood over him in the churchyard of Llandeilo Tal-y-bont, and the papers give the poet as Iorwerth Fynglwyd, and the words as these:

Llawdden a’i Awen Eos a ballodd,
    Pwy bellach i’n dangos?
    Dan y ddaear mae’n aros;
    Dall yw’n Iaith mae’n dywyll nos.

Llawdden and his nightingale-muse have failed. Who is there to show us now? He is waiting under the earth. Our language has gone blind, and the night is here.

The English printed on the facing page in 1848 gives the nightingale as “bright inspiration”, and the blindness as “obscured is our language”. Both birds have flown.Yr Awen, iv. Tudur Aled on the death of Dafydd ab Edmwnd: “Llaw Dduw a fu’n lladd awen”, the hand of God has been killing awen (Gwaith Tudur Aled, p. 282; GPC, awen). It is mourned by name. Awen Eos is an actual bird, the eos, the nightingale, the same one that makes Dafydd ap Gwilym the nightingale of the Dyfi, and dall is not obscured, dall is blind. Weather obscures a language. A language goes blind the way a man does, and does not get better.The englyn is printed in Iolo Manuscripts (Llandovery, 1848), Welsh at p. 320, English at p. 700; the title page reads “with English translations and notes, by his son, the late Taliesin Williams (Ab Iolo)”. And the man who did the softening was not an Englishman and not an enemy. He was Taliesin Williams, Iolo’s son, putting his father’s papers through the press with the Cymraeg sitting on the opposite page as he worked.

Whether a fifteenth-century poet wrote that englyn is disputed; G. J. Williams held that Iolo wrote it himself.G. J. Williams, Iolo Morganwg (Cardiff, 1926), pp. 85–95, on the elegy for Llawdden attributed to Iorwerth Fynglwyd. It does not matter here, and if he is right it is worse. Either a fifteenth-century poet’s blind language was dimmed into obscurity by the man publishing him, or Iolo’s own line was dimmed into obscurity by his own son. The charge sheet cannot have it both ways, and neither way does the English carry what the Cymraeg said. That is the whole method in four lines: the Cymraeg governs. When the two disagree, the Cymraeg is the thing itself, and the English is a report of it.

His teachers kept that rule before him. At Pencoed on All Souls’ Day 1733, fourteen years before he was born, Lewis Hopkin set the purpose of the bards’ meeting into englynion, and the first purpose was the tongue itself:

Os canwn gwiriwn dêg araith—gerddau,
Ag urddas gynhilwaith,
Nid arfer mewn nad oerfaith,
Frattio’n awr y Fruttain iaith.

If we sing, let it be true fair speech of songs, with fine-wrought dignity, not now to tatter the British tongue.Lewis Hopkin, “Englynion ar ddydd y cyfarfod a gynhaliwyd Y’mhencoed, ddydd Gwyl yr Eneidiau,—1733”, stanza 3 of 8, from Y Fêl Gafod (1813) as reprinted in Hopkin-James, Hopkiniaid Morganwg (1909), p. 285, read on the page image. The third line of the first stanza is left out of the English. Fruttain iaith is the British tongue, as in his englyn of 1770 at the head of the book. The English is ours.

A second word works the same way as forgery, and can be caught in the act just as cleanly.The history of forgery is in Y Celwydd, ¶128. Alongside forgery the other word laid on the Britons’ material is fairy tale, and it is worth counting where it actually comes from. Lady Charlotte Guest’s introduction to The Mabinogion (1849), the book that carried these tales into English, uses romance seventeen times, legend six, fiction twice, and fairy, fable, nursery, invention and forger not once between them. She does not argue from enchantment at all. She argues from the ground: that the legends attach to particular pools, hills, detached rocks, caves and fords, and that the names outlive the language that made them. And she names the standard she is working to, work “not unworthy of the talents of a Llwyd or a Prichard.” Edward Lhuyd: the man who catalogued the manuscripts a generation before the attrition. The word fairy was thrown at her book from outside it. It is nowhere in her introduction.Lady Charlotte Guest, trans., The Mabinogion, from the Llyfr Coch o Hergest, 3 vols. (Llandovery: William Rees; London: Longman, 1838–49), introduction. Counts taken across the introduction entire. The Lhuyd comparison is hers. And note where she signs it: Dowlais, August 29th, 1848, from the largest ironworks on earth.

And the profession that threw it said out loud what the word was for. Reviewing two collections of folk-tales, Archaeologia Cambrensis, the journal of the Cambrian Archaeological Association, founded in 1846, complained that “we thought that at least the domain of Fairyland was safe from the intrusion of the ubiquitous man of science,” and that the author had “added the last straw required to break the camel’s back by making fairy tales a subject for scientific investigation.” Read that as what it is. Fairyland is not a description of the material. It is a shelf, and the property of the shelf is that nothing on it has to meet a standard of proof, and the men operating the shelf describe the exemption as a comfort, and the application of evidence to it as an intrusion. That is the same instrument as the forgery verdict, running in the opposite direction. One says the document is false and must be excluded; the other says the material is charming and need never be examined. Either way nobody has to read the thing. And that sentence was not printed in Llundain. It was printed in Cymru, by the learned society that had appointed itself the keeper of the nation’s past, of its own accord, about its own material.Unsigned review of E. Sidney Hartland, The Science of Fairy Tales (Contemporary Science Series) and English Fairy and other Folk-Tales (Camelot Series), both London: Walter Scott, 1891, in Archaeologia Cambrensis, 5th ser., IX, no. XXXV (July 1892), p. 236. Italics added. The complaint is made in earnest and in the first person plural, we thought, which is what makes it evidence.

Set down plainly, then, what rests on what, because a defence that will not sort its own evidence has no standing to attack the prosecution’s. The disputed corpus does not stand on one footing. It stands on three, and honesty divides them.

• Independently attested. Sources whose existence does not rest on Iolo’s word: the scribe Llywelyn Siôn, thirteen of whose manuscripts survive; Morgan Llywelyn, whose name and date the prosecutor himself found in a surviving book; the book of Iago ab Dewi, whose existence and dispersal the national dictionary records. For these the question is not whether the source was real, but what it held.
• Iolo’s hand alone, argued as salvage. Materials where the copy-book he named did not outlive the fire, and his transcript is the only witness left. Here the defence claims no independent attestation and never has, it claims custody and salvage, and asks the court to weigh a documented burning against an assumed fraud.
• Contested. Materials where his hand and a lost original cannot, at present, be told apart, and where the honest verdict is the one already reached: we cannot always tell which, and cannot is not guilty.

Naming the middle class out loud costs the defence nothing it did not already owe, and takes from the prosecution its favourite discovery, presented as damning, that some of the materials rest on Iolo’s word alone. Of course some do. The fire saw to that. The question was never whether every item carries a second witness (almost no medieval corpus does) but whether a man who copied a burning library is to be hanged for the gaps the fire left behind.

And because a case that cannot be broken is not a case but a creed, say plainly what would break this one. The transmission-and-salvage reading is not immune to evidence; it makes a claim that can fail. Produce, for a disputed poem, an independently dated witness older than Iolo (a manuscript in another hand, kept before he was born) that carries the poem in a form his copy cannot be descended from yet contradicts; show that his “additions” cannot be a longer recension because the older witness forecloses one; and for that poem salvage fails and the charge of invention stands. That test has not been met: the surviving witnesses are shorter, and where two of them name a different poet,See Y Croesholiad, ¶162. they differ on the label, not on a text his copy could not descend from; and a shorter copy is the fire’s work, not a forger’s. But the test exists, and a verdict that could survive it honestly is worth more than one that forbids it. The prosecution’s error was never that it tested Iolo. It was that it pronounced the test passed while the one witness that could have run it was still locked in a cabinet at Llanover.

11. Y Gadwyn

The Chain of Custody269 Documents and dates. 272 The house at Llanover. 273 The Prussian ambassador. 275 The money. 280 Stephens and his paymaster. 283 The B.C.D. letters. 288 The pharmacy. 293 The rejected essay. 304 The locked cabinet. 306 The book they said did not exist. 315 The letter and its edition. 318 Every gap falls one way.

Leave rhetoric aside now, and take the documents and the dates in order.

Iolo Morganwg died in 1826.1853, Bunsen and the Abergavenny prize: On the Abergavenny Cymreigyddion and its eisteddfodau, the gentry-and-ironmaster festival at which Bunsen adjudicated, see Museum Wales, “The Abergavenny Eisteddfod,” and “The Abergavenny Cymreigyddion,” Monmouthshire Merlin, 14 October 1853. That Bunsen proposed the subject of the chief prize of 1853 is in Thomas Price, Literary Remains (Llandovery, 1855).  His manuscripts (the seventy-five volumes, the transcripts, the disputed drafts) passed to his son, Taliesin Williams. Taliesin died in 1847. The treasure was offered to the British Museum, and the Museum's grandees turned their noses up at what the modern biographer calls "a Welsh stonemason's jottings." The empire's own house of records declined the evidence; the interested family caught it.Taliesin ab Iolo's will, made 2 June 1845 and proved at Llandaff on 14 August 1847 (NLW, Llandaff probate LL1847-142): "I direct that all the Manuscripts that belong to me shall be disposed of to the British Museum and that the money obtained for them be paid to my said Wife Mary Williams … but should no pecuniary consideration be offered for them I still direct that my said manuscripts whether consisting of bound volumes or of loose papers excepting letters of correspondence which are not to be disposed of shall be presented to the British Museum to secure their preservation." The letters were kept back. The Museum's refusal is recorded in Geraint H. Jenkins, Y Digymar Iolo Morganwg (Talybont, 2018): "Troes penaethiaid mawreddog y sefydliad hwnnw eu trwynau ar jottings saer maen o Gymro"; thereafter "mewn cwpwrdd pren ym mhlas Llanofer," open to "ysgolheigion profedig", vetted scholars, Ab Ithel, D. Silvan Evans and Cadrawd among them. The Dictionary of Welsh Biography (s.v. Hall, Augusta, 2016) has Lady Llanover buy the collection “from his son Taliesin Williams” in 1857. Taliesin had been dead ten years: he died on 16 February 1847, and his will was proved that August. After his death Sir Benjamin Hall and his wife Augusta, Lady Llanover, bought the heart of the archive, the catalogue's Classes B and C, and carried it to the Llanover estate in Sir Fynwy (Monmouthshire). There it stayed, in private hands (in a wooden cupboard, opened to approved hands only, Ab Ithel's among them) until 1916, when Lady Llanover’s grandson deposited it at the National Library of Wales. One of the approved hands described what the cupboard held, in 1910: the bulk of it “written by Iolo Morganwg himself on all sorts of paper, some on pages of old diaries, some on prospectuses and account books, others on advertisement sheets of various kinds”. The only list was Ab Ithel’s, “so meagre” that to trace one sentence he had read sixty-three volumes; and the men who called Iolo careless had “in most cases” never seen one of them, “so jealously are they guarded by their present custodian”.L. J. Hopkin-James and T. C. Evans (Cadrawd), Hen Gwndidau, Carolau a Chywyddau (Bangor, 1910), Introduction, pp. ix–xi. Sixty-nine years. In his eightieth year the stonemason had valued those jottings himself, and not modestly: “by far the greatest in number, and the most refined in Wales and in the whole of the Isle of Britain and in the whole world”.Iolo Morganwg to Taliesin Williams, 4 February 1826, Correspondence, III, p. 759. He wrote it in Cymraeg, to his son Taliesin; the English is the translation of the editors of his Correspondence.

Set the dates of the prosecution against the dates of the evidence. Griffith John Williams built his forensic case (the drafts, the hand, the workshop of the forger) and published it in 1926. Every disputed manuscript he worked from had spent the whole of that span in the closed possession of a single family: the family of Lady Llanover, inventor of the "Welsh national costume," patron of the respectable, state-approved, parlour version of British antiquity, and, through her sister's marriage, sister-in-law to the Prussian ambassador Christian Bunsen. For all that time no independent scholar could examine those manuscripts. No defender of Iolo could. The chain of custody of the central exhibit runs, unbroken and unwitnessed, through the hands of the one interest with the most to gain from the verdict.

And the character of that household matters, because it is the whole charge turned inside out. Lady Llanover was no neutral custodian. In those same years she was manufacturing Cymru's tradition herself, for commercial ends, in the mills of her own class; that manufacture is examined in full later in this argument. So the woman who sat for two generations on the archive of the man being hanged for inventing Welsh tradition was, in those very years, inventing more of it than Iolo ever did, and selling it. Her husband, Sir Benjamin Hall, the ironmaster turned First Commissioner of Works, had charge of the clock tower of the Parliament that governed Cymru as its great bell was cast and hung; “Big Ben” is most likely named for him. And her sister had married Christian Bunsen, the Prussian ambassador, who sat in judgment over the literary competitions of the Abergavenny eisteddfodauChristian C. J. Bunsen, Prussian ambassador; his Outlines of the Philosophy of Universal History, Applied to Language and Religion, 2 vols. (London, 1854), files Cymraeg among the “barbarous” and “crystallized” tongues. See also Frances Bunsen, A Memoir of Baron Bunsen (1868)., set the questions, chose the winners, and in 1848 steered a prize to Thomas Stephens, who spent it debunking the Britons' tradition. None of this requires a conspiracy to state; it is an eisteddfod programme and a marriage certificate. It is simply the fact: the archive of the most accused "forger" of British antiquity lay locked, all that while, in the one household that was at the same time manufacturing that antiquity for profit, raising the imperial Parliament's tower, and adjudicating from a foreign embassy what the nation might call its own. He had feared for those papers in the hands that came after him. In a note among them he worried that his own children would not be able to make proper use of his collections after his death, and would do nothing with them “beyond that of privately amusing themselves, and of converting them into Hobby Horses … that will run with them wildly”.NLW 21413E, no. 21.

That timeline adds up to one picture: a Prussian ambassador sat in judgment, at the largest cultural festival in Cymru, on how the nation had governed itself in law, the Trial by Jury essay, while beside him a second continental scholar, Dr Carl Meyer, adjudicated the nation's oldest surviving poem, the Gododdin: two foreign philologists deciding, at a festival that called itself Welsh, what the Britons were allowed to call their own history and their own literature. The arrangement had a certain administrative logic. The Britons could not be trusted to adjudicate their own legal history, because they had a stake in the answer. The Prussian ambassador had no such inconvenience: he lived in the embassy, spoke no Cymraeg, and was perfectly impartial. He could not be subpoenaed, could not be sued, and could not be made to give his reasons. He sat in judgment on whether the Britons had ever governed themselves in law. Meanwhile, three miles from the festival pavilion, Sir John Guest's blast furnaces were consuming the hills whose governance was under debate, and the railway contractors laying tracks across the empire were waiting for the iron those furnaces produced. The adjudicators certified the past; the ironmasters rearranged the present; and the Britons paid for both. The eisteddfod looked like a celebration of the Britons' culture. It worked like a harvest, and four years after Stephens had first doubted Iolo in print, the Prussian ambassador was still publicly certifying Stephens impartial, in writing, from the platform of his own prize.

And ask who let a Prussian sit in judgment on Cymru's self-government and its tradition in the first place. The people who let him were not the Cymry. The Abergavenny eisteddfod was run and funded by the landowners and industrialists of De-ddwyrain Cymru, many of them English-born, like Lady Llanover herself. And she had said in plain words what she wanted Cymru's culture for: the language was "a firm and hitherto impenetrable barrier … to the progress of sedition and infidelityHer words as given, with the omission marked, by Helen Barlow, “Lady Llanover, Welsh airs and national harmony”, OpenLearn (The Open University), 14 September 2022: “As Lady Llanover put it”. Barlow names no place for them, and the page they were first printed on has not been seen here. On Augusta Hall, Lady Llanover (“inventor of the Welsh national costume,” her Gwenffrwd woollen mill (1865) obliging estate workers to wear it) see Dictionary of Welsh Biography, s.v. “Hall, Augusta,” and Museum Wales, “Lady Llanover, Heroine of the Welsh Woollen Industry.” She domesticated the culture she also policed.," a safeguard against protest and radicalism. That is the key to all of it. She did not preserve Cymru's culture; she domesticated it (a safe “Wales” of harp and costume to keep the people quiet) and the one Briton whose archive was the opposite of safe, the Jacobin Iolo, she kept locked in a cabinet. The Prussian was invited to appraise the carcass because the carcass was the point.

And follow the money under the festival, because it did not come from Cymru, it came from what was being torn out of Cymru. The Abergavenny eisteddfod was funded by the iron and coal masters of the south. Sir John Guest of Dowlais, who owned the largest ironworks on earth, was a patron of the Cymreigyddion from 1834 and paid out of his own pocket to print Stephens's prize essay. On 1 August 1849 the Great Indian Peninsula Railway Bill received Royal Assent in Llundain. In the same month, while William Rees of Llandovery was printing the last sheets of Stephens's The Literature of the Kymry, the Dowlais works Guest ran were supplying the iron rails that would bind India to Victoria: rails beaten out by the very men whose own past the same surplus was, in the same season, buying out of memory. That same year, Guest became sole proprietor of Dowlais, the largest ironworks on earth passing into one man's single hand in the season his money put the word forgery into print.The ledger never closed: Guest’s works became Guest, Keen & Nettlefolds, GKN, and its automotive heir returned to the London exchange in 2023 under the old name itself, Dowlais Group plc. On 3 February 2026, in the season this appeal was being written, the American axle-maker American Axle & Manufacturing (which had renamed itself the Dauch Corporation the week before) completed its purchase of the company, a cash-and-share deal announced at roughly one and four-tenths billion dollars, and the next morning the name Dowlais came off the London exchange and went into a Detroit company. The balance sheet that paid for the verdict was never closed; it was sold on, trading to the last on the name it took from the valley.

And on one day, the 1st of August 1849, one royal assent enclosed the commons at home and the plains of India: the Inclosure Act, chapter 83 of the session’s public acts, An Act further to facilitate the Inclosure of Commons, and the Improvement of Commons and other Lands, and the Great Indian Peninsula Railway, chapter 83 of its local ones.One session, one chapter number, two enclosures, and one day: both received Royal Assent on 1 August 1849, the commons of England and the plains of India enclosed in a single signature’s sitting. The chapters: 12 & 13 Vict. c. 83 (public) = An Act further to facilitate the Inclosure of Commons, and the Improvement of Commons and other Lands; 12 & 13 Vict. c. lxxxiii (local) = the Great Indian Peninsula Railway Company Act (Royal Assent 1 August 1849), enclosure at home and enclosure abroad, filed under one number in one book. The intellectual disarmament of the Britons and the physical enclosure of the Indian subcontinent were twin operations of a single imperial balance sheet. The destruction of the Britons’ historical memory and the laying of the empire's iron arteries were funded by the same account, in the same years, by the same man. Lady Llanover's own husband, Sir Benjamin Hall, was an ironmaster's son whose fortune ran straight back to Richard Crawshay of Cyfarthfa, the Merthyr iron king and his own grandfather. These were the men whose furnaces consumed the Britons, and whose ground the original inhabitants rose to take back, at Merthyr in 1831, at Casnewydd (Newport) in 1839. And it was these same men who paid for the harp-and-costume Wales that Lady Llanover called a "barrier to sedition." Do the arithmetic: they took the iron and coal from under the people, they took the radicalism out of the culture above them, and they paid a Prussian to certify the remainder a barbarous relic. The ironmasters hollowed out the hills; the academics hollowed out the history. It was the same business, run by the same families, for the same end, a “Wales” that produced wealth and made no trouble. Iolo had known that grandfather, and named him in private: Richard Crawshay was “an old iron shopkeeper [who] by purchasing from thieves and by such means amassed an infamous fortune reigns as a king”.NLW 13174A, p. 26v.

Beside that stands one more name, because it shows how concentrated the circle around the evidence really was, and shows who these philologists were and where they came from. Thomas Price, "Carnhuanawc".The standard gloss of the bardic name is sunny cairn: carn, cairn; huan, the old poetic word for the sun (GPC s.v. huan: “(the) sun, sunlight, sunshine”, from the thirteenth-century poets on), the two syllables share no root with coed, woods, whatever the surface resemblance suggests. On Thomas Price (Carnhuanawc, 1787–1848), John Jones (Tegid, 1792–1852), and Thomas Stephens (1821–1875), see the Dictionary of Welsh Biography (https://biography.wales/article/s-PRIC-THO-1787, https://biography.wales/article/s-JONE-JOH-1792, https://biography.wales/article/s11-STEP-THO-1821). Carnhuanawc edited the Iolo Manuscripts for the press in 1848, one year before Stephens turned the same archive into a verdict. He was a Brycheiniog (Breconshire) man, a beneficed clergyman (curate at Builth, later vicar of Llanfihangel Cwmdu, near where he was born) a close friend of the Breton scholar La Villemarqué and a friend of Lady Llanover’s since 1826. With Tegid, John Jones of Bala in Meirionnydd (Merionethshire), educated at Caerfyrddin and Jesus College, Oxford, he was one of the two philologists who actually did the manuscript work behind Lady Charlotte Guest's Mabinogion, for which she alone took the credit and the incomeLady Charlotte Guest, trans., The Mabinogion, from the Llyfr Coch o Hergest, 3 vols. (Llandovery / London, 1838–49), published under her name; the manuscript philology was done by Carnhuanawc and Tegid.. And Carnhuanawc was one of the six editors of the Welsh Manuscripts Society, and sat on its committee, when the Society published the Iolo Manuscripts in 1848. Taliesin Williams had seen the book through the press as far as page 494 when he fell ill. He died in February 1847, and the Society gave the rest to “other hands”. Those editors did not sign their names. They used the preface to tell the public that they did not agree with everything in his notes, and they named three things: what he said about British metre, where he placed the country called Peitwy, and his statement that a cairn marked the grave of a criminal.Iolo Manuscripts (Llandovery: Welsh Manuscripts Society, 1848), Preface, pp. v–vi: “Having proceeded with the printing of the Work as far as page 494, his editorial labours were arrested by illness, which terminated in his death on February 16th, 1847, at the age of 59. In consequence of this much lamented event, the Society found it necessary to engage the assistance of other hands, in order to complete the publication. And those Editors, in submitting the present Volume to the public, wish to have it understood, that they do not concur with their predecessor in the whole of the opinions he has advanced in his Notes.” The preface names no one; the Dictionary of Welsh Biography names Carnhuanawc. The volume’s list of the Society’s “Editors and Collators of Manuscripts” has six: Sir Samuel Meyrick, W. J. Rees, Aneurin Owen, Ieuan Glan Geirionydd, “Rev. T. Price (Carnhuanawc,) Crickhowel” and Tegid. Of the Welsh text the same editors say its apparent errors are owing to “the scrupulous fidelity of Ab Iolo, who invariably inserted every thing as it existed in the Manuscript he transcribed, without altering a single touch of the pen”. It did not come out of nowhere. Carnhuanawc had been writing to Taliesin for years, and pulling him back. In 1829 he told him to hold back the Coelbren: “I would recommend you to withold any publication respecting them until you have re-considered the subject.” In 1844, with the Iolo Manuscripts in the press, he wrote again: “The Society was formed for the publication of M.S.S. and not for the promulgation of opinions whether correct or erroneous.” And all that time he stood beside Lady Llanover: a founder member of the Abergavenny Cymreigyddion, which she joined in 1834, and her friend since 1826.Brynley F. Roberts, “‘The Age of Restitution’: Taliesin ab Iolo and the Reception of Iolo Morganwg”, in Geraint H. Jenkins (ed.), A Rattleskull Genius (Cardiff, 2005), pp. 461–79: the letter of 1829 at p. 473, the letter of 30 July 1844 at p. 476. Dictionary of Welsh Biography (Marion Löffler, 2016), s.v. Hall, Augusta: “Influenced by founder members Lady Coffin Greenly and Thomas Price (Carnhuanawc), whom she has known since 1826, she joined the Abergavenny Cymreigyddion Society in 1834, within three months of its foundation.” The book came out the year before Stephens, citing it forty-one times as his authority, first doubted its compiler in print. The preservation and the prosecution were one year and one circle apart. And note where its two philologists were from: Tegid out of Bala in the north, Carnhuanawc out of Brycheiniog in Canol Cymru, both Oxford- or English-church-trained men, neither a Morgannwg man, working a Morgannwg tradition that was not their own county's. It is the same geography that recurs, sharper and final, in John Morris-Jones three generations later.

The Dictionary of Welsh Biography says the man who finished the book was Carnhuanawc.Dictionary of Welsh Biography, s.v. “Price, Thomas (Carnhuanawc; 1787–1848)”, by Brinley Rees: “He participated in the work of the Welsh Manuscripts Society, editing the Iolo Manuscripts after the death of Taliesin Williams.” The dictionary gives no source for the statement, and the preface speaks of “Editors”, more than one. Price died on 7 November 1848. He was no stranger. At the Welshpool eisteddfod he had stood up and asked the wealthy men in the hall not to forget “this poor old man”, and a collection was made for Iolo. In 1840 he wrote to a friend that he had taken the bardic alphabet for “the mere production of the leisure hours of old Iolo Morganwg”, until Taliesin showed him old lines of verse that left him “completely mystified” and “obliged to acknowledge there appeared to be something handed down in these poems”.Both from The Literary Remains of the Rev. Thomas Price, Carnhuanawc, with a memoir by Jane Williams, Ysgafell, vol. II (Llandovery: William Rees, 1855). The appeal at Welshpool, pp. 128–129: “do not forget the services of this poor old man; and let it not hereafter be said that while the natives of the Principality were indulging in pleasure and gaiety, poor Iolo Morganwg was passing his last days in obscurity and indigence”, and then, “After this a small subscription was made for him.” The letter, to Jane Williams, Crickhowel, 18 May 1840, pp. 265–266: “there is one person living who professes to be a Druid, and to have received the secrets of the order from his father and others, i. e. Mr. Taliesin Williams, of Merthyr Tydfil, son of Iolo Morganwg … I will confess that he has now and then staggered me a good deal by referring to some ancient Bardic lines, when I have doubted the antiquity of his system.” And of the three rays and the bardic alphabet: “Now all this I thought to be the mere production of the leisure hours of old Iolo Morganwg, or some other person in modern times; but one day, by accident, I happened to open upon an ancient englyn in the Myf. Arch., attributed to Gwenddydd … ‘There,’ said Ab Iolo, ‘that’s Druidism;’ and he directed my attention to so many expressions bearing upon the same subject, that I was completely mystified, and was obliged to acknowledge there appeared to be something handed down in these poems in concealed meanings, and which could not be made out by ordinary readers.” Seven years later Taliesin was dead, with the book printed as far as page 494. Whoever finished it could have finished it and said nothing. They chose to tell the public, without signing, that they did not agree with him. Look at what they picked. One was a place-name he had only offered as a possibility. One was a note about cairns that they answered beside the point. The third was not his opinion at all. It was his father’s, and he had printed it over his father’s name: “Toddaid Taliesin yw hwnn a’r nesaf; a mesur ydyw a elwir Hexameter yn Lladin.”Taliesin Williams’s three notes in Iolo Manuscripts (1848). The place-name, p. 419: “Beitwy, may, possibly, mean either Batavia or Poitou.” The cairn, p. 420, on the Cross found “under a heap of stones”: “The Welsh term is ‘Carn,’ which implies a heap of stones; a token of disgrace that was thrown over executed malefactors; and hence depraved characters became branded by public execration, as carned thieves”; the editors reply that a cairn was “amongst the Ancient Britons a mark of honourable sepulture”, which is a different matter. Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru gives carn-lleidr as “Penlleidr, ysbeiliwr, lleidr pen ffordd: arrant thief, highwayman”, from about 1400, carn- being a prefix of adjectival force (carn-fradwr, carn-filain); it tells no story of the heap over the hanged, and does not rule one out. Carn is also rock and cairn (GPC: “craig, bryn”), and the word is heard in Welsh as the thief’s rock. The metre, pp. 402–403: the old stanza “seems to correspond with Hexameter verse, from which it probably was derived”, though “Welsh verses being principally regulated by accent and syllables, instead of quantity and duly arranged feet, the resemblance is frequently quite defective”; he then gives his father’s marginal note from Cyfrinach y Beirdd, p. 212, signed “IOLO MORGANWG”, with his own English for it: “This and the next example belong to the metre called Toddaid Englyn, which is called, in Latin, Hexameter.” The preface answers that “his remarks on Welsh Prosody do not appear to be altogether well founded”. The men who finished Iolo’s book put distance between themselves and his teaching inside it, a year before Stephens. The father had meant that work for the boy from the cradle. Soon after Taliesin was born Iolo wrote: “I hope my Taliesin will live to be the Editor and Translator of the works of his ancient name’s sake”, the first Taliesin, chief of the bards, whose name he had given him.NLW 13221E, p. 28, Iolo Morganwg to William Owen Pughe, 23 July 1788.

Who stands in front of this machine, and who stands behind it? Lady Llanover and Lady Charlotte Guest hold the names, the costume, the translation credit, the patronage of taste, the public face of "Welsh culture." Bunsen, Sir Benjamin Hall, Sir John Guest, and the ironmasters behind them hold the money, the foreign adjudications, and the political offices. The women are the face the culture industry shows the public. The men write the cheques and certify the verdicts.

And the forgery verdict itself had a paymaster, and the paymaster never let go of him. The first man to doubt Iolo in print was Thomas Stephens, a Merthyr chemist by trade, not a man of independent scholarly means; he built his own shop into the most prosperous in the town and spent his profits on years of unpaid eisteddfod scholarship. But the platform that made his name national was not his own: it was Sir John Guest of Dowlais who paid to publish the 1849 prize essay that made Stephens famous, and Lady Charlotte Guest and Lady Llanover who gave it, in print, their own encouragement and guidance. This was not an outsider's verdict smuggled past the family that held the evidence; it was the family's own protégé delivering the verdict they had raised him to deliver. The book's own printed preface is explicit: Lady Llanover and Lady Charlotte Guest gave it their personal "encouragement and guidance." The full conditions of the subsidy (what instructions, if any, accompanied Guest's payment to the printer William Rees) remain unexamined in the Dowlais Iron Company correspondence now held at Morgannwg Archives, Caerdydd. That archive is the next step for anyone who wants the money-trail in full. Four years later they were still vouching for him: at Bunsen's own 1853 Abergavenny prize, the Prussian ambassador awarded Stephens the great essay on trial by jury in Cymru and praised it, in writing, for "great conscientiousness, and that impartiality which alone is worthy of an historian", the foreign judge of the Britons' own legal history certifying, by name, the impartiality of the very man who four years earlier had certified its bard a fraud.Bunsen’s adjudication of the essay on trial by jury, read for him at the Abergavenny Cymreigyddion: Monmouthshire Merlin, 14 October 1853, p. 5 (“He exhibits, in his judgment of the earliest Welsh traditions, great conscientiousness”). The newspaper’s scanned text garbles the words “that impartiality which alone is worthy of an historian”; the page image has not yet been read here.

His stated ambition was to make the scholarship of Cymru answer to "the daring spirit of modern criticism",Thomas Stephens, The Literature of the Kymry (Llandovery, 1849), p. 207, opening Section IV, “Poems fictitiously attributed to Merddin, Taliesin, Aneurin, Llywarch, Meugant, and Golyddan”: “the daring spirit of modern criticism, is about to lay violent hands upon the old household furniture of venerable tradition”; quoted by W. F. Skene, The Four Ancient Books of Wales (1868), vol. I, p. 11.  the same critical-philological method Bunsen and Müller were applying to Sanskrit at that exact moment; the German scholar Albert Schulz, "San Marte," carried Stephens's verdict back across the Channel in an 1864 translation, the same continental circuit that had filed Cymraeg as a fossil now reading the verdict on its own discoverer. From that platform Stephens spent the 1850s pulling down the Britons' past piece by piece: he branded parts of Iolo’s work invention; he struck out Hu Gadarn, Dyfnwal Moelmud, the bardic alphabet and the Chair of Morgannwg as fables; and he set himself to "prove" that Prince Madoc never crossed the Atlantic. That demolition, finally, is what cost him the patronage: when he entered the Madoc essay at the 1858 Llangollen eisteddfod the judges split and refused him the prize, and his case went unpublished for thirty-five years. Probably after that rupture (the letter is undated) Stephens wrote to Thomas Wakeman that he had asked Augusta Hall to see one of Iolo's manuscripts for himself and been turned away: "Her ladyship has a pique against me."Stephens to Thomas Wakeman, undated: Adam N. Coward (ed.), The Correspondence of Thomas Stephens (Celtic Studies Publications, 2020), p. 54.

Read the sequence in the order it actually happened, because the order is the whole argument. The verdict came first, funded and guided by the family that owned the archive. The refusal came after, once the same critical method that had convicted Iolo started cutting into the family's other myths. Stephens was not locked out and left to guess at the evidence; he was let in, raised up, publicly vouched for by a Prussian ambassador, and only shut out once he stopped being useful. This court always asks one question: who benefits when a Briton, funded and personally vouched for by the men tearing the wealth out of Cymru, certifies that the bard who carried his country’s record forged it? The "critical scholarship" that convicted Iolo was not disinterested. It was funded, guided, and praised by name, and it became inconvenient to its sponsors only once it stopped doing what it was bought to do.

There is, in fact, a precise answer to whether Stephens could have written this himself, and it runs back six years further than 1848. Between November 1842 and March 1843, a twenty-one-year-old Stephens published ten lettersMarion Löffler and Hywel Gethin Rhys, “Thomas Stephens and the Abergavenny Cymreigyddion: Letters from the Cambrian, 1842–3,” National Library of Wales Journal 34, no. 4 (2009): 399–451, the ten “B.C.D.” letters, and the finding that Stephens illustrated his attack “with citations from Cyfrinach y Beirdd,” the order’s own book of the craft. in The Cambrian under the pseudonym "B.C.D." and attacked this very circle, in print, under a deniable pseudonym, with the kind of venom that needs no collaborator.Where each quotation in this sequence stands in Löffler and Rhys (2009), 399–451, by letter in The Cambrian and by journal page. Prize 2, “not altogether divested of prejudice”, and Price’s Hanes Cymru “disfigured by prejudices, numberless inconsistences…”: Letter 1, 5 November 1842, pp. 406–407. Prize 7, “in very bad taste”, and silvestres homines; Aspasia, Eudocia and Anna Comnena: Letter 3, 19 November 1842, pp. 410–412. “Minos” and “Pluto’s Lord Chief Justice”: Letter 4, 3 December 1842, p. 413 (the misprint “Mina’s” is in Letter 3, p. 412). “A loathsome ulcer” and “deceit, chicane, and pusillanimity”: Letter 8, 28 January 1843, p. 429; the llyffant, Letter 8, p. 431. The interview in the pharmacy, “villanous liar”: Letter 9, 11 February 1843, p. 437. Taliesin Williams’s account (“taking my son with me”, Hogarth, the anonymous reviewer, “the traducer and the vehicle of his injustice”, “Cimmerian darkness”, the “prescribed amenities”): The Cambrian, 4 February 1843, p. 433. Iago Emlyn, dated 25 January 1843, “drop the last initial”: The Cambrian, 4 February 1843, p. 437; Stephens on Iago Emlyn, “the most ridiculous man, and miserable poetaster in existence”: Letter 10, 18 March 1843, p. 449. Taliesin Williams’s reply, written at Merthyr on 13 February and printed on 18 February 1843 (llyffeint, toads; “It has since fully transpired”; “a court of justice will still be open for me”): pp. 440–441.

His first target was Carnhuanawc. Prize 2 at the 1842 Abergavenny eisteddfod, he wrote, had been adjudicated by a judge "not altogether divested of prejudice"; Price's Hanes Cymru was "disfigured by prejudices, numberless inconsistences, confused and ill-matured views, and unpardonable neglect." A later letter named Price "Minos", then carefully clarified, for anyone who missed the point, that Minos was "Pluto's Lord Chief Justice": the Devil's magistrate of the dead. Named. In print. In the most important newspaper in Cymru.

His second target was the druidical tradition that Taliesin Williams had inherited from his father. Prize 7, he wrote, was "in very bad taste. There is but little of Druidism known, and that not by any means deserving of being perpetuated, much less commended, though some men, of good sense in other respects, insult humanity and intelligence by boasting themselves lineally descended from those silvestres homines, whom Orpheus is said ‘Cædibus et victu foedo deterruit.’" The Latin tag, from Horace, means: wild men of the forest whom Orpheus had to reclaim from slaughter and filth. Men who claim bardic-druidical descent are claiming descent from savages. Taliesin Williams had won the eisteddfod chair at Caerdydd in 1834 for an ode on the Druids. He understood the target.When the mask was off Stephens said it of the son by name: “in the mystic groves of antiquity, he would have made an admirable Druid”. And of the tradition: “Upon triads of uncertain date, and of unknown origin, I place no reliance; of Druidic tenets, of modern invention, I am equally distrustful.” Letter 10, The Cambrian, 18 March 1843; Löffler and Rhys, p. 449. That is the doubt about the druidism over his own name in March 1843, six years before the book that made it a verdict, and it is the last word of a quarrel.

His third target was the women. Letter 3 compared Cymru's patronesses to three learned women of Greece and Byzantium: "Aspasia, Eudocia, and Anna Comnena present themselves to my mind and claim the institution of comparison between them and Ladies Charlotte Guest, Hall, and Greenly. But they seek in vain: the vicious morality of the first lessens the homage we would willingly pay to the splendour of her intellect, while the two latter lie under a charge of having patronised literature more for the sake of show than real patriotism." Grammatically "the first" could be Aspasia, the courtesan, the famously unchaste one. Some readers will have taken it for Lady Charlotte Guest, named first among the women of Cymru. Stephens has it both ways: deniable on the page, legible in the room.Letter 3, The Cambrian, 19 November 1842; Marion Löffler and Hywel Gethin Rhys, “Thomas Stephens and the Abergavenny Cymreigyddion”, National Library of Wales Journal 34, no. 4 (2009), p. 411.

And the Cymreigyddion itself: "a loathsome ulcer, upon an otherwise healthy body", synonymous with "deceit, chicane, and pusillanimity."Letter 8, The Cambrian, 28 January 1843; Löffler and Rhys (2009), p. 429.

On 28 January 1843, the day the eighth letter was printed, Taliesin Williams walked into the shop of the Merthyr chemist Thomas Stephens, with his son beside him as a witness and a name for the man behind the letters. The collision was as physical as it was constitutional: the son of the stonecutter, carrying the secrets of Tir Iarll, confronting the respectable apothecary who was already positioning himself to sell Iolo's memory to the ironmasters. Stephens published the exchange in his own name, Letter 9, The Cambrian, 11 February 1843:

Ab Iolo loquitur: "Mr. Stephens, I find myself shockingly vilified by a letter in the Cambrian of this day, signed B.C.D. Are you B.C.D.?"
T. S.: "I am, sir."
Ab Iolo: "Then you are a villanous liar. What are the damning facts you have to charge against me?"
T. S.: "All statements publicly made by me you are at liberty to question the truth of, and you shall be publicly replied to."
Ab Iolo: "You are a villanous liar." Exit.Taliesin denied that these were the words spoken. “His real words were ‘They shall appear before the public’ … This, I am prepared to prove by evidence on oath.” The Cambrian, 18 February 1843; Löffler and Rhys, p. 439. Stephens dates the visit to 28 January, the day Letter 8 was printed, and places it at “my residence”; Taliesin says “the shop of B.C.D.” (pp. 437, 433).

That playlet is Stephens's own staging, the accuser's version, printed a week after Taliesin's own account of the visit had already run in the same paper, the confrontation reduced to farce with himself as the cool party. Taliesin's account, in the Cambrian of 4 February, is not farce; it is procedure. He did not go alone: "taking my son with me, to witness the interview (a very necessary caution to prevent further falsehoods)", two witnesses, as the law of testimony requires, the craft of evidence handed father to son in the doing. He put the name to the face: "It would have well employed the talents of Hogarth to delineate his countenance, as he stood aghast at the question." Then he set out, for all the Cymry, why the demand was lawful. Judge the work from behind a mask, and welcome, anonymous review is a security "to fair criticism, so beneficial to the advancement of knowledge." Turn the mask on the man, and it forfeits everything: "both the traducer and the vehicle of his injustice become equally responsible to the outraged party." Come under your proper name, and the accused confronts you, "and a fair hearing, under the prescribed amenities of social order, would have ensued; and where is a man of integrity who can sanction any other course?" He even took the accuser's own learned footnote (Stephens had derived the Cymry from Homer's Kimmeroi, the people of the sunless gloom) and handed it back as the man's address: come out of your "Cimmerian darkness." Your etymology is your hiding place. And he adjourned like an officer of a court: "a court of justice will still be open for me." Stephens's next letter was his last, and it went out under his own name, the mask never went back on.Price had said it in one line three months earlier: “it is by no means a pleasant thing to stand out on open ground to be fired at by a man behind a parapet”. He signed that letter with his own name, “T. Price”, not with his bardic one. The Cambrian, 12 November 1842; Löffler and Rhys, p. 409. The record is not all one way, and it is given here. Letters in the Merthyr Guardian signed “Patera Lignea” defended Price and the Druids, and the editors of the correspondence give them to Taliesin himself (p. 403). The second owns its own mask: “The word of one anonymous writer is as good as that of another” (Merthyr Guardian, 7 January 1843, p. 3). Stephens charged him with the letters, Englished the name as “a wooden tub”, and said he had denied them (Letter 10, p. 448). On the silence that followed, the editors: Stephens “did not reply. He had either been silenced by the thinly veiled threat of legal action from Taliesin Williams” or had seen how large a following his adversary had (p. 402). And the town laughed at both sides. A letter signed “Ap Iago ap Iolo ap Beelzebub” asked to be spared “hot-headed and conceited bards” and “disconcerted competitors for paltry Welsh prizes” (Merthyr Guardian, 18 March 1843, p. 3). The two newspaper pages were read in the National Library’s online scans. His father had seen that counter coming. Writing of the boy’s studies to Evan Williams, his publisher in the Strand, he said: “My son is entering deeply into these studies and will, to my sorrow, become an author; will, most probably, like myself, ‘Fall on Evil Days and Evil Tongues.’”Cambrian Register, III (1818), p. 373. The inner quotation is from Milton, Paradise Lost, Book VII.

And Taliesin was not the only one who had the measure of the mask. The poet James James, Iago Emlyn, himself mauled in the letters as “the most ridiculous man, and miserable poetaster in existence”, dated his reply the 25th of January, three days before the pharmacy, and the Cambrian of 4 February carried it: “I should advise B.C.D. to drop the last initial of his name, and adopt the letter A instead, prefixed to the others; this would suit him better.” Drop the D, prefix the A: A.B.C. The formidable young critic, addressed by an elder bard as a child still at his alphabet.James James (“Iago Emlyn”), letter dated 25 January 1843, printed in The Cambrian, 4 February 1843; transcribed, with the whole “B.C.D.” correspondence, in Marion Löffler and Hywel Gethin Rhys, “Thomas Stephens and the Abergavenny Cymreigyddion: Letters from the Cambrian 1842–3,” National Library of Wales Journal 34, no. 4 (2009). The initials themselves were never decoded, a stock deniable cipher of the X.Y.Z. family; the jab, not the key, is the record. The room had his measure before the mask ever came off.

So read the scene as what it was, not as the squabble the accuser staged. On one side of the counter: twenty-one years old, three languages, eight classical footnotes to a single letter, Ezekiel's two written sticks, Solon's laws on wooden tablets, Horace's leges incidere ligno, Tacitus on the Germans, the world's whole wood-writing tradition marshalled by a chemist to show that every old nation had cut its letters on wood, and to say that the son's book on the bards' alphabet had taught him nothing.Ezekiel 37:16-17, in the English Bible of 1611, "take thee one stick... and write upon it... then take another stick... and join them one to another into one stick"; Solon's axones, rotating wooden tablets bearing Athens's laws (Plutarch, Solon 25); Horace, Ars Poetica 399, "leges incidere ligno", to cut laws into wood; Tacitus, Germania 10, on the Germanic tribes casting lots cut from a branch (surculus) marked with signs (notae). On the other: the schoolmaster with Homer, Horace, Hogarth, Junius, the law of libel and the rules of cynghanedd in the same fortnight's letters, enforcing across a shop counter the oldest clause of an outlawed jurisprudence: the accuser shall stand in the light and be seen. The mounds were outlawed in 1402; the Act of Union killed the law in 1536; so the open court sat where it could, the confrontation right of the abolished court, enforced in exile, in a pharmacy on Merthyr High Street.

Taliesin also called Stephens a llyffant, a toad, at a public meeting, confirming it in his own letter: "At the public meeting I mentioned in my last I applied the term llyffeint (toads) to Mr. Price's vilifiers, having particularly in view T. S., whose froth suggested the emblem."Taliesin Williams to the editor, Merthyr Tydfil, 13 February 1843, The Cambrian, 18 February 1843; Löffler and Rhys (2009), p. 440.

But Taliesin's most important published statement about the whole affair is this one, and it changes the frame entirely: "It has since fully transpired that Thomas Stephens's composition was one of the two rejected ones; and it is additionally said that he likewise failed on what has been generally termed the Great Prize; hence, I infer, the wrath of his disappointment."The sentence before it gives the night: “the evening previous to the opening of the last Abergavenny eisteddfod Mr. Price requested that I would look with him over three essays … We met, together with Mr. Rees, of Llandovery, at the Angel Inn, for that purpose, and remained there till nearly day-break” (The Cambrian, 18 February 1843; Löffler and Rhys, pp. 439–40). The editors of the letters say it in their own words: Price judged the “Address to the working classes”, “to which Thomas Stephens, it was revealed later, had unsuccessfully submitted an essay” (p. 400). Price had guessed as much within the week: B.C.D. “seems to have dipped his pen in the same depository of gall with the essayist himself” (12 November 1842, p. 410). Stephens denied it. That B.C.D. was “the writer of the essay spoken of” was an assumption “unwarranted by my expressions”, and “envy, pique, or resentment have no share in determining my conduct” (Letter 3, pp. 411–12). The failure on “the Great Prize” is report only, by Taliesin’s own wording: “it is additionally said”.

Stephens had submitted an essay of his own to the 1842 eisteddfod, and it was said a second. Carnhuanawc had rejected it. The entire "B.C.D." campaign, the attacks on Price, on Guest, on Hall, on Iolo's druidism, on the whole society, was, per Iolo's own son, printed in the same newspaper, the rage of a losing competitor dressed as principled reform. The same publisher, William Rees of Llandovery, who had been present at the judging session that rejected Stephens in 1842, published both the Iolo Manuscripts (1848) and The Literature of the Kymry (1849).The newspaper’s report of the day gives the prize and the judge’s speech. It was Sir John Guest’s prize, ten guineas, “For the best Address to the Working Classes, on the advantages which their children will derive from a careful attention to their religious and moral education”, and “In awarding this prize Mr. Price took the opportunity of combating some opinions advanced by one of the eight competitors”. It went to Thomas Jenkins of Dowlais. The Cambrian, 22 October 1842, p. 4, read in the National Library’s online scan, where the machine-read text is rough (“one or the eight”). So the prize Stephens lost was set by the man who, seven years later, paid to print his book; and in his first letter, while condemning nearly every other prize, he gave Guest “the merit of having, in proposing the second prize, exhibited taste far better” than “all the rest put together” (Letter 1, Löffler and Rhys, p. 406).

Iolo had praised the opposite in his own teacher. In his first book, the elegy for Lewis Hopkin, he wrote that Hopkin had no spiteful awen and never learned the brutish verse that cuts like a sword:

Mewn chwerwder brôch ni’s trochai
Ei bin têg; ond chwêg a chwai
A geiniai a hoyw ganiad
Glôd pob doethion mwynion mâd.

He never dipped his fair pen in the bitterness of rage; but sweetly and quickly he would sing, with lively song, the praise of all wise, gentle and good men.Iolo Morganwg, as Iorwerth Gwilim, Dagrau yr Awen, neu Farwnad Lewis Hopcin, Fardd (Pont-y-fon [Y Bont-faen]: R. Tomas, 1772), as reprinted by L. J. Hopkin-James, Hopkiniaid Morganwg (Bangor, 1909), p. 359, read on the page image. The word-list printed with the poem gives broch as “llid, digter, digllonedd”, wrath, anger. The English is ours.

Why did Taliesin call him a liar? Because of two things Stephens had printed. First, in Letter 3, he pointed out that when Taliesin won the chair at Caerdydd in 1834 he was also the eisteddfod’s corresponding secretary, so that the judge could have known his handwriting; and in the same sentence he "unhesitatingly exculpated" him. That is a smear: say it, then say you never said it. Second, in the letter printed on 28 January 1843, he wrote that he knew "damning facts" about the judges and was sparing them by not printing them. Taliesin went to the shop that same day and told him to print them. He never did. His last letter says only: "Since the cap fits him, it would be folly for me to take it off."The Caerdydd chair, “the successful candidate for the chair prize was at the same time the corresponding secretary”, and “unhesitatingly exculpated”: Letter 3, The Cambrian, 19 November 1842; Löffler and Rhys, p. 411. The “damning facts, upon authority which scepticism would not reject”: Letter 8, 28 January 1843, pp. 430–31. “Since the cap fits him”: Letter 10, 18 March 1843, p. 447. The letter “bearing [a] date several days after the 1st of August, 1840”, which Letter 3 also cites, was the secretary Ieuan ab Gruffydd’s, not Taliesin’s (pp. 410–11); an earlier printing of this book gave it to Taliesin in error.

The shared circle was real. Taliesin Williams had run Merthyr's school since 1816, thirty-one unbroken years as the town's principal cultural figure. Stephens arrived in Merthyr in 1835, aged fourteen. Iolo's own bardic tradition (including Cyfrinach Beirdd Ynys Prydain, the "Secret of the Bards of the Island of Britain") lived in that school and in that orbit. When Stephens attacks Iolo's druidism in Letter 3 using the precise bardic grades and rules of Cyfrinach y Beirdd, he is not citing a text he found in a library catalogue. He is citing the order’s own book of the craft, turned outward, and the irony is exact. Taliesin had printed Cyfrinach Beirdd Ynys Prydain himself in 1829, from his father’s papers; and Stephens, schooled in the Unitarian academy of the same family whose Neath school Taliesin had once taught in, and living now in Taliesin’s own town, turned that book on the order that printed it.Two schools of one house. David Davis of Castellhywel (1745–1827) kept the famous Unitarian school in Ceredigion. His eldest son, David Davis (1778–1846), “settled at Neath, where he opened a school” in 1801, and there Taliesin Williams was “appointed assistant” about 1813. The father’s successor and former assistant, John Davies (1795–1858), “in 1830 … opened an academy at Adpar, Newcastle Emlyn”, and there Stephens “spent about three years” before he was apprenticed at Merthyr in October 1835. Dictionary of Welsh Biography, s.nn. David Davis (Dafis Castellhywel), John Davies (1795–1858), Taliesin Williams and Thomas Stephens (the last in both its entries, of 1959 and 2017). The authors of the study of the B.C.D. letters note this pointedly: "It is noteworthy that Thomas Stephens, later a major critic of Iolo Morganwg's legacy, had illustrated his criticism with citations from Cyfrinach y Beirdd." Noteworthy is an understatement. It is the informer's move, and it is not the first time that move had been made on this network. Iolo named, in 1794, the man who ran the same operation from inside the Gwyneddigion: Edward Jones, Bardd y Brenin, harper to the Prince of Wales, a member of the very radical Llundain-Cymry society whose meetings he attended and whose discussions he relayed to George Guelph (George III)'s loyalist apparatus.Iolo to Peggy, 27 August 1794: NLW 21285E, letter 841: Jones “went to the fellow called Reeves, to magistrates, to every person and place where he thought he should succeed, endeavouring to lay informations against for what he called sedition, treason &cc., but the poor devil failed in every attempt.” Reeves is John Reeves, founder of the loyalist Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers.  The technique is one: enter the circle, learn its vocabulary and its grievances, use what you learn to destroy it. Jones ran the state's version against the Jacobin radicals. Stephens ran the anglicised gentry's version against the bardic order forty-eight years later, and with one refinement: he did not merely report what the order taught, he weaponised the teaching itself.

What Taliesin maintained in Merthyr was not merely a school: it was the living transmission of Iolo's Gorsedd ceremonies, the three-graded bardic order whose ranks of Ovydd (Ovate), Bardd (Bard) and Derwydd (Druid) Iolo had reconstituted, conducted outdoors in open air, by daylight, with the sky as witness, and whose inner knowledge was precisely Cyfrinach, the Secret. He ran Gorsedd ceremonies at the Abergavenny eisteddfodau. La Villemarqué came from Brittany to participate in them. Lady Llanover and Lady Charlotte Guest attended and participated, the costume, the ceremony, the romance of an open-air bardic order were exactly the aesthetic these women were buying into and financing. And Bunsen, the Prussian ambassador, was a fixture in the same ceremonies. When Stephens in Letter 3 called the bardic-druidical tradition a matter of "silvestres homines — wild men of the forest — whom Orpheus had to reclaim from slaughter and filth," he was not attacking an abstraction. He was attacking the ceremony that these exact people had just publicly participated in, in Abergavenny, in October 1842. And the weapon he used was the ceremony's own vocabulary (the names of the grades, the specific bardic rules, the language of Cyfrinach), learned inside the circle from the men who taught it. To take what was given to you in trust and use it to certify the givers as savages in the public press: that is not criticism. Taliesin’s word for it was exactly right. The villainy was not the disagreement; it was the method.Letter 3, The Cambrian, 19 November 1842; Löffler and Rhys (2009), p. 412. The Latin is Horace, Ars Poetica 391–2.

And it is the Unitarian paradox that gives this its full sharpness. Iolo was a Unitarian, a founder of the Unitarian Society of South Wales in 1802. Stephens's grandfather William Williams (Wil y Gweydd) was a Unitarian minister. Stephens’s own school was Unitarian. His entire formation (the rationalist, anti-clerical, scripture-level engagement with texts) came from the dissenting network that Iolo himself had helped build. Iolo's main institutional attackers (Thirlwall, the CAA, the Anglican establishment) struck from outside the tradition. Stephens struck from within it, deploying the rationalist wing of Unitarianism in Cymru against the mystical-druidical wing of the same tradition. This is why the verdict landed and stuck: it looked like internal critical scrutiny. It was an insider's attack, using an insider's tools, and it was devastating precisely because the attacker appeared to come from Iolo's own people. Iolo had hoped for that church in so many words, writing to Theophilus Lindsey, the founding father of English Unitarianism, of his “warm hopes that I shall live to see a glorious Unitarian church in Wales, emerging out of that wilderness into which we have been driven by the fury of the great dragon”. The church came, and its school formed Thomas Stephens.Iolo Morganwg to Theophilus Lindsey, 10 February 1797, Correspondence, II, p. 12. The wilderness and the great dragon are from Revelation 12, in the King James Bible of 1611 [POST-JUSTINIAN].

So the pen was entirely his own, and so were the doubts, and so was the motive. Nobody needed to plant the Iolo scepticism in him; it had been there since 1842, rooted in both personal injury and genuine ideological conviction, sharpened by daily contact in a pharmacy on Merthyr High Street with the workers whose bodies bore the cost of the same industrial order that paid for the eisteddfod prizes. Between 1843 and 1848 his ability held and his views held. His target moved, and with it the direction his sponsors wanted the acid pointed. The families he had attacked in 1842 did not forgive him. They recruited him, because his venom was real, his reach was proven, and by 1848 they needed it aimed elsewhere. That is the comprador's pivot, performed in plain sight. Stephens did not soften his methods; he redirected them. He traded the Unitarian's bite, the outsider's venom aimed at the ironmasters' eisteddfod, for the ironmaster's endorsement, a funded chair at the table of the very people he had called a loathsome ulcer. The son who had called him a liar to his face was dead before the prize that made his name was ever awarded.Every quarrel in a library has been shelved there before. This one was an old story, and the men in it knew some of the earlier tellings by heart. A man hides behind a false name to attack his betters: Stephens signed himself “B.C.D.” and took for his model Junius, the masked letter-writer of the eighteenth century; Taliesin called him “that paltry aper of Junius”, and Taliesin’s side answered from behind a name of its own, “Patera Lignea”, the wooden bowl. A man whose gift is refused turns on his brother: Stephens’s essay was put aside at the Angel Inn, and within weeks he was at the judge and at the bard’s son. The oldest telling is in Genesis: “Cain and his sacrifices he regarded not” (Genesis 4:5, the Septuagint, epi de Kain kai epi tais thysiais autou ou prosesche) [PRE-JUSTINIAN]. A beaten man says the prize was bought: Llawdden said it at Carmarthen (Gogleddiaeth, ¶587). A man from the university tells a trained bard he knows nothing: before 1588 Edmwnd Prys, of St John’s College, Cambridge, and Wiliam Cynwal, a graduate of the Caerwys eisteddfod of 1568, fought it out through fifty-four poems. An old dictionary of lives says the quarrel killed Cynwal. Prys wrote his elegy. And part of Cynwal’s own dictionary survives in the handwriting of Iolo Morganwg. A boy walks into the hall and the king’s bards cannot speak: that is the tale of Taliesin, twenty-four bards left playing “blerwm” on their lips. In Merthyr it ran backwards. A man named Taliesin walked into the boy’s shop, and in the end it was the boy who fell silent. Jung gave the parts their names. The mask is the persona. The fault a man sees in his enemy because he cannot bear it in himself is projection: the critic who called the old bards wild men wrote “trash”, “a loathsome ulcer”, “a mind in the last stage of decay”. But the names came late. The story was already on the shelf. The sources: the letters, in Löffler and Rhys (2009), pp. 399–451. Prys and Cynwal: William Owen [Pughe], The Cambrian Biography (London, 1803), pp. 97–98 and 342 (“fifty-four poems”; Cynwal “at last to fall a martyr to the poignancy of one of the replications of his antagonist”), and Y Bywgraffiadur Cymreig, s.n. Wiliam Cynwal: “disgybl pencerddaidd ail eisteddfod Caerwys (1568)”, “darn o eiriadur yn llaw Edward Williams (‘Iolo Morganwg’)”, now NLW MS 13142A, and “chanwyd marwnad iddo gan Edmwnd Prys”. The tale of Taliesin: Lady Charlotte Guest, The Mabinogion, “Taliesin”. The reading by Jung’s terms is ours, and is offered as a reading.

And the machine that bought the acid eventually taught him what the licence had always been. In 1858, at Ab Ithel's great Llangollen eisteddfod, Stephens entered the essay of his life: a forensic demolition of the legend that Madoc ab Owain Gwynedd had reached America, the same rationalist blade, turned this time on a myth the empire actually used, a British claim to the Americas older than Spain's. The essay was the best in the field and everyone knew it. The presiding druid (John Williams, Ab Ithel, the same hand that would print Barddas four years later) refused him the prize, on the ground that the essay had answered the question in the wrong direction. The critic hired to call the Britons' past a fable was broken the moment he called an English-useful fable a fable. Strokes took him from 1868; he died at Merthyr in January 1875; his Madoc essay surfaced only posthumously, published in 1893 by his own pupil.

Read the two verdicts together and the licence stands naked: forgery for the stonemason who carried a sovereignty; the withheld chair for the chemist who touched an empire's title-deeds. The acid was his. The aim was theirs, on loan, and the direction of pointing was a condition of the loan.

And there is a sharp aptness in the name of the man who ended up holding the papers. Ten years before he died, in 1816, Iolo wrote to Benjamin Hall, the Member of Parliament (father of the Benjamin Hall whose wife would one day hold Iolo's papers), about the survey of a proposed tramroad through the Vale. He set out the route parish by parish and drew his own corrected map "by dotted lines of faint red ink (I had no better at hand),"Iolo Morganwg to Benjamin Hall, 14 March 1816, on the Bridgend Tramroad Bill: NLW MS 21286E, letter 950 in the Iolo Morganwg project’s list of the correspondence, which shows the letter and his plan. and charged, in plain words, that the colliery proprietors had bribed the men who made the official survey to insert a false passage into it, the better to defeat the Act of Parliament behind it. The man the academy files as a careless fabricator of records was, on the evidence of his own hand, a precise surveyor who exposed the purchase of a falsified public record, and reported it to the very family that would, a generation later, lock his own record away. He did not invent documents. He caught the men who did. And it was of a piece with the man: he had offered the Board of Agriculture to survey the whole of Cymru (its soils and minerals, its crops, its antiquities and "ancient modes of culture") and he traced his own trade, the chisel, in a direct line through the Morgannwg mason-bards back to Iorwerth Fynglwyd, "of which last trade I am myself."Iolo Morganwg to Sir Richard Colt Hoare, Flimston, 17 August 1797, NLW 13116B, pp. 134–7: “This tradition is pretty common amongst the Glamorgan masons and stonecutters, of which last trade I am myself.” The line he gives runs from Iorwerth Fynglwyd of St Brides Major, fl. 1450, through Richard Twrch of the Seaton and Bridgend quarries, to the Roberts family who worked the Bridgend quarries until the 1780s, from whose mouth he took the story. The hands the academy could not believe held a tradition held a measuring-chain and a mason's mallet, and worked both with exactness. He had listed his trades for Owain Myfyr, the Llundain patron who would pay for the Myvyrian, in 1783, and drawn the moral himself: “Jack of all trades … I shall never be rich.”Iolo Morganwg to Owen Jones (Owain Myfyr), Landaff, 20 September 1783, BL Add. 15024, ff. 196–7; CIM, I, p. 234 (letter 6, transcribed by the Iolo Morganwg project, CAWCS).

We need not allege that anyone altered a single line of those manuscripts; the physical tampering is the secondary question. The point is simpler and more fatal, and it is the first thing any court in the land would say: evidence that has sat for two generations in the sole custody of an interested party, unavailable to the defence, is evidence to be weighed with the gap in front of the weigher, and weighed light; it is not evidence to convict on. The drawer was locked, and only the prosecution held the key. We need invent no midnight conspiracy of altered ink to say what this is. It is simpler, and worse: a case built across two generations on evidence kept under lock, and then declared won, in a room the prosecution itself had bolted.

And let the prosecution answer that its case was built only after the lock was turned, that Griffith John Williams read the ink on open shelves at Aberystwyth after 1916, where any eye could check it. A document need not be forged in the dark to be ruined by it; it need only be stripped of the context of its own making. More than sixty years of un-inventoried keeping in one family’s cabinet is a sieve, and the things that fall through it are precisely the things that tell a copy from a fraud, the letter of receipt, the wrapping-band, the note of provenance from Bettws (the Bradfords’ books) or Pantlliwydd, the very order of the sheets. Lose those, and a scribe’s trial-page is left naked to be read as a forger’s first draft. They argued from the bareness of the leaf, having first permitted the loss of everything that would have clothed it.

They said the books did not exist.

The book exists. You can order it up in Aberystwyth. Llyfr Du Pantlliwydd, the one his son’s footnote named in 1848, the footnote a century of scholars read as a forger’s alibi. Anthony Powel compiled it. Thomas Truman owned it. Iolo named them both and the catalogue names them both, and Powel’s own signature stands on page 26 in a sixteenth-century hand with Iolo’s note beside it: floruit anno 1580. He did not invent Anthony Powel. He read him off the page and dated him.National Library of Wales MS 13165B (Llanover MS E.3), Llyfr Du Pantlliwydd, a quarto of [1575 × 1625]: catalogued as the heraldic and genealogical corpus compiled by Anthony Powel of Llwydarth in the parish of Llangynwyd, and recorded as standing, in the second half of the eighteenth century, in the library of Thomas Truman of Pant-y-lliwydd in the parish of Llansannor. Among the marginalia the catalogue lists “Anthony Powell his Booke wittness me” at p. 26, with the words “floruit anno 1580” added in the hand of Edward Williams, ‘Iolo Morganwg’. Not digitised. The words and the dating of the hand are the catalogue’s; the page has not been seen here. 

Iolo’s copy is there too, in his hand, dated 1806, with a note to the reader written on the seventh of October.National Library of Wales MS 13109B, in Iolo’s hand. The title-page at p. xvii is inscribed Achau ac Arfau Prif Fonedd y Cymry. Dadyscrif o Lyfr Du Pant Lliwydd Eiddo’r diweddar Mr. Thomas Truman, 1806, the pedigrees and arms of the chief gentry of the Britons, a transcript from the Black Book of Pantlliwydd, the property of the late Mr Thomas Truman, with a note to the reader at p. xix dated 7 October 1806. Not digitised. 

Then the National Library laid the copy against the original and printed, page for page, which page copies which. Three runs of it. That is the acquittal. It has sat in their catalogue for decades in the voice of a shelf-list, pp. 1-61 contain a transcript of the material to be found in pp. 73-204 of the aforementioned manuscript, pitched so low that nobody has ever had to hear it. Shout the charge, murmur the answer. The method of the whole case against him, performed one last time by the men who keep his papers.The correspondence as the catalogue itself sets it out: MS 13109B pp. 1–61 against MS 13165B pp. 73–204; pp. 62–84 against pp. 13–72; pp. 103–08 and 113–54 against pp. 1–74, with further correspondences given for three more items in the same volume. The collation establishes the relation of copy to exemplar; it does not by itself place any one disputed passage on a surviving leaf, and the leaf Iolo reported missing may be among those gone. 

And he told them a leaf was missing. Wrote it down, about a book he is accused of dreaming: Gwelais achos i gredu bod dalen ar goll yn Llyfr Pantlliwydd, I saw cause to believe a leaf is missing from the Pantlliwydd book.Iolo’s own footnote, signed with his name, to a piece headed “O Lyfr Hir Thomas Truman, o Bant Lliwydd, ym Morganwg”, as printed in Iolo Manuscripts (Llandovery, 1848), p. 71. The catalogue’s words are the National Library’s description of MS 13165B, pp. 1–204: “the now incomplete (wanting beginning, end, and contents of a few intermediate leaves) corpus of heraldic and genealogical material”. The catalogue, two centuries later: wanting beginning, end, and contents of a few intermediate leaves.

He was describing a real object in a real room.

The charge was never that he copied badly. It was that there was nothing to copy.

And the law has a name for the presumption this earns. Omnia praesumuntur contra spoliatorem, all things are presumed against the destroyer: where a party has sealed or suppressed the evidence, the court presumes it would have told against him, not against the man he accuses. The maxim is for parties, and this trial has none; but the reasoning is the one a court would reach for. Where the only holder of the evidence had every reason to keep it shut, the doubt does not run in his favour. The household that held the drawer was not the prosecutor; but the prosecutor built his case on what that household had kept, and took its silence with it.

Iolo's substrate was the libraries of Morgannwg, which burned, dispersed, and were sold, leaving his transcripts as, in many cases, the only proof they had ever existed at all, and then the prosecution entered the burning as proof against him. And mark the obscenity of that logic: in the court of imperial history, the man whose library burns is treated as having confessed. The fire that destroyed his evidence is entered as proof of his guilt, the arson charged against the victim, and never against the arsonist.

Of all 1,230 letters, exactly one can be checked both ways, a full transcription beside a photograph of the manuscript: letter #282, written to Iolo in 1771. Lay the print beside the ink, and the modern edition is caught standardising the southern Cymraeg into the northern norm, twice over. At the salutation it prints the name Iorwerth Gwilim; but turn twenty lines down, to the verses the writer enclosed, and the same editors print the very same name the other way, Pam, Iorwarth brydfarth brydydd, the dialect form, Iorwarth, with the southern a. Same hand, same sheet, same name, set down two ways: they quietly regularised the spelling at the salutation, and a critic may fairly object that the salutation word sits under an ink-blot.

So take the cleaner case, which no blot touches. In the plain, un-obscured prose of that same letter the writer twice darkens his vowels the southern way, ofawr fontais… a monteision eraill, and once more near the close; and three times, in silence, the edition flattens them to the standard northern a: fantais, manteision, mantais. The ink is clear. The words are not in doubt. The correction is made three times, without a note, on the one sheet in 1,230 where it can be caught, and what it erases is the southern fingerprint itself.

This is the standardising reflex acting as a quiet machine in the most scrupulous modern hands. The editors who plane Iorwarth into Iorwerth and fontais into fantais are executing in miniature the exact work of the original enclosure: they are standardising the southern tongue out of existence, in the quiet academic belief that they are merely correcting an error. And the standard they should have been held to was set in the accused's own house. When the Iolo Manuscripts were printed in 1848, the editors, careful to record their dissent from the dead editor's opinions, certified that Taliesin ab Iolo had copied "without altering a single touch of the pen, however obvious the clerical and accidental character of the error might be." The son's edition kept every stroke, the errors included; the professors' edition of 2007 planed the vowels in silence. The two standards stand side by side on the record.Iolo Manuscripts (Llandovery: Welsh MSS Society, 1848), preface: the posthumous editors, dissenting from Taliesin's notes, "exonerate the press" and attribute the apparent errors "entirely... to the scrupulous fidelity of Ab Iolo." He had a word for that reflex in his own day: “Some Deudneudians arrogate to themselves the modern Literary dialect. I say arrogate, for it is arrogance.” The Deudneudians were his name for the men of Gwynedd.NLW 13138A, p. 129.

Now stand back, because the shape is the argument. Every gap falls the same way. The drafts sealed two generations in the accusers' cabinet; the edition that images five letters in 1,230; the resolution that fails on his hand and holds on everyone else's; the viewer that breaks; the cross-check foreclosed. Almost never, in any of it, does an accident, a cost, or a lost page fall in the accused’s favour, and where one has, as at Pantlliwydd, it has taken two centuries to be noticed. Were the cause innocent (neglect, economy, chance) the gaps would scatter, and some, by plain luck, would have helped him. The innocent account has a single cause too: a library does what it is paid to do. It does not explain why the one sheet that can be checked both ways is the one that fails. A run this long, all in one direction, is not luck.

Here the oldest tool in reason closes it. Occam's razor, in Newton's wording, directs us to admit no more causes of natural things than are both true and sufficient, and to the same effects, as far as possible, to assign the same causes. The innocent account is not one explanation but a dozen: a separate, lucky accident behind every gap, each conveniently pointing one way. The other account is a single structure, that the bodies which preserve, digitise and publish inherited their priorities from the institutions that made the verdict, so the accused’s checkable evidence is precisely the evidence nobody was ever asked to fetch, and that one structure explains all of it at a stroke, with no one needing to intend it. Parsimony does not weigh twelve coincidences against one structure; it takes the structure. Hypotheses non fingo, we need invent no conspiracy. We need only refuse to invent twelve accidents.

And the inverse seals it. They do not distrust Iolo's work; they distrust a sliver of it. They rest their whole science on nearly everything he left, the seventy-five volumes of transcripts, the entire Myvyrian that Morris-Jones himself calls the only surviving text of the old poetry, the triads, the laws, the genealogies, the lives of the saints, and brand as forgery only a small part of it: the Appendix cywyddau, the Third Series of the triads, and the bardic order. They keep what they need and condemn only what threatens them. An honest doubt does not fall like that. A managed one does. And there is one test, in a hundred years, that no one has run.

12. Y Drychiolaethau

Spectral Evidence321 “In no surviving manuscript.” 323 Salem. 325 The file acquits him. 327 “I failed to obtain permission.” 332 Edfryd, to restore. 334 His notebook names its sources. 341 The guild and its teachers. 343 The words are older than the man. 348 The name the poets kept. 350 The Coelbren. 351 The first accuser, 1809. 356 Was an alphabet ever a crime? 359 Awen and the Bible. 362 No word for what was done. 363 The test never run.

The engine of the whole conviction is a single move, repeated: this line appears in no surviving manuscript; therefore Iolo invented it. Absent from the record, therefore false.The canon itself fails that test: Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest complete New Testament on earth, binds in Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas; Codex Alexandrinus binds in Clement, books later expelled and reclassified. The manuscripts are older than the verdict that condemned their contents: both codices are fourth- and fifth-century witnesses [PRE-JUSTINIAN].

And before weighing that move, weigh what it would do to every literature in Europe. The epic inheritance of England hangs on single books. Beowulf survives in one manuscript, one, copied about the year 1000, centuries after the poem’s making, and that lone witness was itself scorched in the Ashburnham House fire of 1731, its edges crumbling for a century afterwards. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: one manuscript. The Chanson de Roland, in the version the world calls the poem: one. The Cid: one late copy, its first leaf missing. No one calls these poems forgeries, because their sole witnesses happened to live. Survival in a single late manuscript is not the suspicious exception of medieval literature; it is its ordinary condition. The engine convicts Iolo for the ordinary condition of the entire medieval record, applied to the one country whose single copies burned.Beowulf: British Library, Cotton MS Vitellius A.xv (c. 1000), damaged in the Ashburnham House fire of 23 October 1731. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Cotton MS Nero A.x. La Chanson de Roland (Oxford version): Bodleian, MS Digby 23. Cantar de mio Cid: Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, Vitr. 7-17, lacking its first leaf. None has ever been indicted for surviving alone.

That is the exact logic that hanged the women of Salem, spectral evidence, the testimony of an absence, a thing you cannot cross-examine and cannot defend, because you cannot put a ghost or a missing page in the witness box. And the absence here is not neutral. The Britons' manuscript record is a burnt record, Raglan in the Civil War, the dissolution of the monasteries, the long aftermath of Glyndŵr and the gentry dispersals. So the prosecution calls a witness named Absence, and Absence is the arsonist, testifying that what it burned was never there.Two exact sciences condemn the method. In 1943 the statistician Abraham Wald, asked where to armour bombers, was shown the planes that came home holed along the fuselage. Armour the fuselage, said the generals. No, said Wald. You are studying only the planes that came back; the holes that kill are on the aircraft that went down and are not in your sample. That is survivorship bias, and it is the prosecution's whole procedure: it examined the manuscripts that survived, found Iolo's lines absent from them, and read the absence as the wound, when the books that carried those lines are precisely the ones that did not come back. And because those books can never return, the charge fails a second test, the boundary Karl Popper set for science itself: “a theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific.” No possible discovery can clear Iolo, because the only evidence that could is ash. The forgery charge was unfalsifiable from the day it was framed, a verdict in the lab coat of a proof it could never fail. And the greatest literary recovery in history is a two-thousand-year refutation of that logic. From the death of cuneiform to the year 1872, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest epic on earth, was absent from every surviving record on the planet: no text. By the prosecution's method, it did not exist. Then the mound at Nineveh was opened, and a self-taught working man, George Smith, a banknote engraver who had taught himself cuneiform in the British Museum's lunch hours, no university, no chair, read the Flood tablet in the Museum's own drawers and, by the account of that room, leapt up and began in his excitement to undress. The institution had owned the tablets and could not read them; the artisan read them; and what he read scandalised the authorised canon, for the Deluge of Genesis stood revealed with an ancestor a thousand years its elder. And the last irony belongs to the fire: the sack of Nineveh baked the clay and preserved the library, the one arsonist in this long story whose arson archived what it meant to destroy. Absence proved nothing. It never does. It only waits for a mound to be opened, or a drawer.George Smith, a banknote-engraver self-taught in cuneiform, reading Tablet XI (the Deluge) at the British Museum, 3 December 1872 (the Flood of Genesis 6–9, in the received Hebrew of the English Bible [POST-JUSTINIAN]), the undressing recounted by E. A. Wallis Budge, The Rise and Progress of Assyriology; the library of Ashurbanipal buried and baked in the sack of Nineveh, 612 BC.

Iolo knew exactly how a ghost is made, because he once made one. Working as a mason in Kent, he lodged with a man who boasted that no ghost could frighten him. Iolo drew a circle of “strange mystic characters” on the floor of a dim room, took a wand, muttered, and had the landlord write down whose spirit he wanted: his grandfather, John. A “deep sepulchral voice” spoke the name, and the landlord “burst out of the room in a perfect agony of conviction that the ancestral ghost was at his heels.” The voice was a fellow-lodger in the cellar underneath, and when Iolo had enjoyed the joke long enough he told the landlord so. A trick, owned up to, with the laugh shared: that is the difference between a joke and a fraud, and the court of 1926 never learned it.Elijah Waring, Recollections and Anecdotes of Edward Williams (London, 1850), pp. 78–81.

And then the file acquits the accused in its own hand. Griffith John Williams, building the case, lists certain lines, the San Ffraid material among them, as appearing "in no old manuscript," the mark of invention. And then, being an honest forensic scholar, he records where they do appear: printed by Theophilus Evans, in Drych y Prif Oesoedd, in 1716. Thirty-one years before Iolo Morganwg was born.Theophilus Evans, Drych y Prif Oesoedd (Shrewsbury, 1716), where Griffith John Williams’s own case records the San Ffraid lines in print, thirty-one years before Iolo was born. A man cannot forge what was printed three decades before his birth. The universal negative dies on the page it was written on. A man cannot forge what was in print three decades before his birth. The prosecution proved the alibi and read the sentence over it anyway. And that honesty was no slip; it was the man. Griffith John Williams, who built the forensic case against Iolo more carefully than anyone before or since, spent the rest of his life proving the other half of the truthGriffith John Williams, Traddodiad Llenyddol Morgannwg (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1948), the chief prosecutor’s life-work, proving the Morgannwg literary tradition real, deep, and unbroken: the substrate authenticated in the prosecution’s own hand., that the Morgannwg literary tradition Iolo claimed to inherit was real, deep, and unbroken: the labour that became his Traddodiad Llenyddol Morgannwg of 1948. The chief prosecutor authenticated the substrate. He proved there was a genuine inheritance for Iolo to work from, which is the whole of the defence's case, entered once again in the prosecution's own hand.

And the word-test failed its own maker. The book of 1926 held against Iolo the words it could find in no writing before him. After it was printed, Griffith John Williams showed some of Iolo's word-lists to Dr Ceinwen Thomas, a native of Nantgarw, and she, the prosecution's own volume records, "informed him that many of the words contained in them were familiar to her mother and others from Nantgarw." He came to reckon that the lists held "many more words which Iolo had heard on his travels in Glamorgan than he had believed genuine" when he first examined them.Richard Crowe, “Iolo Morganwg and the Dialects of Welsh”, in A Rattleskull Genius (2005), p. 321, citing G. J. Williams, Iolo Morganwg (Caerdydd, 1956), p. 149, and Ceinwen H. Thomas, “Tafodiaith Nantgarw”, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies XVI (1954), 95–102. The two last are cited from Crowe and have not been seen here. Many of the words had not been forged. They had been spoken, in a county the iron and the coal were emptying of its speech, by people no professor had asked until the verdict was in print. Iolo had asked them. As a young man he told Owain Myfyr, the Llundain Welshman who would later pay for the Myvyrian: “I think I may safely say that I have the greatest collection of Welsh words of any man living.”BL Add. 15024, ff. 183r–4r, Iolo Morganwg to Owain Myfyr, 25 January 1776.

And then the file does something worse for the case than acquittal. Turn the pages of the book that fixed the verdict and you find the prosecutor writing, four separate times, that the owners, the Davies family of Ynyslwyd at Aberdâr, would not let him see the manuscripts.Among them the two books Iolo named as his sources: Aberdâr MS. 1, the “Brechfa MS.” (p. 151), and Aberdâr MS. 2, the book of Thomas Evans of Brechfa (p. 162). Iolo named them; the prosecutor never saw them. All four refusals, at pp. 147, 149, 151 and 162, are of these two books, which had been Tomos Glyn Cothi’s: “ym meddiant Tomas Evans, sef Tomas Glyn Cothi. Aeth wedi hynny i Aber Dâr, ac y mae dwy o’i lawysgrifau yno hyd heddiw” (p. 147). Gwenogvryn Evans had recorded them in 1902: “Aberdâr Manuscripts. The property of D. P. Davies, Esq., J.P., of Ynyslwyd” (Report on Manuscripts in the Welsh Language, vol. II, part I).

Methodd gennyf gael caniatad i chwilio'r llawysgrifau, ac felly ni ellais ei gymharu â chopi Iolo.

I failed to obtain permission to search the manuscripts, and so I could not compare it with Iolo's copy.

Methodd gennyf gael caniatad i'w gweled, ac felly ni allaf sicrhau nad ydyw'r llinellau uchod yno.

I failed to obtain permission to see them, and so I cannot be sure that the above lines are not there.

And of a third: ni ellais gael golwg arni, I could not get sight of it.Griffith John Williams, Iolo Morganwg a Chywyddau'r Ychwanegiad (1926), at the passages citing the Aberdâr and Brechfa books, the manuscripts written by Ben Simon from copies of Iago ap Dewi, which Williams himself identifies as the likely source of the cywyddau Iolo said he took from Morgannwg manuscripts. The shelfmarks he gives for them are Gwenogvryn Evans's, from the Report on Welsh Manuscripts; Evans is cited five times in the whole book and every time as a catalogue.

Here is the man bringing the charge, on his own page, in the book that settled the question for a century, saying that he was not permitted to look and cannot say whether the lines are in them or not.

The defence did not find that weakness a hundred years later; it is printed in the case itself.

And one thing stands beside it without needing to be joined to it. The Royal Warrant under which Cymru's manuscripts were surveyed gave their owners a veto over anything published from them, and every inspector worked under a standing order to put their private papers aside unexamined.Royal Warrant of 18 December 1897, under the Sign Manual; and the Secretary's circular to inspectors, Historical Manuscripts Commission. No connection between that regime and the refusals above is asserted here; both are simply on the page. A scholar asking to see a gentleman's manuscripts in Cymru in those years was asking inside a system built to be able to say no.

And there is a word. Two years before his book fixed the verdict, the same prosecutor published ten pages on the Gorsedd in a quarterly in Cymraeg, and closed them by saying what he had been trying to show: how the idea grew in Iolo's mind, and what was in the manuscripts he put into the hands of the Llundain Cymry in 1791:

pan enynnodd ynddynt awydd i edfryd y gyfundrefn dderwyddol.

when he kindled in them a desire to restore the druidic system.

Edfryd. To restore. To bring back. To give again what was had before. The dictionary gives the same word a second sense, older than either man: a judgment, a verdict. In the prosecutor’s own mouth the word for what Iolo wished to do is the word for what he would one day pronounce. Not dyfeisio, to invent; not creu, to create; not ffugio, to fabricate, the word that would be the whole of the charge two years later.G. J. Williams, “Gorsedd Beirdd Ynys Prydain,” Y Llenor III (1924), 162—171, at 171, signed. The essay answers Thomas Shankland's in the preceding number. Williams cites it himself in a footnote to the 1926 book. He is reporting the desire Iolo kindled in others, not conceding that a druidic system existed to be restored; what is on the page is the verb. A thing can only be restored if it was there. Iolo’s own word for what he carried was ruins. Of the proverbs and triads he pressed Owain Myfyr to print in the Myvyrian, he wrote that they were “the noble ruins of what was once very great and splendid in our language and Ethics”.BL Add. 15031, f. 31, Iolo Morganwg to Owain Myfyr, 15 April 1800.

And the charge that he gave no authority for what he carried can be tested in the one place it ought to be hardest to survive: his own papers, in the British Museum, in his own hand. Additional MS 15,003 is catalogued as “various Historical Documents, Triads, Poems, and other pieces, in Welsh, in the handwriting of Iolo Morganwg, alias Edward Williams.” Open it and he is naming his sources, item after item, on the page:Catalogue of Additions to the Manuscripts in the British Museum in the years 1841–1845 (London, 1850), pp. 62–3.

Account of the Eisteddfod held by Gruffudd ap Nicolas, at Caermarthen, transcribed from a Ms. of Jago ab Dewi—
the same Eisteddfod again, from a Ms. of Paul Panton—
the Triads of the Island of Britain, from a copy written by the Rev. Mr. Richards of Lanegwad—
the Statutes of Gruffudd ap Cynan, from a book of William Williams of Landegai—
Achau Saint ynys Prydain, transcribed from a Ms. of Peter Williams of Lan Rug—
the Life of St. Collen, from a Ms. of the Rev. Tho. Evans—
and at f. 131, the Genealogy of Jestyn ap Gwrgan; the five Royal Tribes of Wales.

It is the notebook of a man copying, and crediting, and expecting to be checked.British Museum Additional MS 15,003, from the printed Catalogue of Additions to the Manuscripts in the British Museum in the years 1841—1845 (London, 1850). The volume lies inside Additional MSS 14,962—15,089, the Myvyrian collection presented by the Cymmrodorion Society in 1844, and inside the range the Commission's own inspector decided to leave out of the national survey, on the ground that such manuscripts were “later, fuller but less reliable.”

Borges wrote a man like G. J. Williams into fiction a generation later: the investigator of “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero,” who discovers that the national hero and the traitor are one man, and publishes the legend, because the story is what the nation needs.Jorge Luis Borges, “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero,” Ficciones (1944); English translation in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Viking, 1998). Keep the one difference the comparison owes: Borges’s investigator buried his finding; Williams printed his (both halves, the conviction and the vindication) and the century read only the half it wanted. But the shape is the same shape: prosecutor and custodian in one man, the demolition and the loving history in one career. It took a fabulist to see the shape of it, and the shape is Griffith John Williams.

And there is a positive case for authenticity too, made, with no small irony, by the very man who would later publish the disputed Barddas, John Williams "Ab Ithel," in 1862. He saw two things the prosecution steps around. First, that the bardic system Iolo is said to have invented appears, in fragments, across a whole line of independent Morgannwg bards of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Ieuan ab Hywel Swrdwal, Gwilym Tew, Lewys Morganwg, Meurig Dafydd, Dafydd Benwyn, Llywelyn SiônIndependently documented Morgannwg bards long before Iolo: e.g. Llywelyn Siôn of Llangewydd (1540–c. 1616), recorded by contemporaries c. 1575, some 170 years before Iolo, see the Dictionary of National Biography and Dictionary of Welsh Biography., men of different generations, different stations, even different religions, who could not plausibly have conspired across a century and a half to invent the same intricate and symmetrical doctrine. What many independent hands transmit across generations is a tradition, not one man's hoax. And these are not shadow-names knowable only through Iolo. Llywelyn Siôn of Llangewydd is a documented sixteenth-century copyist whose labour is recorded by his own contemporaries, named, around 1575, as a diligent gatherer of manuscripts in Cymraeg, fully a hundred and seventy years before Iolo was born. The very profession the prosecution says Iolo conjured out of nothing (the Morgannwg scribe carrying the bardic record from house to house) is attested in independent hands before his great-grandfather drew breath. You cannot invent a trade the records already show at work.

And the documentation runs wider than one scribe. Edward Lhuyd, the foremost Celtic scholar of his age, no friend or creature of Iolo's, dead nearly forty years before Iolo was born, printed in his Archaeologia Britannica of 1707 a catalogue of the manuscripts in Cymraeg then surviving: the antiquarian survey of the nation's written record, made a full generation before the supposed forger drew his first breath. And the man who actually taught Iolo the craft, Lewys Hopkin of Llandyfodwg, was himself a documented collector of manuscripts in Cymraeg, the most gifted of the bards of Morgannwg in his day, recorded in his own right, who died when Iolo was a young man. The line of keepers Iolo stepped into is not a fog he conjured; it is a roll of named men, catalogued in print, attested by scholars who owed him nothing and preceded him by decades. The prosecution's lonely forger is a fiction. The record gives a relay.

“Iolo Morganwg admits that Hopkin taught him.” That is how the national biography of Cymru puts it, in an entry signed by G. J. Williams, the man who convicted him. Iolo had nothing to admit. He said it himself, in his own hand, and with love: “fy hen gyfaill caredig, fy athraw godidog Lewis Hopcin o blwyf Llandyfodwg”, my dear old friend, my excellent teacher, Lewis Hopkin of the parish of Llandyfodwg. The word admits turns a pupil’s thanks into a confession, because a teacher is the one thing a forger is not supposed to have. Lewis Hopkin is the relay in a single pair of hands. He was the leading bard of Morgannwg in the early eighteenth century, a carpenter who mastered cynghanedd and the twenty-four measures and held eisteddfodau in the hills; and at Llandyfodwg he taught the old rules to a stonemason’s boy.Dictionary of Welsh Biography, s.v. Hopkin, Lewis (c. 1708–1771), by Griffith John Williams and R. T. Jenkins, https://biography.wales/article/s-HOPK-LEW-1708: “He was also the bardic teacher of Edward Evan, and Iolo Morganwg admits that Hopkin taught him.” Iolo’s words, in his own hand, as printed and photographed (the plate is captioned “Iolo MS. 54, p. 129”) by L. J. Hopkin-James, Hopkiniaid Morganwg (Bangor, 1909), p. 97, note, and plate facing; “At Llandyfodwg, Lewis taught young Edward Williams, now known to fame as Iolo Morganwg, the rules of Welsh poetry”, ibid., p. 116. He kept a book of the old poets, and it was real. Manuscripts in the British Museum cite it by name for poems of Dafydd ap Gwilym and of Gwilym Tew: one has cywyddau of Dafydd ap Gwilym marked as copied “from the Book of Lewis Hopkin”, and another ends a fifteenth-century song with “Gwilym Tew, meddai Llyfr Lewys Hopkin”, Gwilym Tew, says the Book of Lewys Hopkin. The book itself “cannot now be found”.Hopkin-James, pp. 98–9, citing British Museum Additional MSS 15029 (cywyddau of Dafydd ap Gwilym “from the Book of Lewis Hopkin”) and 14884 (at the end of “Cân y Mai”), and Iolo’s copies “o Lyfr Lewys Hopcin”, dated 1769 and 1780, in Llanover MSS 13, 40 and 54. Of the two British Museum copies, 14884 is the second volume of Y Llyfr Brith o Gaer Gybi, which Gwenogvryn Evans describes as “written by W. Morris”, that is William Morris of Caergybi, who died in 1763: a hand other than Iolo’s (J. Gwenogvryn Evans, Report on Manuscripts in the Welsh Language, vol. II, p. 1159, British Museum MS 56). The hand of 15029 is not described there and is still to be checked at the British Library. Hopkin’s surviving books, including his subscription copy of Thomas Richards’s dictionary of 1753, are described at pp. 102–3. His englyn of 1770 stands at the head of the book.Hopkin-James, Hopkiniaid Morganwg (1909), p. 144, from Llanover MS 59, p. 228. Fruthaniaith is Brythoniaith, softened after hen and spelt as Morgannwg said it: Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, s.v. Brythoniaith, “[Brython + iaith] … Brythonic or Brittonic (language), one of the languages derived from Brythonic (esp. Welsh)”, with citations from before 1587 and then from 1830; Hopkin’s line of 1770 falls between them and is not among them. He uses the word again in his englynion for the meeting at Pencoed on All Souls’ Day 1733: “Frattio’n awr y Fruttain iaith”, to tatter now the British tongue (ibid., p. 285).

Second, a stroke of forensic psychology that turns the method on its head: "It is of the essence of forgery," he wrote, "to endeavour to avoid varieties in matters of detail — whilst truth, and integrity of purpose… are generally indifferent to these particulars."John Williams ab Ithel, Barddas, vol. I (Llandovery, 1862), Preface, p. xix. A forger is careful, consistent, seamless, because he is afraid of being caught in a discrepancy. Iolo's corpus is the opposite of seamless: it sprawls, it contradicts itself, it is careless of its own joints. By the forger's own profile, that mess is the fingerprint of a real and tangled inheritance, not the clean work of a fabricator.

Yr Hen Fruthaniaith: The Old British Tongue

The record gives a guild too, and the guild had a lineage, which can be drawn without asking Iolo for a single link. Lewis Hopkin’s first verses in print stand in the almanac of Siôn Rhydderch for 1727, written before he was of age, thanking the almanac-maker for the books he had promised the bards. The next year Rhydderch printed his Grammadeg Cymraeg, the rules of the craft. He had been at the country eisteddfodau since the one at Machynlleth in 1701, and printed their verses in his almanacs: the eisteddfod was alive forty-six years before Iolo was born. And the bards who met at Pencoed in 1733 called themselves grammarians. Hopkin came of Hopcyn Thomas Phylip of Gelli’r-fid, a maker of cwndidau in the sixteenth century, and the national biography, in an entry G. J. Williams signed, says so. And Hopkin had a second pupil beside Iolo, one who owed Iolo nothing: Edward Evan of Aberdare, a weaver’s son, who came to Hendre Ifan Goch at twenty-three to learn carpentry and glazing and was taught the strict metres with them. He became a minister, put the Book of Ecclesiastes into Welsh verse with his master in 1767, and when the master died in 1771 he mourned him in the strict metres he had learned from him.Lewis Hopkin, englynion to Siôn Rhydderch, from Rhydderch’s Almanac for 1727, as reprinted by L. J. Hopkin-James, Hopkiniaid Morganwg (Bangor, 1909), p. 217, read on the page image: quoted in Y Drôr dan Glo; dated “before he had attained his majority” by Hopkin-James, p. 108. The pedigree: Peniarth MS 132, p. 305, “Kelli yfid, Ll.dyfodwg, hopgyn ap to, ap ph”, as cited by Hopkin-James, p. 28; Dictionary of Welsh Biography, s.v. Hopkin, Lewis (G. J. Williams and R. T. Jenkins): “one of the descendants of Hopcyn Thomas Phylip, Gelli’r-fid, a writer of cwndidau”. Edward Evan: the memoir in Afalau’r Awen, 4th ed. (Aberdâr, 1874), pp. 165–6, read on the page image: “Pan yn 23ain mlwydd oed ymaflodd yn y gorchwyl o ddysgu y gelfyddyd o saer coed, ac hefyd gwydru ffenestri (glazier). Bu yn dysgu y celfyddydau hyn gyd âg un o’r enw Lewis Hopkin, … yr hwn oedd hefyd yn fardd rhagorol, a gwnaeth ei ran mewn modd egniol i ddysgu ei gyfaill ieuanc y prif bethau yn y gelfyddyd farddonol”, at twenty-three he took up learning the craft of the carpenter and of glazing windows, with one named Lewis Hopkin, who was also an excellent bard and did his part energetically to teach his young friend the chief things of the bardic art; Dictionary of Welsh Biography, s.v. Evan(s), Edward (R. T. Jenkins): “apprenticed to carpentry under Lewis Hopkin, who also instructed him in the practice of the strict metres in poetry”; his poems were printed at Merthyr in 1804 as Caniadau Moesol a Duwiol, and enlarged as Afalau’r Awen (1816, 1837, 1874). Siôn Rhydderch: Dictionary of Welsh Biography, s.v. Roderick, John (John or Siôn Rhydderch, 1673–1735): “closely associated with the local eisteddfodau of his period, from that held at Machynlleth in 1701 onwards; his almanacks provided him with an opportunity to draw attention to those gatherings and to print some of the poems occasioned by them”; Grammadeg Cymraeg printed at Shrewsbury, 1728. On St David’s Day 1735, at the Cymer eisteddfod, they named each other in verse, Lewis Hopkin, Dafydd Nicolas, Rhys Morgan of Pencraig Nedd, Edward ab Ifan the harper and William Thomas, while Wil Hopkin of Llangynwyd mocked them all; and the songs Dafydd Nicolas of Aberpergwm made were still sung in the Vale of Neath in 1844, when Maria Jane Williams wrote them down.Y Fêl Gafod (1813), pp. 98–110, Hopkin’s poems as published by his son-in-law John Miles; Maria Jane Williams, Ancient National Airs of Gwent and Morganwg (Llandovery, 1844), pp. 14, 32: Dafydd Nicolas, “who, in his verses, compares his lovely Catherine to all the flowers of Spring”.

Strike out every line Iolo ever wrote and the school still stands: its forefather in a sixteenth-century pedigree, its grammar in print in 1728, its meetings of 1733 and 1735 in Hopkin’s own papers, its other pupil in his own book, its songs in the mouths of the Vale of Neath. What Iolo’s papers add is Iolo. Who taught Bradford and Nicolas, no paper outside his names; Bradford had the old books of Tir Iarll, and Nicolas, by Iolo’s own account, taught himself.Bradford: Dictionary of Welsh Biography, s.v. Bradford, John (G. J. Williams): “Several things suggest that he came to own some of the volumes that had been the property of the Powels of Tir Iarll”; he “corresponded with William Wynn, Llangynhafal and Lewis Morris, and he was elected a member of the Hon. Society of Cymmrodorion, London”. Nicolas: ibid., s.v. Nicolas, Dafydd: “Iolo Morganwg listed him with the literary men who were self-educated”; Cadrawd, History of Llangynwyd Parish (Llanelly, 1887), calls him “a disciple of David Hopkin, of Coety”, from the list of the bards of the chair of Glamorgan said to be taken from a manuscript of John Bradford, which reached print through Iolo’s papers. Iolo’s own claim, that Bradford taught him and kept the bardic chair of Tir Iarll, is the part G. J. Williams told his readers to discount.

And the words the system is made of are older than the man accused of making them up. That can be tested without a manuscript, because two dictionaries of Cymraeg printed before Iolo Morganwg was born sit on the shelf. Abred, the lowest circle of the cosmology in Barddas, is a headword in Dr John Davies of Mallwyd's dictionary of 1632, a hundred and fifteen years before Iolo was born: cross-referenced to diabred, and illustrated by a line credited to Taliesin, "Hyd pan ddillyngwys Crist geithiwed, o ddyfnfais a phwys abred." Thomas Richards reprinted the entry word for word in 1753. Annwn stands in the same book as "Abyssus, profundum, orcus, antipodes", the abyss, the deep, Orcus, the antipodes, with verses from Dafydd ap Gwilym and Lewys Glyn Cothi beneath it; and the proverb Richards adds in 1753, "Nid eir i annwn on'd unwaith", one goes to Annwn but once, is in print when Iolo is six years old. Tydain is entered in 1632 as a proper name with a line of verse in Cymraeg behind him calling him tad awen, father of awen, and Tad Awen as a bardic title is in the Nennian Saxon Genealogies, attached to Talhaearn among the bards of the time of Ida, 547-559.Yr Awen, v. The oldest writing of the word is that title, in the ninth century: “Tunc Talhaern Tat aguen in poemate claruit” (Historia Brittonum, c. 62; GPC, awen). It has a father. None of it was waiting to be invented in the 1790s. It was in print, in books the antiquaries of his century in Cymru owned and worked from, and one of them was compiled by the curate of a parish in Morgannwg, in Iolo's own county.John Davies of Mallwyd, Antiquae Linguae Britannicae … Dictionarium Duplex (London, 1632), s.vv. Abred, Annwn, Tydain; Thomas Richards, Antiquae Linguae Britannicae Thesaurus: being a British, or Welsh-English Dictionary (Bristol: Felix Farley, 1753), s.vv. Abred, Annwn. Richards was curate of Coychurch in Morgannwg and took his authorities from Davies. The abred line is the same one that is the single instance, in four and three-quarter million characters of the Myvyrian Archaiology, capable of carrying the doctrinal sense, two lexicographers, a hundred and twenty-one years apart, independently chose it as the defining example. Tad Awen: the Nennian “Saxon Genealogies”, Harleian MS 3859, naming Talhaearn Tad Awen among the bards of the time of Ida, 547–559. And that curate has a second part in this case, missed for a century because the two halves of his name are in different languages. The parish is Llangrallo. In English it is Coychurch. The man is Thomas Richards, who died there in 1790.

He is a witness for Iolo: his dictionary was in print when Iolo Morganwg was six years old, which is why the words cannot have been invented in the 1790s. Iolo’s own list of sources, as the prosecution of 1921 recorded it, calls him something else altogether, the owner of the manuscript one of the disputed poems was copied out of. So the record holds the same man twice over: in his dictionary he is solid enough to prove the words old, and in the list of sources he owns a manuscript the prosecution has to make imaginary to make the poem a forgery. He cannot be both real and unreal.Thomas Richards (1710–1790), curate of Llangrallo (Coychurch) in Morgannwg, compiler of the Antiquae Linguae Britannicae Thesaurus (Bristol: Felix Farley, 1753); W. Llewelyn Williams, The Welsh Outlook, September 1921, p. 199, naming “the Rev. Thomas Richards, of Llangrallo, who died in 1790” among the owners of the manuscripts behind the Appendix odes. 

He knew how the guessing went wrong, and he made fun of it. On a letter of 1813 he set out Cymraeg and English animal words that look alike, hwch and hog, bwch and buck, and then the ones that wreck the rule: march and merch, horse and girl; llo and llew, calf and lion. And he ended on himself: “‘Bard’ and ‘bird’ will do, you will possibly say, because both are flighty.”His note on a letter of 1813, printed by Ffion Mair Jones, ‘The Bard is a Very Singular Character’: Iolo Morganwg, Marginalia and Print Culture (Cardiff, 2010), p. 178, and Appendix IV, no. 49.

And three more of the system’s words stand in the same dictionary, and they mean something else, which is set down here before anyone else sets it down. In 1632 coelbren is not an alphabet but a lot. It glosses the Latin lot-casting family (sortes, sortilegium, sortilegus, sortior, subsortior) and bwrw coelbrenni is to cast lots, dewis wrth goelbren to choose by lot, digoelbren to be without one. Coelfain is not an inscribed stone but the gospel: it glosses euangelium, "efengyl, llawenchwedl, newydd da". Ceugant is not the outermost circle of God but an adjective meaning certain, and it stands in the proverb list in four words: "Ceugant yw angau", death is certain. Alawn is in neither dictionary; neither is eneidfaddeu.Davies (1632), Latin–Cymraeg half s.vv. Sortes, Sortilegium, Sortilegus, Sortior, Insortitus, Subsortior, Euangelium, Euangelizatio, Certe; Cymraeg–Latin half s.v. Ceugant, and the proverb list, Ceugant yw angau. Richards (1753) additionally carries plennydd and gwyddon, which Davies lacks. Recorded against the system, and first, because a book that prints only the half that helps it has no standing to complain of 1926.

And the worst of it, which goes in because it is true. The middle of the three orders is the Ofydd, the Ovate, in green. In the last dictionary of Cymraeg printed before Iolo Morganwg reached manhood the entry runs, in its entirety: "Ofydd, the poet Ovid." That is the whole of it, the form of Ovidius in Cymraeg, standing between Ofregedd and Ofynag, and nothing else. And in Davies 1632 the one apparent occurrence is not the word at all: it is ufydd, humble, in a string of synonyms for supplicating under supplico. There is no Ofydd as a bardic grade in either book. The three-part order itself is not in question, the classical witnesses give the Gaulish learned class in three divisions, druids, ouateis or vates, and bards, and that is old ground. That is what the two dictionaries show. The dictionary of the language shows more, and it is set out in the note.Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, s.v. ofydd: Ovid’s name, taken into Cymraeg as the pattern of the love-poet and the master of an art, from the fourteenth century (Dafydd ap Gwilym, “wyf Ofydd”; Iolo Goch’s elegy for Llywelyn Goch ap Meurig Hen, “Prifeistr cywydd Ofydd oedd”); and, as a class of poets “later identified with a member of the lower order in the Gorsedd of Bards”, in print before Iolo, which the dictionary says came by identifying the word with the ouateis, vates, of Gaul named by Strabo: Henry Rowlands, Mona Antiqua Restaurata (1723), pp. 65 and 251 (“sounding like Ovydd or Offydd”), and Edward Jones, Musical and Poetical Relicks (1784), p. 2 (“The Derwydd, Bardd, and Ovydd”). It says only what follows: naming a restored grade is a coinage, and a coinage is not a forgery. Every restorer of a technical vocabulary makes them, and no one has ever been tried for it.Thomas Richards, Antiquae Linguae Britannicae Thesaurus (Bristol, 1753), s.v. Ofydd, the entry entire. John Davies of Mallwyd (1632), Latin–Cymraeg half s.v. Supplico: “Ufudd atolwg, erfyn yn ostyngedig, ymbil yn ofydd”, where the word is ufydd, obedient or humble. Recorded against the system. The middle grade of the three, in green, carries in 1753 the name of the author of the Metamorphoses.

The highest of the three grades carries a name older than any book in Cymru. Caesar heard in Gaul that the druids’ learning had been found in Britain and was still sought there by any who wished to master it, and that its first lesson was that the soul does not die but passes from one body to another;Caesar, De Bello Gallico VI.13: “Disciplina in Britannia reperta atque inde in Galliam translata esse existimatur, et nunc qui diligentius eam rem cognoscere volunt plerumque illo discendi causa proficiscuntur”; VI.14: “In primis hoc volunt persuadere, non interire animas, sed ab aliis post mortem transire ad alios”. Tacitus saw its keepers on the shore of Môn in the year 60, their hands lifted to the sky against the legions.Tacitus, Annales XIV.30: “Druidaeque circum, preces diras sublatis ad caelum manibus fundentes”. Long before Iolo, the poets of Cymru had the word. “Dysgogan derwydon meint a deruyd,” runs Armes Prydein in the Book of Taliesin: the derwyddon foretell all that will come. When the same book brings the Wise Men to the manger with their gold, it calls them derwydon. Cynddelw has them, and so has the Red Book of Hergest.Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, s.v. derwydd 1: “proffwyd, daroganwr, gŵr doeth … druid”, from a British root that also gives Old Breton darguid, glossing Latin pythonicus, a soothsayer; its witnesses Cynddelw (Hendregadredd MS, H 34a 22), the Book of Taliesin (T 18.3–4, 27.8–9, 76.8–9) and the Red Book of Hergest (R 1423.30–1); dysgogan is from the root of darogan, to foretell (GPC s.v. daroganaf). The dictionary adds that the first to say in print that derwyddon was the Cymraeg for the druids of the classical writers were Sir Thomas Wiliems and Dr John Davies, about 1600. Skene, Four Ancient Books of Wales (1868), vol. II, pp. 128, 174. John Rhŷs, Celtic Britain, 3rd edn (London: SPCK, 1904), p. 70, on the Wise Men. Iolo found the name where the bards had left it, and set it at the head of the order.

The bricks are old and the building is not thereby old, and that line has to be held or this court becomes the thing it is prosecuting. But holding it separates two charges that have been run together for a century. He invented the words is finished: they are in print before he was born, in books that can be opened. He put old words to new work is a different accusation, and no dictionary can settle it, because it is equally what a man restoring a system he believes he inherited would do and what a man building one would do. The charge made in 1926, and recited ever since, was the first. It is the one that can be checked, and it fails. What a restorer believed he owed is on the record too. Among the triads he printed and put into English in 1794 stands the fifteenth: “Three things must be preserved by the Bards: the Cimbric language; the Primitive Bardism; and the remembrance of all that is good and excellent.”Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (1794), vol. II, p. 232 (“Institutional Triades”, no. 15).

And the same machine ran a second time, on the Coelbren, the bardic alphabet they say he dreamed up whole. The move was identical: no medieval manuscript of it survives, therefore Iolo invented it. But the hostile witnesses themselves would not sign that sentence. Tegid, in 1837, went furthest, and even he only hinted: "the public have not as yet been informed from what source Mr. Edward Williams received the Bardic alphabet, of which he has been the promulgator; not to say the inventor." Not to say: the charge is put into the reader’s head, and the writer keeps a step back from it.Tegid (John Jones), in Gwaith Lewis Glyn Cothi (1837), p. 260, in the note on line 19 that begins on p. 259; quoted by G. J. Williams, Iolo Morganwg a Chywyddau’r Ychwanegiad (1926), p. ix. The same note says more. Tegid called the alphabet “a very ingenious and clever invention; and far better adapted to the Welsh language than the Roman alphabet now in use”, and still would not say whose invention it was. His case against it was a silence: at the Caerdydd eisteddfod “there was not only an opportunity, but also an ample inducement, for any one to come forward to prove the genuineness of the alphabet; but no one appeared.” And of Cyfrinach y Beirdd, the book of the bards’ lore that Iolo edited and that came out after his death, in 1829, with Taliesin’s preface, he wrote: “This book is deserving of a place in every library, and should be constantly in the hand of every bard.”Tegid, the same note, Gwaith Lewis Glyn Cothi (1837), p. 260. Edward Davies, Iolo's sharpest early accuser, wrote in 1809 that the chair of Glamorgan's own record showed “some marks of gross misrepresentation, if not of absolute forgery”, dated the collection of its lore to “about the year 1560, and repeatedly altered, from that time to the year 1681”, and called on Iolo to produce “Whatever he has, that can bear the light”. The years he gave are the years of the chair's own books, and so the prosecution put those books into the record.Edward Davies, The Mythology and Rites of the British Druids (London, 1809), pp. 33, 34 and 36, read in the scanned text (Internet Archive, cu31924029164824); G. J. Williams (1926), p. ix, cites pp. 31–65.  And the source was given, in full. Iolo's son Taliesin set it down in 1840. The Coelbren came among the old writings of the Bards of the Chair of Tir Iarll, drawn from the books of Plas y Fan, the dissolved monasteries of Castell-nedd and Margam, and Raglan Castle. They were transcribed by Llywelyn Siôn of Llangewydd, Edward Dafydd of Margam, and John Bradford: the same Bradford who was Iolo's own teacher, the same Llywelyn Siôn named over the Triads.Taliesin Williams, Coelbren y Beirdd (Llanymddyfri, 1840), p. 10, the questions and answers on its sources (II–IV): “Cafodd Iolo Morganwg hanes Coelbren y Beirdd ym mhlith hen ysgrifau Beirdd Cadair Tir Iarll; a’r rhai hynny wedi eu tynnu i maes o hen lyfrau Plâs y Fann, Monachlogydd Castell Nedd, Margam, &c. a rhai Castell Rhaglan … ac wedi eu hadysgrifennu gann Llywelyn Sion o Langewydd, Edward Dafydd o Fargam, a John Bradford”, Iolo Morganwg had the account of the Coelbren among the old writings of the bards of the chair of Tir Iarll, drawn from the old books of Plas y Fan, the monasteries of Castell-nedd and Margam, and Raglan Castle, and copied by Llywelyn Siôn, Edward Dafydd and John Bradford.  Every one of those libraries was burnt or dissolved: Raglan's in the Civil War, Castell-nedd's and Margam's at the Dissolution. No independent Coelbren survives because the buildings that held it were destroyed, which is the same witness recalled: Absence, sworn in a second time over the ashes of Castell-nedd, Margam and Raglan. Source not yet identified is the honest verdict on the alphabet. He invented it is the spectral one.

And read what that first accuser put in print, because he gave his reason. In 1809 Edward Davies wrote that "a slight inquiry into the credentials of the society itself, will discover some marks of gross misrepresentation, if not of absolute forgery."Edward Davies, The Mythology and Rites of the British Druids (London, 1809), p. 33. Six years before that book, at the Caerdydd sessions of 1803, Iolo had offered him the loan of all two hundred volumes of his manuscripts in Cymraeg.From Iolo’s own account: shown Davies’s printed letters at the Great Sessions, he wrote to Judge George Hardinge pointing out their errors and offering “to lend the clergyman all two hundred volumes of his Welsh manuscripts” (Dearnley’s words): Dearnley, in A Rattleskull Genius (2005), p. 432. Iolo subscribed to Davies’s Celtic Researches the next year (ibid.). Read, too, whom that sentence accuses. It is “the society itself”: the Chair of Morgannwg, whose “ratified documents of the seventeenth century” Davies names as the bard’s source, and whose collection of its own acts he dates from “about the year 1560”. The first man to print the word did not say the mason had written the papers; he said the papers were old, and too obscure to be trusted, “however fair their pretensions to candour might have been”.Davies (1809), pp. 32 and 34, read from the scan. And a few pages on he said what the trouble was. The bardic principles "seem to go rather beyond the levellers of the seventeenth century, and to savour strongly of a Druidism which originated in Gaul, and was from thence transplanted into some corners of Britain, not many ages before the year 1792"; it rested with the Chair, he wrote, to say whether its doctrine had been brought in "by the levellers of the seventeenth century, or fabricated during the late anarchy of France."Davies (1809), pp. 57 and 59; and p. 60, of another bardic principle: “I do not recollect to have seen this doctrine, in its full extent, promulgated by any code, before a certain period of the French Revolution”. Read from the scan (Internet Archive, mythologyritesof00davirich). The first printed charge of forgery against Iolo was a charge of Jacobinism. He had been urged to it by a Brecon lawyer, Theophilus Jones: "I intreat that he may not be spared."Theophilus Jones to Edward Davies, 28 July 1807: Moira Dearnley, “‘Mad Ned’ and the ‘Smatter-Dasher’: Iolo Morganwg and Edward ‘Celtic’ Davies”, in A Rattleskull Genius (2005), p. 436. When Iolo answered him in a written reply passed from hand to hand, Davies would not meet it, and said so in print: “I shall not take farther notice of manuscript or oral criticism. I only wish the author to publish it; when I see it in print, my answer shall be ready.”Edward Davies, The Mythology and Rites of the British Druids (London, 1809), p. 43. And he had his rectory from the bishop, with the judge's help, four years before the book came out; when Iolo said that Davies wrote for preferment, the rehabilitation's own essayist allows, "There was, of course, more than a grain of truth in these accusations."Dearnley, p. 439: Judge Hardinge “was certainly complicit in Watson’s offer of the living of Bishopston in 1805”. A journal of the time saw it plainly. Of the two sides it wrote that the one "may also be said to have been carried too far by a strong attachment to liberty and the rights of man, and the latter by a dread of innovation, and a wish to perpetuate the present established order of things."The Cambrian Register, vol. III (London, 1818), p. 9, read from the scan. The “former” are Edward Williams and William Owen; the “latter” is Edward Davies. Read the list of 1794 once more, for the men who came after him. “Rev. Ed. Davies, Sodbury”, at two sets, is the curate who in 1809 would print the word forgery; “Theophilus Jones, Esq.” is the lawyer who would urge him to it;Probably the same man: no paper yet proves that the subscriber of 1794 is the lawyer.  “George Hardinge, Esq.” at six sets and the “BISHOP of LANDAFF” are the judge and the bishop who would give him his living; “Dafydd Ddu, Eryri Bardd” is the northern poet whose doubt Myfyr would report; and “Mr. Owen Jones”, at six sets, is Myfyr himself. The men who accused him had first paid for his book.Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (1794), I, “Subscribers Names”, pp. xxvii (Davies), xxviii (Dafydd Ddu), xxix (Hardinge), xxx (Theophilus Jones), xxxi (Landaff, Owen Jones), each read at the printed page. Davies was then master of the grammar school at Sodbury in Gloucestershire: Dearnley in A Rattleskull Genius (2005), p. 426. Hardinge’s six sets: Jenkins, Bard of Liberty (2012), p. 158. And the book they paid for had told them so at the front. At the end of its preface he printed his English versions of the Welsh motto on its title page, and the last of them ends: “The Bardic song is deem’d a crime, / And former friends are now my foes.”Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (1794), vol. I, p. xxiii (“Translations of the Welsh Motto in the Title Page”, no. 3). The preface is dated 1 January 1794.

The charge itself is older than the verdict, and was unsettled at its very birth. As early as 1793 Walter Davies (Gwallter Mechain, a friend who would later turn critic)Three years before, at the Gwyneddigion eisteddfod at Llanelwy in 1790, the set subject was Rhyddid, Liberty, with a medal engraved by Augustin Dupré, and the prizes went to Dafydd Ddu Eryri and to Gwallter Mechain, both of them loyal to the Crown: Jenkins (2012), pp. 90–91. put it to Iolo's face that "in Anglesea, they suppose Coelbren y Beirdd to be wholly invented by you." But even he would not close it: the alphabet was "too compleat to be of an ancient date," he wrote one moment, and stood "in equilibrio" the next, asking Iolo to "turn the scale in your next letter."Walter Davies (Gwallter Mechain) to Iolo, All Souls, Oxford, 16 May 1793: NLW 21280E, letter 72.  The accusation was a suspicion from the day it was first spoken, never a finding, an open question its own first author declined to settle. And Edward Davies, the man who first put the charge into print, had been asked the court’s own question by Iolo five years before. Writing on 29 May 1804 to Judge George Hardinge, Davies’s patron, about Davies’s Celtic Researches and its account of the bardic alphabet, Iolo said: “Mr Davies exclusive of his unfortunate Mistakes, tells the world that what he calls Bardic Lots are known to the Welsh, but he does not inform us where he saw them, or on what manuscript Authority he gives them. I could have furnished him with all the information that has yet been obtained from our ancient MSS.”Iolo Morganwg to George Hardinge, 29 May 1804, Cardiff MS 3.104, vol. 6, letter no. 41; Correspondence, II, p. 601.

And it stayed open in the hands of the man who is supposed to have closed it. Thomas Stephens (the first prosecutor, the hardest reader the nineteenth century set on Iolo) had first doubted Iolo in print in 1849 and struck out some of its legends in the 1850s, but never, in the end, brought the charge the twentieth century convicted on. Morris-Jones records it himself, in his introduction to the book that sealed the verdict: in the great Coelbren essay of 1872 Stephens nid yw'n cyhuddo Iolo o fod wedi dyfeisio na'r "Gadair" na'r "Goelbren", does not accuse Iolo of having invented either the Chair or the Coelbren, because Iolo's evident honesty obliged him to accept the testimony that the papers came from Llywelyn Siôn and the tradition of the Chair. Then Morris-Jones confesses his own share: yr oeddwn innau, fel Stephens, yn derbyn ei chwedlau am "Gadair Morgannwg", I too, like Stephens, accepted his account of the Chair of Morgannwg.Sir John Morris-Jones’s introduction (Rhagymadrodd, pp. x–xi) to Griffith John Williams’s 1926 book records that even Stephens “nid yw’n cyhuddo Iolo o fod wedi dyfeisio na’r ‘Gadair’ na’r ‘Goelbren’”, does not accuse Iolo of inventing either the Chair or the Coelbren, and confesses “yr oeddwn innau, fel Stephens, yn derbyn ei chwedlau”. Wholesale invention was a twentieth-century escalation. Weigh that pair of admissions. The severest critic of Iolo's own century worked the material for three decades and declined the charge of invention; the prosecutor who finally brought it concedes, in the conviction's own preface, that he had believed too. Wholesale invention is not the old accusation proved at last. It is a twentieth-century escalation, brought only when every witness who could answer it was dead. And Stephens set down his own judgment of the man, in Cymraeg, and signed it. Whoever knew “y trafferth a gymmerodd i wirio cywirdeb ei ysgrifau”, the trouble he took to verify the correctness of his manuscripts, would admit, he wrote, “iddo lafurio gyda diwydrwydd anghyffredin”, that he laboured with uncommon diligence; and he ended: “‘Gwaith arbenig Duw—RHINWEDDOL DDYN.’ Hyn ar air a chydwybod oedd Iolo Morganwg”, God’s especial work, a virtuous man: that, on my word and conscience, was Iolo Morganwg. What he charged him with was want of judgment, “yr oedd yn ddiffygiol mewn galluoedd beirniadol”, he was lacking in critical powers; and nowhere with want of honesty.Thomas Stephens in Yr Ymofynydd: February 1853, p. 35, signed “T. Stephens” (the diligence, and “Rhinweddol ddyn”); November 1853, p. 255, signed (the critical powers). Read at the printed page. His friend Myfyr Morganwg answered him with the one claim about the copying that anyone can test against the transcripts: “Os dim, rhy onest ydoedd; o herwydd, fel y profa ei waith, ni ddiwygiai ef, hyd yn nod wallau llenyddol amlwg y gyn-ysgrif”, if anything he was too honest, for, as his work proves, he would not correct even the plain errors of the manuscript he copied.Myfyr Morganwg (Evan Davies), in Seren Gomer, February 1853, reprinted in Yr Ymofynydd, March 1853, p. 73, read at the printed page. Myfyr was Iolo’s follower, the archdruid of the Rocking-stone; his claim is offered as his.

And the prosecution's own side settled even this, if anyone had cared to read it. In 1872, in Archaeologia Cambrensis, Thomas Stephens of Merthyr, the most formidable sceptical scholar the Britons then had, a man who had demolished other antiquarian claims without mercy, published an essay on the Coelbren and concluded, in four flat propositions, that it "has no pretensions to a high antiquity," that "it was invented in the beginning of the fifteenth century… and that the inventor was in all probability the Bard Gwilym Tew," and that "it was in common use in the fifteenth century, as is shown by the poems of the bards." Read what the hostile expert is conceding. Not that Iolo invented the Coelbren. That it was made around 1400, by a named medieval bard, three and a half centuries before Iolo was born, and was in ordinary use among the fifteenth-century poets. The establishment's own debunker, doing his level best to deflate the thing, dates it to the Middle Ages and pins it on Gwilym Tew.Thomas Stephens, “An Essay on the Bardic Alphabet, called Coelbren y Beirdd,” Archaeologia Cambrensis, 4th ser., 3 (1872): 181–210, the hardest sceptic of his century dating the Coelbren to c. 1400 and a named medieval bard, three and a half centuries before Iolo. Source not yet identified turns out to have a source, and it is not Iolo. By 1879 an Irish antiquary could write that the alphabet’s critics had “fully acquitted Edward Williams of being himself the fabricator of it”, because three initials cut in it had been found on a medieval bedstead in the Court at Merthyr Tudful.Samuel Ferguson, “On the Kenfig Inscription”, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, Polite Literature and Antiquities, 2 (1879–88), pp. 347–54, at p. 354 n. 1: “it has only been since the discovery of three initials, engraved in that character on a mediaeval bedstead in ‘the Court’ at Merthyr Tydvil, that its impugners have fully acquitted Edward Williams of being himself the fabricator of it (Barddas, 1, 164 n.)”. The charge that Iolo dreamed up the bardic alphabet is refuted not by his defenders but by his prosecutors' own sharpest sceptic, and source not yet identified, once again, turns out to have a source, and the source is not Iolo. Twenty years earlier he had said the same of the mystic mark, the three rays of the Gorsedd, /|\. He reported the common belief that the mark was all Iolo’s invention and would not lean on it: “Credaf ei fod wedi cael y nod cyfrin yn ysgrif Llywelyn Sion; ac ymddiriedaf ar ei air”, I believe he had the mystic mark from Llywelyn Siôn’s manuscript, and I trust his word. A year later he allowed that Iolo could have borrowed it, and added at once: “Nid wyf yn gwybod iddo wneyd hynny”, I do not know that he did so; “carwn weled yr ysgrif wreiddiol”, I would like to see the original manuscript. When at last he dated the mark, he put its making in the sixteenth century, two hundred years before Iolo was born. The charge he did bring fell on the bards of that century, who had, he wrote, “ffugio chwedl”, forged a tale.Thomas Stephens in Yr Ymofynydd, the Unitarian monthly, read at the page: August 1852, pp. 183–184; November 1853, p. 255, signed; January 1854, pp. 13–14, signed: “Beirdd Morganwg y 16eg ganrif, wedi ffugio chwedl”, and “y oed pellaf a ellir ei gyfrif i’r Nod, yw yr 16eg ganrif”. Huw Walters’s summary in A Rattleskull Genius (2005), p. 494, that Stephens held the mark to be “Iolo Morganwg’s own creation”, is not what these pages say; Brynley F. Roberts’s, ibid., p. 478, that for Stephens “the forgeries were of the sixteenth century”, is. The Llanelli quarterly that printed his Triads went the same way. In 1869 the writer who blamed Iolo with Macpherson for the contempt of the learned still would not give him the Coelbren: “Gwaith rhyw glerwr neu fynach”, the work of some wandering poet or monk. And in 1870 its reviewer of Skene left the whole question open: “Ai tybed fod yr hen awenyddwr yn dyfeisio ac yn cyhoeddi celwyddau yn ewyllysgar? Ai tybed ei fod yn credu ei ddychymygion gwyllt ei hunan, ac yn cael ei gario ymaith ar gefn ei hobby? Neu a ydyw yn bosibl fod y gyfundrefn ryfedd, a arddelai, yn henafol mewn gwirionedd? Nid ydym yn bresenol yn barod i ateb y cwestiynau hyn yn bendant”: did the old poet invent and publish lies knowingly? Did he believe his own wild imaginings, and get carried away on the back of his hobby? Or is it possible that the strange system he held is ancient in truth? We are not at present ready to answer these questions for certain. Fifty years later the prosecution answered them, and the question the Britons had left open was closed.Y Beirniad (Llanelli), Ebrill 1869, “Yr Hen Lawysgrifau”, p. 380: “ein penderfyniad yw, mai dyfais ddiweddar ydyw Coelbren y Beirdd a’r Beithynen. Gwaith rhyw glerwr neu fynach, yn meddu cryn gywreinrwydd, ond heb ddim i’w wneud”; clerwr, “un o’r glêr, bardd crwydr o’r dosbarth isaf”, one of the clêr, a wandering poet of the lowest order (GPC, s.v.). Hydref 1870, “Y Cynfeirdd”, a review of Skene’s Four Ancient Books of Wales, p. 136. Both read on the National Library’s page images (IIIF 2183782, 2184354).

If Stephens is right about Gwilym Tew, we know exactly why the alphabet was built when it was, and what it was built for, and neither has anything to do with druidic theatre. Gwilym Tew was working in the years after the Glyndŵr rising, when the Penal Codes of Henry Plantagenet of Anjou had stripped the Britons of the right to hold office, bear arms, own property in English towns, or gather in assembly. The language was being systematically expelled from every administrative record it had occupied. Parchment and paper, always expensive, were now the materials of English officialdom: documents in Cymraeg could be seized, read, and used as evidence of sedition. Wood was the material of the poor, the private, and the invisible, and the Coelbren is a wood-working alphabet: all straight lines, no curves, built for the chisel and the notching-knife rather than the quill. That is not mysticism; it is engineering. A script designed to be cut into a stick rather than inked onto a page produces no document that can be confiscated, no evidence that can be laid before a court, no written Cymraeg that the occupying administration can read and act upon. The tally-stick left at a farm gate is simply a tally-stick. The carved message is invisible to anyone who does not know the code. What the academy dismissed as a fanciful druidic invention was, if Stephens's dating holds, a practical technology of cultural survival, the bardic tradition going underground into a medium the Lancastrian state had not thought to ban because it had not thought to recognise it as writing at all. Iolo told that kind of survival, of an older persecution, in the notes to his Poems of 1794: “Edward the Bardicide, surnamed Longshanks, had caused many of the Bards to be massacred … They were Sons of Truth and Liberty, and of course offensive to that age of tyranny and superstition; but the Welsh would not suffer them to be exterminated.”Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (1794), vol. II, p. 223 (“An Account of, and Extracts from, the Welsh Bardic Triades”).

And the charge collapses altogether once you ask whether making an alphabet was ever an unusual thing for a Briton to do, because the answer is in a manuscript that has been sitting in the Bodleian for a thousand years. In a ninth-century section of MS Auct. F.4.32 (the book known as St Dunstan’s Classbook, from Glastonbury) there is a British invented alphabet, set down with an account of why it was made: a Saxon scholar had taunted a Briton named Nemnivus that his people had no letters of their own, and Nemnivus answered the taunt by making some, that same hour, so the jeer could not be repeated. The alphabet was copied at Thorney and at Caergaint (Canterbury), and printed by George Hickes in 1705. Whatever else is true of it, the object is not in dispute and never has been: a native British alphabet, invented deliberately, by a named man, in answer to an English sneer, nine hundred years before Iolo Morganwg was born, and preserved, from beginning to end, in English monastic custody.Bodleian Library, MS Auct. F.4.32, fol. 20r (“St Dunstan’s Classbook”), ninth-century section; the alphabet is attributed in the manuscript tradition to Nemnivus, the name also attached to the Historia Brittonum. Copies at Thorney and Caergaint; first printed by George Hickes, Linguarum Vett. Septentrionalium Thesaurus (Oxford, 1703–05).

Derolez, going through it as a runologist and with no case for Cymru to make, found a section deliberately built for diphthongs (a feature Latin does not need and Cymraeg cannot do without) and traced letters out of it into English rune-rows, which is not what happens to an ornament. It is a working system, cut to the sounds of Cymraeg rather than the sounds of Latin, and it carries its own origin-story with it.René Derolez, Runica Manuscripta: The English Tradition (Bruges, 1954), 157–60: “Excursion: Nemnivus’s Alphabet,” within his chapter on the Isruna tract and runic cryptography. That is the same act Iolo stands convicted of, a full millennium earlier, in the same country, for the same reason. Which turns the question round entirely. The question is not whether Iolo invented an alphabet. It is whether he did what a Briton in this island had already been recorded doing, and the modern label attached to both, so-called, pseudo-Welsh, is simply the ninth-century Goth jeer with a bibliography.

Run the honour roll, because the double standard does not survive it. Wulfila made an alphabet for the Goths and is the father of Gothic literature. Cyril made one for the Slavs and is a saint of two churches. Mesrop Mashtots made one for the Armenians and is a saint and a national hero. Sejong made one for the Koreans and his day is a public holiday. Sequoyah made one for the Cherokee and there is a county named after him. Every one of them invented a national alphabet on purpose, in historical time, and every one is honoured for it.Wulfila (c. 311–83), the Gothic; Cyril (826–69), the Glagolitic, the Cyrillic that carries his name was made by his followers; Mesrop Mashtots (c. 362–440), the Armenian, and by tradition the Georgian and Caucasian Albanian besides; Sejong (1397–1450), the Korean hangul, promulgated in 1446 and marked by a public holiday in both Koreas; Sequoyah (c. 1770–1843), the Cherokee syllabary, complete by 1821. Two men did it in Britain, and both were Britons, and one is filed under so-called and the other stood trial for it. The act is identical. Only the nation is different.

And there is one more absence, and it is the one absence that proves something. The 1804 Bible in Cymraeg runs to more than thirteen hundred pages, and the text it carries (Morgan’s of 1588, as revised in 1620) is the fullest body of printed prose in Cymraeg. Search it right through for awen, the word for poetic inspiration that gives the tradition its name, and it is not there. Not once. Nor cynghanedd, the binding of sound that is the whole technical art of the craft. Nor cymal as the craft uses it, the joint or clause on which the metres are counted: the word is there, as cymmal, only as the joint of a body. Three words of the craft, and not one of them used as the craft uses it, in the book the English state itself ordered to be put into Cymraeg. And the translator had awen in his own mouth and did not reach for it at the making of Adam, where it would have fitted, nor at the valley of the dry bones, where it would have fitted better.Counts taken across the whole text of Y Bibl Cyssegr-lan (London: printed by George Eyre and Andrew Strahan for the British and Foreign Bible Society, 1804), which reprints William Morgan’s translation of 1588 as revised by Parry and Davies in 1620. The one apparent occurrence of awen is a form of ymadael, to depart, and is not the word. Cymmal stands four times, each the joint of a body: Job 31:22 (“a thorrer fy mraich oddi wrth y cymmal”), Ephesians 4:16, Colossians 2:19 and Hebrews 4:12. The making of Adam is Genesis 2:7 and the valley of the dry bones Ezekiel 37, both in Morgan’s translation from the received Hebrew [POST-JUSTINIAN].

Which tells you where the craft actually lived. The bardic register and the scriptural register are disjoint. They do not overlap at the words that matter. The vocabulary of the tradition was not learned from scripture, does not depend on scripture, and cannot be derived from it; it is older, native and technical, and it sits entirely outside the one corpus in Cymraeg the state and the chapel between them agreed to print. Under a regime that policed the pulpit, the school and the press, the craft words survived precisely in the register nobody official was reading. That is not an argument from silence. It is the mechanism caught working: the tradition is missing from the record because the record was made by the people it was hiding from.

And there is a last turn of the spectral screw, and it is the purest form of the absence the whole prosecution feeds on. The cosmology Iolo is damned above all for inventing, the doctrine printed as Barddas, he never published, never saw, and never could disown: it appeared in 1862, thirty-six years after his death, edited and pressed as ancient by the same John Williams "Ab Ithel" who was urging the Coelbren. The central exhibit of the forgery is itself a posthumous construction, raised over his grave by other hands and then charged to the corpse. That is spectral evidence in its final form: not merely a missing manuscript, but a missing defendant. And consider who raised that exhibit, and why. Ab Ithel was no neutral editor: he was a High-Church clergyman with a cause, to prove the ancient British Church apostolic, independent of Rome, and steeped in a native Druidic mysticism, and Barddas delivered him precisely the cosmology that cause demanded. He had the papers, a cause the cosmology served, and a free hand with them, and he printed the result under Iolo's name.

And there is one more absence, and it lies in the vocabulary of the men who judged. A philosopher gave the thing its name in 2007. Miranda Fricker calls it hermeneutical injustice: the condition in which the collective language holds no word for what is being done to a person, so that the person can neither make sense of it nor report it, and the gap in the vocabulary is itself the harm. Set the Gorsedd inside that. English learning had no working category for an order of trained memory performing a jurisdiction the statute book had outlawed, and no word at all for a man who restores such a thing out of a burnt record. It had a word ready for a man who writes an old text in a dead man’s name. That word fitted nothing in this case but the shape of the hand, and it was the only box the language kept open; so the act went into it, and the man was convicted of the box. The missing category did the convicting. And the other half of Fricker’s term is the sneer we have already measured: testimonial injustice, a man’s word discounted for what he is rather than for what he said, a stonemason with no school Latin, no fellowship and no patron, telling Oxford what the tradition of the Britons contained. The two work together and both are in the file. He was not believed because of what he was; and what he was doing had no name.Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), for both terms. Her own instance of the hermeneutical kind is the woman enduring what was later called sexual harassment in the years before the phrase existed: the experience was not nameable, so it was not reportable. The volume is not to hand, and nothing is quoted from it here. The two definitions are given as the terms are defined; the application to this case is ours, and the reader should weigh it as an argument and not as a citation. He had a sentence for that gap while he lived, and Elijah Waring heard it as his common form of speech whenever his account of the druids was questioned: “You are talking of what you don’t understand—of what none but a Welshman, and a British Bard can possibly understand.”Elijah Waring, Recollections and Anecdotes of Edward Williams (1850), p. 33.

There is one test that could settle whose hand made the disputed cosmological pages, and it is physical, not literary: the dating of the paper by its watermarks, the multispectral imaging that shows which stroke lies over which, and, beside it, a palaeographical audit of the hands. For the disputed pages did not lie untouched: through the long decades of private custody they passed under the pens of Taliesin, of Ab Ithel, of the editors of the Welsh Manuscripts Society, any of whom might annotate, extend, or "correct." If a nineteenth-century hand has written into Iolo's margins, the letter-forms and the ink will still say whose. No such test has ever been published for the Llanover manuscripts.

Run the hypothetical once, to see what is at stake: had paper watermarked after 1826 been found under the disputed hand, or a later hand found writing over his, the case would invert in a single afternoon. That the test has not been run is not this court's fault; but the absence of the test is the absence of the proof, and it is marked here plainly. Any reader who doubts the verdict can call for them, the instruments exist, and the ink does not forget. If the most controversial passages prove to be Ab Ithel's century and not Iolo's, the academy has been trying the wrong man for a hundred years, and the real editors signed their work in a chemistry that can still be read. A prosecution that declines to run the one test capable of exonerating the accused is not seeking truth. It is guarding a verdict. And whether that test is ever run, the argument here does not depend on it: the locked drawer, the managed evidence, and the financial interests behind both stand in the record regardless of what any spectroscope finds. The ink does not forget. Neither, any longer, does the reader.

13. Yn Aber Ydon

The Receipt366 Myrddin’s poem and one river-mouth. 367 Four editions print the manuscript. 374 The grave of Gwalchmai. 384 They sent it to Chester. 388 Phillimore’s reason. 395 The third manuscript. 398 The clergyman acquitted. 405 What was done, set beside Iolo.

A test that has never been run proves nothing either way; one that has been run is a receipt. Here is a receipt, and it has a photograph behind it.

There is a prophetic poem in which Myrddin speaks from his grave, and it ends by naming a run of river-mouths. It names Aber Sor on the Usk above Caerleon, where the Sor brook and the Sor bridge and the Lansor farms are still on the ground. It names Aberafan. It names an aber dwfr that a Victorian scholar placed on the Tawe, a boundary of Welsh Gŵyr. Then it names the Burry, which runs into the estuary of the Llychwr where Leucarum stood, and it says there that the men of Gŵyr will do deeds of valour there.Gwasgargerdd Fyrddin yn y Bedd. The identifications of Aber Sor, the Tawe and the Burry are Egerton Phillimore’s own: Y Cymmrodor vol. VII (1886), 118–20. The next verse names one more river-mouth, and every reader for a century and a half has been told it is the Dee, by Chester, a hundred and fifty miles from the line before it.

Not one printed edition has ever said so. Four editors have set this poem in type, and all four printed the manuscript. The Myvyrian Archaiology, 1801: Yn Aber y Don. Skene, 1868: aber y don. Egerton Phillimore, the Celtic scholar, 1886, working from the oldest copy known: Yn aber ydon. And Gwenogvryn Evans, in his own edition of the Red Book poetry: Yn aber ydon.The Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales (1801), i, 132–4, Gee’s edn 105; W. F. Skene, The Four Ancient Books of Wales (Edinburgh, 1868), ii, 236–7; Egerton Phillimore, Y Cymmrodor VII (1886), 154, l. 86; J. Gwenogvryn Evans, Poetry from the Red Book of Hergest, col. 585. Phillimore and Evans differ only in the word that follows, peritor against peruor, where the vellum’s -it- is rubbed; Marged Haycock restores peritor at R585.20. More than two hundred years, four editions, and Peryddon is in none of them.

It is in the footnotes. It is in Phillimore’s discussion, forty pages away from his own printed text, where he calls the identification "a mere guess." And it is in Skene’s index, set out precisely as what it is: "Aber y Don (Aber Peryddon)."Skene, Four Ancient Books, index s.v. Aber y Don, referring the reader to ii, 430, where the Rev. D. Silvan Evans’s note supplies the Dee. The vellum’s word first; the editor’s preference in brackets after it. He knew which was which. His readers stopped at the bracket.

That is this whole case, in one line of an index. The word that has carried this poem’s meaning for a century and a half has never once stood in this poem’s text. It was always the small print, and the small print became the reading.

Go to the page. The oldest text of the poem that can be photographed is in the Red Book of Hergest (there are older copies, and they are met below) and the Bodleian serves it at four and a half thousand pixels across a folio, which is enough to watch the pen leave the vellum.Jesus College, Oxford, MS. 111, f. 143r, col. 585. The column number stands in red at the head of the column, and col. 584 opens with the rubric Gwasgargerd vyrdin yny bed. The word is ydon. Four letters, y, d, o, n. There is no p. There is no abbreviation stroke. There is nothing in front of the y at all; the preceding word, aber, ends the line above.

Turn to a different poem in the same book, copied by the same scribe, the battle-song of Cadwallon, and the word stands there again, spelled identically: Lluest Gatwallawn ar ydon, Cadwallon’s encampment on the Ydon.Jesus College MS. 111, f. 259v, col. 1043. Beneath the word, on the photograph of the vellum, is a faint ruled stroke in a later hand: somebody stopped at it long before we did. A word a scribe writes twice, the same way, in two different poems, is a word he knows.

Peryddon is no invention either. It is a real place-name, written out in full, twice, in Armes Prydein in the Book of Taliesin, and that has been checked on the Library’s photograph as well.National Library of Wales, Peniarth MS. 2, p. 13 l. 15 and p. 15 l. 4; the page carries the rubric Armes prydein vawr. Both occurrences are unabbreviated. But it is real in that poem. It is not in this one. Somebody carried it across.Yr Awen, vi. The same poem opens on the word, straight under its rubric: “Dygogan awen dygobryssyn”, awen foretells (Peniarth MS. 2, p. 13 l. 2, read at the page). It speaks first.

And now the thing that matters more than the word, because it is what they did with it. Peryddon is a real name, and a century of scholarship has argued about where it lies. It has argued over a line of the oldest book of the Britons, and on the skin, that line does not say it.

Open the oldest book of the Britons’ poetry there is. In the Englynion y Beddau, the Stanzas of the Graves, the Black Book of Carmarthen sets down where the dead of the Britons lie, and its eighth stanza says this: "Bet gwalchmei ympyton . irdiliv . y dynetON ."National Library of Wales, Peniarth MS. 1 (Llyfr Du Caerfyrddin), Englynion y Beddau, stanza VIII, as the manuscript stands. Four printed witnesses agree on ympyton: the facsimile text, the Welsh-and-English edition, J. Gwenogvryn Evans’s diplomatic text of 1906, and the Myvyrian, which Lady Charlotte Guest englished as "The grave of Gwalchmai is in Pyton." Read on the National Library’s images, September 2026. Gwalchmai: Arthur’s nephew, the man the French romances call Gauvain and the English call Gawain.

Two words in that line have been handled, and both by the same hand.

The first is the place. The manuscript reads ympyton, ym Pyton. Skene printed ym peryton.Skene, Four Ancient Books of Wales, i, 310 and ii, 32. The scholarship has followed his form: Rachel Bromwich, Trioedd Ynys Prydein, quotes the line as "bet gwalchmei ym peryton" and records Ifor Williams’s suggestion that the Peryddon is a tributary of the Monnow at Monmouth, a place proposed on a reading the manuscript does not give. A four-letter word was lengthened into the name of a known river, and a century of argument about where that river is has been conducted on the longer form. It is the same operation, by the same editor, that put Peryddon beside ydon in the index of the other poem. One man, one word, two manuscripts.

The second is the water. Skene renders the next words "where the ninth wave flows", and Lady Charlotte Guest "when the ninth wave flows", and the phrase has been quoted ever since as though it were Cymraeg. It is not. The ninth wave is a real idea in these islands, the waves were held to run in nines, the ninth greatest and coming from the furthest edge of the world, but it is not in this line. The word on the skin is diliv, dilyw in today’s spelling.Alwyn D. Rees and Brinley Rees, Celtic Heritage (1961), on the ninth wave as the limit of the cosmos. For dilyw: Testament Newydd, 1567, at Luke xvii, "a’ daeth y diliv, ac ei cyfercollawdd vvy oll", and the Flood came and destroyed them all, with diliv glossed in the margin "ddilif, llif mawr", a great flood; Cyfres Beirdd yr Uchelwyr, glossing Genesis, "Dim ond Noa a’i deulu a oroesodd y Dilyw"; Guto’r Glyn, "Dŵr diliw dan draed elawr, / Dŵr Sodma a Gomora mawr" (elegy for Dafydd Llwyd ap Gruffudd of Abertanad, ll. 13–14, in the online edition Gwaith Guto’r Glyn, poem 89, whose editors note that diliw is the form in every manuscript). The remaining word, dyneton, is unread here, and nothing is built on it. And dilyw, in Cymraeg, is the Flood of Noah. It is the word the New Testament in Cymraeg of 1567 uses of the deluge that destroyed them all.

So the oldest poetry of the Britons puts the grave of Arthur’s nephew at a place called Pyton and says the Deluge came there, and two editors working into English turned the Flood into a wave, and a later scholar turned a four-letter place into a river in Sir Fynwy. The river was moved, the metre was mended, and the Deluge became a ninth wave. Three separate operations, and every one of them travels in the same direction.

Now open a Norman chronicler. About 1125 William of Malmesbury wrote that in the Conqueror’s reign the grave of Walwen had been found "in the province of Wales which is called Ros", and found super oram maris, on the sea-shore.William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum III.287 (c. 1125), ed. William Stubbs, Rolls Series 90, vol. II (1889), p. 342: "Tunc in provincia Walarum, quæ Ros vocatur, inventum est sepulchrum Walwen, qui fuit haud degener Arturis ex sorore nepos." Further down the same section: "Ceterum, alterius bustum, ut præmisi, tempore Willelmi regis repertum est super oram maris, quatuordecim pedes longum", the other’s tomb (Walwen’s; Arthur’s is nowhere to be seen), as I said above, was found in King William’s time on the sea-shore, fourteen feet long. Ros is the cantref of Penfro running from St Brides Bay to the Haven.

And there, in Ros, on that shore, stands a castle the Norman inquisitions call de Castro Walwani, Walwyn’s Castle, Castell Gwalchmai, with a stream running down from it into Milford Haven at Sandyhaven Pill. The modern editors of the Stanzas of the Graves say plainly that this stream is the best candidate for the Peryddon of the grave-stanza, and that it answers Malmesbury exactly.John K. Bollard and Anthony Griffiths, Englynion y Beddau: The Stanzas of the Graves (Gwasg Carreg Gwalch, 2015), 70: "Perhaps the best candidate for the Peryddon may be at Rhos, Pembrokeshire, where a stream at Sandyhaven Pill runs down from Castell Gwalchmai (Walwyn’s Castle) into Milford Haven, corresponding with William of Malmesbury’s account." The castle appears as de Castro Walwani in the inquisitions post mortem of the Earls of Pembroke.

And there is a name on this coast that sounds like it. On the south shore of Gŵyr, at Caswell Bay, the Book of Llandaff has a church of Teilo it calls Porth Tulon, and once, run together, portulon. It stands on the sea-shore, and it was given with the commons of the whole of Gŵyr.J. Gwenogvryn Evans and John Rhys, The Text of the Book of Llan Dâv (Oxford, 1893): the grant, “Porth Tvlon”, p. 76, “cum … communione tota regionis guhiri”; the church lists, pp. 32 and 44; the confirmation, p. 90, “Lann Teiliau portulon”; Evans’s index, “On Caswell Bay”. Wendy Davies, The Llandaff Charters (Aberystwyth, 1979), p. 94: Bishopston, whose name in Cymraeg is Llandeilo Ferwallt. And in all three of the Book’s own lists of its churches, Porth Tulon is filed beside Llandeilo Talybont and Lann Gemei: the churches on the Llwchwr.The Text of the Book of Llan Dâv, pp. 32, 44 and 90; at p. 90 it is “Lann Teiliau portulon”, named next to “Lan Teiliau talypont” and “Lann Gemei”. Pyton, portulon, ydon: three names on one coast, all ending the same way. We do not say that Pyton is Porth Tulon. We say that once Skene’s peryton is taken out of the line, Pyton is a place without a map, and portulon is a place on the map, and the two have to be read side by side.

So what do we know? We know where the grave was said to be: in Ros, on the shore of the Haven, below the castle that still carries Gwalchmai’s name, with its stream running down into Milford Haven. The Norman chronicle, the castle’s own name and the ground agree on that, and none of them needs the poem. What we do not know is what the poem calls that water. The editors’ Peryddon stands on Skene’s peryton, and the manuscript, as we have just seen, reads ym Pyton. The ground holds without the word. The word does not hold without the editor. What holds is the coast: Gwalchmai’s water runs into the Haven west of the Burry, on the same shore and in the same order as every other river-mouth this poem names.

The chronicle: “super oram maris”, William of Malmesbury, c. 1125.
The skin: “Bet gwalchmei ympyton”, the Black Book of Carmarthen.
The print: “Bet gwalchmei ym peryton”, Skene, 1868.

And they sent it to Chester.

The whole of it is in that one movement. The vellum gave them ydon. They preferred a longer word, on a count of syllables. The longer word was real, and of the Britons, and a modern edition would put a water of that name on the very coast the poem was walking, below the castle of Arthur’s nephew. And having reached for it, they told their readers it was the mouth of the Dee, by Chester, a hundred and fifty miles away, in England.Y Cymmrodor VII, 119: "the ‘battle of unequal spears’ with the English, at Aber Peryddon (‘the mouth of the Dee’)", with the battle attached to Coed Cennadlog by Basingwerk, and the saving admission, "but this is a mere guess." Skene, Four Ancient Books, ii, 430, the note signed (E.), the Rev. D. Silvan Evans.

That is not a misreading. A misreading is a thing that happens to a word. This happened to a country. A water of this coast was lifted off the map of Cymru and set down on the English border, and the sentence that did it has been reprinted for a hundred and fifty years and more, so that almost every reader who has met this poem has met a water of the south coast standing in Cheshire. In the record Iolo carried, the Llwchwr was not the edge of the old kingdom but its centre, Urien’s court at Aberllychwr, between Tawe and Tywi.So the Urien texts printed in the Iolo Manuscripts (Llandovery, 1848) give it.

The word survived the edition. The country did not.

We know who, and we know why, because he printed his reason. In 1886 Egerton Phillimore collated every copy of the Myrddin poem he could reach and published his workings, honestly and at length.The article is "A Fragment from Hengwrt MS. No. 202", Y Cymmrodor VII (1886), 89–154, with "Corrections of and Additions to" it at 204–206. The volume’s own contents page names the author: "A Fragment from Hengwrt MS. No. 202. By EGERTON G. B. PHILLIMORE. (Illustrated by three Photographic Facsimiles.)" He found the line one syllable short. He had one modern handwritten transcript that read peryddon where the fourteenth-century books read ydon. He printed the transcript, and gave his ground in five words: the manuscript reading "will not scan."Y Cymmrodor VII, 114. His authority is a manuscript of Edward Davies; the two older texts, he states, both read ydon. He then wrote out on the page the line he believed the scribe had spoiled, and gave a mechanism for the damage.Y Cymmrodor VII, 114: the original, he suggests, ran "in aber peridon peritor cat", "it being a common mistake of transcribers to omit one of two similar combinations of letters, when one of them immediately followed the other in a MS." The mechanism is a real one and it must be stated at its strongest, because it works: in aber peridon the syllable ber is followed immediately by the syllable per, and a scribe who collapses two such neighbours writes aberidon, which is aber ydon, exactly what stands on the vellum. On that one line, his case is sound.

It fails on the second line, and the second line is in the same book. Turn back to Cadwallon: Lluest Gatwallawn ar ydon. There is no aber there. There is no ber beside a per, and so there is nothing for the mechanism to collapse, and yet the same scribe writes the same four letters. A slip that needs a particular pair of syllables is unlikely where that pair is absent. Haplography can account for one occurrence. It is very unlikely to account for two.

And a slip of that kind needs one more thing to be believed: the thing it produces must be nonsense. If ydon were gibberish, the collapse would be the obvious reading. But Ydon is a river. Edward Lhuyd printed it as one in 1707, with no doubt about it except how to spell it.Edward Lhuyd, Archaeologia Britannica (Oxford, 1707), 286, indexing the places of Marwnad Cadwallon: "2. Ydon seu forsan Ydhon flu." And the hedge is worth reading closely, because Lhuyd hedged everything he was unsure of, in the same Latin and on the same page. Four items further down the same list he glosses a place vallis Dinothi aut Donati, the valley of Dinoth, or of Donatus: two candidates, and he will not choose between them. At the last entry of all he writes An forte Cestria?, or perhaps Chester?, with the question mark his own. Where he is guessing, he says he is guessing.Lhuyd, Archaeologia Britannica, 286, the same index: item 14, "Guarthevyn Bro Dynod, i.e. vallis Dinothi aut Donati"; item 17, "Kaer. An forte Cestria?" The eighteenth-century lexicographers working from the same list mark their own doubts the same way, with Qu., quaere, ask, as at "MEIRIN, river. (Ll. Hen in Marwnad Cadwallon.) Qu. whether Merin?" And at Ydon the only thing he will not settle is the spelling. Whether the word is Ydon or Ydhon he leaves open; that it is a river he states flat, with no aut, no forsan carried over to the thing itself, and no question mark. Ninety-four years before anyone printed Peryddon, and then only at the foot of a page, Edward Lhuyd, the first scholar of the Brythonic tongues in his age, had the manuscripts in front of him, read the short word, and doubted only how to write it down. Lewis Morris gave it an entry of its own in his dictionary of British antiquities, on a different page from his entry for Peryddon, because he did not think they were the same word.Lewis Morris, Celtic Remains, 434: "YDON or YDDON, fl. (Llywarch Hen in Marwnad Cadwallon.) Lluest Gadwallon ar Ydon." The suggestion that this be read as the Ieithon in Maesyfed is a bracketed note by a later hand, signed W. D. And the editor himself knew it, because he put it in his own footnote: there was a place called Aber ydun in Llanfachreth and a Pwll Ydon on the Conwy, both in the fourteenth century, both in the north, which proves the word a river-name and nothing more about where this one ran.Y Cymmrodor VII, 114 n.: "There was at least one place in N. Wales called Aber ydun (= Aber Idon?), and one called Pwll Ydon, in the fourteenth century," citing Dugdale’s Monasticon, ed. 1825, v, 458* and 674. He adds: "Is either the Ydon on which Cadwallon fought one of his traditional battles?", and then lets the question drop. He asked, in a footnote, whether the word he was deleting was the river Cadwallon camped on; and then deleted it anyway. A scribal accident that lands twice on an attested river-name, in a book that uses that name elsewhere, is not an accident. Iolo had kept that book by him since his youth: as a young mason working among Englishmen in Kent he had his father send him his copy of Lhuyd, and years later he named the debt and the method in one line: “Llwyd, my old Master, whom I have been following, for many a long year, with cautious feet”.NLW 13150A, p. 208.

The following word, for the record, is peritor, not Skene’s pernor (Gwenogvryn Evans printed peruor); Skene misread it, as Phillimore noted and the photograph confirms.The -it- is rubbed on the vellum and at a glance looks like u. Jesus College MS. 111, f. 143r, col. 585. And having supplied his own word, the editor told his reader at once what it meant: "the mouth of the Dee."Y Cymmrodor VII, 118–19. Of the battle he attaches to it he adds, to his credit, "but this is a mere guess."

Two things must be said about that transcript, and the first is that Phillimore printed the manuscript honestly before he argued against it. Forty pages further into the same article he set the older poem in type from the skin of the Hengwrt book itself, and what he printed at that line is "Yn aber ydon peritor cat."Y Cymmrodor VII, 154, l. 86, from the manuscript he calls "believed to be the oldest copy known of this poem" (112). The page image has been read at the resolution of the original scan; the word is four letters and there is no p. The word he emended away is the word he himself set in type from the vellum. He did not hide it, he did not doctor it, and he told his reader exactly what he was doing and why: his transcript, he wrote, "shows, moreover, independence of both the older texts."Y Cymmrodor VII, 114. Independence of both the older texts is the editor’s own phrase for the reading he preferred: it agrees with neither fourteenth-century book. That sentence is the case in miniature. Two medieval manuscripts say one thing; one modern transcript says another; the modern one was printed because it scanned.

The second thing is that the transcript has an owner, and he is findable. Phillimore calls it E. D.’s MS., and the initials are not his own shorthand, they are the Myvyrian Archaiology’s, and the Myvyrian prints a key to them in its front matter: "E. D. — The MSS. of the Rev. Ed. Davies, of Olveston, Gloucestershire."The Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales (Denbigh: Gee, 1870), "Explanation of Abbreviations used in referring to various copies", 18. The same key gives "L. M. — The MSS. of Mr. Lewis Morris, in the Welsh School, Gray’s Inn Lane, London", and identifies Ll. D. and Ll. C. as the Black Book and the Red Book. The Myvyrian had sigla for the medieval books and did not use them here. And it did not put the reading in its text. At that line the Myvyrian prints "Yn Aber y Don pervor cat", and sends peryddon to the foot of the page as a variant, credited by name: "Yn Aber Peryddon peritor cad. — Ll. E. D."Myvyrian, 1870 edn, 105, stanza 30 and note 1; read from the page image of the original scan, not from optical transcription. The editors also name their sources for the poem as a whole at the foot of it, "Dyma y diwedd yn Ll. L. M. Banau o L. E. D. yw y lleill": this is the end in Lewis Morris’s book, the remaining stanzas are Edward Davies’s. The editors of 1801 put the vellum’s reading in the text and the clergyman’s in a footnote. Everything since has promoted the footnote.

And the case must be tested where it can fail, because three lines earlier in the same poem there is a second disputed word and it behaves in the opposite way. At that line the Red Book reads hyrri and the Hengwrt book reads byrri, an h against a b, and the disagreement is between the two medieval manuscripts themselves.Y Cymmrodor VII, 113: "In l. 83 it has chat for cat, and byrri for hyrri." Confirmed from the scan of Phillimore’s printed Hengwrt text at 154, where the letter is a closed-bowl b against the open h of hydri and guhyr on the line below. On the Red Book’s own page (Jesus College MS 111, f. 143r, col. 585, l. 18) the first letter is h; the name itself, Hurri, is still open. There, nobody invented anything and nobody need be accused: the books differ, as books do, and both readings are medieval.

And the test has to be run further than that, because there is a third manuscript; and when this court went looking for it, it said the wrong thing. It is Peniarth MS 26, a small mixed book of prophecies, astrology and verse, once Hengwrt 133, written in a running fifteenth-century cursive.National Library of Wales, Peniarth MS 26 (formerly Hengwrt MS 133): "Vaticinatory texts in both verse and prose, and texts concerning astrology and medicine … dating from around 1456 (p. 83)." J. Gwenogvryn Evans, Report on Manuscripts in the Welsh Language, i, 351, is the more careful witness: "written for the most part about the year 1456", and the year is written on p. 83, not on the leaves that carry this poem. It has the poem at its page 44, under a rubric of two lines ruled off in a box, which names Merddin a Thaliessin, the two prophets together, not Myrddin alone.Peniarth MS 26, p. 44. Gwenogvryn Evans catalogues the item as "Gwasgargerdd Taliesin" (Report, i, 352), which is his shorthand rather than the manuscript’s wording; the rubric on the leaf names both men. The preceding item, ending immediately above the box, is the Merddin poem that closes "gwedy taliessin byddawt kytfredin vy narogan." And at the line in dispute it reads yn aber beryddon, Beryddon, which is Peryddon softened after aber, the mutation a writer of Cymraeg makes without thinking about it.Peniarth MS 26, p. 46, l. 1 of the river-mouth stanzas. Read from the Library’s own image at the resolution of the original photograph, where the b is formed exactly as the b of aber two words before it: looped ascender, closed bowl, no descender. So the longer word was being written in Cymru four hundred years before anybody printed it.

That is the strongest thing that can be said against the argument of these pages, and it was found by the court that is making the argument. It must therefore be followed the whole way, because it does not end where it appears to end.

Read one line higher on the same page. Where the Red Book has Yn aber Sor yt uyd gyghor ar wyr, a council at Aber Sor, Peniarth 26 has garw gynghor ar wyr: the place-name gone, an adjective standing in its room, a harsh council.Peniarth MS 26, p. 46, first line of the page, against Jesus College MS. 111, col. 585, l. 74. Now open the Myvyrian Archaiology at that same stanza and read the foot of the page: "Yd fydd garw gynghor ar wyr. — Ll. E. D."The Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales (Denbigh, 1870), 105, stanza 26, note 7. The volume’s key to its own sigla, at p. 18, gives "E. D. — The MSS. of the Rev. Ed. Davies, of Olveston, Gloucestershire." The Gloucestershire transcript and the fifteenth-century Welsh manuscript carry the same change. Two copies do not exchange a place-name for an adjective by accident. They are of one family.

Which acquits the clergyman, and this court says so plainly, having been the one to suspect him. Edward Davies of Olveston (the same Edward Davies who in 1809 printed the word forgery against Iolo) was not bending a British poem to fit a theory of his own.Edward Davies (1756–1831), curate of Olveston in Gloucestershire and from 1805 rector of Bishopston. Iolo names him so himself: “Edward Davies, curate of Olveston, has manufactured two huge volumes” (Waring, Recollections and Anecdotes of Edward Williams, 1850, p. 170). Southey names him the same way, in the letter that could not find Bard Williams: “There is Davies of Olveston the author of the Celtic Researches” (to Grosvenor C. Bedford, 24 November 1808: The Collected Letters of Robert Southey, Part Three, letter 1542). The charge of 1809 is at Y Drychiolaethau, ¶321. He was copying, and copying faithfully, a British manuscript tradition older than he was. The readings held against the vellum were never his; they were his exemplar’s. The suspicion was ours, it was wrong, and the evidence that clears him is evidence we went out and found. Saying so, when the truth clears one of his accusers, is only keeping the rule Iolo gave his own daughter. In a letter of 5 May 1810 he reminded Ann of “what I have always told you, adhere to truth on all occasions”.Iolo Morganwg to Ann Matthews Williams, 5 May 1810, NLW 21285E, letter no. 884. Set beside it the counsel of Rousseau’s Émile (1762), book IV, which his generation read: “Truth, they say, can never do a man harm. I think so too. My good youth, be honest and humble … keep steadfastly to the path of truth or what seems to you truth, in simplicity of heart, and never let yourself be turned aside by pride or weakness.”

And with that, the poem falls into two families, and the families answer the question. On one side the Red Book of Hergest stands alone. On the other stand the Hengwrt fragment, Peniarth 26, and the transcript descended from their tradition, marked off by the readings they share against the Red Book: byrri where it has hyrri, garw gynghor where it has Aber Sor.The grouping is not new; only the proof is. Phillimore had already written that "E. D.’s MS. resembles the version of our Hengwrt MS. rather than that of the R. B." (Y Cymmrodor VII, 114). He did not have Peniarth 26 to show it with. A third shared reading, at l. 20, is equivocal: Peniarth 26’s dy dorby takes its opening from the Hengwrt dydderbi and its middle from the Red Book’s didorbi. And here is the whole of it. The word ydon stands in both families. The word Peryddon stands in one of them, and not at its head, because the oldest book in that family, the Hengwrt fragment, reads ydon as well.

A reading found in two independent branches of a tradition is the reading both of them inherited. A reading found in one branch only, and absent from the oldest member of that branch, is a change made inside it. That rule is not this court’s invention; it is the ordinary practice of anyone who has ever edited a text from more than one copy. By it, ydon is what stood in the copy behind them all, and Peryddon is what happened to the poem afterwards, somewhere between the fourteenth century and the book at Peniarth. The vellum was overtaken by one wing of its own descendants, and the editors printed the wing.

And that changes the charge against 1886 by making it smaller and a great deal more exact. Nobody invented a word. What was done is this: of two medieval readings the editor preferred the younger, on the ground that the elder would not scan; set it in his text as the poem; did not tell his reader which branch of the tradition it came out of; and glossed it as the mouth of the Dee. The reader was handed a choice that had already been made for him, and was not told that a choice existed. Iolo had done the opposite, and been overruled. Answering Owain Myfyr on 5 April 1806 about the ethical tract of Bardd Glas o’r Gadair in the third volume of the Myvyrian, he said he had found a better text in the Caer Rhun manuscripts and asked that it be printed in place of his own: “I found a copy of this beautiful little piece preferable in many of its readings to that in my manuscript. I transcribed this … and had recommended it in preference to my own copy for printing – at least some of its readings. But in my absence, it was not attended to – it was forgotten, at least neglected, and the worst copy printed.”Iolo Morganwg to Owen Jones (Owain Myfyr), 5 April 1806 (draft), NLW 21285E, no. 880.

And there is one way, exactly one, of testing what that editor’s judgment was worth when it could be checked; and it has now been taken. The same article passes sentence on the closing stanzas of the poem, the run about the Teifi, about Aber Mulchwch, about Llandudoch, which is St Dogmael’s at the Teifi mouth. Of these he writes that they are "stated to be taken from a MS. of Edward Davies, and obviously form a comparatively modern addition to the original text," and that their contents suggest they were "chiefly compiled by a person connected with the Abbey of St. Dogmell’s."Y Cymmrodor VII, 113. The judgment rests on two grounds, both of them the editor’s own sense of the material: that the stanzas are absent from the two old copies he had, and that they read to him as late. He named the place they came from and he was right. He dated them and he was wrong.

Peniarth 26 does not stop where the Red Book stops. It carries the poem across the foot of its page 46 and on to page 47, through the Teifi, through yn aber mulchwch, through llan dydoch, down to the last of them: "Disgoganaf y llan Dydoch, na bydd na chledr na chloch", I prophesy of the church of Llandudoch, that there shall be neither beam nor bell.Peniarth MS 26, pp. 46–47, read from the Library’s images at the resolution of the original photographs. The page ends with the catchword llan, and page 47 takes it up. The stanzas answer to Myv. Arch. (1870 edn) 105–6, stanzas 32 to 42. That is, the whole of the run in question, to its final line. The comparatively modern addition is in a fifteenth-century British manuscript, entire, to its last stanza. It was old when the Tudurs came.

And that is the only instance in this whole affair where the editor’s instinct can be laid against a manuscript, and the manuscript wins. He declared eleven stanzas modern because they felt modern to him and because his copies lacked them. He declared a word wrong because it would not scan. The two judgments are the same judgment, made by the same faculty, on the same page of the same article, and the one that can be checked is false by three hundred years. It does not prove the other false. It measures what the faculty was worth.

And now weigh what was actually done, because the whole case turns on it. A syllable was added to somebody else’s poem, in print, presented as that poem; and the addition moved a river a hundred and fifty miles. That is not a spelling. It changes what the poem says. A verse that stood on the Burry, with the men of Gŵyr named in the line above, was made to stand on the English border, and every reader for a century and a half has read it there, without being told that the vellum says otherwise. The meaning was altered, and the alteration was published as the original. The copyist the profession convicted had a rule against exactly that, and he held other men to it. Of Evan Evans, Ieuan Brydydd Hir, whose catalogues of the gentry libraries this court has already called as a witness, he wrote: “Evan Evans was not a fair copyist. I have detected him on several occasions copying according to his own ammendments.”NLW 13221E, p. 76, Iolo Morganwg to William Owen Pughe, 19 December 1800. The emendations he caught were made on the Black Book of Carmarthen: Evans took four stanzas from it into his own copy and there “made emendations and offered alternative readings”.Ffion Mair Jones, ‘The Bard is a Very Singular Character’: Iolo Morganwg, Marginalia and Print Culture (Cardiff, 2010), pp. 23–4, on Evan Evans’s transcript in Panton 33. A century later the editor who read sixty-three of Iolo’s volumes at Llanover to trace one borrowed paragraph named the test and the culprits together. Iolo’s researches, he wrote, “have been made use of by men who have had a reputation for scholarship and carefulness, while Iolo himself who provided them with the information, has sometimes been looked upon as a man who was careless in his transcripts and unscholarly in his methods. A comparison of Dr. Gwenogvryn Evans’s edition of the Black Book of Carmarthen with Iolo’s transcripts may do somewhat to remove the erroneous opinion as to the one; and the assertion as to the other, has in most cases been made by those who have never seen a Iolo MS.”L. J. Hopkin-James (“Hopcyn”) and T. C. Evans (“Cadrawd”), Hen Gwndidau, Carolau a Chywyddau (Bangor, 1910), Introduction, pp. x–xi; on p. xi, a statement printed in Taliesin (1859) under the name “Hynafiaethydd”, without credit, found after reading 63 Llanover volumes “in the hand of Iolo Morganwg himself, almost word for word”; and the Iolo volumes “form the primary authority for the history of Glamorgan”. Iolo’s own copies of Black Book verse are in NLW MSS 13100B, pp. 171–4; 13152A, pp. 167–220 (Englynion y Beddau); and 13122B; his note on its spelling in NLW MS 13139A, p. 73 (NLW catalogue). None is yet online, so the comparison has not been made. Where one of his copies has been studied, the rule is there to be seen. The Stanzas of the Graves had come down to that generation through a corrupted eighteenth-century copy, with two stanzas jumbled together, and in 1801 his co-editors printed it so in the Myvyrian Archaiology, from Owen Pughe’s transcript. Iolo, copying from the same corrupted family, stopped: “On p. 428 Iolo broke off his copying after the garbled text of I.24–25 (p. 429 is blank), perhaps realising the text’s worthlessness.”Patrick Sims-Williams, The Medieval Welsh Englynion y Beddau: The ‘Stanzas of the Graves’ (Woodbridge, 2023), pp. 91–92: the corrupt version, “distinguished by further corruptions such as I.4b bron, 21a kein hen, and a complete muddling of I.24–25”, “would eventually be printed in the Myvyrian Archaiology in 1801”; Pughe’s copy of 1784, NLW 13239, is the “source of the Archaiology text”; Iolo’s is NLW 13100B, pp. 425–28, c. 1800. Read in the text of the book.

Set beside that what Iolo Morganwg did. He wrote in his own notebooks, seventy-five volumes of them, kept for forty years, in his own hand and under his own name, and the bulk of what he is condemned for was never published by him at all. It was printed by other men after he was dead. He did not slip a word into another poet’s poem and leave it standing there as the poem. He filled private papers, said where things came from, and kept every draft, which is the only reason there is anything to argue about. One man changed the meaning of a public text. The other man wrote privately and kept the workings. The first was called an editor. The second has been called a forger in every reference book in the language for a hundred years. He had said what his good name was worth to him. Setting down some anecdotes of his life at the request of friends, he wrote that if any unwelcome truths in his tale should offend anyone, “let them be as publicly contradicted as they are here asserted, I owe more to my own reputation and the consequent reputability of my Children, than all the world could purchase.”NLW 21387E, no. 10 (memoir draft; transcribed by the Iolo Morganwg project, CAWCS).

Nor does the charge itself differ by a word. The man who convicted Iolo wrote that somebody had supposed lines "ought to be added in order to clarify the sense," and had put them in.G. J. Williams, Iolo Morganwg a Chywyddau’r Ychwanegiad (Llundain, 1926), 48: "Ymddengys i rywun dybied y dylid ychwanegu llinellau er mwyn eglurhau’r meddwl, ac iddo eu rhoddi i mewn rhwng y ddwy linell." And that Iolo had perhaps found a cywydd of Edward Dafydd’s and mended it, and added to it.Williams, Cywyddau’r Ychwanegiad, 81: "Y mae’n bosibl i Iolo ddarganfod cywydd Edward Dafydd, ac iddo ei drwsio ac ychwanegu ato." The verb is trwsio, to mend or repair. Ei drwsio. To mend it. That is the crime, and it is also the method, performed in print, in the same decades, on the same kind of text, by the profession that was trying him. The editor’s authority for his mending was "the Rev. E. Davies’s copy", a transcript he did not describe, from one branch of the tradition, which he did not tell his reader he was following.

And it is not one word. Four readings in these two poems were taken off the skin, and four printed readings failed. The vellum has peritor and the edition has pernor. The vellum has ydon and the edition has peryddon. And the same annotator who sent ydon to the Dee in one poem met the same word in another poem twelve pages later in the same volume. There he wrote that what river was meant was “difficult to ascertain”, and then named one all the same, the Ithon, which falls into the Wye. He never laid his own two notes side by side.Skene, Four Ancient Books, ii, 430 and ii, 442, both signed (E.), the Rev. D. Silvan Evans. At 430: “For ‘Aber y don’ the Rev. E. Davies’s copy has ‘Aber Peryddon,’ which is one of the old names of the river Dee.” At 442, on the Cadwallon line, he keeps the manuscript reading: “‘Ar ydon.’ Some transcripts have ‘ar y don’, that is, on the wave, or near the sea. What river, if any, is intended, it is difficult to ascertain. As far as the mere name is concerned, it may be identified with the Ithon, Eithon, or Ieithon, which falls into the Wye about seven miles above the town of Builth, Breconshire.” There was a fifth in that count, and this court has struck it out, because a tally never audited is worth nothing. Where the Red Book reads hyrri, Skene’s annotator wrote that we should "undoubtedly read byrri"—and the Hengwrt fragment reads byrri, and so does Peniarth 26.Skene, The Four Ancient Books of Wales (Edinburgh, 1868), ii, 430. The letter in Jesus College MS. 111, f. 143r is an unmistakable Anglicana h; but Y Cymmrodor VII, 113 records of the Hengwrt text "In l. 83 it has chat for cat, and byrri for hyrri", and Peniarth MS 26, p. 46, reads byrri with the same looped b. He had two medieval manuscripts behind him, whether he knew of them or not; and a man with a manuscript behind him has invented nothing. That charge is withdrawn.

The same man wanted the same word to be two different rivers in one book, and neither answer troubled him, because the answer was never the point. What was wanted was a location and a meaning, something to say, something that resolved. The evidence was the obstacle, not the object. Set the word on the Dee and the poem means one thing; set it on the Ithon and it means another; leave it where the scribe put it and you must admit you do not know. That last is the only honest position available, and it is the one nobody took. They wanted the meaning, and they took it; and they did not much mind what was destroyed to get it, a reading, a river, a valley’s claim on its own past, or a man’s name.

That is what the machine looks like from the inside. No conspiracy, no whisper, no shut room. An editor mends a line for the metre; the mended line becomes the printed text; the next man cites the printed text; the manuscript reading sinks into an apparatus nobody reads; and a river of Cymru sits in the wrong county for a century and a half. They were not hiding any of it. They published it, with their reasons underneath. The only thing that stayed hidden was that the operation had a name, and that the name was his.

14. Y Ceidwad a'r Orsedd

The Keeper and the Throne411 The man as the century found him. 413 A hard word. 414 The motive. 419 The white robe. 421 The Trickster. 424 The gaol and the debt. 430 Peggy. 438 One world. 441 What the throne means. 442 Innocent, and of what. 444 The bishop’s library. 445 The bishop made a druid. 447 The hymns. 449 The verdict.

He died in 1826 without a whole pair of small clothes to his name, and on his table, in careful stacks, lay the literature of a nation. His own letters record that estate without embellishment. It is the one currency a charge of forgery cannot argue with: what the forger owned. He held no land, no capital, and no office; he had put off a civil list pension when Longman pressed him to petition for one in 1826 (the petition drawn at the very last, for his blind wife's sake, survives only as a draft in his papers; no pension ever came). He had been gaoled for debt at Caerdydd in 1786. That is the estate of the man we must now put on trial. Whatever he took, he took none of it for himself. He had written the epitaph of such a man in his Poems of 1794, in the Epitaph on an Old-fashioned Fellow: “He Pomp detested, pity’d Kings, / And thought high Titles worthless things … And to the Poor, imprudent, gave / What wiser heads would strive to save”.Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (1794), vol. I, p. 166 (“Epitaph on an Old-fashioned Fellow”).

This book could have ended there. A clean verdict, an innocent man, a corrupt court, and all of it true, and all of it earned. It would also have been half the truth, because one thing came in that could not be left out: the acquittal, followed to its floor, uncovered a crime larger than the one he was charged with, a crime that was never his, committed with the thing he built. That finding arrived late. It cost the book its clean ending. It goes in anyway.

A defence that cannot say a hard word about the man it defends is not a defence; it is a fan letter, and no court has ever believed one. So now we turn the same forensic honesty we have used on the prosecution onto our own witness (onto Iolo himself, and onto the order he raised) because a case only proves itself when it can survive its own scrutiny. Everything said so far stands: the verdict was unjust, the custody corrupt, the drawer locked against the very man hired to use it. But the man in the dock was not a saint, the institution he built was not, in its bones, the thing it claimed to be, and the people who destroyed his name were his own. All of it is true at once. The truth was always going to be stranger, and harder, and better, than the hagiography.

Begin with the question every forgery charge must answer before any other: motive. Why does a man forge? For money, for fame, or to break into a world that has shut him out. Chapter 10 has dealt with the first two: he made nothing from the poems, and the credit for them went to Dafydd ap Gwilym, not to him. That leaves the third, and Iolo was not shut out of the world he is accused of forging his way into. He was inside the circle of letters, if never inside the circle of money, his manuscripts in his own keeping, his place in the world of letters established, Owain Myfyr and the Gwyneddigion printing him, the antiquarian establishment seeking him out, and for most of his working life on the same side as the very people who would later be cast as his accusers. He had no door to force, because he was already through it; he had nothing to gain by counterfeiting a position he already held. Strip the romance off both ends and the great "forgery trial" resolves into something stranger than a trial: a verdict passed inside one world of letters, among men who shared its salons and patrons and societies, on the one man in it who never shared its money. And that money was not a county’s. It was the coal, iron, copper and tin of the first industrial nation on earth, the fuel of every railway and every steamship on the globe, dug out of Cymru in a gold rush that ran for a century and carried off to London: the greatest haul of its age, taken by the families who sat in those very salons. The line in that room was never learning. It was that money, and the stonemason stood on the wrong side of it.

Measure the vacancy by the champions. Every other country of the tradition got its advocate. Morgannwg had Iolo, then Taliesin, and at the last, in the deepest irony of the case, its own prosecutor: Griffith John Williams spent the rest of his life writing Traddodiad Llenyddol Morgannwg, the loving, monumental history of the very tradition he had convicted Iolo of inventing. Even the prosecution was a Morgannwg patriot. Gwynedd had the Morris brothers, the Gwyneddigion, and in the end a knighted grammarian. Two centuries of the forgery war are those two champions fighting over custody of the culture. And Deheubarth, the seat itself: Dinefwr, the seat of the Lord Rhys, whose eisteddfod of 1176 sat at Aberteifi, the country of Talley and the Physicians, had no one. Not for want of abbeys: Margam and Castell-nedd fell in the same Dissolution that felled Talley. The difference is what each country had left when the smoke cleared. Morgannwg's tradition ran on two rails (the granges and a lay guild of gentry-house and farmhouse copyists) so when Harri ap Harri tore up one rail, the other carried the load, and carried it all the way down to Lewys Hopkin's generation, where a stonemason's boy could still be apprenticed to it. Deheubarth's memory ran on the court and the court's civil service (Dinefwr and Talley, the throne and its record-office) and the same king took the first in 1531 and the second in 1536, five years apart. With the court and the record-office both gone, the southern seat of the old sovereignty had no institution left to carry its memory, and no one left to speak for it. To fight for Morgannwg was antiquarianism, safe, printable, prize-winnable. To fight for Deheubarth was to stand up for a jurisdiction the conquest had abolished outright, and that was a colder and lonelier country to defend. Iolo had said which rail carried his own country’s, in the notes to his Poems of 1794: “the Ancient British Bardism has for ages been in the hands of those who ranked not with the higher classes”.Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (1794), vol. II, p. 161 (note to “Ode on Converting a Sword into a Pruning Hook”).

And this is what makes sense of a hundred years of quarrelling that otherwise makes none. The squabble over whether Iolo forged was real, but it was never the point; it was the weather over a deeper and steadier interest the same people shared no matter which way the verdict fell, and that interest was control of the archive, of what could be seen, cited, published, and what could not. Measured against that end, Iolo's guilt or innocence was almost beside the point. Because here is the thing the whole case finally reveals: they owned both sides of the argument. Not by a script (there was no committee handing out the parts, and we allege none) but by ownership of the very ground each side had to stand on. They held the manuscripts, so they controlled the evidence either case could call. They held the journals, the prizes, the chairs and the societies, so they controlled which case was printed, funded and taught. The men who attacked Iolo and the men who defended him were not one party. But one house held the papers that both of them needed, and whichever side carried the day, the archive stayed in the same hands, and the sovereign court of native law beneath it all stayed bolted outside the door. A party that owns both sides of an argument cannot lose it. That is not a conspiracy; it is a monopoly, and a monopoly never has to meet in secret, because it never has to coordinate what it simply owns.

A conspiracy requires a secret meeting; a class requires only a shared bank and a common gate. When the same small circle of families hold the land, the coal, the church, and the cabinet, they do not need to coordinate their erasures in secret. They need only look at the balance sheet. What the records show is not a cabal of whispered instructions but a single interlocking world (eisteddfod patronage, aristocratic salons and gentry marriages) in which the same few hundred people held the offices, the money, the archives and the rituals, and inside which disputes were settled not by warfare but by absorption. When we say the players were on the same side, it does not mean they conspired. It means they swam in the same water, and the water ran one way. Iolo named the owners of that water in his last years: the privileged few who “plunder the vast majority of what the Great Parent obviously designed for all”.NLW 13151A, p. 106, and NLW 13112B, pp. 273–85.

And once the monopoly is seen, ask what the monopoly was for, because empires do not only burn the memory of the peoples they unmake; they collect it. The twentieth century made the method infamous, whole bureaux of the Reich sent hunting the ancestral and the occult across a conquered continent, but Westminster's empire had refined it a century earlier and called it scholarship: East India Company money, on Bunsen's word, sent Müller to master the sacred root of India in the Rig-Veda, on the open reasoning that to hold a people's root is to hold the means of uprooting them. In Cymru this empire never needed to send a collector at all. It had the best who ever lived, working for love. Iolo walked the dying libraries and gathered Cymru's scattered sacred into a single archive with his own hands; the money under the gathering was Myfyr's, Llundain money, trade money, money that had to stay sweet with Pitt; and within a generation of his death the whole harvest was bought from his heirs and locked in the cabinet of the very circle already named, with the vellum rolls of Class A, the oldest skins in the collection, never seen again, as the measure of what mattered most. We do not assert he knew; everything in his hand says he believed he was saving it, and he was. But stand back from the man and read the function: before him the tradition was dispersed, unownable, alive in a hundred houses; after him it was collected, catalogued, ownable, and owned. The Trickster did the fieldwork. The machine took the field.

Now the commonest objection to the pageant: the white robe. There is no white robe in the medieval bardic record, it is said; therefore the whole pageant is invention, foreign fancy dress got up to look ancient. Turn that exhibit over in the light. The white robe is not nothing. It is a habit, and there was one order of white-robed men in Cymru whose entire vocation was the keeping of the nation's record. The Premonstratensian White Canons of Talley, Talyllychau, the only house of their order in all of Cymru, founded by Rhys ap Gruffydd, the Lord Rhys, sovereign of Deheubarth himself. Know the order to know the office. The Premonstratensians were born at Prémontré in 1120 as canons regular (not enclosed monks but men vowed to prayer and to work in the world) and their white habit was chosen against the black of the Benedictines: a uniform that announced office, not retreat. The Lord Rhys planted their one house in Cymru beside his own seat, and its canons were the chancery and the judiciary of Deheubarth (lawyers, archivists, registrars, parish administrators, the working civil service of Cymru's princely state) and their house was its record-office until the Dissolution tore it down in 1536.Talley (Talyllychau), the only Premonstratensian house in Cymru, founded by Rhys ap Gruffydd, the Lord Rhys, sovereign of Deheubarth. The White Canons were not enclosed contemplatives but lawyers, archivists, and parish administrators, the working civil service and record-office of Cymru's princely state, until the Dissolution tore it down in 1536. See F. G. Cowley, The Monastic Order in South Wales, 1066–1349 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1977). When Iolo reclothed his druids in white, he did not borrow a stranger's uniform. Consciously, or not (we do not claim he knew) he put the keepers of the tradition back into the exact habit of the men who had been Deheubarth's keepers of the record, the white order Harri ap Harri had destroyed for being precisely that. The robe the prosecution calls proof of forgery is the uniform of Cymru's shadow-state. They were nearer the truth than they knew: it was a costume, the costume of the office of memory itself, the office the conquest had abolished, worn again in the open air, where the old law said a gorsedd must sit, since it was unlawful to hold one by night or under a roof.

And since everything turns on telling the true from the imported, set the two apart plainly, because the line is not hard to draw. What is genuinely ancient, standing in the Britons' record centuries before Iolo drew breath, is the core: the gorsedd itself as throne, court and tribunal, the word in its royal and legal sense, more than three hundred times over in the manuscripts; the ranked bardic order of the medieval law; the rule that a gorsedd was held in the open, by daylight, and was unlawful under a roof or by night; and above all the sovereign claim, that this people had once governed and judged itself under its own law, in its own tongue, before the invader's writ ran. None of that is invention. It is the inheritance, and it is the part that matters. What is Iolo's own overlay is the machinery: the three orders and their colours, and the ring of stones for a setting. Keep the two clearly in hand and the confusion the verdict feeds on falls apart. The sovereignty is real and old; the scaffolding bolted around it is Iolo's, added to by the Victorians, and, in his heirs' hands, cheap. The critic points at the scaffolding and cries forgery over the whole building. But the building is ancient; only the scaffolding is new. Take the scaffolding down and the throne is still standing under it, exactly where the old law of this island left it.

This is where the oldest pattern in the psyche walks onto the stage, and it is not a flattering one. When a legitimate centre is destroyed and the seat stands empty, something always comes to fill it, and what comes is rarely the rightful heir, it is the figure Jung named the Trickster. The Trickster is the culture-bringer who is also a thief: in Jung's account he lies, transgresses, counterfeits, and keeps alive by exactly those means what the destroyers could not be allowed to reach. Read as psychology (and it can only be read, not proven) Iolo is the Trickster in his institution, not in his texts. Against a state with cavalry and treason laws and a printer's monopoly, he built the one kind of vessel such a state does not search: a mystery: the ceremonial frame, new-made, because the old frame had been burned and something had to carry the genuine fragments forward. That frame is his, and we have said so. The texts it carried are another matter, and they have been weighed in their own chapters, on their own parchment.

And this trickster laughed at himself first. He held that man was no “cooking animal” and could live on grass like a horse, and with one friend, walking in the north, he spent a whole day grazing; by sunset both were running for bread and cheese, “abandoning all thoughts of returning to the green diet of Nebuchadnezzar.” When he told it at dinner, a guest added the part he had left out: the farmer had caught the pair of them in his clover and driven them into the parish pound “like any other stray cattle.” “At this sally no one was more diverted than the object of it,” who said he did not remember that part, “but thought such an episode in perfect keeping with the main argument.”Elijah Waring, Recollections and Anecdotes of Edward Williams (London, 1850), pp. 13–14.

He told the grass story another way too: the diet was training, to harden himself for a walk into the interior of America to find the Welsh of Madog, until want of breath and other pains convinced him of his mistake.Cyfaill yr Aelwyd, I (Llanelli, 1881), p. 387: “bu yn caledu ei hun at y gorchwyl, yn pori glaswellt, &c., nes i ddiffyg anadl a phoenau ereill ei argyhoeddi o’i gamsyniadau.” And when another poet called him boastful, in verse (“Mae cred y bardd yn eithaf dyn, / Am weled synwyr yn ei waith ei hun; / Ni wiw mo’i alw yn brydydd cibddall, / Mae yn gweled mwy nac un bardd arall”, the bard thinks himself a fine man for seeing sense in his own work; no calling him a purblind poet, he sees more than any other bard), Iolo answered in the same four lines, changing only what mattered: “Gwir yw fod Sion y Bardd yn eithaf dyn, / Am ro’i gwaith ereill yn ei waith ei hun; / Ni wiw mo’i alw’n brydydd cibddall, / Lladratodd fwy nag un bardd arall.” True, Sion the Bard is a fine man, for putting other men’s work into his own; no calling him a purblind poet, he has stolen more than any other bard.Cadrawd, “Cyfrinach y Beirdd”, Cyfaill yr Aelwyd, I (1881), p. 139: “I Fardd Ymffrostus, sef Iolo Morganwg”, and “Ateb Iolo”; read on the page image (HathiTrust, Harvard copy).

And here is the hardest fact in his defence, which we will not soften, and the reason we do not make him a saint: the work was paid for, and not by him alone: by Peggy and the children. The same Iolo who spent his failing strength at seventy-one on Alice John, a blind pauper girl his parish had refused relief, was gaoled for debt in Caerdydd in 1786, and the debt should be looked at before the gaol. The chief creditor was John Walton, the Y Bont-faen surgeon who for five years had supplied the family's medicine chest (pearl barley, julaps, bark, emetics, tinctures and oils) and whose account carried two men's bills: Iolo's own, and his dead father-in-law's, the doctoring of Peggy's dying father, pursued against the son-in-law who had cut the old man's gravestone with his own hands.Y Maen, vi. He cut the words for other men: for his wife’s father, “Rees Robert ap Rees rested from his labours 4 May 1780 aged 72”; for Anthony Jones in St Illtud’s church at Llantwit Major, a monument signed “E. Williams, Cowbridge” (Church Monuments Society, Monument of the Month, May 2022). The stone slides.  "High time," the surgeon wrote to his patient, "our matters should be settled." The bill itself survives in his papers, itemised: five pounds seventeen shillings, for medicine and medical services, 1778 to 1782, the years of his courtship, his wedding, and his father-in-law's dying.The creditor's own letter survives in Iolo's archive: Jno. Walton, Y Bont-faen, to Edward William[s], 22 October 1783, "concerning the addressee's bill and that of his father-in-law" (NLW, Iolo Morganwg correspondence, no. 527; printed CIM I, 249–51: "high time our matters sho[uld] be settled"); the itemised bill, £5.17.0 "for medicine and medical services, 1778–1782," is no. 527a. The medicines: Jenkins, Bard of Liberty (2012), 52–3.

Behind WaltonIolo’s biographer: “erbyn gwanwyn 1786 roedd haid o fytheiaid yn ysgyrnygu eu dannedd wrth ei sodlau. Hwsmon y pac oedd John Walton”, by the spring of 1786 a pack of hounds was snarling at his heels, and the huntsman of the pack was John Walton. Geraint H. Jenkins, Y Digymar Iolo Morganwg (Talybont, 2018), p. 56. pressed a chorus of the aggrieved: a second surgeon, a prominent Caerdydd attorney, and the gentry houses of Coedrhiglan and Cwrt Colman, the professional Vale, dunning a stonemason for physic. The squire of Cwrt Colman was William Rees, a lawyer. In August 1783 he gave notice that he would sue Iolo, Peggy and her widowed mother for twenty pounds her dead father had owed him; and from January 1784 he held the deeds of Peggy’s mortgage, a hundred pounds that would have paid every creditor in the Vale, and would neither collect the money nor give the papers back.See Y Dyn Bach, ¶450. The pressure had begun by 1783 (Walton's letter in the October, Griffith's formal notice of suit five months behind it) and in 1785 the family fled by night across the water to Wells, leaving no forwarding address. Iolo believed, and wrote, that neighbours were spreading lies about his credit. That same summer of 1786 he was beaten to the ground in Flimston by a neighbour's mob that stoned his four-year-old daughter; it was Peggy's widowed mother who drove them off him. Weeks later, on the sixth of August, at the suit of Walton and of Evan Griffith of Penllyn, who held his note for fifteen borrowed pounds, he was arrested and carried to Caerdydd with three pence in his pocket.The pack and the flight: Jenkins (2012), 53, with Phillips in A Rattleskull Genius (2005); the creditor letters, NLW 21389E, 99. The Flimston affair: Iolo was accused by Watkin Lloyd of the song against his wife Gwenllian and strenuously denied it; two copies of "Cân Gwenn" stand in his papers; the mob (Gwenllian, her daughter, her sister-in-law, then Watkin Lloyd and a henchman) was driven off by Peggy's mother (NLW 21410E, no. 23). His belief that his credit was being talked away is his own, in his own hand. The arrest: NLW 21389E, 98, nos. 12–13; Griffith’s notice of action, 16 March 1784, for £15 “due by a promissory note” (NLW, Iolo papers, item 18). William Rees: NLW MS 21389E, item 99/16, notice of 9 August 1783 that “William Rees, gent.” will sue Elinor Robert, Edward William, mason, and Margaret his wife on a bond of £20 (catalogue description); the deeds, Iolo to a creditor, 24 February 1784 (NLW, Iolo Morganwg letters, no. 792), and his note in the gaol, “he has thrown off the mark refuses either to proceed or restore me the papers” (NLW 21387E, no. 16).

The law he went under is worth stating exactly: a debtor's body was held as surety for his estate, and since the creditor could stretch the negotiation, the creditor set the sentence. In Cymru, by Howard's great survey of the prisons, the debtors inside outnumbered the felons more than two to one. Iolo's negotiation was stretched to a year. And set the cell in its age, for the age itself was in the debtors' court: the American war had ended in 1783 with every crown in Christendom mortgaged, and the new taxes were wringing the debt out of the poor; in Massachusetts, the very winter Iolo sat inside, ruined farmers marched under arms to shut the debt-courts down; in France the monarchy, bankrupted by the same war, had two years of credit left before the deluge. The age gaoled its poor for the price of its wars, and the poor were beginning to answer. The Bard of Liberty was given his subject in a debtors' cell. He kept that subject. Pleading for Catherine Thomas, Cati Caerffili, the daughter of Flimston parents, gaoled six months for stealing wool, he wrote that “her confinement in jail amongst very wicked characters of her own sex, like a millstone about her neck, sank her”.NLW 1895Ei, letter no. 81, Iolo Morganwg to David Rowlands, 14 June 1819. And of the gaol that held her: “The house of correction is thus become a house of corruption.”NLW 21286E, letter no. 970, an undated memorandum on her case, as printed by Cathryn A. Charnell-White, “Women and Gender in the Private and Social Relationships of Iolo Morganwg”, in A Rattleskull Genius (2005), p. 375: “to be amongst a rabble of wicked characters for nearly 6 months, has opened the way for seven devils to enter where only one was before. The house of correction is thus become a house of corruption”.

Beaten for refusing the keeper's entry-fee; his flute stolen; barred his hammer and chisel, the mason's hands disarmed. What his room held is on record: two tables, a bed, two chairs, a pair of shelves, a bellows, a pair of tongs, a poker, a teapot, two cups and saucers, a knife and fork, a pewter spoon and a teaspoon, two chipped plates, a jug and a saucepan. Peggy came as often as she could and slept the nights in the cell beside him (their only son was conceived inside Caerdydd gaol) and when her time came near the keeper turned her out lest she give birth in the place; Iolo, for protesting it, was dragged into the alley and beaten, and a week later, in revenge, was moved from the debtors' quarters into a cell of men waiting for the gallows or the transports. And in that cell he wrote. He worked on Cyfrinach Beirdd Ynys Prydain, the doctrine of the bards, drafted in a prison. He drew a petition to the House of Commons against the debtor laws. And he made a ballad for his cell-mates with his own charge-sheet in it: "Ned Williams a mason… stands indicted for building huge castles in air, and also for trespass, a scandalous crime, on the grounds of Parnassus by scribbling a rhime", and the count against them all: "convicted of poverty, what a vile thing." Read it twice: in Caerdydd gaol, in 1787, he wrote the indictment of 1926 himself, a mason charged with imagination, and with trespassing on poetry. And the plea to that count was the craft itself: the old British measure he wrote in was his title-deed to the ground, handed down to him through the mason-bards of Morgannwg.The gaol dossier is Iolo's own, NLW 21389E: the ballad at 98, no. 4; the Botany Bay letter at no. 7; the transfer to the felons' cell at no. 12. The keeper's persecutions, in Jenkins's words from those papers: "Dygwyd ei ffliwt oddi arno a'i wahardd rhag defnyddio morthwyl a chŷn"; "gorfodwyd Peggy… i adael y carchar rhag ofn iddi roi genedigaeth yn y fan a'r lle"; "llusgwyd Iolo i'r ale a'i guro'n dost" (Y Digymar, 2018). Cyfrinach in the gaol: G. J. Williams, Iolo Morganwg (1956), 375–8, with Charnell-White in A Rattleskull Genius (2005). Debtors more than double the felons in Cymru: John Howard, The State of the Prisons (1777). Body as surety, creditor-set duration: Jenkins (2012), 54–5. The flute: “On 25 May 1787 his beloved German flute was stolen” (ibid., p. 59, from NLW 21389E, 98, no. 7). The room: ibid., pp. 55–6, from NLW, Great Sessions, Glamorgan Prothonotary Papers 2751 (August 1787).

He came out in August 1787 under the Lords’ Act, the standing law that let a poor prisoner go free once he had given up everything he owned to his creditors in open court. The two judges of the Great Sessions that heard it were George Hardinge and Abel Moysey, and he had petitioned them both from his cell. Hardinge, he remembered years later, “highly approved of my conduct, and was pleased to declare your good opinion of my morals and principles in a very public man[n]er”, and afterwards subscribed to his Poems. Moysey he would meet again.See Y Dyn Bach, ¶450. Then he walked home and told his Llundain friends nothing; for two years Owain Myfyr did not know, and when he heard at last, he told William Owen Pughe, who wrote it to Iolo: "had I known Iorwerth was so held, I would have freed him." The shame sealed the record, and the record stayed sealed. As for Walton: he died rich within four years, sworn at thousands of pounds, his house willed to the squire of Llanmihangel, his fifty-pound legacies scattered to Bonvilston and the Excise, and Iolo cut his epitaph in verse: "Here lies John Walton, one who plied / the costly pill, grew rich and died; / enquire no more, for who can tell — / go search the registers of Hell." And the search ends where he never intended: Walton left neither wife nor child, and his name survives almost nowhere on earth but in Iolo’s papers. The register that holds him is Iolo's archive. The surgeon exists only in the keeping of the man he gaoled. His son Taliesin was born that September, into that, the child of the gaol given the name of the Chief Bard: the boy who would grow up to be the keeper of the archive.The release: in his own papers are “A Schedule of all the real and personal Estate of Edward Wiliams the younger … now in Cardiff Gaol”, 21 March 1787, his “Extracts from the Act of 32 George II for the relief of insolvent debtors (commonly called the Lords’ Act)”, and, about 1793, a note that “the assignment in court to his creditors” still lay on the title of his land (NLW MS 21389E, items 98/9, 98/14 and 98/13; catalogue descriptions). Geraint Phillips in A Rattleskull Genius (2005), p. 412, has him “Released in August the following year under the Act for the Relief of Insolvent Debtors”; Jenkins (2012), p. 59, that “No insolvency acts, however, were passed by Parliament between 1781 and 1793”. The Lords’ Act of 1759 was not one of those occasional acts but a standing law, which is why both can be read. Myfyr’s two-year ignorance: Phillips, ibid. His words, as William Owen Pughe reported them to Iolo on 28 March 1788: CIM I, 309, 311 ("Be buaswn yn gwybod fod felly ar Iorwerth mi fuaswn i yn ei wneud yn rhydd"), and Jenkins (2012), p. 59, n. 62; the petition to Hardinge and Moysey, 15 August 1787, CIM I, 295–7 and NLW MS 21389E, item 98/10. Hardinge’s praise, in Iolo’s letter to him of about 1803 (NLW 21286E, letter no. 1038), recalling the court at Cowbridge, as quoted by Moira Dearnley in A Rattleskull Genius (2005), p. 431, n. 42, from G. J. Williams, Iolo Morganwg (1956), pp. 452–3n; his subscription, Dearnley, ibid., and Jenkins, Bard of Liberty, p. 158. Walton's will: proved Llandaff, November 1791, sworn under £5,000, the dwelling-house to Thomas Franklen of Llanmihangel, John Franklen executor and residuary, £50 apiece to Bassett of Bonvilston and the Supervisor of Excise (NLW, Llandaff probate). The epitaph: NLW 21424E, no. 63. Taliesin: Flimston parish register, baptised 16 September 1787.

And that November, three months out of gaol, he was writing comic verse. In the voice of a puffed-up young man from the Blaenau who rode down to Flemingston to see his girl, he complained that nobody stabled his fine horse and nobody rang the bells for him: “Oedd gen i geffyl costus a ffrwyn a chyfrwy gwych / Ag er i mi fynd yno, ni chanws neb y clych”, I had a costly horse, a bridle and a fine saddle, and though I went there, nobody rang the bells. Then the young man curses the whole village. The joke is on him.‘Ymweliad â Threfflemin’, NLW 21283E, no. 520, 20 November 1787 (Correspondence, I, letter 115, p. 298), as printed by Ffion Mair Jones, ‘The Bard is a Very Singular Character’: Iolo Morganwg, Marginalia and Print Culture (Cardiff, 2010), Appendix V, pp. 299–300.

Peggy, Margaret Roberts, Euron, the Golden One, married at St Mary Church in July 1781 by the hand of John Walters, the dictionary-maker who had taught himThe officiant's dictionary is the one this court has already opened at gorsedd. Peggy's father, Rees Roberts, lies under the tower of the same church; the stone is Iolo's own cutting: "Rees Robert ap Rees rested from his labours 4 May 1780 aged 72", the patronymic in the son-in-law's own chisel-hand. Noted in Jenkins, Y Digymar (2018)., kept the children alive in a collapsing cottage at Flimston through the Llundain years, and her own hand survives to say what it cost. New Year's Day, 1793: "none put your self knows of our distres… I know not how to find bread for your children a nother week."NLW 21283E, Letter no. 604, Margaret (Peggy) Williams to Iolo Morganwg, 1 January 1793, one of nine letters that survive in her own hand, her phonetic spelling keeping the spoken voice of the Vale on the page. Her family's farm, her father Rees Roberts's twenty acres at Rumney, went to keep the work alive. He did not come home. Three months later their youngest child died, Elizabeth, Lilla, three years old, her father in Llundain. He had been seized, in the black autumn before, by the conviction that his children were dead and that Peggy was hiding it from him; then the letter came, and for one of them it was true. He left Llundain at once; he was "utterly unable to do or think of any thing, for 8 or 9 months after"; he thought of ending his own life; he wrote her grave-verse in Cymraeg, Bedd-bennill Lila fach, and then walked the two hundred and fifty miles back to Llundain to finish the book she had died waiting for.Geraint H. Jenkins (ed.), A Rattleskull Genius: The Many Faces of Iolo Morganwg (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005). Iolo's preface to Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (1794) accounts for the delay by recording the death of "one of my dear children, a favourite little girl"; the incapacity, NLW 21387E, no. 21; the funerary verse, NLW 13141A, p. 113. The grave-verse opens: Cyn oed i bechod lygru’th galon / Cyn profi’r byd a’i holl ofalon, / Gwell Tad a’th ddug o bob Trueni / O’i gariad mawr i Fro’r goleuni, before sin was old enough to taint your heart, before you tasted the world and all its cares, a better Father carried you from all misery, of his great love, to the land of light.Correspondence, I, p. 309.

She had a name for his schemes, the books announced and never finished: “building castles in the air”. He took the phrase up, and used it of himself.The online edition of the correspondence, iolomorganwg.wales.ac.uk, “Iolo’s Work”, harvested 7 September 2026.

He was nearly two more years in Llundain. At the end of April 1795 she wrote again, "greatly distresed and wore out to death", worn from her long attendance on his own dying father, and still delivering his books to the Morgannwg subscribers, and let him have it: "you was composed enough to write and had money to spare to print when you did not know whether your children had bread or not." And then, having said the unforgivable true thing, she forgave him in seven words: "do not minde disappointments but com home we will do somthing again." Still he did not come home. He waited another month on a prince who had let him expect fifty guineas and gave him two; then he walked home, in June, by Bath and Bristol, delivering his poems as he went, home for good, racked with guilt, to the woman who had held the whole of it together.NLW 21283E, Letter no. 610, Margaret Williams to Iolo Morganwg, 28 April 1795; the two guineas, NLW 21285E, Letter no. 852, 2 May 1795. The farm at Wentloog had gone for £590 in 1793.

He was not a good husband, and the record does not let him pretend otherwise. To their daughter he wrote that her mother “has always been my ruin by her want of a proper knowledge of human nature.”NLW 21285E, Letter no. 844, Iolo Morganwg to Margaret Williams the younger, 29/30 October 1794: “Tell her that she has done me a very material injury by writing her last letters she has always been my ruin by her want of a proper knowledge of human nature.” Printed by Cathryn A. Charnell-White, “Women and Gender in the Private and Social Relationships of Iolo Morganwg”, in Geraint H. Jenkins, ed., A Rattleskull Genius (2005), pp. 368–9.

The temper was real, and his friends kept the measure of it. At Christmas 1814, at Robert Dare’s house near Pen-y-bont, he argued against the existence of the Devil until midnight and grew “perfectly furious”; when his opponent rose to walk home across a common full of tramps, Iolo, still red in the face, jumped up to walk him there himself. They were let go only when he had “jocosely promised ‘not to raise the Devil by the way’”, and the two “parted better friends than ever.” “His lightnings, however, startled without blasting.”Elijah Waring, Recollections and Anecdotes of Edward Williams (London, 1850), pp. 14–16.

Her letters stop in 1795, because they were never parted again. And here the record allows what the story has so far withheld: happiness. The rest of the life, thirty years and more, was lived under the one thatched roof at Flimston, together; the old man's late love-poems still sang to Euron, and the scholars who read them found "the two still deeply in love with one another in their old age and deriving inestimable comfort and pleasure from the memories they share of the glorious springtime of their lives."Ceri W. Lewis, in Jenkins (ed.), A Rattleskull Genius (2005), on the late poems to Euron, following G. J. Williams, "Cywyddau Cynnar Iolo Morganwg," Y Beirniad, VIII (1919). Margaret (Peggy) Williams, 1749–1827. In the May of 1826, seven months before the end, the old bard wrote to Taliesin from that garden, and the letter is nothing but delight: a granddaughter staying (named Elizabeth, the lost child's name) teething, drinking her "nicy drink," raiding the gooseberry bush, walking from flower to flower; she called her grandmother Mam, she called him Daitta, and he begged to keep her a week longer.Iolo Morganwg to Taliesin Williams, NLW 21286E, no. 998, dated by Iolo “May 30th 1825”; the edition dates it 30 May 1826, and the letter bears that out: he asks for paper to write letters “in readiness against the next general election”, and that election was held in June 1826: "You must permit us to keep her here for a week longer than the time appointed." The man who did the right thing under every adversity was given, at the last, the happiness the story owed him: the garden, the grandchild, the Golden One still at his side. He died in the winter dark of December 1826, and Peggy followed him within the year, not parted long, even by that.

That is what he sacrificed: the money he would not take, the warmth he could not give, the child he was not home to bury, all of it given to the tradition. And the tradition's inheritors took the offering and sacrificed the man: sold his archive, locked his hand away, and called him a forger over the very pages his family had starved to keep dry. A career fraud would have taken the annuity and kept his children warm. Iolo refused it, and the warmth with it, he gave it all to a tradition that would convict him a century after it had already starved his own table. He sacrificed everything to the thing that was sacrificing him. You do not have to make him a saint to acquit him, a saint's sacrifice costs the saint alone, and his was paid by Peggy and the children too. You have to see him whole, and a whole man casts a shadow. Pride was part of that shadow, and it gave way only so far. When Llewellyn Traherne of Coedrhiglan raised a yearly fund for him among thirty well-wishers, he took it, and wrote that “my independent spirit was a little wounded”.Iolo Morganwg to John Herbert Lloyd, 1 July 1814, Correspondence, III, p. 268.

That is who the verdict is for. Not the scholars who will argue it in journals: for the woman who could not find bread another week and sent her seven words of mercy anyway, and for the children whose father chose the manuscripts and then willed the manuscripts back to them. He gave them up to do this. And it was for them that he did it.

Now widen the lens to the entire cast, because the most uncomfortable truth in the story is that there are no clean sides. There is one world. Iolo; Taliesin running the druid-school and conducting the Gorsedd at Twynyrodyn in Merthyr in 1825; Lady Llanover the initiate, Gwenynen Gwent, the Bee of Gwent; Lady Charlotte Guest at the ceremonies; the ironmasters who paid for the prizes; the Prussian Bunsen in the same drawing-rooms; La Villemarqué carrying the rite home to found the Breton Gorsedd; and Stephens the chemist, citing the order's own inner texts from inside the very school that had taught them to him. These are not two armies. They are one closed circle of fraternal, eisteddfodic, gentry culture, settling its business by absorption. And running through the whole circle is one thing exactly: an immunity to consequence. The people who played the game suffered none of it. The colliers in Guest's furnaces died young; the child of Cymru wore the Welsh Not, the board hung round the neck of a schoolchild caught speaking Cymraeg;The “Welsh Not”: a wooden token hung round the neck of a schoolchild caught speaking Cymraeg, passed from child to child through the day; whoever wore it when the lesson ended was beaten. No statute ever required it, the schoolroom enforced, unbidden, what the Blue Books had certified. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o gave the device its general name. The colonial school, he wrote, detonates a cultural bomb, whose effect is “to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle”, Decolonising the Mind (1986), p. 3. He was describing a Kenyan schoolroom of the 1950s, where a child caught speaking Gikuyu was made to carry a metal plate round the neck reading I AM STUPID. The same object, the same rule, the same transfer from child to child, the same beating at the end of the day. Nobody carried it from Cymru to Kenya. It did not need carrying: it is what the instrument looks like wherever the instrument is installed. the language was certified a barrier and a fossil; the bard was convicted in his grave. And the players? Llanover kept her estate and her costume; Guest kept Dowlais; Bunsen kept his embassy; Stephens kept his shop and his name as the man who tidied up the scholarship of Cymru. They experimented on a living civilisation from a platform on which the experiment could never touch them. That asymmetry, the immune playing games with the lives of the exposed, is the story. It is what a class does to a people when it owns both the furnace and the archive and answers to neither.

And once you see the one world, the real shape of the crime resolves, and it is not the shape the verdict named. The forgery in this story was never Iolo's manuscripts. The forgery was the substitution of a respectable copy for a dangerous original, performed over and over, each time moving one step further from the specific and the real. The first was the Gorsedd's own, where a particular murdered sovereignty was poured into a universal mystery and came out an allegory. The second was Lady Llanover's, who took the radical archive and gave the public the costume (the harp, the invented national dress, the safe pageant) while the dangerous thing went into the drawer. And the third and last was the academy's, which took the whole compromised inheritance and reduced it to a single word, forgery, filed against the one man who had carried the real fragments out of the fire. Three substitutions, one direction: away from the particular, toward the safe. They convicted the Trickster of counterfeiting, and the conviction completed the very counterfeit he had been trying, by his own oblique means, to prevent.

And at the heart of the sentence that began it all sat a lie older than the case against Iolo. When the Tudur state attainted a lord of the south in 1531 it declared his blood corrupt, corruption of the blood, the working doctrine of English treason law: that guilt descends, that a father's condemnation poisons his children and their children unborn. But blood does not corrupt. That is a legal fiction, a sentence pronounced over a living thing as though words could stop it flowing.The first British thinker in the record said exactly this, and was made the first British heretic for it: Pelagius (c. 354–418), a Briton, whose Greek name means “of the sea” (later tradition made it a rendering of the Welsh Morgan), who carried the argument from Britain through Rome and Carthage to Jerusalem: that guilt is not inherited, that corruption does not pass by blood, that a man answers for his own deeds alone. Rome condemned him (418); Jerome sneered that he was stuffed with Irish porridge, Scotorum pultibus; and Britain held to him so stubbornly that Germanus of Auxerre was sent twice (429, c. 445) to stamp the teaching out. Eleven centuries later the Attainder legislated the doctrine the first British thinker had refused: that blood corrupts. And mark the word they charged him with, because it is built out of the same machinery: heresy is Greek hairesis, simply a choosing, and it became a crime only once heterodoxia, the other opinion, from heteros, the other of exactly two, had been set against the one. The cross-examination sets out the two Greek words for “other”; note how hard it is to build a charge on allos.

Be clear what the throne means here, because it is not a plea for crowns. In the old law the gorsedd is jurisdiction, the seat is a people's right to judge itself, made visible. It is that right the word keeps alive, and nothing narrower; a republic could raise the same seat tomorrow, and the case would not change by a word.And the old chair-lore agrees. When Rhys ap Tewdwr refounded the chair of Castell-nedd Castle, “an old chair that had been there since ages beyond memory”, its privilege, in the record Iolo carried, was peace and an open door: the chair stood open to every man of the world who came, whatever his country or nation, under the assembly-word Hedd Duw a’i Dangnef, God’s peace and His tranquility. The sovereign seat was never blood-gated; the open door, like the open sky, was the law of it. Iolo Manuscripts, from the book of Thomas Truman of Pantlliwydd. Iolo’s own song gives the seat to the people: Mae’r gwledydd oll fal Ffrainc / Yn rhoddi’r orsedd fainc / I freiniau dyn, all the nations, like France, are giving the gorsedd, the throne, to the rights of man.Iolo Morganwg, Breiniau Dyn, stanza 17 (Charnell-White 2012, no. 18); the English is our own. His son said it to the gentry’s faces. At the Abergavenny eisteddfod of October 1842, after the chairman had spoken of the eisteddfodau once held under the royal sign manual, Taliesin Williams told the platform that in the earlier ages the power which convened the bards “was superior to that of the Prince himself, who, equally with the peasant, was bound by the authority received from the sanction of those assemblies.”The Cambrian, 22 October 1842, p. 4, “Abergavenny Cymreigyddion Society”, read on the page image (Welsh Newspapers Online, view 3330440/3330444); the same report in the Monmouthshire Merlin, 15 October 1842. The words are the reporter’s account of the speech, in the third person.

Cowardice is fudging "a bit guilty" without saying of what. So: Iolo is innocent, of the poems, of the throne, of all of it. Not because his hand made nothing: because what his hand made, it made inside a living tradition and in that tradition's service, and that has never been the crime. The guilt in this story belongs to others, and it has a name.

The record keeps a witness to what the rite was to the people who first kept it: the morning after the gorsedd at Glynogwr in 1798, the company of bards was in the parish church, hearing a sermon, reported to Iolo that same week, in Cymraeg, in a letter that still lies in his papers. The open court and the parish altar were one people.EW of Pen-y-lan to Iolo, 26 March 1798 (NLW, Iolo Morganwg correspondence, no. 557; in Cymraeg): an account of "the remarkable service some of them had the day after the meeting of the bards at Glynnogwr… held in the church," with a sermon by the Rev. Rhys ap Evan Cethinog.

And in the end the church came to him. In the autumn of 1818 Thomas Burgess, Bishop of St Davids, summoned the seventy-one-year-old Unitarian to the episcopal palace at Abergwili, his own clergy had persuaded him that the old man's knowledge of British antiquities was unsurpassed and his advice indispensable. Iolo walked there from Cefncribwr carrying pens, notepads, manuscript drafts, a spare shirt, and his mallet and chisel, in case his skills as a mason should be wanted on the road; his usual colour was blue, but for the visit he bought “a new coat fit for an admiral, with gilt buttons, and a buff waistcoat”, and when his friend Waring teased him about it at Neath he said that as he was going to visit at a palace he was minded to keep up appearances: it was a new kind of visiting for him, and the suit was probably, he added, the last he should ever buy. After the household had gone to bed, the bishop's servants heard someone below and found him pacing the hall with a night-cap on his head, a book in one hand and a candle in the other; the butler knew him, and sent them back to bed. They had given the Jacobin the run of the episcopal library, and the cramp in his legs drove him out of his chair at night: the hall was cooler than his room.Thomas Burgess to Iolo, 27 August 1818 (NLW 21280E, no. 43); Thomas Beynon, archdeacon of Cardigan, to Iolo, 19 October 1818 (NLW 21280E, no. 21). The coat, the reply and the night in the hall: Waring, Recollections and Anecdotes (1850), 124–5, who has it “after the family had retired to rest”; the cramp, and “he found the hall cooler than the apartment which had been assigned to him”. The satchel, with the mallet and chisel: Jenkins, below, p. 269, who gives no source for it. Geraint H. Jenkins, "The Unitarian Firebrand, the Cambrian Society and the Eisteddfod," in A Rattleskull Genius (2005), 269–92: "It is remarkable how many distinguished people over the years had genuflected before the venerable Welsh bard." That same autumn his sharpest accuser, Edward Davies, drafted a reply to the bishop: Iolo was “not a man of literary integrity”; and in the same draft, “He is certainly an excellent welsh scholar”. On 28 October, at Abergwili, the bishop’s committee, Davies among its members, was asked to consider inviting Iolo to teach its students Welsh literature and to oversee the printing of its books.Edward Davies, an undated draft, probably his reply to Bishop Burgess’s letter of 20 October 1818 (Cardiff 3.86; the bishop’s letter Cardiff 3.82): “I should be sorry to detract one atom from the real merit of Iolo. He is certainly an excellent welsh scholar … But he certainly is not a man of literary integrity”. The committee, 28 October 1818: NLW 21403E, no. 10. Both as given by Dearnley, in A Rattleskull Genius (2005), p. 441, who adds that the matter was not discussed at the next meeting, on 25 November. The society’s own record, as the Cambro-Briton printed it, sets it down not as a proposal but as a resolution: that he be invited to live in Caerfyrddin for a set term every year, to oversee the printing of its publications, and to teach the young the poetry and literature of the Cymry.“Fod Mr. Edward Williams i gael ei wahodd i fyw yn Nghaerfyrddin am dymmor pennodol ym mhob blwyddyn, i arolygu argraffiad eu cyhoeddiadau, ac i roddi addysg i bobl ieuanc ym marddoniaeth a llenyddiaeth y Cymry”: Thomas Stephens, Yr Ymofynydd, December 1852, p. 270, quoting the Cambro-Briton, i. 73. The visit has two codas. At the bishop's eisteddfod in Caerfyrddin the next summer, the gorsedd's terms were published in the old man's own archaic orthography, and they are an open door: a licence "i bawb a geisient addysg", to all who sought learning, patronage, degree and licence in the privilege of the Bards of the Isle of Britain, the people's court proclaimed under an episcopal canopy. And the writings he left in the bishop's keeping went astray: Burgess lent them to two scholars who died with them unreturned, and their libraries went to auction. The old man, past seventy, read the auctioneer's sale-book, walked Sir Gaerfyrddin, Penfro and Ceredigion after the buyers, and got back nearly all of them. What the church admired, it also mislaid; it was the stonemason who found it again.The Hysbysiad of the Caerfyrddin eisteddfod, 7–10 July 1819 (“a rhoddi trwydded i bawb a geisient addysg, a nawdd, a gradd, a thrwyddedigaeth ym mraint Beirdd Ynys Prydain”), and the papers given to Bishop Burgess and lost, with the bard's search for them: T. D. Thomas, Bywgraffiad Iolo Morganwg (Caerfyrddin, 1857), ch. VI. Their recovery: Elijah Waring, Recollections and Anecdotes of Edward Williams (1850), pp. 125–6: the bishop submitted them “to the inspection of two other literary characters”, both died, their libraries were sold, and by “a careful inspection of the auctioneer’s sale-book” and “a long march to and fro in Carmarthenshire, Pembrokeshire, and Cardiganshire”, at “more than 70 years of age”, he “succeeded in regaining possession of nearly all the lost papers”. He had passed that palace before. In June 1796, walking Sir Gaerfyrddin to report on its farming, he called it “this grovelingly great place” and wrote, of a bishop he held to have backed the slave trade: “O! that I could consign this Parish, Bishop and all, for a while, to the slave traders! I had almost said, to the D[evi]l.” Twenty-two years on, another bishop gave him the run of the library.NLW 13115B, p. 58.

At that eisteddfod the old Dissenter did one more thing, and the paper that reported it saw it from the floor. When Walter Davies, Gwallter Mechain, had been chaired, the old bard of Morgannwg climbed up to the high table and tied a blue ribbon on his right arm, the mark of a bard. Then he came down, went to Thomas Burgess, Bishop of St Davids, and told him he had been authorised to invest his Lordship with the order of Druid. The reporter could not hear every word. He heard the bishop's answer: “Wel, myfi a ymostyngaf i bob peth a farnoch yn gymhwys”, well, I submit to everything you think fit. And the bard bound a white ribbon on the bishop's right arm. The hall, the paper says, broke into long and general joy, and it added that to see the Bishop of St Davids ordained by an old Dissenter was a sight a thousand times more pleasing than to see the Archbishop of Canterbury perform the same office in all his robes and pomp. The bishop of the established church took the order of the gorsedd from the stonemason's hand, in public, in the town where Dafydd ab Edmwnt's eisteddfod had sat in 1451.Seren Gomer, 28 July 1819, p. 281, “Hanes yr Eisteddfod”, read on the page image of the National Library's scan: “dringodd hen Fardd Morganwg, i fynu, a chylymodd ysnoden (riband) lâs am ei fraich ddehau, sef arwydd Bardd. Wedi hyny disgynodd Mr. Edward Wiliams, a nesâodd at yr Esgob, gan ddywedyd wrtho ei fod wedi cael ei awdurdodi (neu ei gymhell, canys ni's gallasom ei glywed yn eithaf eglur) i wisgo ei Arglwyddiaeth âg Urdd Derwydd: Wel, eb yr Esgob, myfi a ymostyngaf i bob peth a farnoch yn gymhwys: yna rhwymodd y Bardd ysnoden wen am fraich ddehau yr Esgob. Creodd hyn ddywenydd hir a chyffredin. Dangosai hyn fod rhagfarn grefyddol wedi cael ei gadael o'r tu allan i'r gynulleidfa gan fawrion a chyffredin. Gweled Esgob Tyddewi yn cael ei urddo gan hen Ymneillduwr oedd olygfa mil mwy hyfryd gan goleddwyr cariad ac ewyllys da cyffredin … nâ phe gwelsid Arch-esgob Caergaint, yn ei holl wisgoedd a'i rwysg prif-esgobawl, yn cyflawni yr un gorchwyl.” The same report prints the address Iolo gave the meeting.

The same eisteddfod judged the rules of the craft itself. It was decided there, an account of 1881 records, “yn unfryd unllais, heb nâg na gwrtheb na llaw na thafawd”, with one voice, without a nay or a contradiction of hand or tongue, that the twenty-four metres fixed at the Caerfyrddin eisteddfod of 1451 bound the poet’s awen “o fewn llyffetheiriau rhy gaethion”, within fetters too tight. Iolo was in the room. So were Eliezer Williams, Daniel Ddu, Dewi Silin, Rhobert Dafydd of Nantglyn, Hywel Glandyfroedd and Gwilym Morganwg.Cyfaill yr Aelwyd I (1881), p. 571, read on the page image: “Hwyrach, os caf hamdden, y cewch hanes yr ail Eisteddfod a gynhaliwyd yn Nghaerfyrddin yn 1819, pan y darweiniwyd dan ystyriaeth, y barnwyd yn unfryd unllais, heb nâg na gwrtheb na llaw na thafawd bod y Rheithiadau Cerdd a freiniwyd yn Eisteddfod Caerfyrddin yn y flwyddyn 1451 dan yr enw pedwar mesur ar hugain, yn cyfyngu awen y Bardd o fewn llyffetheiriau rhy gaethion; a bod, yn rhy fynych o’r achaws, synwyr a rhwyddineb iaith yn cael eu hoffrwm ar allawr gwag orchest egwan bwyll a diansawdd.” The rest of the sentence: and that too often, for that reason, the sense and ease of the language are offered up on the altar of empty, feeble, worthless show-pieces. The list of those present follows.

The hymns close the question with a number. Edward Williams wrote nearly three thousand hymns, and three hundred hymn-tunes beside, three times the count of Pantycelyn himself, and four hundred of them he printed in 1812 under the title Salmau yr Eglwys yn yr Anialwch, the Psalms of the Church in the Wilderness, with a second volume printed by his son after his death.Nathan Munday, ‘Pursuing God’ — Poetic Pilgrimage and the Welsh Christian Aesthetic (PhD thesis, Cardiff University, 2018), 181–2: nearly 3,000 hymns and 300 hymn-tunes; 400 printed in Salmau yr Eglwys yn yr Anialwch, vol. I (1812), vol. II posthumously (1834). Iolo’s own words on hymnody: Seren Gomer, 1 January 1814. Even the posthumous volume is missing a limb: Taliesin had seen the completed preface whole in his father's hand, and after the death it could not be found anywhere.Taliesin's testimony, reported in T. D. Thomas, Bywgraffiad Iolo Morganwg (Caerfyrddin, 1857): “iddo weled y Rhagymadrodd i gyd yn llaw ei dad”, yet “nis gellid ei gael yn unlle ar ol ei farwolaeth”, only fragments survived among the papers. His quarrel was never with Christ; it was with enthusiasm, he wanted praise sung, in his own words, “in a more rational manner” than the “Enthusiastic Rants” of the Methodists. The man charged with founding a rival religion was the most prolific writer of Christian praise his country ever produced, and the charge has simply never done the arithmetic. And his working papers show where the psalms were written: served with a King’s Bench action in 1805, he turned the notice over and drafted on its back a hymn on Matthew 7:5, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye, and the bailiff’s distraint nailed to his Y Bont-faen goods in 1797 survives with music written across its back in his hand.NLW, Iolo Morganwg papers, no. 43: notice in an action on the case, King’s Bench, 22 June 1805, “On the dorse is a draft of a hymn on Matthew 7, 5” (the verse quoted above in the English Bible of 1611); no. 36: distraint by Fras. Taynton for William Skynner, Y Bont-faen, 29 May 1797, “On the dorse is some music written in the hand of Iolo Morganwg.” The state served its papers; he answered on the versos, in psalms.

And name it by the only name that fits, the name the whole story has been circling. To take a people's sovereign court (its throne, its tribunal, its right to judge itself) and empty it, cheapen it, and sell it off for costume is the oldest treason there is. This is treason. And here is the last cruelty, the one that seals the entire apparatus shut: the real treason, the sovereign seat emptied and sold, was theirs, and no court charges its own masters; to name the crime at all was to concede the throne had been real. So they tried the keeper for forging poems, and left the real treason unnamed.

So the verdict that follows is simple, and it is the only one the evidence will bear. Iolo is innocent, wholly: of the charge they brought, as the next pages show beyond doubt, and of every charge they did not. The court tried him for the one thing he did not do, because the thing that was actually done it could not afford to see. He built the Gorsedd with an enaid, soul and breath in one word; they cut the enaid out.Enaid: the soul, and the principle of life, which early thought tied to the breath. The word is from the same root as anadl, breath, and as Latin anima (GPC, enaid, anadl).

15. Y Dyn Bach

The Small Man450 The papers hidden. 454 A confession. 456 The subscribers. 458 The rooms in Llundain. 464 Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey. 470 The Prime Minister. 474 The county. 475 The Chartists and Rebecca. 481 The trade. 486 The law. 503 He wrote the small man himself. 507 They tried the coat.

In May 1794, the month the government suspended habeas corpus, officers came to the Llundain lodging of Edward Williams, stonemason, to seize his papers for the Privy Council. He had been warned. The incendiary papers were already gone, moved to a safe place; what the state carried away told it nothing. Four years later, in Cymru, with the authorities watching his gorsedd gatherings and threatening to examine his papers again, the record notes the same thing a second time: anything that could ground a case against him had already been hidden. Twice, at the height of the Terror, the most watched Briton alive was searched, and twice the archive had left the house before the knock came.The pre-hidden papers of May 1794 and the empty seizure: CIM, I, 632–4; Waring, Recollections (1850), 104–5. The second hiding, under the threatened examinations of the later 1790s: Jenkins, Y Digymar (2018), "roedd yr archdderwydd hirben eisoes wedi cuddio unrhyw ohebiaeth a phapurau a allai fod yn sail i achos yn ei erbyn." In May 1798, with his gorsedd gatherings watched, he wrote to William Owen Pughe, his fellow worker in Llundain: “We (the Bards of Glamorgan) have been as severly persecuted by Church and Kingists as our glorious predecessors were by Edward the Bardicide”.Iolo Morganwg to William Owen Pughe, 12 May 1798, Correspondence, II, p. 85.

He died in 1826, and the hiding did not stop. It changed hands. His son Taliesin, executor of the mountain of manuscripts, let no radical page of his father’s see the light while he lived, and Victorian Cymru received a harmless saint, and canonised him. The safe half of the archive, the bardic and antiquarian half, went to a wooden cupboard in a country house at Llanover. And the other half, the dangerous half, stayed with the family. In 1862 a French traveller calling at Dowlais was shown it and wrote home in wonder: a voluminous correspondence, and inside it, mixed among the bardic antiquities, the letters of the men of the French Revolution with whom the old bard had corresponded, but the grandson was deep in industry, and no one could say when the family’s papers would be put in order. They were never put in order. They were kept.Taliesin’s suppression of the radical material and the Victorian image built in its absence: Jenkins (2018). The British Museum’s refusal of the Llanover manuscripts (1849) and the Llanover cupboard: ibid. Taliesin’s will (1845) sent the manuscripts to the Museum but excepted “letters of correspondence which are not to be disposed of” (NLW, Llandaff probate LL1847-142). The Dowlais visit: Alfred Erny, "Voyage dans le pays de Galles", Le Tour de Monde, 15.1 (1867), 271, "des details interessants sur les personnages de la Révolution française, avec lesquels Iolo a été en correspondance; mais M. Ed. Williams est plongé dans l’industrie, et l’on ne sait quand il pourra mettre en ordre ses papiers de famille."

The bardic half reached the National Library in 1916, and on that file (the visible file, the curated file) the centenary court of 1926 convicted him. The political collection, the hundreds of manuscripts and letters of the radical, the true papers of the twice-searched man, reached the National Library only in 1953 and 1955: a hundred and twenty-seven years after his death. And so settled was the verdict built in their absence that the great scholar of the field could still write, in 1956, that Iolo had been a wild, flimsy, unsteady nothing of a politician (a sentence repeated nearly word for word by another scholar in 1995) over an archive, by then open on the desk, that proves the opposite of every word.The Llanover deposit of 1916; the accession of the political collection, NLW 21280–21386, in 1953–5 (the gift of Iolo Aneurin Williams, the poet’s great-grandson, and of Mrs J. Mackinlay); the verdict written in its absence, "gwleidydd nwydwyllt a simsan a gweglyd" (G. J. Williams, 1956), repeated nearly verbatim by C. W. Lewis (1995): Jenkins (2018).

Ask why a family hides a man for a century and a quarter. Fear, first, and it was a reasoned fear: this was a household that had heard, from his own mouth, how he was called before the Prime Minister and the Privy Council of England, in the month the law of the land stopped protecting the accused; a household that knew exactly what certain letters could cost, and who was hanged, transported and gaoled in those years for less. Respectability, after, a son building a monument, in a Cymru that wanted its bard pious and loyal. But under the fear and under the respectability lay something the man himself had taught them, by example, over fifty years: call it what it was, a rule of modesty. What the state cannot see, it cannot burn. A small man’s papers are never subpoenaed. Survival is a performance of harmlessness, sustained for exactly as long as it takes; and if it must be sustained past your own death, then your son sustains it, and his son after him. He wore the coat before the Privy Council and walked free. His family kept it buttoned over his grave for four generations. It is the most successful single stratagem in the history of letters in Cymru, and the cost of it was the verdict of 1926, passed on the visible man, because he was all the court could see.

And that is why, before the verdict, there is a confession to make. Until now you have been shown a small man. A stonemason with three pence in his pocket. A debtor carried to Caerdydd gaol at the request of the village surgeon. A pedlar of poems begging subscriptions at the doors of the great. A widower of his own reputation, dying in a chair under a failing roof, buried without a stone in the floor of a village church. Every word of it is true. It is in the record, and you have seen the record. He had once drafted that stone himself, in a mock epitaph with the day left blank: “he died and lies buried here (at Nootka Sound) June 00th 1795, aged 48.” Nootka Sound is a harbour on the Pacific coast of America, and he had written to the Prime Minister about it.NLW 13141A, p. 111.

And it is a costume. What follows is the rest of the man, and it has been withheld until now for a reason that will become plain: because he withheld it, all his life, from everyone whose seeing it could hurt him, and what he practised on the Privy Council of England has worked, without interruption, on nearly every reader since. Now the coat comes off.

Begin with a list. In January 1794, while the war with France hardened and the treason trials were being prepared, two volumes of verse by a stonemason of Flimston were published in Llundain by subscription. The subscription list was printed at the front, as the custom was: six hundred and seventy-six names.Edward Williams, Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (2 vols., London, 1794), I, "Subscribers Names", 676 names printed in the front matter; the count is Jenkins's (Y Digymar Iolo Morganwg, Talybont, 2018). The named entries quoted here stand in the printed list itself. At its head: His Royal Highness George, Prince of Wales. Inside it: "Thomas Paine", the outlawed author of Rights of Man, whose effigy the loyalist mobs were burning from Caerdydd to Talley, and "John Horne Tooke, Esq.", who within the year would stand trial for his life. Inside it: "Rev. Dr. Price, late of Hackney", Richard Price of Llangeinor in Morgannwg, whose sermon of 1789 on the love of our country had provoked Burke into writing his Reflections, dead in April 1791 and kept on the roll; and from the same Hackney,"Rev. Thomas Belsham, Tutor in Divinity at Hackney College". Inside it: "John Vaughan, Esq. Golden Grove", the house whose name stands on the Golden Grove books of pedigree, and "Mr. Owen Jones, 6 sets", Owain Myfyr, who would pay for the Myvyrian.Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (1794), vol. I, list of subscribers, read on the page images. Price: Dictionary of Welsh Biography, s.v. Price, Richard (1723–1791), https://biography.wales/article/s-PRIC-RIC-1723. The same list carries "William Melmoth, Esq. Bath", the translator of Pliny, and "Philip Thicknesse, Esq.", the travel-writer. Inside it: "Citoyen I. P. Brissot", leader of the Girondins in revolutionary Paris, subscribing to a Morgannwg mason's verse in the year of the guillotine. Inside it: "William Bowles, Generalissimo of the Creek Nation." Inside it: "General Washington", the name as printed. And page upon page around them: James Boswell; the Rev. Dr Joseph Priestley; Hannah More; Mrs Barbauld; “Granville Sharpe, Esq. &c.”, as the list spells him, Granville Sharp, who had taken up James Somerset’s case against slavery in England; the Rev. Dr Parr; the poet William Mason; Governor Pownall of Massachusetts, at four sets; Lady Juliana Penn, of the Penns of Pennsylvania; Dr Kippis; the Earl of Abergavenny at six; the Earl and Countess Delawarr; the Marquis and Marchioness of Worcester; Viscount Cremorne, and Lady Dynevor.The extended roll as printed in the 1794 list (long-s normalised); where a printed name has more than one possible bearer, only the name as printed is claimed: “General Washington” stands in capitals among the W’s (I, p. xxxviii), with no office and no address, and is not claimed for the President. Granville Sharp is “Granville Sharpe, Esq. &c.” (I, p. xxxvi). He had his own ancient constitution: he argued that the tithings and hundreds of King Alfred should be restored, and he used The Mirror of Justices to do it (Christopher Hill, “The Norman Yoke”, in John Saville, ed., Democracy and the Labour Movement, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1954, pp. 11–66, at p. 45; on his law and the Somerset case, Jonathan Connolly, “Granville Sharp’s Ancient Constitution: Legal Argument and Antislavery Thought”, Modern Intellectual History 22.3 (2025), 399–424). He also took the chair at the London Tavern on 7 March 1804, at the meeting that founded the British and Foreign Bible Society, a society that began with Thomas Charles of Bala’s plea for Bibles in Welsh (John Owen, The History of the Origin and First Ten Years of the British and Foreign Bible Society, London, 1816, I, pp. 14–16 and 42: “Mr. Granville Sharp was unanimously called to the chair”). And one subscriber wrote his verdict into his copy: "I well knew this honest, ingenious and worthy poetical stone mason, and received much pleasure, and instruction in his society", the antiquarian FRANCIS DOUCE, afterwards Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum, in his subscription copy of Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (Jon Mee, "Images of Truth New Born", in Jenkins, ed., A Rattleskull Genius, 2005, epigraph). The keeper of the nation’s manuscripts knew the man; the museum would later refuse the man’s own. And these, each read at the printed page: “HUMANITY’S WILBERFORCE”, set in capitals across the head of the W’s; “His Excellency Thomas Pinckney, Minister Plenipotentiary from the United States of America”; “Mrs. Piozzi”, who had been Dr Johnson’s Mrs Thrale; “Mrs. Montagu” at twelve sets; “Charles Burney, Mus. D.” and “Miss Burney”; “Samuel Rogers, Esq.”; “Robert Raikes, Esq. Gloucester”; and the “Earl of Bute” at six.Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (1794), I, “Subscribers Names”, pp. xxvi (Burney, Bute), xxxii (Montagu), xxxiv (Pinckney, Piozzi), xxxv (Raikes, Rogers), xxxviii (Wilberforce), each read at the printed page; only the names as printed are claimed. And more: “LORD ORFORD” at three sets, who in January 1794 was Horace Walpole; “Henry James Pye, Esq.”, the Poet Laureate of the day; “William Cowper, Esq. Inner Temple”, the style under which the poet of The Task signed his own title pages; “SIR WILLIAM JONES, Bt.”, as the list prints the great orientalist; the “BISHOP of DROMORE”, Thomas Percy of the Reliques; the Bishops of “LANDAFF” and “ROCHESTER”; “Mrs. Carter, Deal”, who had Englished Epictetus; “General Conway”; “Rev. W. L. Bowles” at four sets; “Rev. Dr. Peckard, Master of Magdalen College, Cambridge”, who set the prize essay that made Clarkson an abolitionist; “David Samwell, Esq.”, surgeon on Cook’s last voyage; and “Mr. J. Johnson, Bookseller, St. Paul’s Ch. Yard”.Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (1794), I, “Subscribers Names”, pp. xxvi (Bowles), xxvii (Carter, Conway, Cowper), xxviii (Dromore), xxx (Johnson, Sir William Jones), xxxi (Landaff), xxxiv (Orford, Peckard), xxxv (Pye, Rochester), xxxvi (Samwell), each read at the printed page. Cowper’s Poems (1782) and The Task (1785) carry on their title pages “William Cowper, of the Inner Temple, Esq.” Sir William Jones is counted among the subscribers by Jenkins, Bard of Liberty (2012), pp. 86–7; he was a knight, and the list prints “Bt.” Bowles, of the four sets, was the man Southey disliked for years afterwards, and Southey gave the reason: “just such an effusion of spleen against the Welsh bard Edward Williams, to whom he denied anything like genius because he wrote commonplace English verses, unmindful that the Welshman was writing in a foreign tongue.”Robert Southey to Caroline Bowles, 4 July 1832: The Correspondence of Robert Southey with Caroline Bowles, ed. Edward Dowden (Dublin, 1881), p. 252, read at the printed page. Southey dates his first sight of Bowles, and the dislike, to 1802. And from the two universities sixty-eight members of colleges, seventeen of them fellows and twenty-nine of them of Jesus College, Oxford, the college of the Cymry, whose Principal took six sets; and with them “Rev. Dr. Jackson, Dean of Christ Church, Oxford”, Cyril Jackson, who had been tutor to the Prince of Wales.Counted on the page images of the list, Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (1794), I, pp. xxv–xxxix: every subscriber entered with an Oxford or Cambridge college or hall, fifty-seven of Oxford and eleven of Cambridge, the heads and officers among them (the Principal of Jesus, the Dean of Christ Church, the Principal of St Mary Hall, the Master of Magdalene, the Public Orator of Cambridge); Hackney College, a Dissenting academy, and “M.D. Oxf.” are not counted. Herbert G. Wright, Review of English Studies, VIII/30 (April 1932), p. 130, gave some forty-five members and sixteen fellows. The Principal of Jesus College and the Dean of Christ Church are on p. xxx. And “Mr. Oswald, Paris”: John Oswald, the Scots Jacobin, killed fighting for the Republic four months before the book came out. And “Mr. Edw. Jones, B. T. C.”: Edward Jones the harper, Bard to the Prince of Wales, who that May would betray the mason to the Privy Council.Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (1794), I, pp. xxxiv (Oswald) and xxx (Jones), each read at the printed page. Oswald among his Llundain acquaintance: Walford Davies in A Rattleskull Genius (2005), p. 149; he fell in the Vendée in September 1793. The letters after the harper’s name are printed without explanation; they fit his title in Cymraeg, Bardd Tywysog Cymru. He used the title of harper to the Prince of Wales from about 1790: Dictionary of Welsh Biography, s.v. Jones, Edward (Bardd y Brenin). The betrayal: Jenkins (2012), p. 112. And lower down the columns, entered by their trade, stand the men best placed to judge the hand that held the chisel: “Mr. Bacon, Statuary”, John Bacon of the Royal Academy, the Llundain sculptor, the most prominent of them, “Mr. King, Statuary, Bath”; “Mr. Ricketts, Statuary, Bath”; “Mr. John Ricketts, Statuary”; “Mr. Thomas Rowland, Statuary, Bristol”; “Mr. Thomas Stackhouse, Statuary”; and “H. Marsh, Statuary, Bristol”, the master for whom he had raised the Man of Ross.Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (1794), I, “Subscribers Names”, pp. xxv (Bacon), xxxi (King), xxxii (Marsh), xxxv (the two Ricketts and Rowland), xxxvi (Stackhouse), each read at the printed page. The identifications are Richard Suggett’s, from Rupert Gunnis’s Dictionary of British Sculptors: John Bacon RA (1740–99); Thomas King of Bath (d. 1804), “the most prolific and popular of all the West Country statuaries”; John Ricketts of Bath, of a family firm whose monuments are “above the provincial level”, “Iolo Morganwg: Stonecutter, Builder, and Antiquary”, in A Rattleskull Genius (2005), p. 205. The masters of his own craft bought the mason’s verse. And still the roll runs on: “Sir John Caldwell, Bart.”, at three sets, and Lady Caldwell; “Dr. E. Long Fox, Bristol”; “Lady Bridget Tollemache”.Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (1794), I, pp. xxvi (Caldwell), xxix (Long Fox), xxxvii (Tollemache), read at the printed page; only the names as printed are claimed. The Prince of Wales at its head, a printed "General Washington" among the names, and Tom Paine around them, at the height of the Terror, and the list belongs to the man you have watched being beaten in a gaol corridor for protesting an entry fee of half a crown.

And he curated that list. He refused subscriptions (refused money, being poorer than nearly everyone he refused) from any man "who villainously abet the slave trade"; a Bristol printer he turned away threatened to flatten his nose for it.The refusal of William Bulgin of Bristol and of all slave-trade abettors, Iolo’s own draft letter to William Bulgin (NLW MS 21400C, item 24a), discussed in Jenkins (2018). The list's ornaments, Anna Seward entered as "Ofyddes ym mraint Beirdd Ynys Prydain", an Ovate by the rite of the Bards of the Island of Britain, show the Gorsedd already conferring titles the Llundain literary world was pleased to print. A man with no floorboards was vetting the consciences of his patrons.

Now the rooms. In Llundain in the early 1790s he stood in the circle above Joseph Johnson's bookshop where Blake, Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft and Paine took their weekly supper; he supped and quarrelled at Godwin's own table, and it is Godwin's own diary that seats him there: "Tea Dyers, w. Porson, Holcroft, Williams bard, Staley, Thelwal" on the second of January 1795; the next evening, "Dine at Northmore's w Walker Manch.r, Wakefield, B Hollis, Disney, Dyson & Williams b; talk of God", Godwin’s own engagement-book keeping the register of where the stonemason satWilliam Godwin's diary, 2 and 3 January 1795 (Bodleian Library, Oxford, Abinger MSS): "Williams bard" distinguishes Iolo from the philosopher David Williams. The co-diners include Richard Porson, Thomas Holcroft, Gilbert Wakefield, Thomas Brand Hollis and John Disney; George Dyer was host the evening before, and the edition reads “Dyson”, George Dyson, at Northmore’s on the third (The Diary of William Godwin, ed. Victoria Myers, David O’Shaughnessy and Mark Philp, Oxford, 2010, 3 January 1795). Damian Walford Davies, "'At Defiance': Iolo, Godwin, Coleridge, Wordsworth," in Jenkins (ed.), A Rattleskull Genius (2005).; in David Williams's house he heard Talleyrand say Ah! La Liberté!; he sat in the Old Bailey through the treason trials of Hardy, Horne Tooke and Thelwall, three men he knew, and when they walked free he stood up on the fourth of February 1795, before nine hundred people at the Crown and Anchor, and declaimed "Trial by Jury, the Grand Palladium of British Liberty" to a roar the reports remembered.Johnson's circle, the Godwin suppers, Talleyrand at David Williams's house, attendance at the 1794 treason trials, and the Crown and Anchor recitation of 4 February 1795 before 900: Jenkins (2018), from the Iolo papers and correspondence (CIM). Wordsworth and Coleridge: ibid. — Jenkins states his work had already influenced both. Blake's "The Voice of the Ancient Bard" (Songs of Innocence and Experience, 1794): Jenkins hears Iolo's voice in it.

And when Joseph Priestley (his laboratory and library already burned behind him by a loyalist mob) left Britain for America in 1794, the bard walked with him to the water: he was, Waring recorded, "one of the last persons the Doctor conversed with upon British ground."Elijah Waring, Recollections and Anecdotes of Edward Williams, the Bard of Glamorgan (London, 1850), 134. Blake himself, in the catalogue of his one exhibition, in 1809, printed a triad in Cymraeg never before published in English, under a painting, The Ancient Britons, commissioned by William Owen Pughe, Iolo's closest collaborator, in the very years Iolo had been carrying manuscript translations of just such triads around Johnson's circle.William Blake, A Descriptive Catalogue (London, 1809), on The Ancient Britons, commissioned by William Owen Pughe; the triad "not previously published in English." Jon Mee, in A Rattleskull Genius (2005): Blake and Williams "at the very least knew what each other was doing in the period 1793–5."

And to Johnson himself, in 1795, he sent his compliments to the “Literary friends that frequent your Shop”, and named among them two brothers: “G. & W. Morgan”, George Cadogan Morgan and William Morgan, born at Pen-y-bont ar Ogwr (Bridgend), nephews of Richard Price.Iolo to Joseph Johnson, 1795: “Compts. To Literary friends that frequent your Shop, Dyer, Disney, Aikin, Mr & Mrs Barbould, G. & W. Morgan, & all others”, Jon Mee, in A Rattleskull Genius (2005), p. 175, dating it 9 January; Jenkins (2012), p. 104 n., citing CIM, I, 772, dates it [?September]. That Iolo knew George Cadogan Morgan: Jenkins, ibid., p. 80. George, schooled at Y Bont-faen and for a time his uncle’s fellow-minister at the Gravel Pit meeting-house in Hackney, was in Paris in July 1789. He lodged at the Palais Royal, and the rising broke round the house: the sky red with fires, the door of the gunsmith under his room beaten in for arms. Thomas Jefferson, the American minister in Paris, told him his party stood in no danger; and on the fourteenth they were in the street when the crowd came down it with a paper held up, La Bastille est prise. “Our situation at the awful moment of the revolt,” he wrote to his wife a week later, “enabled us to see what others who lodged in a different part of the town heard from us with astonishment.”George Cadogan Morgan to his wife, Dijon, 21 July 1789 (Letter IV), and the letter before it, in Travels in Revolutionary France and A Journey Across America, ed. Mary-Ann Constantine and Paul Frame (Cardiff, 2012), pp. 50–1; Jefferson, and the fourteenth of July, from the journals of his companions, ibid., pp. 16–17; his birth at Bridgend in 1754 and his schooling at Cowbridge, p. 4; his ministry beside his uncle at the Gravel Pit meeting-house, p. 5. His son’s memoir has him “present at the taking of the Bastille”, and Jenkins has him witness its fall (Bard of Liberty, p. 80); the editors of the letters show that he was in the city, at the Palais Royal, and not at the fortress (p. 200). The stonemason of Flimston counted among his friends a man of his own county who had stood in Paris that week. He had written of those revolutions, in those years, with his heart up: “Man begins now to learn the Language of Nature, of Reason, of Truth, of Humanity. O! for a Song in the divine Language, to the tune of an Angel’s Harp, to celebrate the glorious Revolutions of France and America.”NLW 21395E, p. 7.

And he laughed at the throne in its own language. Among the books he announced in 1794 and never finished was one by “E.W. Explorer of the Den of Thieves to his most Supernal Majesty the King of Kings”, and a dedication: “To the prince of the Powers of the Air, King of Corsica, Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, Defender of Billy Pit’s Faith, Head under God of the Church of Britain. This little work is with all the pomposity, all the adulation, all the Church and Kingism, and all the Blasphemy, of Regal etiquette, inscribed, addressed, Dedicated, &c, &c, &c”.His unrealised projects of 1794, as listed by the online edition of the correspondence, iolomorganwg.wales.ac.uk, “Iolo’s Work”, harvested 7 September 2026; the manuscript reference is not given there.

And in his own hand, in a letter of December 1798, stands the proof that he saw the trap a century and a quarter before it closed. Writing to Pughe of the Sanskrit laws that Sir William Jones had just Englished (doctrines, he found, “so similar to those of the ancient bards of Britain”) he set down the arithmetic himself: “had not your Llywarch Hên and my Poems been published three years before the appearance in the English language of this work… all the world would have sworn that we had borrowed from it what we have published.” The man the next century convicted of invention had already stated, in private, the defence the court never let him give: the resemblance was survival, not theft, and the dates prove which.Iolo to William Owen Pughe, 20 December 1798 (NLW 13221E, pp. 55–8; The Correspondence of Iolo Morganwg, no. 1054). The “lately printed translation by Sir William Jones from the Sanscreet” is the Institutes of Hindu Law, or the Ordinances of Menu (1796).

When the Cymry came to write him down, the tradition set out its own list of the rooms: the standard edition of his collections and the first biography in Cymraeg alike record him "known and esteemed by many of the illustrious men of his age — Prince Talleyrand, Lord Stanhope, Benjamin Franklin, Bishop Percy, Dr. Aitkin, Gilbert Wakefield, Francis Douce, Dr. Burgess (Bishop of St. David's), Horne Tooke, and Robert Southey." That is tradition's list, offered here as tradition and nothing more, set beside the documents above, which need no help.Publisher's Biographical Note to the Iolo Manuscripts (2nd edn., Liverpool: Foulkes, 1888), repeating the fellowship-list of the first biography in Cymraeg, T. D. Thomas, Bywgraffiad Iolo Morganwg, B.B.D. (Caerfyrddin, 1857) Franklin (in Llundain to 1775, Iolo from 1773) and Percy of the Reliques are chronologically possible but undocumented in the surviving correspondence: attested memory, not evidence, and labelled as such. Percy, though, stands on the printed list of subscribers of 1794, as the “BISHOP of DROMORE” (I, p. xxviii).

And the scholarship has now said plainly what the record implies. Coleridge and Wordsworth enlisted him (the man, his history, his defiance of Godwin at Godwin’s own table) in the argument that shaped their own political and moral identities in the late 1790s; the old suggestion that he had "more influence on the early Romantics, especially Coleridge and Southey, than has been recognised" has been re-examined and confirmed. And the proof of it survives in Coleridge’s own hand: writing to John Thelwall in May 1796, he told how the meek British bard, by a plain account of the way Godwin had insulted him at that table, had “brought the tear into my Eye”, his indignation at Godwin, he said, was never more powerfully roused.S. T. Coleridge to John Thelwall, 13 May 1796: “Poor Williams, the Welch bard — (a very meek man) brought the tear into my Eye by a simple narration of the manner in which Godwin insulted him... his Indignation & Contempt were never more powerfully excited than by an unfeeling and insolent Speech of the said Godwin to the poor Welch Bard” (Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs, Oxford, 1956, I, 214). This is the documentary core of the ‘enlistment’ the scholarship describes. The friendship was Bristol-made: Iolo was in the room at Coleridge's Bristol lecture against the slave trade on the sixteenth of June 1795, and the copy of his Poems he gave the younger poet, inscribed "From the Author," survives, it sits in a library in Toronto now.Iolo in Bristol, 15–16 June 1795, at Coleridge’s slave-trade lecture: Mary-Ann Constantine, Notes & Queries 52.1 (2005), 42–4. The presentation copy of Poems, Lyric and Pastoral inscribed “From the Author”: Victoria University Library, Toronto.

And Bristol had already heard him: on the nineteenth of December 1791, gathering subscriptions in the slave-trading city, he climbed Brandon Hill and wrote it up as a dormant volcano, "who knows but that those fires may encrease again... may once more gather strength sufficient to burst again in volcanic eruptions", the abolitionist's threat dressed as geology, over the harbour that shipped the trade."Cursory observations on Brandon Hill, Cliffton Hill etc near Bristol — Decr 19th 1791. By E. Williams" (NLW MS 13089E, pp. 174–6); Mary-Ann Constantine, 'Combustible Matter': Iolo Morganwg and the Bristol Volcano (Aberystwyth: CAWCS, 2003), 7–9.

Nor did Coleridge let him go. In the winter of 1799 he noted a plan to “introduce poor Williams” into a set of poems on infancy, and three years on he was turning the same figure over still: “Poor Williams seeking his Mother, in love with her Picture – & having that vision of Beauty & filial affection, that the Virgin Mary may be supposed to give.”Kathleen Coburn (ed.), The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, I, entry 605 (November–December 1799) and entry 330, item 15 (added, probably in late September 1802, to notes of 1798 on infancy), quoted in Damian Walford Davies, “‘At Defiance’: Iolo, Godwin, Coleridge, Wordsworth”, in A Rattleskull Genius (2005), p. 159. The pity was the surface. Beneath it lay a doctrine, and the doctrine was the bard’s. Among the articles of bardic teaching printed in the notes to his Poems in 1794 stands the twenty-second: “Pride is the utmost degree of human depravity; it supplies the motive for perpetrating every kind of wickedness, it aims at Superiority and Power, which none but GOD is, of right, entitled to. Man may confer conditionally, and for the general good, a well restrained and limited power on superior merit; but none are entitled to usurp it. Self-created superiority, and power over others, is a dethroning of the ALMIGHTY as far as man can do it. PRIDE is the destroyer (CYTHRAUL) of the works of the CREATOR, the subverter of all order, forces itself obtrusively into a station that was never allotted to it. All men are equal in the CREATOR’s paternality, as his children.”Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (1794), II, p. 200, article 22 of the outline of bardic doctrine in the notes, read at the printed page. Within two years of the Poems, Coleridge was planning a hymn to dissect “the Godwinian System of Pride”; and the editor of his notebooks suggested that he had it from the bard.Coleridge’s notebook entry of 1795–6 (Notebooks, I, entry 174), and Kathleen Coburn’s suggestion that its strictures on Pride drew on Iolo’s passage: Walford Davies, pp. 159–60, who judges it likely that the bardic writings “played a significant role” in Coleridge’s thinking on it.

And Wordsworth. The Poems stand in the modern register of his reading, among the books he may have had in his hands;Duncan Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, 1770–1799 (Cambridge, 1993), p. 161, lists Poems, Lyric and Pastoral among the books Wordsworth may have read: cited in Walford Davies, p. 160, who thinks it likely that Coleridge put the book in his way about 1797–8. and when the Critical Review noticed them in June 1794 it reached at once for Beattie’s Minstrel, readers of it, the reviewer said, “will be struck with the similarity between young Edwin” and this rustic poet, the very poem in which Dorothy Wordsworth, the year before, had seen her brother: “the whole character of Edwin resembles much what William was when I first knew him.”Critical Review, XI (June 1794), 169; Dorothy Wordsworth’s letter of 1793, The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, ed. de Selincourt and Shaver (Oxford, 1967), pp. 100–1; both quoted in Walford Davies, p. 167. What the book carried into English, six years before the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, was a rule of the bards, with the Cymraeg printed over it: Tri phrif anhepcor awen, / Llygad yn gweled Anian, / Calon yn teimlo Anian, / A glewder a faidd gydfyned ag Anian, “The three primary and indispensable requisites of poetic genius are, An eye that can see Nature; A heart that can feel Nature; And a resolution that dares follow Nature.”Yr Awen, vii. The bardic grammar of the fourteenth century had a rule of the same make: poetry comes from the Holy Spirit, “a’e hawen a geffir o ethrylith a cheluydyd aruer”, and its awen is had from genius and practised art (Gramadegau’r Penceirddiaid, p. 35; GPC, awen). It asks an eye, a heart and nerve. And beneath it the mason’s own challenge to the schools: “Have any of the great Manufacturers of Poets, from the days of Aristotle to the present time, ever said any thing more to the purpose?”Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (1794), I, pp. 175–6, read at the printed page: the Cymraeg at the foot of p. 175, the English and the challenge at the head of p. 176. In 1800 Wordsworth told the English that poetry must go to “low and rustic life” for “a plainer and more emphatic language”. The bard had printed its first article (go to Nature, and dare to follow her) in two languages, in 1794.Walford Davies, p. 166: Iolo’s statements “obviously prefigure — and perhaps inform — Wordsworth’s preface”; the phrases of the Preface as he quotes them there.

Southey was a close acquaintance,Robert Southey, Poet Laureate from 1813, counted Iolo among the few men who could tell him what the Welsh themselves knew of Arthur. In 1807, planning an edition of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, he wrote that he meant “to give the history of Arthur, and collect, by the aid of Turner, Owen, and Edward Williams, all that the Welsh themselves can supply”, Sharon Turner the historian, William Owen Pughe, and Iolo (to Richard Heber, Keswick, 16 November 1807). A year later, looking for someone to write on the Welsh manuscripts for the new Quarterly Review, he complained that he could get at neither Welshman: Owen had joined the followers of the prophetess Joanna Southcott, “and Bard Williams is, God knows where, and nothing is to be got out of him except by word of mouth” (to Grosvenor C. Bedford, 24 November 1808; the printing of 1850 misdates it the 17th). The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, ed. C. C. Southey, vol. III (London, 1850), pp. 116, 188–9. and Southey’s epic Madoc grew in the very mania Iolo had promoted; his documented relations run to Dr Johnson and to Cowper (and Cymru kept a story of the first: the mason in his working clothes asked Johnson in a bookshop which of three English dictionaries was best, and was told that any of them would do for him; “Wel, mi brynaf y tri”, said Iolo, well, I’ll buy all threeY Beirniad (Llanelli), Gorphenhaf 1879, the editor’s note to “Y Moddion i Gyraedd Gwybodaeth”, p. 227, read on the National Library’s page image (IIIF 2187746): “‘Gwna unrhyw un o honynt y tro i chwi,’ oedd yr ateb sarug a difoes. Edrychai ar Iolo yn ei wisg weithiol fel un o’r gwreng iselaf … barnai na allai fforddio prynu mwy nag un Gramadeg … dywedodd yn ol, ‘Wel, mi brynaf y tri.’” A story as the Welsh press kept it, printed fifty-three years after his death.); and Blake engraved for Iolo’s own publisher, in Iolo’s own Llundain years, around the same table, a fair hearing of "The Voice of the Ancient Bard" finds the British bard standing inside it.Damian Walford Davies, "At Defiance: Iolo, Godwin, Coleridge, Wordsworth", in A Rattleskull Genius (2005), 147–72, Coleridge and Wordsworth "enlisted Iolo Morganwg during the 1790s as an instructive exemplum in the case against... Godwin’s An Enquiry concerning Political Justice"; the confrontation "shaped their own political trajectories and moral identities in the late 1790s in important ways"; Kathleen Coburn’s suggestion of unrecognised influence on the early Romantics "can be confirmed". Jon Mee, "Images of Truth New Born: Iolo, William Blake and the Literary Radicalism of the 1790s", ibid., 173–96, shared publisher, shared years, parallel practice; a meeting is likely but not proven, and is not asserted here. Herbert G. Wright, "The Relations of the Welsh Bard Iolo Morganwg with Dr Johnson, Cowper and Southey", Review of English Studies, VIII/30 (April 1932), 129–38. Caroline Franklin, "The Welsh American Dream: Iolo Morganwg, Robert Southey and the Madoc Legend", in English Romanticism and the Celtic World (Cambridge, 2003), 69–84. The specific borrowings the scholarship traces: Iolo’s “Ode on Converting a Sword into a Pruning Hook” (1794) as a template for Coleridge’s “Ode on the Departing Year” (1796); his “The Learned Ignorants” behind Wordsworth’s “A Poet’s Epitaph”; and his “To Ivor the Liberal” behind Wordsworth’s “Simon Lee” and its hall of Ivor (Walford Davies, above; Newton P. Bement, The Wordsworth Circle, 1982). The Madoc mania was his, and he never recanted it. In 1803 he wrote to William Owen Pughe: “Old as I am growing, I have not yet given up the idea of going in quest of the Madogwys. You will say that I am romantic.” The Madogwys were the Cymraeg-speaking Indians the Madoc story placed in the American west.NLW 13222C, p. 173, Iolo Morganwg to William Owen Pughe, 25 August 1803.

And Southey gave him a place in the poem. When Madoc goes to heal the stricken king of Aztlan, “there went with me / Iolo, old Iolo, he who knows / The virtue of all herbs of mount or vale, / Or greenwood shade, or quiet brooklet’s bed; / Whatever lore of science, or of song, / Sages and Bards of old have handed down”, and it is old Iolo who takes the king’s arm, feels the symptom, and bids him have good hope.Robert Southey, Madoc (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1805), Part I, section VIII, pp. 79–80, read at the printed page. The identification is the old one: Southey “held ‘bard Williams’ in great respect, and gave him a place in ‘Madoc’”, Dictionary of National Biography (1885–1900), s.v. Williams, Edward (1746–1826), citing the same page. The epic’s gorsedd, too, the circle of stones, the stone of covenant with the sword sheathed upon it, the robes of blue and green and white, went to the bard to be checked before it went to the printer. Southey’s own note says so: that the account “might be as accurate as possible”, William Owen “and Edward Williams the Bard did me the favour of examining it”; and to their knowledge, he wrote, “I am greatly and variously indebted.”Southey, Madoc (1805), notes, p. 486, on the gorsedd of Part I, section XI: “Mr Owen’s very curious introduction to his translation of Llywarc Hen has supplied me with materials for the account of the Gorsedd, introduced in the poem. That it might be as accurate as possible, he himself and Edward Williams the Bard did me the favour of examining it. To their knowledge and to that of Mr Turner, the Historian of the Anglo-Saxons, and to the liberality and friendliness with which they have ever been willing to assist me therewith, I am greatly and variously indebted.” The same note gives the robes: sky blue for the Bard, green for the Ovate, white for the Druid. The man who would be Poet Laureate of England printed the rite of the stonemason’s court in an English epic, and it had passed under the stonemason’s eye first. And his private letters say what the poem only shows. To a friend at Bristol in May 1802: “The Welsh Bard is here – Edward Williams – old & infirm & poor. poor fellow – but brimfull of genius & jacobinism.”Robert Southey to Charles Danvers, 10 May 1802 (British Library, Add MS 47890): The Collected Letters of Robert Southey, gen. eds Lynda Pratt, Tim Fulford and Ian Packer (Romantic Circles), Part Two, letter 675. To his wife, from Llundain, two years later: “Bard Williams is in town, so I shall shake one honest man by the hand, whom I did not expect to see.”Southey to Edith Southey, [14] May 1804: Collected Letters, Part Three, letter 940. The manuscript is untraced; the text is that of The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, ed. C. C. Southey, vol. II, pp. 283–4. And that December, to his friend and patron Charles Watkin Williams Wynn, of the bards: “I do think it very probable that their system as it appears in the Triads, is the patriarchal belief – in other words the real & true faith”.Southey to Charles Watkin Williams Wynn, 7 December 1804 (National Library of Wales, MS 4811D): Collected Letters, Part Three, letter 999. The words before it: “according to your Bards, or mine I may say for I have a claim to be affiliated by them.” That June he had told Coleridge: “Bard Williams communicated to me some fine arcana of bardic mythology, quite new to me and to the world, which you will find in Madoc.”Southey to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 11 June 1804: Collected Letters, Part Three, letter 951. The next summer he sent Joseph Cottle to him: “Edward Williams if you write to him will gladly tell you all that either history or tradition has preserved concerning the event you have chosen.”Southey to Joseph Cottle, 25 August 1805: Collected Letters, Part Three, letter 1097. And he had read the Welsh names of Madoc aloud to him, to hear how they sounded, and told Wynn in January 1806: “Bard Williams understands English measure, & yet he did not object.”Southey to Charles Watkin Williams Wynn, 10 January [1806]: Collected Letters, Part Three, letter 1145: “this way I read them to Owen & Edward Williams, who found no fault.” And ten years after the bard was dead, Poet Laureate now, he put it in print. Telling in his Life of Cowper of the morning the poet was brought to breakfast to hear the mason and sat silent by the fire, he wrote that the talk turned to “Welsh literature and the bardic institutions, a subject with which no man was better acquainted, and few so well”; and at the foot of the page, in his own person: “It grieves me to think what curious knowledge, and how much of it, has probably perished with poor old Edward Williams!”Robert Southey, “The Life of William Cowper”, in The Works of William Cowper, ed. Southey, vol. III (London: Baldwin and Cradock, 1836), pp. 93–4 and note 52, read at the printed page. The same note calls him “my old acquaintance”. He had said it first in private, five weeks after the old man died: “He was the most eccentric man I ever knew, in whose eccentricity there was no affectation, and in whose conduct there was nothing morally wrong. Poor fellow! with a wild head and a warm heart, he had the simplicity of a child and the tenderness of a woman, and more knowledge of the traditions and antiquities of his own country than it is to be feared will ever be possessed by any one after him.”Robert Southey to Henry Taylor, Keswick, 24 January 1827: The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, ed. C. C. Southey, vol. V (London, 1850), p. 285, read at the printed page. Later writers often give it as “a wild heart and a warm head”; the page reads “a wild head and a warm heart”. The bardic vision the twentieth century prosecuted as a poor man's forgery was, in the 1790s, furniture in the minds of the men who built English Romanticism.

Now the state. In February 1793 the stonemason wrote to the Prime Minister of Great Britain proposing imperial strategy: a reconciliation with Spain over Nootka Sound to open the Missouri country "before hand" of the Americans.Iolo to William Pitt, 4 February 1793, on Nootka, Spain and the Missouri route (the Madoc scheme's geopolitical frame): CIM, I, 548–50 (Iolo to Pitt, 4 February 1793). In May 1794 (the month habeas corpus was suspended) he was betrayed by George Guelph (George IV)’s harper and brought before Pitt and members of the Privy Council, on his own account and Waring’s, to be questioned in detail on his politics. You know already what the government's men found at his lodging, and why. And before the most powerful men in the world the man from the Johnson circle, the correspondent of strategy, the friend of the treason-trial defendants, gave the performance of his life: a harmless, poor, eccentric little Briton, too small to hang. They let him go.The Privy Council examination of May 1794, the forewarning, the pre-hidden papers, the seized papers yielding nothing, and the performance, "fel Cymro bach diniwed, tlawd ac ecsentrig", CIM, I, 632–4; Elijah Waring, Recollections and Anecdotes of Edward Williams (London, 1850), 104–5; Jenkins (2018). A year later Pitt sent for him again, this time voluntarily, over the mad prophet Richard Brothers, whom Iolo claimed had been gulled by two French ventriloquists, and the two men had, the record says, a long and friendly discussion. He wrote to Pitt again in 1796 against the taxes on tea and bread. He drafted a letter to Napoleon in 1805, in the character of a Quaker, proposing a Congress of Nations to arbitrate all wars, a league of nations, from a thatched cottage, a hundred and fifteen years early. He wrote to the Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1815 with a costed scheme to tax absentee wealth a million pounds for the relief of the poor.The Brothers summons and the "long and friendly" interview of 1795; the letter of December 1796 on the taxes; the draft to Napoleon "in the character of a Quaker" (1805) proposing a Congress of Nations; the letter to Nicholas Vansittart, March 1815: Jenkins (2018), from the Iolo papers and CIM. Count them: five approaches to the summit of the state, and one interrogation by it, survived by acting small. And a sixth, in person: at Oxford in 1793 the Duke of Portland received the British bard, the same Portland who, as Home Secretary within the year, sat at the fountain-head of the espionage system whose reports watched men exactly like him. The hand he shook ran the watchers.The Portland meeting, Oxford 1793: NLW, Iolo Morganwg correspondence (CIM). Portland as “fountain head” of the Home Office spy system from 1794, he and Pitt credited with “the prevention of revolution in Britain”: J. E. Thomas, Social Disorder in Britain 1750–1850 (2011).

How that interview ended is not only a story the Cymry kept. Iolo told it himself to Elijah Waring, who printed it in 1850, and his biographer in Cymraeg, T. D. Thomas told it again in 1857. Thomas tells how he came to that door, too. When a gentleman in Llundain rose with his whip to drive the stranger off, the bard answered him in rhyme: “Strike a Welshman if you dare, / Ancient Britons as we are; / We were men of great renown, / Ere a Saxon wore a crown”; and learning that this was the bard of Morgannwg, the gentleman had him in at once. The later English Life puts that door at Pitt’s.T. D. Thomas, Bywgraffiad Iolo Morganwg (Caerfyrddin, 1857), pp. 25–6; The Life and Works of Edward Williams (Iolo Morganwg), the Bard of Glamorgan (n.d.), p. 5. A third telling, from John Shamby, sets it at Merthyr Mawr, with “Honest Britons as we are” (Thomas, p. 69). Tradition, not record. When the papers taken from his lodging had been read before Pitt and found harmless, Pitt told him in English that he might carry them home: “Now Mr. Williams, you may carry home all your papers, and make yourself perfectly easy.” The bard, as Thomas tells it, would not: dywedodd fod yr ysgrifau wedi eu dwyn yno heb ei gydsyniad ef, ac y disgwyliai iddynt gael eu dychwelyd trwy’r un awdurdod, he said the papers had been brought there without his consent, and he expected them to be returned by the same authority. Waring gives what happened next: “The requirement was deemed a reasonable one, and an official was ordered to attend him with the papers to his quarters.” The Prime Minister’s man carried the stonemason’s papers home. Waring knew of an earlier visit to the same room as well, when Iolo came by invitation and was served “from a salver of massive plate”; this time he came “not as an invited, but a compelled, visitant”.T. D. Thomas, Bywgraffiad Iolo Morganwg (Caerfyrddin, 1857), p. 27, read in the text of the scanned pages; the later, unsigned English Life and Works of Edward Williams (p. 5) puts the reply into English words of its own. Seven years before Thomas, from Iolo’s own telling: Elijah Waring, Recollections and Anecdotes of Edward Williams (London, 1850), pp. 104–5: “his papers were seized by an order from Government, and conveyed to Whitehall, and he was summoned to present himself before Mr. Pitt and one of his official colleagues, as a person suspected of disaffection to the State”; they held nothing “beyond one or two songs in favour of Liberty”; “He told the Premier that as his papers had been brought thither without his consent, he should expect to have them conveyed back again, by the same authority which took them away.”

He went to the palace as a mason. To present his verses to the Prince of Wales he dressed “in his best clothes, girded himself with a new apron of white leather, and took a bright trowel in his hand: in this guise he presented his verses to the Prince, and they were most graciously received.” The book he dedicated to the same prince carried, as Waring put it, “sundry scraps of satire against royalty”.Elijah Waring, Recollections and Anecdotes of Edward Williams (London, 1850), p. 114.

The coat came off in private. When Mary Nicholl of Remenham, who had gathered many of his subscribers, saw what was in the second volume of his Poems, she wrote of herself in the third person, the way a lady writes to a tradesman: “Had Mrs Nicholl then known Edward Williams’s principles, she would not have subscribed to any of his writings, for she would not purchase poetry fine as Homer’s were it written by a republican. And her inducements to put her name to his verses were the accounts she formerly heard of Edward Williams’s morality & general good character, not his merit as a poet, which … she knew to be very small. She admits no Jacobines under her roof.” He signed his answer “Edward Williams, A Leveller”. Two years before, in Llundain, he had declaimed an ode to Rhita Gawr, the giant of the old tales who killed the tyrant kings of the island and made himself a robe of their beards, and told his hearers: “I am determined to follow his example, and hope to be soon furnished with an excellent warm great Coat.”Iolo to Mary Nicholl, [?20 May 1794], CIM, I, 670 (“A Leveller”); her letter in Bethan M. Jenkins, Between Wales and England: Anglophone Welsh Writing of the Eighteenth Century (Cardiff, 2017), p. 159 and p. 94 (Rhita Gawr).

Now the county. In the summer of 1789, when four noble houses (Beaufort, Mountstuart, Vernon, Plymouth) combined to hand a Morgannwg seat to an absentee captain, one man turned the freeholders against them with letters, squibs and songs in two languages, under the name Christopher Crabstick, on the old cry Trech Gwlad nag Arglwydd, a country is mightier than a lord. The grandees' candidate withdrew without a vote. The freeholders' man, Thomas Wyndham of Llanmihangel, held the seat unopposed for twenty-five years.The 1789 Morgannwg by-election: the Crabstick letters and songs, the withdrawal of Capt. Thomas Windsor, Wyndham's unopposed return and long tenure: Jenkins (2018), from the squibs in the Iolo papers. The 1820 sequel, the pamphlet Vox Populi Vox Dei! or, Edwards for Ever! (Abertawe (Swansea)) and the "Needy King Cole" campaign against Sir Christopher Cole of Penrice, ibid. Thirty-one years later, past seventy, he did it again for the independent interest against the "conqueror of Banda",“Ni welai Iolo fawr o wahaniaeth rhwng dioddefaint brodorion Ynysoedd Banda a dioddefaint teuluoedd annibynnol Morgannwg. Rhaib a gormes Sais oedd y drwg yn y caws yn y ddau achos”: Iolo saw little difference between the suffering of the natives of the Banda Islands and the suffering of the independent families of Morgannwg; English greed and oppression was the rot in both. Jenkins (2018), p. 200. and lost that one, 791 votes to 656, but the pamphlet he published for it bore the title he had lived by: Vox Populi Vox Dei. When Cymru’s historians wrote him down for a century and a half as no politician, they were describing a man who had unseated a candidate of four dukedoms with a pen. And a man who, in the Llundain of the Terror, sat down and wrote a constitution for a republic: sovereignty vested in the people, “The People once, the People forever”, a Senate of delegates elected province by province on a yearly rotation, a National Council of judges to try every bill three times over, and at its head no king but an elected President, “so that there might never again be such Villains as Henry the Eighth, knaves as Louis the Sixteenth, or Fools as many as we know”.Iolo’s draft constitution for a republic, popular sovereignty, an elected Senate of provincial delegates on rotation, a National Council of judges, and an elected President: NLW 21323B, p. 61; NLW 21395E, pp. 30–9; NLW 21396E, no. 10. The vernal and autumnal voting conventions were set for 21 March and 21 September, the days of his own Gorseddau. The villain Iolo names by his English regnal style is Harri ap Harri (Henry VIII), son of Harri ap Edmwnd, son of Edmwnd ap Owain, son of Owain ap Maredudd ap Tudur of Penmynydd in Môn. Iolo’s words stand exactly as he wrote them; the man behind the number is named here.

Nor did it die with him. The song he wrote for the rights of man in 1798, Breiniau Dyn, set deliberately to the tune of God Save the King, so that the loyal air would carry the disloyal words, was still being sung a half-century on: the Chartists of Merthyr reprinted it in 1841 as a supplement to their own newspaper, Udgorn Cymru, the Trumpet of Cymru. The village eccentric the professors filed as no politician had written a marching-song for the first mass democratic movement in Cymru’s history, and it outlived him by two generations.Breiniau Dyn (1798: Jenkins (2012), p. 146, has it sung “at Bryn Owain in the fraught year of 1798”, but his note to it (n. 125) cites only the manuscripts of the song, NLW 13148A, pp. 286–92 and 297–300, and E. G. Millward’s Blodeugerdd Barddas o Gerddi Rhydd y Ddeunawfed Ganrif (1991), pp. 242–5, and nothing for the place; his Y Digymar Iolo Morganwg (2018) sets it at the gorsedd of Glynogwr that year, and a gorsedd was held at Glynogwr in March 1798 by the letter of EW of Pen-y-lan cited in §XV. Which place is right is not settled), in the metre of God Save the King; reprinted at Merthyr by David John jun. and Morgan Williams as a supplement to the Chartist paper Udgorn Cymru, 1 October 1841 (Cardiff University, Special Collections and Archives, Welsh Ballads). Its afterlife among the Merthyr radicals: Jenkins (2012); Morgan Williams’s essay tracing Iolo’s influence, Red Dragon (1882).

And there was a flag. When the Chartists of Cymru came down on Casnewydd in the November of 1839, some came under a tricolour of blue, white and green, the three colours Iolo had given the three orders of his Gorsedd: blue for the Bard, white for the Druid, green for the Ovate. It was made the year before by a Caerfyrddin solicitor who signed himself with a bardic name, Cadvan, Hugh Williams, who had called the first radical meeting in De Cymru, and who would soon be the lawyer of the Rebecca protesters and the drafter of their petitions to Alexandrina of Hanover and Saxe-Coburg (Victoria)Alexandrina Victoria, daughter of Edward, Duke of Kent, of the House of Hanover, the family name Guelph, and of Victoire of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. German on both sides, and christened Alexandrina; the single regnal name was chosen at her accession. The petitioners of Talog and Pontardulais were addressing a woman with a father and a surname like anyone else, and she is named here accordingly.. The stonemason’s bardic vision did not stay in the cottage. It went to Casnewydd under arms, in his own three colours.The Chartist tricolour presented by Hugh Williams (‘Cadvan’) to the Caerfyrddin Working Men’s Association, April 1838 (Northern Star, 21 April 1838), and carried at the Casnewydd rising of November 1839: its blue, white and green are the colours Iolo assigned the three Gorsedd orders, blue for the Bards, white for the Druids, green for the Ovates. Hugh Williams (1796–1874), solicitor and agitator, later defended the Rebecca protesters of Talog and Pontardulais and drafted their petitions to Victoria: Dictionary of Welsh Biography, s.n. Williams, Hugh.

And there was a druid. The bardic order Iolo had raised did not stay a pageant. William Price of Llantrisant, physician, nationalist of Cymru, and self-proclaimed archdruid, who kept the old rites at the rocking-stone above Pontypridd in scarlet and greenY Maen, vii. The rites at the Rocking Stone, Y Maen Chwŷf, were Iolo’s first: on 1 August 1814 he held a Gorsedd on it, and Gwilym Morganwg remembered, “Iolo Morganwg presided at the time; and it was then and there I was invested with my Bardic Order” (Huw Walters, “Myfyr Morganwg and the Rocking-Stone Gorsedd”, in Jenkins (ed.), A Rattleskull Genius (2005), p. 483). For a rock in a bard’s garden he wrote his own disguise: “To your vile world unknown, I’ll end my peaceful days” (Poems, Lyric and Pastoral, 1794, vol. II, p. 85). The stone is moving. The books of Myfyr Morganwg (Evan Davies, 1801–1888), who kept the Gorsedd of the Rocking Stone after him, are rare for a reason: chapel ministers in Morgannwg had their people buy them and bring them in, “a gwnawd tân o honi nhw”, and a fire was made of them (Walters, ibid., p. 495). , helped plan the Casnewydd rising and organised a supply of arms for it, then fled to France when it failed. The man who wore Iolo’s druidhood in earnest had a hand in arming the march: Iolo built the Gorsedd for a theatre of peace, and a generation on his archdruid was gathering guns.William Price (1800–1893), physician, Chartist and self-styled archdruid of Llantrisant, who conducted neo-druidic rites at the Rocking Stone (Y Maen Chwyf), Pontypridd: his part in planning the Casnewydd rising and procuring arms, and his flight to France, Dictionary of Welsh Biography, s.n. Price, William. His druidism stood in the tradition Iolo had restored with the Gorsedd. The law he had sung for his own gorsedd was plain. In Cerdd Cymru, the song he made for the gorsedd on Mynydd y Garth in 1797: Deddf oedd mai ar wirionedd syth / Y rhoddai fyth ei fyfyr. / Nid oedd i fardd roi llaw ar gledd, / Cenhadwr hedd y byddai, it was law that on straight truth he should ever set his mind; a bard was not to lay hand on sword; a messenger of peace he would be.Cadrawd (ed.), Gwaith Iolo Morganwg (1913), p. 17.

The men who led the Chartists down on Casnewydd were, in their convictions, Iolo’s own heirs: John Frost, the draper who marched them in, was formed by Tom Paine and Cobbett; and Zephaniah Williams, who led the Blackwood column, was a freethinker in religion who had defended his rationalism in print, the very Rational Dissent Iolo had planted. And the ground they rose from was ground he had broken. The Unitarian heartland of the west, the “Black Spot” that Iolo knitted together when he founded the South Wales Unitarian Society, its rules drawn up at Gelli-gron in 1802 and its first assembly held at Cefncoedycymer on the twenty-sixth of June 1803, bred the very ministers who stood up for the Chartists a generation later: John Jones of Cefn Coed and Owen Evans of Trecynon, marked men both for it. He called the Society together and wrote its rules; its pulpits stood behind the risings.John Frost’s formation by Paine and Cobbett, and Zephaniah Williams’s freethought (defended in A Letter to Benjamin Williams, 1831): Dictionary of Welsh Biography, s.nn. Frost, John; Williams, Zephaniah. The South Wales Unitarian Society, founded by Iolo, rules drawn at Josiah Rees’s Gelli-gron, 1802; first public assembly at Cefncoedycymer, 26 June 1803: Geraint H. Jenkins, Bard of Liberty (Cardiff, 2012), 213–14. How it was founded, the same book, 160–61: after Tomos Glyn Cothi was gaoled Iolo “convened a meeting of Unitarians in Carmarthen and prevailed on fourteen signatories to support his aim of establishing a society”; “With the help of Josiah Rees, Iolo worked hard to lay the administrative foundations and at Gellionnen on 8 October 1802 the Unitarian Society of South Wales was formally established”; its secretary, David Davis of Neath, called Iolo “our father”. The printed rules are Iolo’s: Rheolau a Threfniadau Cymdeithas Dwyfundodiaid yn Neheubarth Cymru (Llundain, 1803). The Dictionary of Welsh Biography gives the founding to Davis, “although the credit for this is usually given to Edward Williams (Iolo Morganwg)”; and A Rattleskull Genius (2005) cautions that he “probably exaggerated his own role in his unpublished papers, but it is also true that he had few serious rivals”. The “Black Spot” ministers John Jones (Cefn Coed y Cymer) and Owen Evans (Trecynon) publicly supported Chartism and became marked men.

And there was a rising that wore a woman’s name. When the farmers of the west threw down the tollgates between 1839 and 1843 (blackened, in petticoats, summoned by the hunting-horn, calling themselves Rebecca and her daughters) they were not improvising a disguise. They were carrying on the Ceffyl Pren, the “wooden horse,” the old folk-justice of the parish in Cymru, whose roots ran back to the customary law the Tudur illegal annexation had abolished in 1536.A man of the riots’ own time, Edward Crompton Lloyd Hall of Newcastle Emlyn, held that the laws of Hywel Dda sanctioned it: David Williams, The Rebecca Riots (Cardiff, 1955), p. 53, who doubted it.  The same conquest that killed the bardic court and drove its tradition onto paper had killed the people’s own courts too; and here, three centuries on, the abolished law walked out of memory and into the lanes. They took their name from the blessing on Rebecca in Genesis (that her seed should possess the gate of those that hated them) and they threw the gates down.The Rebecca rising, 1839–43: the female disguise, the blackened faces and the summons by horn derive from the Ceffyl Pren (‘wooden horse’), a folk court of Cymru whose roots lay in the customary law discarded at the Tudur illegal annexation of 1536. The name is from Genesis 24:60, in the English Bible of 1611, “let thy seed possess the gate of those which hate them.” Their solicitor, who drafted their petitions to Victoria, was Hugh Williams (‘Cadvan’), also the maker of the Chartist tricolour. And the Crown’s own courts show that the thing was older than the name, and that women were in it from the start. The Court of Great Sessions, which tried Cymru until Westminster abolished it in 1830, kept a separate heading for it, in the clerks’ own words: riots, ceffyl pren, skimmington, charivari. Under that heading an effigy of a man was carried through Presteigne and burned in 1752, by twenty-four people, three of them women and four of them gentlemen; “divers loud and terrible noises and hallooings” were made in Brecon in 1814, and the prosecutors were the two constables; and an effigy was set alight outside a man’s door at Newtown in 1823 by the weavers and spinners of the flannel trade. The same court kept a heading for enclosure riots, and there the women are named first on the indictment: at Pistyll in Caernarfonshire in October 1812, five of the seven accused were women, and at Cilcennin in Cardiganshire in March 1816 four of the six were, charged with riot to hinder an Act of Parliament passed in 1812 and with assaulting the commissioner the Act had appointed. Thirty-one years before the first gate came down in the west, the state was already prosecuting women of Cymru for pulling down fences, and its clerks were already writing ceffyl pren into an indictment.Records of the Court of Great Sessions, indexed in the National Library of Wales Crime and Punishment database, searched under the offence headings “Riots, ceffyl pren / skimmington / charivari” (41 records in all Wales) and “Riots, enclosure” (61). Presteigne, 1 March 1752, gaol file 4/522/2 document 9, “making an effigy of prosecutor and exposing the same to injure prosecutor’s reputation and burning the effigy”, no true bill; Brecon, 17 March 1814, 4/393/5 document 12; Newtown, 9 July 1823, 4/201/8 document 2. Pistyll, 29 October 1812, 4/279/4 document 8; Cilcennin, 6 March 1816, 4/912/5 document 32, one of four prosecutions brought on the Llanrhystud enclosure Act of 1812 (with 4/912/5 document 33 and 4/913/2 documents 8 and 9), twenty-eight accused between them and eight of them women. The gaol files themselves have not been read; the entries are the database’s. Iolo spent his life recovering that outlawed order from the manuscripts; Rebecca enacted it in the dark. And Rebecca’s own lawyer, who drafted her petitions to Victoria, was Hugh Williams, Cadvan, the bard whose Gorsedd colours had already gone to Casnewydd. The buried native law had two recoveries in one generation: one on the page, in a stonemason’s hand; one in the road, under a hunting-horn. They were the same inheritance, surfacing.

And the Crown said in its own court what it was doing to them. One of Rebecca’s singers, David Davies, Dai’r Cantwr, made a song of longing in the gaol at Caerfyrddin and named his birthplace in it: “Llancarfan ydyw’r plwyf … Fe’m ganed yn Nhregof”, Llancarfan is the parish, I was born at Tregof. It is the parish in whose register Iolo’s own baptism stands. Dai’s father was known to his neighbours as Honest John of Treguff, a tenant of the Duke of Beaufort. In January 1844 Dai stood in the dock at Caerfyrddin beside John Jones, Shoni Sgubor Fawr, for pulling down a toll-house, and Mr Justice Cresswell told the two of them what their sentence meant: “You will be placed under a taskmaster, not chosen by yourselves, you will be compelled to work, but will receive no payment for your labour, except such food as will serve to support your strength in order that you may work again. You will be, not in name, but in reality, slaves. To that I must sentence you.” Shoni was transported for life and Dai for twenty years, and the two men left the dock laughing.Dai’r Cantwr, “Can Hiraethlon Dai’r Cantwr, pan yn garcharor yn amser Rebecca”, to the tune Roslyn Castle, a ballad sheet in the National Library of Wales (Welsh Ballads, wg35-2-5089), read on the page image of the sheet, p. 2, verse 4; he signs it “DAVID DAVIES”. His father: The Welshman, 9 February 1844, p. 3, “Rebeccaism. The Convicts”: “John Davies, the father of David Davies, was a tenant to the Duke of Beaufort, and lived at Treguff. He was so proverbial for uprightness and honesty that the neighbours invariably called him ‘Honest John of Treguff.’” The sentence: The Welshman, 5 January 1844, p. 2, “Carmarthenshire Winter Assizes”, read on the page image; the same number names the judge as Mr Justice Cresswell and calls his sentences “unnecessarily severe”. That is not a figure of speech, and it is not an innocent observation. It is a judge of the Crown telling two men of Cymru, in open court and for the newspapers, that the state was making them slaves, ten years after the same state had abolished slavery in its colonies. The name had been abolished. The thing had not, and it was kept for the men who stood against the state’s tolls. And it fell on a singer from the parish of the man who would sell no slave-grown sugar, who refused his brothers’ slave money when he was poor, and who put the bards on the side of “Afric’s injur’d race”. Llancarfan gave the island its abolitionist, and the Crown, in its own words, made a slave of Llancarfan’s singer.The Slavery Abolition Act 1833 (3 & 4 Will. IV, c. 73), in force from 1 August 1834. Iolo’s sugar, his refusal of his brothers’ money and his lines on “Afric’s injur’d race” are given, with their sources, in earlier chapters.

Now the trade, because the prosecution’s word for him, humble stonemason, has had the second word doing the work of the first. His brother Thomas worked on the rebuilding of Crichel House in Dorset for Humphrey Sturt, between 1776 and 1780 (the Bastards of Blandford the builders, James Wyatt engaged for the decoration) and in 1780 Iolo was there, measuring the freestone work; he was owed money afterwards for carving of his own at Moor Crichel.Richard Suggett, “Iolo Morganwg: Stonecutter, Builder, and Antiquary”, in A Rattleskull Genius (2005), pp. 202–3, from the brothers’ letters (NLW 21284E, nos. 710–16) and the gaol papers (NLW 21389E, nos. 8–9, 40). He was a measurer and surveyor, pricing the work of masons, tilers and plasterers, a business, Richard Suggett observes, that “could be undertaken only by those respected by other craftsmen”: he measured the sea wall at Barry; he helped value the unfinished work at the Bridewell of Y Bont-faen in 1806; and in 1810, when the town feared the arcade of its church was coming down, it was he who surveyed it and told them it would stand.Suggett, pp. 209–10 (NLW 13157A, pp. 198–9, 210–11; NLW 13150A, pp. 216–17; NLW 13094E, p. 181). He opened a quarry at Pyle on the Margam estate in 1780; he kept a collection of the marbles of Morgannwg, polished; and in 1799, with the war shutting foreign marble out of the country, he planned to prove the white limestone of Môn (said to be whiter than Carrara) and bring it down to Abertawe (Swansea) in the copper-ore boats.Suggett, p. 208.

And the trade had its verse. When the mason William Edwards threw the great single arch over the Taf at Pontypridd, Iolo’s teacher Lewis Hopkin called the masons of the country to come and look:

Drych i fil, cynnil amcanion—a gwir
Rhagoriaeth gwaith dynion;
Y seiri meini mwynion,
Dewch, gwelwch a chwiliwch hon.

A mirror for a thousand, of fine designs, and the true excellence of the work of men; you gentle masons, come, see her, and study her.Lewis Hopkin, “Englynion o glod i’r digyffelyb adeilad, ac i’r awdwr o honi, sef Pont y Ty Pridd, ar afon Taf, yn swydd Forganwg”, first printed in Gwilym Howel’s almanac of 1769 as “Englynion i’r Bont newydd ar Daf … a’r Pen Saer Maen William Edwards”, from Y Fêl Gafod (1813) as reprinted in Hopkin-James, Hopkiniaid Morganwg (1909), p. 277, and dated there to the bridge’s completion, p. 116. The English is ours. His chief published works: Llyfr Ecclesiastes neu’r Pregethwr (Bristol, 1767), the book of Ecclesiastes in cywydd metre, the greater part of it his; the elegy on David Jardine of Abergavenny (1769); the elegy in dialogue for his son Thomas, dead at seven in 1757; and the collection his son-in-law John Miles printed after his death, Y Fêl Gafod (1813).

He wrote an essay on building, cob walling, roughcast, ashlar fronts, the qualities of stone, mortar and mortar floors, with sections promised on ovens and furnaces, and he drew: a house roofed with a stone vault to carry a garden, a writing-cabinet, a Gothic summer-house for a gentleman forty miles above Quebec.Suggett, pp. 208–9 (the essay, NLW 13116B, pp. 346–59), 211 (the vaulted house, NLW 13106B, p. 179), 213–14 (the cabinet and the summer-house, NLW 21416E, nos. 25, 60). And he would not have it that architecture was finished. The men who held that no sixth order could be added to the five of the ancients he called “wise fellows”, and he proposed one: a “British Order”, to “comprehend all the Beauty’s of the others as well Gothic as Roman, Grecian, Chinese”.Suggett, p. 210 (NLW 21387E, no. 10; NLW 21417E, nos. 15–16).

Benjamin Heath Malkin, who found him at Flimston in 1803, set down what he saw: “Had they been noticed in early life, the public would probably have gained an eminent architect or sculptor, without losing a valuable antiquarian. As it is, there are few better judges either of design or execution in architecture.” On the same page he set down what the estates had paid the man who found their stone, “not the slightest recompence for the discovery of very valuable quarries”, and what the county called him: “there are few in Glamorganshire who know him by any other name than that of Ned Williams the stonecutter.”Benjamin Heath Malkin, The Scenery, Antiquities, and Biography, of South Wales (London, 1804), p. 129, read at the printed page. He played the stonecutter to Malkin too. When the churchmen of his last years went on calling the old Unitarian a danger, he wrote to him: “what will be the term that may be properly applied to the poor Welsh bard of Flimston? Pop-gun, beyond a doubt.”Iolo Morganwg to Benjamin Heath Malkin, 28 November 1809, Correspondence, II, p. 880.

The survey walks made him a wonder. Villages that heard the stranger talk Latin with the parson came out to stare, and in one he was taken for a conjuror, “and having confirmed the opinion, by putting some honest farmer in the way of regaining a stolen horse, though only by the exercise of good common sense.”Elijah Waring, Recollections and Anecdotes of Edward Williams (London, 1850), pp. 110–11.

Now the law, and attend closely here, because this is where the game shows its whole hand. The man the Great Sessions gaoled for debt had drawn, in 1782, the plans for an extension of the Y Bont-faen town hall to house the jury rooms and the prothonotary’s office of those same courts, in ink and grey wash, the stone of every pillar, quoin and cornice specified. It was not taken up; the drawings lie in his papers still.“Plann and Elevation of a new additional building to the town hall in Cowbridge”, 8 August 1782 (NLW 21416E, nos. 31–5): Suggett, in A Rattleskull Genius (2005), pp. 213–14, “Iolo’s scheme was not approved”; Jenkins (2012), p. 50, and Y Digymar (2018). Four years later the courts had a room for him. In 1813, when a young labourer of Llantrisant was sentenced to hang for stealing twenty-five shillings from a Tonyrefail tavern, the old man walked the county for signatures (one hundred and thirty-six of them by the sixth of October) had a Caerdydd attorney's clerk engross the petition fair, and sent it up to the Prince Regent. The sentence was commuted. A man lived because Iolo Morganwg walked.The reprieve of William Morgan of Llantrisant, 1813, the 136 signatures, John Wood's clerk, the petition to the Prince Regent, the commutation to transportation: NLW, Great Sessions 4/633/8, nos. 16, 26, 64; CIM, III, 183–5, 188; Jenkins (2018).

In January 1820 William Rees of Cwrt Colman died. He was a solicitor and a squire, with a mansion near Pen-y-bont and farms across the Vale, and he was said to be worth close to a hundred thousand pounds. He left no children, and no will was ever proved. He was one of the creditors who pressed Iolo into Caerdydd gaol, and he was the one who could have kept him out of it.No will and no administration is entered for him in the Llandaff probate index, searched under Rees, Reece, Court Colman, Court Coleman and Coychurch (National Library of Wales, wills database, 11 October 2026). Yet a notice of 3 October 1820 called on all indebted to “the Estate of the late William Rees, of Courtcoleman” to pay “the Administratrix” (The Cambrian, 7 October 1820), so a woman was granted administration somewhere; where, and who she was, has not been found. On whether he had a wife the two local witnesses differ: Thomas Morgan, Hanes Tonyrefail (1899), p. 33, “bu farw heb na gwraig na phlant, ac heb wneud ei ewyllys” (as quoted in Jenkins, Y Digymar, 2018, p. 200); T. M. Price, Glamorgan Gazette, 13 November 1914, that he “had made a will”, that none could be found, and that “his widow had probably concealed it”.

Rees had been the family lawyer of Peggy’s father. When the old man died, Rees turned on the family: in August 1783 he gave notice that he would sue Iolo, Peggy and Peggy’s widowed mother for twenty pounds her father had owed him on a bond.National Library of Wales, NLW MS 21389E, items 99/9 and 99/11 (William Rees’s bill of costs to Rees Robert, 1772, and his receipt for a year’s interest, 1776) and 99/16 (notice, 9 August 1783, that “William Rees, gent.” will sue Elinor Robert, Edward William, mason, and Margaret his wife “upon a bond entered into by the said Rees in his lifetime for the payment of £20”). These are the Library’s catalogue descriptions; the documents themselves are still to be read. Iolo had the means to pay him, and to pay John Walton the surgeon and every other creditor with him. Peggy’s father had left her a mortgage on land in Sir Fynwy, and a hundred pounds, with the interest, was owing to them on it. In January 1784 Iolo put the deeds of that mortgage into Rees’s hands, so that Rees, as a lawyer, could collect the money and settle the debts.Iolo to a creditor, Caerdydd, 24 February 1784: he “gave Mr Rees of Court Coleman about a month ago some papers to recover for him a small mortgage debt due from lands in co. Mon.” (NLW, Iolo Morganwg letters, no. 792, in the words of the Library’s catalogue). Rees kept the deeds. He did not collect the money, and he would not give the papers back. In August 1786 Walton and a second creditor had Iolo arrested for about twenty pounds between them, and Iolo was carried to Caerdydd gaol. He wrote it down inside: “Mr Rees has had in his hands this three year mortgage Deeds to the amount of £100 principal & interest which he promised to recover for me verbally & by Letters which I have but of late he has thrown off the mark refuses either to proceed or restore me the papers.”

Iolo was a year in that gaol for a debt of twenty pounds while Rees held a hundred of his. He came out in August 1787 by assigning everything he owned to his creditors in court. His petition from the cell had gone to the two judges of the Great Sessions. One of them was Abel Moysey.NLW MS 21389E, item 98/10: “Petition, Aug. 15 1787, of Edward Wiliams, confined for debt in Cardiff Gaol since 7 Aug. 1786, to the Honourable George Hardinge and Abel Moysey, esquires, HM Justices of Great Sessions for Glamorgan, for redress against Thomas Morgan, keeper of the said gaol”; items 98/9 (the schedule of all his estate, 21 March 1787), 98/14 (his extracts from the Lords’ Act, 32 George II) and 98/13 (“the assignment in court to his creditors”). Catalogue descriptions.

Thirty-three years later Rees was dead, and the fight over what he left began within weeks. With no will, the law gave his land to his nearest kin by blood. So the whole estate would go to whoever could prove a pedigree, and a pedigree was proved from gravestones, parish registers and family Bibles. In February 1820 somebody chiselled the age and the date of death off a Rees gravestone at Llangrallo.The Cambrian, 18 November 1820: “One Hundred Guineas Reward” for whoever “on or about the middle of February last” erased “the AGE, MONTH, and YEAR, of the decease of HOPKIN REES, late Freestone Mason, from OFF HIS TOMBSTONE” at Coychurch; signed David Terry and William Rees. In the same year five men were charged with breaking open a grave at St Mary Hill and taking out the coffin of “William Rees, esq.”; the court’s file does not say why.NLW, Great Sessions gaol files, Glamorgan, 4/636/2, document 7 (1820), as indexed in the Library’s Crime and Punishment database: “Breaking and entering a grave and removing the coffin of William Rees, esq.” No verdict is entered. The stonemason who would soon be reading the Rees family’s papers for one of the claimants had cut such stones for a living, and he held a rule about them: “everything on a Tombstone or monument should, in my opinion, always have a very solemn and significant meaning and represent some lesson of piety or of Wisdom”.G. J. Williams, Iolo Morganwg (1956), pp. 346–8, and NLW 13136A, pp. 1–3.

Robert Thomas, a farmer of Y Glyn near Tonyrefail, believed he was that nearest kinsman, and soon after Rees died he asked Iolo to come and read the family papers. Iolo was nearly seventy-three. He knew the Reeses from the inside, because his mother’s father had been first cousin to one of them, and his mother had told him many times how the two cousins fell out over the family burying-ground.NLW MS 21410E, no. 65: Iolo’s account, “as given to him many times by his mother, Ann, daughter of Edward Matthews of St Mary Hill”, of the quarrel between Edward Matthews “and his first cousin, Hopkin Rees of St Mary Hill” over “the burying-ground of the Rees family at Coychurch”. Catalogue description. On the tenth of February 1820, within a month of Rees’s death, Robert Thomas and two others of his family made an agreement to share the cost of the claim and whatever it won. The handwriting of the agreement is Iolo’s.NLW MS 21397E, item 1: agreement of 10 February 1820 between Robert Thomas and Evan Thomas of Llantrisant, farmers, and David Thomas of Cowbridge, labourer, “to join in any expense that may occur in recovering the property” and “to divide equally amongst them”; “In the autograph of Iolo Morganwg”. Items 2–23 are the pedigrees he compiled. Catalogue description. Then he read hundreds of the family’s papers, worked the archives for three years, and drew up the pedigree.

There was a rival. David Terry of Llangrallo, a labouring man, claimed to be the heir through another line, and Terry won first. Years later a barrister described it to another jury: Terry “gained a verdict and took possession”, and about a year afterwards “it was found that a great deal of false swearing had been used at this trial, and a new trial was granted”.Mr Whitcombe, opening The King v. Jenkins and others, Glamorgan Spring Assizes: The Glamorgan, Monmouth and Brecon Gazette and Merthyr Guardian, 8 March 1834, p. 2.

The new trial came on at the Great Sessions in Caerdydd town hall in April 1823. Iolo was now seventy-six, and his son Taliesin had to make him go there by carriage. Terry had a King’s Counsel, William Taunton. Robert Thomas’s counsel was a man of eighty who came down on purpose for this one case, at the end of his time at the bar. He was Abel Moysey, one of the two judges Iolo had petitioned from Caerdydd gaol in 1787. He had resigned as a judge in 1819.The Cambrian, 21 August 1819: Francis Casberd “was sworn in before the Lord Chancellor … as one of the Welsh Judges, in the room of Abel Moysey, Esq. resigned.” The Cambrian, 26 April 1823: “Mr. Moysey (who came down on purpose, as he is about to retire from the bar)”. He died in 1831 “in his 88th year … formerly one of the Judges of this Circuit” (The Cambrian, 23 July 1831). All read in the Library’s machine text of the pages. He called Iolo as his first witness.

The case ran from Saturday morning to Wednesday afternoon. Over two hundred witnesses were heard, from nine in the morning to midnight, and an interpreter was sworn for those who had only Cymraeg. Terry’s side laid old Cymraeg Bibles before the court, with the family’s pedigree written in them. Taunton questioned Iolo for six hours on the Monday morning and five more that evening, had him back four times the next day and twice on the last morning. Iolo traced the family line back to Howel Rees, about 1570, without a note in front of him, and showed the court that the pedigrees in Terry’s Bibles were forgeries. The second expert was William Illingworth, who had been sub-keeper of the records in the Tower of London and was the first authority in the capital on the reading of old manuscripts. He confirmed Iolo point by point. The Chief Justice summed up for five hours. The jury took a quarter of an hour, and found for Robert Thomas.The Rees of Cwrt Colman inheritance trial (Thomas v. Terry), Caerdydd Great Sessions: the Cambrian, 26 April 1823; CIM, III, 554–8, 656–7 (the verdict-line at 657); Iolo's trial pedigree of the Rees family survives as NLW 21397E, nos. 5, 7, 8, 12; the counsel were W. E. Taunton and Abel Moysey (the same Moysey Iolo had petitioned for release from Caerdydd gaol in 1787), the second expert William Illingworth (ODNB). The aftermath, perjury committals and the estate consumed in costs, T. Morgan, Hanes Tonyrefail (Tonyrefail, 1899), 33. The year is 1823: the Cambrian of 26 April 1823 prints the report (“Important Law Case”: “who was the heir-at-law of Wm. Rees, late of Court Colman, Esq. a gentleman who was supposed to have died worth nearly 100,000l.”; “The cause commenced on Saturday morning, at nine o’clock, and was not finished until two o’clock on Wednesday afternoon, although the Court sat until 11 or 12 o’clock every night”), and Iolo’s own letter on it is dated 17 April 1823 (Jenkins, Bard of Liberty, 2012, p. 239). The newspaper counts “upwards of 100 witnesses on both sides” where Jenkins has more than two hundred. Its “verdict for defendants” is the verdict for Robert Thomas: Terry was the plaintiff, with Taunton for him, and Thomas the defendant, with Moysey (Jenkins, Y Digymar, 2018, pp. 200–202, where Thomas Morgan’s Welsh is quoted: Rees “a bu farw heb na gwraig na phlant, ac heb wneud ei ewyllys”, and “rhoddwyd y farn o blaid Mr. Robert Thomas, a rhoddwyd rhai o dystion Dafydd Terry yn ngharchar am dyngu celwydd”). William Rees and the deeds: Iolo’s own note, as Jenkins quotes it from NLW 21387E, no. 16, “Mr Rees has had in his hands this three year mortgage Deeds to the amount of £100 principal & interest which he promised to recover for me … but of late he has thrown off the mark refuses either to proceed or restore me the papers”; Rees among the creditors, and “one of Iolo’s great enemies”: Bard of Liberty, pp. 51, 53, 239. Jenkins’s two books differ on the man Iolo stood for: Bard of Liberty, p. 239, “Robert and Evan Thomas, two illiterate farmers from Llantrisant”; Y Digymar, p. 200, “Robert Thomas, ffermwr digon cefnog o’r Glyn”, a fairly well-off farmer of Y Glyn. Y Digymar, p. 201, has the cause begin “am naw ar fore Sadwrn, 23 Ebrill”: 23 April 1823 was a Wednesday, Iolo’s letter on the verdict is dated 17 April, and the Cambrian printed the finished case on 26 April. By the calendar and the letter the cause ran from Saturday 12 to Wednesday 16 April 1823. And Bard of Liberty, p. 239, puts Iolo’s farmers on the wrong side of the case, as men “seeking to recover property from the estate”: they were the defendants, holding it, and the newspaper’s “verdict for defendants” was theirs. Thomas Morgan’s local history has some of Terry’s witnesses gaoled for false swearing at the trial; the only gaolings for perjury the newspapers record in the story are those of 1833, over the bankruptcy, ten years later.

Iolo wrote afterwards: “A completer victory at law was never yet obtained than ours. I thank God for it, for no testimony has ever been more the testimony of conscience than mine was, which was in the highest degree corroborated by that of Mr Ealingworth who, with myself, are branded . . . as the greatest scoundrels that ever existed!!! Whoever exerts himself to bring truth and justice to light will ever in this world be so branded.”As printed in Jenkins (2012), p. 239, from CIM, III, 657. Jenkins’s later book has Iolo “yn wên o glust i glust wrth adael y llys”, smiling from ear to ear as he left the court (Y Digymar, 2018, p. 202); the smile is Jenkins’s.

Rees had threatened Iolo with the law over twenty pounds that Peggy’s dead father owed, kept the deeds that would have paid it, and left him a year in gaol. Then Rees died without a will, and it was Iolo who stood up in court and showed who should have everything Rees had owned.

The verdict did not end it. The losing side said the winners had bought their evidence, and Robert Thomas was tried for that twice at Hereford. In 1824 the indictment was thrown out, and in 1826 a jury acquitted him after three days.The Cambrian, 28 August 1824 (Rex v. Thomas and others, “conspiring and subornation of perjury”) and 1 April 1826 (the King v. R. Thomas, D. Williams, T. Thomas, J. Morgan and others: “the jury returned a verdict for the defendants”). This much of the charge was true: two men who had first gathered evidence for Terry changed sides, and Robert Thomas gave them his bond for two thousand pounds. His own counsel said it was given so that they would “destroy certain false documents of pedigree, particularly three family bibles, and establish the claim of Robert Thomas”.Merthyr Guardian, 8 March 1834, p. 2: the bond was to Jenkin Morgan and Thomas Thomas, “who had been extremely active in obtaining evidence in behalf of David Terry”. In 1831 creditors had Robert Thomas declared a bankrupt, to get at what he had for the costs of the lawsuits. Only a man in trade could be made bankrupt, so men were brought to swear that he was a cattle dealer. A jury found that he was not, and in 1833 three of the men who had sworn it were gaoled for perjury.London Gazette, 18 October 1831, p. 2139; The Cambrian, 10 March 1832 (Robert Thomas v. Jenkin Thomas Jenkins: verdict for Thomas) and 13 July 1833; Monmouthshire Merlin, 20 July 1833: the affidavits “were false from beginning to end”. The papers differ on whether the third man gaoled was John Jones or John Davies. Others who claimed the land took farms on the estate by force in 1834 and in 1836, the first time with a scythe thrust through the doorway at a magistrate’s face.The Cambrian, 18 October 1834 (Penywain: “a scythe was thrust out against him, which nearly came in contact with his face”) and 23 July 1836 (Pant-y-Ruthin Fach, St Mary Hill). Robert Thomas died in June 1837, and the paper that printed his death said that “the anxieties of constant law suits, no doubt, hastened his end”.Merthyr Guardian, 1 July 1837, p. 3: he died on 23 June. The Cambrian printed the same notice: “it is supposed hastened his end.” Neither gives his age or the cause. A will of “Robert Thomas, Gentleman of Llantrisant, Glamorganshire” was proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury on 2 November 1837 (The National Archives, PROB 11/1887/33). The register copy was read through the archive’s watermark: “Proved at London 2nd Nov[embe]r 1837 … by the oath of Howell Hopkin and William Williams the executors”. It is dated “the twenty fifth day of September” 183–; the last figure of the year is not safely read. He had made a will, and it was proved in London that November. It left everything to two trustees, Howell Hopkin and William Williams, to pay his debts and divide what was left into two halves, one for his son William Thomas and the other for his married daughter.PROB 11/1887/33: “do and shall divide the surplus … into two equal shares or moieties and pay transfer and assign one moiety or share unto my son William Thomas”, the other “to my said daughter”, wife of a man whose name the watermark hides. Each half was to pass to that child’s own children at twenty-one if the child died first. One of the four men who witnessed it was Charles Redwood, a solicitor of Y Bont-faen and very likely the man who drew it up. He was the son of Theophilus Redwood of Boverton, the Quaker tanner who had been Iolo’s patron, and it was a Redwood, Isaac, who had paid for Iolo’s funeral eleven years before. The Redwoods had stood by Iolo to his grave, and they were still beside the man he had gone into the witness box for.Witnesses in the will: Charles Redwood, John Bird, John Stockwood and a clerk of Cowbridge whose name is not read. Charles Redwood (1802–1854), son of Theophilus Redwood (1760–1840), “tanner, Quaker, patron of Iolo Morganwg”, by his second wife Elizabeth Holland: Burke’s Peerage (2003), vol. 3, p. 3308. He lived at Llandough by Cowbridge and later at Orchard House, Boverton, wrote The Vale of Glamorgan (1839, anonymously), and was the friend of John Sterling and Thomas Carlyle: Glamorgan Gazette, 6 November 1908, p. 6. Forty of Carlyle’s letters to him, 1840–1853, are in the National Library of Scotland. Isaac Redwood paid for the funeral: Jenkins, Y Digymar, p. 205. That this Isaac was Charles’s half-brother Isaac (1792–1873), a leather manufacturer of Neath, is likely but not shown. Then the estate was sold, and by 1843 Cwrt Colman belonged to the Llewellyn family.Merthyr Guardian, 2 December 1843 (“William Llewellyn, of Court-coleman, Esq.”); Monmouthshire Merlin, 13 July 1844, p. 2. No notice of the sale itself was found. In Tonyrefail they said the lawyers, “the men of the quills”, swallowed nearly all of it but the buttermilk, and the heir got that.T. Morgan, Hanes Tonyrefail (1899), 33, as quoted in Jenkins, Y Digymar, p. 202: “yr oedd gwyr y ‘quills’ wedi llyncu bron y cwbl ond yr enwyn! Cafodd yr etifedd hwnw.” Iolo saw little of this. He died in December 1826.

The charge against Iolo is forgery, and this trial does not settle that charge. Once in his life his reading of old documents was tested in open court, on oath, by a hostile King’s Counsel, over three days, with a keeper of the Tower records called beside him. That time the forgeries were the other side’s. A hundred years later the professors found him guilty of forgery, and he was never called.

Hold the picture: the system that had imprisoned this man as a debtor, and whose scholars would convict him as a forger, called him in his old age as its expert on the difference between a true pedigree and a false one (eleven hours of hostile cross-examination could not shake him) and the Tower of London's own archivist stood up and said he was right. His word ruined the forsworn and made an heir. That is what his expertise was worth in open court, under oath, against the sharpest counsel money could hire, while he lived. And the trial of 1823 was not even the first time the law had called him. In March 1800 George Guelph (George III) himself had served him a subpoena: Edward Williams, summoned to give evidence for the King at the Great Sessions. The state whose scholars would one day rule that no word of his could be trusted had put him on oath as its own witness.Subpoena of 12 March 1800, to testify for George Guelph in The King v. Christopher Bassett and others, forcible entry, at the Great Sessions (NLW, Iolo Morganwg papers, no. 37).

And hold the trial against its background, and it convicts a class. The new gentry of the south, the estates that swallowed the old order after the annexation, were, in the words of their own modern historian, "anxious to claim descent" from the aristocracy of the Britons they had replaced, and their claims rest on records that are conveniently scarce. The last true bardic patron, Sir Richard Pryse of Gogerddan, died in 1661, and with the bards' order went the keepers of the real pedigrees. Forged Bible-pedigrees at a Morgannwg assize were not an aberration; they were the working method of a class. And the one man who could expose them on sight, the last master of the real record, is the man the next century convicted of pedigree-forgery.J. E. Thomas, Social Disorder in Britain 1750–1850 (2011): the post-Union gentry “anxious to claim descent” from the aristocracy it displaced, the claims dubious for the “paucity of records”; Sir Richard Pryse of Gogerddan (d. 1661) recorded as “the last bardic patron.” Iolo had said what that class had done for the record: “How little are the Welsh Nation or Welsh Literature indebted to the superior Classes of their Country.”NLW 13089E, p. 264.

And now, deliberately, in one breath (because a life should be weighed entire before it is judged) the inventory. He put more than a thousand words into living Cymraeg, his biographer counts them in the national dictionary’s own records, among them peiriant, machine, and tirwedd, landscape, and crebwyll, llyfryddiaeth, hwyrbryd: words in every mouth that nobody thinks of as his.Jenkins (2018), pp. 18–19; see Y Diffynnydd, ¶60. Some he coined openly, so that science and learning could be written in Cymraeg, and declared them his: among them amlen, envelope, blaenor, elder, and canolog, central (Crowe, in A Rattleskull Genius (2005), p. 322). He mapped the four dialects of Cymraeg a hundred years before the professors drew the same map, from some twenty-five thousand words he had gathered by 1806, and drew up a Welsh Corresponding Academy, with elected members for every dialect, which its historian calls “possibly the first ever blueprint for collective corpus planning on behalf of the Welsh language”.Richard Crowe, “Iolo Morganwg and the Dialects of Welsh”, in A Rattleskull Genius (2005): “as far as is known, Iolo Morganwg was the first to form a tripartite division of Welsh dialects” (p. 325); Sir John Rhŷs, the Oxford professor of Celtic, divided them into “the same basic four”, and “Iolo had reached the same basic conclusions nearly a century before Rhŷs undertook his work” (p. 329); “some 25,000 words” by 1806 (p. 316); “The Welsh Corresponding Academy for the Restoring to its Pristine Purity the Ancient British or Welsh Language” (p. 331). He was the first man to collect the folk-songs of Cymru from the mouths of the people, and the song every audience still rises to, the white wheat, passed through his hand, for the oldest copy of it is in his own; and the street-presses of his own town sold his lyrics on the same sheet as the Maid of Cefn Ydfa.A ballad sheet printed at Y Bont-faen by E. Davis (NLW, Welsh Ballads, wg35-2-1209a) carries on one side “Y Ferch o Cefn Ydfa” (Ton: “Bugeilior Gwenith Gwyn”), imprint “E. Davis, Argraffydd, Bontfaen”; and on the other “The Power of Love”, Iolo’s own poem, verbatim from Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (1794), vol. I (“Though doom’d with thee, my lovely fair, / O’er Libya’s burning sands to stray…”), signed “Iolo Morganwg” beside the imprint “E. Davis, Printer, Cowbridge”. Read on the sheet. The first printed book of the folk-songs of Cymru, in 1844, Maria Jane Williams’s Ancient National Airs of Gwent and Morganwg, took two of its songs from his own singing, and the words of many more from his manuscripts, by the hand of his son.Daniel Huws, “Iolo Morganwg and Traditional Music”, in A Rattleskull Genius (2005), p. 348: the volume “the first published collection of Welsh folk-songs”; the two songs she “heard sung by Iolo himself”, Ffoles Llantrisant and Cerais Ferch; Taliesin “supplied versions of the words of many songs from his father’s manuscripts”. Prys Morgan, ibid., p. 261. He signed his hymn-tunes, and now and then a tune of the dance or the fair, with his initials, I. M., so that, as the historian of his music says, “he distinguished his own compositions”; and he was the first to set down the two ways of singing penillion to the harp, Dull y Gogledd and Dull y De, the northern and the southern.Daniel Huws, “Iolo Morganwg and Traditional Music”, in A Rattleskull Genius (2005): about sixty tunes, enough “to earn Iolo credit as the first collector of Welsh folk-songs” (p. 333); “Iolo was the first to make clear the distinction in penillion-singing between north and south” (p. 347); “Iolo habitually signed his hymn-tunes and also, occasionally, secular tunes ‘I. M.’: it thus appears that he distinguished his own compositions” (p. 350). And when the old was better than his own, he said so. Coming home from England in 1802, at Caerffili, where the Vale of Morgannwg opens to view, he sang an old triban of the country to himself and wept, and wrote it in pencil in his pocket-book: Mi wela’r mor yn amlwg, / Mi wela Fro Morganwg, I see the sea clearly, I see the Vale of Morgannwg. He tried a verse of his own beneath it, and under that he wrote: “But who can equal the old one? What would I not give to know the name and æra of its author? Any addition to this beautiful little thing can never have a good effect, will never establish it self.” Alone, with no reader in the world, the man convicted of passing his own verse off as old set his own below the old, and said so.NLW 13174A, ff. 90v–92r, the pocket diary of 1802, as printed by Huws, in A Rattleskull Genius (2005), p. 351: “Vale of Glamorgan opens to view. One of its songs and tunes occurs. There is something strange in the powerful effect of these provincial, or local, things. The Swiss have their mal de pays. So have the Glamorganians. I mentally sung the following old popular Stanza to the ancient tune in two parts of Triban Morganwg and felt my eyes Streaming with tears.” The stanza whole: Mi wela’r mor yn amlwg / Mi wela Fro Morganwg / Pan fwyf yn hon am bwthyn bach / Mi fydda’n iach fy ngolwg; Huws’s English: “I see the sea clearly, / I see the Vale of Glamorgan, / When I am there and in my cottage / I’ll be healthy in appearance.” Another essay in the same volume prints “this beautiful thing”, without “little” (p. 104, n. 35). His own county kept him as its master of the craft. Fifty-six years after his death the Llangynwyd antiquary Cadrawd, opening a series on the old tribannau of Morgannwg with Iolo’s own chapter on the metre, wrote that for all his faults “yr hen lenor athrylithfawr o Drefflemin”, the old literary genius of Trefflemin, was acknowledged “gan y dosbarth mwyaf dysgedig o feirdd ein gwlad, yr awdurdod penaf ar Ddosbarth Morganwg”, by the most learned of our poets as the chief authority on the Glamorgan rule of poetry. The same Llanelli monthly taught its readers the penill cywydd from a couplet of his, “Addawaf i ti’n ddiau / Gan bob tafod glod yn glau”; and when it asked them for acrostics on the great of Cymru, Iolo Morganwg stood among the names they chose, with Goronwy Owen, Islwyn and Daniel Ddu.Cyfaill yr Aelwyd, ed. Beriah Gwynfe Evans (Llanelli), II (1882), p. 364, Cadrawd, “Hen Dribanau Morganwg”, third article, reprinting “Triban Cyrch, neu Triban Morganwg” from Cyfrinach y Beirdd (with his note that Iolo always writes ag for ac); II, p. 82, “Penill Cywydd”, in the cynghanedd lessons edited by Carnelian; I (1881), p. 123, the twenty-five acrostics of competition no. 6. Read on the page images (HathiTrust, Harvard copy). He held that the old tunes the ploughboys of the Vale sang to the oxen had come down to them from the time of the Romans.Cyfaill yr Aelwyd, II (1882), p. 314: “Creda Iolo Morganwg fod yr hen alawon oeddynt yn arferedig ar hyd ein meusydd yn y Deheudir gan y taiogion (peasants) yn ei ddyddiau ef, wedi eu trosglwyddo i lawr drwy’r canrifoedd oddiar amser y Rhufeiniaid”, with Bardd Alaw on the antiquity of the ox-songs. He wrote near three thousand hymns, three times Pantycelyn. He carried the manuscript corpus of a nation to the press on his own back and called the labour love. He raised an eighth-century royal stone out of a churchyard with his own tackle and set it where it stands today. The Royal Commission examined his field-surveys and found them flawless; the founding textbook of British geology took his chapter on the rocks of his own Vale, and at sixty-eight he was offering lessons in mineralogy at his son’s new school in Merthyr.Taliesin Williams’s advertisement for his Commercial School, Cambrian, January 1816: “Sessions on the elements of Mineralogy will be given if required at such stated times as may appear expedient, by Edward Williams.” Brynley F. Roberts, “‘The Age of Restitution’: Taliesin ab Iolo and the Reception of Iolo Morganwg”, in A Rattleskull Genius (2005), p. 464. He kept the poor alive with the medicine of Myddfai, set their bones, wrote their petitions. He kept a shop in Y Bont-faen that sold only East India sugar, "uncontaminated with human gore," and went short rather than stock the slave-grown kind. He built the first national institution his nation ever had, married it to the Eisteddfod, and left the plans (drawn, costed, specified) for the national library, the folk museum, the county collectors, the college of the nations of Europe: the whole furniture of modern Cymru, sketched in a cottage with no floorboards, by a man the parish overseers would not trust with a shilling. And they came true: within a century of his death the nation had the national Library, the national Museum and the University he had specified in that cottage, the plans of a man refused a shilling, realised as the standing institutions of a people.Prys Morgan, Iolo Morganwg (Cardiff, 1975): by 1913 the National Library of Wales, the National Museum of Wales and the University of Wales (three institutions Iolo had “demanded or foreseen”) all existed. And the century which inherited every item of it chose, of all his works, to prosecute two books of poems.Each item stands documented singly: the coinages in GPC (Jenkins, Y Digymar, 2018); the dialect map, ibid.; the folk-song collecting and "Bugeilio’r Gwenith Gwyn", ibid.; the hymns, Munday (2018); the Myvyrian labour, CIM; the Samson stone (1789) and the fieldwork verdict of the Royal Commission, Jenkins (2018); Conybeare & Phillips, Outlines of the Geology of England and Wales (1822); the shop, the reprieve, the petitions, the plans for library, museum, academy and college, Jenkins (2018), from the Iolo papers. Now set that man beside the man you have been shown. They are the same man. And the distance between them is a work, his own, and the most successful thing he ever made.

A Glamorgan copyist of about 1600 had set down the rule in a poem he gave to the old bard Ystudfach: “Na ddirmyga wr bychan / nag ofna wr mawr”, do not scorn the small man, nor fear the great.Cardiff MS 18 (Phillipps 12462), p. 106: “Lyma gerdd ystydfach fardd: Na ddirmyga wr bychan / nag ofna wr mawr / … na anobeithia dy luniaeth o fynydd a dyfynfor”, in the hand that wrote the Precepts of Cattwn Ddoeth in the same manuscript, “circa 1600”: J. Gwenogvryn Evans, Report on Manuscripts in the Welsh Language, II, part 1 (1902), the Cardiff MS 18 entry; MALDWYN no. 27509.

He wrote the small man himself. In 1789 he placed an unsigned self-portrait in the Gentleman's Magazine, written in the third person over false initials: a sheepish, sickly, retiring booby of a bard, from "a very sequestered corner of Wales."The third-person self-portrait over the initials "J.D.", Gentleman's Magazine (1789), and the "sequestered corner" letters to patrons: Jenkins (2018). His own later question about his early pseudonyms, "Ai ofn oedd?", was it fear? — sits in the papers beside them. The corner was not sequestered. It was one day's post from the largest city on earth, and he knew its book trade, its dissenting pulpits and its radical taverns by name. The booby was not a booby. He was vetting his subscribers. The portrait was bait for patrons, and it worked; and when the day came that his life depended on it, he wore it before the Privy Council, and it worked there too. Understand what that means. The disguise was armour, tested at the highest tribunal in the land, and it held. Jung’s word for such a coat is persona. The second branch meets one with nothing behind it, the Hanoverian title. This one had a man behind it.

He named the old books his material came from, where a prosecutor could go and look for them, and the prosecutor found twenty-four of the thirty-one.See Gwirddysg, ¶205. He printed the name of the living man who owned the manuscript of the Triads, and the parish he lived in.See Gwirddysg, ¶205. And in 1823, at seventy-six, a court at Caerdydd took his reading of a family’s old papers as evidence and gave its verdict on it. A man can hide his standing from a government and still tell the truth about a manuscript. The record shows him doing both.

Then his son locked the rest away, you know this now, and the verdict of 1926 was given on the only Iolo the scholars could see. And the prosecution completed the costume. A humble stonemason, you have met the phrase already, in the mouth of the man who convicted him: it is the sneer that made the conviction possible, for who inquires after the connexions of a humble stonemason? The judges of 1926 tried the small man because the small man was the only one on the file. The large one was in a locked cupboard in Sir Fynwy. He had written their question for them in the 1790s, in the mocking voice of the men who would ask it, of Paine the staymaker and of himself, and of their right to look into the secrets of state: “What right has a Staymaker, a Cobler, a Welsh mason, Ploughmen, milkmaids, etc. … to pee[r] [into] the Arcanum Imperium … how dare they talk of their own Rights, or in oth[er] king-detested worlds, the Rights of Man”.NLW 21396E, no. 14.

And it has been done to you as well, and here is precisely how. Every device used on you is in the dossier of this chapter. You pitied the three pence in the gaol. The three pence was real, and so was the bread Peggy could not find. What he chose was how small he let the powerful think he was. You took the begging letters at their word; they were written by the man who refused money on principle from half of Bristol. You heard "humble stonemason" so many times, from his enemies and from his own pen, that the word humble came to feel like evidence. It is not evidence. It is the exhibit. The smallness was load-bearing: the visible bard (poor, whimsical, harmless) could be gaoled for debt and mocked for madness, and survived it all precisely because nothing about him seemed worth destroying. The connected bard, the Prince of Wales's subscriber-poet, Pitt's correspondent, the counties' king-maker, the courts' one incorruptible expert, was never put in the dock, because no one who mattered ever saw him whole. He said it himself, in one line, and left it in his papers like a key on a table: Power and wealth should never be combined."Power and wealth should never be combined": Iolo's own maxim in the papers, with its companion "Nid gwir yw pob rhyfeddod, ond rhyfeddod yw pob gwir", not every wonder is true, but every truth is a wonder: Jenkins (2018). He kept the power and refused the wealth, and the refusing was the keeping. Poverty was the licence. No one audits a man with three pence. One thing would break this reading, a letter in which, in the same month, he pleads want to one patron and is shown to have had the money in hand. None is known. And when a country debater reached for flattery and pressed him on high blood, he answered with the whole doctrine in one breath: "I can trace my own genealogy for many generations — I can prove that many of my forefathers were noble, wealthy men of power; and I am determined to print the whole genealogy, solely to show that the highest in wealth and greatness were the lowest in morality, and that the most noble men among my forefathers were the worst villains beyond all measure." The pedigree kept, and worn upside-down.Reported verbatim (in Cymraeg) in the first biography, T. D. Thomas, Bywgraffiad Iolo Morganwg, B.B.D. (Caerfyrddin, 1857) (ch. VII): “gallaf olrhain achyddiaeth fy hun am genhedlaethau lawer… ac yr wyf yn benderfynol i argraffu yr holl achyddiaeth, yn unig er mwyn dangos mai yr uchaf mewn cyfoeth a mawredd, oedd yr iselaf mewn moesoldeb.”

And so, before the verdict is read, correct the file. The court of 1926 convicted a humble stonemason of forging his way into a tradition too great for him. There was no humble stonemason. There was a man with the Prince of Wales at the head of his subscription list and Tom Paine on it; a man who was interrogated by the Prime Minister and came back a year later as his guest; a man whose evidence moved a fortune, gaoled perjurers and stayed a hanging; a man whose ideas were carried into the English canon by Coleridge and Wordsworth while the Cymry still thought him a village eccentric, and who dressed that man, deliberately, on this reading, for fifty years, in the coat of a fool, because the coat was the one thing the state never thought to search. The judges never tried Iolo Morganwg. They tried the coat.

16. Y Dull Cymreig

The Welsh Method509 The method before the men. 517 The Act of 1536, read as a sentence. 525 The language clause. 527 “Reduce.” 528 The method sent to Ireland. 538 The statute of 1746. 544 How the Act was received. 551 The prize: the land and the coal. 557 One operation, four instruments.

We have been speaking as though this were the Britons' story. It is not. It is one tile in a far larger floor, and the pattern only resolves when you stand back far enough to see the whole of it.

Yr Enghraifft: The Example of Wales

Before the men, the method. What was done to Iolo Morganwg was not improvised by scholars in 1926, and it was not invented for him. It is a procedure, it is written down, and the people who ran it wrote it down themselves, not in secret, but in statutes, in state papers, in charge-sheets between great officers, and in speeches to Parliament. They named it after us. They called it the example of Wales.

Start with the word, because the word came first. For centuries England called the Cymry barbarous. Iolo turned the word round.

He did it first as a joke, in his own hand, in the voice of an English gentleman explaining the Welsh to his own kind:

“It is not very clear what the Welsh Bard means by K[ing]s. It may possibly be Knaves. The word in the original Welsh is Brenin, which anciently signified K[in]g, synonymous to Knave. In its modern acceptation it signifies any Officer that executes the Law, from the Monarch up to the Hangman. This may be wrong, tho’ it does not yet appear to be so, for the Welsh Bards and their language are very barbarous things. I asked the old Celtic Rhymer what he meant by the word Brenin. Why said he, I mean a Journey-man K[ing], that is a Bumbailiff, Hangman, Informer, Attorney General, or, in short, a place-man of any description whatever: – what an ignorant old fellow! That he is so in the extreme will appear from the following particular: I asked him what he meant by the Welsh term Rheithwyr-anudon. Why, said he, I mean a Pack’d Jury or which is the same thing a special Jury. Now having myself some knowledge of the language, I am able to assure the reader that Rheithwyr-anudon signifies literally Foresworne Juries – so let every loyal Englishman say ‘From Welsh Bards, Good Lord deliver us’.”Iolo Morganwg, NLW 21401E, no. 11, printed in Geraint H. Jenkins, Bard of Liberty: The Political Radicalism of Iolo Morganwg (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012), p. 184; the manuscript is cited there at n. 111. Jenkins calls it “this characteristically witty passage”.

Say it plainly. The Englishman calls the bards barbarous, and then cannot read one word of theirs. And every word of Cymraeg he cannot read turns out to name an officer of his own government: the hangman, the informer, the Attorney General, the packed jury. The barbarism is on his side of the page, and he is the only one in the room who cannot see it. He did the same to vulgar, the word polite society kept for the common people. In a note to his ‘Ode to Solitude’, printed in Poems, Lyric and Pastoral in 1794, he gave the word to fashion itself, which lets any rogue in the right clothes pass for a king: “What can be more vulgar than that which enables fools, thieves, rascals of every description, oister-wenches, and the most infamous strumpets, to rival, in outward appearances, Kings and Queens, Peers and Peeresses, and all the head-bitten brood of vanity.”Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (1794), vol. II, p. 106 (note to “Ode to Solitude, written in 1782”).

Then he said it in earnest. The Welsh poor, he wrote, were more literate, more moral and more humane than the English poor, who were still sunk in “savage rudeness”.Jenkins, Bard of Liberty, p. 186. Iolo’s own manuscripts are cited there at n. 124: NLW 13089E, p. 324; NLW 13118B, pp. 98–9; NLW 13121B, p. 474. Jenkins reads them alongside Margaret Mary Rubel, Savage and Barbarian: Historical Attitudes in the Criticism of Homer and Ossian in Britain, 1760–1800 (Amsterdam, 1978). English had been used for “the sordid acquisition of wealth”, to keep the poor in “the thraldom of ignorance”. Cymraeg had been used to raise them.Jenkins, Bard of Liberty, p. 187, citing NLW 13121B, pp. 471–2 at n. 125: the English language and its literature had been used to encourage “the sordid acquisition of wealth” and to trample on the poor and hold them in “the thraldom of ignorance”, while Cymraeg “had been employed to improve the minds and morals of the Welsh and enable them to pursue truth and knowledge”.

The historian who found these pages says so in as many words. Iolo, writes Geraint Jenkins, “subverted the traditional image of England as ‘civilized’ and Wales as ‘barbarous’ by depicting the Welsh peasantry as a far more literate, moral and humane people than their English counterparts who were still wedded to ‘savage rudeness’ and barbarity.”Jenkins, Bard of Liberty, p. 186.

Turn the page. The same historian, on the next leaf of the same book, writes that Iolo “passed them off”, and was “continually concocting bogus material”.Jenkins, Bard of Liberty, p. 187. “Passed them off” is said of Taliesin, Aneirin, Myrddin, Llywarch Hen and Catwg Ddoeth, claimed as men of Morgannwg or men of Siluria; “continually concocting bogus material” stands three sentences later on the same page. He has just shown the man catching the word barbarous being used as a weapon, and one page later he picks the weapon up himself. Call it a slip and you miss the measure of how deep the old verdict runs: it reasserts itself in the hands of the very writer who has described the trick.

Then the statute, which everything else refers back to. The Act of 1536 that claimed Cymru opens with a preamble of one sentence and two hundred and seventy-three words:

“Albeit the Dominion Principality and Country of Wales justly and righteously is, and ever hath been incorporated annexed united and subject to and under the Imperial Crown of this Realm … whereof the King’s most Royal Majesty of Meer Droit, and very Right, is very Head … yet notwithstanding, because that … divers Rights Usages Laws and Customs be far discrepant from the Laws and Customs of this Realm, and also because that the People of the same Dominion have and do daily use a Speech nothing like, nor consonant to the natural Mother Tongue used within this Realm … His Highness therefore, of a singular Zeal Love and Favour … minding and intending to reduce them … and utterly to extirp all and singular the sinister Usages and Customs differing from the same, and to bring the said Subjects… to an amicable Concord and Unity, hath … ordained enacted and established…”27 Henry VIII c. 26, the preamble, from Ivor Bowen, ed., The Statutes of Wales (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1908), pp. 75–76. Bowen heads the Act A.D. 1535, by the regnal year; it is conventionally cited 1536. Both are right. Counted in Bowen’s text: two hundred and seventy-three words from Albeit to established, the main verb hath being the two hundred and forty-first. The preamble is given here in the words the argument turns on; the whole sentence stands in Y Ffeil, under The Act of 1536.

Read it as a sentence and the whole operation is visible in its grammar. The first word is the crime. Albeit is a concessive, although, and the single most contestable claim in the document, that Cymru “ever hath been” subject to the Crown, is put inside it and granted in passing, as common ground already agreed, on the way to the real business. Nobody argues with a subordinate clause. Those three words convert a conquest into a filing error. Cymru had not ever been subject; it was invaded in 1282 and held down by castles, which is why Conwy, Caernarfon, Harlech and Biwmares are where they are.

Then the sentence does not let you out. The main verb does not arrive for two hundred and forty words, and it is not finished until the two hundred and seventy-third, “hath … ordained enacted and established”, and you cannot interrupt a sentence. By the time the verb lands, the reader has been walked past the title, the blame and the purpose without one place to stop and disagree. The Britons are given exactly two active verbs in the whole of it, and both are offences: they “use a Speech nothing like” the mother tongue, and “some rude and ignorant People have made Distinction and Diversity”. Speaking, and noticing. That is the entirety of the Britons’ agency in the founding document of the annexation. The sedition, meanwhile, has no author at all: Discord, Variance, Debate, Division, Murmur and Sedition “hath grown”, intransitive, agentless, like weather. Nobody caused it; it simply appeared between the subjects. And the native law is not called different. It is “far discrepant”, a word that presupposes the standard it has departed from, and so performs the annexation before the clause does. The King is the only actor in two hundred and seventy-three words, with three infinitives of purpose, all his: to reduce, to extirp, to bring. And the most absolute claim in the document is made in French (“of Meer Droit, and very Right”, mere droit, pure and absolute title) in the language of the occupying law rather than in English.The Act’s habit of piling synonyms in threes and fours, incorporated annexed united and subject; Rights Usages Laws and Customs; Zeal Love and Favour; Order Notice and Knowledge; ordained enacted and established, is legal formulary style, and its effect is to make every claim feel exhaustive, settled and already decided.

Two clauses later the jurisprudence ends in four words. Justice in Cymru is to be done “according to the Laws Customs and Statutes of this Realm of England, and after no Welsh Laws”.27 Henry VIII c. 26, §18; Bowen, Statutes of Wales, p. 87. The jurisdiction Magna Carta had guaranteed in 1215 is abolished in four words in 1536, and the abolition is done as a favour.

And 1536 was not the first time an English government had settled the question of which law governs Cymru's ground. Three centuries earlier it had settled it the other way, in writing, and then unwritten it. Magna Carta gave three of its sixty-three clauses to Cymru. Clause 56 orders the immediate return of everything taken from Britons without lawful judgment of their peers, and then does something the later centuries make almost unreadable: it names the governing law, ground by ground. De tenementis Angliae secundum legem Angliae, de tenementis Walliae secundum legem Walliae, de tenementis Marchiae secundum legem Marchiae, for holdings in England by the law of England, for holdings in Wales by the law of Wales, for holdings in the March by the law of the March. There it stands, in the founding document of English liberty, in the plainest Latin: the law of Hywel, named as the law of Welsh land, in one sentence and on the same footing as the law of England. Clause 57 promises the Britons full justice on the older dispossessions secundum leges Walensium, according to the laws of the Welsh. Clause 58 gives back what John Plantagenet of Anjou (King John) was holding to keep the country quiet: Nos reddemus filium Lewelini statim, et omnes obsides de Wallia, et cartas quae nobis liberatae fuerunt in securitatem pacis, we will restore the son of Llywelyn at once, and all the hostages of Wales, and the charters handed over to us as security for the peace.Magna Carta, 1215, cc. 56–58; Latin from the engrossments (text and translation, the Magna Carta Project, University of East Anglia). Clause 56 opens: “Si nos dissaisivimus vel elongavimus Walenses de terris vel libertatibus vel rebus aliis, sine legali judicio parium suorum, in Anglia vel in Wallia, eis statim reddantur…” and closes “Idem facient Walenses nobis et nostris”, and the Welsh shall do the same for us and ours: a reciprocal jurisdiction, not a favour. Clause 59 does the same office for Alexander, king of Scots.

Now open the next edition. John was dead within the year, and in November 1216 the regency reissued the charter with forty-two clauses in place of sixty-three, stripped of what it judged temporary or political. Cymru's clauses were among the losses, the Scots clause beside them, and they were not restored in the reissue of 1217, nor in the definitive charter of 1225, nor in the confirmation of 1297 by Edward Plantagenet of Anjou (Edward I), the thirty-seven-chapter text that went into the statute book, three of whose chapters stand in it still. The concession lasted one year and one king. Say it flatly, because it is a flat fact: English law once conceded, in the most celebrated document it possesses, that Welsh land is held under Welsh law, and then cut the sentence out, and went on revering the document. Three hundred and twenty-one years later the Act of Union enacted the opposite, and there was nothing left in the charter to contradict it. The two erasures we began with (the court dissolved, the man who raised it made a fraud) are the late instalments of that very old account.The 1216 reissue (Bristol, 12 November) cut the sixty-three clauses of 1215 to forty-two, dropping what the regency judged temporary or political; cc. 56–58, and c. 59 for Scotland, went with them and never came back. The charter that survives in English law is the 1225 text as confirmed in 1297 (25 Edw. I), thirty-seven chapters, not one of them touching Cymru. The clause is not repealed. It is simply not there, and has not been there for eight hundred years.

One phrase in that preamble belongs to a later science, and it is used here as a reading and not as a proof. The King acts “of a singular Zeal Love and Favour”, and what the love is for is to extirp: to root out. Anna Freud, in 1936, gave the name reaction-formation to a defence in which a feeling the mind will not admit is held down by putting its opposite in its place. Repression, she writes, is “secured by means of a reaction-formation, which contains the reverse of the repressed instinctual impulse (sympathy instead of cruelty, bashfulness instead of exhibitionism)”.Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, trans. Cecil Baines (London: Hogarth Press, 1937; German original 1936), p. 96, read at the scan of the 1937 edition; the defence is called “one of the most important measures adopted by the ego as a permanent protection against the id” at p. 9, and is one of the nine listed at pp. 46–47. She was describing a child, and nothing here says that an Act of Parliament has a mind. The claim is narrower. The text of 1536 sets the most destructive verb in its vocabulary beside the most loving noun, in one breath, and the pattern has a name. Whether the men who drafted it felt anything, no document says. The pairing is on the page. Iolo would not let that pairing stand in a man either. He wrote that “from an early period of my youth I have been clearly convinced that it is impossible for a Warrior to be a Christian”.NLW 6575E, p. [iii]. Geraint Jenkins thinks Iolo set this conviction earlier in his life than it began; it is in his poems against war by the late 1770s.

Then the language clause, and the reach of it is the find. All courts are to be kept “in the English Tongue”; all oaths, verdicts and affidavits in the English tongue; and “no Person or Persons that use the Welsh Speech or Language shall have or enjoy any Manner Office or Fees within this Realm of England, Wales, or other the King’s Dominion, upon Pain of forfeiting the same Offices or Fees, unless he or they use and exercise the English Speech or Language.”27 Henry VIII c. 26, §20; Bowen, Statutes of Wales, p. 87. In plain words: a man who spoke only Cymraeg, as most of his countrymen did, could hold no office of any kind in his own country (not justice, not sheriff, not coroner, not clerk) and the court that tried him would take the oaths, hear the evidence and give the verdict in a tongue he did not have. Not office in Cymru. Office anywhere the Crown held or would ever come to hold. On the day it was passed, the language clause of the Act of Union was drafted to the size of an empire that did not yet exist. It stood for four hundred years, and one judge broke it from the bench: Sir Thomas Artemus Jones heard cases in Cymraeg in defiance of the clause, and backed the petition that led to the Welsh Courts Act of 1942, the same man who had told the Middle Temple in 1937 that the Union was shaped by “responsible self-government”, “one of the foundations of British rule throughout the world”.Thomas Artemus Jones, The Union of England and Wales (London, 1937), p. 9; on his hearing cases in Welsh, Gwilym Prys Davies, “The Legal Status of the Welsh Language in the Twentieth Century”, in Geraint H. Jenkins and Mari A. Williams (eds.), ‘Let’s Do Our Best for the Ancient Tongue’ (Cardiff, 2000); both as given by Jenkins (2008), p. 22 and n. 69.

And they never once used our word for it. Across both volumes of the Crown’s Irish correspondence under Harri ap Harri, some three and a quarter million characters of letters between the men actually doing the work, colony, colonise and colonisation occur no times at all. What occurs instead is reform and reformation, two hundred and seventy times; obedience and obeysaunce, a hundred and seventy-three; reduce and reduction, eighty-six; conformity, thirty-four; civility, twenty-eight.Counted across State Papers, published under the authority of His Majesty’s Commission. King Henry the Eighth, vols II and III (the Irish correspondence), read in full here. The zero for colony and its cognates is a zero across both volumes, and holds in the old spellings (colonie, colonye). Plantation, the word of the next reigns, does not occur in them either; the verb plant is used of settling men four times, all in volume III, as when Robert Cowley wrote to Cromwell in 1539, “It shalbe necessary to plante Englishmen here, suche as wol remayne to inhabite here” (vol. III, p. 148). Counted again on 27 October 2026 in the Internet Archive text of both volumes.

Reduce is not a soft word for conquer. It is Latin reducere: to lead back. A thing that is being led back was yours to begin with, so the verb quietly asserts that the country was always the Crown’s and is merely being returned to its owner. You are not taking it. You are recovering it. And a man recovering his own goods does not have to justify himself, cannot be accused of theft, and owes no explanation to anybody, least of all to the people currently holding the thing. The whole claim of right is smuggled into the grammar, where it never has to be argued and therefore can never be refused. You cannot rebut a verb. Its companions do the same work: reform presupposes a right form departed from, conformity a shape to conform to, civility that the people had none, order that the prior state was disorder, settle that the land was unsettled. They had no need of a word for colonising. They had a vocabulary that made the question unaskable. Iolo heard that vocabulary being issued in his own day. When the French landed at Abergwaun in February 1797, he wrote to William Owen Pughe, his fellow worker on the Myvyrian in Llundain, that “the old women of Pembrokeshire had secured the damned Republicans, as it seems we are requested to call them”. The word was the state’s; the mockery was his.Iolo Morganwg to William Owen Pughe, 7 March 1797, Correspondence, II, p. 19.

Now watch it being exported while it is still being built. In 1515 a plan for the reformation of Ireland proposes arming the Pale “after maner of Welshemen”, every man to have “his horsse, his spere, and his harnoyse, reddy allwaye, after the Welshe maner”, and stocking the plantation with “one man oute of every parysshe of England, Cornwale, and Wales… to inhabyte”.State Papers Hen. VIII, vol. II, pp. 19–25, “State of Ireland, and Plan for its Reformation”, 1515. The conquered are to supply the manpower for the next conquest, and Cornwall is named alongside Wales. In plain words: the English settlers were to be armed like Welshmen, each man with his own horse, spear and armour, ready at all times; and the country was to be filled by taking one man from every parish in England, Cornwall and Wales and settling him on it. In 1521 the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland writes to the King and costs the job in units of Cymru: “this londe is fyve tyme as moch as Walys; and when Kyng Edward the Furst set on hande to conqwer the same, it cost hym ten yeres, or he wan it all… I feare, and can not byleve it wolbe so sone won, as Wales was.”Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, to Henry VIII, State Papers Hen. VIII, vol. II, pp. 73–74. In the same letter he uses the euphemism twice, “the meanys for reduccion off the same” and “reduce this londe to obedience and gode order”, and states the policy: “trustyng, by that meanys, to dissever some off them… more dissevered.” In plain words: this country is five times the size of Wales; it took Edward Plantagenet of Anjou ten years to conquer Wales; and I cannot believe Ireland will be won as quickly as Wales was. That is project planning, not analogy, and Cymru is the baseline estimate.

In 1539 Robert Cowley, Master of the Rolls in Ireland, wrote to Thomas Cromwell asking for settlers: “It shalbe necessary to plante Englishmen here, suche as wol remayne to inhabite here, beeing honest men, and not ravenoures.”Robert Cowley to Thomas Cromwell, written at Dublin on Our Lady’s Day of the Nativity (8 September) 1539, State Papers, published under the authority of His Majesty’s Commission. King Henry the Eighth, vol. III (London, 1834), p. 148, running head “R. COWLEY to CRUMWELL”; read on the page image (Internet Archive, statepaperspubli03grea, leaf 179). In plain words: Englishmen must be planted here, men who will stay and live here, honest men, not plunderers.

Two years later he wrote the worst sentence in these pages. Arguing about how Ireland should be governed, he reaches for us:

“Sume wold think it better the land shuld remayn stil in seperacion and contencion, wherby they shal have no mynde ne power to confeder with any alyen ralme to the noysance of England… Example of Wales, which is as true to the Crown, as England, by reason that there is not oon general ruler, but several in every shire, whoos myndes and conjecturis can not concurre in oon, by reason that they bee distansing, and every ferith to disclose his mynde to an other. So might Irland bee orderid, if it were subdued; no Deputie Generall, but several rulers, in maner of Seneshalles and Justices of Peas.”Robert Cowley, Master of the Rolls in Ireland, “Plan for the Reformation of Ireland”, State Papers Hen. VIII, vol. III, pp. 346–348, the editors’ headnote assigning it to Cowley’s hand between August and December 1541; calendared in Letters and Papers, Hen. VIII, XVII, no. 68, endorsed “Comittatur”.

He is not saying Cymru is peaceful, or content, or well governed. He is saying Cymru is safe because its leaders are kept apart, cannot combine, and are each too frightened to say what they think to the next man, and he is recommending it. The country is quiet because the people who might lead it have been made to distrust one another, and that is entered not as a scandal but as the proposal. And the schoolroom is in the same paper: the Irish are to become “obedient to his lawes, forsaking their Irish lawes, habittes, and custumes, setting their childern to lerne English”.Cowley, ibid. Their law, their custom and their children’s language, all three, in 1541, three hundred and six years before Brad y Llyfrau Gleision. In plain words: give up your law, your dress and your customs, and bring your children up in English.

And here is what happened to that passage afterwards, which is the whole subject here performed on a state paper. The Victorian calendar, the form in which nearly every scholar meets the document, and the form they cite, renders the whole of it as: “Wales is true to the Crown, because not under one ruler, but several in each shire; and so would Ireland be under seneschals and justices.” What the abridgement drops is “seperacion and contencion”; “no mynde ne power to confeder”; “whoos myndes and conjecturis can not concurre in oon”; “they bee distansing, and every ferith to disclose his mynde to an other”; and the conditional “if it were subdued.”The calendar entry is Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, XVII, no. 68. The State Paper itself is at St. P. III. 346. Every clause removed is a clause of motive. What survives is a tidy note on local government. The calendar keeps the arrangement and loses the reason for it, which is the whole of the evidence, and the injury is done by abridgement, by people who are not lying.

Five years later the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, drawing a charge-sheet against the Lord Deputy, ends a paragraph with four words: “For I cannot lerne that ever soch barbarus people kepte toche any whyle, or were ever vanquished wyth feyre wordes. Let Wales be example.”Sir John Alen, Lord Chancellor of Ireland, “Certen Notes on the State of Ireland”, 1546, State Papers Hen. VIII, vol. III, pp. 564–565, item CCCCXLI; the editors note that it seems to be in Alen’s own hand. St Leger was the Lord Deputy he was accusing. In plain words: I have never heard of such a barbarous people keeping their word for long, or of their ever being conquered with fair words. Let Wales be the example. Cowley and Alen were on opposite sides of the argument. Cymru was not the point in dispute between them; it was the shared premise. That is what makes it policy and not rhetoric.

The premise outlived the Tudurs. In 1607 the King himself stood in Parliament to argue for the annexation of his own northern kingdom and asked: “Do you not gain by the Union of Wales? And is not Scotland greater than Wales?”James VI and I, addressing Parliament in 1607 on the proposed union with Scotland, in Geraint H. Jenkins, “‘Taphy-land historians’ and the Union of England and Wales 1536–2007”, Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies 1, no. 2 (2008), p. 8, citing Peter R. Roberts in Bradshaw and Morrill, eds., The British Problem c.1534–1707 (1996), p. 139. Not concord, not justice, not the welfare of the Britons. Gain. And the second sentence is a scaling calculation: Scotland is bigger, therefore the return is bigger, which is Surrey’s costing of Ireland in units of Cymru, done eighty-six years later on Scotland, by the monarch, on the floor of the House. In 1630 a judge put the same argument in print, holding that because the annexation of 1536 had produced “great peace, tranquility, ciuility, and infinite good” it could serve as a precedent for further union; and the title of his book binds Wales, Cornwall and Chester together as one administrative category.John Doddridge, The History of the Ancient and Modern Estate of the Principality of Wales, Dutchy of Cornewall, and Earldome of Chester (London, 1630), p. 40; Jenkins (2008), p. 8.

In 1612 the Attorney-General for Ireland, the architect of the Plantation of Ulster, set the method out as a checklist. “The like prudent course hath been observed in reducing of Wales,” he wrote: divide it into shires, erect a borough in every shire, send knights and burgesses to Parliament, establish a Court of Presidency, run the assizes as in England, make all the laws and statutes of England in force there, and abolish gavelkind, “which is the very Irish gavelkind”, “by means whereof that entire country in a short time was securely settled in peace and obedience.”Sir John Davies, A Discovery of the True Causes why Ireland was never entirely Subdued (London, 1612), pp. 274–275 of the CELT edition. He equates the two native legal systems explicitly, calling the native law “in many points agreeable to the Irish or Brehon law.” Edward I, he wrote, “did not reject and cast them off as outlaws and enemies, but caused their laws and customs to be examined”, abolishing some, allowing some, amending some; when that was neglected “a great part of Wales grew wild and barbarous again”; and Henry VIII’s statutes “brought it indeed to full perfection”, so that Wales “hath attained to that civility of manners and plenty of all things as now we find it not inferior to the best parts of England.” His charge against the law of Cymru was that under it “the heirs-females were utterly excluded and the bastards did inherit as well as the legitimate”.Davies, Discovery (1612), as printed in Henry Morley (ed.), Ireland under Elizabeth and James the First (London, 1890), pp. 274–5. Gavelkind is the English lawyers’ name for cyfran, the custom of Cymru by which a man’s land was shared among all his sons when he died.Geraint H. Jenkins, “‘Taphy-land historians’ and the Union of England and Wales 1536–2007”, Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies 1, no. 2 (2008), p. 4: “the divisive Welsh custom known as cyfran (gavelkind) was supplanted by primogeniture”. The word divisive is his. In plain words, abolishing it meant the eldest son took the land and his brothers took none of it: a holding that had been the family’s became one man’s, to keep, to sell or to mortgage. He also records what happened when the enforcement lapsed: “a great part of Wales grew wild and barbarous again.” Note the word, and note who uses it. The Attorney-General for Ireland uses of Cymru the word the Lord Chancellor of Ireland used of the Irish, and the word the Blue Books would use of its children three centuries later. In these papers barbarous names a status, the condition a country is deemed to be in whenever the administration is not currently on top of it, and therefore the standing justification for going back in. And the word is older than the Tudurs. In an Anglo-Saxon royal grant of land in Cornwall, the king, having given the place its Saxon name, adds: “which the inhabitants there call barbarico nomine, by the barbarous name of Pendyfig.” “This barbarous name,” wrote the English historian who cited the grant in 1803, “was Welsh!”Sharon Turner, A Vindication of the Genuineness of the Ancient British Poems (London, 1803), p. 8, citing “MSS. Cott. Lib. Claud. B. 6, p. 38”. See Y Celwydd, ¶128.

By 1706 the word had left the chancery and was in the street, and the direction of the lesson had reversed. Defoe, an eye-witness to the Anglo-Scottish union debates, records the cry against it: the people “cried out, they were Scotsmen, and they would be Scotsmen still; they contemned the name of Britons, fit for the Welchmen, who were made the scoff of the English, after they had reduced them.”Daniel Defoe, The History of the Union between England and Scotland (London, 1786 edn), p. 226; Jenkins (2008), p. 10. There is the verb, a hundred and seventy years after the statute, in the mouths of ordinary Scots, used of Cymru as a plain settled fact that needs no explanation. Every other document here is an English official holding Cymru up as an example to be followed. This is a people holding Cymru up as an example to be avoided. Cymru was the precedent for the administrators and the warning for the governed, and both sides knew it at the same time.

In 1746 Parliament finished the grammar. One statute extended the Act of 1731, that all proceedings in the courts “shall be in the English Language”, to the Great Sessions and every other court in Cymru; and the next clause, which the editor of The Statutes of Wales heads “WALES TO BE INCLUDED IN ENGLAND”, enacted that wherever England “hath been or shall be mentioned in any Act of Parliament, the same has been and shall from henceforth be deemed and taken to comprehend and include the Dominion of Wales”.20 George II c. 42, ss. 2–3, in Ivor Bowen (ed.), The Statutes of Wales (London, 1908), pp. 205–206. The clause also takes in the town of Berwick upon Tweed. A country was folded into its neighbour’s name by a definition clause. “No objections were voiced publicly.”Jenkins (2008), p. 12. Iolo had seen why. In his drafts for the preface to the Myvyrian Archaiology, arguing that after 1536 the gentry of Cymru had worked with the government against their own language, he put it in one line: “Govt. can always engage the superior classes in its designs”.NLW 13089E, p. 264.

By 1768 the verdict had reached the reference shelf. The first Encyclopaedia Britannica, printed in Edinburgh, set English down as “the language of a great and powerful nation”.Encyclopaedia Britannica (Edinburgh, 1768–71), as quoted in Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People (Oxford, 1989), p. 306; Jenkins (2008), p. 11.

The church learned the same lesson. Robert Lowth, whose Short Introduction to English Grammar of 1762 praised “the genius of the [English] tongue”, was made bishop of St DavidsSt Davids: Tyddewi. for five months in 1766; and in the Court of Arches, in the case of Dr Thomas Bowles, an advocate argued that since Wales was “a conquered country” it was perfectly in order for the church to promote the English language there.Jenkins (2008), p. 12, citing Lowth, A Short Introduction to English Grammar (London, 1762), p. iii; Lambeth Palace Library, Records of the Court of Arches, no. 10002, G 139/95; and Jenkins, “‘Horrid Unintelligible Jargon’: The Case of Dr Thomas Bowles”, Welsh History Review 15 (1991), 494–523. A conquered country. The word the preamble of 1536 would not use, spoken in an ecclesiastical court two hundred and thirty years later as a settled point of law. Iolo watched a later bishop of the same see at the same work. When Samuel Horsley, Bishop of St Davids, led the hunt against the Unitarians, Iolo described it in Cymraeg as palfau llygredigaeth ar bob peth … pob gwirionedd, pob cyfiawnder, a phob braint naturiawl i ddyn, the paws of corruption on everything … every truth, every justice, and every natural right of man.NLW 13112B, p. 318.

And in 1775, with a colonial war beginning, the greatest parliamentary orator of the age rose in the Commons to argue that America should be conciliated rather than coerced, and reached for Cymru: “as by a charm, the tumults subsided; obedience was restored; peace, order, and civilisation, followed in the train of liberty — When the day-star of the English constitution had arisen in their hearts, all was harmony within and without.”Edmund Burke, The Speech of Edmund Burke, Esq; on Moving his Resolutions for Conciliation with the Colonies, March 22, 1775 (London, 1775), p. 38, quoted in Jenkins (2008), pp. 12–13, who calls it Burke’s “misleading rhetorical interpretation” of Cymru’s experience. He is describing Cymru since Harri ap Harri’s Act, and offering it to the House as the precedent. Two hundred and thirty-nine years after the statute, the settlement of Cymru is still the working example an English statesman produces when he is asked what to do with a colony. Look at his four words, obedience, order, civilisation, liberty. Three of the four are the vocabulary counted above in sixteenth-century state papers. Nothing had to be translated. The language survived the administration. Five years later, in his speech on economical reform, the same Burke counted Wales’s “eight judges” among the “laborious fooleries” of a “form and shadow of a principality without any substance”, and told the House that his “original thought was to suppress five of the eight judges”. Those eight judges were the Court of the Great Sessions, the last survivor of Cymru’s judicature. He praised the union, and then set out to finish it.Speech of Edmund Burke, Esq. … on presenting to the House of Commons (on the 11th of February, 1780) a plan for the better security of the independence of Parliament, and the oeconomical reformation of the civil and other establishments (London, 1780), p. 28 (the eight judges, the fooleries, the shadow of a principality) and pp. [31]–32 (to suppress five of the eight), read on the page text (Internet Archive, speechofedmundbu00burk). The speech of 1775 makes no such proposal. America was not settled on the Welsh model. It broke with the Crown and built a republic, and Iolo wrote that its lawmakers had set up something “as good as, or better than any thing of this kind that has ever yet been established [on] this earth”.NLW 13123B, p. 56. The word in square brackets is supplied by Jenkins.

One thing must be said plainly here, because everything here depends on it and it is the easiest thing in the world to get wrong. This was not the English doing it to the Britons. The same instrument was turned on English ground and by the same hands. The Council of the North was set up after the Pilgrimage of Grace with powers modelled on the Welsh Council, because “the success of the Welsh Council seemed so great”.Caroline Skeel, The Council in the Marches of Wales (London, 1904), pp. 79–80. The instructions for the Council of the North survive as British Library Additional (Egerton) MS 2790, ff. 30 ff., with explicit reference to Wales at §§11 and 44; not read here. Four English counties (Herefordshire, Shropshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire) were governed from Ludlow for a century, and fought it for forty years. In 1604 every Justice and Baron of the Exchequer in England resolved una voce that the four counties lay outside the jurisdiction, and the Crown refused the ruling; the grand jury of Herefordshire presented the court as a nuisance; a declaration carrying five thousand signatures was raised; and not until 1641 did the Commons vote the jurisdiction in the four shires illegal.Skeel, Council in the Marches, pp. 133–137, 161–162. The Crown’s own argument for holding them in: “it being too well knowen that those 4 Counties are as apte to ‘banding and siding’ as Wales.” And the list of places that got out is an English list. Bristol, Chester and Caerwrangon (Worcester) each won relief before the counties tried; Cheshire obtained a separate exemption. Cymru is not on that list and could not be, because the whole legal question in the forty-year case was whether the word Marches in the statute meant the border counties or the old Marcher lordships, a question that could only be raised about England, since no party ever disputed that the statute covered Cymru. The English places argued about whether they were inside the instrument. Cymru was what defined it. There was a door, and Cymru was not a room with a door. Cymru was the building.

Two smaller things, because they show the method working at the scale of a town and of a man’s name. In 1284 the Britons were “kept down by castles”, and beneath the castles towns were built and given charters modelled on an English city’s, with a guild-merchant that “monopolised the trade of the district”, and in some of those towns, Caernarfon and Conwy among them, the charters excluded native burgesses.Skeel, Council in the Marches, on the Edwardian settlement. Locked out of the commerce of his own country by charter in 1284; locked out of office by statute in 1536, the same instrument, two hundred and fifty years apart. And under Harri ap Harri the President of the Marches, Rowland Lee, Bishop of Lichfield, sitting on a cause from Cymru and “wearied with the quantity of aps in the jury”, directed from the bench that the panel take their last name or the name of their house, so that Thomas ap Richard ap Howel ap Jevan Vychan should “for the future be reduced to the poor dissyllable Mostyn; no doubt to the great mortification of many an antient line.”Thomas Pennant, Tours in Wales, ed. John Rhys (Caernarvon, 1883), I, pp. 17–18, read on the page image; quoted also by Skeel. The verb is Pennant’s own. Lee is recorded by Skeel as the only prominent figure who objected to the Union, and he objected from the other side, dismayed at plans to place local government in the hands of “untrustworthy natives”. A descent through four generations reduced to two syllables for the convenience of a court: the Britons’ naming system abolished from the bench, by irritation, without a statute.

At the time, the Act passed almost in silence. Elis Gruffudd, the soldier-chronicler of Calais, whose Cronicl runs from the Creation to 1552, gave it one line: “Subsequently he passed another bill to decree and divide the whole of Wales into counties.”Elis Gruffudd, Cronicl (NLW MS 3054D), in the English of Peter R. Roberts, “Tudor Legislation and the Political Status of ‘the British Tongue’”, in Geraint H. Jenkins (ed.), The Welsh Language before the Industrial Revolution (Cardiff, 1997), p. 125; quoted in Jenkins (2008), p. 2. The Cymraeg has not been read off the manuscript here.

There was praise, and it is worth hearing who gave it. Lewys Morgannwg, the royal bard of the south, sang Harri ap Harri as “a powerful Hercules”. George Owen of Henllys, Lord of Cemais, called Cymru “a cuntrey in England” and the Tudur years a “joyefull metamorphosis”. In the history of Cymru that David Powel began in 1584: “Since the happy incorporation of the Welsh with the English the history of both nations as well as the people is united.”Jenkins, “‘Taphy-land historians’ and the Union of England and Wales 1536–2007”, Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies 1, no. 2 (2008), pp. 5–7: Lewys Morgannwg from Cynfael A. Lake (ed.), Gwaith Lewys Morgannwg (2004), II, 491–5 (the English is Jenkins’s); George Owen, The Description of Penbrokshire, III, 7, 56; Powel as printed in William Wynne’s History of Wales (1697), sig. A3r. The historian who records them says what they were: “the major beneficiaries, having sampled tangible economic and political advantages, were happy to put a favourable spin on the results of incorporation.”Jenkins (2008), p. 6. The praise came from the men the Act had paid. Two and a half centuries on, the bard of Morgannwg gave the other answer: Clyw’r brenin balch di-ras, / A thi’r offeiriad bras: / Dau ddiawl ynglŷn!, hear, proud and graceless king, and you, fat priest: two devils bound together!Iolo Morganwg, Breiniau Dyn, stanza 10 (Charnell-White 2012, no. 18); the English is our own.

None of this is a grievance invented later. The first holder of a Chair in Welsh History in the University of Wales called the Union in print “an annexation rather than a bipartisan treaty”, and in a private letter of 1938 he went further: “I can well believe that a session of parliament at the time was something akin to a Fascist Grand Council and that there was little scope for discussion of the draft submitted.”William Rees, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion (1937), p. 27, for the printed judgment; and Rees to J. E. Lloyd, 23 August 1938, Bangor University Archives, Papers of Sir John Edward Lloyd 248, for the letter. He put it in a letter and not in a lecture. That is the same mechanism operating on a professor in 1938 instead of a stonemason in 1794, and it is the reason this court trusts correspondence, marginalia and manuscript over the published book. The modern authority on Iolo Morganwg, the same scholar we lean on for Iolo’s life, calls the preamble’s claim “the extraordinarily fictitious claim”, and calls Cymru “England’s oldest colony”.Jenkins (2008), pp. 3 and 5.

And it was said from inside the case itself. In 1901 O. M. Edwards (in whose journal the campaign against the Gorsedd had been opened in 1896) wrote of the Tudurs: “To them the customs of Wales were sinister usages, its language a curse, and its national life a dead volcano of treason.”O. M. Edwards, Wales (London, 1901), p. 335; Jenkins (2008), p. 18. When the four-hundredth anniversary came in 1936, Saunders Lewis said Cymru had been “taken out at dawn and shot”, and Ambrose Bebb called the Act “the most fatal blow ever to the entire Welsh culture”. Half a century later Gwyn Alf Williams wrote of “a naked people under an acid rain”.Saunders Lewis, “The Case for Welsh Nationalism”, The Welsh Nationalist 5 (1936), p. 6; W. Ambrose Bebb (ed.), Y Ddeddf Uno, 1536 (Caernarfon, 1937), pp. ix–x, in Jenkins’s English; Gwyn A. Williams, When was Wales? (London, 1985), p. 305. All three as quoted in Jenkins (2008), pp. 21 and 26.

So: a statute that grants its own title in a subordinate clause, abolishes a jurisprudence in four words, and bars a language from office across an empire not yet built; a vocabulary with no word for what it was doing and a verb that made the question unaskable; the whole of it offered as a working model to Ireland in 1541 and 1546, to Scotland in 1607 and 1630, and to America in 1775; run on English ground as well as Cymru's; and a calendar that later tidied the motive out of the central document. That is the method. And the usages the Act set out to extirp, the native law, the native custom, the native speech, the native descent kept in trained memory, are the exact things Iolo Morganwg spent his life copying out and saving.

And he saw what the Act was for. In 1801, in the preface to the first volume of the Myvyrian Archaiology, the stonemason put its purpose into one sentence that no Act of Parliament would ever print: “About the time when Wales was incorporated with England, government seems to have entertained an idea that it was not safe or politic to suffer the Welsh language to live; the use of it was discouraged, and all that could decently, and with saving-appearances, be done, was attempted, to suppress and annihilate it.”Owen Jones, Iolo Morganwg and William Owen Pughe (eds.), The Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales, I (London, 1801), preface, pp. [ix]–x; read against the reprint (Denbigh, 1870). The preface is Iolo’s: drafts in his own hand are NLW 13089E, pp. 264–73; NLW 13104B, pp. 119–29; NLW 13112B, pp. 11–36 (Geraint H. Jenkins, Bard of Liberty, 2012, p. 192 n. 163). Decently, and with saving-appearances, the Zeal Love and Favour of 1536, named for what it was, by the man the academy would convict. The modern authority on him grants him the priority: Iolo, he writes, “was the first historian to declare that union had precipitated a cultural malaise”.Jenkins, “‘Taphy-land historians’ and the Union of England and Wales 1536–2007”, Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies 1, no. 2 (2008), p. 15. In Bard of Liberty (2012), p. 192, he says it again: Iolo “became the first historian to declare publicly that union had been seriously damaging to Welsh culture because the notorious ‘language clause’ of 1536 had deliberately discriminated against the Welsh language”. And on the same page he says that Iolo “unashamedly created the past in his own image”, “passing off bogus material as authentic chronicles”.Jenkins (2008), p. 15. The priority and the charge, on one page, from one pen, the same move, made a second time.

The Act names the crime. Nearly four hundred years later the academy passed the sentence, on the archivist, rather than on the archive. What follows is the reason and the machine, and then one worked example of one of those methods, the doctrine that built it, the architects who ran it and the bench that delivered it, carried out in our own time, by our own countrymen, on one man. The evidence is long, and the counts themselves are longer still: they are in Y Ffeil.

Y Wobr: The Prize

Now the reason, because nobody builds a machine like that to catch a stonemason out in a poem. Cymru was the first industrial nation in the world.Beryl Evans, Tracing Your Welsh Ancestors (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2015): Wales “can therefore claim to be the world’s first ‘industrial nation’”. Merthyr was “the greatest industrial phenomenon of the world”, with the largest ironworks on earth at Dowlais, and, at Penydarren in 1804, the first steam locomotive ever to haul a load on rails.Jan Morris, Wales: Epic Views of a Small Country (London: Viking, 1984; Penguin edn, 1986), p. 291; Gwyn A. Williams, The Merthyr Rising (London: Croom Helm, 1978), p. 24, Trevithick’s locomotive out of Penydarren, 1804. Dowlais, the largest ironworks on earth, is at Y Gadwyn, ¶269. The very first passenger train in the world ran at Swansea.Morris, Wales, p. 286. Railways all over the world, steamships on every sea depended upon Cymru’s raw materials.Morris, Wales, p. 290. The works made “dynastic millionaires of their proprietors”.Morris, Wales, p. 292. Llanelli was “Tinopolis”; Swansea had “the largest nickel works on earth” and was a global Copperopolis; Parys Mountain, from 1768, was the most productive copper mine in the world; and by the 1850s Cymru was smelting half the copper on earth.Morris, Wales, p. 290; Geraint H. Jenkins, Bard of Liberty (Cardiff, 2012), p. 165, Swansea “a Copperopolis of global significance”; Evans, Tracing Your Welsh Ancestors, Parys Mountain from 1768, and fifty per cent of the world’s copper smelted in Cymru by the 1850s. The slate of the north roofed the houses of the British Empire, America and the new industrial Europe.Morris, Wales, p. 284. “The profits were vast.”Morris, Wales, pp. 436–437. Barry was the busiest coal port in the world; the first cheque for a million pounds in the history of the world was signed on the floor of the Coal Exchange in Cardiff; Cymru’s steam coal held a “magnificent monopoly”; and the whole field was “once a wonder of the world”.Barry Dock shipments for 1913: “The peak of the coal exporting trade was reached at Barry in 1913”, with more than eleven million tons of coal and coke through the port (Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales, Coflein, “Barry Docks, Barry”, NPRN 34234, February 2011). The histories print the year’s total as 11.05 or 11.09 million tons; the Barry Railway Company’s own returns have not been read here. The Coal Exchange, Mount Stuart Square, Cardiff, built 1884–88; the million-pound cheque is dated 1904, and 1901 and 1907 in other accounts. Morris, Wales, p. 437. The Royal Commission’s own inventory of Glamorgan calls the man who owned that ground “the richest man in the world”.Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments in Wales, An Inventory of the Ancient Monuments in Glamorgan, vol. III, p. 185, the third Marquess of Bute. From his castle at the top of Cardiff the Marquis looked out “to the sea one way, where the coal of Wales went streaming off to the markets of the world, to the hills the other, where in valleys hidden from his view the miners toiled to dig it out.”Morris, Wales, p. 295. That is the prize. Not a parish and not a professorship: the greatest accumulation of wealth and power on earth, and for a century its centre was Cymru. It was a gold rush a hundred years long, the furnace of the whole industrial world, and the people whose land it was dug it out with their hands and were paid for it in pit-deaths. Whoever held it held the power that moved the world. And none of the people of the land got any of this wealth. It was all looted. “For about a century the plunder boomed on, in an apparently irresistible cycle of extraction, production and profit, making many millionaires.”Morris, Wales, pp. 290–291. “Huge financial combines owned most of the mines, with their headquarters generally in London.”Morris, Wales, p. 436. Iolo had named that cycle while it was beginning. In his manuscripts of the 1790s he wrote: “Oh! Commerce, thou Great Thief of the World. Thou that, a Canibal, feedest on human blood, quenchest thy thirst in the tears of Widows, of Orphans, of Wretches of all descriptions.”NLW 21323B, pp. 21–40, and NLW 21395E, p. 4.

Before the coal, the land. Set the surveyor’s word against the record of the Loughor Valley.See Y Diffynnydd, ¶60. The enclosure books of the 1790s entered the uplands of the Loughor Valley under four heads (field, wood, water, pasture) and totalled them as waste. Those four words are a fixed legal formula, not one grant: in campo et in siluis, in aqua et in pascuis, running through charter after charter of the oldest register of land in De Cymru. The same four heads the surveyor totalled as waste are the four in which that land had been held by everybody who lived on it, written into the charters by the Llandaff clerks in the 1120s, in Bishop Urban’s last editing of the Book, seven hundred years before him.Wendy Davies, The Llandaff Charters (Aberystwyth, 1979), pp. 15–16 and 20, puts the four-heads formula in the last editing of the Book, under Bishop Urban, after about 1120, and links it to Worcester charter practice; the charters it stands in claim to be centuries older. Whether the words are older than Urban’s scriptorium is not settled here. The agreement of 1126 between Urban and Robert, Earl of Gloucester, shows the common in use on the ground either way. And the thing the clerks’ Latin names is older than their Latin. The laws of Hywel measure the rhandir, the law’s unit of land, as lying rhwng rhwydd a dyrys, a choed a maes, gwlyb a sych, between open ground and rough, and wood and field, wet and dry, and one text of them rules that porfa a ddyly fod yn gyffredin: pasture ought to be common.Cyfreithjeu Hywel Dda ac eraill, seu Leges Wallicae, ed. William Wotton (London, 1730), p. 205, in the oath for denying a killing, where it is given as the measure of coed a maes (the same land-measure stands at Lib. II, p. 157): “Rhandir gyfreithawl rhwng rhwydd a dyrys, a choed a maes, gwlyb a sych”; p. 290, printed there as a variant reading from one manuscript (Wotton’s S. 2, which his preface describes as a Welsh book on vellum “plus CCCL abhinc annos in Agro Ceriticensi scriptus”, written more than 350 years before 1730 in Ceredigion, as the saints it calls on show, Dewi Brefi and Gwenog among them; then in the library of Sir Thomas Sebright): “Ni ddyly neb o gyfraith welld cadw, can’s porfa a ddyly fod yn gyffredin”, and in the main text, no one but the lord may keep more than two grasses back, the enclosed field and the hay meadow. Iolo named the men who had taken it. In an essay of the 1790s arguing that an equal right to land was among the first rights of man, he set them down in a row: the “Monopolizing Merchant, Slave-possessing Planter, land-Engrossing Farmer, all-grasping Manufacturer, Blood-sucking Usurer, or common Purse-proud Master”.NLW 21323B, pp. 1, 9, 16, 19–20.

Meurig ap Tewdrig, king of Gwent and Glywysing, endowed the see of Llandaff in the seventh century, the register itself puts the endowment in the age of Dyfrig and dates that to the year 429, and the more sceptical modern reckoning brings it down to about 620. Take the later date; take the one that concedes most. It is still eleven hundred and fifty years before the surveyor opened his book. Concede the register as well. The book these grants come down in was put together between 1120 and about 1129, in the middle of Bishop Urban’s disputes with St Davids and Hereford over the property and the boundaries of his see.Wendy Davies, An Early Welsh Microcosm: Studies in the Llandaff Charters (London: Royal Historical Society, 1978), p. 5: Urban “was involved in disputes with the bishops of St. David’s and Hereford over episcopal properties and over diocesan boundaries from at least 1120 until his death on his way to Rome in 1134”, and the original Liber Landavensis “was compiled in the context of the property disputes”, most likely “in the period 1120–c.1129.” The historian who has examined every charter in it calls it “in some senses a forgery”, and in the same sentence refuses to throw it away: “this does not limit its value for it is quite clear that much of its charter material is based on earlier manuscripts.”Davies, An Early Welsh Microcosm, p. 5. She reads it charter by charter to measure “the extent of twelfth-century tampering and the essential content of the original texts”, and calls what that reading recovers “of unparalleled value.”Davies, An Early Welsh Microcosm, p. 5. That is the standard scholarship applies to a register of Cymru reworked by an interested bishop in the middle of a land dispute: sift the old from the new, and trust the old. It is the standard the prosecution refused Iolo. And what Meurig granted was not a wilderness to a church. It was a constitution, and the register sets it out clause by clause:The grants are in the Liber Landavensis, the Book of Llan Dâv, Llyfr Teilo, the register of the see of Llandaff; printed for the Welsh Manuscripts Society, ed. W. J. Rees (Llandovery, 1840), from a text prepared by W. H. Black.

• Free of all service, regal and secular, with one reservation only: daily prayer for the faithful departed.
• No other reservation whatever, not even military service and watch.
• Its court free and entire as a royal court.
• Its refuge perpetual.
• Free commonage to the inhabitants of the whole diocese, in field and in woods, in water and in pastures.
• All future gifts canonically obtained to remain undisturbed.
• Any man, secular or ecclesiastical, who infringed those liberties and persisted after three admonitions to suffer sanction here and now, and judgment after.

Read the fifth clause again. Not to a lord. To the inhabitants. Of the whole diocese. Without term. And it is not one king’s eccentricity. The same words are claimed in charter after charter, for the inhabitants present and to come, within the boundaries specified and without them, including, in one grant, the entire commonage of the region of Gŵyr, the hundred that runs down to the Loughor. Some three hundred years later a king had sold the church that came with it, “quibusdam hominibus”, to certain men, without the bishop’s leave, and did penance for it in the same book.The Text of the Book of Llan Dâv, p. 239: King Gruffudd ab Owain, about 925, among his three sins “uendendo portum dulon ecclesiam sancti dubricij … sine licentia episcopi quibusdam hominibus”, selling Porth Dulon, a church of Dyfrig, without the bishop’s leave, to certain men. Wendy Davies, The Llandaff Charters (1979), entry 239: “The church was sold by king Gruffudd c. 925.” Nor were these the appurtenances of a poor country. Teilo’s privilegium grants immunity from suits of court and from military service, its own jurisdiction over crimes and misdemeanours, the commonage of water and pasture and field and forest, and with it a market, and mint, and free anchorage for ships. The privilege stands in the Book in Welsh as well as in Latin, and in Welsh the common is plain: dufyr ha guell hac choyt ha mays yn cyfrytin dy lytu teliau, water and pasture, wood and open field, in common to the people of Teilo.J. Gwenogvryn Evans and John Rhys, The Text of the Book of Llan Dâv (Oxford, 1893), p. 120, “The Privilege of Teilo”: “hay guir hay braut dy lytu yr ecluys y gundy teliau ynn lan taf. hac ny lys. dufyr ha guell. hac choyt ha mays yn cyfrytin dy lytu teliau”. Cyfrytin is cyffredin, common: Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, s.v. cyffredin, cites this line. A place that strikes its own coin and anchors its own shipping is not waste ground. It is an economy, with a currency, a port and a court, and the King of Morgannwg himself answerable in that court for any wrong done to the bishop’s men.

Nor did the right lapse with the kings of the Britons who gave it. In 1126, six hundred and sixty years before the enclosure books, Bishop Urban and Robert, Earl of Gloucester, went to law over that same ground, and the Norman earl did not deny the common, he divided it: the bishop’s men to have common of pasture with the Consul’s men, and commonage in woods and pannage. The incomer was still bargaining for a right he could not simply abolish. And the widest statement of it is also one of the last. About 1060, as the register has it, seven hundred and thirty years before the surveyor, Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, the only man ever to rule the whole of Cymru, granted full commonage to all inhabitants of church lands throughout his kingdom, in field and in woods, in water and in pastures.‘& cum data communione omnibus incolis terrarum ecclesie per totum regnum suum in campo et in siluis, in aqua et in pascuis’, Gruffydd ap Llywelyn’s grant of privileges, made at the height of his power, about 1060.

That is what the word waste was doing, and it described the paperwork, never the land. Ground held in common by everybody has no single owner to enter in a column, and a survey that can record only owners records such ground as belonging to no one. The Act then vests what belongs to no one in whoever is standing nearest with a lawyer. The improvement is real (the hedges, the drains, the roads, the rent) and so is the theft, and they are the same act. What the enclosure of the Loughor commons required was not an argument that the original inhabitants had no right to the land. Seven hundred years of record at the least, and on the register’s own dating twelve hundred, stood the other way, in the four words the surveyor was himself using. It required only a form of words in which the right had never existed, and a clerk to write it: an administrative technique perfected on Cymru's ground before it was carried out of the country into every acre the same state later measured, around the world.Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor”, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1:1 (2012), 1–40: the word is not a synonym for broadening a syllabus or improving a mood, and it is emptied every time it is used as one. What was taken in this valley was land, a court, a mint, a language and a record. Any answer to it has to be made of the same things. Iolo knew the one question that decides where such a technique is sent. Writing in the 1790s of a plan for an overland route from Nootka Sound, on the Pacific coast of America, to the Mississippi country of the Madogwys, the Cymraeg-speaking Indians of the Madoc story, he set it down: “Will it be of any advantage to Government? To Trade and Commerce? Will it put some tens of thousands into the purses of avaricious individuals? Aye, there’s the rub. Yes it will.”NLW 21394D, no. 1.

Y Diddymiad: The Abolition

Step back now, because a stonemason is not worth a century of this. What remains is the abolition, Y Diddymiad, the movement that explains all the others. Nobody builds an apparatus on that scale to discredit a dead poet for his own sake. Iolo is the symbol, the witness, the convenient name. The thing actually in the dock, the thing the verdict exists to bury, is the claim he carried: that Britain held an ancient, sovereign, learned civilisation, with a bardic order and a line of native kings, before the invader's story began. He made that claim in print in 1794, and made it against the Norse Edda that the admirers of the Goths had taken up: the British Bardic Mythology, he wrote, “seems to me far more rational, sublime, and congenial to Human Nature, than the superlatively barbarous and bloody Theology of the EDDA, which some depraved imaginations are so charmed with.”Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (1794), vol. II, p. 195 (Advertisement to the “Ode on the Mythology of the Ancient British Bards”).

That claim was suppressed by one operation with four instruments, and the records exist for each. Legally, by attainder, the "corruption of blood" of 1531 and 1532 that drove the old native lines from their inheritance. Economically, by the enclosures of the 1790s that turned the commons of princes into the manorial waste of colliers. Morally, by Brad y Llyfrau Gleision, the Blue Books of 1847, which told the Britons to their faces that they were primitive. And intellectually (the last instrument, the one we are trying) by three verdicts doing one job: forgery for Iolo, myth for Brutus of Troy and the line of native descent, and silence for the suppressed antiquarian work that pointed the same way, never issued at all. The same erasure, three words. The oppressor's word is itself evidence of the suppression, never a reason to accept it.

And read those four down the years, not across. Nearly four centuries separate the first from the last, and no one man appears in more than one of them. That is the point. What joins them is not a conspiracy but a structure: each instrument does the work the one before it made possible, and each is carried out by officials who could say truthfully that they had never met. The attainder took the old native lordships. The enclosure took the commons of many, by Act of Parliament, on the ground that land held by everyone belonged to no one. The Blue Books explained the people the enclosure had produced. The academy then certified that those people had never had anything to lose. No one has to plan that. It plans itself once the first instrument is in place, because every later official inherits the file the earlier one wrote and mistakes it for the world. Invasion here was what the historian Patrick Wolfe called it in the settler colonies: a structure, not an event, and a structure does not end, it administers.Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native”, Journal of Genocide Research 8:4 (2006), 387–409: “invasion is a structure not an event.” Wolfe was writing of Australia; Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (2010), sets out the same logic as a general form. Both date the form to the settler colonies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Britons' case runs from 1531, and every element of it, the legal extinguishment of native title, the reclassification of the land, the moral certification of the population, the scholarly closure, is complete before the theory has a name.

17. Y Drôr dan Glo

The Locked Drawer560 The locked drawer. 564 The costume. 570 Why the Briton: race, empire, religion, snobbery.

And every name worth naming here belongs to one theme: custody. Who held the record, and who was kept from it. Lady Llanover, Augusta Hall, is the figure in whom the whole mechanism closes. Her authorised culture was the respectable Wales: the invented costume, the parlour harp, the de-fanged eisteddfod, an antiquity safe for the drawing-rooms of the very class that had enclosed the land.Plato's Republic Book VIII charts how a good order decays: the money-class buys its way into the institutions, and the forms survive while the substance is inverted. The Gorsedd's capture by ironmaster patronage is that decay executed to the letter. And in her house, locked away until 1916, sat the actual archive, the dangerous, unedited thing, the transcripts of the burned libraries. But say archive with precision. When Taliesin Williams died in 1847, his son Edward catalogued the family's holdings into five classes, A through E (E being printed books).

Lady Llanover did not simply inherit the collection; she acquired it with care. She took twenty-four of the thirty volumes in Class B, and every one of the seventy-six in Class C: Iolo's own notebooks in his own hand, which the Library now holds, with his other papers, as NLW MSS 13087–13162Iolo’s own notebooks in his own hand (Class C of the 1847 catalogue, acquired entire by Lady Llanover) are in the Llanover deposit, where the Library describes NLW MSS 13087–13162 as “miscellaneous notebooks, papers, etc., of Iolo Morganwg, bound into eighty volumes” (National Library of Wales, Llanover Manuscripts, catalogue description). On the class dispersal see the National Library of Wales finding aid, “Iolo Morganwg and Taliesin ab Iolo manuscripts and papers.”. She also acquired seventeen further volumes not listed in Edward's catalogue at all, manuscripts the family's own inventory had not recorded. For the twenty-one years after Iolo's death the archive had lived with Taliesin at Merthyr, the school and the papers under one roof, the nation's memory kept above a classroom, and it left the family only when death broke the household. And mark the year of the purchase. 1847, the year of Brad y Llyfrau Gleision, the year the state certified to the Britons’ face that the nation had no learning worth the name. In the very season the report was telling the world there was nothing in Cymru worth keeping, the proof of what the Britons had kept was being carried, crate by crate, into a locked cabinet in Sir Fynwy. The certificate of emptiness and the confiscation of the contents were issued in the same twelve months.Y Llyfrau Gleision — a’r gwerthiant — 1847: the Blue Books, and the sale, in one year. 

What she did not acquire tells more than what she did. Class A was the vellum rolls (the oldest documents in the collection, the medium of pedigree and grant) and the National Library's own catalogue records their fate in three words: they remain missing. No sale, no fire, no shelfmark: the parchment layer of the archive walked out of history.And mark the material: vellum is the most durable writing medium Europe ever used, it survives damp, neglect and centuries where paper rots. The oldest class of the archive was the one least capable of perishing by accident. Its absence is not decay; it is removal.The oldest story about a burned archive prices the loss: the Sibyl offered Tarquin nine books of prophecy; refused, she burned three and offered six at the same price; refused again, burned three more, and Rome paid the full original price for the surviving third, then guarded it in the Capitol under a college of priests for nine hundred years. Attrition does not discount what survives; it raises it. The prosecution priced the Britons' remnant as if the nine books had never existed. And Class D never went to Llanover at all, the family kept it back, holding it through the whole century of the locked cabinet, the conviction, and the verdict, until Iolo Aneurin Williams and his kin began giving it to the National Library from 1953 onwards. Read the two fates together: the heirs surrendered the paper and withheld a portion; the oldest skins vanished entirely; and the lock at Llanover covered what it covered intact. The same hand that manufactured the harmless version of British antiquity held the real one under lock, and held it selectively, and completely, where it counted. Around her: the Guelphs who held the attainders and granted the knighthoods; the enclosing capital that fenced the commons and, in Lady Charlotte Guest's authorised English Mabinogion, issued the tradition itself as a thing owned, edited, and provenanced to Dowlais; and, in the same rooms, Christian Bunsen, the Prussian ambassador from 1841, Lady Llanover's brother-in-law, at the Abergavenny Cymreigyddion, in open admiration of Dr James Prichard's ethnology.

The bards of the hills had asked the opposite of their keepers. In 1727 Lewis Hopkin, not yet of age, thanked the almanac-maker Siôn Rhydderch for the books he had promised them: “Dwg ini dy Lyfrau: / Athrawiaeth, helaeth rywiau / Boddus Gân”, bring us your books: teaching, and every kind of pleasing song. The guild that taught Iolo asked for the books to be brought out to it. The house that bought his papers locked them in.Lewis Hopkin, englynion to Siôn Rhydderch, from Rhydderch’s Almanac for 1727, as reprinted by L. J. Hopkin-James, Hopkiniaid Morganwg (Bangor, 1909), p. 217, read on the page image; written “before he had attained his majority”, ibid., p. 108. The English is ours.

And the costume is no side-detail; it is the whole method in miniature, and it can be documented to the thread. The Dictionary of Welsh Biography records her, without irony, as the inventor of the Welsh national costume, for it was an invention, not a survival. Before her, the women of Cymru wore whatever local, practical flannel came to hand: organic, varied, regional, real. Llanover took that living diversity, drew it up into a fixed and pictured uniform, assigning her own designs to this county and that, and declared her version the authentic one, a standardisation she launched from an 1834 eisteddfod prize-essay on the preservation of Welsh dress.

Then she imposed it. Her servants were obliged to wear it; the household was staffed only with speakers of Cymraeg, given names in Cymraeg and dressed in her mandatory costume, a living tableau of the picturesque Wales she had designed. And she closed the circle with a mill: in 1865 she built the Gwenffrwd woollen factory on her own estate, which spun the heavy flannel that became the very clothes her dependents were required to wear.Mark Lucas, ‘Lady Llanover – Heroine of the Welsh Woollen Industry’, Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales blog, 11 May 2020 (accessed 4 October 2026): “In 1865 she commissioned the building of Gwenffrwd Woollen Mill on the Llanover estate near Abergavenny”; its heavy flannel “was made into clothes for the house and estate workers to wear”, and into clothes for Lady Llanover and her friends “styled on her own ideas”; it ran until the 1950s on the machinery she installed. The title of that page is the “heroine” below.

Where did that mill's capital come from? Sir Benjamin Hall was an ironmaster's son, his fortune running straight back through Richard Crawshay of Cyfarthfa, the Merthyr iron king, whose furnaces were fed by the labour of the very valleys whose people she now required to wear her designed dress. She transformed y werin, the dispossessed common people of those valleys, into walking advertisements for her own textile mill. The "traditional" flannel uniform put on the body what enclosure had put on the common land outside: a boundary. She did not save the Welsh dress; she invented it, wove it at her own mill, and made her servants wear it to work, cloth paid for, in the end, out of a fortune the ironworks had made. She put her own maker's mark on a tradition of Cymru, and a dispossessed gwerin wore it. She wore it herself, on Sundays and on public occasions; her servants wore it every working day. What was her Sunday best was their uniform.Marion Löffler, ‘Hall, Augusta, Lady Llanover (‘Gwenynen Gwent’) (1802–1896), patron of Welsh culture and inventor of the Welsh national costume’, Dictionary of Welsh Biography (2016), biography.wales/article/s10-HALL-AUG-1802.html (accessed 4 October 2026): “Lady Llanover wore Welsh costume herself on Sundays and public occasions”; “her servants had to wear it”. The loop, read plainly: she used her wealth to manufacture the demand, her authority to compel it, and her own mill to supply it, cloth made on her land, sold to clothe the workers of her land, in a uniform of her own design, certified by her as their ancestral tradition. The charitable historians call her the heroine of the Welsh woollen industry. She owned the mill.

Read it as a colonial loop, the pattern the empire ran on every territory it occupied. Extract the raw material, the iron wealth of the Merthyr valleys, dug by the labour of the very people she would later costume. Process the proceeds into metropolitan capital and cultural authority, the Crawshay-Hall fortune buying the Llanover estate, the aristocratic standing, the bards' papers. Acquire the dangerous original, Iolo's radical archive, purchased from Taliesin's estate. Suppress the subversive substance, sealed in the drawing-room cabinet. Sell the processed, de-fanged commodity back to the colonised at a profit, the flannel uniform, the standardised tradition, the hired-mouth version of their own ancestors, on her terms and at her price. She was not a patron who went too far. She was a monopolist of representation: she owned the raw material, the processing, the product, and the narrative, and she used all four to ensure the only version of their own culture available to the Britons was the version she had manufactured. The identical hand that fabricated a Welsh tradition and fastened it onto the bodies of living women is the hand that locked the real one, Iolo's radical archive, in a cabinet. She manufactured the counterfeit and buried the genuine; and the academy spent the next century hunting the stonemason for forgery.

And lest this be called a conspiracy (the charge the comfortable always reach for when a pattern names its beneficiaries) put the receipt on the table. It is not an inference; it is a letter. Thirty years before he died, and half a century before his archive was locked in the Llanover cabinet, the founder of the very fortune that would buy it moved, in his own hand, to deny the man his bread. Richard Crawshay of Cyfarthfa, the iron king whose money, passing through the Halls, would purchase the Llanover estate and the drawer that sealed these papers, wrote to the President of the Board of Agriculture in December 1796 to warn him off employing the “Y Bont-faen Poet”: he was, Crawshay reported, “a broken Fellow Char’d by various Acts of Insolvency — and is now a seller of seditious Books and will be planting Treason wherever he goes.”Richard Crawshay to Sir John Sinclair, President of the Board of Agriculture, December 1796: Chris Evans (ed.), The Letterbook of Richard Crawshay 1788–1797 (Cardiff, 1990), 160. And this was no distant bureaucrat’s caution but the malice of a zealot: the same Crawshay urged loyal churchmen to drive nails into their boot-soles in the shape of the letters TP, that they might tread Tom Paine underfoot with every step they walked to work.Richard Crawshay to George Hardinge, 16 October 1792 (Gwent Record Office, Cwmbrân, D2.162, f. 130); Chris Evans (ed.), The Letterbook of Richard Crawshay 1788–1797 (Cardiff, 1990), 139. Crawshay raged against the “Damnable Doctrines of Dr. Priestley & Payne” and the “uncivilis’d Welch Workmen”; Iolo, for his part, called Merthyr “Llaw’r Diawl,” the Devil’s hand (CIM, II, 265). There is the loop entire, in one surname across two generations: the iron that made the money that bought the papers that buried the man was smelted by the house that, while he lived, moved to starve him as a traitor. The sealing of his voice was a policy, pursued by a named family, from the year he was most dangerous to the decade he was most safely forgotten. Nobody has to imagine a plot. Richard Crawshay wrote it down, dated it, and signed it. The seller of seditious books answered in verse, from his own shop at Y Bont-faen: “Here are hats of all sorts, good as ever were seen, / One guinea, one shilling, all prices between, / And fearless of spies and th’ Informer’s fell traps, / He’ll soon become dealer in Liberty caps.” The liberty cap was the red cap of the French Revolution.NLW 21410E, no. 29a.

One detail of Lady Guest's Mabinogion shows the mechanism in miniature, and is worth keeping precise. Where the medieval Cymraeg names a thing plainly, the authorised English cannot. The old tale's own word for what was done to Goewin is treis, and the dictionary gives it the plain sense of rape. She says it herself, to the king: A threis arnaf a orugant a chywilyd y titheu, they did treis to me, and shame to you.Peniarth MS. 4 (the White Book of Rhydderch), col. 90, as printed in J. Gwenogvryn Evans, The White Book Mabinogion (Pwllheli, 1907), p. 45, where the editor heads the page Hanes Treis Goewin a Llad Pryderi. For the sense, Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, s.v. trais, sense b, “Y weithred o orfodi rhywun (fel arfer merch) i gael cyfathrach rywiol yn erbyn ei ewyllys: rape”, where the dictionary’s first fourteenth-century example is this very line. Guest's version will not write the word, softening the violation into "an attack… made unawares" and the violated woman into one who "is now a wife." And this is no squeamish hand: the same translation renders, in full, a boy thrust living into a blazing fire and a stallion cut to the bone. She will speak any cruelty. The single thing her English cannot let the Cymraeg say is that a violation happened, and the gore is the control that proves the silence is aimed. For treis is the exact word for what was done to the Britons: the Attainder was treis, the enclosures were treis. The colonised text lets Goewin name the crime herself; the authorised version, which will translate every other horror, falls silent precisely there. That is not prudery. It is the occupying tongue, unable to let the people of the country say aloud that they were violated.

Pam y Brython? Why the Briton

So now the question under all of it. Why the Briton? Why him, of all the European improvers, the one set alight, when Scott was made a baronet and Lönnrot crowned for the same act? The answers stack, one upon another.

Race. The nineteenth century built a science to rank human beings, and James Prichard, whose ethnology Bunsen so admired in Lady Llanover's circle, was its British father. Ethnology classified the Celt as a type: a stage of development, a specimen to be catalogued rather than a voice to be heard. The Blue Books of 1847 then said it in plain English to the nation's face. Three English commissioners who spoke no Cymraeg reported the people ignorant, lazy, and immoral, and named the cause as the language and the chapel: "The Welsh language," the report declared, "is a vast drawback to Wales, and a manifold barrier to the moral progress and commercial prosperity of the people." A modern historian of those volumes gave her study its exact and unanswerable subtitleGwyneth Tyson Roberts, The Language of the Blue Books: The Perfect Instrument of Empire (Cardiff, 1998), on the Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales (1847): “The Welsh language is a vast drawback to Wales, and a manifold barrier to the moral progress and commercial prosperity of the people.”, The Perfect Instrument of Empire. That is not our phrase for it; it is the title their own historian gave the Reports. The modern authority on Iolo describes the report as one “which outrageously depicted the Welsh as degraded liars and cheats with the morals of alley-cats”, and says what it did: “the Welsh lost their nerve and a proper appreciation of their past. As a ‘reduced people’, they were now expected to count their blessings, hold their tongues”, and, as Henry Hussey Vivian told the National Eisteddfod at Swansea in 1863, to see themselves as a “whole united compact people”.Jenkins (2008), pp. 16–17; Hussey Vivian from Hywel Teifi Edwards, Gŵyl Gwalia (Llandysul, 1980), p. 348. Reduced is the verb of 1536: see Y Dull Cymreig, ¶508. This is not a slur we are importing into the past; it is the documented scientific and official position of the precise men and the precise decade in question. And a people scientifically ranked as primitive cannot, by definition, have produced an advanced and sovereign ancient civilisation, so the evidence that they did must be a fabrication. The racial classification does not merely accompany the forgery verdict; it requires it. They are the same judgment in two registers, the one in the laboratory and the one in the library.

And the race-science was no passive backdrop; the architects pushed it. Christian Bunsen, the Prussian ambassador in Lady Llanover's circle, personally advanced Prichard's career, hoping, in his own words, that he might have been of use "in causing (through Lord Ashley) the mind of the Lord Chancellor to be directed towards him, with reference to a place of importance";Frances Baroness Bunsen, A Memoir of Baron Bunsen (London, 1868), vol. II, p. 33, read on the page image (Internet Archive, india.history.resource.74712), Bunsen’s letter to Mrs Waddington, his mother-in-law: “one from that excellent man, Dr. Pritchard, to whom I hope I may have been of use, in causing (through Lord Ashley) the mind of the Lord Chancellor to be directed towards him, with reference to a place of importance”; and his own letter of 23 September, printed next, “Dr. Pritchard has been named one of the two physicians who are to inspect all the lunatic asylums in England.”  and Prichard duly became the inspector of England's lunatic asylums, the man who catalogued the Celts made the state's inspector of the mad.James Cowles Prichard, The Eastern Origin of the Celtic Nations (London, 1831), the “British” father of ethnology, later inspector of England’s lunatic asylums. On his race-science: Stefan Poland, “Of Skulls and Speech: James Cowles Prichard and the ‘Science of Races’,” History of Humanities 10 (2025): 39–65. Bunsen's own widow set down the gaze without embarrassment: Prichard's ethnology was the more admired for being "new of their kind in a country where ethnology had yet to be admitted among the number of sciences worthy of cultivation." The Britons, in that sentence, are the specimen the new science was raised to catalogue. No slur need be imported; the structure is the contempt. And the science itself has not aged well. Prichard's lasting point (that Celtic is an Indo-European tongue) stands; but the colonial use he made of it, the island’s first people as one more migrant wave off the steppe, no older or more rooted than anyone, is exactly what modern genetics undercuts: the People of the British Isles study of 2015 found the Welsh the first people in the United Kingdom to separate genetically from the rest after Orkney, and its authors say the Welsh clusters are “more similar to the early post-ice-age settlers of Britain than those from elsewhere in the UK”, the older British stock, pushed west. Read straight, the data support the very claim the verdict was built to bury: that these were the original Britons. (We hold that as support and never as the keystone, ancestral DNA is a live weapon in our own day, wielded to erase indigeneity as readily as to assert it, but it is worth knowing which way the science finally fell.)

Now the doctrine these men were building, because it was a ranking of human beings, dressed as literary criticism, and to climb it they invented a race that never existed. "Aryan" was not a discovery; it was a fabrication. Out of the harmless real fact that languages are kin (Cymraeg, Greek and Sanskrit share one old root) Bunsen, Müller and their kind forged a fictional master-people and a chart of its children, the noble and "developed" at the top, the "barbarous" and "crystallized" at the bottom. There was no Aryan race. They made it up. And it is that same forgery, running from these desks through Gobineau to NurembergOn the manufacture of the “Aryan” race from the mere fact of language-kinship: Arthur de Gobineau, Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (1853–55); Josiah Nott and George Gliddon, Types of Mankind (1854); and, for the whole genealogy, Léon Poliakov, The Aryan Myth (1974)., that a lifetime later licensed the sterilisations and the camps. They convicted a mason from Cymru of forging a tradition while they were forging an entire master-race. The Britons were the first body on the bench.

Bunsen filed the Britons near the bottom of it in his own hand. In his Outlines of the Philosophy of Universal History (1854) the living speech of the Britons is "the most ancient, and as it were most remote" of the family; "decidedly barbarous"; "the least developed branch"; a tongue that "crystallized," set hard as stone, before the living languages "burst forth." A nation's mother-tongue, filed as a dead mineral, by the man whose wife's family had that nation's archive under lock.C. C. J. Bunsen, Outlines of the Philosophy of Universal History, applied to Language and Religion, 2 vols (London, 1854), I, p. 64 (“the most ancient, and as it were most remote”), p. 86 (“decidedly barbarous”), p. 144 (“the least developed branch”, “crystallized”, “burst forth”), read in the scanned text of the Toronto copy.

His word barbarous does not survive the fact. When the Goths these men crowned as the "developed" race were illiterate pagans in the trees, the Britons were Roman, Latin-lettered and Christian, a Church old before Augustine came to baptise the English, a bardic poetry already among the oldest in Europe. The civilised were filed as barbarous and the barbarians enthroned as civilisers. That is the system, working as designed: invert the truth, so that the destruction of an advanced people can be entered as their improvement. Iolo had worn the name of the Ancient Briton as a claim to something else entirely. In the preface to his Poems, Lyric and Pastoral, dated Llundain, 1 January 1794, he wrote: “I have always, with an Ancient Briton’s warm pride, preserved the freedom of my thoughts, and the independence of my mind: these shall not be subjected to any thing but my own conscience. … I possess a trade, and, in that, independence.”Edward Williams, Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (London, 1794), I, p. xix.

His protégé carried it worldwide. Bunsen secured Max Müller his East India Company money for the Rig-Veda, "published under the patronage of the East-India-Company," on the title page, and Müller dealt the Britons the same verdict he dealt India. In his 1861 Oxford lectures the Britons are a primitive first wave "driven towards the westernmost parts," the Cornish "lately extinct," the people "no longer an independent nation"; he lingers over "the last old woman that spoke Cornish" and rules, cold, "A Celt may become an Englishman"; Iolo's own kind he dismisses as deluded "Celtic enthusiasts." Of the Indians' sacred book he wrote that to show them its root was "the only way of uprooting all that has sprung from it during the last 3,000 years," and to the Secretary of State for India that "India must be conquered again, and that second conquest should be a conquest by educationF. Max Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language (1861), filing the Celts as a conquered first wave; his Rig-Veda-Sanhita (1849–74), “published under the patronage of the East-India-Company”; and, in Georgina Müller, ed., The Life and Letters of F. Max Müller (1902), his letters on uprooting India’s religion and conquering it “again… by education.”."

He did not invent that on the Ganges. The method was three centuries old at home: the Act of Union that struck Cymraeg out of every court of law, and the 1847 Blue Books that certified a whole people dirty and ignorant. India was the machine built on Cymru and shipped abroad. And at home the sentence was passed in the open, Arnold, same Oxford, 1867: "the sooner the Welsh language disappears as an instrument of the practical, political, and social life of Wales, the better for England, the better for Wales itselfMatthew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature (London, 1867): the death sentence passed in the open, from the same Oxford that filed Cymraeg a fossil.." Iolo had asked for the opposite. In two lines against slavery, printed among his poems in Cymraeg by the Llangynwyd antiquary Cadrawd in 1913, he wrote: Cadwynodd drachwant a chreulonder; / Boed bloedd gorfoledd gan bob iaith, greed and cruelty chained them; let every tongue shout for joy.Cadrawd (ed.), Gwaith Iolo Morganwg (1913), p. 60. The title and date of the poem these lines come from are not yet confirmed.

So the cruelty ran two ways at once. Kill the tongue, and brand the man who saved its records a forger, erase a people twice, once from the mouth and once from the memory. The death sentence on Cymraeg and the forgery verdict on Iolo are one sentence in two clauses, written by one hand. The page in Bunsen's Outlines and the drawer at Llanover are the same act, the same family, the same money, and now we know the drawer was kept shut even from the man hired to use it against him. Not a library keeping papers. A verdict, owned by the men it served, that did not need to consult its own exhibit.

Empire, rehearsed at home. The hand on the lever was Lord Melbourne's. He was Home Secretary when the soldiers were sent into Merthyr in 1831 and Dic Penderyn (Richard Lewis, twenty-three) was hanged at Caerdydd on perjured evidence, for a stabbing eleven thousand petitioners said he did not commit; he was Prime Minister, and the young Victoria's tutor in power, through the years the machinery set hard. De Cymru, its ironworks, its Cymraeg-speaking colliers, its Rebecca rising against the tollgates, its commissioned inquiry into the very character of the natives, was an internal colonyThe phrase is Michael Hechter’s: Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966 (London, 1975), a date range that opens on the Act of Union. His economic thesis has been contested since; his description of the relationship has not. It is borrowed here for the description, and the man is named because the phrase is his., and the instruments tried on it (the troops, the surveillance, the official report that defines a people as unfit to govern themselves) are the instruments the same governments shipped to New Zealand and West Africa in those same years.Chinua Achebe closed Things Fall Apart (1958) at the far end of that shipment, with the District Commissioner turning from the body of the man whose country he has just taken, he never gives him his name, to the book he means to write about him: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower …, chosen, Achebe says, after much thought. The novel is not evidence and is not offered as any, and the title is Achebe’s invention rather than a real report. What it is, is a novelist who grew up under that administration reproducing its register exactly, the same word the Blue Books had used of the Britons (“rude and primitive agriculturists”: R. R. W. Lingen, Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales (1847), Part I, p. 3), in the same official mouth, a continent away and half a century late. Cymru was the proving ground. And to hold a colony you must hold its story, because a people who remember they were princes do not stay quiet colliers. Philology was only the part of the machine that wore a gown; Melbourne supplied the part that wore a wig and the part that swung a rope. Forty years before Merthyr, Iolo had written in his manuscripts that “danger, tumult, insurrection, Revolution, are breeding very fast in Britain”. When it came, the state answered it with soldiers and a rope.NLW 21323B, p. 13.

And beneath both, the oldest motive there is: the fear of the new thing for the old. The dynasty on the throne was itself recent and imported, Hanoverian, then Saxe-Coburg, German-blooded, anxious, a few generations deep and knowing it. Nothing threatens a young sovereignty like an older one. And here, written into the native record, was the oldest claim of all: that the Cymry were the original Britons, the people of the island before the invader, heirs of a civilisation beside which the Guelphs were an arrival of yesterday. Such a claim cannot be argued down; it can only be unmade, turned from history into "myth," from inheritance into "forgery." Call the ancestors savages and the heirs have nothing left to inherit. This last is interpretation, not document, and we mark it plainly as such, but it is the reading that makes every other fact lie down in its place. You do not spend a century proving that a stonemason invented a tradition unless the tradition, were it true, would cost you something. And what it costs is the conqueror's dearest possession: the belief that he was the more civilised party. That is the wound under all of it, the suspicion, never quite scarred over, that the people they invaded and called primitive were the keepers of the older and the greater thing, and that the savagery, if it belonged to anyone, was their own. Iolo had said whose savagery it was. In a note to his Ode on Converting a Sword into a Pruning Hook, printed in 1794, he wrote: “What can we conceive so horrid as the blasphemous idea of wheedling the ALMIGHTY to become a party in the diabolical contentions and throat-cutting matches of the great men of this, little less than, infernal world.”Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (1794), vol. II, p. 163 (note to “Ode on Converting a Sword into a Pruning Hook”).

You can watch that anxiety take human form in the consort himself. Prince Albert, German, imported, a few years in the country and resented as a foreigner, and by his own court's account jealous of the native Lord Melbourne's hold over the young Alexandrina of Hanover and Saxe-Coburg (Victoria), built his standing not on blood, which he lacked, but on a mission: the improvement of the people, and he ran it hands-on, chairing royal commissions in person, reforming Cambridge as its Chancellor to plant the natural sciences (ethnology among them) in the curriculum, presiding over the Society of Arts and the whole machinery of "improvement." He framed it, in his own published speeches, as a sacred charge of the high upon the low, the duty of those who "under the blessing of Divine Providence, enjoy station, wealth, and education" to raise the condition of the labouring classes, because "God has created man imperfectPrince Albert, The Principal Speeches and Addresses of His Royal Highness the Prince Consort (London: John Murray, 1862), improvement as a sacred charge of the high upon the low: the duty of those who “enjoy station, wealth, and education,” because “God has created man imperfect.”." The irony is too compact to miss. The German consort, whose family had held their British titles for barely a generation, was profoundly exercised by the imperfect development of a population that had been composing strict-metre cynghanedd poetry, an intellectual discipline beside which the German court's own vernacular was an arrival of yesterday, in a continuous tradition for twelve hundred years. The Saxon prince looked upon the descendants of the original Britons and saw only raw material in need of monarchical refinement.

Meanwhile the literal ground of Cymru was being hollowed out beneath the feet of those imperfect labourers (shaft by shaft, drift by drift) to power the Great Exhibition of 1851: that sovereign performance of British civilisation, raised in Hyde Park while the coal under Merthyr was still being drawn. Hear what that assumes: that the masses, and the Britons among them, are imperfect, degraded, in want of elevation from above, and that the providential task of the cultivated is to civilise them. It is the same premise as Prichard's ethnology and the Blue Books, now spoken in the language of Christian duty from the steps of the throne. And the man who carried Prichard's race-science into that very orbit, named by the historian of anthropology Claude Blanckaert as the second wave of the Prichardian heritage in England, was Christian BunsenClaude Blanckaert, “Un fil d’Ariane dans le labyrinthe des origines… Langues, races et classification ethnologique au XIX^e siècle”, Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines 17 (2007), pp. 137–171, in its opening section: Broca “s’opposera vigoureusement à la seconde vague d’héritage prichardien, représentée en Angleterre par le baron von Bunsen et en France par Franz Pruner-Bey”, Broca would set himself hard against the second wave of the Prichardian heritage, represented in England by Baron von Bunsen and in France by Franz Pruner-Bey. : Prussian ambassador, Lady Llanover's brother-in-law, the in-law of the locked archive. The civilising mission, the science that ranked the Britons, and the cabinet that held Iolo's manuscripts were one apparatus, and it reached the consort's own circle.

Religion. And he was a heretic, which made him other twice over. Iolo was a Unitarian, the most radical edge of Rational Dissent: anti-Trinitarian, anti-clerical, a founder of the Unitarian Society of South Wales. To the Established Church of England, the Guelphs' own religion, that was not a denomination but a blasphemy. He had set his face against the bishops, the tithes, and the whole "Church and King" order, and been screamed at by its mobs, cleavers up, to kneel and bless the King. A man already marked a religious subversive is the easiest of all to discredit, and note the word the academy finally chose for him. Unclean is not, in the first place, a scholar's word; it is a priest's. To brand his life's work a contamination was to finish in the library what the Church had begun in the chapel-yard: the heretic's record is not refuted, it is anathematised. The heretic had put his own question to that Church. Writing in 1793 to the publisher of Cylch-grawn Cynmraeg, the first political journal in Cymraeg, he asked: Beth a wnaeth hi erioed er pan a’i galwyd yn eglwys (neu’n hyttrach a’i llysenwyd felly) tuag at dannu gwybodaeth o’r gwirionedd? Dim yn y byd! What has she ever done, since she was called a church, or rather nicknamed so, towards spreading knowledge of the truth? Nothing in the world!589–93, Iolo Morganwg to the publisher of Cylch-grawn Cynmraeg, 27 July 1793, Correspondence, I, pp. 585–9 (in the editors’ translation).

And no empire does this work with only its own hands; it never has to. There is always a native class ready to carry it, the people the Cymry named the crachach, the petty gentry, the conceited upstarts, the word a southern mouth makes of crach, a scab: those who forsook their own culture to ape the manners of the English gentry, and whose standing was granted by Westminster on a single condition, that they use its language and bury their own. They are not a slur invented for this argument; they are a documented sociology, the comprador class of an internal colony, rewarded for despising the thing they came from, and despising it the more fiercely because they came from it, since the convert must out-believe the born. The record gives their method. The leading families “abandoned Welsh patronymics, took up the English mode of land tenure”, stood no nonsense from the “much-derided ‘mountain Welsh’”, employed agents and stewards who had no Cymraeg, and earned, in one tenant farmer’s words, a name for “insatiable avarice”.Jenkins (2008), p. 11; the tenant’s words from NLW MS 13221E, f. 343. It is the crachach cast of mind, not the conqueror's, that produces the cruellest verdicts on Cymru's culture, because the collaborator has to prove he has risen above his origins, and the surest proof is to convict them. When a knighted grammarian rules that a stonemason's life-work is a stain to be scrubbed from the record, the blow does not descend from Llundain. It is the colony amputating its own limbs in the master's uniform, the most efficient suppression ever devised, because it never has to be imposed. It volunteers.

Snobbery, and self-interest. And the small, mean motives, which should never be left out for being small. Plain snobbery first: to the Oxford-trained, knighted men of the northern academy, Iolo was a stonemason, unschooled, provincial, southern, a labourer presuming to know the tradition better than the professors who graded it; the sneer in the phrase humble stonemason is audible, and it is the contempt of class for class and North for South at once. But measure the labourer’s hand before you sneer at it. The “humble stonemason” had helped fashion, in 1776, the monument to John Kyrle, the Man of Ross, that stands to this day in St Mary’s, Ross-on-Wye; the standard dictionary of British sculptors calls the work “as good as London work.” The word humble was doing the same office in the library that it had always done in the chapel-yard: not describing the man, but lowering him far enough to be dismissed.The John Kyrle (“Man of Ross”) monument, St Mary’s, Ross-on-Wye, 1776, on which Iolo worked as assistant to Henry Marsh of Bristol; Rupert Gunnis, Dictionary of British Sculptors 1660–1851, s.v. Edward Williams, “as good as London work.” His surviving Vale monuments are catalogued in Richard Suggett, “Iolo Morganwg: Stonecutter, Builder and Antiquary”, in A Rattleskull Genius (2005). And the university that trained them had left the evidence unread. A writer in Cymraeg said so in Llanelli in 1869, in an article that called Iolo himself drunk on Druidism: “Er fod llaw-ysgrifau hynaf a phwysicaf y Gymraeg yn y Bodleian Library, ni chyfododd neb rhwng muriau y Brifysgol yn alluog i ddarllen a defnyddio yr ysgrifau gwerthfawr hyny er ys dau can mlynedd, yr hyn sydd ffaith alarus a chywilyddus”: though the oldest and most important manuscripts of the Welsh language are in the Bodleian Library, no one has risen within the walls of the University able to read and use those precious writings for two hundred years, which is a sad and shameful fact.Y Beirniad (Llanelli), Ionawr 1869, “Llenorion Cymru”, p. 231, read on the National Library’s page image (IIIF 2183632). The same page, against him: “Yr oedd Iolo, druan, wedi meddwi, fel y mae Myfyr Morganwg wedi gwallgofi, uwchben Derwyddiaeth a Barddas”, poor Iolo was drunk, as Myfyr Morganwg has gone mad, over Druidism and Barddas.

And plain self-interest beside it: exposing him paid. A young discipline made its name by catching a great fraud; chairs and reputations were built on the conviction, and a man whose standing rests on having unmasked a forger has every reason never to let the forger turn out innocent. Never underestimate how much of a great injustice is carried along by motives as small as a sneer and a salary.

18. Gogleddiaeth

Northernism587 The stone at Loughor. 589 The hand that could have read it. 597 Lewis Morris: the ore and the tongue. 600 Three men of one island. 603 A standard not native to the north. 611 The doctrine becomes the weather. 612 Pitt’s machine.

Y Garreg: The Stone at Loughor

One small altar at Loughor. One short line of ogham along its edge. And every learned eye that came to it read something different: five readings, no two alike. R. R. Brash made it one thing; Macalister, later, another; and John Rhŷs, the finest Celtic philologist of the age, read it one way in 1873 and, twenty-two years on, contradicted himself. Longueville Jones did stranger still: he printed one reading and drew another, so that on a single page his own hand gives the lie to his own text. The same marks, the same stone: not one eye that came to it saw what the last had seen.The five readings and their sources: H. Longueville Jones, “Roman Altar bearing Oghams at Loughor,” Archaeologia Cambrensis, 3rd ser. XV (1869), 258–61, with his drawing facing p. 344, the plate his own text departs from; John Rhys, ibid. 4th ser. IV (1873), 198, reading the drawing L(?)VIC, Levic, and hearing in it Leucarum, and again, differently, 5th ser. XII (1895), 182; R. R. Brash, ibid. 4th ser. IV (1873), 286; R. A. S. Macalister, Corpus Inscriptionum Insularum Celticarum, no. 405; the whole tabulated in W. Ll. Morgan, An Antiquarian Survey of East Gower (London, 1899), 19–20.

And what defeated them was not learning but stone. For ogham is not written but cut, and not across the face of the stone but along its edge, notch after notch over the arris, a script made to be read as much by the finger as the eye, a blind man’s language of the cut. Jones brought a lamp and still lost the strokes, the stone so pale, the cuttings so shallow, that they threw almost no shadow to the eye; Rhys brought only a drawing, and never touched the stone at all.

Iolo would have brought his thumb.

He cut letters in stone for his bread, and learned his alphabet off the chisel, tracing his father’s incisions on the gravestones of the Vale before he could well remember; put such a hand to that worn edge and it does not decipher the marks so much as recognise them, the bite, the angle, the depth of each stroke known from within, because the same hand makes the same strokes with the same tools. He would have read it as the cutter’s kin, for so he was: he traced his own trade, in his own words, back through the Morgannwg mason-bards in an unbroken line, “of which last trade I am myself”, the craft passed hand to hand, master to boy, in that one country, across the very centuries that lie between the mark and the man.Iolo Morganwg to Sir Richard Colt Hoare, 17 August 1797, NLW 13116B, pp. 134–7; see Y Gadwyn, ¶269. The gentlemen came to the stone from outside, as strangers, by eye, from a copy. He would have come to it from inside the making, by the touch of a hand that was the maker’s heir.

And the hand that knew the cut would have known, too, what the cut was trying to say, for the reading is the second half of the same gift. The boldest reading of the marks, and the only one that makes them mean rather than merely spell, is not a philologist’s construction but an etymologist’s leap, and it was Rhys who made it: that they name no man at all, but a place, Leucarum, the Roman fort, worn down through the centuries into the Llwchwr that every southern tongue still calls it. To hear that you need the southern ear, the feel for how the old Latin lies buried and living beneath the speech of Morgannwg, and that was the daily instrument of the man who coined words in Cymraeg and caught an ancient tongue inside a worn one. Rhys reached it once, from a drawing, in a study in the north. Iolo carried it always, in the Cymraeg of his own mouth, on the very ground the word was worn down on. The marks speak the British of the south; and he, of all of them, was the man who could have heard it.

The fort’s excavators, closing their monograph a century later, supplied the last turn: Leucarum is the Celtic leuco, bright, shining, with the old water-ending, the shining river, its name carried onto the fort at its bank; and the name survives in exactly one ancient source, the Antonine Itinerary, the Roman Empire’s own register of roads. Then their philology concedes, in a single sentence, the whole method of this trial: the modern names “cannot be connected with the Latin Leucarum on phonological grounds”, “however, the similarity must be due to more than mere coincidence.” When the rule and the record disagree, the record stands.A. G. Marvell and H. S. Owen-John, Leucarum (Britannia Monograph 12, 1997), 13, citing Rivet and Smith (1981), 388–9. W. H. Black, in his manuscript itinerary (The National Archives, PRO 31/17/20), marked the Loughor identification among those he held wrong and set Leucarum at Llandybie. The excavated fort at Loughor is the modern placing; both are recorded here. Two hands had been on the name before him. Lewis Morris, in the gazetteer he left in manuscript at his death, printed only in 1878, supposed the river’s British name lay in Llywarch Hen: “Aberllyw… the British name of Leucarum.” And when the Cambrian Archaeological Association printed that gazetteer, the entry for Llychwr carried a bracketed note in another hand, set in type without a tremor: “[Leucarum, is in Morgannwg, east of Llychwr river, and called Castell Llychwr, a borough town — I. M.]” Iolo Morganwg, annotating the name of this valley, published as an authority by the association that taught the Britons to call him forger.Lewis Morris, Celtic Remains (1878), s.vv. Llyw, Llychwr.

And here is the justice of it, laid bare. Five learned readings of one stone, no two alike, one master against his own younger self, and no one cried forgery; it was honest difficulty, honestly met, and so it was received. Now set that charity against the trial: Iolo made copies of poems that differed from other copies, and for those variances he bears the mark of the forger to this day. The marks on the stone, read five ways, are scholarship; the poem, read two ways, is forgery; the only thing that ever changed was whose hand it came from.

And that is the last cruelty, because the charge against him was always a charge against his hand: the forgery in his hand, the handwriting the whole case was raised to condemn. Yet the Loughor stone can be truly read only by a hand, by a touch that knows the cut from the inside; and the one hand in this story equal to it is the very hand they called a forger’s.

They indicted the hand that could have read the stone.Y Maen, iv. Five learned readings of the Loughor stone, and none of them called forgery; John Rhŷs fixed its names from “the Iolo MSS.” A hand finds the edge of the stone.

And the reader they did have leaned, as he read, on the man in the dock. In the very letter that solved the stone, Rhys reaches for his working library, “in the Iolo MSS. (p. 125) we read as follows”, Iolo’s pages set beside the Myvyrian to fix a name on another inscription; in the same volume he reads the Bridell ogham against “Noethan and Nwython of the Iolo MSS.”, traces Arawn through the Iolo MSS. for the Book of Llandaff, and settles Cath Palug from the Iolo MSS. at page 81. Brash fought him over every reading, as evidence, not as forgery. The man who would hold the first chair of Celtic at Oxford read the oldest stones in Cymru through the transcripts of the man his successors convicted for transcribing. The same volume carries the fashion of the age in one aside, a stone with no “venerable look” to excite “an enthusiastic disciple of the ‘Old Iolo’ school.” The mockery was print by 1873; the dependence was print in the same binding.Archaeologia Cambrensis, 4th ser. IV (1873): Rhys at 198 (the Loughor letter, citing Iolo MSS. 125) and, in the same volume, on Noethan and Nwython, on Arawn (Iolo MSS. 108, with Myv. Arch. 411) for the Liber Landavensis, and on Cath Palug (Iolo MSS. 81); R. R. Brash’s reply in the same series; the “Old Iolo school” aside in the same volume’s excursion reports.

Y Mwyn a’r Iaith: The Ore and the Tongue

And this is not theory; the documents put names and dates to it, two generations before Morris-Jones ever lifted a pen. The doctrine itself, that the northern Cymraeg was the pure and classical tongue and the southern a degenerate corruption, was authored in the mid-eighteenth century by Lewis Morris of Anglesey, eldest of the Morris brothers and framer of the Llundain-Cymry society, the Cymmrodorion, from which the whole apparatus descends. He was no Nonconformist democrat of the chapel pew; he was a staunch Church of England man and a dedicated officer of George Guelph (George II), the established church and the King’s mineral rights were his twin axes of loyalty, and his linguistic doctrine served both. In his working life he was superintendent of the King’s mines in Cymru and deputy steward of the King’s manors, the man who rediscovered the Esgair Mwyn lead for the Crown and was dragged to Aberteifi gaol in 1753, a pistol at his head, fighting the native gentry to keep the King’s claim to the metal under their ground.

1753 is the same year, the same decade, in which Morris was simultaneously composing his Celtæ, building the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion in Llundain, and setting down in his notebooks the linguistic doctrine that would rule the southern Cymraeg a degenerate corruption of the northern standard. The gaol-letter and the grammar were signed by the same hand in the same years, delivered to the same patron. The man dragged out of the Ceredigion (Cardiganshire) hillside with a pistol at his head was, in the same years, drafting the rules that would classify the Morgannwg valleys as culturally dead ground. A mine-superintendent classifies the strata of a hillside into royal ore, the rich, extractable seam belonging to George Guelph (George II), and dead ground: the barren face to be cleared and dumped. Morris applied that classification, in effect, twice, to two different resources under his jurisdiction: the northern literary forms became the royal ore of the tongue, pure and fit to be extracted and refined into the monuments of a national culture; the living speech of the south became dead ground, degenerate and unfit for refining. The words are ours, borrowed from his other warrant; the classification is his. Iolo’s own verdict on the man was harder. Writing on 23 June 1803 to William Owen Pughe, his fellow scholar of Cymraeg in Llundain, of Lewis Morris and his trust in the fabulous chronicles of the Norman period, he said: “The whole labours of his life were employed in feeble attempts to prop up a monstrous lie.”Iolo Morganwg to William Owen Pughe, 23 June 1803, Correspondence, II, p. 510.

There is the comprador entire, in a single body: the cultural doctrine that branded the south degenerate was written by that same officer of George Guelph (George II) paid to dig out the south's lead, on the same desk, under the same warrant, and in both surveys the verdict was decided before he ever went into the field.The word is Portuguese, comprador, a buyer, and far older than Frantz Fanon; in his hands it is not an insult but a job description. In “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness” (The Wretched of the Earth, 1961) the comprador is a function: the educated native class the empire installs between itself and the people, paid to administer its own country on another account, and generally quite unable to see the arrangement as anything but a career. Fanon was writing about the bourgeoisies of the 1950s. The post is older than his name for it, and it was staffed in Cymru for two hundred years before he described it. And Iolo had seen the join himself: among his own notebooks sit notes on Lewis Morris's “character and literary and metallurgical activities,” the grammar and the ore weighed in one hand, by the very man whose doctrine would, two generations on, be turned against him. And the weighing ran both ways: Morris’s Celtic Remains, as the Stone section showed, passed through Iolo’s hands and was printed in 1878 with his notes kept in, because, the editor’s own preface says it, "coming from such men, these notes… it was thought desirable to retain" them. Fifty-two years after his death, the establishment that filed him as the forger was printing his marginalia as authority, trusting the hand, damning the man, in a single volume.Lewis Morris, Celtic Remains, ed. D. Silvan Evans (London: printed for the Cambrian Archaeological Association, 1878), preface: the manuscript passed from Owain Myfyr to Gwallter Mechain and through Iolo's hands; the notes of both are retained in square brackets with their initials (W. D., I. M.). Among the entries carrying Iolo's initials: LLYCHWR.Iolo Morganwg’s own notebook, NLW MS 13118B (formerly Llanover C.31), pp. 93–97, 105–06, notes, generally derogatory, on Lewis Morris’s “character and literary and metallurgical activities.” And the extraction Lewis Morris served did not end with his lead. The same logic ran on, generation upon generation, down into the coal and iron of the very Morgannwg whose tradition was now being branded a forgery. To take a people's wealth you must first dissolve their standing to object to the taking, and a people told that their past is a fraud are a people left with no title to plead. The culture-war was always the visible surface of a property-war: dispossess the identity, and the dispossession of the ground follows behind it, with no one left who can say it was ever theirs. Iolo watched the new owners of that ground arrive in his own lifetime, the great absentee proprietors who had taken the place of the old native gentry, and he did not soften his verdict on their kind: “I have long had good reason for considering the British nobility … the most abominable Monsters of depravity under the sun.”NLW 13174A, p. 4v.

Now set three men side by side, because they come off one island, and off one corner of it. The dynasty that abolished the law of the Britons in 1536 came from Penmynydd in Môn, and it had been the princes’ own civil service before ever it was a dynasty. Ednyfed Fychan, its founder, was seneschal of Gwynedd to Llywelyn the Great, and was paid for it in land held free of every due but service in war. Two of his sons, Goronwy and then Tudur, held the same office under the last Llywelyn, and the Tudurs of Penmynydd came down from Goronwy. Within a generation of the conquest, Goronwy’s son and grandson were serving in the conqueror’s administration of their own country.Dictionary of Welsh Biography, s.v. “Ednyfed Fychan (Ednyfed ap Cynwrig) and his descendants”, by Glyn Roberts: Ednyfed “seneschal (in Welsh, distain) of Gwynedd c. 1215–1246”; the family’s lands held “free from all dues and services other than military service in time of war”; “a ‘ministerial aristocracy’ of considerable wealth … the forerunners of that class of Welsh squires whose emergence is characteristic of the post-conquest period”; “From Goronwy ab Ednyfed (died 1268) were descended the ‘Tudors of Penmynydd’”, whose son Tudur Hen (d. 1311) and grandson Goronwy ap Tudur (d. 1331) “appear to have been members of that Welsh official class”. An occupier does not import administrators. He keeps the administration and changes whose it is. And the same king made the church two years before he unmade the law (the supremacy in 1534, the Act in 1536) one hand, one programme, and both instruments swearing the authority had been his all along. The doctrine that the southern tongue is a corruption of the northern was drafted by Lewis Morris of Anglesey, born at Llanfihangel Tre’r Beirdd, on George Guelph (George II)’s payroll. The man who took that doctrine and convicted a southern bard with it was John Morris-Jones, born at Llandrygarn in Môn and brought up from 1868 at Llanfair-pwll, knighted in 1918. Three centuries, one island, the same transaction three times.

And measure the ground before deciding it is a coincidence: Llanfair-pwll, where the codifier was raised, lies under three miles from Penmynydd; the house where Lewis Morris was born lies under six from it; the two birthplaces are under six apart. Three parishes inside a circle a man could walk across in a morning, on an island thirty miles wide.

And the charge is not against Môn, which has given Cymru as much as any county and more than most, and which was robbed with the rest. The charge is against the arrangement. A state that wants a country policed does not need to import a policeman. It needs only to find the division already there, and pay one side of it. It does not stop with these three.

And the standard was not even native to the north. Iolo, who had handled the old books, set down in his own notebooks what a northern grammarian could not afford to notice: that the court poetry of the princes of Gwynedd was preserved in the manuscripts of the south (the Red Book of Hergest, the Black Book of Carmarthen) the north's own inheritance kept alive by southern hands; that the Gwynedd poets had written in Iaith Deheubarth, the literary language of the south; and that the very order of their craft was the older Hen Drefn Deheubarth that had stood in Gwynedd before Gruffudd ap Cynan. The survival of the northern poetry in southern books is plain fact, checkable on any shelf; the rest is Iolo's reading of it. Either way, the measuring-rod cut in the north was milled, in no small part, from southern timber.Iolo Morganwg’s own notebook, NLW MS 13154A (formerly Llanover C.67), pp. 56–60 (“Hen Drefn Deheubarth ag a fu yng Ngwynedd cyn nog amser Gruffydd ap Cynan”) and pp. 359–61 (Gwynedd poets writing in Iaith Deheubarth; the princes’ poetry preserved in southern manuscripts, Llyfr Coch Hergest, Llyfr Du Caerfyrddin).And the tradition of a re-ordering under Gruffudd ap Cynan’s name is no ghost: the Statud Gruffudd ap Cynan, adopted at the Caerwys eisteddfod of 1523, survives in some seventy manuscript copies, a working constitution regulating the grades, fees, licensing and conduct of the bardic profession, satire forbidden without cause. The attribution to the twelfth-century king is legendary; the document is genuine sixteenth-century law-making by the order itself, two hundred and seventy years before Primrose Hill. A profession that writes and carries its own statute is not a romantic fantasy; it is a jurisdiction. Edition: Thomas Parry, BBCS 5 (1929), 25–33. And mark what replaced it within two generations: the royal commission for the Caerwys eisteddfod of 1567 put the grading of bards under Elizabeth ferch Harri (Elizabeth I, daughter of Harri ap Harri and Anne Boleyn, queen 1558–1603, the last of the Tudur line on the throne, named here by patronymic as her father is) and her Council of Wales and the Marches, licensed those it approved, and named all the rest “vagraunt and idle persons naming theim selfes mynstrelles Rithmers and Barthes”, the order’s own law exchanged for the licence of Elizabeth ferch Harri, and the unlicensed officer re-entering the record as a vagrant. Iolo had felt that rod on his own tongue. Writing to William Owen Pughe on 12 March 1788 of the societies of the Cymry in Llundain, whose members were mostly northerners, he recalled that “when ever a Silurian expression dropt from me, it was often carped at, on the supposition that it was not pure Welsh”.Iolo Morganwg to William Owen Pughe, 12 March 1788, Correspondence, I, p. 306.

And the north’s settlement of the craft was disputed in the south before Iolo was born. The edition of Llawdden prints the quarrel.See Gwirddysg, ¶205. Llawdden was at the Carmarthen eisteddfod, and he lost. The chair went to Dafydd ab Edmwnd, of the Hanmers of Flintshire, whose twenty-four measures became the law of British verse for the next five hundred years. Llawdden said it had been bought. The scene is set down by John Jones of Gellilyfdy: Gruffudd ap Nicolas put the chief poets to sing the twenty-four measures, and some sang sixteen, some eighteen, some twenty, and Llawdden only twenty-three (reckoning that Dafydd could not sing them all) and Dafydd sang all twenty-four, and the chair was judged to him. Llawdden’s first words, in Jones’s text, are not a complaint but a curse on himself: “Baw diawl i mi na chanasswn hwynt”, devil’s filth on me that I did not sing them. Then he said that Dafydd had given Gruffudd ap Nicolas a fee for the chair, “ag nid ar ganu yr enillasai ef y hi”, and that he had not won it by singing, and he put the charge into an englyn.Huw Meirion Edwards (ed.), Gwaith Llawdden, Cyfres Beirdd yr Uchelwyr 31 (Aberystwyth, 2006), notes to poem 34, quoting Peniarth MS 267, pp. 53–64, written by John Jones of Gellilyfdy between 1635 and 1641. And the Cymraeg carries a turn the English cannot. The word in Jones’s text for what Dafydd is said to have given is gobyr, gobr, which the dictionary gives as a form of gwobr, a prize, and which in the laws of Hywel was also the fee due to the judges who decided a case. Prize, fee and the judge’s due are one word, so Llawdden’s charge is a pun on the chair itself.Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, s.v. gobr: “amr. ar gwobr”, a variant of gwobr; “reward, payment, fee, wages, recompense; gift; merit, desert; bribe; maiden-fee”; and gobr cyfraith, “legal fee due to the judges who decided a case”. Peniarth MS 267, as printed in Edwards, Gwaith Llawdden, notes to poem 34, and in G. J. Williams, Iolo Morganwg a Chywyddau’r Ychwanegiad (London, 1926), p. 92: “y dyfod Llowdden mae gobyr a roesse Dafydd [i] Gruffudd ap Nicolas am y gadair”. The englyn survives, in eight manuscripts, and it names a figure:

Cam oedd i’r Guto roi’r gatair—i’r gŵr
    Am ganu tôn deuair,
    A gwedy rhoddi’r gadair
    Dwyn dwy bunt neu dair.

It was wrong for Guto to give the chair to the man for singing a two-word tune, and then, after giving the chair, to take two pounds or three. Dafydd answered it in kind, in an englyn of his own, and told Llawdden he had not known either of the two words.Edwards, Gwaith Llawdden, poem 34, with Dafydd ab Edmwnd’s reply; the eight sources are BL Add 14964 (twice), BL Add 15003, CM 129, J 138, LlGC 3039B (Mostyn 131), Peniarth 239 and Peniarth 267. The first line names “y Guto” where the prose account names Gruffudd ap Nicolas; the manuscripts differ and the edition does not resolve it. A second englyn of his, in another manuscript again, goes at the winner rather than the judging: there the chair is given “am gydaid—o bys”, for a bagful of peas, to “boswrn ’r Hangmeriaid”, the Hanmers’ little man, and the editor takes a bagful of peas to mean a worthless poem.Edwards, Gwaith Llawdden, poem 36, from Peniarth MS 313, p. 100, and the editor’s notes to it: cydaid—o bys as “cerdd ddi-werth”, a worthless poem; the Hanmers as a family of Flintshire gentry; poswrn first attested in 1546 in Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, p. 2862, which gives its sense as “corrach; chwyddedig”, dwarf; swollen.

Dates decide what that is worth. Iolo was born in 1747. The englynion of the quarrel were being copied into a manuscript between 1605 and 1612, under a heading saying they were sung “yn halaeth Dinevor o vlaen Grvffvth ap Nicolas yr hwnn oedd yn roi barn am y gadair arian”, in the hall of Dinefwr before Gruffudd ap Nicolas, who was giving judgment for the silver chair. John Jones set his account down a century before Iolo was born. And the scholar who did more than any other to convict Iolo held that Jones’s account mattered precisely because it preserved “y traddodiadau a ffynnai ymhlith y beirdd yn y wlad honno”, the traditions current among the poets of that country, and the edition reports it as probably true in substance.The englyn collection’s earliest copy is LlGC 3039B (Mostyn 131), 1605–12; the heading is quoted in Edwards, Gwaith Llawdden, notes to poem 34. G. J. Williams, ‘Eisteddfod Caerfyrddin’, Y Llenor v (1926), p. 95. So a southern pencerdd disputing the Carmarthen settlement is not something that had to wait for Iolo to think of it. The dispute was in the manuscripts before he was born, in the mouth of a poet who was in the room when the judgment was given; and the man who prosecuted him valued the account for the traditions it kept. G. J. Williams went further, in his own book. Of the fuller telling of the quarrel printed in Y Greal, he wrote that it is hard to see how it can be attributed to Iolo at all, for Y Greal said the manuscript was in the hands of Thomas Evans of Brechfa, a living man and something of a man of letters. On the next page he rejected the whole of it “without any hesitation”, unless older manuscripts should confirm it. The witness was alive; the rule was that it did not matter.G. J. Williams, Iolo Morganwg a Chywyddau’r Ychwanegiad (London, 1926), p. 92: “y mae’n anodd gweled ym mha fodd y gellir priodoli’r hanes i Iolo ei hun, oherwydd dywaid yn Y Greal fod y llawysgrif ym meddiant Thomas Evans ym Mrechfa, ac yr oedd y gŵr hwnnw yn fyw ar y pryd, ac yn gryn dipyn o lenor”; p. 93: “Heb unrhyw betruster, rhaid inni wrthod yr hanesion hyn i gyd, oni chadarnheir hwynt gan lawysgrifau hŷn.”

And the campaign is older than Morris-Jones's opening shot of 1896, it began in 1789, when the Llundain Gwyneddigion seized the eisteddfod and ruled the Cymraeg of the south unfit for poetry, and it was answered, in 1792, on Primrose Hill. And the charge itself is older than the quarrel over Iolo: the doctrine printed in 1787, the ancient British poems impeached in 1789 and 1790, the word forgery laid on Taliesin and the British bards as a class in 1800, and answered on the evidence in 1803.All of it is set out in Y Celwydd, ¶128. Which is to say: the trial of Iolo Morganwg has been in continuous session for more than two hundred years, and Morris-Jones was its most thorough prosecutor, not its first. And the scorn ran both ways, for Iolo had answered the northern purists in their own coin long before they sat in judgment on him. He had a mocking name for them, deudneudwr, a "deud-and-neud-sayer," built from the very dialect words (deud for dweud, neud for gwneud) by which a Gwynedd man gives himself away, and he boasted, as G. J. Williams reports it, that Morgannwg still held cywyddau of Dafydd ap Gwilym "na wyddai'r un deudneudwr ddim amdanynt," that not a single deudneudwr knew anything of.G. J. Williams, Iolo Morganwg a Chywyddau’r Ychwanegiad (1926), p. vi, who calls it “ei ymffrost ef ei hun”, his own boast, and p. 5, where Iolo tells Owain Myfyr he has cywyddau of Dafydd that no deudneudwr knew. The word is Iolo’s; the sentence is Williams’s report of it. His gloss: “Ystyr ‘deudneudwr’ ydyw gŵr o’r Gogledd, lle y dywedir gneud a deud. Ni wn lai nad Iolo ei hun a luniodd y gair”, a man of the North, where they say gneud and deud; very likely Iolo coined the word himself.  The southern bard they would convict for failing the northern rules had already weighed the northern purists and found them ignorant of the very inheritance they presumed to license. He had said it in print in 1794, in a note to his Poems: “The North Walian BARDS, as they call themselves, but improperly, of whose meetings we sometimes of late meet with accounts, know nothing at all of the ancient and genuine Bardism.”Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (1794), vol. II, p. 161 (note to “Ode on Converting a Sword into a Pruning Hook”).

He said what he thought of them at the time, and he said it laughing. “What in the name of Old Nick, for it cannot be in the name of any other being, induced Mr Davies to address his book to the Gwyneddigion? … I was one of the very first members in 1772. It was at first whimsical, became afterwards ridiculous, and is now detestable.” Their committee, he wrote, met every Monday night at the Bull’s Head, “a very creditable bawdy house in Walbrook Street,” where the society’s bard was “well convinced that sambies, frochees” (iambics, trochees) “and such outlandish things, are poisonous plants that grow in Otaheite”. And Geoffrey of Monmouth, the Britons’ historian, he called Galfrid gelwydd têg, Geoffrey of the fair lies.Iolo Morganwg to William Meyler, 1 January 1792, Cardiff Central Library MS 3.99 (a copy made by Edward Davies); The Correspondence of Iolo Morganwg (2007), no. 1213.

And the quarrel was never only the scholars’. The coalfield sang it. A ballad of the railway age, Cân newydd, sef castiau Jack o’r North, “a new song, the tricks of Jack from the North”, by Edward Williams, Y Dyrnwr, gives a northerner the voice: he cheats his way through Aberdâr, the butcher, the shop, the bank, his own men’s wages, snapping his fingers at each and away. The last verse turns to the buyer: “Cymerwch chwi ofal o Jack o’r North, / Mewn Wil, Twm Puch a Deio o’r North, / Maent yn twyllo pawb trwy wlad a thre’, / A gweithio am ddiwrnod a ffwrdd a’r Railway”: beware Jack o’r North, and Wil, Twm Puch and Deio from the North; they cheat everyone in town and country, work a day, and off on the railway. The north called the southern bard a forger. The southern street had a word for the northerner too.Cân newydd, sef castiau Jack o’r North, by Edward Williams (Y Dyrnwr), undated, 4 pp., Cardiff University Welsh ballads collection (Internet Archive, wg35-2-6394), last verse.

And the standardising hand was laid on the Cymraeg long before Morris-Jones lifted his pen, and it too was Victoria's. In 1840 Connop Thirlwall, an Englishman, a Cambridge historian wired into the German scholarly establishment, lately made Bishop of St Davids by Lord Melbourne and so placed in ecclesiastical authority over Sir Gaerfyrddin, sat at the Cymreigyddion of Abergavenny writing on Cymraeg orthography: the spelling-reform weapon, in the hands of an English bishop and a Prime Minister's appointee, seventy years before the knight codified it. The man who held the diocese held the dictionary too. And note the timing of that diocese, because it was not incidental. The St Davids see was the epicentre of Merched Beca, Rebecca's daughters, the rural rising of 1839 to 1843 in which the ceffyl pren tradition was turned to burn the tollgates of Sir Gaerfyrddin and Sir Benfro: the same parishes, the same pulpits, the same people Thirlwall now governed. Read beside the burning tollgates, his double project, standardising the spelling of Cymraeg and governing the pulpits, looks like counter-insurgency as much as scholarship. Standardise the tongue and you make the communications of a rural Cymraeg-speaking people legible, classifiable, and manageable to the state's military and judicial intelligence. The spelling-reform and the troop-deployment were two instruments of the same state. To standardise the tongue and to superintend the religion of a people were, here as everywhere, two offices of one occupation.

The doctrine did not die with Lewis Morris; it became the weather. Every man in the dock breathed it, and you can see it in the one place a scholar cannot hide, which is the direction his mistakes run in. Sir John Rhŷs, adjudicating at Liverpool in 1884, found that the Cymraeg of five of his competitors (southern men, Cadrawd of Llangynwyd among them) was “the style and orthography of comparatively illiterate men”. John Gwenogvryn Evans, a Sir Gaerfyrddin man ordained thirteen miles from the Llwchwr, took that river out of the oldest poetry in the language and put it in a cart-rut outside Chester, and called the scholarship that objected “Bangor philology”. Sir John Morris-Jones’s own misses run one way: in his Welsh Grammar of 1913 he called efe a “figment” of Salesbury’s, and its older form efef is written in a Brut of the thirteenth century.Morris-Jones, A Welsh Grammar (Oxford, 1913), pp. 272–3; Sims-Williams (2016), p. 146, citing NLW, Llanstephan MS 1, p. 48. The rest of his mistakes are counted in John Gwenogvryn Evans, ¶632. Griffith John Williams counted a phrase of southern speech, ar bwys, against the disputed poems. And the man who set the whole investigation going in 1917, J. H. Davies of Cwrt Mawr, had given his working life to editing the letters of the Morrises of Anglesey. The south named it outright in Y Darian in 1918, Gogleddiaeth, Northernism.Every quotation in this paragraph is evidenced in its own place: Rhŷs at Liverpool in Y Ffeil and Morris-Jones’s misses in John Gwenogvryn Evans, ¶632; Evans on the Llwchwr and on “Bangor philology” in Y Ffeil; G. J. Williams’s ar bwys, J. H. Davies, Y Darian and the bench of 1921 in Y Fainc, ¶684. It is gathered here because scattered it reads as coincidence, and it is not one. Iolo’s own tongue had marked him out in the north more than a century before the south named it. At Y Bala in 1799 he wrote: “I am by my tongue known to be a S. Wn.”: a South Welshman, known by his speech.NLW, Iolo Morganwg Papers, E5/18.

And the state itself was not idle while the doctrine did its work. The machine of Pitt’s Terror ran a national web of informers as well as the suspensions and the trials.See Y Croesholiad, ¶162. The Gorsedd itself was treated as a subversive organisation, and Iolo's shop was searched. His closest associates went down one by one: the Unitarian minister Thomas Evans, Tomos Glyn Cothi, gaoled two years and set in the pillory at Caerfyrddin for a liberty-song; Morgan John Rhys, founder of the first political journal in Cymraeg, fleeing to America ahead of arrest; Jac Glan-y-gors, the "Welsh Paine," running from George Guelph (George III)’s Messengers. And one of the King’s informers sat inside the radical society itself, Edward Jones, Bardd y Brenin, a member of the Gwyneddigion alongside the very men he watched.Iolo to Peggy, 27 August 1794, NLW 21285E, letter 841; see Y Gadwyn, ¶269.  This was the weather Iolo wrote in, and it is the documented backdrop to everything else. He wrote a song in that weather for the road west: “O let us to some desert wild / Haste o’er the stern atlantic wave / There live with freedom self exiled / From realms where bloody Tyrants rave / And thanking heav’n, there shall we thus / In strains of joy together sing / ‘Good Lord! thou hast deliver’d us / From Pitt and spies, from Church and King.’”NLW 21401E, no. 7.

In Iolo's own lifetime the same class closed on him from two sides at once, a pincer, the inside and the outside of one operation. From the inside, the money. Owain Myfyr, the wealthy Llundain furrier who bankrolled the work, used the purse as a muzzle: with an international business to protect from Pitt's treason laws, he funded the safe antiquarian work (the Myvyrian) while steering the movement away from open radicalism and deciding which texts saw print and which were buried, an experience Iolo recorded for exactly what it was, intellectual censorship. From the outside, the state. Edward Jones, "Bardd y Brenin," was harper to the Prince of Wales, a courtier whose whole standing rested on George Guelph (George IV). By Iolo's own account in 1794 he was "laying snares" to have him charged with treason and shipped to Newgate or Botany Bay, working at the seam of his court patronage and John Reeves's government-sponsored Association against Republicans, the loyalist network that made informers of neighbours. Iolo had already faced him with it. On New Year’s Day 1794 he drafted a letter to the King’s harper, addressed in mockery to “Mr Humstrum”, a humstrum being a rough home-made fiddle: “I understand by what I hear from many … that you take unwarrantable liberties with my name … You must desist, and, what is more, you must publickly recant, or I will, in a few days, give you from the press such a literary drubbing as ever any scoundrel had. You shall no longer pass for the supposed author of what you only begg’d and filch’d from every corner that you possibly could. Mr John Walters shall have his due, so shall Mr William Owen … You have been meddling with edge tools.”Iolo Morganwg to Edward Jones, 1 January 1794, NLW 21286E, no. 1022, a copy or draft, endorsed “Humstrum”; The Correspondence of Iolo Morganwg, ed. Geraint H. Jenkins, Ffion Mair Jones and David Ceri Jones (Cardiff, 2007), no. 1022; quoted from the Iolo Morganwg project’s transcription (iolomorganwg.wales.ac.uk/llythyr-1022.php), not yet read on the manuscript. The address reads “Edward Jones Esqr. (Duw a’n cadwo ni)”, God save us, “at Mr Chambers, Grocer, No. 122 Mount Street, Grosvenor Square”. John Walters was the lexicographer of Llandochau, William Owen the later Pughe. A radical movement contained from within by a businessman guarding his investment, and hunted from without by a courtier guarding his monopoly: that is the apparatus in working order, half a century before it ever produced the word forgery. The verdict of 1926 did not begin the suppression. It inherited a machine already running. Iolo had seen that network at work in the street. In 1794 he wrote to the Revd Hugh Jones at Lewisham: “All the whores and thieves of London are assembled about the fellow called [John] Reeves and his fiddlers and faddlers in a mighty band, bawling and squawling, like the songs of caterwauling, ‘God-Save-the-King! Church and King for ever!’”Iolo Morganwg to Hugh Jones, 4 June 1794, Correspondence, I, pp. 676–7.

He had names for the informer: Humstrum Jones, and Ned Taro Tant, String-bashing Ned. And for his title: “One Jones, who most curiously nicknames himself Bard and Harpist to the Prince of Wales. Poor Prince, how many coxcombs are there of this that and t’other thing, to the Prince of Wales, to the King &c—what impudence!”NLW 13108B, p. 114, as quoted by the online edition of the correspondence, iolomorganwg.wales.ac.uk, “Edward Jones (1752–1824)”, harvested 7 September 2026, with the two nicknames.

19. Y Penseiri

The Architects615 The witness box. 622 Rhŷs. 625 The boy from Ponterwyd. 627 The inspector of schools. 629 The race.

Y Blwch Tystion: The Witness Box

The art Iolo served, cerdd dafod, the craft of the tongue, was made to be said aloud, in the open, before people who would hear a false word the moment it was spoken. That is how a charge against a man is tried: in the open, count by count, under cross-examination.The Rees of Cwrt Colman trial: the Cambrian, 26 April 1823; CIM, III, 554–8, 656–7; NLW 21397E, nos. 5, 7, 8, 12. Y Dyn Bach, ¶450. The art kept its own rule against the false word. In Cyfrinach Beirdd Ynys Prydain, printed from Iolo’s papers in 1829, it is set down that gwarth pennaf Bardd yw dywedyd yn ei Gerdd y peth na fytho gwir a chyfiawn, a bard’s greatest shame is to say in his song the thing that is not true and just.Cyfrinach Beirdd Ynys Prydain (1829), p. 34.

And the accused had named them first. In 1794, in the preface to his own Poems, Lyric and Pastoral, in print and over his own name, the stonemason put the whole of this case into two sentences: “I have in several places aimed at rectifying some mistakes of modern Welsh Historians, gentlemen (if they may be so called) of no conscience, who are partial to every thing but Truth. The true history of the Ancient Welsh Bards is wilfully suppressed in favour of the wildest preconceptions and absurdest theories that could ever enter the brain of the most barbarous Goth.”Edward Williams, Poems, Lyric and Pastoral, 2 vols. (London, 1794), I, p. xviii, the preface; read off the page image of the printed book (Internet Archive, poemslyricpastor01ioloiala, leaf 21). The Goth is Pinkerton’s: see Y Celwydd, ¶128. Wilfully suppressed. More than a hundred and thirty years before the verdict, the man it convicted had named the charge and the motive, and turned barbarous back on the men who used it.

He never softened it. Theophilus Jones’s history of Brecknockshire, still counted a good county history, was to him “a mere mixen of low buffoonery”, all “low irony, vulgar witticisms, coxcombical sarcasms, and ignorance”, with no more than “a few shrivel’d grains of historical truth” in it.NLW 13136A (Llanover C 49), pp. 96–97. A mixen is a dung-heap. Theophilus Jones was the grandson of Theophilus Evans of Drych y Prif Oesoedd. “So much ignorance, self conceit and buffoonery never before met together in any attempt at writing history.”Iolo Morganwg to Thomas Rees, 25 February 1814: The Correspondence of Iolo Morganwg, III, p. 246. The writers of the history of Cymru, as a body, were “our Jack-a-lanthorne Historians”.NLW 13089E, p. 449. A jack-a-lanthorn is the will-o’-the-wisp: the light that flickers over bog and marsh at night, which a traveller follows thinking it a lamp, and which leads him off the path and into the mire. His historians gave a light, and it led the reader into the bog. And of those he despised most he wrote: “a loathsome swarm of the vilest bloodsucking insects that ever dishonoured the Creation”.NLW 13112B, p. 367, as given by Geraint H. Jenkins, who cites that one page twice and gives the sentence two different targets. In Bard of Liberty (2012), p. 150 and n. 145, it is aimed at the magistrates, informers and whistle-blowers of Pitt’s terror, and printed as Iolo spelled it, “a loathsom swarm”; the same page is his source, at p. 154 and n. 163, for Iolo’s “My life is given up, is devoted to the Great cause”. In “‘Taphy-land historians’ and the Union of England and Wales 1536–2007”, Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies 1, no. 2 (2008), p. 14 and n. 44, it is aimed at the Oxford and Cambridge men sent into the parishes, and the page is cited as “f. 367”, a leaf, though the volume is numbered by pages. The manuscript is not online, and it has not been read here. Until it is, the 2012 reading is the likelier: it cites the page as the volume numbers it, it keeps Iolo’s spelling, and it puts the sentence on a page of his writing about his own cause and its enemies.

And he said what the real thing costs. When Thomas Rees, writing South Wales for The Beauties of England and Wales, complained that Iolo had sent him nothing, Iolo answered that the history Rees wanted was not written on the face of the county to be read at a gallop: “No Sir, Historical Truth is in its acquisition not to be obtained but with great Labour where nothing has been previously done.”Iolo Morganwg to Thomas Rees, in his long reply to Rees’s complaint (Phillips’s n. 30: Iolo Letters 909, 25 February 1814), as quoted in W. J. Phillips, “Iolo Morganwg and the Rees family of Gelligron”, National Library of Wales Journal XIV, no. 2 (Winter 1965). As for the title of the series, he knew “of no other beauties, unless we may make use of such terms as the beauties of imagination, of blind conjecture, of dreaming, in short of mere humbug.”The same letter, as quoted by Phillips. Books of Fenton’s kind were “husks only fit for feeding a herd of swine”, and he told Rees not to become “a bookseller’s hireling”.The same letter, as quoted by Phillips (1965). The husks are the prodigal son’s, Luke 15:16: [PRE-JUSTINIAN] the Greek keratia, the carob pods the swine ate; [POST-JUSTINIAN] “husks”, as the King James Bible has it. And the travel-writers who were filling the shelves with Cymru were not historians at all: “I do not include tourists amongst those who have pretended to write Welsh History, it is sufficient for them to give the history of their own travels, and of their own observations and ideas. These things have nothing or very little to do with ancient history.”Iolo Morganwg to Thomas Rees, 3 May 1813, in Elijah Waring, Recollections and Anecdotes of Edward Williams (London, 1850), p. 171, as quoted by Phillips (n. 31); the same letter as the “language of sarcasm” in the court roll. The one man in that correspondence demanding labour in the manuscripts is the one the verdict called the forger. He drew the same line between labour and dreaming in his own life, and drew it with a smile. Telling William Owen Pughe, the scholar of Cymraeg in Llundain who later edited the Myvyrian with him, of a plan in January 1792 to go to America, deal in furs and send them home to Owain Myfyr’s fur business in Llundain, he wrote: “Castles in the air, you cry, – but the idea gives me pleasure.”NLW 13224B, p. 9, Iolo Morganwg to William Owen Pughe, 2 January 1792.

None of the men who follow was ever put in a witness box. They are put there now, one after another, each on his own counts, in his own words, in print. A charge tried in the open takes as long as the evidence takes; the men who tried Iolo gave him a paragraph and a verdict. What follows is the case: who each man was, what he was paid, what he did, and what it came to. The counts themselves, the line-by-line proof, quoted from the scholars who made it and answered in the men’s own words, are in Y Ffeil, where they can be read against the page. Nothing is summarised away and nothing is softened.

And there is a third officer in this succession, and he is the worst of the three, because the first two only wrote about the record. The third had it in his hands.

Lewis Morris was paid by George Guelph (George II) to find his ore, and wrote the doctrine of northern purity in his spare hours. Connop Thirlwall was placed by a Prime Minister over the diocese that was burning, and made spelling a branch of order. John Gwenogvryn Evans was paid by Victoria to walk into every house in Cymru that held a manuscript in Cymraeg, open the boxes, and write down what was inside.

Syr John Rhŷs

Before that officer, the man who made him. Every officer in this succession was taught, examined, recommended, voted for or paid by John Rhŷs, Professor of Celtic at Oxford, and the professorship is the smaller half of him. He was also the finance officer of a landlord, and the landlord’s tenants were Britons.

In plain words: for fourteen years John Rhŷs kept the accounts of an Oxford college that lived partly on the tithe of Cymru; when the farmers stopped paying he was secretary to the Crown’s inquiry into why; and the men who would try Iolo were his men. What follows is how that was done, and the figures.

The men who tried Iolo Morganwg ate from one dish, and the dish was filled by the poor of the Cymry.

Now the boy the college took in. John Rees of Ponterwyd was the son of a farmer and lead miner, raised in the Calvinistic Methodist chapel; his own denomination could do nothing with him, because its college at Bala was shut to a clever boy who would not preach.Y Goleuad, 1 January 1870, “Rhydychain ac Ymneillduwyr Cymru”: brought up by his parents in the Calvinistic Methodist church at Ponterwyd; Bala closed to him “am nad oedd yn bregethwr”, because he was not a preacher. The Crown paid first, with a Queen’s Scholarship examined by one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors; Oxford paid next, with an exhibition of £40 a year at Jesus; and in December 1869 Merton elected him to a fellowship worth £300.North Wales Chronicle, 4 February 1860 (the Queen’s Scholarship, second class, “John Rhys, Penllwyn”) and 30 December 1865 (“he had, last October, gained an Exhibition of £40 a-year”); Baner ac Amserau Cymru, 26 January 1870, and Western Mail, 24 December 1869, on the Merton fellowship, “gwerth 300p. yn y flwyddyn”, won against twelve others. The Methodist paper told its readers plainly who had lifted him: “Clerigwr o Eglwys Loegr a sylwodd arno, ac a’i cymerodd erbyn ei law”, a clergyman of the Church of England noticed him and took him by the hand.Y Goleuad, 1 January 1870. The same column: had Rhŷs stayed with the Methodists he would be to this day “yn ysgolfeistr tlawd a dinod mewn rhyw Ros neu Gors yn ynys Môn”, a poor and obscure schoolmaster in some Rhos or Cors on the isle of Môn.

There was a price on the fellowship and it was printed at the time. To take it he had to attest “ei fod yn aelod o Eglwys Loegr, ac yn credu ei hathrawiaethau”, that he was a member of the Church of England and believed her doctrines, and it was a clerical fellowship, carrying the expectation of ordination within five years.Baner ac Amserau Cymru, 26 January 1870 (the Nonconformist paper recording the loss of “ein cydwladwr talentog”, our talented countryman, from among them); Y Goleuad, 1 January 1870: “Deallwn mai Cymrodaeth Glerigol a gafodd Mr. RHYS; hyny yw, disgwylir iddo, fel un o amodau ei etholiad, gymeryd ei ordeinio yn Eglwys Loegr o fewn ysbaid pum mlynedd.” Whether he was ever ordained is not seen; he left for the Crown inspectorate in 1871 and married in 1872. The Nonconformist system could use a clever boy from Cymru only if he would preach. The Church and the Crown could use one who would not. Rhŷs made the declaration. Iolo, a Unitarian who lived all his life under the laws that shut Dissenters out of office, wrote the rule for the free country he drafted in the 1790s: “None can be tollerated who will not tollerate.”NLW 21395E, pp. 24–5. On the Test and Corporation Acts, which kept Dissenters out of office until 1828, Jenkins, Bard of Liberty, p. 72.

Then the Crown sent him home to inspect the schools of Flint and Denbigh, and there he said what he thought of the language he would spend his life professing. At Christmas 1871, six months into the post, presiding at an eisteddfod as “one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools”, he said Cymraeg was “doomed to go the way of all the earth”, and that the child in Cymru took to English so readily that “we might safely predict that a generation not far off would find respectable English in general use in North Wales”.Cambrian News, 5 January 1872, reporting the Liverpool and Birkenhead Gordofigion Eisteddfod, Christmas Day 1871. The same speech defends Cymraeg against the Llundain press as neither harsh nor barbarous, praises “the logical precision” of the verb bod, and ends on “the last Welsh-speaking mountaineer, who dies in solitude … murmuring to himself of his mother-tongue”. He also said words in Cymraeg “ought to be … rescued from loss”. Recorded whole. In his official report of 1876 he set the language down as the thing slowing English: Cymraeg “is the language which most of them talk outside the walls of the schoolroom”, so that teaching them to pronounce English “take up a good deal of time, which in the case of English children might be employed in appealing more directly to their intelligence”, and “the consequence to the managers of Welsh schools is, that they cannot earn so much grant as those of English schools”.John Rhys, “Report on Elementary Education, Denbighshire and Flintshire” (Committee of Council on Education, 1876), reprinted in full in the Wrexham Advertiser, 7 and 14 October 1876. “Payment by results”: the Cymraeg-speaking school earned the Crown’s money at a lower rate. The one concession he asked for was money, “a concession to Welsh in the code, similar to that made to Gaelic … in Article 19 c. of the Scotch Code of 1873”. Iolo had expected another future for the language. Writing on 27 November 1799 to Owen Jones, Owain Myfyr, the Llundain furrier who bankrolled the work, he said that “the Welsh nation and language, like the Jews, are by providence reserved for future glory”.Iolo Morganwg to Owen Jones (Owain Myfyr), 27 November 1799, Correspondence, II, p. 244.

In the same report he listed the children’s English as a set of faults of Cymraeg, “bebby and pepper”; “Tysarles and Dsymes got a shilling eats”, and reached for a verse to explain them: “It is notorious, monoglot natives of North Wales cannot any more than the Ephraimites of old sound sh.”Rhys, “Report on Elementary Education” (1876), Wrexham Advertiser, 7 October 1876. The allusion is Judges 12:6 [POST-JUSTINIAN, the KJV form of the story, used by Rhŷs himself; retained and downgraded]. The elder Greek witness does not print the sound-test word at all: LXX Judges 12:6 gives σύνθημα, “password”, in Codex Alexandrinus and στάχυς, “ear of grain”, in Codex Vaticanus [PRE-JUSTINIAN]. That is the ford at Jordan, and the word the Ephraimites could not say was shibboleth: by the verse’s own count forty-two thousand men of Ephraim were killed there for the way they said one letter. He recommended that teachers in Cymru be given E. A. Freeman’s Old English History for “the origin of the English people”; Freeman was the leading Teutonist of the day and one of his own correspondents.Rhys, “Report on Elementary Education” (1876). Freeman’s letters to Rhŷs, 1876–1898, are catalogued in the Sir John Rhŷs Papers, NLW GB 0210 JORHYS, A1/1. His post-bag also holds Max Müller, John Beddoe (The Races of Britain, 1885), Giuseppe Sergi and A. C. Haddon. And he closed the report to his masters like this: “a perusal of the reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the state of education in Wales printed in 1847, convince me that the progress made since then in North Wales cannot be over-rated. JOHN RHYS. To the Right Honourable the Lords of the Committee of Council on Education.”Rhys, “Report on Elementary Education” (1876), closing paragraph, Wrexham Advertiser, 14 October 1876. The man who made both of Iolo’s prosecutors measured the Britons against the Blue Books of 1847, found the improvement could not be over-rated, and signed it to the Crown. Twenty-four years later, as a historian, he gave the same verdict again: Brad y Llyfrau Gleision was “ultimately productive of good”.John Rhys and D. Brynmor-Jones, The Welsh People (London, 1900), on the 1847 inquiry: “for a time the cause of Welsh education may have been prejudiced … but, on the whole, the very fact that attention was drawn to the state of education in Wales in a very forcible manner was ultimately productive of good.”

From 1893 he sat as one of the Queen’s Commissioners on the Royal Commission on Land in Wales. The Commission’s report carried a section on ethnology and language, and the press reported before publication that it would be “written expressly by Professor Rhys”.Weekly Mail, 16 November 1895: “Another very interesting feature of the report will be probably written expressly by Professor Rhys, the principal of Jesus. This will, I believe, deal with the ethnological and linguistic sides of the question, and will, of course, in no sense be controversial or contentious.” Royal Commission on Land in Wales and Monmouthshire, Report, signed 26 August 1896, C.8221. Four years later the same material came out as a book, written with a fellow Land Commissioner, and it told the Britons what they were. They were not, it said, “the decayed and disconsolate remnant of a once great nation”; they were the descendants of Celtic races “which though absorbed into the English polity, after a prolonged struggle for independence, have steadily progressed by the side of their conquerors”, a conclusion reached, the same sentence says, by declining to look at the matter “through the mists of Neo-Druidism”.Rhys and Brynmor-Jones, The Welsh People (1900), on the origin of the Cymry. D. Brynmor Jones MP sat with Rhŷs on the Royal Commission on Land in Wales. Beneath the Britons, in that account, lies an older and darker people. In Celtic Folklore he wrote of “a dark-haired, long-skulled race” still living in Cymru and Ireland, whose affinities “appear to be Libyan, possibly Iberian”, who reckoned descent through the mother “on account of its promiscuity”, and of whom “the Picts made slaves and drudges”; and he assigned the families of the Mabinogi (the children of Dôn, the children of Llŷr, Pwyll and Rhiannon) to that race by blood.John Rhys, Celtic Folklore, Welsh and Manx (Oxford, 1901), ch. XII, “Race in Folklore and Myth”. The racial scheme is reported by him as what “the students of ethnology … tell us”, and he calls part of it “conjectures which I cannot establish”; the Mabinogi families are assigned “probably”. Recorded as he wrote it. He also named a living woman for measurement: the wife of a farmer near Nefyn, of whom the neighbours whispered that she was a changeling, and of whom he wrote that “she ought to be an extreme specimen of the type”, adding the hope that “the photographer and his anthropometric brother have found her out in time and in good humour”.Rhys, Celtic Folklore (1901), ch. XII. The British Association’s Ethnographic Survey of the United Kingdom was photographing and measuring in these years.

And the linguistic proof of the whole scheme was supplied to him by the man who would prosecute Iolo Morganwg. “It has recently been shown by Professor J. Morris Jones, of the University College of North Wales,” Rhŷs wrote, “that the non-Aryan traits of the syntax of our insular Celtic point unmistakably to that of old Egyptian and Berber.”Rhys, Celtic Folklore (1901), ch. XII, citing J. Morris-Jones, “Pre-Aryan Syntax in Insular Celtic”, Appendix B to Rhys and Brynmor-Jones, The Welsh People (1900), pp. 617 ff. The main text sends the reader to it: “We are glad to be able to refer our readers to an elaborate treatment of this question in Appendix B.” The chief prosecutor of Iolo Morganwg made his academic name by furnishing the argument that his own people were the language-wreckage of a non-Aryan race from North Africa, whose place in history was to be conquered. That is the doctrine those two men held about the original inhabitants while they were deciding what a Briton was allowed to say about his own people's past. What Iolo had to say about his own people’s past is in one of his own notebooks, in a single sentence: “A Nation now exists and has from a very remote period existed.”NLW 13128A, p. 249.

None of this makes him an English placeman, and the truth is worse for the Crown than that would be. He was a Cymraeg-speaking Radical who took a Cymru Fydd platform in 1894. He had acted as host to John Dillon, a leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party and the Land League, “at a time when Irish Nationalism was not so respectable as it has now become”. In 1907 the Crown knighted him, and in 1911 it made him a Privy Counsellor.South Wales Daily News, 21 September 1894, “Professor Rhys and the Cymru Fydd League”: he was to open the Llanberis branch in October 1894 and address the Liverpool and Chester Cymru Fydd societies. The Liberal members for Cymru fought to install him; the press in Cymru, of every colour, welcomed him; a farmers’ solicitor used him. That is precisely what made him useful. A hostile Englishman can be answered. A Briton of unimpeachable patriotism, who reports to the Crown that the language is ending and that its ending is progress, cannot be, because he is one of us. The Crown did not need an Englishman. Iolo had asked the question that arrangement answers, and asked it, says his biographer Geraint Jenkins, with a touch of irony: “Is not Wales conspicuously the least turbulent part of the British Dominions at this very day?”NLW 13097B, p. 293.

20. John Gwenogvryn Evans

The Inspector632 Evans. 634 Iolo’s book taken from the boy. 643 The pension and the Commission. 645 What he might not look at. 664 Rheged and the Llychwr. 669 The charges of 1918. 680 And nothing happened.

And he was a Briton to the bone. That is the first thing to say about him, and the last thing his defenders can get round.

He was born on 20 March 1852 at Ffynnon-felfed, a farm in Llanybydder, Sir Gaerfyrddin, and raised over the county line at Llanwenog. Cymraeg was his only language: at nineteen, he said, he could neither speak nor understand English. In 1866, fourteen by his own date, he was behind the counter of his uncle David Rees’s grocery at Llanbedr Pont Steffan (Lampeter), half past seven in the morning till eight at night, and between customers he read two books off his uncle’s shelf: Dr John Davies’s grammar of Cymraeg, and Cyfrinach y Beirdd, The Secret of the Bards. That is Iolo Morganwg’s book: the rules of verse in Cymraeg as Iolo set them down, published after his death by his son Taliesin ab Iolo.

The boy taught himself the metres out of Iolo’s book, talked metre with a friend after closing, and wrote a ballad on Gladstone’s reforms, which a local man sang at a political meeting to cheers. “Next morning my uncle gave me ‘a talking’ — and pointed out that poetry led to idleness and the public house, to failure in business, and ‘that Daniel Ddu had hanged himself.’” Daniel Ddu o Geredigion was the best-loved poet of that valley: a farmer’s son schooled at Lampeter like the boy, a Bachelor of Divinity of Oxford, twice a prizewinner at the Carmarthen eisteddfod, who killed himself in 1846 and lies at Pencarreg, the next parish up the Teifi.Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), p. 64. The uncle did not need to spell it out. Write Welsh poetry and you will end up like him: in the pub, bankrupt, and on the end of a rope. It was the lesson a whole century taught the children of the Britons: if you want to get on, leave Cymru’s things alone.

“The two books were locked up out of my reach.” That night, he says, he “read the cursing Psalm over three times, and next morning I parted my hair down the middle and had it cut short, very short. From that day to this I have never been interested in metres, and consequently have escaped the public house and the ‘hanging’, but not being lectured.”Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), p. 64.

He told it as a joke, in a footnote of 1924, fifty-eight years after the night, to answer Sir John Morris-Jones, who had written six years earlier that the secret of the bards was a closed book to him. Evans turned the closed book into a locked cupboard, the professor into a grocer, and ignorance into a lucky escape. The only witness is Evans. But take him at his word, and the book he learned the rules of verse in Cymraeg from was Iolo Morganwg’s, taken off him at fourteen by a grocer. That is the man who goes on to rewrite the metre of the oldest poetry in the language.Evans, “Taliesin, or The Critic Criticised”, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), pp. 63–65 n.; English at nineteen, p. 69. Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, Y Cymmrodor XXVIII (1918), p. 124. Cyfrinach Beirdd Ynys Prydain (Abertawy, 1829), ed. Taliesin Williams. The uncle and the apprenticeship: Dictionary of Welsh Biography, s.v. Evans, John Gwenogvryn, which gives his age as sixteen. Daniel Ddu: Dictionary of Welsh Biography, s.v. Evans, Daniel (1792–1846), by D. Gwenallt Jones; T. R. Roberts, Eminent Welshmen (1908), pp. 94–95.

The psalm he read three times, the cursing Psalm, is by the usual reckoning the hundred and ninth, and it is the curse of the attainder: let his days be few: and let another take his office of overseer … in one generation let his name be blotted out.Psalm 109 [POST-JUSTINIAN]; the Greek, Psalm 108 [PRE-JUSTINIAN], reads episkopē, oversight, and heteros, a different kind of man. It is read in full in Y Gwir a'r Ddyled, ¶744, beside the psalm that answers it. The boy read the curse; the man he became spent his life on the side of it. He was the Crown’s appointed overseer of the manuscripts of Cymru, and his rule for the Britons’ pedigrees, as we shall see, blots out a line in three generations.

An accident at eighteen, which no printed record describes,The National Library’s description of the Evans family papers (GB 0210 GWENOGFAM) says only that it was “following an accident”. The Dictionary of Welsh Biography and the obituary in The Times, 28 March 1930, p. 17, do not mention it. The family letters, four boxes of them still uncatalogued, are at the National Library. sent him back to school and on to the Presbyterian College at Caerfyrddin: Iolo’s own denomination, the Unitarians. He was ordained in 1876, married the Principal’s daughter, Edith Hunter, and took a pastorate in the town. It was the connexion Iolo had helped to found and had given hymns to sing. His first hymn book, he told his correspondents, “went off in little more than three months”, read across “the boundaries of our South Wales Unitarian connexion”.6 July 1818) and CIM, III, p. 104 (Iolo Morganwg to William Williams, 19 February 1812), Correspondence, III, p. 474 (Iolo Morganwg to Lant Carpenter.

He was never a well man, and the polite phrase hides what happened. “Attacks of typhoid fever in early life had undermined his health, which throughout the greater part of his life continued to be precarious.”Dictionary of Welsh Biography, s.v. Evans, John Gwenogvryn, by E. D. Jones (1959). Attacks: more than one, in a farmhouse in the 1850s and 1860s, with nothing to treat them but nursing. The standard medical textbook of his own lifetime, Osler’s, sets out what that fever did to the children it did not kill. It reached the brain: “Delirium is present in all severe cases”, the patient lying “constantly muttering”; “He picks at the bedclothes or grasps at invisible objects”. It could take away speech: “aphasia, which is more apt to occur in young children, and great slowness of speech, which may or may not be associated with mental weakness”. It could take the mind: “Post-febrile insanity is perhaps more frequent after typhoid than after any other disease.”Osler, Principles and Practice of Medicine (1892), p. 25. It ulcerated the voice-box down to the gristle; one of Osler’s patients recovered only “after the expectoration of large portions of the thyroid cartilage”.Osler, Principles and Practice of Medicine (1892), p. 23. And it left the chest open: “some writers hold that there is a greater susceptibility to infection with the tubercle bacillus after this than after other fevers.”Osler, Principles and Practice of Medicine (1892), p. 24. Now the life. In 1880, at twenty-eight, his voice failed for good and the ministry was over. His Oxford years were broken by a voyage to Australia and a winter at Davos, the two cures of the day for a consumptive chest. No doctor’s record survives in print to join them up.

And he told a second story, straight this time. The first time he asked to see a manuscript in Cymraeg, somebody said: “What is the good? You can’t read it.” “The tone in which that was said,” he wrote, “became the driving force that shaped the after-activities of my life.”Evans, Poems (1915), p. vii.

Put the two stories side by side, because they point opposite ways, and that is the key to him. Told to leave the metres alone, he obeyed, and never asked why: he never studied verse in Cymraeg again. Told he could not read a manuscript, he took it as a dare, and learned to read the old hands, letter by letter, better than anyone alive. He mastered the eye and gave up the ear. He could see every letter of the oldest poems in Cymraeg and could not hear one line of them. And he spent forty years telling the dead scribes that it was they who could not read.

Sir John Rhŷs, Professor of Celtic at Jesus College, Oxford, turned him to the manuscripts, and Oxford kept him for twenty years and gave him two degrees. Westminster made him an office.

In 1893 he was granted a Civil List pension of two hundred pounds a year. Not a fellowship, not a prize: a personal income for life out of the sovereign’s own list, on the Prime Minister’s word, a professional man’s salary for nothing in particular. In 1894 he was made Inspector of Welsh Manuscripts to the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts. Victoria paid him first, and gave him the country’s manuscripts second. And the grocer’s boy rose, on public money, to Davos and Australia, to doctorates from Oxford and Cymru, and to a house above the sea.Dictionary of Welsh Biography, s.v.: the pension, 1893; the inspectorship, 1894; hon. M.A. Oxford 1887, D.Litt. Oxford 1903, Wales 1905. The stonemason took his cures on foot. Geraint Jenkins, his biographer, tells how the old man, asthmatic as he was, left behind on the road a farmer too fat and short of breath to keep up with him, and said: “The Devil it is! A poor abstemious water drinking Welsh Bard in the Gout! Who’d a thought it!”NLW, Iolo Morganwg Papers, E5.

The Commission’s report on the manuscripts of Cymru is a Command Paper, printed for Her Majesty’s Stationery Office by the Queen’s printers, “Presented to both Houses of Parliament by Command of Her Majesty”.Report on Manuscripts in the Welsh Language, Historical Manuscripts Commission (H.M.S.O., 1898–1910), Vol. I, title page, [C.—8829]. The Majesty is Alexandrina Victoria, of Hanover on her father’s side and Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld on her mother’s. It sat in the Public Record Office in Chancery Lane. Its commissioners in his years were fifteen men, among them two Prime Ministers, Salisbury and Rosebery; a Viceroy of India, Ripon; a Regius Professor, Acton; the Earl of Crawford; the Lord Chief Justice of England, Alverstone; the Master of the Rolls; and the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records, Maxwell-Lyte, with the costs “defrayed at the public expense.”The Commission’s Circular, Report, II, ii, p. 801. Not one of them from Cymru. The notebook went round Cymru on Westminster's errand: the cabinet itself, sending the one Briton who could read the hand and be trusted in the parlour to take stock of his own country’s memory. The hand that opened the boxes was a Briton’s. Every hand it answered to in Llundain was not. And it was the second such mission in this story. In 1840 the same office sent Mr Black into Cymru under written Instructions … for the Survey of the Welsh Records. Same state, same object, same method: send a man in, and tell him in writing what he may look at.The commissioners: the Commission’s printed Circular. For 1840, Y Diffynnydd, ¶60. Iolo had written such a survey himself, a century before, and lost even the credit for it. His “Review of the Present State of Welsh Manuscripts”, printed at the front of the first volume of the Myvyrian Archaiology in 1801, was widely given to William Owen Pughe, and to Evan Williams, the bookseller in Llundain, he wrote: “I have been by many, perhaps all, the subsequent Writer[s] who quote or refer to it, rob’d of the credit of being the Author of it; all ascribe it to Wm. Owen.”Iolo Morganwg to Evan Williams, 17 April 1819, NLW 21286E, letter no. 971.

What he might not look at was the land. The Commission’s circular, printed in his own volumes, gave “positive instructions … to every person who inspects MSS. on their behalf that nothing relating to the titles of existing owners is to be divulged, and that if in the course of his work any modern title-deeds or papers of a private character chance to come before him, they are to be instantly put aside, and are not to be examined or calendared under any pretence whatever.” Its opening words give the reason: “To avoid any possible apprehension”. The owners’ fear, not the nation’s. The sentence before promises the owners that nothing will be published without their consent. The sentence after offers to carry their papers to Llundain and keep them “with the same care as if they formed part of the muniments of the realm.”The Commission’s Circular, Report, II, ii, p. 801.

Call it what it is. This was not a filing rule. The land of Cymru had been taken, by the attainders of Harri ap Harri, by enclosure, by courts run by the men who took it, and by 1900 it was being dug for coal and iron by the heirs of the takers. A survey of everything written in Cymru was ordered, in writing, not to look at the one thing that could prove the theft: who held the ground, and how they got it.

And Victoria’s own Warrant, under her Sign Manual, sealed it. The owners were to be given “full assurance that no information is sought except such as relates to public affairs, and that no knowledge or information which may be obtained from their collections shall be promulgated without their full licence and consent.”The Royal Warrant of 18 December 1897, in the Commission’s Eighteenth Report (H.M.S.O., 1917). The circular barred title. The Warrant barred knowledge. A family’s descent is not a “public affair”, so every family sitting on stolen land was handed a veto over the public record of itself, and the Crown’s inspector was bound to obey it. The men who made the theft lawful made sure it stayed hidden.The Royal Warrant names as commissioners the Marquess of Salisbury, the Marquess of Ripon, the Earl of Rosebery, the Earl of Crawford, Baron Acton and Sir Henry Maxwell-Lyte, and closes “Given at Our Court at Saint James’s, the eighteenth day of December … By Her Majesty’s command … VICTORIA, R.” Iolo had described the obedience that class expected. Of the nobles he railed against he wrote in 1820 that they were men “whose dictates we are arrogantly called upon to obey, and for all this be thankful, and consider them as a superior order of beings”.Iolo Morganwg to [?John Edwards], 27 March 1820, Correspondence, III, p. 544.

The inspector had his own view of Britons who wanted their land back, and he printed it for Parliament in 1899: “The writer has found it difficult to swallow his soup with grace as he listened to a ‘descendant of Rhodri Mawr wondering’ if there was no way of recovering some of the family estate, which was so extensive in the year 946.”Evans, Report, I, ii (1899), p. vi. A dispossessed man asked at dinner whether his family could ever get back what was taken. The Crown’s inspector, forbidden to write down who owned the land, wrote the question down as a joke.

Evans was never put in that box. Put him there now. He is the authority the professors, librarians and editors of Cymru have leaned on for a hundred years to come down against Iolo: men paid to read, who took his word and never read what had been printed against him in their own journals. Every witness against him is a scholar of his own day and his own trade, writing in print, and every one of them is in Y Ffeil. The chief of them, Sir John Morris-Jones, was Iolo’s prosecutor. That is why his evidence against Evans is no favour to us.

Y Llwchwr: The River

Evans read Taliesin’s llychwr as Lache, a lane of cart-ruts outside Chester; Morris-Jones put the word in the sky. Llychwr, he said, was daylight: “I played in the daytime; I slept in purple.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 102. In two hundred and ninety pages that argue the word twice, the Llwchwr is never named, nor Loughor, nor Leucarum, nor Llangennech, nor Llandeilo Talybont, though “Gower” appears nine times and Cydweli twice. The Llandaf charter of about 655 had already put the word in the river, bet lychur. One man sent it to Cheshire and the other to heaven. Neither would put it in the water.Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”: daylight, p. 103. Thomas Shankland, Y Llenor 3 (1924), pp. 95–96, on John Morris-Jones, Cerdd Dafod (1925), and G. J. Williams, Iolo Morganwg a Chywyddau’r Ychwanegiad (1926). Bet lychur: The Text of the Book of Llan Dâv (1893), and Rees, Liber Landavensis (1840).

And there is a second naming of that river, which arrives from a direction nobody would expect. It was printed in 1864, in a Congregationalist quarterly at Llanelli, by Thomas Stephens of Merthyr, the man who, fifteen years before, had been the first to doubt Iolo Morganwg in print. He was arguing that the story of Brân ap Llŷr bringing the gospel to the Britons was a late invention. To prove it he produced an older text which knew nothing of that story, and set the passage out in full.

Brân Fendigaid, son of Llŷr Llediaith, ar gwr mwyaf a welpwyd eirioed, the greatest man ever seen, and the gentlest, and the most generous in his gifts, drove the Irish out of his country, where they had been settled since the time of Gwrgan Farfdrwch. Ag a wnaeth Gaer ar lan Afon Llychwr, ac ai gelwis hi Dinmorfael o enw ei ferch anwylaf a fu farw yno. And he made a fort on the bank of the river Llychwr, and called it Dinmorfael (Morfa), after his dearest daughter, who died there. Afterwards he made a llan on the spot, and it is called Llanmorfael, a Chastell Llychwr yr awr honn, and Castell Llychwr at this present hour.Thomas Stephens, “Trioedd Ynys Prydain”, Y Beirniad (Llanelli), Hydref 1864, pp. 127–128, read from the page images. The Cymraeg entire: “Ag efe a yrres y Gwyddelod o’i wlad, lle ydd oeddynt wedi gwladychu er amser Gwrgan Farfdrwch. ag a wnaeth Gaer ar lan Afon Llychwr, ac ai gelwis hi Dinmorfael o enw ei ferch anwylaf a fu farw yno. Gwedi hynny efe a wnaeth Lann yno, a Llanmorfael ai gelwir, a Chastell Llychwr yr awr honn.” Mwyaf is rendered “largest” in the 1848 translation and “greatest” here; the word carries both. This is Y Beirniad the Congregationalist quarterly of Llanelli, 1859–1879, not the later journal of that name which Morris-Jones edited from 1911 and which is cited throughout.  The river had a king’s grave on it long before. The Black Book of Carmarthen, written about 1250, keeps it among the Stanzas of the Graves: Bet unpen o Prydein yn lleutir guynnassed, yn yda lliv yn llychur, the grave of a chief of Prydain in Lleutir Gwynnasedd, where the flood runs into the Llychwr. And the name of the llan is older than Iolo too. On folio 32v of the same book: Bet owein ab urien im pedryal bid, dan gverd llan morvael, the grave of Owain ab Urien, in a four-square grave, under the sod of Llan Morvael. The standard edition of 2023 says the place “has not been satisfactorily identified”, sends it to Powys, “real or imagined”, and calls the Llan Morfael at the Loughor “presumably invented by Iolo Morganwg”. It does not find a Llan Morfael in Powys either. The vellum gives the name; Iolo’s papers, and the chronology Stephens printed, give it a river.National Library of Wales, Peniarth MS 1 (the Black Book of Carmarthen), f. 34r, read on the page image; Skene, Four Ancient Books of Wales (1868), i, stanza XXXIX: “where the flood enters the Llychwr”. F. 32v, read on the page image: dan gverd llan moꝛvael, with the scribe’s round r; Skene prints gverid, and Gwenogvryn Evans’s index to his 1906 text has “Morvael, Llan, 64·8”. Patrick Sims-Williams, The Medieval Welsh Englynion y Beddau (Woodbridge, 2023), pp. 161–162 and n. 245: “neither the Llan Morvael nor the Llan Helet of I.13–14 has been satisfactorily identified”; “the llannau of Morfael and Heledd may be one and the same place, real or imagined, in Powys”; “LBS III 504 notes a Llan Morfael, presumably invented by Iolo Morganwg.” Read in the PDF.

A fort on the Loughor with a name of its own. A girl dead and buried beside it. A church raised over the place, carrying her name. And a castle standing on the ground as the writer set it down, named so his reader would know the spot. It is not a mist. It is an address.

So where did Stephens get it? He says so himself, three lines into his next page: Iolo MSS, page thirty-eight. The Iolo Manuscripts is a volume of Edward Williams’s own papers, published at Llandovery in 1848, twenty-two years after his death, and edited by his son. The passage is Iolo’s. It comes out of the very collection Stephens had doubted.

The date is worth following too, because it is not what it looks like. There is no manuscript in any library with 1485 written on it. The text is a chronology, one of those British tracts that measure history in spans, from this king to that king, so many years, and it ends by counting down to y flwyddyn honn a goraniad y Brenin Harri’r Seithfed, this present year, and the crowning of King Henry the Seventh. Henry was crowned on the thirtieth of October, 1485. Iolo’s son did that sum and printed the answer in a footnote, “From this it appears that the brief account here concluded was compiled in the year 1485”, and that footnote is the entire authority for the date. Stephens took it.Y Beirniad, Hydref 1864, p. 128, three lines down, closing the quotation: “Iolo MSS. tud. 38.” The tract is Amseroedd Cof a Chyfrif, “The Periods of Oral Tradition and Chronology”, Iolo Manuscripts (Llandovery: William Rees, 1848), Cymraeg pp. 36–39 and English pp. 412–417; the Loughor passage is at p. 38 and p. 414. The dating sentence is at p. 39: “er amser Hywel Dda hyd y flwyddyn honn a goraniad y Brenin Harri’r Seithfed ab Edmwnt am Owain Tudur … pum cant mlynedd a phump a deugain”. Taliesin Williams’s footnote at p. 417: “From this it appears that the brief account here concluded was compiled in the year 1485.” Henry VII was crowned 30 October 1485. 

Now set the two dates side by side. In 1849 Thomas Stephens published the first book to doubt Iolo in print. In 1864 he opened Iolo’s book, took the year Iolo’s son had worked out, and used the passage as sound evidence of what the fifteenth century believed. And it was not a lapse. He had been doing it from the start: the book that brought the charge cites the Iolo Manuscripts forty-one times, across thirty-three pages. He uses it to finish his own argument about the prison of Oeth and Annoeth, “This is comparatively easy, as we find it described in the Iolo MSS.” He retells a story out of it and judges that because a fifteenth-century elegy supports it, “it probably contains some truth.”Counted in The Literature of the Kymry (Llandovery, 1849): forty-one citations of the Iolo Manuscripts across thirty-three pages, thirty-four “Iolo MSS.”, six “Iolo Manuscripts”, one “Iolo MS.” Oeth and Annoeth at pp. 199–200: “It now only remains for us to enquire what the prison of Oeth and Annoeth was, to conclude the proofs in favour of the above interpretation of the poem. This is comparatively easy, as we find it described in the Iolo MSS.”, and of the same story, “admirably told, and … a fine specimen of national bravado”. The Roll of Rhys ab Tewdwr at p. 338: “there is a somewhat singular story told in the Iolo MSS.; and as it is countenanced by Iorwerth Vynglwyd’s Elegy on the celebrated bard Llawdden, it probably contains some truth.” 

And one of those forty-one comes back to this river. Carnhuanawc had put Rheged in Cumberland. Stephens corrected him out of Iolo: the Iolo Manuscripts, he wrote, place it “in the district between the rivers Tawy and Towy, and comprised the territories of Gower, Kidwely, Carnwyllion, Iscennen, and Cantrev Bychan.” That is the Loughor valley. Sixty-nine years later Sir John Morris-Jones called that same southern Rheged “one of the numerous fabrications of the authors of the Iolo MSS”. The first prosecutor used the passage the last prosecutor called a fabrication, and used it to correct a Welshman who had sent the kingdom to England.Stephens, The Literature of the Kymry (1849), p. 53, note, correcting Carnhuanawc’s Hanes Cymru, p. 278: the poem places Rheged within a night’s ride of Maelienydd, “which accords with the locality assigned to it in the recently published volume called Iolo MSS., wherein it is stated that it was situated in the district between the rivers Tawy and Towy, and comprised the territories of Gower, Kidwely, Carnwyllion, Iscennen, and Cantrev Bychan.” Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, pp. 70–71, on the same southern siting. 

Be exact about what this shows, because it is not what it first looks like. It does not prove there was a fort at the mouth of the Loughor in the first century, and it does not prove there was a manuscript in 1485. What it shows is how Stephens actually worked. He read Iolo’s papers the way the rest of them read anything, taking what he could use and refusing what he could not, and refusing some of it well: he threw out a poem given to Aneirin because “the metre, diction, and sentiments, belong less to the sixth century than to the sixteenth”. What it is not is the position the twentieth century built on his name. Which of course is worthless is Morris-Jones’s sentence, not Stephens’s. The blanket was woven seventy years later and hung on the first prosecutor’s shoulders.The rejection, same book, on a predictive poem given to Aneirin: “The late Mr. Edward Williams, pleads warmly for its antiquity; but … the metre, diction, and sentiments, belong less to the sixth century than to the sixteenth.” He also puts Edward Williams’s dating of Rhys Goch two hundred years too early, and argues it out. “Which of course is worthless” is Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 65.  Stephens admired Iolo’s stand against slavery, and it is through Stephens that one of Iolo’s sayings on slave-grown goods comes down: Pris gwaed ydyw … gwerth genedigaeth-fraint dynolryw ydyw, it is the price of blood … it is the price of mankind’s birthright.Thomas Stephens, “Iolo Morganwg”, Yr Ymofynydd, V, no. 60 (1852), p. 186. Passed on by Thomas Stephens.

And now weigh the thing the whole charge is supposed to rest on, which is inconsistency. On the two pages where Morris-Jones dismisses the southern Rheged he sets out, in his own hand, where the authorities had put it. Lewis Morris: Cumberland. Palgrave in 1831: Dumfriesshire. Carnhuanawc in 1842: Cumberland. Stephens in 1849: between the Tawy and the Towy. Stephens again in 1852: Lancashire. Stephens again in 1853: the river Swale. Nash in 1858: Cumberland. Skene in 1868: wherever the Cymraeg Geoffrey put it. Rhŷs in 1891: nowhere, because Rheged is mythical. Oman in 1910: Cumberland and a piece of Northumberland. Morris-Jones in 1918: the southern one is “a pretty obvious fiction”.All of it from Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, pp. 64–65, where he assembles the list himself: Lewis Morris (via Stephens, Lit. Kym., p. 267); Palgrave, History of England, i (1831), map opposite p. 30; Carnhuanawc, Hanes Cymru (1842), p. 278; Stephens, The Literature of the Kymry (1849), p. 53; Stephens, The Gododin (1852), p. 371, and (1853), p. 238; Nash, Taliesin (1858), p. 50; Skene, Four Ancient Books (1868), i, p. 59; Rhŷs, Arthurian Legend (1891), pp. 238–240; Oman, England before the Norman Conquest (1910), p. 239. The charge of misunderstanding Hywel ab Owain Gwynedd’s poem is Morris-Jones’s, at p. 65; “a pretty obvious fiction” is at p. 70. 

Count that. Nine authorities, eleven placings and eight answers, and three of them belong to one man inside four years. The first prosecutor moved the kingdom from the Loughor to Lancashire to a river in Yorkshire between 1849 and 1853, and by Morris-Jones’s own account got to the first of the three by misreading a poem of Hywel ab Owain Gwynedd. Not one of them is accused of fabricating anything. The only man on trial for inconsistency is the one who is not on the list, because he was dead before the list began.

That is the double standard with its clothes off, and it is the standard running through every chapter. When a professor changes his mind three times it is the progress of scholarship. When a stonemason’s papers disagree with each other it is forgery. The onus never once travels in the direction a court would send it. Nobody asks what proof there is that Iolo invented the southern Rheged; they ask what proof there is that he did not, and Williams’s rule of 1919 had already arranged that there could be none.

And there is a second thing to do with a list like that, which nobody has done to this one. Ask what each entry is standing on. The oldest of them is Lewis Morris, and his own words are “Rheged is supposed to be Cumbria, now Cumberland”, a supposition, marked as one by the man who made it. What turned the supposition into a location was a name in Geoffrey of Monmouth. Geoffrey gave Urien a place called Mureif, and in some copies of the Cymraeg Bruts Rheged stands against it. Which leaves the northern kingdom resting on the one authority this same scholarship throws out wherever it suits: a twelfth-century romancer, and on a gloss they cannot agree about. Rhŷs says the Welsh translator “confounded” Rheged with the province of Moray. Morris-Jones puts it on Geoffrey and then confesses he cannot account for it: whether Geoffrey “confused him with the Pictish king Brude Urgant, or whether he thought Mureif had something to do with the wall, I cannot say”. That is the foundation. Two men who cannot place the error, on a name neither can explain.The Cymraeg witnesses do not agree with one another here, and the manuscript question is not settled here. Lewis Morris’s words as Morris-Jones quotes them, “Taliesin”, p. 64 (from Stephens, Lit. Kym., p. 267); Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 70, for the gloss and for “I cannot say”; Rhŷs, The Arthurian Legend (1891), p. 240, for “confounded”; Skene, Four Ancient Books of Wales (1868), i, p. 59, for the acceptance. Lewis Morris’s words are quoted by Stephens, The Literature of the Kymry (1849), p. 267. The gloss and the doubt are Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 70: “How Geoffrey came to give Mureif to ‘Urien’ — whether he confused him with the Pictish king Brude Urgant, or whether he thought Mureif had something to do with the wall, I cannot say; but since Mureif was assigned in the original to Urien it was natural for the translator or copyist to gloss it as Rheged.” Rhŷs, The Arthurian Legend (1891), p. 240: “the Welsh translator who identified Rheged with Mureif confounded it thereby with the province of Moray.” Skene’s acceptance: Four Ancient Books of Wales (1868), i, p. 59. 

And then they go on using it. Skene’s edition of 1868, the standard text for the next half-century, adopts the northern siting by accepting the Cymraeg Geoffrey’s identification: that is, by taking as settled the very equation Rhŷs calls a confusion. Palgrave puts it in Dumfriesshire on a map in a history of England. Nash puts it in Cumberland by correcting Palgrave. Oman puts it in Cumberland and a slice of Northumberland in a book about England before the Normans. Not one of those is an argument from a British source. They are a supposition, a gloss, a map, and four men agreeing with each other. Iolo had a description for history built that way. Of Mona Antiqua, the book in which Henry Rowlands, a clergyman of Môn, made the island the seat of the druids, he wrote that it was a “confused Mass of violations of history, audacious assertion, groundless conjecture, superstitious tradition, false etymology, and a shameful ignorance of the ancient MSS, and even the Language of Wales”.NLW 13130A, p. 292.

Now the southern tradition, and here the prosecution supplies the evidence against itself. Morris-Jones’s reason for calling it a fiction is that “if there had been a Rheged ‘between the Tawy and the Towy’ medieval Welsh literature would not have been wholly silent about it.” Two sentences later he breaks his own silence. He cites a pedigree in the work of Lewis Glyn Cothi, a court poet of the fifteenth century, bringing Urien down to Gruffudd ap Nicolas of Dinefwr. Then he quotes a life of Gruffudd’s grandson Sir Rhys ap Thomas, written in the early seventeenth century, which traces the descent up to “Sir Urian Rheged, king of Gower in Wales, prince of Murriff in Scotland, lord of Kidwelly”. Medieval literature in Cymraeg is quoted on the very page where it is said to be silent.Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, pp. 70–71, the whole passage: “The South Wales Rheged is also a pretty obvious fiction; if there had been a Rheged ‘between the Tawy and the Towy’ medieval Welsh literature would not have been wholly silent about it. It appears to be one of the numerous fabrications of the authors of the Iolo MSS. Urien had already been brought down to Gower and Kidwelly, seemingly to bolster up the claim of Gruffudd ap Nicolas to be descended from him. The pedigree is given in Gwaith Lewis Glyn Cothi, 1837, p. 130, and represents Gruffudd as a descendant of Urien in the fifteenth degree — fifteen generations in nine centuries!” The life of Sir Rhys ap Thomas, early seventeenth century, printed in the Cambrian Register (1795), p. 56, quoted by him at p. 71; his own gloss on it, same page: “Rheged is not yet identified in it with Gower and Kidwelly — that was the finishing touch of the Iolo romancers.” 

His escape from his own quotation is one sentence long: “Rheged is not yet identified in it with Gower and Kidwelly — that was the finishing touch of the Iolo romancers.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 71. Read the words he has just printed. Urian Rheged, king of Gower in Wales … lord of Kidwelly. The three names stand in one clause of one sentence, a hundred and thirty years before Edward Williams was born. What is left of the charge is the claim that a text naming Rheged, Gŵyr and Kidwelly together does not identify Rheged with Gŵyr and Kidwelly. The rest is the word “seemingly”, Urien was brought south, he writes, seemingly to bolster a family’s claim. A supposed motive, offered where the evidence should be. And his only other objection is arithmetic: fifteen generations in nine centuries. That is a complaint about a pedigree’s length. It is not a complaint about a place.

There is an older witness than either, and it is the Crown’s own. In the autumn of 1531 a King’s Bench jury was told that on 28 August Rhys ap Gruffydd, lord of Dinefwr, Carew and Emlyn, and two of his servants, sitting in his house at Islington, had recalled an old prophecy current in Wales, “that king Jamys with the red hand and the ravens should conquer all England”, and that on 1 September he took a new name, Ryce ap Gruffith ffitzuryen: Rhys, son of Urien. The indictment says he did it so that he might the more worthily, under “a pretended colour of title”, win the state and honour of the principality. The name is Fitz-Urien, and the ravens, on the reading of the man who printed the indictment, are Urien’s.The Latin indictment, King’s Bench, Michaelmas term 1531, printed whole for the first time in W. Llewelyn Williams, “A Welsh Insurrection”, Y Cymmrodor 16 (1902), pp. 33–38: the prophecy in its English words at pp. 33–34, read at the scan, and the new name at p. 38 (novum nomen videlicet Ryce ap Gruffith ffitzuryen in se proditorie assumpsit … sub praetenso tituli colore, translated here). Rhys was beheaded on Tower Hill on 4 December 1531 (p. 32). That man is W. Llewelyn Williams KC, who stood up for Iolo in 1921. He stopped to explain the prophecy. The Red Hand, he wrote, is “the old Welsh tradition of Owen Lawgoch”; the prophecy “shows that in Rhys’s country — which was, roughly speaking, Carmarthenshire — the tradition about Owen Lawgoch was even then current”; and “the Ravens, of course, were the ravens of Owen ap Urien Rheged, which formed the coat of arms of the Dynevor family.” Of everything the Crown alleged, he says, the one thing that could be called an act at all was the taking of the name Fitz-Urien.Williams (1902), p. 33 n. 2 (the Red Hand and the ravens, read at the scan); p. 41 (“the old Welsh tradition of Owen Lawgoch”); p. 43 (“the alleged assumption of the name and title of Fitz-Urien”, the only overt act he can find). He calls the evidence “most unsatisfactory” (p. 41) and Rhys “undoubtedly popular in South Wales” (p. 48). Rhys’s great-grandson Henry Rice told in 1625 a story the court told of the king: that at Wandsworth a raven put the king’s falcon off the quarry and a courtier whispered, “you see how peremptorie this raven is growne, and therefore it is high time to pull him down”; Williams thinks it may be myth but calls it “an index of what people thought” (p. 51). That is two hundred and sixteen years before Iolo was born, and it is not a fabrication of the Iolo romancers. It is in the record of the Crown’s own court, in the Latin of the clerk who wrote it down, and it was printed in the Cymmrodorion’s own magazine sixteen years before Taliesin. The Red Hand outlived the trial: in 1858 a fair-song in south Ceredigion still called Owain Lawgoch Harri ’r Nawfed, Henry the Ninth.John Rhŷs, Celtic Folklore, Welsh and Manx (Oxford, 1901), ii, p. 464, giving the verse as Gwynionydd printed it in Y Brython (1858), p. 179; Y Brython itself not seen. Rhŷs says nothing of the name, and the book does not try to explain it.

So the account stands like this, and every item in it comes from the prosecution’s own printed pages. The northern kingdom rests on a supposition and a gloss that two of its own champions call an error. The southern one is named by the Crown’s own indictment of 1531, by a British poet in the fifteenth century and by an English-language life in the early seventeenth, the last two quoted by the man dismissing them. And in the only manuscript of the Book of Taliesin that exists, Urien’s own bard says where he had been: Gwaryeis yn llychwr, I played at Llychwr. To keep that line out of the water, one knight of the realm moved it to a village in Cheshire and another turned it into the time of day.Book of Taliesin, the only copy there is: Gwaryeis yn llychwr, kysceis ym porffor. Evans, Facsimile (1910), p. xxix, for Pulford in Cheshire; Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, pp. 102–103, for daylight. The charter form bet lychur is in the Book of Llan Dâv. See Gogleddiaeth, ¶587.  Iolo had a phrase for etymology that travels like that: “blind and wildly rambling imagination, like those of Rowland Jones, of insane notoriety”. Rowland Jones was the eighteenth-century etymologist who traced every language back to the Celtic.NLW 13150A, p. 144.

And through all of it the river keeps its own counsel. It is bet lychur in a Llandaf charter of about 655, which nobody accuses Iolo of writing. It is named again in the tract Stephens trusted. It still runs past a castle that carries the name. Then the best philologist among the Cymry read the word and found daylight in it, and the best manuscript scholar the Britons had read it and found Cheshire. Neither man went to look.

A Dim a Ddigwyddodd, And Nothing Happened

In 1918, in print, against a living man holding a Civil List pension, a Crown appointment, two doctorates, an honorary Oxford degree and the numbering of the national archive, the best philologist among the Cymry proved:

that the oldest poetry in the language had been altered again and again, for no cause: “there is absolutely no other reason for the numerous alterations of perfect lines”;Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 82.

that the alterations were passed off as corrections of a dead scribe’s errors, and listed under his name;

that the argument for them was “a tissue of false reasoning which betrays a mind that has never properly understood what ‘evidence’ or ‘proof’ means”, “one gigantic petitio principii”: one gigantic begging of the question;Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 81.

that “the text thus altered is quoted to prove that the geography is that of the twelfth century, and therefore that the poems were written in that century, where we began: it is always the same vicious circle”;Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 82.

that, after a recovery of the Breint Teilaw that was “a service to Welsh learning greater than many for which honorary degrees have been conferred”, he had “of late years … manifested a growing disposition to pose as an authority on the language and subject-matter of his texts”;Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, pp. 149–50.

that the North was made Cheshire “by flagrant misrepresentation, and by omitting the names of the Northern leaders”, with “reckless irresponsibility”, a common noun “quietly changed into a proper name”, and names “re-arranged to give an effect foreign to the original”;Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, pp. 49, 65 (“reckless irresponsibility”), 82.

that evidence against him had been held back by the man who had indexed it;

and that he had used, without citing it, the work of the one man he would not name.

And Ifor Williams proved, in 1916, that every twelfth- and thirteenth-century reference in Evans’s Armes Prydein was Evans’s own addition, and that he had composed a new book.

Alteration of the text. Passing off one’s own hand as an older one. Suppression of the evidence against. Uncited use of a source. Interpolation. Those are the elements of the offence for which Iolo Morganwg is called a forger to this day. Every one was alleged against John Gwenogvryn Evans, within living memory, by the two best scholars the Britons had in his day, in print, in Cymraeg and in English, in Y Beirniad and in the Cymmrodorion’s own journal, and was never answered on the evidence.

And nothing happened.

He kept the pension. He kept the post. He kept the doctorates and the house above the sea and the grave cut in the rock. He was given a whole volume of the Society’s journal to reply in, and used it to say his critic smoked a pipe. His numbers are on the shelves of the National Library of Wales this afternoon. No verdict issued. No word was fixed to his name. He is not in the dock. He is in the catalogue. And when G. J. Williams wrote the book that convicted Iolo, he found his way through the manuscripts of Cymru by this man’s catalogue, cited him five times, every time as a catalogue, corrected one of his dates (“ac nid 1788, fel y dywaid y Dr. Gwenogvryn Evans”, and not 1788, as Dr Gwenogvryn Evans says), and three times could not get at the manuscripts the catalogue described.G. J. Williams, Iolo Morganwg a Chywyddau’r Ychwanegiad (1926), p. 129 (the date); pp. 147, 149 and 162 (the three manuscripts he could not see, the last one Evans had catalogued as “Aberdâr MS. 2”). His own words are quoted in Y Drychiolaethau, ¶321. The man who convicted Iolo could not get through the doors Evans had walked through.

Eight years after Morris-Jones’s volume, the word forgery was delivered: to a dead stonemason who never held a salary, a chair, a pension or a knighthood, who never wintered at Davos, whose papers were locked in another family’s house, and who could not be called to answer. Set the two men side by side and it stops being an opinion. It is arithmetic. The word was never a finding about what a man had done to a text. It was a decision about whose alterations count.Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”: “reckless irresponsibility”, p. 65. G. J. Williams, Iolo Morganwg a Chywyddau’r Ychwanegiad (Llundain, 1926), index s.v. “Evans, y Dr. J. Gwenogvryn”: pp. 125 n., 129, 147, 149, 162. The stonemason’s side of the arithmetic is in one of his last notes. He wrote it crippled at Flimston, to Mr Redwood of Boverton, who passed on his weekly stipend, about his plan to publish a second volume of hymns, Salmau yr Eglwys yn yr Anialwch: “I am a burden on my humane benefactors, who will be indemnified in a better world than this … I shall experience difficulties, but hope for Divine blessings on the attempt—I will make the struggle.”Elijah Waring, Recollections and Anecdotes of Edward Williams (1850), p. 117.

There is a word for this kind of man, and it is not traitor. A traitor sells a state. What passed through Evans’s hands was older than any state: a language, a memory, the record of who a people were before the conquest. The Cymry had a name for him half a century before he was born: Dic Siôn Dafydd, the man who puts on the master’s coat and holds his own people in contempt.Jac Glan-y-gors, Dic Siôn Dafydd (1790s). Homi K. Bhabha’s “mimic man”, “almost the same, but not quite”, the native functionary trained to reproduce the coloniser’s judgment in the coloniser’s idiom: “Of Mimicry and Man”, October 28 (1984), 125–33. The men who studied the colonised mind in the last century, Mannoni in Madagascar, Fanon in Martinique and Algeria, Memmi in Tunisia, drew the same figure again and again: a child taught that his own language and his people’s memory are the road to ruin, who gets on by learning the master’s tongue and the master’s contempt, and then turns that contempt, with a convert’s zeal, on his own. Every empire has preferred to do this work through a son of the oppressed country. It is cheaper than a garrison, and on the page it looks like scholarship. Mir Jafar opened Bengal to the Company from the inside; the comprador clerk kept the ledgers of his own people’s dispossession, and drew a commission on it. And a boy of Cymru with no English at nineteen grew up to draw the Crown’s wage, laugh over the soup at a robbed family, move the Old North into Cheshire with the Conqueror’s tax roll, call the British scribes fakers and forgers, call his own people geese, and keep Iolo Morganwg’s name out of every line of the record of the manuscripts of Cymru. The shame was put into him in a shop in Lampeter, and he spent the rest of his life handing it back to the Cymry.O. Mannoni, Psychologie de la colonisation (1950); Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs (1952); Albert Memmi, Portrait du colonisé (1957). The book his uncle locked away in that shop had already named the type. In Cyfrinach Beirdd Ynys Prydain, the book of the bards’ craft that Iolo’s son Taliesin printed from his father’s papers in 1829, Iolo set down: Y mae rhai yn awr, yn dilyn ffordd y Saeson … ag yn llunio Celwydd yn eu Cerddi; ag nid ydynt y Beirdd hynny, yn meddu’r AWEN O DDUW, eithr Awen o Gythraul, some now, following the way of the English, … shape lies in their songs; those bards have not the Awen, the gift of song, from God, but an Awen from the Devil.Cyfrinach Beirdd Ynys Prydain (1829), p. 31.

21. Y Fainc

The Bench685 The verdict agreed before the evidence. 689 Two more men, and the technical case. 693 The rule of 1919. 697 Llewelyn Williams answers. 704 The prize. 708 The excuse.

The bench had a stake in its verdict, and the stake has a name and a date. Griffith John Williams made his scholarly reputation on the conviction: his prize essay of 1921, printed in 1926 as Iolo Morganwg a Chywyddau'r Ychwanegiad, was the forensic demolition that established him; it brought him a lectureship at Caerdydd in 1921, and in time the chair of Cymraeg. He was no careerist, and nothing here says he was: he spent his later life proving the Morgannwg tradition genuine, as we have already seen. It does not mitigate; it sharpens the difficulty, and the structure is the point, not the man: a discipline that founds its first reputations on a conviction acquires, in the same stroke, a standing institutional interest in that conviction never being overturned. The verdict outlives the evidence because too much has been built on top of it to let it fall. Iolo had described that habit of mind in the learned men of his own day. In his manuscript of 1806, condemning Henry Rowlands’s Mona Antiqua Restaurata, he wrote: “To know Latin and Greek, is to know everything, in the idea of too many. Preconceptions are formed, or ideas acquired, from the Greek and Roman writers, and to coincide with these, they twist and strain whatever they find in other languages, rejecting, or passing over in silence, everything that tallies not with their own imaginary schemes.”Iolo Morganwg, manuscript of 1806, printed in Elijah Waring, Recollections and Anecdotes of Edward Williams (1850), p. 209.

And the verdict was agreed before its evidence was printed. In 1924, two years before the book that convicted him and a year before Cerdd Dafod, the prosecution’s historian of the Gorsedd told the readers of Y Llenor what both books would find:

Nid wyf am fyned i’r tystiolaethau a’r profion sydd gennym mai ffugwaith Iolo yw Cyfrinach y Beirdd yma’n awr, ceir hynny yn llyfr fy nghyfaill G. J. Williams a ddaw o’r wasg cyn hir. A dengys Syr John Morris-Jones yn ei lyfr ar ‘gerdd dafod’ sydd ar fyned i’r wasg, nid yn unig fod Cyfrinach y Beirdd yn ffugwaith, ond mai ffugwaith bwnglerwr anwybodus ym marddas Cymru yw.

I will not go into the evidence and proofs we have that the Cyfrinach y Beirdd is Iolo’s forgery here now; that will be found in the book of my friend G. J. Williams, which will come from the press before long. And Sir John Morris-Jones will show in his book on cerdd dafod, which is about to go to press, not only that the Cyfrinach y Beirdd is a forgery, but that it is the forgery of an ignorant bungler in Welsh bardic lore.

The evidence we have. My friend’s book. The ignorant bungler. Three men, one conclusion, announced in a third man’s article before the other two had printed a page of proof.Thomas Shankland, “Hanes dechreuad ‘Gorsedd Beirdd Ynys Prydain’,” Y Llenor III (1924), 94–102, at 95–96. Cerdd Dafod was published in 1925; Iolo Morganwg a Chywyddau’r Ychwanegiad in 1926. The same article had already settled the poems: gwyddom yn awr, we know now, it said, that a number of the cywyddau of the Ychwanegiad were that man’s forgeries, the first of his to reach print. That was two years before the book that was to prove it.Shankland, Y Llenor III (1924), p. 95, read on the page image: “gwyddom yn awr mai ffugiadau’r gŵr hwnnw yw nifer o gywyddau’r ‘Ychwanegiad’, ac mai’r rhain oedd ffugiadau cyntaf Iolo i ymddangos trwy’r wasg”. Iolo had a phrase for that kind of publishing. Of a book that his rival the clergyman scholar Edward Davies, ‘Celtic’ Davies, rushed into print, he wrote: ac allan a hi yn fellt ynfyd heb gymmeryd amser, and out with it like mad lightning, without taking time.NLW 13150A, p. 87. The English is Moira Dearnley’s.

Syr John Morris-Jones

Morris-Jones was born in 1864 at Trefor in Llandrygarn, Môn, one of the churches of the old clas of St Cybi, whose tithe the College held, into a family of Calvinistic Methodists, and he went up to Jesus College, Oxford, on a scholarship in mathematics and took a Third.J. E. Caerwyn Williams, “Syr John Morris-Jones: Y Cefndir a’r Cyfnod Cynnar”, Trafodion y Cymmrodorion 1965 (2), pp. 167–206, and 1966, pp. 16–72. His Meyrick Scholarship of 1887–88, £80, was “i astudio Cymraeg a Gwyddeleg dan Rhys”, to study Cymraeg and Irish under Rhŷs. At Oxford he spoke for the death of Cymraeg, because he believed it. He wrote home: “Mae Rowland wedi dyfod a motion ymlaen — that the extinction of the Welsh Language would be beneficial to Wales — Yr wyf i am siarad o blaid y motion, achos ‘rwyf yn credu fod hynny’n wir”: Rowland has brought a motion forward; I mean to speak for it, because I believe it is true.Bangor MS 7201, printed in J. E. Caerwyn Williams, “Syr John Morris-Jones: y Cefndir a’r Cyfnod Cynnar, Rhan II”, Trafodion y Cymmrodorion 1966, p. 25. His first printed attack was not on Iolo at all. In July 1888 he went for the spelling of Owen Pughe, Iolo’s colleague, asking whether any example of a form predated him; Silvan Evans produced earlier examples in the next issue, and he shifted his ground in the one after that.Y Goleuad, 12, 19 and 26 July 1888; Caerwyn Williams (1966), p. 53. Five months later John Rhŷs wrote to him about the lectureship in Cymraeg at Bangor, stipend one hundred pounds: “I do not think I ought to write a testimonial as I intend to go there to vote, that is to say if I find there is likely to be anyone standing against you.”Trafodion y Cymmrodorion (1966), p. 57. He was appointed on 16 January 1889. The chair came about 1895.

On 9 June 1921 he wrote privately to Sir Vincent Evans, secretary of the Cymmrodorion, that Iolo was “dyn trwyadl ddrwg”, a thoroughly bad man, and that reading him made him almost ill.Y Llenor XV (1936), p. 251, printing the letter. First printed by Sir Vincent Evans in Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, Session 1919–1920 (London, 1921), pp. 153–5, as “not intended for publication”; the holograph is NLW MS 11333B. In the same letter: “Yn 1896 … yr oeddwn yn derbyn y traddodiad am onestrwydd Iolo”, in 1896 I accepted the tradition of Iolo’s honesty, and that in 1911 he had concluded “mai Iolo neu John Bradford a ffugiodd y cwbl”, that Iolo or John Bradford forged the whole. Two months later he sat as chief judge on the prize set to decide Iolo’s guilt. The verdict was in a letter before the court sat, and the letter went to the man who ran the Eisteddfod’s publications and would go on to correct the proofs of the book.

Y Llys: The Court that Tried Him

Two more men supplied the technical case, and neither of them blamed Iolo. In 1911 J. Glyn Davies called certain of the Appendix poems “palpable forgeries”, and laid them at the door of “the Glamorgan bards… dating back to the mid sixteenth century perhaps.”J. Glyn Davies, Welsh Metrics (1911), p. 7, as quoted in Morris-Jones’s 1926 preface, pp. xii–xiii, which adds that Glyn Davies had not found the author either: “nid oedd yntau wedi cael hyd i’r awdur”. The 1911 page itself has since been read (Welsh Metrics I, London: Constable, 1911, p. 7, in the scanned text on disk) and has both phrases: “Poems Nos. 70 and 80, App. 14, 15, and 17 are palpable forgeries”, and “The tampering of the Glamorgan bards with Dafydd ab Gwilym poems and other texts, dating back to the mid sixteenth century perhaps”. A forgery of the mid sixteenth century predates Iolo Morganwg by two hundred years. And it is worth knowing who was being believed. John Glyn Davies was the son of a Liverpool tea merchant, educated at the Liverpool Institute, and he spent the years from 1887 to 1895 as a clerk to sailing-ship companies, then with Henry Tate and Sons and a New Zealand mining corporation. He came into the scholarship of Cymraeg in 1899 when T. E. Ellis and others persuaded him to build a library for Cymru at Aberystwyth; he joined the Liverpool University library staff in 1907, assisted the professor of Celtic there, and succeeded to the headship of that department when the professor retired in 1920. He had no university training in the philology of Cymraeg at all, and his own national biography, which grants his “undisputed abilities”, records that “his contribution to Welsh scholarship proved to be erratic and uneven.”Dictionary of Welsh Biography, s.v. Davies, John Glyn (1870–1953). The professor of Celtic he assisted and succeeded at Liverpool was Kuno Meyer. T. E. Ellis is the same Member who four years earlier had secured John Rhŷs the secretaryship of the tithe inquiry.

In 1914 Ifor Williams, who had been Morris-Jones’s assistant at Bangor since 1904, wrote of the Appendix poems that “rhaid gwrthod y dwsin”, the dozen must be rejected.Ifor Williams and Thomas Roberts, Cywyddau Dafydd ap Gwilym a’i Gyfoeswyr (1914). That note is where the prosecution’s own account says the case begins. Two years later the same man asked the question nobody in the case ever answered: “Whom would he want to deceive? Whom could he deceive?”Ifor Williams, Y Beirniad VI (1916).

Two smaller figures hold the joints of it. The 1896 attack was printed in Cymru, edited by O. M. Edwards, who had founded the Dafydd ap Gwilym Society at Oxford with Morris-Jones and was named beside him and Gwenogvryn Evans in the English press that February as wanting a graduates’ institute in the Gorsedd’s place. And D. Silvan Evans, the country’s great lexicographer, who had publicly corrected Morris-Jones in print a week after his first shot in 1888, later passed him, in private, the hearsay that Iolo was not as honest as he had thought.For Silvan Evans’s correction, Y Goleuad, 19 July 1888; for the private remark, cited by Morris-Jones in 1911. A public correction that was answered by a shift of ground; a private remark that was carried for twenty-three years and then used. That is how the case was actually built.

The instrument arrived in 1916, when Iolo’s own manuscripts reached the National Library of Wales, and the terms matter, because they are the terms described here all along. They came as a deposit, not a gift. They were deposited in 1916 by Lord Treowen and were not converted into a donation until 1939, by his daughter.National Library of Wales / Archives Hub record for the Llanover (Iolo Morganwg) manuscripts, now NLW MSS 13061–13185. The Dictionary of Welsh Biography’s statement that they were donated in 1917 is wrong. For the whole of the twenty-three years in which the case was built, printed and won, the evidence was private property held at the owner’s pleasure. In 1917 J. H. Davies, Principal of Aberystwyth, set “The Literary Tradition of Glamorgan” as a research subject for a young graduate and, in that graduate’s own words, “a’m dododd ar ben y ffordd”, set me on the road; an additional scholarship to work on the Llanover manuscripts followed the same year. And it matters who he was. Sir John Humphreys Davies of Cwrt Mawr, Llangeitho (Lincoln College, Oxford, and the Bar at Lincoln’s Inn) was a collector and an editor before he was a Principal, and the thing he edited was the north. His two major works are The Letters of Lewis, Richard, William and John Morris of Anglesey (1907–09) and the Letters of Goronwy Owen (1924).Dictionary of Welsh Biography, s.v. Davies, John Humphreys (1871–1926): born Llangeitho 15 April 1871, Lewis School Pengam and University College School London, then Aberystwyth and Lincoln College, Oxford, BA 1893; Registrar of Aberystwyth 1905, Principal from 1919 to his death on 10 August 1926; collector of the Cwrtmawr manuscripts; a founder of the Calvinistic Methodist Historical Society; editor of the Journal of the Welsh Bibliographical Society 1910–20. That is the Morrises of Anglesey and the poet of their circle: the northern classical school, Lewis Morris’s school, the same Lewis Morris who wrote the doctrine of northern purity in his spare hours, and whom Iolo Morganwg called “a most abominable lyar and imposter”. The man who in 1917 commissioned an investigation of the literary tradition of Morgannwg had given his own working life to the papers of the men Morgannwg’s champion had attacked. He did not pick that subject out of the air, and the archive says so plainly: on the record as it stands, the case against Iolo Morganwg was set as a research topic by an editor of the other side’s letters.The inference is the archive’s and is marked as such: no statement by J. H. Davies about Iolo Morganwg, Glamorgan or the Gorsedd in his own words has yet been found; the introduction to the first volume of his Morris Letters (1907) does not name Iolo. But one judgment of his on an Iolo text is reported, fourteen years before the commission. An essay in the Cymmrodorion Transactions for 1903–04, “Mireindeb merch a’r bardd Cymreig”, p. 35, says that since the poems of Rhys Goch ap Rhicert of Tir Iarll were printed in the Iolo Manuscripts in 1848 most writers had held him older than Dafydd ap Gwilym, but that Mr J. H. Davies (Cwrtmawr), “ar ol ymchwiliad manwl”, after close inquiry, had shown “tuhwnt i bob dadl”, beyond all argument, that Rhys Goch was “o ran iaith, arddull, a meddwl, yn ddiweddarach o rai canrifoedd na Dafydd ab Gwilym”, in language, style and thought some centuries later than Dafydd ap Gwilym. Where Davies printed that, and his letters, are still unread. What is documented is the editorship, the commission and the date. Saunders Lewis published A School of Welsh Augustans, on that same northern classical school, in 1924, the year of the Penarth meeting.G. J. Williams, Rhagair yr Awdur to Iolo Morganwg a Chywyddau’r Ychwanegiad (1926); Dictionary of Welsh Biography, s.v. Williams, Griffith John.

In February and December 1919 that graduate published his first findings against Iolo, in Y Beirniad, edited by Morris-Jones, in numbers that also carried W. J. Gruffydd and reviews by T. Gwynn Jones.Publishers’ advertisements in Y Brython, 24 July, 7 and 28 August and 6 November 1919, listing Y Beirniad VIII no. 3 “a than olygiaeth J. Morris Jones” with articles by Griffith J. Williams and W. J. Gruffydd and reviews by T. Gwynn Jones; the February number, VIII no. 2, carried his “Cywyddau Cynnar Iolo Morganwg”. He was awarded a Fellowship of the University of Wales, in his national biography’s own words, “as a result” of those articles. And in the December number, two years before any court sat, he wrote down the rule by which the evidence would be read:

“Dull Iolo o ffugio oedd cymysgu’r gau a’r gwir… a phe ceffid darnau o’r pymtheg cerdd uchod neu ddarnau o gywyddau’r Ychwanegiad yn myned yn ôl i’r unfed ganrif ar bymtheg, dyweder, ni buasai hynny ond yn dangos yn eglurach fyth ddull Iolo o gyfansoddi. Y mae’n anos darganfod celwydd pan fo tipyn ohono’n wir.”
Iolo’s method of forging was to mix the false and the true… and if parts of the fifteen poems above, or parts of the cywyddau of the Ychwanegiad, were found going back to the sixteenth century, say, that would only show all the more clearly Iolo’s method of composing. It is harder to discover a lie when some of it is true.G. J. Williams, “Rhys Goch ap Rhiccert — Ôl-nodiad”, Y Beirniad VIII, no. 4 (Rhagfyr 1919), p. 260.

Read what that does. The entire charge rests on one kind of proof: the disputed lines appear in no manuscript older than Iolo. Here, before the competition existed, the prosecutor sets down what is to happen if older manuscripts are found with the lines in them. If the lines are not in the old manuscripts, Iolo forged them. If the lines are in the old manuscripts, Iolo mixed the false with the true, which is how he forged. No document that could ever be produced can acquit him. A charge that no evidence can answer is not a finding. It is a sentence. And it was tested almost at once: Ifor Williams admitted that three of the poems stood in manuscripts older than Iolo, and G. J. Williams himself found a fourth, Y Bilain o Fabolaeth, in Y Llyfr Hir o’r Mwythig of about 1630.W. Llewelyn Williams KC, Welsh Outlook, 1921, p. 199; G. J. Williams (1926), p. 6. The poem is No. XV of the Appendix in Barddoniaeth Dafydd ab Gwilym (1789), p. 526, headed “Y Mabolaeth”, its first line “Y Bilain o fabolaeth”; both pages read at the printed image. G. J. Williams’s own book tells it differently: on p. 6 he counts No. 15 among the three Ifor Williams found in the old manuscripts (“sef Rhif 8, Rhif 11, a Rhif 15”) and gives the fourth as No. 10 (“Y mae un arall i’w weled mewn hen lawysgrifau, sef Rhif 10”), read in the 1926 text on disk. Which poem was the fourth is not settled until Ifor Williams’s Dafydd ap Gwilym a’i Gyfoeswyr (1914), pp. lxxxii–lxxxiv, is read. Under the rule of December 1919, every one of those discoveries counted as further proof of guilt. On another page of the same article he had already sent the question of motive somewhere it could not be cross-examined: “problem mewn eneideg yw Iolo Morganwg”, Iolo Morganwg is a problem in psychology, seven years before Morris-Jones reached the same refuge.Y Beirniad VIII, no. 4 (1919), p. 226. Iolo had written his own psychology, and it was an account of how any gift is made. Writing in 1811 to the philosopher David Williams, of what he owed to his mother, he said: “Every kind of genius is actually made or created by circumstances which, making strong and indellible impression on the mind of early infancy, too early perhaps to be remembered, strongly determine it to certain pursuits.”Iolo Morganwg to David Williams, 8 January 1811, Correspondence, III, p. 39.

The country did not take it quietly. The charge broke in the press during the week of the National Eisteddfod at Corwen in August 1919, and it was answered from the Logan Stone. W. Llewelyn Williams KC (a lawyer, a historian and a Member of Parliament) publicly challenged the critics to advance any proof a legally trained mind would accept, and declared that “so far there was not a tittle of evidence adduced in support of the charges made. It was hardly, if at all, necessary to call upon the defendants to reply, because there was really no case to answer.” The same report notes that the men who had been making those attacks “deemed discretion to be the better part of valour to-day and kept away from the sacred circle.”North Wales Chronicle, 8 August 1919. And Yr Herald Cymraeg, 12 August 1919, reports Gwili striking at the same target from the Logan Stone with an englyn on Morris-Jones’s attacks on Owen Pughe and on the newspaper attacks on Iolo and his Gorsedd, recording that the bards believed “fod Syr John Rhys law yn llaw a Syr John Morris-Jones”, that Sir John Rhŷs was hand in hand with Sir John Morris-Jones, and that something better than “the hammer and pick of college men” would be needed to dig under the Gorsedd’s foundations. The bards on the hill in 1919 had already named the machine, and they named it correctly. Neither man was a crank on the edge of things. W. Llewelyn Williams was a scholarship boy from Brasenose College, Oxford, a historian, a King’s Counsel, and Liberal Member for the Carmarthen Boroughs from 1906; Gwili was John Jenkins of Hendy on the Llwchwr, a poet whose recruiting verses Morris-Jones himself had crowned three years before.Dictionary of Welsh Biography and the parliamentary record: William Llewelyn Williams (10 March 1867 – 22 April 1922), Llandovery College and Brasenose, graduated in history 1889, called to the Bar 1897, took silk 1912, MP for Carmarthen Boroughs 1906 until the seat was abolished in 1918. And this is how the defence was silenced: it died. Llewelyn Williams lost his seat when the constituency was abolished in 1918, lost the Ceredigion by-election of 1921 against the Prime Minister’s candidate, and died on 22 April 1922, eight months after the prize was awarded, and four and a half years before the book appeared. The one man in Cymru with the training to cross-examine the case, and the standing to be heard doing it, was in his grave before the evidence was printed. Nobody replaced him. The verdict did not win an argument. It outlived the only person equipped to have one.Y Maen, v. Corwen, August 1919: from the Maen Llog, the Logan Stone, “not a tittle of evidence”. The stone gives.

He answered first. In September 1921, one month after the prize and seven months before his death, W. Llewelyn Williams took three pages of The Welsh Outlook and tried the case properly.

He had already been mocked for his doubt. “When I ventured to state that I was not convinced by the ‘available evidence,’ the learned Professor scornfully asked what evidence I had seen at all?” He had read every page the prosecution had printed. The one thing he had not seen was the essay the judges kept, and that was the thing he was asked to produce.W. Llewelyn Williams, The Welsh Outlook VIII, no. 9 (September 1921), p. 198, read at the page image. A reporter wrote “We must suspend judgment”, and called him Iolo’s “stout and competent defender”. Gwili, who had stood beside him on the Logan Stone in 1919, addressed the same Gorsedd.L. J. Roberts, The Welsh Outlook VIII, no. 10 (October 1921), p. 229: “According to Sir John Morris Jones, one of the adjudicators, Mr. Williams has shown conclusively, in an essay of over 500 pages … that Iolo was a shameless and systematic forger. We must suspend judgment … But ‘Old Iolo’ has a stout and competent defender in Mr. W. Llewelyn Williams, K.C.” Cymru LXI (November 1921), p. 142, for Gwili. And Williams told the same Eisteddfod what he thought of the court: while “the Bangor scholars were flirting with the language, the language was withering.”Quoted at the head of Gwilym Davies, “Wales at Work: A Social Diary”, The Welsh Outlook VIII, no. 10 (October 1921), p. 239, read at the page image, as said “at the Carnarvon Eisteddfod, 1921”; the meeting is not named. He named no one. At Bangor the chair of Welsh was Morris-Jones’s, Ifor Williams had been his assistant there, and G. J. Williams had been his student there in 1919–20 (Dictionary of Welsh Biography).

Nor had the man who mocked him seen the manuscripts. “I do not profess, any more than Professor Morris Jones, to have studied the Llanover MSS.” Morris-Jones had believed the poems genuine “up to ten years ago”, and changed his mind “not by his own independent investigation, but because he accepted the conclusions” of two other men.W. Llewelyn Williams, The Welsh Outlook VIII, no. 9 (September 1921), p. 199, read at the page image: “… because he accepted the conclusions of Professor Ivor Williams and Mr. G. J. Williams.” And the indictment, Williams said, rested on papers Iolo “kept … for 40 or 50 years, without any attempt to destroy the evidences of his guilt. That is not the way forgers usually proceed.”The Welsh Outlook VIII, no. 9 (September 1921), p. 200, read at the page image. Iolo had said it himself, over the counter of his shop at Y Bont-faen. Elijah Waring, the Quaker friend who wrote down his recollections, tells how one of a pair of government spies bought the book in his window labelled RIGHTS OF MAN, found it was the Bible, called him a cheat and demanded his money back. That story has been told already; Waring kept the answer: “No, sir,” replied the Bard, “I am no cheat—you will find in that book the best and dearest RIGHTS OF MAN—and I am glad of the opportunity which has put the Bible into your hands, for once in your life.”Elijah Waring, Recollections and Anecdotes of Edward Williams (1850), p. 109.

He began by refusing the ground the professors had chosen. “To decide this matter, one needs be no expert in ‘llen a chynghanedd,’ but one must be used to sifting and weighing evidence.” He had been sifting evidence at the Bar for twenty-five years. So he set the test a criminal charge has to pass (the evidence must be “direct, cogent, and irresistible before he can be found guilty by reasonable and unprejudiced persons”) and held the prosecution’s own book against it.W. Llewelyn Williams, The Welsh Outlook, September 1921: the expert ground at p. 200, the standard of proof at p. 199.

It failed. “The evidence, so far as I know it, does not convince me of Iolo’s guilt.”W. Llewelyn Williams, The Welsh Outlook VIII, no. 9 (September 1921), p. 200, read at the page image.

Then he said what had gone wrong, and it was nothing to do with manuscripts. “He started out with the fixed idea that Iolo was guilty, and he has persuaded himself that he has succeeded in proving his theme.” And he named the reason, which no other man in Cymru would put in print: he wished that Professor Morris Jones “had not allowed his ancient feud with Old Iolo to make him support one of the most amazing and incredible literary delusions ever known.”W. Llewelyn Williams KC MP, The Welsh Outlook, vol. VIII no. 9 (September 1921), pp. 198–200, read at the scan: the standard of proof and the fixed-idea finding at p. 199, the refusal of the expert ground, the verdict and the ancient feud at p. 200. The editorial matter at p. 197 of the same number refers to “an academic tyranny which, as Mr. Llewelyn Williams suggested at Carnarvon, is becoming almost unbearable”, the prize had been awarded at the Caernarfon National Eisteddfod that August, and the protest was made in the town and printed within weeks. A King’s Counsel read the case against Iolo Morganwg and found there was no case.

Nobody answered him. Search every journal in Cymraeg of the decade that followed and the phrase ancient feud with Old Iolo appears exactly once, in his own article. Not one writer quoted it, even to knock it down. And when the prosecution’s book finally appeared, Y Llenor, the leading literary quarterly, reviewed it over two pages and did not mention him, his article, or his defence. What it printed instead was this. “Mae’n sicr na chafodd neb erioed decach prawf nag a gaiff Iolo yma, ac y mae mor sicr â hynny na phrofwyd neb erioed yn euog mor llwyr ac mor gyfiawn”, it is certain that no one ever had a fairer trial than Iolo gets here, and it is just as certain that no one was ever proved guilty so completely and so justly. And of the author: “Mae’r pwnc yn gyfryw ag na fedr neb byw mo’i drin ond Mr. Williams”, the subject is such that no living man can handle it but Mr Williams.Review of Iolo Morganwg a Chywyddau’r Ychwanegiad, Y Llenor 6 (1927), pp. 59–60, read at the scan. The review sets out the whole contents of the book and names no opponent. Searched across its pages for Llewelyn, Outlook, cyfreithiwr, barnwr, gwrthwyneb and amddiffyn: not one occurrence. The single appearance of “Welsh Outlook” on those pages belongs to an unrelated book from the Welsh Outlook Press. A full-text search of the Welsh journals for 1921–1930 returns four occurrences of Cywyddau’r Ychwanegiad in total: three are the three pages of Llewelyn Williams’s own article, the fourth is this review. The academic tyranny he had named at Caernarfon six years before was now the reviewer’s idea of praise. The verdict never survived the argument. It survived the arguer, and then it was written up as the fairest trial ever held.

In 1921, two years after Corwen, the National Eisteddfod Association offered forty pounds at Caernarfon for the best essay on Iolo’s relation to the Appendix poems, and the chief judge afterwards explained in print exactly why. The proofs, he wrote, had been wholly convincing to everyone with training in Cymraeg and literary criticism, “ond yr oedd eraill, heb feddu’r cymwysterau hynny, yn gwrthod yr unig gasgliad posibl”, but others, without those qualifications, were rejecting the only possible conclusion, arguing from suppositions such as probable motives, “am hynny”, for that reason, the prize was offered.Morris-Jones, Rhagymadrodd (1926), p. xiv. The prize was not set to find out what was true. On the chief judge’s own account it was set to close down a dispute in favour of a conclusion he had already called the only possible one, and the objection he brushes aside, “probable motives”, is precisely the defence Llewelyn Williams had made from the Logan Stone. As to motive, Iolo had written down his own, among his papers: “No idea can be more grievous to me than that of quitting this life without having been in some degree the benefactor of mankind.”NLW 21387E, no. 23.

One essay was entered. Its author had spent the academic year 1919–20 at Bangor being supervised by the chief judge. The three judges were Morris-Jones, W. J. Gruffydd and T. Gwynn Jones. That same year the single entrant was appointed lecturer in Cymraeg at Cardiff, in Gruffydd’s department. The chief judge explained the empty field too: “Ni ddaeth neb i’r maes yn erbyn Mr. Williams, am y rheswm syml y deallai pawb… fod ei safle’n anorchfygol”, nobody came into the field against Mr Williams, for the simple reason that everyone understood his position was invincible.Morris-Jones, Rhagymadrodd (1926), p. xiv; Dictionary of Welsh Biography, s.v. Williams, Griffith John, for the supervision in 1919–20 and the Cardiff appointment in 1921. A contest with one entrant, whose judge announces in advance that no one could have beaten him, is not a contest. And the winning essay was not the book. It was sent back: “gofynnwyd i’r awdur ei ddiwygio, a’i ail gopïo lle bai angen”, the author was asked to revise it and recopy it where needed. When it appeared five years later its author thanked all three judges for “llawer o awgrymiadau gwerthfawr”, many valuable suggestions, and thanked Gruffydd twice over for “bob help a chyfarwyddyd wrth baratoi’r gwaith ar gyfair y wasg”, every help and direction in preparing the work for the press; and he thanked Sir Vincent Evans (the man who had received Morris-Jones’s private verdict two months before the bench sat) for correcting the proofs.Morris-Jones, Rhagymadrodd (1926), p. xiv; G. J. Williams, Rhagair yr Awdur (1926). The printed book of 1926 is therefore a text revised after judgment by its own judges, and what was altered between the winning essay and the printed book is not known. Iolo had sat in judgment on entries himself, and had said what he thought of the northern scholars’ skill. A month before the Caerfyrddin eisteddfod of July 1819, writing to its secretary David Rowland, Dewi Brefi, about the entries he had to judge, he said he had met no scholar in the north “who has a competent skill either in the rules of versification and in poetry, or in the language itself of which they boast so much”.Iolo Morganwg to David Rowland, 14 June 1819, NLW 1895Ei, letter no. 81.

One fact about the convicting author belongs here as a fact, and the meaning of it is left open. On 7 January 1924, in his own house at Penarth, between the winning of the prize and the printing of the book, G. J. Williams sat down with Saunders Lewis and W. Ambrose Bebb to found a new movement in Cymru, and was made its treasurer; in August 1925 that group joined the northern one at Pwllheli to found Plaid Genedlaethol Cymru.Dictionary of Welsh Biography, s.v. Williams, Griffith John; Plaid Cymru History Society (2015). His wife Elizabeth took the minutes of the Penarth meeting. That the new movement’s programme required Iolo’s conviction is not established, and nothing yet read says it: it is recorded here as a fact of the same years, and as a question. What is established is that Iolo was a Unitarian, a Jacobin and a Romantic, that Morris-Jones’s preface lists “cydraddoldeb a brawdoliaeth y Chwyldroad Ffrengig”, the equality and fraternity of the French Revolution, among Iolo’s contaminations, and that the man who defended Iolo from the Logan Stone was a Liberal MP of the Nonconformist order the new party was founded to replace. W. J. Gruffydd, one of the three judges of the prize, is recorded as “a prominent member of the Welsh Nationalist Party (as it was then called)” who in 1943 won the University of Wales seat in Parliament as a Liberal, defeating Saunders Lewis (Dictionary of Welsh Biography, s.v. Gruffydd, William John).

He gave the motive as Iolo’s “great love of Morgannwg”, and, on the authority of psychologists he does not name, wrote that it was as if two persons lived in the one body.G. J. Williams (1926), p. 209. Then he spent the rest of his life on the subject. In 1948 he published Traddodiad Llenyddol Morgannwg, and in 1956 the first volume of a biography of Iolo, which stops at 1788. Both books are proofs that the literary tradition of Morgannwg which Iolo claimed to carry was real. He never finished the biography. The head of the modern Iolo project records his final position: “Po fwyaf yr astudiai Iolo a’i waith, mwyaf yn y byd yr edmygai ei gamp”, the more he studied Iolo and his work, the more he admired his achievement.Geraint H. Jenkins, Y Digymar Iolo Morganwg (Talybont, 2018).

Yr Esgus: The Excuse

There is one defence left for these men, and it is the one their successors always reach for: that this was the way of things, the temper of the age, the water everybody swam in. It is not available, and the record makes sure of that. At every single point, somebody said so at the time, in print, over his own name, and was answered by silence, or by a shift of ground, or not at all.

Take them in order. When Morris-Jones fired his first shot in 1888, D. Silvan Evans, the country’s lexicographer, produced the contrary evidence the following week, and Morris-Jones moved his ground rather than withdraw. When Rhŷs gave his own pupil the proverbs prize in 1884, a correspondent signing himself “U.” asked in Y Genedl Gymreig whether counting work that had never been submitted was adjudication at all, and noted that the professor seemed very anxious to put his man first; nobody replied. When the Crown’s inquiry turned a farmer’s promise to give evidence into a threat of revenge, the farmers’ own solicitor corrected the translation on the spot, and a columnist writing in Cymraeg asked whether that was not the key to the charge of perjury English judges brought against Cymru’s witnesses.Y Goleuad, 19 July 1888; “U.” in Y Genedl Gymreig, 1 October 1884; South Wales Daily News, 29 July 1887, “How Injustice is Done”. When Bridge’s report came out, the Cambrian News printed what it had left out, and T. E. Ellis (the Member who had put Rhŷs on the inquiry) tore it apart in public that September.

When Jesus College cut the Holyhead vicar while raising its Principal’s stipend, Lord Stanley of Alderley published the figures and called it the impoverishment of working clergy for the sake of sinecures. When the College took the Môn endowment, Anglesey County Council voted in 1890 that money taken out of the tithe of Cymru should be spent on schools in Cymru. Ten years before that the case had been put in the House of Commons, where Gladstone said the college had served to take selected youth of Cymru, place them in English associations and wean them from their language, and had “done nothing for Wales as Wales”. The College’s own dealings with founders’ wills were condemned by the University Commissioners in 1852, by a critic in 1878 who wrote that no founder’s intentions had been so much trampled on in a hundred years, and by a Cowbridge pamphleteer in 1882 who noted the omission of a codicil in four words: “The omission is significant.”Gladstone in the House of Commons, 18 July 1879, on Hussey Vivian’s motion, “Education (Wales) — Resolution”: Jesus College had served “to bring from Wales a certain number of selected youth who were placed in English associations, and were thus weaned from their language. It had done nothing for Wales as Wales.” The College’s figures, the Anglesey County Council resolution and Lord Stanley’s letters are set out in Y Penseiri, ¶615. The 1882 Cowbridge pamphlet is carried at second hand; the pamphlet itself has not been seen. Iolo had a line for clergy who dined well on other men’s endowments. Writing of St Illtud, who ate one meal a day, he noted that the meal “did not continue for the whole day as it is with some of our modern Parsons”.NLW 13158A, pp. 152–3.

When Gwenogvryn Evans rewrote the Book of Taliesin, Ifor Williams demolished him in 1916 and Morgan Watkin in 1920, and Morris-Jones himself, in 1918, wrote two hundred and ninety pages proving him a man who asserted things against the evidence. And he opened those two hundred and ninety pages with a principle this court adopts: “Tradition is now generally admitted to be worthy of more respect than was paid to it in the nineteenth century. When it is not the obvious product of popular etymology it usually contains some element of truth. And it may carry its message from a very remote age.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, Y Cymmrodor XXVIII (1918), p. 1. When Morris-Jones ran the campaign, T. Marchant Williams named it in 1911 for what it was, and titled the piece The Conspiracy against the Gorsedd; W. E. Davies, in the Welsh Outlook of August 1920, called him “a most bitter and uncompromising” partisan; and the south named the thing outright in Y Darian in 1918, Gogleddiaeth, Northernism, a movement afoot to save poor southerners from its claws of ignorance.T. Marchant Williams, “The Conspiracy against the Gorsedd”, The Nationalist (1911); W. E. Davies, Welsh Outlook, August 1920, p. 187; Y Darian, 11 July 1918. And when the charge against Iolo broke, a King’s Counsel who was also a historian and a Member of Parliament stood up at the Eisteddfod and said there was not a tittle of evidence and no case to answer, and a Baptist minister from the Loughor valley said from the same stone that the two knights were working hand in hand.

That is not one crank. That is a lexicographer, a King’s Counsel who sat in Parliament, a county council, a peer, a solicitor, two professors, a poet-preacher, an eisteddfod competitor, three newspapers and a royal commission, across forty years, in print, at the time. The evidence was public, the objections were public, and the men who made the verdict read the same papers everybody else read. They were not carried along by their age. They were opposed in their age, by people who could see it plainly, and they won anyway, because they held the chairs, the journals, the prizes and the presses, and their critics did not. Iolo had said as much of the courts of his own day. In the preface to his Poems, dated Llundain, 1 January 1794, he wrote of “the boasted laws of this land, that are not, whatever one REEVES, or his brother gear-monger, of Holborn-Hill, may say, made equally for the poor as for the rich; and hardly an instance can be produced, where a poor man, unbacked by wealthy friends, ever obtained justice in our Law-Courts.”Edward Williams, Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (London, 1794), I, p. xi.

So the excuse fails, and with it the rehabilitation. A man who is never contradicted may perhaps plead the temper of his times. A man who is contradicted in print, by qualified people, repeatedly, and proceeds anyway, is not a product of his age. He is making a choice, and he is making it with the objection in front of him. That is true of every name in this case, and it is true of every critic of Iolo Morganwg who came after them and repeated the verdict without opening the file.

A discipline must be stated, or we become what we try. We need not construct a conspiracy of whispered instructions in shut rooms. The machinery of class does not require secret coordination to run out of true: when one family owns the coal beneath the valleys, marries the Prussian ambassador, funds the eisteddfod, and locks the archive in its own drawing-room, the outcomes standardise themselves. They had no need to conspire; they had only to consult their interests. Beyond the one receipt already on the table, Crawshay’s letter of 1796, no private letter has yet been produced that proves the wider verdict was coordinated, and until one is, we assert only the record: the identities, the offices, the marriages, the dates, the locked drawer they all stand around, and the race-science, the rifles, and the Blue Books that are nobody's invention but their own. That is enough. The men who built this verdict are dead. The verdict is not, and a verdict is a thing renewed by everyone who repeats it. To have called Iolo "the forger" in 1926, inside that machine, was an inheritance. To call him that now, with the machine in plain view, is a choice.

22. Y Cysgod

The Shadow715 Two shadows. 717 Jung and Prospero. 719 Geoffrey of Monmouth. 725 The Hanoverian title. 730 Envy. 737 The defendant was the court. 739 The two poems.

There are two shadows in this trial. The first was the keeper’s own, and it has been faced.See Y Diffynnydd, ¶60 and Y Ceidwad a'r Orsedd, ¶411. The second is the shadow of the people who took.

Ask the question the verdict keeps begging. Why would a powerful, confident civilisation spend a century insisting that a dead stonemason invented a tradition? Confidence does not behave like that. Confidence ignores. What spends a hundred years proving the natives had nothing is not confidence. It is anxiety, and there is a body of thought, now a century deep, that has named the anxiety exactly.

Carl Jung called it the shadow, the part of himself a man cannot bear to own, and so disowns by seeing it in someone else.Jung, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951 (Collected Works vol. 9ii, English trans. 1959): "Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is." A civilisation has a shadow too, and the shadow of a conquering one is its own buried knowledge of what conquest is: theft, savagery, the seizure of another people's land and memory. That knowledge cannot be carried inside the conqueror's picture of himself as the civilised party, so it is projected, flung outward onto the colonised, who are then made to carry it. The native becomes the savage so the coloniser need not see the savagery in the act of colonising. Jungian scholarship has followed this straight into the minds of the colonisers, and calls what it found there the "colonial shadow".Kira Celeste, The Colonial Shadow: A Jungian Investigation of Settler Psychology (London: Routledge, 2023), on the settlers of what is now Canada; for instance p. 100, “the colonial shadow’s expression of its violence”, and p. 169, “the honest and intentional processes of facing and tending the colonial shadow”. Read in the book. What frightened them was never the natives, but what the natives might show them about themselves. Iolo had shown them. In ‘Winter Incidents’, printed in Poems, Lyric and Pastoral in 1794, he turned to the man who goes to war on the French and put the savagery back where it belonged: “Thou, that in blood canst thus delight, / Steel well thy soul, court fame, and fight, / With well-directed cannon balls / Knock down ten thousand harmless Gauls, / Drink human gore, and laugh thy fill / At Him who said, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’”Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (1794), vol. I, p. 126 (“Winter Incidents”). The last words are the commandment of Exodus 20:13 in the wording of the Authorised Version.

The literary name for it is older and sharper. Octave Mannoni, studying the French empire in Madagascar, called it the Prospero complexOctave Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization (Paris, 1950; Eng. trans. London: Methuen, 1956), the usurper who needs Caliban to be a monster, because a monster is the only thing that turns a usurper into a civiliser., after Shakespeare's exiled magician who lands on an island that is not his, takes it from the native Caliban, sets him to labour, and then needs, absolutely needs, Caliban to be a monster, because a monster is the only thing that turns a usurper into a civiliser. Hold Caliban's answer against the Britons’ whole case, because Shakespeare wrote it three centuries early: "You taught me language, and my profit on't is, I know how to curse.Shakespeare, The Tempest, I.ii (Caliban): “You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse.” Ed. Vaughan & Vaughan, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser. (1999)." Give the dispossessed your tongue and your record, and they will use them to indict you, which is exactly why the record had to be taken back, and the man who saved it called a liar. Frantz Fanon reduced the mechanism to one sentence that closes the argumentFrantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (Paris, 1952; Eng. trans. New York: Grove, 1967): “it is the racist who creates his inferior.”: "it is the racist who creates his inferior." The man they called a liar was a Caliban who had learned the master’s language, loved its greatest poet, and turned it on the master. His mother brought him up on Shakespeare, and after going out of his way to Stratford in May 1802 he wrote to Walter Davies, Gwallter Mechain, the Sir Drefaldwyn clergyman and poet: “I feel some thing like magic in every thing that relates to Shakespeare.”Iolo Morganwg to Walter Davies (Gwallter Mechain), 1 June 1802, and NLW 13174A, ff. 11r–v, 17r, Correspondence, II, p. 416.

And he was never the only one to be given that name. Put the charge against Iolo beside the charge against Geoffrey of Monmouth and they are not two cases, they are one case twice.

Geoffrey said, in the dedication of his history, that Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford, had brought him "a certain most ancient book in the British language", setting out the deeds of the kings from Brutus to Cadwaladr in a continuous and regular order, and that he had taken pains to translate that volume into Latin.Acton Griscom, The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth (London: Longmans, 1929), 87, translating the Prologue. The first printed edition advertised the same source on its title-page: Josse Bade, Paris, 1508, "ab Galfrido Monemutensi ex antiquissimis Britannici sermonis monumentis in latinum sermonem translata" (Griscom, 10). The scholarship of eight centuries has answered that he invented the book.Griscom, 102: "by far the majority of British and Continental writers over a long period have expressed themselves in no uncertain terms as entirely unconvinced that any such ‘ancient British book’ ever existed. As a result, the opinion is often held today that Geoffrey merely invented a ‘vetustissimus liber’."

Read the ground given for it and you have read the ground given against Iolo. A scholarly authority of 1923, quoted in full by Geoffrey’s editor: "We need not take very seriously the author’s declaration … that he was translating into Latin an old book in the British language furnished him by his friend Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford. There is no evidence that he had more than superficial acquaintance with Welsh, and probably he knew Breton no better."J. D. Bruce, quoted in Griscom, 107. Griscom adds that a public appeal by Professor Petrie in 1917 to examine the Welsh chronicles "does not seem to have changed in the slightest since then the consensus of opinion that no actual ‘ancient book’ ever existed." He could not have read it, therefore it was not there. Against Iolo the same move runs the other way and arrives at the same place: if he had forged the poems he would have destroyed every paper that could show it, and so whatever is missing is the proof.G. J. Williams, Iolo Morganwg a Chywyddau’r Ychwanegiad (Llundain, 1926), 182: "o bu’n llwyddiannus wrth y gwaith, gellir bod yn sicr iddo ddinistrio pob papur a allai daflu goleuni ar y twyll", if he was successful at the work, one can be sure he destroyed every paper that could throw light on the fraud. In both, the source that was never produced is read as evidence that there was none, and in both, no forgery is ever exhibited.

Geoffrey’s editor saw the shape of it in 1929 and wrote it down, and what he wrote is the most exact description of this trial that exists, made by a man who had never heard of it. It has been said, he wrote, that the history is "romance"; that the kings are "inventions"; that the stories are "fictions" proving nothing but the fertility of one man’s imagination; that the author was "facile princeps in the art of historical lying", and that this view "has for too long held the field, since it has prevented the consideration of a multitude of historic details of real importance."Griscom, 102. The "facile princeps" phrase is the one he reports as the settled opinion of his profession.

Then the sentence that matters most, because it is not about Geoffrey at all: "Such an attitude of contempt and denial seems often to have followed the effort of any historical writer to gather together the traditional history of bygone days."Griscom, 102, who instances Herodotus, "the ‘Father of History’," openly accused by Lucian (Philopseudes, 2) of "making use of falsehood." The charge does not attach to a man. It attaches to an act, the act of carrying a tradition rather than inventing one, and it attaches to whoever performs it. Herodotus was accused of lying in the second century. Geoffrey has been called a liar for eight hundred years. Iolo Morganwg has been called a forger for two hundred. The word changes with the century; the indictment does not. Iolo had seen that indictment coming, and reached for the Greeks himself. In the advertisement to his “Ode on the Mythology of the Ancient British Bards”, printed in 1794, he wrote: “There are in the world writers of matchless impudence—these will, without knowing a word of the Welsh language, without having ever seen one of its many thousands of manuscripts, arrogantly tell the public that what is here said of BARDISM is all a fiction. Just as if a man, without knowing any thing of the Greek language, should peremptorily tell us that such persons as Homer, Pindar, or Aristotle, never existed, or that the writings attributed to these great men are gross impositions on the credulity of mankind.”Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (1794), vol. II, p. 195 (Advertisement to the “Ode on the Mythology of the Ancient British Bards”).

And the defence does not change either, which is the last thing worth saying about it. Geoffrey’s editor answered the invention charge by going to the oldest manuscripts and showing that they spell the Britons’ names "far more nearly (when not exactly) their Welsh equivalents than in the later editions", so that the copies nearest the pen are the copies most British, and the further from the pen, the further from the tongue.Griscom, 22, of Cambridge University Library MS 1706 and Bern Stadtbibliothek Codex 568, which he takes to represent the earliest state of the text. That is the same test this court has applied to a single word, and it returns the same answer: the vellum is Cymraeg, and everything that moved away from the vellum moved away from Cymraeg.

Now the "not belonging" under all of it. The deepest root of the projection is the conqueror's own unease about his title, the suspicion, never said aloud, that he is the interloper on a soil older than his claim to it. A dynasty newly imported from Germany; a "British" identity assembled in the eighteenth century out of a union the original inhabitants never chose; an island whose oldest inhabitants, the Cymry, were still there, still speaking, still remembering a sovereignty that predated the whole arrangement. That is intolerable, and the cure is to make the older people the lesser people: primitive, backward, and above all not to be believed. You do not merely rule them; you rewrite them, so that their memory of having been here first becomes a fantasy, a forgery, a thing no serious person credits.

The Hanoverian dynasty knew what it was. It was imported in 1714 by Act of Parliament, brought in because the Catholic line was barred, not because any native tradition called for it, not because any claim of blood ran hot enough to justify the throne. It was, in the most naked sense available, a legal construction: a paper title propped by statute and by the army that enforced the statute. Every serious lawyer and antiquary in the country knew this, and the court knew they knew it. The "British" identity assembled over the following century, the Union Jack, the anthem, the constitutional mythology, the empire presented as the natural estate of an island people, was a performance of belonging assembled precisely to fill the gap where a genuine claim would have been. An empire built on a manufactured identity cannot afford to let the concept of manufactured identity be examined too carefully, especially not when the people making the examination are the oldest inhabitants of the island, the ones whose memory predates the whole construction by a thousand years. Call their memory a fantasy, brand their record-keeper a forger, and you do not merely silence them, you make the word forger point anywhere but at the throne. The Hanoverian shadow is the shadow of a dynasty that knew its own title was the largest counterfeit in the room, and purchased its peace of mind by finding smaller counterfeits to condemn. Iolo had reported on that house at table. In 1792, when the Duke of Brunswick, a prince of the same Guelph house and brother-in-law of George Guelph (George III), led the armies of the kings into France, Iolo wrote up the campaign as a dinner on the plains of Champagne: “The first Course consisted of one hundred thousand Frenchmen, who having asserted that their Lives and properties were their own, and persisting in this their Wicked Error, were first excommunicated by the Pope, and then according to the well known Imperial Laws in such case made and provided, Slaughtered. … after the most delicious wines, the whole company regaled themselves plentifully with the Tears of Widows, Orphans, etc. and every heart was glad.”NLW 21395E, p. 18.

And see how completely the claim Iolo carried inverts the one the empire needed. The verdict required the ancients to be children, primitive, credulous, the infancy of a race that came of age only in the modern European. But Iolo belonged to an older and more stubborn lineage of mind: the one that held the reverse, that the ancient world had possessed a prisca sapientia, a first wisdom since lost, the lineage of Newton, who poured his secret life into alchemy and the geometry of Solomon's temple because he believed the old world had known more, not less. To that cast of mind the bardic tradition was not a quaint survival but the wreckage of a great knowledge; and Iolo said so in terms that startled even him. In the letter of 1798 to Pughe he saw that the bardic doctrine of the elements matched the Hindu scriptures then newly turned out of the Sanskrit, saw the forgery-charge coming half a century early, and named its mechanism precisely: when the attacked tradition turns out to share the deep grammar of the world's oldest wisdom, the barbarians' science cannot afford to call it kin, it must call it theft. He understood, in his own lifetime, the very move that would be made over his grave.

And here is the proof that this was no peculiarity of Cymru but the working method of an age: it was happening everywhere, at once, in the same years, in the same borrowed authority of science. The decade that told the Britons they were primitive, the Blue Books of 1847, sat in the middle of a transatlantic boom in the ranking of human beings. In France, Arthur de Gobineau published his Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races in 1853, seedbed of every later Aryan fantasy, while the French army was a generation deep into the conquest of Algeria. In the United States, Nott and Gliddon's Types of Mankind (1854) made polygenism (the doctrine that the races are separate species, ranked by nature) the most widely read science of its day, in the service of slavery and on the heels of the Indian Removal that had already cleared the native nations from the land. In Britain, Prichard's ethnology fed the same machine. The Briton branded a forger, the African enslaved as a separate species, the Algerian "pacified," the Native American removed, the English cottager enclosed off the common his family had worked for centuries. These were not separate stories. They were one story, told in one decade, by one civilisation, in the single voice it had taught itself to mistake for objectivity.“The writing of history is rarely altogether innocent or detached”: F. J. Levy, “Afterword”, Huntington Library Quarterly 68 (2005), p. 427, quoted by Jenkins at the opening of his 2008 article. And Robin Okey asked why nationalist interpretations alone were reckoned “uniquely subject to anachronism and propagandist present-mindedness”: “Plausible Perspectives: The New Welsh Historiography”, Planet 73 (1989), 31–38, cited by Jenkins (2008), p. 26 n. 85. The Britons' case is small only in scale. In kind it is the whole empire. Iolo had seen it go round the world. On Bryn Dinorwig in October 1799 he declaimed his Cywydd Gorymbil ar Heddwch, a plea for peace against the British government’s war: Rhyfel yn gawr sy’n rhwyfaw / Fal tonnau’r aig, fal draig draw; / O! Dduw, cylchynu’r ddaear / Mae ag anrhaith, yn faith fâr, war, a giant, rows on and holds sway, like the waves of the sea, like a dragon yonder; O God, it circles the earth with plunder, a long fury.Cathryn A. Charnell-White (ed.), Welsh Poetry of the French Revolution, 1789–1805 (2012), p. 184. Rhwyfaw carries both rowing and ruling, and the verse means both.

Which brings us back, at last, to the one word on Iolo's biography, and shows it for what it is. An empire that manufactured a "British" people out of a conquest, that invented a Welsh national costume to sell its wool, that forged a science to certify ranks it had already decided, and that assembled a whole authorised past for a stolen island, that empire reached for one native who had spent his life carrying the real record out of the fire, and called him the forger. It is the oldest move the shadow knows: the thief cries thief, the fabricator points at the witness, the arsonist testifies against the man who ran into the flames. Project, and you never have to look down at your own hands.

And projection is only the mechanism. Underneath it is a psychology, and it explains the one feature of the whole history that mere greed never could: the waste. A people that inherits a thing has earned its attachment to it, through the long apprenticeship of the bardic schools, the winter copying, the manuscripts carried out of burning houses on a poor man's shoulders; the thing is held as a trust, because the labour of receiving it is what teaches a hand to hold it. A culture that seizes a thing skips the labour, and so acquires the object without ever acquiring the attachment: it holds as property what the heir held as trust, and property can be wasted.

The custody record of the takers bears it out. Hafod’s hundred or so manuscripts burned in a night under gentry keeping; the rats and the damp doing their slow work in the muniment rooms; the archive locked for sixty-nine years and never used; two whole classes of the catalogue simply lost on the way; the national collection that reproduces five letters of 1,230 and leaves the viewer broken; the sovereign of Deheubarth brought back, in the 850th year of his eisteddfod, as a five-metre puppet for the tourists. That is not the record of guardians. It is the record of owners, and of something darker than negligence, which the psychology of envy names exactly: the drive not merely to take the good thing but to spoil it, because the genuine heir's unbought relation to it is unbearable to the hand that could only ever buy or seize. The taker cannot have what the heir has (the attachment does not come away with the object) and so the object must be cheapened until no one has it: the throne made a pageant, the court a puppet-show, the keeper a forger. And there stands the deepest motive of the verdict, beneath the money and beneath the jurisdiction: the word forgery is envy speaking in the dress of scholarship. Call the true thing fake, and the taker's hollow copy need never stand beside it for comparison. Say it more simply still, because the plain words are the diagnosis: not wanting the good thing, needing to spoil it, because someone else's genuine relation to it is unbearable. The taker skipped the labour, so he holds the object without the attachment; he does not value it, because he cannot; and he knows, in the one place where knowledge cannot be argued away, that it is not his.

And Jung takes the analysis one turn deeper, down to where the malice lives. A stolen identity is a persona with nothing behind itJung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (Collected Works 7, 1953), on the persona and psychic inflation, identification with the mask. The step from the persona to a stolen identity, and to the dread of the real owner, is ours, not Jung's., a mask over a vacancy, the same vacancy found beneath the Hanoverian title, and the psyche that wears one lives in unconfessable dread of exactly one thing: the return of the real owner, whose mere existence proves the mask a mask. That dread has a single permanent cure. The owner must not only be dispossessed; he must be made never to have existed (the record burned, the line declared extinct, the memory reclassified as fantasy) because only a crime with no victim leaves the impostor's face as the true one. Every burned library, every locked drawer, every verdict of forgery in this story is that cure being applied, generation after generation, by hands that mostly never knew what the prescription was for. What was done to Iolo's archive was never carelessness about the Britons' past. It was the maintenance of a stolen face.

And Iolo was never the only casualty of it, even at home. The same decades that branded him a forger saw the native institutions of learning quietly displaced by establishment ones, the Cymreigyddion of Abergavenny wound down and its archive locked away, while the Cambrian Archaeological Association and its journal rose in their place: the coloniser's apparatus settling over the destroyed one, the prize-table and the periodicals and the bishopric gathered into the same few hands. There was a resistance (scholars and antiquaries fighting a network that owned the archive and the Guelphs alike) and Iolo is one name on that longer list. The verdict against him is a single battle in a wider war over who is permitted to keep the Britons' record at all.

There is one last proof, the strangest and the largest, that this was never only the Britons’ quarrel. That what was fought over Iolo was a seam of something continental. Follow the Cymry who crossed the water. Two streams left for America out of that same century, and they were the two sides of Iolo's own fight. One was the Dissenting stream (Quakers, Baptists, Unitarians) fleeing the Established Church and the Stuarts who backed it, carrying the egalitarian, anti-clerical conscience that had declared slavery a sin in the Germantown petition as early as 1688. They settled the Pennsylvania Welsh Tract and named a township Gwynedd. Out of that stream, through, as the Ysbyty Ifan tradition holds, a farmer's daughter named Ellen Morris, came Abraham Lincoln. And the stream remembered its tongue: standing for the presidency in 1860, Lincoln had near a hundred thousand election pamphlets printed in Cymraeg, for the Cymraeg-speaking voters of the republic.The hundred-thousand figure is the received account, carried on the Welsh Government’s own Wales-and-America pages among many others; no primary campaign document has yet been produced for the count, and it is entered here at that weight. The other stream drifted south (into Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia) and there a family from Cymru climbed, as climbing families do, into the thing the first had fled: the planter aristocracy and its church, the Episcopal Church, which is the Church of England in American dress. Out of that stream, through (as the family's own contested genealogies have it) an emigrant named Evan Davis of Sir Benfro, came Jefferson Davis, baptised into that establishment church in 1862, as President of the slave-holding Confederacy.

So the fork Iolo stood at, take the Guelphs' patronage and the establishment's church, or stay the penniless Dissenting mason and be called a forger, was the same fork his countrymen's descendants faced across the ocean, and they chose as he would have known they would. The line that kept the Dissenting conscience ended slavery; the line that assimilated into the establishment church defended it, and both lines are ours. The quarrel between extraction-and-hierarchy and Dissent-and-equality did not stay in a Llundain tavern. It crossed the Atlantic in the blood of emigrants and was settled, the second time, at Gettysburg. Iolo took his own side of that fork in his own house. Of the Jamaica plantations, and of anything that might come to his family from them, he wrote to William Owen Pughe, his fellow worker on the Myvyrian, in 1803: “God deliver my very poor children from ever having a single farthing from such estates. May the vast Atlantic ocean swallow up Jamaica, and all other slave-trading and slave-holding countries, before a boy or a girl of mine eats that single morsel that would prevent him or her from perishing of hunger, if it is the produce of slavery.”Iolo Morganwg to William Owen Pughe, 25 August 1803, Correspondence, II, p. 537.

This is not a causal chain to be proved by receipts; it is a structural fault-line running through the people, the same two postures toward power and toward one's own people, resolving at the only scale large enough to settle them. The descents are as the traditions record them; the churches are documented; the fault-line is the argument. And the argument is the thesis entire, that what was done to Iolo was never only about Iolo, or only about Cymru: that it was one local outcrop of the oldest fault in the imperial mind, the fault that takes the ground and then tells the people of the ground that they were never its keepers; and that the same fault, carried west, ran straight through the middle of America. And mark which hands carried it, because both those streams were Britons. A people who have been robbed are not thereby prevented from robbing. Some of them are the readiest hands of all, having been taught every move. The mechanism belongs to no nation and to no blood. It was there to be picked up, and it was picked up. Iolo had hoped the new republic would refuse it. In 1794, in a note to his Poems, he hailed “America, where first since the world began, appears of, apparently, Human Institution, a government founded on the true principles of Liberty, Justice, and the Rights of Humanity.” Half of his countrymen’s descendants there kept that faith, and half sold it.Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (1794), vol. II, p. 212 (note to “Ode on the Mythology of the Ancient British Bards”).

The defendant in the dock was always the court.

Dafydd ap Gwilym a'i cant.
Gogoniant y traddodiant.
Galwyd cywydd yn gelwydd,
cywilydd y celwydd sydd.
Cywir yw cân y ffug ŵr:
nid celwyddwr — cywyddwr.
Galwyd y gŵr yn ffugiwr:
y byd yn erbyn y gŵr.
Un gŵr oedd, a'r gwir hefyd:
y gŵr yn erbyn y byd.
Byw yw'r gwir, a'r gŵr hefyd:
Y Gwir yn erbyn y Byd.

— Dafydd ap Gwilym sang it — a'i cant: the same letters English reads as I can't. / The glory of the tradition. / They called the poem a lie — the lie's shame remains. / True is the song of the “counterfeit” man: no liar — a maker of cywyddau. / They called the man a forger: the world against the man. / He was one man, and the truth as well: the man against the world. / Alive is the truth, and the man as well: the Truth against the World.

See.

Both of those poems, the couplets at the head of the book, and the cywydd above, were written in the year 2026, in the traethodl, the cywydd without cynghanedd that Dafydd ap Gwilym himself used when he wanted to tell a story: the measure of the people, not of the schools.W. J. Gruffydd, Llenyddiaeth Cymru hyd 1450 (1922), pp. 89–91: “pan fynnai Dafydd ab Gwilym ddywedyd hanes, gwnaeth hynny ym mesur y cywydd heb gynghanedd”; and of the strict measures, “barddoniaeth yr ysgolheigion ac nid barddoniaeth y werin”. The metrist who comes to them with the schools’ rulebook will find no cynghanedd in them, and the last line of each is the motto, which no rule of Cerdd Dafod was ever made to hold; the reader who catches the measure has caught the point. By the establishment's own definition, they are forgeries, composed in a dead master's manner, dressed in his form, even carrying his colophon.

And if, reading them, you caught yourself scanning the lines, weighing the cynghanedd, ruling whether this was a true cywydd or a clumsy modern counterfeit, whether the hand had the right to the measure it used, then stop, and notice what you were doing. That ruling is the whole case. The act of sitting in judgment on who is fit to sing in the old tongue, of deciding which hand may wear the tradition and which may not, is the exact chair Sir John Morris-Jones sat in when he convicted Iolo. No one appointed him to it. No one appointed you. You took it up because the form invites it, and that is precisely how the verdict was made, and how easily anyone makes it. The chair is empty. Do not sit in it.

So convene the court. Knight the prosecutor. Lock the drafts in a baroness's cabinet for two generations and then discover the proof.

Or admit the thing you have known since the first line: that composing in the manner of the masters is not a crime but the craft itself, the first lesson every apprentice is set, in every art, in every century. And that the only forgery in this whole long story was the verdict. The man they called the forger had named his bardic word himself. On Bryn Dinorwig in 1799, in the same plea for peace, he declaimed: Fy marddair, y gair a’m gwedd, / Yw gair anwyl gwirionedd, my bardic word, the word that befits me, is the dear word of truth.Cadrawd (ed.), Gwaith Iolo Morganwg (1913), p. 31 (“Gorymbil am Heddwch”).

Y Gwir yn erbyn y Byd.

23. Y Gwir a'r Ddyled

Truth and Debt744 A question too large for the court. 747 The old law of debt. 753 Debt in the dark. 756 The clean slate. 758 Debt as conquest. 761 Merthyr, 1831. 764 The two tongues. 767 The registers you stand in. 770 The two psalms. 773 Forgery, the false making of a bond.

In the winter of 1786, in Caerdydd gaol, held by his creditors, Edward Williams drew a petition to the House of Commons against the laws that kept a debtor's body as security for his debts. It went nowhere. It is taken up here. The man was too large for the charge; the question is too large for the court. For two centuries the quarrel has been made to stand in a room the size of a library carrel (did one Briton forge one sheaf of poems) and the whole art of the prosecution has been to keep it there. Step out of the carrel. Ask what the words on his banner actually claim, Y Gwir yn erbyn y Byd, and the case opens onto the oldest ground in these islands: what is truth, what is debt, and who owes whom. He wrote his own answer to the last of those questions in his notebooks: “The object of True Civilization is to patronize and enforce true morality, Rational Religion, truly beneficient Arts and Sciences, and that Equality which Genuine and properly restrained Liberty demands, to distribute justice, to secure competency to every member of the Community, and to curb with an invincible Bridle the arrogancies and Tyranies of Power, Rank, Title, and illgotten Wealth that at present enslave every part of the world, the whole race of mankind.”NLW 13088E, p. 76.

And there is a debt in this case that nobody has ever been asked to settle. The charge against him has not been tried since 1926. It has been inherited. Each generation of scholars took the verdict from the one before, the way a son takes a debt, and paid it on without once going back to the ledger to ask whether the sum was owed at all. That is the thing a Briton refuted sixteen centuries ago, in the first argument these islands put into the European record. Pelagius held that a man answers for his own acts, that guilt is not transmitted at birth, and that no other man’s fault stands between a person and his own conduct, and this book has already called that the exact refutation of corruption of blood, the doctrine of English treason law by which a father’s condemnation poisons his children unborn.Pelagius and the refutation of corruption of blood: chapter 5, Y Cwmni. The attainder’s use of the doctrine: chapter 16, Y Dull Cymreig. The forgery verdict is corruption of blood worked on a reputation instead of an estate. It was passed once, by men who had read almost none of the papers, and every scholar since has been born into it and has paid it forward. If the rule holds against the attainder it holds here, and it holds for the same reason: the charge dies with the court that could not prove it, and it cannot be handed down. Nobody inherits a conviction.

He had been laughing at the king for years. In October 1780, at thirty-three, he wrote a shepherd on Garth mountain who “laughs at all monkeys who riches adore”, and then turned on himself: “Let him laugh at all blo[c]kheads for ’tis a good thing, / But sure he’s a fool, for he laughs at the king. / He calls him a niny – sure that cannot be – / Yet this shepherd by Jove is far wiser than me, / ’Tis treason I fear, I was taught so at school, / To laugh at poor George or to call him a fool.”“The mountain shepherd”, NLW 21285E, no. 786, [?October 1780] (The Correspondence of Iolo Morganwg, I, letter 55, p. 173), as printed by Ffion Mair Jones, ‘The Bard is a Very Singular Character’: Iolo Morganwg, Marginalia and Print Culture (Cardiff, 2010), Appendix VI, pp. 284–5.

Begin where his law begins. The old law of this country lived in the light, and it had to, because light was its whole mechanism. Under the law of Hywel a debt was not a private thing between two men: it could not lawfully exist between two men. Every bond required a third, the mach, the surety, who stood in the open and answered for it; the amodwyr, the contract-witnesses, whose spoken memory was itself the record; and above them the third party of last resort, God himself, in the oath called briduw, for a man could deny a sworn debt only by swearing his innocence alone, upon seven consecrated altars, in the face of his community and his Maker. Attend to the architecture. Two parties and a witness. Two columns and the light. A bond that no one saw was no bond at all.Dafydd Jenkins, ed. and trans., The Law of Hywel Dda: Law Texts from Medieval Wales (Llandysul, 1986), suretyship, the mach and the amodwyr; Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, s.v. briduw, mach, amod. The briduw denial “uch seith allawr kyssegredig”, upon seven consecrated altars, is cited in full at the verdict.

And the black letter is harder than any summary of it. Turn to the chapter Am Ammod, Of Contract, in the law-books, and it opens by pointing back to briduw and then lays down the rule that governs every bargain not sworn to God: “Pob dadl yn ei hammod; nid Ammod heb Ammodwyr”, every plea stands in its contract, and there is no contract without contract-witnesses. The Latin of the printed edition puts it as a rule of procedure and leaves no room at all: Causa de Pactis conventis inutilis est sine Arbitro, an action upon a covenant is void without a witness; no lawful suit can be brought upon such a bargain whatever. And the remedy against a man who denies an unwitnessed agreement is one line long: “Llw un dyn i ddiwad Ammod heb Ammodwyr”, one man’s oath denies a contract made without contract-witnesses. Proof, under that rule, has no standard at all. A private bargain, in this jurisprudence, is not a weak claim. It is not a claim.Cyfreithjeu Hywel Dda ac eraill, seu, Leges Wallicae, ed. William Wotton and Moses Williams (London: William Bowyer, 1730), Lib. II, Pen. VI, Am Ammod / Cap. VI, De Pactis conventis: “Pob dadl yn ei hammod; nid Ammod heb Ammodwyr” (H.2, J, M, S.2); “Llw un dyn i ddiwad Ammod heb Ammodwyr” (J); “Ammod a dyrr ddeddf” and “Trech Ammod no gwir” (Cott. 6, H.2, P, M); “Un ddiwad yw Ammod a Mechniaeth” (H.2, J, M), contract and suretyship are denied in one and the same way. The Latin runs “Causa de Pactis conventis inutilis est sine Arbitro”, with the editors’ own gloss “Actio legitima ad pacta ista exigenda institui non potest”, no lawful action can be instituted to enforce such covenants. On enforcement, sect. 4: “yr Arglwydd biau gymmell ei gadw”, “Dominus ad praestandum Pactum eum coget”, it belongs to the lord to compel the keeping of it. Wotton’s letters are his own, explained in his preface (“Notitia Codd. MSS.”): all six are Welsh books on vellum. Cott. 6 is Cotton Cleopatra A. XIV, some four hundred years old in 1730; H. 2 a Harleian book of more than four hundred years; J the Jesus College book, about three hundred years old and written, it seems, at Hergest in Herefordshire; M a book of nearly four hundred years lent by Owen Meyrick of Bodorgan in Môn; P one of more than four hundred and fifty years lent by William Philipps of Brecon; S. 2 the Ceredigion book of more than three hundred and fifty years.

And the preceding chapter is just as exact about who stands behind the greatest of the bonds. “Yr Eglwys a’r Brenin a ddyly gymmell Briduw, canys Duw a gymmerwyd yn lle Mach”, the Church and the King must compel briduw, since God was taken in the place of surety. Both arms of the state, bound to enforce a promise to which the third party is God. And it may be taken of every baptised person, of man and of woman alike, and (the provision that tells you what kind of society drafted this) of “mab seithmlwydd a el dan law y Periglawr”, a child of seven who goes under the priest’s hand. A seven-year-old could bind the Church and the king to enforce his word. Set that beside the signature you are asked for now, and ask which of the two systems takes a promise seriously. Iolo knew what those two arms had come to in his own day. Among the sayings of Cattwg the Wise that he gave to the Myvyrian Archaiology, printed there in 1807 as Cattwg’s and counted by his biographer Geraint Jenkins as Iolo’s own composition, stand these: Un offeiriad ymhen can twyllwr. … Un cyvreithwr ymhen cant gwylliad, one priest amounts to a hundred cheats … one lawyer to a hundred bandits.The Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales, vol. III (London, 1807), p. 54.

Then set the whole architecture beside the instrument that governs us, and see how complete the inversion is. Our debt is enforceable because it is private: two signatures, no third, no witness who must be able to speak it back, no community that has to have seen it done. The entire apparatus of modern credit is precisely the bond the old law refused to recognise, and the old law refused it for a reason it states in four words: “Trech Ammod no gwir”, a contract is stronger than gwir, than right, than what is merely true or owed; and beside it “Ammod a dyrr ddeddf”, a contract breaks law, and though it be made against the law it must be kept. A bargain, once properly made, binds harder than any later argument about what was fair. Precisely because it binds that hard, it had better be made in the light, in front of men who will remember it, or it binds nothing whatever. The witnesses were the price of the bond's power.

And this was not a local eccentricity of the Cymry; it was the common jurisprudence of the Brythonic and Goidelic world. The old Irish testament of Morann (counsel to a young king, seventh century or earlier) teaches that it is through the ruler's truth, fír flathemon, that there is corn in the land and milk in the cattle and fish in the streams, and that his falsehood withers all three. It is the same doctrine the Druids of this island held: that a land governed in truth grows heavy, and that a governing lie blights the very soil. This is a claim about structure, made in verse. That truth is what holds a country up, and a lie of state is a load-bearing wall removed.Fergus Kelly, ed. and trans., Audacht Morainn (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1976), the fír flathemon sections: by the ruler's truth, milk-yields, corn and fish abound; by his falsehood they fail. On the shared inheritance of this doctrine across the Brythonic and Goidelic laws, see Charles-Edwards, cited above. The triad he printed in 1794 gives the bards of the Island of Britain the same office. Their three attributes are “to make truth manifest and diffuse the knowledge of it; to perpetuate the praise of all that is good and excellent; and with peace to prevail over the lawless and depredatory.”Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (1794), vol. II, pp. 231–2 (“Institutional Triades”, no. 12).

The gorsedd he raised on Primrose Hill stood in that jurisprudence and no other. Yn wyneb haul, yn llygad goleuni, in the face of the sun, in the eye of the light; proclaimed a year and a day ahead; open to anyone with legs to climb the hill. Even the English tongue knows the principle when it hears it, who ever knew Truth put to the worse, asked Milton, in a free and open encounter? An open law needs no locks, because it keeps nothing that can be stolen. The locks are coming.John Milton, Areopagitica (London, 1644).

For debt is how law is taken into the dark. A debt, as the modern world keeps it, is the one bond that lives in a book only the creditor holds. It is written, not witnessed; private, not proclaimed; enforced not by the judgment of a community in daylight but by a bailiff at the door with a ledger nobody else has read. The difference is exact: it is not the owing that darkens it, for the old law knew owing. It is the expulsion of the third. Creditor and debtor, two columns, and the witness put out of the room. That expulsion is the crime, and it is committed before a penny moves.

The ancients knew the two sins were one. In the oldest religion of Persia the god Mithra is lord of the contract, and his enemy has a name, mithra-druj, he who lies to the contract: a broken bond and a spoken lie are a single offence against the order of the world. And Herodotus, reporting the Persians, sets it down like a schoolmaster: they hold the telling of lies to be the most disgraceful thing in the world, and the owing of a debt the next after it, chiefly, they say, because the man in debt must needs lie. Debt does not merely take your goods. It takes your standing in the light; it makes a liar of you by arithmetic.Herodotus, Histories I.138. The mithra-druj, “he who lies to the contract”, is of the Mihr Yasht (Yasht 10) of the Avesta, where the covenant binds whether made with the righteous or the wicked.

And left in the dark, it takes the body. In the Rome of the Twelve Tables the unpaid creditor could bind the debtor and sell him beyond the Tiber, and the third table says the rest plainly: on the third market-day, let the creditors cut their pieces. The Roman plebs walked out of Rome itself, more than once, over the bondage of debt; and when the lex Poetelia at last ended the body as collateral, Livy wrote that in that year the liberty of the Roman plebs had, as it were, a new beginning. Roman liberty is dated not from a battle but from the moment the human body ceased to be security for a loan.The Twelve Tables, Table III (partis secanto); Livy, Ab Urbe Condita VIII.28, on the lex Poetelia of 326 BC.

And every people that kept its soul kept the cure, and the cure was always the same: a third beat. The ledger knows two (owe, pay) for ever, compounding. The old law kept three: owe, pay, release. The first word for freedom in any human tongue is Sumerian, amargi, the debt-cancellation proclaimed by a king of Lagash more than four thousand years ago, and it means, literally, return to the mother. The Babylonian kings wiped the slate at their accession and called the act misharum: straightness. Moses commanded the release of every seventh year, and the great fiftieth-year restoration: proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof. Solon tore the mortgage-stones out of the fields of Athens and wrote in his own verse that the earth which had been a slave was free. And a carpenter's son, standing up in the synagogue at Nazareth to open his ministry with a single text, chose the acceptable year of the Lord, the release. The clean slate is the rhythm the law had before the ledger flattened it to two beats.Michael Hudson, “…and forgive them their debts”: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year (Dresden, 2018), amargi (Enmetena of Lagash, c. 2400 BC), andurarum, misharum. Solon's verses survive in Aristotle, Constitution of Athens 12. Deuteronomy 15:1–2; Leviticus 25:10; Luke 4:18–19, where the Greek of the “release” is aphesis, remission of debts: the same word the Septuagint uses for the release of Deuteronomy 15 and the jubilee of Leviticus 25. Iolo sang that third beat when Parliament ended the British slave trade in 1807, in Cân Rhyddhad y Caethion, the song of the freeing of the slaves: Masnach dyn! Ei gorff a’i enaid / Meibion trachwant mwy ni chânt … Dydd i agor drws pob carchar, / Dryllio’r gadwyn, torri’r iau, / Dydd i sychu dagrau galar, trade in man! His body and soul the sons of greed shall have no more … a day to open every prison door, break the chain, smash the yoke, a day to dry the tears of grief.Cadrawd (ed.), Gwaith Iolo Morganwg (1913), p. 57 (“Cân Rhyddhad y Caethion”). His friends knew whose cause it had been. David Davis, the Unitarian of Castell-nedd, wrote to him on 3 April 1807: “Is not this triumph of humanity over the most execrable cruelty a ten thousand times more proper subject of public thanksgiving to the benevolent ‘Father of all’ than all the victories ever gained by the Nelsons of the world over their brethren in arms?”David Davis to Iolo Morganwg, 3 April 1807, Correspondence, II, pp. 828–9.

So set the two systems side by side and count. The ledger is a binary instrument: two columns, two parties, owe or own, mine or thine, true or false, and no third thing admitted. The old law of these islands was ternary in its very grammar: debtor, creditor, and the witness; man, world, and the truth standing over both. Every quarrel this court has judged comes down to that count. The court of 1926 was a two-column court. The law it presumed to judge was a three-term law. The arithmetic never had a chance of coming out. Iolo counted in threes. Among the triads he printed in 1794 is one that Elijah Waring, the Quaker friend who wrote down his recollections, kept in Cymraeg and in English: “There are three connates; MAN, LIBERTY and LIGHT.” Connates are things born together.Elijah Waring, Recollections and Anecdotes of Edward Williams (1850), p. 61; Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (1794), vol. II, p. 243 (“Theological Triades”, no. 22).

Now bring it home, and attend closely, because this is the argument the histories will not make. The sword stops at the border of what it can hold. In 1282 the sword took the princes; in 1536 the statute took the courts and the tongue of record; but an army cannot occupy a memory, and no statute yet drafted can make a people agree to its own conquest. Debt can. Attainder took the land first, and enclosure after it, the common hills fenced by paperwork. Debt is the second road, and it takes the land without a battle. It took the land of this court’s own defendant. Peggy’s father had left her a small copyhold at Rumney, in the marshes across the river from Caerdydd, and it was mortgaged to a Caerdydd family, the Whitings. To come out of gaol in 1787 Iolo had to assign everything he owned to his creditors in court, and the assignment stood on the title afterwards: when he found a buyer, he wrote, “the assignment in court to his creditors is a bar upon the title”. In January 1793 Peggy wrote to him in Llundain that she did not know how to find bread for the children another week, and asked his leave to sell; in February the land was sold to a farmer of Llanrumney.National Library of Wales, NLW MS 21389E, items 98/13 (“Case of Edward Wiliams for redress against his creditors”, about 1793: “He now has a purchaser for his little landed estate, but the assignment in court to his creditors is a bar upon the title”), 99/27 and 99/31 (the advertisements of 1787 and 1793: a messuage and 31½ statute acres of copyhold in Rumney), 99/32 (his notice to Edward Whiting on the money due from the land, “mortgaged to the late James Whiting, his brother and to Edward Whiting himself”) and 99/33 (articles of agreement of 15 February 1793 surrendering it to James Jones of Llanrumney, gent.), in the words of the Library’s catalogue; Margaret Williams to Iolo Morganwg, 1 January 1793, NLW 21283E, no. 604. Debt takes the law, the man dragged out of the open court of his neighbours into the private ledger of a creditor. Debt takes the tongue, for the man in debt must needs lie. Debt takes the body, the gaol we have already sat in, with the mason's hands barred from his trade. And its masterstroke, the thing no army ever managed: it reverses the moral polarity of the conquest. After the debt, the robbed man is the guilty party; the nation that was stripped stands in the dock owing its stripper. Cobbett, watching the machine at full steam from inside England, could find no name for it but THE THING; Marx, a generation on, put the joke with perfect dryness: the only part of the so-called national wealth that actually enters into the collective possession of modern peoples is their national debt. This country was not defeated at Cilmeri. It was foreclosed (slowly, in daylight-looking instruments, over five centuries) and the foreclosure was the war, continued by a pen.William Cobbett, Paper against Gold (London, 1815), and the “Old Corruption” writings, where the whole nexus of Debt, paper and placemen is THE THING; Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I, ch. 31.

If you doubt that debt is a weapon of war, hear the mechanism named in modern English by a man inside the machine. At Versailles in 1919 the victors wrote a debt over Germany, and John Maynard Keynes, of the British Treasury's own delegation, resigned his post and wrote: the policy of reducing Germany to servitude for a generation, of degrading the lives of millions of human beings… should be abhorrent and detestable. Nobody in the room heard him; the debt compounded; the next war arrived on schedule. What one treaty did to a nation in a decade, five centuries of instruments had done here, and the poet in the dock of this court is one of the few men of his age who saw the two systems whole.J. M. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (London, 1919). He resigned from the Treasury delegation rather than sign his name to the debt. He saw them as one system. Of the British government he wrote that it stood for “Wars, vain and imaginary honour, covetousness, Pride, luxury, and all vices”: the war and the ledger in one line.NLW 13123B, f. 69.

At Tredegar, in a municipal park, stands a fifteen-ton block of coal, cut by John Jones, Coliwr Mawr, for the Great Exhibition of 1851, “like the fetish of some old religion whose gods were wealth and power, and whose hope of redemption was ever greater profit.”Jan Morris, Wales: Epic Views of a Small Country (London: Viking, 1984; Penguin edn, 1986), pp. 291–292. That is the religion the ledger serves.

And once, in this country, the old law rose and enforced itself, five years after the defendant's death, in the valleys where his heirs in conviction carried his politics. Merthyr, the second of June, 1831. Before the soldiers at the Castle Inn, before the flag that everyone remembers, the crowd went to the house of Joseph Coffin, president of the Court of Requests, the small-debts court whose bailiffs had been stripping the town's kitchens through a starving spring, and shouted for the account-books. Coffin threw down a set of obsolete ledgers as decoys, and the crowd, who knew their own ledgers at a glance, tore them to pieces; then they broke in, and his furniture and his books went up in a bonfire that reached the top windows; and by night the leaves of the account-books of debt were blowing down High Street like a snowstorm. Then they went house to house through the town, collecting the goods the court had distrained, and carried them back to the families they had been taken from. The ledger dragged out of the dark into the light and destroyed; the goods not seized but restored; the release proclaimed by the community, in the open, in daylight. It is a Jubilee, executed to the letter of the old rhythm, by a town that prayed every Sunday in its own tongue: A maddau i ni ein dyledion, fel y maddeuwn ninnau i'n dyledwyr, and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. The English liturgy had long since softened the word to trespasses. The Bible in Cymraeg never blinked: dyledion, debts. The town was word-perfect in the law it enforced.Gwyn A. Williams, The Merthyr Rising (London, 1978), the Court of Requests and the debt crisis, pp. 88–92; the house-to-house restitution of distrained goods, pp. 115–16, 121 (“like so many justices itinerant”); the crowd at Coffin's house on 2 June 1831 demanding the account-books and burning them, pp. 121–3 (“the leaves of his account-books were blowing down High Street like a snowstorm”); the red flag first led the crowd only the following morning, 3 June, p. 124. Y Beibl Cyssegr-lan (1620), Mathew 6:12, where the Greek opheilemata, debts, is kept literal. Iolo had written that grievance down thirteen years before. In 1818, when the overseers of his own parish of Flimston were abusing Alice John, a young servant going blind, he took her case to the magistrates: “The parishes are almost every where by their oppression driving the poor into madness.”24 October 1817) and pp. 465–7 (to the Magistrates of Cowbridge, 13 March 1818), Correspondence, III, pp. 444–5 (to Robert Nicholl.

And the record of that day is precise, because the historian who assembled it was a scrupulous one. The Court whose books they burned had sent bailiffs to an old woman named Margaret Rees, sick in her bed; they dragged the bed out from under her and she died on straw, even the English-language press called them “fiends in human form,” and the two bailiffs walked free on a technicality. The man the crowd raised onto the recaptured trunk, Lewsyn yr Heliwr, had once taken back a neighbour's chest of drawers from a poor woman who had bought it at the debtors' auction, and made sure the woman got her money back, at the risk of his own neck: restitution more scrupulous than any court in the county. On the trunk, as a witness had it, he dealt natural justice under the oak: their own court, raised against the court that had stripped them. The captains of the crowd wrote out receipts for the moneys they recovered, in the middle of a rising, an open law keeps its record even at night. And the same historian, watching the bands march from house to house behind their banners, reached despite himself for the only simile that fits: they went, he wrote, like so many justices itinerant.Gwyn A. Williams, The Merthyr Rising (London, 1978): Margaret Rees and the “fiends in human form,” p. 89; Lewsyn's restitution-with-repayment and the “older morality,” p. 114; the receipts and the “justices itinerant,” p. 121; the decoy account-books, p. 122; the snowstorm of ledger-leaves, p. 123. The next morning they marched behind a red flag with a loaf of bread impaled on its point, and blew a hunting-horn to call the valleys out, the summons of the Scotch Cattle, the night-courts of the valleys, heirs of the Ceffyl Pren. They rose not only, as Gwyn A. Williams’s history reads it, as a class discovering itself, but as a Cymraeg-speaking town reclaiming what had been taken. The cry in the streets was Cymraeg, Caws a bara, cheese and bread, and the magistrates had to read the Riot Act in Cymraeg before the soldiers fired. And it was Iolo’s son’s town. Taliesin, the child conceived in Caerdydd gaol, kept his school in Merthyr; what Iolo had petitioned the Commons to abolish from his cell in 1787, his son’s town tried to abolish with its hands in 1831. The man they hanged for it, Richard Lewis, Dic Penderyn, died on the Caerdydd scaffold speaking the tongue his judges would not hear: O Arglwydd, dyma gamwedd, O Lord, here is iniquity. The draft of the town’s petition for mercy for him and for Lewis Lewis, Lewsyn yr Heliwr, is among Taliesin’s papers.NLW 21271E, letters nos. 392 and 392a–c, which “discuss the sentences and include a draft petition”: Roberts, in A Rattleskull Genius (2005), p. 470, who writes that Taliesin “joined others in preparing a petition to ameliorate the sentences passed on Richard Lewis (Dic Penderyn) and Lewis Lewis (Lewsyn yr Heliwr)”. The debt that caged the father was the debt the son’s people rose to burn.Gwyn A. Williams, The Merthyr Rising (London, 1978), esp. chs. 4–6: the red flag bearing a loaf of bread, the summoning horn (“good Scotch Cattle practice”), and Lewis Lewis (Lewsyn yr Heliwr) set on his chest to dispense “natural justice under the oak tree”; the Cymraeg cries (“Caws a bara”) and the Riot Act read in Cymraeg; Dic Penderyn’s scaffold words, 13 August 1831. The Court of Requests was set up in 1809 for the recovery of small debts; when the iron trade collapsed and the wages were cut, its seizures grew unbearable. Taliesin ab Iolo kept his Merthyr school from 1816 until his death in 1847. The father had done that kind of justice himself, alone. Elijah Waring, the Quaker friend who wrote down his recollections, had a story from a winter night at a roadside inn in Ceredigion, when Iolo gave his one shilling to a pedlar worn out with cold whom the publican was turning out of doors, and then turned on the publican: “Villain! do you call yourself a man? You, who would turn out a poor exhausted traveller from your house, on a night like this, under any circumstances! … You have the heart of a murderer; you are a disgrace to humanity, and I will not stay under your roof another minute”. Waring asked Iolo whether the story was true, and he said it was.Elijah Waring, Recollections and Anecdotes of Edward Williams (1850), pp. 56–7.

You are told the Merthyr Rising was the birth of the red flag, and so it has been filed, conscripted into an imported quarrel, class against class, one more two-column book with the columns renamed. But look at what the crowd actually did. It did not open a new ledger with the names reversed. It burned the ledger. It did not seize; it returned. The rising was not the first act of one binary or the last act of another: it was the old ternary law of this island executing itself one final time, and both hostile traditions, the state's and the red one, have spent two centuries re-costuming it, for the same reason the judges dressed a nation-builder as a humble stonemason. The truth of it was too large for either of their books. Iolo had put the size of it himself. The bardic morality, he wrote to William Owen Pughe, his fellow worker on the Myvyrian, in 1805, was “the glory of our ancient literature, a single sentence of which is worth a thousand volumes of such history as that of the infernally bloodthirsty princes of Wales at some periods, or of wars at any period”.Iolo Morganwg to William Owen Pughe, 14 February 1805, Correspondence, II, p. 653.

And the two books have faces. In 1985 the nation was given its television history as a staged quarrel between two men, a dragon, the series said, with two tongues. One tongue was the red: Gwyn Alfred Williams of Dowlais, Marxist, magnificent, the very historian whose pages preserve every fact of the Jubilee above, and who filed them, all of them, under the birth of the red flag. His own sentences convict him. It was he who wrote that the crowd's hatred of the Court flowed from an older social morality at odds with the market economy; he who called the restitution natural-justice action; his own pen that saw the marchers go like so many justices itinerant, and having written all that, he raised the flag over it anyway, because the flag was what he had come to find. The other tongue was the establishment's: genial, silver-voiced, the Wales of princes, choirs and scenery, and it settled this whole case in a subordinate clause, a gifted poet who preferred to pass off his poems as the work of the medieval bards, and pronounced the Gorsedd a delightful even a necessary fiction, and then confessed itself proud to wear the robes of the fiction it had just convicted. A verdict recited, never checked. One detail undoes the geniality: that same broadcaster's own grandfather, at Pontarddulais on the Llwchwr, lies under a gravestone cut at his express instruction in Coelbren y Beirdd, the sceptic's family grave keeping faith, letter by letter, with the alphabet of the man he patronised.The Dragon Has Two Tongues (HTV/Channel 4, 1985, 13 parts), Gwyn A. Williams and Wynford Vaughan-Thomas; Williams called Iolo the “arch-demon” and “demiurge” of Cymru’s Romanticism in ‘Romanticism in Wales’, in Porter and Teich, eds., Romanticism in National Context (Cambridge, 1988). Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, Wynford Vaughan-Thomas's Wales (London, 1981), pp. 142–3, “pass off his poems”; “a delightful even a necessary fiction”; his Gorsedd membership; and the grandfather at Pontarddulais whose gravestone he records was carved, at the grandfather's insistence, in Coelbren y Beirdd.

Even the gentlest voice of that generation, a writer who plainly loved the man, as clever a man as ever lived, she called him, wonderfully percipient, his restorations of such exquisite beauty that they seemed a mystical immersion of one personality in another, still wrote him down as both scholar and forger, a cracked vision, a man honouring, in his queer drugged way, truths of his own conception. She meant him no harm, and she repeated the verdict anyway. For a century the verdict has not needed enemies to carry it. Love carries it. It is recited by those who mock him, those who admire him, and those who wear his robes to the Eisteddfod field, and in a hundred years of two-tongued argument about everything else, not one of the reciters stopped to check it. And watch the same hands at Merthyr: in her account of the Rising, the loveliest in the language, there is no Court of Requests at all; the spark is a wage-cut, and the red flag flies in the opening line. Six years after the red historian's own book had laid out the burned ledgers page by page, the popular canon had already lost them entirely. That is how an erasure completes itself: not by censorship, but by the gentlest teller passing on the tale with the law left out.Jan Morris, Wales: Epic Views of a Small Country (London, 1984; Penguin edn 1986), pp. 182–3 (“scholar and forger”; “as clever a man as ever lived”; “queer drugged way”); the full Gorsedd proclamation, “in the face of the sun, the eye of light... TRUTH AGAINST THE WORLD”, printed with affection at pp. 167–8; her Merthyr Rising, with no debt-court in it, at pp. 416–21. Her own pages preserve the pattern elsewhere, displaced: the Scotch Cattle of the Black Domain, for fifteen years, sacked the shops of rapacious merchants and threw their ledgers into the street (p. 420), the ledger-attack was standing practice across the eastern valleys, not a Merthyr aberration. He had written the line for it in a song printed in 1794, Love’s Eloquence: “The lips may Falsehood’s form disguise, / Whilst Innocence believes; / But Love and Truth have speaking eyes, / Their language ne’er deceives.” Love that had looked would have seen.Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (1794), vol. I, p. 38 (“Love’s Eloquence, a Song”).

Now stand back far enough and see the mechanism whole, because the two tongues are only the latest deal from a very old deck. For centuries the same hand has dealt this country the same pair of cards, and always a pair: Cymraeg-speaking against English-speaking; chapel against church, and chapel against chapel, Baptist against Methodist against Unitarian; the pit village against the farm parish; north against south; respectable against rough; and now red against pageant. Every one of those divisions is real enough to bleed at the edges, and every one of them is a page ruled into two columns, and a people busy contesting the columns never asks who rules the page. The ledger-trick again, played not on a household's goods but on a nation's mind: set the two sides to prove each other wrong for ever, and the frame they share (the conquest, the foreclosure, the verdict) is never itself put in the dock. The dragon was given two tongues and told to argue. What it was never given, on any channel, was the third, the one that stands over both columns and asks the old question of the old law: is it true? Iolo had written that third voice into the constitution he drafted in the 1790s: “The voice of Truth, Reason, Wisdom, Justice and Benevolence shall be heard and respected from all quarters, from every individual Citizen whether passive or active.” A passive citizen, in his scheme, was one without a vote. His voice was to be heard all the same.NLW 21395E, p. 36.

And today? Count the registers in which you yourself are entered. A financial ledger, of course, mortgage, loan, the national debt you were born owing. But also the social ledger of standing and reputation, scored now by machines; the historical ledger, in which the unpaid wage of the valleys is still denied; and the personal ledger, for guilt itself, the thing that keeps a man awake at three in the morning, keeps the accountant's name. In German, Schuld is one word for debt and for guilt. In Cymraeg, dyled is debt and dyletswydd is duty. In English, ought is nothing but the old past tense of owe. And the dark law confesses the same theft every time it opens its mouth: credit is credere, to believe; a bond is a promise; trust, security, fiduciary, fides, faith; we honour a debt. The ledger cannot name a single one of its own instruments except in words stolen from the open law of sworn truth. The tongues remember what the books were built to forget.Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, s.v. dyled, dyletswydd; Friedrich Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887), II.4, the moral concept Schuld descends from the material concept Schulden, debts; Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ought, owe, credit, fiduciary.

Even the occupying jurisprudence, at its best, knows the principle it sat down to break. In the King's Bench in Llundain, in the year 1924, the Lord Chief Justice of England laid down the line that English law now recites as scripture: justice should not only be done, but should manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done. Nineteen twenty-four. Two years later the verdict of this case was assembled in the closed seminar of a language faculty (no defence answered, the defendant a century dead, the evidence locked in a drawer) and has been recited as scripture since. By the standard of Hywel's altars it was void; by the standard of the gorsedd it was void; and by the standard of the English bench's own house rule, published in Llundain two years earlier, it would have been set aside. The court failed the one test that every one of these laws (Persian, Roman, Hebrew, Briton, and English) agrees on: it would not do its justice in the light.R v Sussex Justices, ex parte McCarthy [1924] 1 KB 256 at 259, per Lord Hewart CJ.

So say at last, plainly, what the man in the dock was saying under all the robes, because it is the one thing nobody who wrote about him would engage. He was not decorating history. He was making a claim: that truth is not a description of the world but the load-bearing structure of the world, the corn-law of the Druids, the fír of the Irish, the asha of the Persians, the veritas of Esdras, and that a lie of state, left standing, does not merely deceive but withers what it governs. And he drew the engineering consequence. A truth kept only on parchment is a thing, ownable, seizable, burnable; a deed in a strong-room, a bill in a drawer. A truth carried in ten thousand mouths, sworn in the open, examined in the eye of the sun and renewed in every generation, is not a thing but a relation, and there is no instrument in the dark law's whole armoury that can foreclose on a relation. That is what the Gorsedd is. Not pageantry: a machine for keeping the third term alive, the witness, the light, the truth standing over both man and world. He built the one form of law ever devised that debt cannot touch, and he built it in the decade the ledgers were closing over his country, in the open, in daylight, in Cymraeg, for nothing. Among the triads he printed in 1794 is the one that says why it could not be touched: “Three things cannot be controverted: the usages, the song, and the voice, of the Bardic Convention.”Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (1794), vol. II, p. 232 (“Institutional Triades”, no. 14).

And the same two columns stand in scripture, and the Britons’ whole case is in a pair of psalms. The first is the hundred and ninth of the Cymraeg and English Bibles and the hundred and eighth of the Greek, and it is the curse of the attainder, laid on a man and his whole line: “Let his days be few: and let another take his office of overseer … Let his children wander without a dwelling-place, and beg … let strangers spoil his labours … in one generation let his name be blotted out … let their memorial be blotted out from the earth.”Psalm 108:8–15 in the Septuagint, Brenton’s translation [PRE-JUSTINIAN]; Psalm 109 in the Cymraeg and English Bibles [POST-JUSTINIAN]. In the Greek the man who takes the office is heteros: not one more of the same kind, but a different kind of man. A replacement, not a successor. The English Bible says only “another”, and a usurpation reads like a change of staff.Psalm 109:8 in the English Bible [POST-JUSTINIAN].

And the very next psalm is the answer to it. “The Lord sware, and will not repent, Thou art a priest for ever, after the order of Melchisedec.”Psalm 109:4 in the Septuagint, Brenton [PRE-JUSTINIAN]; 110:4 in the English Bible [POST-JUSTINIAN]. The Epistle to the Hebrews says what that order is: Melchizedek is “without father, without mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life”, and he “remains a priest for ever”.Hebrews 7:3, the Greek apatōr, amētōr, agenealogētos, mēte archēn hēmerōn mēte zōēs telos echōn … menei hiereus eis to diēnekes [PRE-JUSTINIAN]; “Without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life … abideth a priest continually” in the English Bible [POST-JUSTINIAN]. No record gave him his standing, so no record can take it away. The curse works on paper: it blots a name out of the record. The priesthood does not live on paper, and it outlasts every record there is. Curse, then answer. That is the pair, and it is the whole of the argument about the Britons’ record in two psalms. Iolo’s own heaven was a standing of that kind, and it was open to everyone: “It is that place where St. John tells us all are kings and priests – i.e. all are equal in the divine love and estimation. Of course this place may with strictest propriety be called the Land of Levelling – and as thus described by an inspired writer, it must [be] a heaven indeed. What a heaven where I shall no longer be trodden by Kings, Priests etc.”NLW 21396E, no. 11. St John: Revelation 1:6, in the Authorised Version’s words.

The curse is a ledger entry. It works by writing, and what writing does, writing can undo: a name struck out, a memorial blotted from the earth, an inheritance closed by an Act of Parliament. The answer is no better entry. It is a standing that was never on paper at all, the relation, again, that no ledger can reach. That is the difference between a thing and a relation, set down in two psalms; and it is the distinction we have been drawing from the start, between a truth kept on parchment and a truth carried in ten thousand mouths. A boy of fourteen read the first of them three times by candlelight in a grocer’s back room in Llanbedr Pont Steffan in 1866, on the night his uncle locked Iolo Morganwg’s book away out of his reach, and nobody told him there was a second. Nobody knows what a boy of fourteen made of that by candlelight. You have met him already: John Gwenogvryn Evans, the Crown’s appointed overseer of the manuscripts of Cymru, with a rule for the Britons’ pedigrees that blots out a line in three generations. He spent his life on the side of the curse.The Greek of Psalm 108:8 has episkopē, “oversight”, and heteros, another [PRE-JUSTINIAN].

The charge, remember, was forgery: the false making of a bond. Hold the word up to the light you now have, and go in to hear the verdict.

Before the verdict, a song. There is one every audience in Cymru still stands for, and it came down through his hands: Bugeilio’r Gwenith Gwyn, watching the white wheat.

Mi sydd fachgen ieuangc ffol / Yn caru’n ol fy ffansi, / Mi yn bugeilio’r gwenith gwyn, / Ac eraill yn ei fedi. I am a foolish young lad, loving as my fancy leads; I watch over the white wheat, and others reap it.Maria Jane Williams, Ancient National Airs of Gwent and Morganwg (Llandovery, 1844), pp. 38–39, “Bugeila’r Gwenith Gwyn. Watching the Wheat”, the words under the music as printed; read on the National Library’s page images (hdl.handle.net/10107/5726885). The ballad sheet of Y Bont-faen prints the fourth line “Ac arall yn ei fedi”: another reaps it, one man, the rival of the story.

When Maria Jane Williams of Aberpergwm first printed it, in 1844, she gave it no poet and no maid: “Sung in all parts of Glamorganshire with many different sets of words.”Williams (1844), p. 82, the note on the song entire: “Sung in all parts of Glamorganshire with many different sets of words. The measure is easy and popular.” Two other songs in the same book are given to Iolo by name: “Ffoles Llantrisant”, “communicated by Iolo Morganwg” (p. 79), and “Cerais Ferch”, “taken down from the singing of the celebrated bard, Edward Williams, (Iolo Morganwg)” (p. 82). The poet came from Iolo. The oldest copy of the song is in his hand, headed “Cân o waith Wil Hopkin, Eos Morganwg”, a song by Wil Hopkin, the nightingale of Morgannwg, and signed beneath, “Wil Hopkin ai Cant cylch 1740”, Wil Hopkin sang it about 1740. Even G. J. Williams, who convicted him, would not say Iolo made it: he had mended an old song of the country, as Burns mended the songs of Scotland, and set it on a poet of Morgannwg.G. J. Williams, “Wil Hopcyn a’r Ferch o Gefn Ydfa”, Y Llenor VI (1927), pp. 227–228, read on the National Library’s page images (IIIF 1320873–4): “Ceir y copi cynharaf yn llaw Iolo yn Llanover MS. C12” [now NLW MS 13099B], with a fourth verse that is not the one now sung (“Haws tynnu’r llong i benn y brynn”); a second copy in Iolo’s hand among the papers of Edward Jones, Bardd y Brenin; and “ni fynnwn awgrymu mai efô a gyfansoddodd y gerdd hon, er na ellir amau iddo ei thrwsio”, I would not suggest that he composed this poem, though it cannot be doubted that he mended it. Huw Meirion Edwards, “A Multitude of Voices: The Free-Metre Poetry of Iolo Morganwg”, in A Rattleskull Genius (2005), p. 113: “attributed by Iolo to Wil Hopcyn of Llangynwyd”, among poems that “seem to have been artistic reworkings of earlier material in the style of Burns”. Of Wil Hopcyn himself the parish register gives his baptism in 1700 and his burial in 1741; Iolo, who copied the inscription on the gravestone, wrote of him as the author of “the sweetest love songs ever heard from a man’s lips in Wales” (Llanover C73, p. 85, in Williams’s Welsh, VII (1928), p. 42). The stone was still there to be read in 1881, when the Llangynwyd antiquary Cadrawd printed it: “In memory of William Hopkin, of this Parish, who died the 19th August, 1741, aged 40 years”, with the englyn “Dyma le goleu y gwelwch—r’wy’n gorwedd, / Dan gaerau pob tristwch; / Os tirion chwi ystyriwch, / Lleyg a llen llawen a’n llwch. / Nid yw’r holl-vyd hyvryd hedd / A’i vwriad ond overedd.” (here, you see, is the bright place where I lie, under the walls of every sorrow; if you consider it kindly, layman and cleric, our dust is glad; all the world’s sweet peace and its purpose is nothing but vanity); it had been taken from the grave under the yew “gan rhyw Goth” to make the foundation of a tomb, and about 1877 Dr Parry of Aberystwyth had it carried into the church and set beside the grave of the Maid of Cefn Ydfa (Cyfaill yr Aelwyd, ed. Beriah Gwynfe Evans (Llanelli), I (1881), p. 612). By Iolo’s copy the stone had first stood over Wil’s father, who died at least twenty years before him (G. J. Williams, Y Llenor, VII (1928), pp. 36–37). The same monthly named him “Will Hopkin, awdwr y gân boblogaidd hono, ‘Bugeilio’r Gwenith Gwyn’”, and printed the triban a neighbour made when he caught the mason dancing in the pigsty he had just built, and Wil’s answer: “Y llawr oedd newydd lorio, / A llechi clir ar wcha clai, / Pwy all’sai lai na dawnsio?”, the floor was newly laid, clean slate on top of the clay, who could do other than dance? (Dewi Grenig, “Will Hopkin a Siencyn Evan”, ibid., p. 265.) A Glamorgan triban has him at Plas Gwaenfo with the Aberpergwm bard: “Ar Deio a Wil Hopkin, / Yfed gwin yn Mhlas Gwaenfo”, Deio being, in Cadrawd’s note, “Dafydd Nicholas o Aberpergwm” (Cadrawd, “Hen Dribanau Morganwg”, fifth article, Cyfaill yr Aelwyd, II (1882), page image 450 of the HathiTrust scan). And Iolo wrote down that Lewis Hopkin the bard, Wil Hopkin of Llangynwyd, the Hopkins of Coychurch and he himself “were descended from the same stock”: found “in the hand of Iolo Morganwg himself” after a search of sixty-three Llanover volumes (L. J. Hopkin-James and Cadrawd, Hen Gwndidau (1910), pp. x–xi, with a photograph of Iolo MS 67).

But the poet does not stand on Iolo’s word alone. In 1722 the Lord of Margam leased a meadow by the church of Llangynwyd to the widow Diana Thomas and her sons William and Jenkin Hopkin, and in 1723 William Hopkin was collecting the land tax in the hamlet of Cwm-du. On St David’s Day 1735, twelve years before Iolo was born, the bards met in eisteddfod at Cymer, and Wil Hopkin turned his tongue on the whole company, so sharply that Rhys Morgan of Pencraig Nedd got up and walked out. Lewis Hopkin, his kinsman, who would one day teach Iolo, answered him in seven englynion, and even in the rebuke owned that he had heard and seen better work from him: “Clywais, mi welais o’i waith—yn deccach”. Dafydd Nicolas of Aberpergwm, another of Iolo’s masters, answered the two coarse englynion Wil had sent the bards with one of his own:The lease: Margam MSS 4409, “Counterpart of a successive Lease by the Rt. Ho. Thomas, Lord Mansel, Baron of Margam, to Diana Thomas, of Langonoyd, co. Glam., widow, William Hopkin and Jenkin Hopkin of the same her sons, of meadow land called Gwayne-y-llan, 8 acr—in Langonoyd, and a house and land near the Church there”, dated 25 March 1722; the tax: Margam MSS 4865, “Cumdy Hamlett in Langonwyd … 27 May, 1723. Assessor: David Jenkin. Collector: William Hopkin.” Both as printed by L. J. Hopkin-James, Hopkiniaid Morganwg (Bangor, 1909), p. 68, read on the page image. The eisteddfod: Lewis Hopkin, “Englynion a wnaeth Lewis Hopkin i Wil Hopkin, am y senn a ganodd ef i’r Prydyddion, yn Eisteddfod y Cymmer, ddydd Gwyl Ddewi, 1735”, seven englynion, the first “Daeth Will Hopkin flin aflonydd—i’n mysg, / Er mysgu’n llawenydd”, Will Hopkin came among us, peevish and restless, to spoil our joy, and the last on Rhys Morgan’s going; from Y Fêl Gafod (Merthyr, 1813), the collection of Hopkin’s poems published by his son-in-law John Miles (Dictionary of Welsh Biography, s.v. Hopkin, Lewis), pp. 109–110, read on the page images of the Bodleian copy (HathiTrust, oxu1.601907595); reprinted by Hopkin-James, p. 292, with his account at p. 108. Rhys Morgan of Pencraig Nedd is the bard who greeted Lewis Hopkin’s marriage in an englyn (ibid., p. 103).

Pwy blethu, ganu cerdd, gau—wr dywed
Mor dywyll dy leiniau,
Fab Hopkin erwin eiriau,
A di ddawn ydoedd dy ddau.

Who would plait such stuff and call it song? Tell us, false man, why your lines are so dark, son of Hopkin of the harsh words; and both your two were without gift.“Englyn a ddanfonwyd at William Hopkin, am iddo ddanfon dau ynglyn serth attynt hwy”, an englyn sent to William Hopkin because he had sent them two coarse englynion, signed D. N., Y Fêl Gafod (Merthyr Tydfil: W. Williams, 1813), p. 101, read on the page images of the Bodleian copy (HathiTrust, oxu1.601907595); reprinted by Hopkin-James, p. 287. In the 1813 print it follows straight on from the englynion and the cywydd naming the bards who came to Cymer on St David’s Day. Wil was the son of Hopkin Thomas, so Fab Hopkin. The book does not say it was sent after the Cymer meeting; it stands in the same collection among the verses of that company. The English is ours.

These are his fellow bards speaking to him while he lived, in Lewis Hopkin’s own papers, printed by his son-in-law in 1813, and none of it passed through Iolo’s hands. And Wil gave as good as he got. Meeting Siôn Bradford of Betws, the third of Iolo’s masters, at the top of a steep rise near the fulling mill Bradford had a hand in, he complained that the hill had broken him: “’Rwyf wedi myned lawn mor wàn / A Melin Bàn y Bettws”, I’ve grown as weak as the fulling mill of Betws. Bradford answered: “Mae Melin-Bàn y Bettws / Yn cerdded yn ddiorphwys; / A’r felin fàl, ni ŵn i p’am, / Ni chêr un cam yn gymwys.” The fulling mill of Betws goes without rest; and the corn mill, I don’t know why, never takes one step straight.T. C. Evans (Cadrawd), History of Llangynwyd Parish (Llanelly, 1887), p. 112, read on the page image; Cadrawd gives Wil’s whole verse, “Y tyla hwn y’m torws, / Mae’n ddyled imi orphwys”, this hillock has broken me, I am owed a rest, and names no written source: it is the verse of the country. The same page gives the riddle Nicolas sent Wil, in R. D. Morgan’s English only: “My love gave me a cherry that in it had no stone, / And fed me on a wondrous fowl, whose flesh concealed no bone; / And wrapped me in a blanket warm, where ne’er had been a thread, / And shewed me a strange mystic book, that ne’er a man had read”; and Wil’s answer: “My cherries bear no stones when they blossom on the tree, / When fowl lies in the new laid egg, no bone we look to see; / When blankets are but new shorn fleece, we look not there for thread, / Till words are written on a book, words may not there be read.” Of Bradford’s verse little else is known to survive; one more piece, a satire on the old parson of the Sarn who threw his dog into the Ogwy at a Baptist baptism, is printed in Seren yr Ysgol Sul, December 1906, p. 14, beginning “’R oedd yno lan Fedyddiwr / Yn trochi with ei glun”; the rest of that page has not yet been read. Cadrawd also prints Wil’s mock-heroic song “Tarw Maescadlawr”, the Bull of Maescadlawr, as the old man Jenkin Treherne of Llangynwyd recited it in 1845; the parish register confirms the people it names and dates the song before 1738, and the note printed with it says that “many pieces of sparring between Will Hopkin and David Nicholas … are traditionally recited and sung by the peasantry even to this day” (Cadrawd, pp. 116–121).

The maid came later, nineteen years after Iolo was dead. The vicar of Llangynwyd and his wife, Richard and Mary Pendrill Llewelyn, first told her story in print, in The Cambrian of 10 October 1845: the poet “unfortunately fell in love with a lady, far his superior in rank, a daughter of the Thomas’s, of Ceven Ydva”, who “returned his love”, was “compelled to marry another”, and “lost her reason”. The next spring the song was sold in London as sheet music, The Maid of Ceven Ydva, and on the street sheets of Y Bont-faen as “Y Ferch o Cefn Ydfa”, with a poem of Iolo’s own on the back.“To the Editor of The Cambrian”, signed “R. & M.”, “Llan. Vicarage, 6th October, 1845”, The Cambrian, 10 October 1845, p. 4 (newspapers.library.wales/view/3334389/3334393/11), printing the song from Maria Jane Williams’s book as “universally attributed among his native hills to William Hopkin”; reprinted in the Cardiff and Merthyr Guardian, 11 October 1845. A printed copy sent “to Ab Iolo with R. P. & M. C. Ll.’s kindest regards” is among Taliesin’s papers (NLW, Iolo Morganwg and Taliesin ab Iolo papers, 384). The sheet music: “THE MAID OF CEVEN YDVA. This much-enquired for Ballad, translated from the original Welsh (which is also printed with it) of W. Hopkin, and adapted to an Ancient Welsh Melody, by Mrs. Pendrell Llewelyn, dedicated to Lady Mackworth”, London: Z. T. Purday, advertised in The Cambrian, 27 February 1846. The ballad sheet: NLW, Welsh Ballads, wg35-2-1209a (see Y Dyn Bach). The later growth of the story (Ceiriog, 1864; Mynyddog, 1866; Llyfnwy’s The Cupid, 1869; Cadrawd, 1887) is traced by Williams, VI, pp. 225–227. Ann Thomas of Cefn Ydfa married Anthony Maddocks in 1725 and died in 1727; the rest is the story’s.Huw Meirion Edwards, “A Multitude of Voices: The Free-Metre Poetry of Iolo Morganwg”, in A Rattleskull Genius (2005), p. 113: “the well-known love-song ‘Bugeila’r Gwenith Gwyn’ (Watching the White Wheat), attributed by Iolo to Wil Hopcyn of Llangynwyd”, among poems that “seem to have been artistic reworkings of earlier material in the style of Burns”. The ballad sheet: NLW, Welsh Ballads, wg35-2-1209a (see Y Dyn Bach). The dates of the lovers (Ann, 1704–1727; Wil, 1700–1741) are the legend’s, as the guides give them.

And the men who came for the Gorsedd came for the song as well. In June 1896, in one issue of Cymru, the monthly of Owen M. Edwards, Morris-Jones’s fifth article against the Gorsedd stood beside the demolition of the maid and her poet by Dafydd Morganwg, the historian of Morgannwg. It had been their own song. In 1887, for the Welsh students’ Dafydd ap Gwilym Society at Oxford, Morris-Jones had asked who would ever again sing so sweetly “Unwaith gerdd ‘y Gwenith Gwyn’”, the song of the white wheat; and at Edwards’s wedding in 1891 he remembered a friend who put his heart “Yn iaith goeth ‘y Gwenith Gwyn’”, into the fine language of the white wheat.John Morris-Jones, Caniadau (Oxford, 1907), p. 43, “Cywydd Hiraeth, a ganwyd ar gais Cymdeithas Dafydd ap Gwilym ar ol Cymdeithion a’i gadawsai, 1887”: “Pwy gân cyn fwyned wedyn / Unwaith gerdd ‘y Gwenith Gwyn’?”; p. 45, “Cywydd Priodas Owen M. Edwards”, June 1891: “A dodi ’i brofiad wedyn / Yn iaith goeth ‘y Gwenith Gwyn.’” Read on the page images (Internet Archive, caniadau00jonegoog, leaves 57–61). “With the dust of the crumbling Gorsedd, undermined by Professor Morris Jones, yet filling our eyes,” wrote the South Wales Daily News, “we are threatened by Dafydd Morganwg with another dread calamity.” Two years before he convicted Iolo, G. J. Williams had written of the song himself: “Daeth inni trwy ddwylo Iolo. Gwelaf i rywun awgrymu yn ddiweddar mai efô a’i cant. Ni wn ar ba sail y cyhuddid ef”, it came to us through Iolo’s hands; I see someone has lately suggested that he composed it; I do not know on what ground he was accused; and “nid amhosibl mai Wil Hopcyn biau honno”, it is not impossible that Wil Hopcyn owns it.G. J. Williams, “Traddodiad Llenyddol Morgannwg”, Y Llenor III (1924), p. 42. The year after he convicted Iolo, G. J. Williams took the story apart again in Y Llenor, and opened by recalling Morris-Jones’s articles of 1896 against the Gorsedd. They could take the maid off the hill and the poet off the song. The song they could not take.Cymru, June 1896, contents as listed in Y Werin, 13 June 1896: “Gorsedd Beirdd Ynys Prydain. V. Gan J. Morris Jones” and “Wil Hopcin a’r Ferch o’r Gefn Ydfa. Gan Ddafydd Morganwg” (newspapers.library.wales/view/3759759/3759763/69). South Wales Daily News, 16 June 1896, “Another Welsh Idol Demolished” (newspapers.library.wales/view/3737475/3737482/105). G. J. Williams, “Wil Hopcyn a’r Ferch o Gefn Ydfa”, Y Llenor VI (1927), 218–29, and VII (1928), 34–46. Dafydd Morganwg was David Watkin Jones (1832–1905), author of Hanes Morganwg (1874).

24. Y Ddedfryd

The Verdict781 He knew. 782 The seal, until 1901. 785 His death. 788 The motto. 791 Wholly innocent. 797 The harm. 804 The meaning kept, the name lost. 811 Abercuawg: the lost place is Cymru. 812 The cauldron. 816 The tradition moved. 824 The restitution.

And he knew. That is the hardest thing to say, and it must be said. Iolo Morganwg did not die believing he had been understood. In the January of 1826, too weak to walk, writing by candle in the middle of the day and setting the very paper on fire, he did two things that tell us he saw the verdict coming and was already appealing past it. He set down, one last time, the inheritance he was leaving, the bardic chair, the motto, the tradition he traced back to Caerfyrddin. And he gave instruction for his archive: that the greatest collection of manuscripts in Cymraeg ever gathered by a working man be sealed against the world, shown to "no one in the world other than the issue of his own body," until, he wrote, "the beginning of the twentieth century, or the year 1901."

An old collector, he called himself, a man past eighty. He did not lock the archive against the future. He locked it against the present. He had given the present its chance. In 1822, as the English critic D. W. Nash records, he circulated prospectuses in English and in Cymraeg announcing: “In the press, and speedily will be published, in the Welsh language, the Esoteric Literature of the Ancient British Bards”. It never came from the press while he lived.D. W. Nash, Taliesin; or, the Bards and Druids of Britain (1858), p. 141.

In his own hand, of himself in the third person: "…ar ôl ei Farwolaeth ni chaniatteir golwg arnynt i neb o'r Byd ond iw Eppil o'i gorph ei hunan; hyd ddechrau'r ugeinfed ganrif neu'r flwyddyn 1901, a hynn yn unig, achos y camymddwyn cywilyddus ag y mae ef wedi ei brofi oddiwrth ei genedl yn gyffredin…", "…following his death no one in the world other than the issue of his own body will be permitted to look at them until the beginning of the twentieth century, or the year 1901, and this only because of the disgraceful misbehaviour which he has experienced from his nation in general."NLW 21286E, no. 1005, Iolo Morganwg to Taliesin Williams, January–February 1826. Read in the Iolo Morganwg project’s text of the letters; the manuscript is still to be seen.

That year is the signature of the mind they called a careless, drug-addled paranoiac. Not 1900, 1901. He knew, dying, what most men never trouble to learn: that there is no year zero, that the centuries turn on the one and not the nought, that the twentieth century properly begins in 1901. He counted it exactly, on his deathbed, in the act of sealing his life's work against a present he no longer trusted and addressing it instead to the hour he had appointed. A careless man writes the round number. This one got the century right to the year. And say that year in his own tongue and it seals itself: un naw dim un, one, nine, nought, oneNLW 21286E, rhif 1005, is, to a Morgannwg ear, un nawr dim un: “one now, no one.” The number is the bequest, sealed to his own blood first and past them to the cyfeillgar future, the friendly reader the record had promised him since its first surviving line in 1771, at the turn he had counted to the year.

And mark where the century he addressed found him. He died in his chair, without a groan, on the 18th of December 1826, and was buried inside the little church at Flimston, and there the man whose trade was memorials, who had cut a county's gravestones since he could first hold a chisel, lay under bare flags for nearly thirty years without so much as an inscription. The boy who had learned his letters off the dead lay among them unlettered. No name, no date, no line of verse. For nearly thirty years the man who had kept a nation’s memory was given none of his own. The stone above the stonemason came at last in 1855Y Maen, viii. The words they cut in 1855: “Stone Mason, Bard, and Antiquary … born … A.D. 1746”, in the old reckoning; “not clouded by his humble occupation … a welcome visitor within the mansions of the rich as well as the cottages of the poor … a large contributor of acknowledged authority to Bardic and Historic literature”. The church itself was restored three years later and reopened on 4 August 1858; the Cardiff and Merthyr Guardian (7 August 1858, p. 5) credits the Countess of Dunraven, of the house of Thomas Wyndham, whom Iolo had helped into Parliament in 1789, writing as “Christopher Crabstick”. They lay a second stone on the first, and it does not hold. and gave his birth-year as 1746. The stone may simply have used the old reckoning: its Cymraeg side says hen gyfrif, Old Style,The Welsh half of the tablet, copied in the church on 11 October 1883 by “E. G.” and printed as “Beddargraff Iolo Morganwg”, Yr Ymofynydd, no. 36 (August 1884): “ar y 10fed o Fawrth (hen gyfrif), O.C. 1746”. The English half does not say Old Style. The Llancarfan register gives his baptism as 13 March 1747: Glamorgan Archives, Llancarfan parish register; NLW 21426A, no. 6; NLW 13141A, p. 111. and in the old calendar, when the year turned on the twenty-fifth of March, a March birth in what we now call 1747 was written 1746.A. Emrys-Jones, The Life and Works of Edward Williams: the death “without a groan or a stir while resting in his old familiar chair”; burial inside Flimston church; “for nearly thirty years there was no inscription to perpetuate his memory”; the monument of 1855, whose epitaph gives “born… on the 10th day of March, A.D. 1746” against the accepted 10 March 1747. In 1778 he had sung of who outlasts whom, in Banks of the Daw, a song of the river Ddawan, the Thaw, that runs by Flimston: “Rough Barons are gone, and forgotten their fame, / Who kept a rude race for long ages in awe: / But Nature, sweet rustic, for ever the same, / Still dwells with her Bard on the Banks of the Daw.”Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (1794), vol. I, p. 42 (“Banks of the Daw, written in 1778”).

His master Dafydd Nicolas of Aberpergwm had put that end in four lines, at the eisteddfod at Cymer where the bards took Death for their subject:

Yr Angau a gau, er gwg,—ag achau,
Wyr gwychion o’r golwg;
Oer dro dychrynllyd i’r drwg,
A galar fydd ei gilwg.

Death shuts away, for all their frowns and all their pedigrees, fine men out of sight; a cold and dreadful turn for the wicked, and grief is his scowl.Dafydd Nicolas, “Englynion a ganwyd i’r Angau yn Eisteddfod y Cymmer”, the first of seven, by Nicolas, Edward ab Ifan, Lewis Hopkin, Nicolas again, Edward ab Ifan, Rhys Morgan and William Thomas, in Y Fêl Gafod (Merthyr Tydfil: W. Williams, 1813), pp. 98–99, read on the page images of the Bodleian copy (HathiTrust, oxu1.601907595); reprinted by Hopkin-James, Hopkiniaid Morganwg (1909), p. 286. The English is ours.

The seal failed. His heirs sold the archive to Lady Llanover within a generation; in her keeping she lost part of it for good; the locked drawer that should have shielded him became the locked drawer that convicted him. He addressed his inheritance to the appointed hour, and his own blood handed it to his enemies. But the address still stands, and we are the age it was written toThe oldest epic closes the same way: Gilgamesh’s quest for immortality fails, and the poem’s answer is its frame, climb the walls of Uruk, find the copper tablet-box, take out the lapis tablet and read it aloud. Endurance is the inscribed record, deposited for the future reader. The tablet-box of Uruk and the sealed archive of Flimston are one gesture, four thousand years apart.. The drawer is open now. The hand is on the table. And the man who counted the century correctly while dying turns out to have been right about the only thing that finally mattered: that the truth he carried would have to wait for a world willing to read it back, and that, given that world, it would stand.

Y Gwir yn erbyn y Byd is not the name of his crime. It never was. It is the name of what is being done to the verdict now, the truth, with no army and no chair and no friend in the room, standing against the whole weight of the thing arrayed against it, and winning anyway, because that is the one fight the truth always eventually wins. He had sung its morning, in a song called Gwawr Dydd Rhyddhad, the dawn of the day of freeing: Mae gwawr / Dydd ein rhyddhad yn deffro’n awr, / Disgleirdeb y gwirionedd mawr, the dawn of the day of our freeing wakes now, the brightness of the great truth.P. J. Donovan (ed.), Cerddi Rhydd Iolo Morganwg (1980), p. 39.

And those words were never his to invent. They are the last plain saying of the oldest law in these islands. The Druids held that a land ruled in truth grew heavy with corn and fish, and that a ruler’s lie withered the very soil beneath his boots. The old law of Hywel Dda would let a man deny a debt only by swearing his innocence, alone, upon seven consecrated altars, for the price of a lie sworn to God was his own soul. And the oldest Latin scripture the British Church ever read set it down, in the book of Esdras: Magna est veritas et praevalet, Great is Truth, and it prevails. He did not coin the motto; he inherited it, as he inherited everything, the last keeper of a law five thousand years deep, that truth is the security of the world and the lie its only true treason. And this is the quiet joke under the whole trial: they indicted for forgery the one man whose entire inheritance was the truth.On the Druidic “truth of the land”, a just king’s reign makes the earth flourish, a false king’s withers it, see the Cymraeg triads in Rachel Bromwich, ed., Trioedd Ynys Prydein (4th edn, Cardiff, 2014). On the debt-oath of Cyfraith Hywel: to deny a debt sworn under briduw (the suretyship of God) the debtor swore alone “uch seith allawr kyssegredig”, upon seven consecrated altars, within his cantref (Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, s.v. briduw; the Law of Hywel Dda). Magna est veritas et praevalet: 1 (3) Esdras 4:41, in the Old Latin (Vetus Latina) text of the pre-Augustine British Church.

But the inheritance is older even than these islands, and it turns on the same coin. The Greeks, who first wrote the law down, bound debt and the lie together at the root: Herodotus tells that the Persians taught their sons only three things (to ride a horse, to draw a bow, and to speak the truth) and counted running into debt the next disgrace after lying itself, for the man in debt, they said, must needs lie. And the greatest of the Greeks’ own legends is a debt unpaid. The famous walls of Troy were raised by Poseidon and Apollo, hired by King Laomedon for a wage he then refused, he sent the gods away cheated, threatening to bind them and crop their ears and sell them into slavery. The city that would not pay for its own walls was bankrupt from the first stone; and when it fell, the Romans knew why. Horace named the cause in a phrase (mercede pacta, the wage agreed) and the Roman poets remembered the whole long ruin as the perjury of Troy: not a war lost by bad tactics but a debt collected in full, at interest, across three generations.Herodotus, Histories I.136 (a Persian boy is taught three things only, to ride, to draw the bow, and to speak the truth) and I.138 (debt reckoned the next disgrace after lying, “for the debtor is forced to tell lies”); Homer, Iliad XXI.441–457 (Poseidon’s account of raising Troy’s walls for Laomedon, who withheld the promised wage and threatened to bind the gods and sell them into slavery); Horace, Odes III.3.21–22 (“destituit deos mercede pacta Laomedon”). The Britons’ descent from Brutus of Troy and Llundain as Troia Nova: Historia Brittonum (9th c.) and Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1136). In their oldest books the Britons descend from Brutus of Troy, and Llundain itself is Troia Nova, the New Troy, a lineage the northern purists and their patrons dismissed as fable. But the New Troy on the Thames inherited more than the name. It raised the fortress of an industrial empire on the unpaid labour of Cymru’s valleys, ran up the same unsettled wage; and when the descendants of the builders came carrying the old titles, it answered with Laomedon’s own hand, it called the creditor a liar. The charge of forgery is the bankrupt’s oldest move: brand the man who holds the bill a forger, and the debt need never be paid. They meant “Trojan” for an insult. It was the name of the thing they were running from. Iolo had seen what the New Troy was doing to the island while he lived. Llundain, he wrote in the 1790s, was “a monstrous and foul Cancer, corroding Britain to the heart”.NLW 21323B, p. 51.

The accused is innocent, wholly innocent, and not merely unconvicted; and we claim the larger word on purpose. Wholly innocent of the charge of forgery, which was the only charge, because forgery was the only crime ever alleged; and of that charge, wholly, for there was never a sound case to bring. He is innocent, first, because the thing they charged him with was never a crime: composing in the manner of a master is the craft itself, the first lesson set to every apprentice in every art, and a man cannot be a forger for doing in poetry what the academy calls scholarship when it does it in prose.Borges wrote the reductio in 1939: Pierre Menard composes, word for word, fragments of Don Quixote, and the narrator solemnly finds Menard's version richer, subtler, utterly different in meaning, though the text is identical. The satire cuts one way: meaning and merit are assigned by the name attached, not the words written. The identical line in Cymraeg is medieval genius over one name and criminal forgery over another. Borges made it absurd. The academy made it a verdict. He had drawn the academy’s portrait himself, in a song of 1772 he called The Learned Ignorants: “Ye book-poring pedants, by learning made fools, / Whose skulls are well-stuff’d with the rubbish of schools”.Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (1794), vol. I, p. 85 (“The Learned Ignorants, a Song, written in 1772”). His sources were real. He named thirty-one old manuscript books as the places his material came from, and the man who set out to prove him a forger found twenty-four of them. Where he mended a damaged text, he did what the editors who tried him did to the same kind of text, and he named the books the pieces came from.

And he is innocent, second, because not one of the charges built on top of that survives a fair examination. The central exhibit, a'i cant, is the universal convention his own judge codified as innocent. The drafts said to catch him sat locked in the drawer of an interested party, beyond the reach of any defence, and were never tested by a soul who might speak for him. A century of demanding that a corpse explain its handwriting, while the court sat on the key to the desk. The texts cannot tell craft from fraud, and "we cannot tell" is not a verdict of guilt. Let it be said once, plainly, so no reviewer need say it for us: this appeal does not dispute the modern palaeography. Let every disputed leaf be in Iolo's hand, the hand was never the crime. What we dispute is the category, the word that turned a restorer's bench into a coiner's den; and many scholars have looked at the handwriting; none has published an independent, adversarial examination; none has re-examined the word. And the one test that could show whose hand wrote which line, the test of paper and pen-stroke, is still waiting to be run.See Y Drychiolaethau, ¶321.

And mark who keeps the word. His greatest modern champion, the historian who recovered the political Iolo entire, still files him under his ‘so-called malign gifts as a literary forger,’ and hands the forgery itself to a book whose very subtitle is Romantic Forgery, worship the achievement, retain the slur, and pass the awkward question along. Ask that question plainly and the case dissolves: a forger forges for something (for money, or for fame) and his admirers concede, in as many words, that he made nothing by it. Where the motive should stand they have set an aesthetic compliment: his invented Morgannwg, they say, is a masterpiece of imagination, to be shelved beside Tolkien’s Middle-earth. But that is praise, not a charge. You cannot convict a man of fraud and acquit him of every reason to commit it, and paper the gap with a comparison to a novelist. The word survived because no one looked at it. Look at it, and it is the name of an art.Geraint H. Jenkins, Bard of Liberty (Cardiff, 2012), introduction, Iolo’s “so-called malign gifts as a literary forger”, “so-called”, but the label stays on the cover of the field; Jenkins refers the forgery analysis itself to Mary-Ann Constantine, The Truth against the World: Iolo Morganwg and Romantic Forgery (Cardiff, 2007). The aesthetic defence (the invented Morgannwg as “creadigaeth artistaidd y cyfnod rhamantaidd”, an artistic creation to be read as literary heritage) is G. J. Williams’s, restated in the popular press to this day. And Cymraeg gives the category away by itself: its word for the whole art of imaginative literature is ffuglen, ffug and llên, feigned literature; its word for the maker of it, ffuglenydd. By the prosecution's etymology every novelist who ever lived is a forger. The charge they hanged him with is the ordinary name of literature.Gödel proved that no consistent system can certify its own consistency from inside itself. The 1926 court was asked to test its own founding axiom (that the surviving record is the whole record) with instruments built on that axiom. The verdict is the system grading its own examination paper.

And the other half of that subtitle, Romantic, fits him no better than the first. The Romantic’s favourite figure was the simple peasant, good because untaught, and Iolo would have none of him. Crossing Pumlumon in the summer of 1799, he wrote: “Ignorance and brutality are always hand in hand. That imaginary amiable simplicity so much talked of by no great philosophers that they suppose attends ignorance I have never had the good fortune to meet with.”G. J. Williams, Iolo Morganwg (1956), p. 65.

The one parallel case where the sources survived, La Villemarqué’s Barzaz-Breiz, ended in acquittal, and only the burning of Iolo's own sources stands between him and the same. The lines they call missing are missing only from the books that lived; the books he named are ash, and ash cannot be cross-examined. He did not edit, print or profit from the volume that carried the disputed poems to the public; he supplied copies to the men who did. The rest is the testimony of an absence created by the fire. And no court that cannot produce its own commission has the standing to convict anyone of anything. Take the charges one at a time and not one of them stands; take them together and they are not a case but a campaign. This is not a man who slipped a conviction on a technicality. He is innocent.

And see the trap entire, because it is the cruellest turn in the case. While it lived in the mouth, this tradition could not be touched: a song held in a thousand memories cannot be burned, or seized, or edited, which is precisely why the order that kept it would not write it down. So the conquest killed the mouth first. It outlawed the bardic order, abolished the law, broke the schools and shamed the tongue, until the whole inheritance could survive in one place only, on paper, in the hand of whoever would sit up through the nights and copy it before it burned. Iolo was that hand. He wrote it down because they had left no other way to save it. And then, once it had a body at last, they tried the body: they locked it, they burned it, and finally they called it a forgery, on the ground that it existed nowhere but in his own handwriting. They destroyed the world in which it could have lived unwritten, and then convicted him of having written it. The state fired the library; the academy prosecuted the man who ran in, for the smoke on his hands.

Y Niwed: The Harm

And now we can say in full what that means, because we met it at the very start, and the whole trial has been the road back to it. The word the verdict was built to bury is Gorsedd, and the first thing ever done to it, long before Iolo was called a forger, was done to the word itself: it was shrunk to what every modern ear now hears in it, a fancy-dress ceremony of robes and a sword and a ring of stones, the harmless pageantry of a Victorian poetry festival, a seaside puppet show. Open the dictionaries of his own lifetime and hear what the word meant before the shrinking. Throne, says the plain English–Cymraeg dictionary of 1809: gorsedd. To enthrone: gorseddu. A throne of gold, says Walters, the Morgannwg rectory dictionary a young Iolo helped through the press: gorsedd aur; the mercy-seat of God in Exodus: gorseddfaingc; a bishop’s see: gorseddfa; and under Magistrate, among the words for judge: gorseddog, a gorsedd-man. Ordinary lexicography, sworn to no bardic cause.Thomas Evans, An English-Welsh Dictionary (1809), s.vv. Throne, Enthrone; John Walters, An English and Welsh Dictionary (compiled 1770–94; ed. 1828), s.vv. Mercy-seat, Seat, Magistrate, and, under Of, “a throne of gold: gorsedd aur.”

And the 1809 book carries its own testimony. Its maker, Thomas Evans, printed at Merthyr, and he was Tomos Glyn Cothi, the weaver-minister who was Iolo’s friend and one of his gorseddogion, perjured into Caerfyrddin gaol about 1802, with the pillory twice over, for a song he had not sung, and sentenced by the very judge who had once freed Iolo from Caerdydd and subscribed to his Poems. They had met when the weaver carried his cloth round Morgannwg for sale, and it was Iolo who shaped his theology: the first minister the Cymry ordained to a Unitarian cause was the stonemason’s pupil. The Cymraeg for throne was set down in that dictionary by one whom George Guelph (George III) gaoled for singing.Thomas Evans, An English-Welsh Dictionary (Merthyr Tydfil: W. Williams, 1809), title page; the Dictionary of Welsh Biography (J. D. Owen, 1959), s.v. “Evans, Thomas (Tomos Glyn Cothi; 1764–1833)”, lists “An English-Welsh Dictionary neu Eir-Lyfr Saesneg a Chymraeg, 1809” among his books; library catalogues give him 1766–1833. Tomos Glyn Cothi: weaver; first minister ordained to a Unitarian cause in Cymru (Cwm Cothi, Brechfa, 1794), the chapel slate was cut by Iolo’s own hand: “I ni nid oes ond un Duw y Tad.” The perjury complaint is in Iolo’s papers (letter 174, 21 March 1801: songs “which they had not sung at the time he swore they did”); the trial, pillory and Iolo’s petition-walking: Jenkins, Y Digymar (2018), with G. D. Owen, Thomas Evans (Tomos Glyn Cothi) (Abertawe, 1963). The meeting and the shaping: N. Munday, doctoral thesis (Cardiff University, 2018), 182, a weaver, "it was through his travels in Morgannwg selling cloth that he encountered the poets of that county such as Iolo Morganwg"; "There is no doubt that Iolo influenced Evans’s theology." Iolo sang the same kind of song and was never gaoled for it, and he made a song of how he got away: “As late I walk’d out with my Soul in a flame / Up-kindled by songs to sweet Liberty’s name / A gang of Informers came plump in my way, / I cried room for Tom Paine! and all scamper’d away.”NLW 21401E, no. 34. He and Tomos prayed together, often on their knees, for peace and justice. Iolo’s biographer prints a prayer the two of them said, and does not say who wrote it; most likely it was Tomos’s own: O Dduw’r trugaredd a’r tosturi! … O, cymmer ymaith y cleddyf dinystriol o’u dwylaw, a gwared y byd o dan orthrymder a gallu treiswyr!, O God of mercy and pity … take the destroying sword out of their hands, and free the world from the oppression and power of tyrants!Printed in the press of the 1790s; reprinted in Marion Löffler (ed.), Welsh Responses to the French Revolution: Press and Public Discourse, 1789–1802 (Cardiff, 2012), p. 227. His biographer says the two men “aent ar eu gliniau’n aml i weddïo dros heddwch a chyfiawnder”, went often on their knees to pray for peace and justice, and does not name the author of the prayer.

The word was on the land, too, with its judgment intact, before Iolo could have put it anywhere. Lewis Morris, the exact scholar the prosecution raised as Iolo’s opposite, left, in the gazetteer he had not published when he died in 1765, a Cymru scattered with gorseddau: Gorsedd Orwynion out of Llywarch Hen’s lament for Cynddylan; Gorsedd Hoedliw on its named ground in Môn; a poet praised as eryr gwyr gorsedd, eagle of the men of the gorsedd; and above Conwy the seat of Gwalch Gorsedd, “where Maelgwn went to judge between the poets and musicians.” A king adjudicating bards, at a gorsedd, in the papers of the prosecution’s own saint, a generation before Primrose Hill.Lewis Morris, Celtic Remains (written by 1765; ed. D. Silvan Evans for the Cambrian Archaeological Association, 1878), s.vv. Siôn (Caer Süon), Gorsedd Orwynnion, Hoedlyw, Meilir. The Association’s own journal had already printed the institution’s later life as plain fact: Gwilym Tew “presided at the Morgannwg Gorsedd in 1460”, Archaeologia Cambrensis, 1869, Catalogue of the Hengwrt MSS.

And now, to mark 850 years since Rhys, sovereign of Deheubarth, held the first recorded eisteddfod, the establishment built a five-metre puppet of him: a nodding doll on poles, "woken from its sleep" on the steps of St Davids and trundled through the streets for the summer tourists, a cartoon dog bobbing at its heel, like a carnival giant on a parade float.The puppet was “created by Small World Theatre” (Theatr Byd Bach, of Cardigan) for the National Eisteddfod’s Prosiect 1176, paid for by a grant of £238,100 from the National Lottery Heritage Fund to Eisteddfod Genedlaethol Cymru: Heritage Fund, “Celebrating 850 years of the Eisteddfod”. It set out from St Davids Cathedral for Cardigan Castle in June 2026 and stood on the Eisteddfod field in August. That was one more forgery, not Iolo's, but theirs: a throne reduced to a toy. The occupier has always preferred his victims in this form. A balloon is far easier to steer than a king, and it never asks for its land back. Strip it away and gorsedd is plain royal and legal Cymraeg, gor, supreme, and sedd, seat: the supreme seat, the throne, the tribunal, the judgment-mound of native law.Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, s.v. gorsedd 1: from Brythonic *u̯or-essed-, Indo-European *uper-en-sed-, from the root *sed-, to sit (as in Latin sedeo); gor- is literally “over”. Its first senses are a mound of earth, a knoll, a barrow or grave, as in the First Branch, “penn gorssed aoed uch llaw y llys a elwit gorssed arberth”; and the verb gorseddu is “to sit in a court of law, to sit in judgment” (s.v. gorseddaf). It stands, again and again in Iolo's manuscripts, in exactly that company: Teyrnedd Dinefwr — Brenin, Arglwyddi Llys a Gorsedd, a Gwlad, the sovereignty of Dinefwr: King, Lords of Court and Throne, and Country; brenhinoedd gorseddog, enthroned kings; twelve enthroned lords sitting in the judgment of Court and Tribunal. Even the bardic Gorsedd he raised on Primrose Hill was built as a court and not a concert, three ascending sittings, each granting nawdd a barn, protection and judgment, deciding by the verdict of the assembly, held by daylight in the open because it was not lawful to hold a gorsedd under a roof nor by night. The song he made for the gorsedd on Mynydd y Garth at midsummer 1797, Cerdd Cymru, says what such a court asked of a bard: Tri pheth anhebgor oedd ar fardd- / Bod fyth yn hardd ei fuchedd, / Dirio tangnefedd yn ddi-dawl, / A thaenu gwawl gwirionedd, three things were needful in a bard: to be ever fair in his life, to press for peace without ceasing, and to spread the light of truth.Cadrawd (ed.), Gwaith Iolo Morganwg (1913), p. 17.

That is the measure of what the verdict was guarding. To call the Gorsedd a forgery was to take a throne and a court of native sovereignty, the standing claim that this people had once governed and judged itself, in its own tongue and under its own law, before the invader's writ ran, and file it as bunting for the tourist and the choir. The trial was never really about whether a stonemason wrote some poems. It was about jurisdiction, the right of an older order to sit in judgment in its own land.“There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism”, Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940), written while fleeing a state that had criminalised his existence. The sentence beside it names the method attempted here: history is written in “empathy with the victor,” and every generation's scholarship inherits the victor's file unless it deliberately reads against it. The 1926 verdict was empathy with the victor, credentialled. Iolo set down how far that order’s authority once ran. In the English of the modern editor Cathryn Charnell-White, his note says the bard “was the herald of peace, and was not allowed to bear arms. … if he interrupted two armies intent on engaging in battle, they would immediately desist and lay down their weapons. He passed in safety from one hostile land to another. The bard operated in this capacity as a flag of truce.”NLW 13189E, p. 444.

And do not mistake that erasure for a thing safely in the past. It is complete, it is global, and it can be read today on the most-consulted reference on earth. Look up Druid now and you meet a worldwide movement of some quarter of a million souls across thirty-odd nations, nine in ten of them outside the British Isles, a nature-venerating faith of solstice rites and tree-lore and the Wheel of the Year, whose grades are bard, ovate and druid.Wikipedia, “Druidry (modern)”, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Druidry_(modern), read 27 October 2026 (revision of 15 October 2026): “est. 250,000” followers, the figure given by the British Druid Order (“Druids Are for Life…”, 16 December 2018); “By 2020, modern Druidry had spread to 34 nations across six continents”, and “roughly 92% of world Druids were residing outside the British Isles”, both from Larisa A. White, World Druidry: A Globalizing Path of Nature Spirituality (Belmont, California, 2021), pp. 16–26 and 280–283, the World Druidry Survey of 2018–2020. The censuses of the English-speaking countries alone counted 59,299 (White, ibid.). The grades are those of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, founded by Ross Nichols in 1964. The costume is worn now as a creed, and the genuine thing has been emptied clean out of it. And say plainly whose work this is, because the verdict must cut both ways: the vessel is his, even if the cult that filled it was not. The vessel he built to save the tradition is the vessel that carried it away, a quarter of a million members across the earth inherit his grades, his ceremonies, his stones and his robes, and not one word of the claim they were built to keep. The Trickster's masterpiece works on without its cargo, the greatest single carrier of the very forgetting it was raised to resist. Read what the vessel no longer holds. Of gorsedd as throne, court and tribunal, the supreme seat of a people's own law, there is not one word; the sovereign meaning is buried so deep that the reference does not know it was ever there, and knows only the robes. It sets down Iolo, flatly and in passing, as a man who "fabricated" his sources, the verdict of 1926, read out to the whole earth as settled fact. And then, without a flicker, it gives the movement's own teaching on ancestry, in a phrase that should stop a Briton where he stands: its forebears are ancestors of the land, rather than the ancestors of the blood, an amorphous group, rather than a set of named individuals. The disinheritance no longer needs a court or a fire. It has become a devotion.

And the emptying can be measured to the word, for they kept the words, and lost only the meaning. A gorsedd was to sit yn llygad haul, in the eye of the sun, because a court of law must be seen to do its justice in open day. The movement keeps the phrase exactly: its rites, its own references note, are held "in the eye of the sun", by which is now meant only midday, out of doors. The sovereign rule of the open court survives as a remark about the clock. So with the prayer. Iolo's own Gorsedd Prayer climbs, rung by rung, to the thing the whole tradition was for: "and in knowledge, the knowledge of justice; and in the knowledge of justice, the love of it." What a quarter of a million swear in its place is the Druid's Vow, "We swear, by peace and love to stand, heart to heart and hand in hand." The knowledge of justice has become peace and love; the court has become a hug. And even the hug is lifted: calon wrth galon, heart to heart, is, in the record Iolo carried, the chair-word of Deheubarth itself in the old chair-roll, the motto of the old court of the south, chanted now in perfect sincerity by a congregation that has never heard the seat existed.The chair-roll in the Iolo Manuscripts gives each royal chair its word: Powys, A laddo a leddir, who slays shall be slain; Gwynedd, Iesu; Deheubarth, Calon wrth Galon, heart to heart; and over the chairs of Arthur, Taliesin and Tir Iarll, the word of the Round Table itself: Nid da lle gellir gwell, nothing is good where better is possible. They kept even these words, and lost even this meaning. And they could not keep even his text: the one God he addressed is written over now with "Goddess," or "Spirit." Keep the robes, keep the grades, keep the very words "the eye of the sun", and throw away the law, the lineage, and the justice they were cut to carry. The theft is finished in them, and it wears his costume to do it. The God they wrote over was the centre of it for him. Answering Paine’s attack on the Bible, in an essay he never finished, he wrote of “the sublimely beautiful column of Christianity that has for ages been thrown down by Priests and Tyrants”.NLW 21396E, no. 33. Paine’s attack was answered by Richard Watson, Bishop of Llandaf, the same bishop who stands among the subscribers to Iolo’s Poems, in An Apology for the Bible; and in his copy of it William Blake, who engraved for Iolo’s own publisher, Joseph Johnson, wrote in 1798: “To defend the Bible in this year 1798 would cost a man his life.” Blake’s note is printed in D. V. Erdman (ed.), The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake.

At home the loss ran the other way: there they kept the meaning, and lost the name. In the last days of July 2026, with the Eisteddfod of the eight hundred and fiftieth year about to open, Mererid Hopwood, the Archdderwydd, head of the order Iolo raised on Primrose Hill, wrote for the readers of Nation.Cymru on what her office and its regalia mean. She opens on the same giant Rhys we met on the steps of St Davids a few pages back, and then walks the reader through the rite. The circle is not a triangle or a pyramid but “an open circle that represents equality”; the crown of leaves is worn for a term and then set on another head; the breastplate stands for truth and the sceptre for justice; the three rays on every piece of the regalia mean that the Gorsedd meets in broad daylight and honours the Awen; and the sword never leaves its sheath, because the order seeks peace.Mererid Hopwood, “Mererid Hopwood contemplates 850 years of Eisteddfod symbolism,” Nation.Cymru, 29 July 2026, https://nation.cymru/feature/mererid-hopwood-contemplates-850-years-of-eisteddfod-symbolism/, read, with the comments beneath it, on 28 September 2026. The name Iolo stands nowhere in the article; it stands only in the comments. The archived copy of 30 July 2026 shows the same: web.archive.org/web/20260730103426/https://nation.cymru/feature/mererid-hopwood-contemplates-850-years-of-eisteddfod-symbolism/.

Beside the Llundain papers of September 1792 it is the same court: the circle of stones; the three orders “upon the most perfect equality with each other”; the sitting held “whilst the Sun is above the Horizon”; the naked sword laid on the stone, and every bard present helping to sheathe it.The Llundain papers of 26 September 1792, reporting the second sitting on Primrose Hill: Y Llys, ¶29 above, from Thomas Shankland, Y Llenor III (1924), 100–101. Two years later he printed the reason for the sheathing: “In the ancient Barbarian world the Bards of BRITAIN first avowed themselves the Heralds of Peace; in the Christian world, the first sect that literally converted their spears to ploughshares, and their swords to pruning hooks, learning war no more, appeared in BRITAIN.”Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (1794), vol. II, p. 43 (note to “Escape from London”). The words echo Isaiah 2:4 in the Authorised Version.

The three rays are his as well: the nod cyfrin, the sign he devised for the three rays of light that came with the Creation, made the emblem of his Gorsedd, and set on the title-page of his own hymns in 1812.NLW 13093E, p. 167 (the sign drawn from the three rays of the Creation); the title-page of Salmau yr Eglwys yn yr Anialwch (1812); Geraint H. Jenkins, Bard of Liberty (Cardiff, 2012), 202 (the emblem of the Gorsedd). The circle, the equality, the daylight, the sheathed sword and the three rays: every one of them came into the Gorsedd by his hand.Yr Awen, viii. Llywelyn ab y Moel, early fifteenth century: “Yr awen befr … a roed imi … o’r Ysbryd … goleuni cerdd”, the bright awen given me by the Spirit, the light of song (GPC, awen). It is the light. His name is not in the piece once. The readers put it there, and they asked the question themselves. The first comment underneath asked whether most of the traditions had not been invented by Iolo in the eighteenth century; the reply to it did not dispute the invention, only whether invention mattered; and further down another reader wondered, in one line, why the writer had avoided mentioning Iolo at all.

The silence is not hers. It is the verdict’s. A hundred years after 1926 the head of his own order can give his proclamation as the creed of the Gorsedd and not say whose it is, and the first voice from the public supplies the charge without being asked. She will not put her title into English, because, she writes, it needs its context to make any sense at all; and that setting begins with the one name the verdict has made unsayable. That is the verdict still at work, not a book on a shelf, but a name that will not come out of the mouth that is speaking his words.

His teacher asked for it in 1767, in the verses Lewis Hopkin printed with his Ecclesiastes. Few in the land now, he wrote, cared “I’r addysg yma roddi / Ymgeledd brauwedd a bri”, to give this learning shelter and honour; and so he asked:“Englynion at y Cymry”, signed Lewis Hopkin, printed with Llyfr Ecclesiastes (Bristol, 1767), as reprinted in Hopkin-James, Hopkiniaid Morganwg (1909), p. 300, read on the page image.

Rhowch beth parch hybarch, a hedd, ag urddas,
I gerdd o’r hên agwedd,
Cyn i’r Awen lawen wledd
Dewi, a marw o’r diwedd.

Give some reverend respect, and peace and honour, to verse of the old shape, before the Awen of the glad feast falls silent and dies at last.“Englynion at y Cymry”, signed Lewis Hopkin, printed with Llyfr Ecclesiastes (Bristol, 1767), as reprinted in Hopkin-James, Hopkiniaid Morganwg, p. 300, read on the page image. There are four englynion: the couplet quoted above closes the third, and this is the fourth. Dewi is tewi, to fall silent, softened after i’r Awen. The English is ours.

One of his pupils gave it to him while he could. When Hopkin died in 1771, Edward Evan of Aberdare, the pupil who owed Iolo nothing, mourned him in the strict metres his master had taught him:

Yn iach i Lewys, iawnwych oleuad,
Yn iach wir gynnil iawnwych aur ganiad,
Yn iach dda englyn iawnwych ddeongliad,
Yn iach unodlau iawnwych anadliad,
Yn iach bwyll ddidwyll ddywediad araf,
Yn iach gywiraf iawnwych agoriad.

Farewell to Lewys, a true and splendid light; farewell, true and skilled, the splendid golden song; farewell the good englyn, splendid in its meaning; farewell the single-rhymed lines of splendid breath; farewell the honest mind and its slow speech; farewell the truest and most splendid opener of the way.Edward Evan, “Englynion o goffadwriaeth am Lewis Hopkin”, four englynion and three stanzas of hir-a-thoddaid, the first stanza given here; the third calls him “Ffraetha iawn brif-fardd”, the most eloquent true chief bard. Printed in Afalau’r Awen (Hopkin-James, p. 146) and reprinted by Hopkin-James, pp. 342–343, read on the page image. The English is ours.

Respect, peace and honour, for the old verse and for the men who kept it. Two hundred and fifty years on, it has still not been given.

Fifty years before she wrote, at the festival she was writing about, a man asked the question this court asks, and answered it. At the Eisteddfod of 1976, at Aberteifi, the town where the Lord Rhys had called the poets to his castle at Christmas 1176, R. S. Thomas, a priest of the Church in Wales who had learned his Cymraeg as a grown man, gave the lecture in Cymraeg and opened it: “Lle mae Abercuawg?”, where is Abercuawg?R. S. Thomas, Abercuawg (Llandysul: Gwasg Gomer, 1976), the lecture at the National Eisteddfod at Aberteifi; the opening question, and the sentence quoted below from p. 16, in Thomas’s Cymraeg and in Kaminski-Jones’s English, both as given in Rhys Kaminski-Jones, “William Owen Pughe and Romantic Rewritings of the Poetry of Llywarch Hen”, The Review of English Studies 73, no. 308 (2022), 100–120, n. 64. Thomas’s own English of the closing sentence, “This is certainly not an example of emptiness, but of becoming”, is in R. S. Thomas, Selected Prose, ed. Sandra Anstey (Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press, 1983), pp. 153–66, at p. 165, as quoted by M. Wynn Thomas, R. S. Thomas: Serial Obsessive (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), p. 149. The 1976 Welsh text itself has not yet been read here. The castle and the date of 1176: Brut y Tywysogion, Peniarth MS 20, pp. 191–2, read at the National Library’s page image (the original is restricted, but the whole manuscript is digitised: handle 10107/4754463, p. 191, second column), agreeing with the diplomatic transcription of the Welsh Prose 1300–1425 project (Cardiff University); a later hand has written “gwled rys ap Gruffud” in red in the margin beside it: “y nodolic yn y vlwydyn honno y kynnhelis yr arglwyd rys ap gruffud llys yn arderchawc yn aberteiui. yn y kastell”, at Christmas that year the Lord Rhys held a splendid court at Aberteifi, in the castle, and set two contests there, one between bards and poets, the other between harpers, crwth-players and pipers. The place is in the ninth-century englynion of the sick man: “Yn Aber Cuawc yt ganant gogeu”, at Aber Cuawg the cuckoos sing. No map has it. Tradition put the sick man at Dôl Guawg by Machynlleth, and Ifor Williams, editing the poem, wrote down why: “oherwydd y cyfeiriadau at Aber Cuawg yn y testun”, because of the references to Aber Cuawg in the text.Ifor Williams, Canu Llywarch Hen (Caerdydd, 1935), poem VI, “Claf Abercuawg”, stanza 5, and the introduction on the sick man’s place. The place is found by reading the poem, and the poem is then pinned down by the place. Thomas would not let the missing map decide whether the place was real. Its absence, he said, was “ffordd i gael gwybod yn well, trwy ei absenoldeb, natur y lle yr ydym yn chwilio amdano … Nid enghraifft o wacter sydd yma, bid sicr, ond o ryw ddyfod i fod”: a way to know better, through its absence, the nature of the place we are looking for; “not in fact an example of emptiness, but rather some kind of becoming.” That is the Gorsedd’s case, put at the Gorsedd’s own festival: the cartographer’s failure is not the verdict. And he said afterwards what the lost place was. That summer, at Gregynog, he told a summer school that Abercuawg was the name he had given to Cymru, “er mwyn osgoi siarad yn boliticaidd yn yr Eisteddfod Genedlaethol”, so as not to speak politically at the National Eisteddfod. The place no map would hold was the country itself, and he named it at its own festival under another name.Gwenda Owens, “Cyfarfod ag R. S. Thomas am y tro cyntaf”, Lleufer 27, rh. 1 (1978), 24–26, at 25: “Pwy a all benderfynu o ba beth y gwnaethpwyd Abercuawg? Yma y datgelodd mai enw a roddodd ar Gymru oedd Abercuawg, er mwyn osgoi siarad yn boliticaidd yn yr Eisteddfod Genedlaethol.” It is her account of his lecture to a summer school at Gregynog in the summer of 1976, in which he drew threads from the Eisteddfod lecture without repeating it. She says she wrote down what she heard, “neu’r hyn a feddyliais i mi glywed” (or what I thought I heard), p. 26. Iolo had kept watch on another lost country, Cantre’r Gwaelod, the hundred drowned under the bay off Ceredigion, and recorded what it had left behind: “There were lately (and I believe are still) to be seen in the sands of this bay, large stones with inscriptions on them, the characters Roman, but the language unknown.”Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (1794), vol. I, p. 79 (note on Cantre’r Gwaelod, to “The Fair Pilgrim”).

In the second branch of the Mabinogi stands the Pair Dadeni, the Cauldron of Rebirth: cast the slain into it at nightfall and by morning they rise (whole, strong, fit to fight again) with one lack only. They come back without speech, without song. Alive, and mute. That is the creature loose in the world now. They took the tradition they had killed, threw it into the cauldron of their science and their profit, and it rose: a quarter of a million strong, robed, ceremonied, and dumb, unable to say one word of the law, the line, the justice it was raised to carry. The cauldron gives back the body and keeps the tongue. That is how the unburnable thing was beaten at last: the country kept in song, which no fire could ever reach, was handed back its body with the song taken out.

They stitched the corpse from stolen parts, galvanised it with romanticism and railway money, and walked away.In 1818 Mary Shelley, Godwin’s daughter, wrote it exactly: a man of science and reason assembles a being out of dead parts, galvanises it, and flees from what he has made; the creature, unmothered and soulless, walks the earth in the shape of a man. It multiplied without them. “The gods have become diseases,” Jung wrote. Kill an archetype (a throne, a court, a people's own law) deny it the daylight, and it does not die; it goes underground and returns autonomous, a splinter running on its own, a mask over a vacancy. They made it a disease, and the disease is caught, and has circled the earth.

The heirs of Troy, felled once by a hollow gift of wood, were felled again by a hollow gift of robes, the same trick, the same hollow shape.The horse the Greeks wheeled to Troy was a gift with the fall of the city sealed inside it. And the whole risen multitude is mute in the very same way, by the very same hands that burned the libraries, locked the drawer, and hung the word forger on the keeper so that no one would look at the forgery they were themselves committing.

Their temple is a ring of stones they never raised, on ground that was never theirs: a court of law traded for a ceremony.

Nine in ten of them live outside these islands, and they honour the land as the root of their belonging from a hemisphere away. What happened is simple to state. The people who held the tradition by descent and by ground were told it was a fraud; the same tradition (the robes, the grades, the sacred words) was taken up by a movement overseas and received there as genuine. The tradition was not lost. It moved, away from the people it came from, and it is practised today, sincerely, far from Cymru, while the people it came from are still here. Sincerity is a fine thing; it is not the same as title. Iolo would have opened his door to them. In the war of 1794 he wrote of a stranger born in France: “He, though contending cannons roar, / Shall open find my friendly door; / And, spite of all that Kings command, / Find in my cot his native land, / My peaceful cot, secluded far / From Hell-born rage of ruthless war.” A guest finds his native land in the cottage. He does not take the deeds.Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (1794), vol. I, pp. 126–7 (“Winter Incidents”).

And there is a final cruelty in it, sharper than all the rest, because the age that did this prides itself on knowing better. Ours is the era that taught itself to name cultural appropriation and to condemn it, to recoil when a sacred thing is lifted from an oppressed people and worn as costume by those with no claim to it. The very reference that buries Cymru's gorsedd records, a few lines on, Native Americans protesting the outsiders who take their sweat-lodge rite, and notes without a blush the view that calls such taking cultural theft. The category exists; the conscience exists; it is simply not extended to the Britons. Take a Native ceremony and the modern world calls it theft; take one of Cymru's (the throne, the bardic order, the holy word) and the same world calls it heritage, calls the man who kept it a forger, and calls the takers authentic. The act is identical. The only difference is the name. For the Britons were never conquered in the sense the word likes to pretend, not absorbed, not extinguished, not melted into the taker; they are still here, on the same ground, speaking the same tongue, still at their own old board, playing tawlbwrdd while the incomer plays chess.

Chess, the incomer’s game, came in with the court that displaced this one, and its object is simple and final: kill the king. Tawlbwrdd is the older game of this island, and its object is the opposite. The king must survive and get out. The defenders are outnumbered. The attackers have every material advantage. Success is measured not by how completely the centre is annihilated, but by whether the centre can still escape. One game teaches that power is perfected in the death of the opposing sovereign. The other teaches that power is tested by whether the sovereign can still be got to safety when the odds are hopeless. These are two different accounts of what a people is for. The first was imposed. The second is the one that had to be forgotten.The native laws give the bard of the household a throw-board, tawlbwrdd, of sea-animal bone from the king, and "these trinkets he is neither to sell nor give away whilst he lives"; the note on the passage describes the game as a black king and eight black men against sixteen white men. Alwyn and Brinley Rees, Celtic Heritage (1961), set the Britons' tawlbwrdd beside the Irish brandub and the Swedish tablut: a king and a small guard at the centre of the board against a larger force ranged along the sides. The Cymraeg account preserves the board and the odds; the object, the king's escape rather than his capture, belongs to the whole family of games of which tawlbwrdd is the Cymraeg member, and for the Cymraeg game itself the rules are reconstructed from its cousins rather than recorded. Guto'r Glyn uses the game as a figure in a praise poem, so it was live in bardic hands. Iolo had put the two accounts in one sentence: “the laws and reasons of peace we derive from Heaven; those of War, only from Hell”.NLW 13089E, p. 258.

They are the Britons, the first people of this island, the line the old books trace back through Brutus to the beginning, and British is their name. There is the trick on which the whole double standard turns: the incomer took the name. He called his own Goth imperial state, Saxon and Norman, Britain, so that when the world now hears a tradition of the Britons has been lifted and worn by strangers, it does not see one people robbing another, it sees "British heritage," generic and ownerless and free for the taking, because the thief is dressed in the victim's name. The Britons are not filed as a colony robbed of its inheritance; they are hidden inside the very word their robber answers to. Iolo sang under that name, and sang it free, in Liberty, a Song, printed in 1794: “Subject to no tyrant sway, / Saucy love, or despot king, / Free as air I pass the day, / And give sneaking Care the fling: / Free-born Britons, join with me; / ’Tis the song of Liberty.”Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (1794), vol. I, p. 132 (“Liberty, a Song”).

Iolo had seen the shape of it himself, three generations before, watching Lewis Morris carry off the title to the south's tradition along with its ore. Nature has a name for this arrangement, and it is not conquest. The cuckoo does not destroy the nest it takes; it lays its egg among the host's and lets the nest raise the usurper as its own. A thin ruling stratum seated in a population still two-thirds ancient blood is not an extermination; it is a brood parasite: the host body kept alive and labouring, the egg in the nest swapped, the Cymry feeding a "Britain" that wears their name and was never their child. And that is why neither of the modern words will quite fit. Appropriation takes an artifact; genocide takes the people; this takes neither, and does worse than both. It kills the record that the owners ever existed, and then it answers to their name, identity theft at the scale of a nation: first the owner must be made dead in the story, then the death must go unrecorded, and then the impostor collects everything ever owed to the name (the land, the history, the word British itself) while the owner's children stand alive in the road outside, unable even to report the crime, because on paper the victim never existed and the thief is him. The man who coined genocide saw this exactly. Raphael Lemkin defined the crime in 1944 in two phases, not one: the destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group, and then the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. The modern world kept phase one and forgot phase two; but phase two is the cuckoo in the nest, and in Cymru it has run for centuries after the first. By the coiner's own definition, what was done here is genocide in the textbook sense, the two-phase case, with the second phase still in progress.Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, Carnegie Endowment, 1944, ch. IX: "Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor." The pathology has no tidy term, because the term would have to be minted by the takers' own dictionaries.

And the same erasure reaches into England, where the genetics has lately overturned the oldest schoolroom certainty of all. The English were taught that the invading Goths, the Saxons and the Angles, swept the native Britons away (killed, or driven west) and made the country new. The blood says otherwise. The landmark People of the British Isles project (led from Oxford, funded by the Wellcome Trust) mapped the living population gene by gene and found no trace of a vanished nation: the Goth in the English, the Anglo-Saxon and Continental contribution, is a minority, most likely between a tenth and two-fifths and, the authors say, very likely under a half, heaviest in the south and east and thinning as you travel north and west. Which leaves most of the ancestry of the English descending not from the Goth incomers at all, and the ancestry of the Welsh, the Scots and the Irish, on the later paper’s own words, coming “most or all” from the people of the island before themLeslie et al., “The fine-scale genetic structure of the British population,” Nature 519 (2015), 309–14, the Wellcome Trust-funded People of the British Isles study, read in the authors’ manuscript: “We estimate the proportion of Saxon ancestry in C./S England as very likely to be under 50%, and most likely in the range 10%-40%”, and its two analyses show “clearly excluding the possibility of long-term Saxon replacement”. The words “intermarried with, rather than replaced” do not occur in the paper as read. The same paper finds that the Welsh samples are the first to separate from the rest of the non-Orkney UK, with north and south Wales separating next, and says the Welsh clusters are “more similar to the early post-ice-age settlers of Britain than those from elsewhere in the UK”. Gretzinger et al., “The Anglo-Saxon migration and the formation of the early English gene pool,” Nature 610 (2022), 112–19, from 460 medieval genomes: individuals from eastern England derived “up to 76%” of their ancestry from the continental North Sea zone; “We estimate that the ancestry of the present-day English ranges between 25% and 47% England EMA CNE-like, 11% and 57% England LIA-like and 14% and 43% France IA-like”, with less of it in the south-west, the north-west and along Cymru’s borders; and “most present-day Scottish, Welsh and Irish genomes can be modelled as receiving most or all of their ancestry from the British Bronze or Iron Age reference groups, with little or no continental contribution.” The French-Iron-Age-like stream it finds in England only, and “to a substantial amount after the Roman period”, so the arithmetic is not two-way. Earlier work on present-day Y chromosomes had inferred “50–100% replacement of male lineages”; Gretzinger’s own conclusion is “a complex, regionally contingent migration with partial integration”., the British stock the Goths were supposed to have swept away. There was no extermination. There was mixture. So the inheritance now sold as ownerless "British heritage" is, in plain descent, the birthright of the island's own people (of the Britons almost whole, and of the English in very great part) robbed from all of them by the same thin ruling stratum that took the name. And the English were handed the cruellest lie of the lot: that they were the robbers, when by blood the Goth is the smaller part of them. Iolo had grieved for what the English common people lost too. Lamenting the loss of the Saxon language, he wrote to Evan Evans, Ieuan Fardd, the scholar of the old manuscripts, that had it lived “its words would have been all from roots of its own which would have been popularly understood by the common people, which our present English never will, never can be.”Bethan M. Jenkins, Between Wales and England (2017), pp. 108, 128–9.

So the one mercy the modern conscience grants the dispossessed is the single mercy refused the Britons: the right to have been robbed at all. That is the deepest cut of the whole long erasure, not only to take the inheritance, but to take, first, the very name that would let its owners call the taking a theft.

But mark what the theft actually got, because this is where the whole machinery finally fails. The gorsedd itself (the court, the judgment, the standing claim of a people to its own law) cannot be lifted, because it is not an object but a relation: it exists only as the earned attachment of the line and the land it grew from, and attachment is the one thing on earth that cannot be stolen, only transmitted. The costume came away in their hands; the office stayed where it always was. And the owners are not a memory. This is the fact the whole apparatus (the verdict, the lock, the puppet) exists to manage, and must keep managing, generation after generation, at mounting cost, forever: the island's first people did not die, did not leave, did not stop speaking, and did not forget. The maintenance never ends because the theft never completes. A dead nation needs one burial; a living one has to be re-buried every morning, and every morning it is still there, at its own old board, holding both the blood and the ground, needing nothing back but the name. The dread at the bottom of the impostor's psyche is accurate. Iolo had described what becomes of learning that is not grown in its own ground. The Roman learning, he wrote, “was not a native that originally sprung from their own soil and grew up to a natural magnitude it was an exotic that flourished during a summer, but propagated itself but weakly.”Bethan M. Jenkins (2017), p. 130.

Yr Adferiad: The Restitution

For the throne was only the centre of it. Around it Iolo preserved the whole of the inheritance the verdict was raised to bury. He kept the older faith: the genealogies of the British saints, and the claim the establishment most needed silenced, that the church in Britain had been apostolic and independent before Rome ever reached it, through Ilid, whom the readings of the saints’ lives call Joseph of ArimatheaThe record carries Ilid to his end at Ynys Afallen yng ngwlad yr haf, the Isle of Avalon in the Summer Country, where he died. Iolo Manuscripts (1848), the genealogies of the British saints: p. 7, “yr hwn Ilid a elwir yn y llithion o fywyd y Saint Sioseb o Arimathia”, this Ilid is called Joseph of Arimathea in the readings of the saints’ lives (llith, plural llithion, a reading: Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru); Taliesin’s English, p. 343, “This Ilid is called, in the service of his commemoration, St. Joseph of Arimathea”; and p. 635, “Saint Ilid, who was called Joseph of Arimathea”., and through Illtud's great school at Llantwit; he even set down, on the very ground of the Loughor, the memory of a battle in which "the men of Rome" were killed, a British stand against the empire, kept in Cymraeg in his own hand. And he did not keep it alone. He was the middle link of a chain that passed the inheritance from hand to hand across a century, Evan Evans, who carried the record out of the dying gentry libraries before him, and whom Iolo names in his own pages, and others who took the thread up after his death. Not an isolated forger inventing a past out of nothing, but one keeper in a long line of keepers, each handing on what the fires and the courts had not yet reached.

This is the witness the verdict was built to discredit. Acquit him, and he does not merely walk free; he changes seats. The man they put in the dock as the inventor of a tradition stands up, at the last, as its custodian, and the things they filed as his fabrications, the throne and the descent and the alphabet and the older church, turn back into what they always were: not a stonemason's fabrications, but the inheritance a conquest spent three hundred years trying to make the world forget, copied where he had the text, pieced together where he had only fragments, and carried on in his own hand where the fire had left him nothing but the craft.And notice the recursion, the deepest thing in the case. This shape is not only Iolo's. It is the shape of the very stories he spent his life copying out of the burning libraries. Propp's Morphology of the Folktale (1928) fixed the sequence every such tale obeys: the hero marked with a false brand, driven out, and at the last recognised, the false claimant exposed; the international tale-type index files the calumniated innocent, vindicated after exile, as a structure recurring across the whole earth. Jung gave the reason folklore can only catalogue: these are archetypes, inherited grammars of the psyche, and they do not wait to be invented, they seize the teller and tell themselves through him. Iolo preserved the archetypal stories, the hidden heir, the returning king, the culture-bringer who steals fire and is punished for it, and in preserving them was seized by one, and made to live it. This book is the final function in Propp's sequence, the one the whole tale exists to reach: the recognition scene. The archive Iolo saved has, at the end, told his story in the same shape as the stories it kept. Borges called it partial magic: if the people in a story can read it, its readers may themselves be inside one.The self-reference has exact names: metalepsis (Gérard Genette), the breach of the wall between the telling and the told; mise en abyme, the work that carries a small copy of itself; and the strange loop (Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, 1979), the hierarchy that bends back and swallows its own tail, the figure the Gödel note above already set turning. Borges, “Partial Magic in the Quixote,” in Other Inquisitions (1952).And the book's own form is the last instance of it. The Geneva Bible of 1560 set its notes in the margin, beside the verse they explained, so that a lay reader, with no priest standing between him and the page, had the explanation and the text at the same point, rather than a summary delivered from a pulpit fifty pages away. The Reformation broke a monopoly on scripture by putting the source in the margin beside the claim. This book does the same with its own, for the same reason, against the same kind of monopoly, the form that armed Reformation polemic now serving the appeal of a Unitarian of Cymru against an English-established verdict. The margins you have been reading are themselves the argument. And he carried it in person. Elijah Waring, the Quaker friend who wrote down his recollections, tells of the journey Iolo made on foot past seventy to recover his manuscripts, driving an empty pony ahead of him all the way to Caerfyrddin. When his son Taliesin begged him at least to let the pony carry his bags, he said: “No! trust my wallets to no shoulders but my own.” Pressed again to ride, he said: “No! Tally, you may ride if you please—I will not.”Elijah Waring, Recollections and Anecdotes of Edward Williams (1850), p. 126.

And hold onto this, because everything the future will need turns on it. The throne and the transcript are two different questions, weighed on two different bodies of evidence, and the one does not touch the other. What became of the seat he raised says nothing whatever against the reliability of what his pen preserved, for what was done to the court was done by others, after him, and what was done at his desk was done exactly. The cult it dwindled to was never his. That desecration was theirs, the orders that came after. His service was documentary: he carried the record out of the fire, and the service stands whole, the laws, the poems, the chronicles and the triads, carried out of the burning libraries and set down again, each to be weighed on its own parchment. The acquittal of forgery restores every one of them to evidence. That is what this whole trial was for, not to make a saint of the keeper, but to put the record he kept back on the table as evidence, so that the inheritance he guarded, having outlived the fire that came for it, stands clean and usable at last, not a forger's inventions to be quarantined behind a warning, but documents again: to be read, weighed, cited, and built upon by anyone willing to do the work.

And he never softened. Into his last years the old man carried the whole heat of the 1790s undimmed. George Hardinge was the very judge who had shown him mercy. He had freed him from the Caerdydd gaol and praised him from the bench, and in 1804 he had passed one of Iolo’s letters on to his accuser Edward Davies with a note calling him “this knave”.Hardinge to Edward Davies, covering Iolo’s letter of May 1804: “the enclosed is a picture of all your enemies – you now can produce adversaries of more liberality than are possesst by this knave”: Moira Dearnley, “‘Mad Ned’ and the ‘Smatter-Dasher’: Iolo Morganwg and Edward ‘Celtic’ Davies”, in A Rattleskull Genius (2005), p. 435. Edward Davies (1756–1831), the clergyman who first printed the word forgery against the Chair of Morgannwg in 1809. To him Iolo would make no apology for his Rational Dissent or his republican liberty: “I am what I am,” he wrote, “and I most fervently thank God that I am what I am; for I am, I believe, what he intended me to be. I am a Man, and I have ever stood up for the Rights of Man.”Iolo to Chief Justice George Hardinge, ?1803, refusing to apologise for promoting Rational Dissent and the cause of liberty: CIM, II, 459. The words are St Paul’s (1 Corinthians 15:10, “by the grace of God I am what I am”, in the English Bible of 1611) so that even his defiance to the bench was spoken in scripture, not paganism: the answer of a devout man, not a heathen forger. Past seventy he still came to his feet in an argument as if to address a court, and Elijah Waring, who knew him, set the whole man down in one line, “the raised arm and clenched hand, the kindled eye, the highly-pitched voice, and the emphatic foot, probationary of floor and joist.”Elijah Waring, Recollections and Anecdotes of Edward Williams (London, 1850), 129. He never forgave Pitt; to the end he called him Wil Pwll Uffern, Will of hell’s pit, and defined his justice as “everything save what is just” (pob peth ond a fai iawn).Iolo on Pitt’s fall (1801) and death (1806): “So Wil Pwll Uffern is out at last” and “Cyfiawnder Wil Pwll Uffern — pob peth ond a fai iawn”; Iolo to William Owen Pughe, 15 February 1801 (CIM, II, 367), with the “Pandemonian Bulletin” marginalia on letter no. 1056 (NLW 21286E). And he clung to his papers past all reason: the great heap of his transcripts he called gwarged y gwallgof, the relics of the mad, and he could not bear to be parted from a leaf of them.Iolo’s own name for his transcripts, “gwarged y gwallgof” (the relics of the mad): NLW 21334B. Nor would he give up the road: “in spite of my lame foot, in spite of my asthma, in spite of my villainous cough that struggles to get loose, I persist in walking”.NLW, Iolo Morganwg Papers, E5.

Recall what he did with that archive at the end: he sealed it against the world and addressed it to the year 1901, an hour of his own appointing.

That is the whole of him, and the whole of this case, in one image. Everything he did was a record entrusted to the appointed time: the transcripts carried out of burning libraries; the triads and the genealogies and the laws; the Gorsedd raised as a sovereign court when sovereignty was a hanging matter; the history of his own life, whose first sheets went through the press in 1793 and 1795 and which was never published;To Peggy, 30 October 1793: “I have my poems all printed the history of my life in the press” (NLW 21285E, no. 822, as quoted by Mary-Ann Constantine in A Rattleskull Genius (2005), p. 135). And in a letter headed 19 February 1794, but postmarked 1795 and speaking of the treason trials of that winter: “I have printed off some sheets of the history of my life, but I can not complete it at present” (NLW 21285E, no. 850, read in the online edition of his letters). He still meant to finish it in 1810, as “the vehicle of such remarks as I may be able to make on Welsh literature” (to Evan Williams, 16 January 1810, CIM, III, p. 2, as quoted by Ffion Mair Jones (2010), p. 212). Whether any of the printed sheets survive has not yet been checked. the bardic alphabet, which on one reading was a cipher because a cipher was the only safe place to keep the truth.“Art is a lie that makes us realise truth”, Picasso. The whole case against Iolo is the refusal of that sentence: the insistence that a frame which carries true things must itself be tried as perjury. He worked, always, for readers he would never meet, for the readers of the appointed day, against a present that hunted him. And that present did to him exactly what he feared: it called the keeper a forger, locked his hand away where no one could examine it, and trusted the great bulk it needed while burning the small part that threatened it. He had told himself how to bear that present. In notes for an essay he called A push at the pillars of Priestcraft, he wrote of waiting “in peace for the interposition of divine providence to accomplish a revolution in the political world”.NLW 13123B, p. 162.

The appointment has been kept. That is what has changed, and it is the only thing that needed to. The record was always there; what was missing was an age willing to read it back (all of it, faster than the verdict could defend itself) to go to the parchment, to count the gaps and see which way they fall, to lay the hand beside the transcription and ask, at last, whether the thing they convicted him for was ever a crime. The drawer he sealed until 1901 is open. The hand he was not allowed to show is on the table. And the one song he said would outlast the lock has outlasted it: Y Gwir yn erbyn y Byd, the truth against the world, kept for the appointed day; and the appointed day is this one. And mark the year the appointed day fell in, because the calendar itself convenes this court: 2026, the eight hundred and fiftieth year since the Lord Rhys held his court at Aberteifi; the two hundredth since the keeper died in the winter dark at Flimston; the one hundredth, to the year, since the verdict. Three clocks striking together.1176 · 1826 · 1926, 2026 He counted his century to the year. We have counted the rest.

He knew that what he planted would be slow to grow, and he planted it anyway. Writing in 1814 to John James, the Unitarian minister, about founding a college, he put the whole of it in a line: “Mesen fach a dŷf yn dderwen fawr ymhen amser, ond heb blannu’r fesen, ni ellir fyth cael y dderwen. Hai! Plannwch y fesen!”: a little acorn grows to a great oak in time, but without planting the acorn the oak can never be had. Come on! Plant the acorn!Iolo Morganwg to John James, 1 September 1814, Correspondence, III, p. 281.

His teachers had planted before him. At Pencoed in 1733, fourteen years before he was born, Lewis Hopkin set down what the guild of the hill bards hoped for:

Os daw’r iaith eilwaith i olwg—digon
A’i dwgyd i’r amlwg;
A doniau, nid geiriau gwg,
Ar gynnydd trwy Forganwg.

If the language comes into sight again, and is brought into the open, then gifts, not frowning words, will grow through Morgannwg.

Dawnmaith ffrwyth ganwaith ffraeth gynydd—delo
Diliau o’r awenydd;
Dyged pob gramadegydd,
Dôn frawdgar difyrgar fydd.

Let the gifts bear fruit a hundredfold, in eloquent increase; let honeycombs come from the awen; let every grammarian bring a brotherly tune, and merry it shall be.Lewis Hopkin, “Englynion ar ddydd y cyfarfod a gynhaliwyd Y’mhencoed, ddydd Gwyl yr Eneidiau,—1733”, stanzas 6 and 8 of 8, from Y Fêl Gafod (1813) as reprinted in Hopkin-James, Hopkiniaid Morganwg (1909), p. 285, read on the page image. A gramadegydd, grammarian, is a bard schooled in the bardic grammar, the rules of the craft; the bards of the hill parishes called themselves by it in 1733. The English is ours.

And the last word is not his. It is the line of Taliesin, the chief bard of the Britons, that the book of his papers, printed by his son in 1848, set down to show that Taliesin knew this country; and it stands here as the one manuscript of Taliesin’s poems has it, in the spelling of the scribe who wrote it down.

Gwaryeis yn llychwr,
Kysceis ym porffor.

I played at Llychwr, I slept in purple.The Book of Taliesin (NLW, Peniarth MS 2), p. 26, l. 8, in the pagination of Evans’s facsimile (1910); there is no other copy. The Iolo Manuscripts (1848), p. 466 n. 3, give it in later spelling, “Chwaryeis yn Llychwr / Cysgais ym mhorphor”, and translate it “I have played at Llychwr (Loughor) and slept in purple.” For the two knights who moved the river to Pulford and into the time of day, see Y Llwchwr, in the chapter on John Gwenogvryn Evans.

Atodiad: Yr Archwiliad

The Audit835 The court does not rise. 836 The office of the historian. 837 The founders. 839 The university. 843 The roll. 849 The adjourned. 851 Five exemptions. 852 The court closes no mouth.

The verdict is given and the file is read, and by custom the court should rise. But this court was not convened inside the jurisdiction that convicted; it was reconvened in the open, after an adjournment measured in centuries. And a jurisdiction that resumes after long absence has one duty left before the circle breaks, and it is the steward's question, the oldest question any returning authority asks: what has been done with the place in its absence?

For there has been an office in this country since 1584, the office of the historian of Cymru, and it had one duty: to speak the truth about the country in its keeping. This appendix is the examination of that office, era by era, under three questions, which it leaves on the table at its close; and the first of them has to be asked of a burnt record: the library of Raglan perished with the siege of 1646, Hafod went up in flames in 1807, and the first class of Edward Williams's own catalogue of his manuscripts, the vellum rolls, has never been seen since.On the burnt record: the library of Raglan Castle was lost in the aftermath of the siege of 1646; the Hafod library of Thomas Johnes burned on 13 March 1807; Edward Williams’s catalogue of 1847 lists a first class of vellum rolls which never reached Llanover and has never surfaced (National Library of Wales, Iolo Morganwg Manuscripts, fonds description). To treat the surviving record as the whole record is to use the inventory of the stolen goods to prove that the missing things never existed. And the histories filed the enforcement of the native law, at Merthyr and on a hundred dark roads after it, as riot and distress, so that the fire lost its law and the law lost its fire.

The Tudur founders set the frame. David Powel's Historie of Cambria of 1584, dedicated to the Sidneys, entered the extinction of the native law as a mercy and the conquest as a civilising union, a nation's history written as a long application for office, and every steward after him inherited the frame with the shelf.David Powel, The Historie of Cambria, now called Wales (London, 1584), with its dedication to Sir Philip Sidney. The antiquaries of the eighteenth century began the great recovery and stopped it at the gate: the Morrises kept the standard of purity in the north while George Guelph (George II)'s business kept their stewardships in the south's mines and manors, and the living southern tradition, the one this court's defendant carried, was entered in their letters as degeneracy. The recovery of the nation's papers proceeded; the recovery of its jurisdiction was never proposed.

One voice in the nineteenth century found the method the office was built for. When the Blue Books of 1847 certified a nation as ignorant and immoral in eight hundred folio pages, Jane Williams, Ysgafell, did not apologise: she prosecuted the report itself, examined the commissioners' competence, their witnesses, their translations, and convicted a state paper of forging the character of a people. That is the examination's first exemption, entered with honours. She had the method and could not follow it home: she wrote from the drawing-room of the patroness in whose cupboard the defendant's papers lay locked, and the analysis that dismantled a parliamentary commission was never turned upon the lock.[Jane Williams (Ysgafell)], Artegall; or, Remarks on the Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales (London, 1848); her A History of Wales (London, 1869) is the first full history of the country written in English from Cymru's side. But in the History she wrote twenty-one years later: “Wales has gradually become a land of peace, to which bloodshed, with heinous crime in every form, is now almost unknown”, written, the historian of these matters says, with every rebellion, riot and radical left out of the account.Jane Williams, A History of Wales (London, 1869), p. 495; Jenkins (2008), p. 17, who calls it a verdict than which “a more fatuous” “could scarcely be imagined”. The exemption stands for Artegall; this sentence is entered against her.

Then the university took the office, and the surrender was completed in good order. The foundation history of the academic school closed its account in 1282, as if the sovereignty of a people were a matter of state machinery which died with the prince, so that six centuries of the law carried in the mouth did not count as keeping, and a history with no room for the bards would need no defence of the man who saved their records. The standardiser of the language was knighted in 1918. And the scholar who built the conviction of 1926 spent the rest of his life assembling the proof that the tradition his verdict had disgraced was real, his great book of 1948 stands as the fullest history of the Morgannwg muse ever written, and he never reconciled the two halves, and the label his youth had bolted on was left bolted. The keeper who could not tell his masters the prisoner was innocent.J. E. Lloyd, A History of Wales from the Earliest Times to the Edwardian Conquest, 2 vols (London, 1911); G. J. Williams, Traddodiad Llenyddol Morgannwg (Caerdydd, 1948), set against his Iolo Morganwg a Chywyddau'r Ychwanegiad (Llundain, 1926), tried in chapter 21, Y Fainc.

Of the two tongues of the television age, and of the gentlest voice beside them, the court has already heard the evidence in open session, and enters them in the roll of their era: the red steward whose own pages preserve the Jubilee he flagged as class war; the pageant steward who pronounced the throne a necessary fiction and wore its robes; the loving portraitist whose Merthyr carries no debt-court at all. Between them they operated the estate's oldest management tool (the pair of cards, the ruled page, the licensed argument) and neither tongue, in thirteen hours of national quarrel, once asked whether the founding verdict was true.

And the living stewards, the great recovery project of the last generation, must not think themselves singled out; they close a roll four and a half centuries long, and they are the best of it. They gave the defendant back his letters, his politics, his hymns, his continent of learning. The charge is not that they failed where others succeeded. The charge is the office itself: that in four hundred and fifty years of Tudur dedication and antiquarian recovery and scientific method and red flags and pageants and rehabilitations, the office of the historian of Cymru never once performed the single act an office of truth exists to perform. It never tried its own founding verdict. Every steward inherited the dereliction with the chair, and passed it on with the pension.

And a court does not convict an office in the abstract; nor will it do to any steward what was done to the defendant. So let the standard of proof be read before the roll: no one here is convicted unread. Where the court has weighed a steward's own pages, or facts of public record no one disputes, judgment is entered. Where it has only reputation and the frame of a school, the case is adjourned (charged, summoned, and not judged) until the book is opened. The roll, era by era:

Y Sylfaenwyr, the founders of the office. David Powel, The Historie of Cambria (1584): Caradoc of Llancarfan's matter dressed for the new state under the Sidneys' patronage; a patriot by his own lights, who preserved much of what he reframed, and the frame convicts him nonetheless.Powel's frame is the “accepted history” later defended against this court's defendant. · Percy Enderbie (1661) and William Wynne (1697): Powel recycled for the Restoration, unexamined.

Yr Hynafiaethwyr, the antiquaries. Lewis Morris (1701–65): superintendent of George Guelph (George II)'s mines and deputy-steward of his manors in the south; he began the movement the defendant joined, and outran, and was punished for outrunning. Two hands, two ledgers. · Thomas Nicholas, Annals and Antiquities of the Counties and County Families of Wales (1872): respectability backdated for the county families. · Thomas Stephens and John Williams, Ab Ithel: tried at the bar, not the bench. · G. T. Clark, Limbus Patrum Morganiae et Glamorganiae (1886): pedigrees drawn for the ironmasters while the native genealogies stood accused of forgery.G. T. Clark, Limbus Patrum Morganiae et Glamorganiae (London, 1886); Clark was a trustee of the Dowlais Iron Company, the same house whose money printed the book of 1849 tried at chapter 11, Y Gadwyn. · Egerton Phillimore: the sharpest forensic blade of his age, never turned on the verdict.

Y Gwrthodedig, the refused, entered not among the guilty but among the evidence. The defendant himself: a six-volume New History of Wales, its prospectus laid before the country at Caerfyrddin in 1819, refused its funding and never written; the office's charter enacted.The prospectus survives with the Cambrian Society's founding papers (NLW 1949E). He had said why it was needed: “I cannot help using the language of sarcasm when I am obliged to mention the stuff that has been written on Welsh history.” Iolo Morganwg to Thomas Rees, 3 May 1813, in Geraint H. Jenkins, Ffion Mair Jones and David Ceri Jones (eds.), The Correspondence of Iolo Morganwg (Cardiff, 2007), III, p. 151. Jenkins’s 2008 article gives the same words, with a comma after sarcasm, from Elijah Waring, Recollections and Anecdotes of Edward Williams (1850), p. 170. Jenkins set a phrase beside those words as Iolo’s own, “Taphy-land historians”, and made it the title of an essay; where the phrase comes from is not yet known. Jenkins, “‘Taphy-land historians’ and the Union of England and Wales 1536–2007” (2008), p. 14 and n. 43: “Iolo was scathing about the ‘Taphy-land historians’ of the past”. His note gives one source for the sentence, Waring (1850), p. 170. That page carries the sarcasm sentence; it does not carry “Taphy-land”, and the phrase is nowhere in Waring’s book (read on the Google Books scan of the British Library copy, 30 September 2026; the only near thing is “Taffy twice” in a squib at p. 204). Waring prints only extracts from a letter he calls “four closely written sides of a large folio sheet”, and the whole letter, in The Correspondence of Iolo Morganwg III, has not been read here. So the phrase may yet be Iolo’s, from elsewhere in that letter or another; on the evidence cited for it, it is Jenkins’s. He uses the phrase once more, at p. 16, where his note 48 cites The Correspondence of Iolo Morganwg II, 143–8; that letter has not been read here either. · Angela John: the historian of the women of Cymru, put forward as the second presenter of The Dragon Has Two Tongues and driven off it; she wrote the women's history of Cymru regardless.On Angela John and The Dragon Has Two Tongues (Channel 4, 1985): its director and producer Colin Thomas, in Christopher Evans, ‘Breathing fire: The making of The Dragon Has Two Tongues’, Nation.Cymru, 4 December 2022 (accessed 3 October 2026): Wynford Vaughan-Thomas “was so hostile to her and the whole notion of a two-presenter approach” that “she pulled out”; Gwyn Alf Williams was approached after, and the chair went to him. Angela John's Our Mothers' Land: Chapters in Welsh Women's History (Cardiff, 1991).

Yr Ysgol Academaidd, the academy: the verdict's home. Sir John Edward Lloyd, A History of Wales to the Edwardian Conquest (1911): medieval Cymru given dignity at last, and the tradition given the door; the frame within which 1926 could make sense. · Sir John Morris-Jones: on the bench of this trial from its first page; knighted, 1918. · Griffith John Williams: the conviction of 1926 built for his master, the vindication of 1948 built from the evidence. · Thomas Parry, The Oxford Book of Welsh Verse (1962): printed one exquisite cywydd long worn by Dafydd ap Gwilym under the name of its true creator, Edward Williams of Flemingston, and left the word forger in the file.Thomas Parry, ed., The Oxford Book of Welsh Verse (Oxford, 1962); the inclusion, and the words “its true creator, Edward Williams of Flemingston,” are recorded in Jan Morris, Wales, pp. 183–4. · Ceri W. Lewis (1995): the sentence of 1956 repeated nearly word for word forty years on; ten years later, the concessions.The 1956 sentence, the “wild, flimsy, unsteady politician”, is G. J. Williams's, framed before the political archive (NLW 21280–21386, received 1953–5) could be weighed, and repeated in Ceri W. Lewis's biographical chapter of 1995, as if the locked half of the archive, which reached Aberystwyth in 1953, had changed nothing. In his craft-chapter ten years later the Dafydd cywyddau "received as much attention and praise as any other products of that bard's muse", testimony, in his words, to "Iolo's great poetic genius"; "only a well-informed scholar who had mastered all these details could have forged as successfully"; and "there is some basis for Iolo's claim" of descent, through his mother, from the master-poets of Tir Iarll. The guild's own metrist beside him concedes "unparalleled knowledge of Welsh metrics" and writes the sentence this court adopts: "the recognition he deserved was sacrificed." Ceri W. Lewis, “Iolo Morganwg and Strict-Metre Welsh Poetry,” and Huw Meirion Edwards, “A Multitude of Voices: The Free-Metre Poetry of Iolo Morganwg,” in Jenkins (ed.), A Rattleskull Genius (2005), 71–94, 95–122.

Oes y Ddwy Dafod, the age of the two tongues. Prys Morgan: the scholarly engine of the “invention of tradition,” whose own page finds the defendant “extremely reliable.”Prys Morgan's concession, “Whenever he collected material of a detailed, empirical and antiquarian nature, its accuracy can often be corroborated from other sources, and all the indications are that he was extremely reliable”, stands in his own essay in Jenkins, ed., A Rattleskull Genius (Cardiff, 2005), p. 267, four pages from the laudanum explanation it refutes; his ‘invention’ essay is in Hobsbawm and Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983). · Gwyn Alfred Williams, Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, Jan Morris: tried in open session, on their own pages.See Y Gwir a'r Ddyled, ¶744.

Y Ceidwaid Byw, the living stewards. Geraint H. Jenkins, Mary-Ann Constantine, and the school they built at Aberystwyth: the whole man given back to the record, and ffugiwr kept on the label, the motto taken for the title of a book that kept the label on him.

Yr Achosion a Ohiriwyd, the adjourned cases. And here this court does what the court of 1926 never did: it declines to convict on reputation. The following stand questioned by the frame of their school, and their books this court has not yet read entire; their cases are adjourned, not judged, until the books are opened in this light. George Owen of Henllys (c. 1600), the surveyor of the lordships. B. B. Woodward (1853), the English compiler. Gweirydd ap Rhys, Hanes y Brytaniaid a'r Cymry (1872–4). R. T. Jenkins, the great essayist of the eighteenth century. David Williams, The Rebecca Riots (1955), summoned with a question already drafted for his pages: whether the Ceffyl Pren stands in them as distress, or as the survival of a law. Glanmor Williams, dean of the guild. Kenneth O. Morgan, the parliamentary tongue. Ieuan Gwynedd Jones, anatomist of the chapels. Dai Smith, Wales! Wales? (1984), the industrial south's advocate against the language's nation. Gwynfor Evans, Aros Mae (1971), the nation's advocate. John Davies, Hanes Cymru (1990), the great synthesis, whose anatomy of the Bute machine already stands to his credit. Adjournment is not acquittal and it is not conviction; it is the difference between this court and the one it replaces.

And let the record show who is not charged: those who worked beneath the quarrel and dug true, the geographer of the saints' roads and settlements; the anatomists of gwely and gwestfa, the old law's land beneath the parchment; the historians of suretyship in the native courts; the anatomist of the Morgannwg gentry's making. And with them, cleared on the evidence: Humphrey Llwyd of Dinbych (Denbigh), who defended the old British history against Polydore Vergil's assault and died before the frame was cut, a defender, mistaken for a founder. Rice Merrick (1578), whose Morgannwg collections preserved the very county tradition the defendant inherited, a source for the defence, not a defendant. Huw Pryce, whose anatomy of the guild's own founder is evidence this examination has used. Martin Johnes, who put the colonial question back on the nation's screens. And John Edwards, schoolmaster, whose Merched Beca (Gomer) set the rising before schoolchildren as their own inheritance (and forty-five years later his pupil is still bringing the connection in) the office of truth kept at a teacher's desk. Entered without charge. And the court extends clemency where clemency is owed: to Theophilus Evans, whose Drych y Prif Oesoedd (1716) gave the people their history in their own tongue and asked no forgiveness for the old story, he kept the flame burning in the only lamp his century allowed; and to Thomas Price, Carnhuanawc, who spent a whole heart on the recovery and died in the very year the Blue Books triumphed. The office failed them; they did not fail it.

The examination therefore records five exemptions, each of whom left a key on the grass, every one of which this court has used. Jane Williams, who proved a state paper can be tried for forgery. Rees Davies, who mapped the conquest as what it was (colonisation, the taking of land and law by force under forms) with an authority no one has impeached, and halted his survey at 1536 as a medievalist must. Wendy Davies, who took the Book of Llandaff, long dismissed as a monkish fabrication, so that the south might have no early record, and demonstrated by the academy's own instruments that a genuine early core survives in it: the south's oldest title-deeds handed back across a seminar table. Hywel Teifi Edwards, Gŵyl Gwalia (1980), who prosecuted the establishment's capture and humiliation of the founder's own festival with more fire than anyone the guild ever licensed, Llangollen 1858 and all, the nearest of his generation to this court's ground; one file he left shut, and this court has opened it. His own warning stands over the whole roll: "Everybody who knows anything about Welsh literature knows something about Iolo Morganwg. That's the problem: by taking him for granted we lose sight of his remarkableness."Hywel Teifi Edwards, quoted in Jenkins (ed.), A Rattleskull Genius (2005), introduction: “Y mae pawb sy’n gwybod rhywbeth am lên Cymru yn gwybod rhywbeth am Iolo Morganwg. Dyna’r drafferth: trwy ei gymryd yn ganiataol collwn olwg ar ei ryfeddod.” And Simon Brooks, who indicted the respectable consensus itself (the chapel-and-schoolroom liberalism that domesticated the language while surrendering the courts) and so named the machine, though he left its first victim in its file.R. R. Davies, ‘Colonial Wales’, Past & Present 65 (1974), and The Age of Conquest: Wales 1063–1415 (Oxford, 1987); Wendy Davies, An Early Welsh Microcosm: Studies in the Llandaff Charters (London, 1978); Simon Brooks, Pam Na Fu Cymru (Caerdydd, 2015), in English as Why Wales Never Was (Cardiff, 2017).

And the court closes no mouth it has named. If any steward on this roll objects, any of them, and the court means every one: the living in their own persons, the dead by their editors, their pupils and their heirs, the circle stands open. Let them come with their opinion and their evidence, and they shall be heard at full length, in the open, by the rules of evidence both laws share; and whatever survives their proof, the record will be amended in their sight. That liberty is extended to every name on the roll, without exception, because it is the whole difference between the two jurisdictions: it is the liberty the court of 1926 never extended to the man it condemned.

Y Tri Chwestiwn: The Three Questions

853 The archival question. 854 The severed question. 855 The clerk’s question. 857 The goodbye. 860 The first letter.

The first, the archival question. When you test the poet of the Britons for forgery, you test him against the records that survive. But the records that survive are the ones the conquering state kept. The rest were burned, taken or lost, and the taking is not over. So why treat that archive as a fair measure of what is true? A list of what was left after a robbery cannot prove that what is missing was never there. The old court did everything where all could see and hear. An archive one side kept under lock is the opposite of that.

The second, the severed question. Why do the histories put the fight for the land in one chapter and the fight for the poetry in another? When the people burned the debt-ledgers and brought out the Ceffyl Pren, the books enter it as riot. When a bard kept the old learning, the books enter it as forgery. They were one thing: the old law of this country, outlawed, and still being kept. Some carried it out in the open, and some kept its record. Read them apart and you see criminals and forgers. Read them together and you see one law. Read them apart, and the fire loses its law and the law loses its fire.

The third, the clerk’s question. A clerk’s rule says a text is honest only when it is copied exactly. The office of the pencerdd was never to copy. It was to make new work in the old manner, and to mend what had been damaged. So by what right is the last pencerdd judged by the clerk’s rule? Judge him by it and you convict him for doing his work, and all that is left of a sovereign inheritance is a harmless pageant.

That is the examination, and it is entered in the record. The office is not abolished; it is recalled to its duty. The charge has now been tried (here, in the open, by the rules of evidence both laws share) and the third seat, which stood empty through every era of the roll, is empty no longer. The court required no licence from the guild to convene, and requires none to rise. It rises as it was summoned, by the old rule of the old law: proclaimed a year and a day, in the face of the sun, in the eye of the light.

And they could not even get the goodbye right. The letter below is the earliest of Iolo's 1,230 surviving letters (written to him, in Siencin Morgan's own hand, when Iolo was twenty-four) and the only one of the 1,230 whose manuscript is photographed beside its print. It signs off the way friends did: Byddwch wych a chyd ddygwch am beia. The modern edition (the rehabilitation itself, volume I, pages 60 to 63) prints: "Farewell and bear with my faults." The Cymraeg has no my in it: am beia is only "for faults", and cyd- means together, the same cyd- as cydymaith, companion. The letter has been about nothing else: three times it calls the poets yngyd, together, and its prose ends on the good of i'n gilydd, each other. The farewell says bear with one another's faults: not one man apologising for himself, but a company agreeing to carry each other.

Set the print beside the ink and the same letter shows something plainer. Three times the writer darkens his vowels the southern way, ofawr fontais, monteision eraill, mentais i'n gilydd, and three times the edition's text planes them flat: fantais, manteision, mantais. And where the letter says together, the English says my. That is the verdict at work on a syllable, doing to the letter what it did to the man: taking him out of his own company and standing him in a dock by himself.

Ordinary readers have caught a standardiser at one changed word before: when Jerome’s revised Bible reached Oea in North Africa and a bishop read Jonah with the old gourd, cucurbita, replaced by the reviser’s ivy, the congregation rose in uproar until the old reading was restored, they knew their text by heart. Augustine to Jerome, Epistula 71 (c. 403). A text belongs to the people who carry it, not the hand that corrects it. So we will do as the letter says, and bear with one another's faults. The whole case is in that one syllable, cyd-, together; and that is where we leave him, not alone in a dock, but among his own, and us.Y Maen, ix. Iolo, Breiniau Dyn, stanza 18: “Yn honno cwyn o’r bedd / Holl freiniau dyn.” Mae’r maen yn agored: the stone is open.

Cawn deyrnas hardd ei gwedd,
Dan farn Tywysog Hedd,
Yn honno cwyn o’r bedd
Holl freiniau dyn.

We shall have a kingdom fair to see, under the judgment of the Prince of Peace, and in it shall rise from the grave all the rights of man.Iolo Morganwg, Breiniau Dyn, stanza 18 (Charnell-White 2012, no. 18); the English is our own. It answers the englynion at the head of the book, the bard who lies mute beneath the throne with the crime set on his grave. Tywysog Hedd, the Prince of Peace, is Isaiah 9:6, in the Welsh Bible Iolo read [POST-JUSTINIAN].

The last word belongs to the first word, a document. A working man's letter, Penrhiw-fer, Llantrisant, the 30th of November, 1771, thanking Iolo for the loan of a word-book:

"Y cyfeillgar Gymro Iorwerth Gwilim… Y rwi yn diolch i chwi am eich cyfyillach… ach benthig, sef eich geirlyfyr, yr hwn sy yn fy ngyfrwyddo mewn amryw eiria or hen iaith Gymraeg… a chynal ychydig awan yn ein mysg…"Yr Awen, ix. Book of Taliesin: “Awen aganaf. o dwfyn ys dygaf”, awen I sing; from the deep I bring it (Peniarth MS. 2, p. 21 ll. 21–22, read at the page).

Friendly Cymro Iorwerth Gwilim… I thank you for your fellowship, and for your loan, your word-book, that teaches me many words of old Cymraeg… and to sustain a little muse among us…

Siencin Morgan. Be well, and bear with one another’s faults.Siencin Morgan to Iolo, Penrhiw-fer, Llantrisant, 30 November 1771: NLW 21281E, no. 282, read against the photograph; The Correspondence of Iolo Morganwg, ed. Geraint H. Jenkins, Ffion Mair Jones and David Ceri Jones (Cardiff, 2007), I, pp. 60–3.

Y Ffeil

The File

This is the working. The chapters in front of it carry the verdict on each of these men; this carries the evidence it was reached on, count by count, in the words of the scholars who made it.

The rule of the file is the rule of the court that convened this book, and it is the rule the court of 1926 did not keep. Nobody here is convicted unread, and nobody is convicted in a summary. Every count is quoted from print (in Cymraeg and in English, with the page) and where the man answered, his answer stands here too, at whatever length he chose to take, in his own words and not ours. A reader who thinks a count unfair has the quotation in front of him and can say so.

And the file is not finished, and is not meant to look finished. Twelve men are in it: first the men who went before, Pinkerton and the shut libraries, Thomas Stephens, and Ab Ithel; then the six who made the case; and last the men who held the joints of it, T. Gwynn Jones, the third judge, and Sir Vincent Evans, the secretary, with the Prime Minister behind him; and, a century on, Rhys Kaminski-Jones, who brought a new charge on an old source. A file that can grow is the whole point of keeping one: the verdict of 1926 was delivered in a paragraph and has stood for a hundred years because nobody was ever shown the working.

I. Y Rhagflaenwyr: John Pinkerton and the shut libraries

The men before the men. John Pinkerton (1758–1826), the Scottish antiquary whose Gothic doctrine, that the Celts were savages by blood, is set out in Y Celwydd, ¶128; the Critical Review, the London journal whose unsigned review of January 1800 called the poems of the bards forgeries, and which Sharon Turner laid at Pinkerton’s door in 1803; and the owners of the old libraries of Cymru, who kept the books shut. The chapter carries the doctrine. These are further counts, from their own pages.For Turner naming Pinkerton, and the Critical Review’s debt to his preface of 1790, see Y Celwydd, ¶128.

He was a confessed forger himself. In 1781 he published, as an old Scots ballad, the “Second Part” of Hardyknute. In 1786 he owned it: “Of the Second Part of Hardyknute, written in 1776, but not published till 1781, the editor must now confess himself guilty. As for his secret, he has observed the Horatian precept he at first laid down to himself, Nonum prematur in annum; and requests pardon both of his friends and the public for keeping it to himself … For the imposition, it was only meant to give pleasure to the public … Perhaps, like a very young man as he was, he had pushed one or two points of the deception a little too far; but he always thought that novel and poetry had NO BOUNDS of fiction.” He added that “his whole fictions rested on supposititious tradition”.John Pinkerton, Ancient Scotish Poems, never before in print … from the MS. Collections of Sir Richard Maitland (London, 1786), vol. I, “A List of the Scotish Poets”, pp. cxxviii–cxxix, read on the page images. Nonum prematur in annum: let it be kept back until the ninth year (Horace, Ars Poetica 388). Three years later he called the poetry of the Britons the work of forgers, though on his own admission he knew no more of the language than he had picked up from a few grammars and dictionaries. His own forgery he called a pleasure given to the public. Theirs, he wrote, was “a common trade with the bards”.

He called the Welsh mind a maker of blunders. Camden, he wrote, “consulted some silly Welch antiquist about etymologies, and other matters, as he did not understand Welch himself. This same Welch prophet wishing to make all great folks Welch, as his countrymen delight to do, tho the honour be generally rejected, thought he might lay violent hands on all the fame of the Piks; and thus led Camden into a blunder, which a Welch mind could alone originally form.”Pinkerton, An Enquiry into the History of Scotland Preceding the Reign of Malcolm III (London, 1789), vol. I, pp. 121–2.

He called the bards vagrants, and blamed them for the history of two islands. “The English, till the present century, were fighting for the Welch antiquities, as doing honour to their nation; and the Scots are following the same tract to this day. The bards, and sennachies, authors of all this perdition to the history of Great Britain and Ireland, were strollers of the genuine Celtic breed.”Pinkerton, Enquiry (1789), vol. II, p. 48. The sennachies were the keepers of genealogy and history in Ireland and the Highlands, the bards’ counterparts there.

He sorted the peoples by their hair. “The red hair and large limbs are to this day the grand features of the Scandinavians, while the Scotish, Irish, and Welch Celts are remarkable for black hair, and a size rather diminutive.”Pinkerton, Enquiry (1789), vol. I, p. 185. Of the Gaelic Dalriads of Scotland: “being mere Celtic savages, ignorant of all arts, could know nothing of engines, or aught belonging to fortifications”.Pinkerton, Enquiry (1789), vol. I, p. 87.

He judged the Celtic peoples without their languages, and said so. “It may be imagined that i, who confess no further knowledge of the Celtic language, than is picked up from a few grammars and dictionaries, am but ill qualified to discuss a subject, whose evidences are wrapt up in that language … Were i writing on the history of Ireland, or Wales, in a total ignorance of the Irish and Welch languages, there would be room for as much laughter, and utter derision, as if one should attempt to paint without colours, or to build without materials.”Pinkerton, Enquiry (1789), vol. II, p. 2. The same year he wrote off the British poetry of the sixth century in four sentences (Y Celwydd, ¶128).

He did the same to the Irish, and worse. “The whole tale of the Milesians … is the most deplorable piece of nonsense, that ever stained the annals of mankind”; “the very name of Milesians is a jest; and the acceptance of any part of the fable is esteemed an infallible criterion of an insane writer”; “the very mark A.M. or Anno Mundi in Irish affairs, is well interpreted Asinaria Maxima by foreigners, and affords perpetual laughter.”Pinkerton, Enquiry (1789), vol. II, p. 13. Asinaria Maxima: the greatest asininity. And then, of the people: “The Wild Irish are at this day known to be some of the veriest savages in the globe; and seem by nature intended as a medial race between beasts and men. The chief families in Ireland, and the industrious and civilized part of the people, are all of Gothic descent”. The Welsh he set above the Irish only because “the Celts who remained were much improved by Roman intercourse”.Pinkerton, Enquiry (1789), vol. II, p. 48.

He called the keepers of pedigree mercenaries, and the Britons’ historian infamous. “True it is, that the crazy and mercenary bards and sennachies thought to get money, and favour, by giving pedigrees of their patrons, carried up to Heremon and Milesius, nay to Adam, and far beyond.”Pinkerton, Enquiry (1789), vol. II, p. 12. The sentence runs on: the Irish antiquaries “attempt to continue the imposture … by this pitiful trick”, while the good families “are content, as other noble families of Europe, to close the genealogy at the first shade of uncertainty; for falsehood, far from adding honour, is infamous in itself, and can only bring infamy and derision”.Ibid., vol. II, p. 12. A confessed forger of ballads told the Celts to cut off their own pedigrees. “The fables of the other Grand Celtic race, the Welch, as delivered to us by the deservedly infamous Geoffrey of Monmouth, and deduced from Brutus, great grandson of Aeneas … are sober and sapient, compared to the Irish fictions.”Ibid., vol. II, p. 13. And he made the forgers of the north and west answerable for a king’s head: “it is to their falsehoods that we owe the death of Charles I. and abdication of James II. The tales of the Welch and Scotish forgers had an influence on the whole history of Europe”.Ibid., vol. II, p. 14. The defendant’s own biographer: “the provocative essays of racists like John Pinkerton were utterly repugnant to him”; Pinkerton was “known for his prejudice against the Welsh and his hostility towards ‘Celtic nonsense’”.Jenkins, Bard of Liberty (2012), pp. 78, 205 n. 230.

The review laid at his door made Taliesin a joke. Turner had written that Taliesin became bard to the king of Llychlyn. The reviewer: “There was at that time no king of Scandinavia; a vast region, then divided into thirty or forty principalities, involved in a frequency of sanguinary contests; and to suppose that a Celtic poet was engaged at the court of a Gothic prince, is almost as absurd as to suppose that a Chinese may be appointed poet laureat to George the Third.”The Critical Review 28 (January 1800), p. 21.

And it made a gap in the record into proof of fraud. “In the catalogue of manuscripts, arranged by Davis in his Welch Dictionary, and by Llwyd in his Archaeologia, some of the pieces are ascribed to the sixth century; after which no Welch writer is recorded till the twelfth. This remarkable chasm leads us to infer that the pretended remains of the old Welch bards were merely composed in their names by later writers”.The Critical Review 28 (January 1800), p. 21. The missing books became the evidence that the surviving ones were forged: the argument from silence, a hundred and twenty years before G. J. Williams.

Nash, the sceptic of 1858, by the men who came after him. D. W. Nash’s Taliesin; or, the Bards and Druids of Britain made the poems twelfth-century work. Morris-Jones: “Not being restrained by any inconveniently exact knowledge of Welsh inflexions and word-formations, Nash plays fast and loose with them, and produces anything which seems to be sensible, and to fit the case … he has that naïve type of mind which naturally assumes that what it does not understand is mere silliness.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 19. And Matthew Arnold, quoted by Morris-Jones: “his determined scepticism about Welsh antiquity seems to me, however, to betray a preconceived hostility, a bias taken beforehand”.Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 20, quoting Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature.

And the owners shut the doors. The editors of the Myvyrian Archaiology, Iolo among them, set down in 1801 what had happened to the first man who tried to print the old books of Cymru. Edward Lhuyd “had been promised admittance to some of the first libraries for ancient manuscripts in Wales; but when it became known what services he intended to Welsh literature, his friends forsook him, and withdrew from him the patronage which they had promised him: books in or of use to the Welsh language were not to be encouraged. … In short, he met with oppositions that disgrace the age in which it was his misfortune to be born. The most malignant artifices were practised to obstruct him, so that he was not able to accomplish his laudable design.”The Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales, vol. I (London, 1801), “A Short Review of the Present State of Welsh Manuscripts”, p. xi, read in the Denbigh edition of 1870. A century later the men in the dock condemned Iolo for what he could not show them from those same libraries.

The same editors named who held the books, and what was done with them. “Our old manuscripts have for ages been locked up in the libraries of some of the first families in Wales — first in rank, first in fortune, and what on the present occasion is worth notice, first of birth and descent.”Myvyrian Archaiology I (1801), “A Short Review”, p. ix. “How far the absurd politics that would (had it been known how) have laid violent hands on the Welsh language, had succeeded in engaging the first and leading families of the Principality to act on such an idea, admits of no proof now, beyond that of a strong presumption”; and “That it has been once in contemplation to banish the Welsh language out of Wales, admits of no positive proofs; but such as are strongly presumptive forcibly obtrude themselves upon us”.Ibid., p. x. The collection of Moses Williams went to the Earl of Macclesfield “under the singular injunction of not even showing them to any person whatever.”Ibid., p. xi. Lhuyd’s own collection went to Sir John Seabright, “in whose library they remained for almost a whole century, inaccessible to any one that could make a proper use of them”; and of the owner of Hengwrt, Lhuyd himself had written that after promising, “At postea a quibusdam magis pseudopoliticis opinor, quam literatis dissuasus promissum revocavit”, but afterwards, dissuaded, I think, by certain men more pseudo-political than learned, he took back his promise.Ibid., p. xi, and n., citing Lhuyd, Archaeologia Britannica (1707), p. 261. Of Evan Evans, Ieuan Fardd, who gave his life to the old poetry: “Poor Evans! he spent the last years of his life in want”.Ibid., p. xii. And they answered the charge before it was laid: “before we can hope to establish a forgery, in any one single branch, it is absolutely necessary that we should forge in all, or most, of the others”; and they warned against “those who, without examining the evidences which we point out to them, may presume to decide one way or the other”.Ibid., pp. xiv, xv.

And they said how they printed. “We pretend to give nothing from oral tradition; we produce many hundreds of manuscripts of undoubted antiquity”.Myvyrian Archaiology I (1801), “A Short Review”, p. xiii. “We conceive it one of our greatest duties to give these ancient manuscripts with the most scrupulous fidelity, as we find them; even with all their real or supposed errors of orthography, omissions, interpolations; defective arrangements, of words, lines, stanzas, and the like, however obvious these may be; and to leave the work of purging them of such defects to the judicious and candid philologist. This we think the best way of obviating the charges of imposition and collusion, which may fairly be brought against those who send writings into the world through the medium of the press, in colours not originally their own”.Ibid., p. xvi. Iolo was one of its three editors.

And how copies multiply. “The copy of a negligent or unskilful transcriber gets into the hands of one who detects its errors, and in his own way corrects them … The judicious critic can only prefer that copy which has the best readings”; and the many copies of Welsh manuscripts show “appearances that art can never give”.Myvyrian Archaiology I (1801), “A Short Review”, p. xiv in the reprint of 1870. The editors described in 1801 the variant readings the prosecution would later call forgery.

They answered the forgery charge before anyone made it. Of the many decayed copies of the old poems: “These things are, as we may term them, the grey hairs and wrinkles of old age, which never deceive those who behold them … of course, they are authentic; or there must have existed a very great number of forgers … and in every age there must have been a succession of forgers, who, possessed of a secret, very similar to that of Free Masons, continued the fraud, and all to no purpose. If there are any who can possibly believe such a thing, we warmly congratulate them on the peculiar superiorities of their understandings; who can stand under mountains of absurdities and improbabilities without failing.”Myvyrian Archaiology I (1801), “A Short Review”, p. xiv in the reprint of 1870. They named the judges they feared: “that stubborn audacity, which either withholds or gives false evidence, is not chargeable on us; and we hope that we shall never have any occasion to bring a charge of audacity equally stubborn against those who, without examining the evidences which we point out to them, may presume to decide one way or the other”.Ibid., p. xv. And they condemned the thing Iolo would be charged with: “imprudent sticklers for the imaginary honours of our ancient church, or any thing else, that wears the colours of unphilosophical nationality, would admit, or reject, as best suited their prejudices; and would consequently greatly mutilate, and otherwise corrupt, our old manuscripts”.Ibid., p. xvi.

Iolo met the same doors. On his tour of the north “He had been refused access to the critically important collections at Hengwrt, Gloddaith and Wynnstay”.Jenkins (2012), p. 173. A friend of his from Montgomeryshire told it differently: that Iolo did once spend two or three months in the Wynnstay library, copying what he thought most important. The Wynnstay manuscripts burned with the house in 1858.Cynddelw (Robert Ellis), “Cofion am William Maurice”, written at Sirhowy and printed after his death in Cyfaill yr Aelwyd, II (1882), p. 270: “clywsom gyfaill mynwesol i’r hen fardd, Iolo Morganwg, yn adrodd … i Iolo dreulio dau neu dri mis yn Llyfrgell Wynnstay rywbryd yn copio y pethau pwysicaf yn ei dyb ef”; Cynddelw adds that he does not know what ground there is for it. Many collections were already “lost or scattered like chaff in the wind. Some had been deliberately burnt or allowed to fall into the clutches of rats and mice, and many owners, like the Vaughans of Hengwrt, had gained a reputation for hoarding priceless literary treasures and, as Iolo put it, ‘then hiding them for ever’.”Jenkins (2012), p. 172.

The first prosecutors, answered in their own century. Sharon Turner, in 1803: “unless Welshmen had themselves introduced their authors to our notice, we should to this day have been as ignorant of their literature as we are of the MSS. and monuments now existing in Great Tartary”; and the subjects of the old poems “were the most unlikely of all others for a forger to have chosen.”Sharon Turner, A Vindication of the Genuineness of the Ancient British Poems (London, 1803), pp. 9, 19. J. O. Westwood, in 1850, on why the doubts came so easily: “there is not a single genuine Welsh manuscript in existence, so far as I know, either historical, religious, or poetical, earlier than the twelfth or thirteenth century. Hence the ease with which doubts are thrown upon the genuineness of the earlier Welsh writers”.J. O. Westwood, “Observations on the Stone of St. Cadfan, at Towyn”, Archaeologia Cambrensis, n.s. I (1850), p. 90.

II. Thomas Stephens

The first doubter. Thomas Stephens (1821–1875): a chemist of Merthyr Tudful, schooled in the Unitarian academy at Neath, whose prize essay, The Literature of the Kymry (1849), made his name. His mask of 1842–43, “B.C.D.”, the patrons who took him up, and the prize they refused him in 1858, are told in Gwirddysg, ¶205. These are his counts, from his own pages and from the pages of the men who weighed him.

At twenty-one he called his nation’s past the relics of savages, and called that enlightenment. Of the Cymreigyddion of Abergavenny, from behind the mask: “Presumptious without dignity, and degraded by choice … To rake from deserved oblivion the monkish relics of an ignorant and priestridden age, when they should disseminate useful knowledge; to eulogise inhuman and brutal butchers, when they should form moral and intellectual men; to cherish absurd and illiberal national prejudices, when they should enlighten the national mind”.“B.C.D.” [Thomas Stephens], Letter 8, The Cambrian, 28 January 1843, in Marion Löffler and Hywel Gethin Rhys, “Thomas Stephens and the Abergavenny Cymreigyddion: Letters from the Cambrian, 1842–3”, National Library of Wales Journal (2009), p. 428. The monks were the keepers of the manuscripts of Cymru, and the butchers, in an eisteddfod’s subjects, were her princes.

He mocked the old man’s lineage, and on the same page leaned on the old man’s book. “the late Mr. Edward Williams used to say, that he was the only living personage of genuine Druidic descent; his son claimed the same privilege after his death”. And, needing a reading settled: “as the Editors of the Archaiology saw nearly every Welsh Manuscript in existence, and therefore this particular one, if such existed, the adoption by them of a different reading is conclusive of the question.”Stephens (1849), p. 123. Iolo was one of those editors. Across the book Stephens cited the Iolo Manuscripts forty-one times as his authority (Y Drychiolaethau, ¶321).

He dated a poem by his ear, and printed the hearing as a finding. “The late Mr. Edward Williams, pleads warmly for its antiquity; but with all becoming deference for so renowned an authority, I must be permitted to assert, that the metre, diction, and sentiments, belong less to the sixth century than to the sixteenth.”Stephens (1849), p. 296.

Two years after judging a nation’s antiquities, he called himself a novice in them. Writing to the antiquaries on the Tywyn stone, he differed from Westwood and Ab Ithel “with much diffidence and reluctance, being a mere novice in antiquities”, and thanked Ab Ithel for “his learning and philological skill”.Thomas Stephens, letter dated Merthyr Tydfil, Archaeologia Cambrensis, n.s. II (1851), p. 59.

He confessed he had been taken in, and called the charge of inconsistency just. “nes i minau yn mhlith ereill gael fy hudo ganddynt hwy, a thraethu barn o blaid hynafiaeth y Trioedd … yn y Literature of the Kymry. Dygir hyn yn awr yn fy erbyn, ac mor bell ag y mae yn brawf o anghysondeb mae y cyhuddiad yn gyfiawnhaol”: until I too, among others, was beguiled by them and gave a judgment for the antiquity of the Triads … in the Literature of the Kymry. This is now brought against me, and so far as it proves inconsistency the charge is justified. In the same breath: “Yr oedd Iolo Morganwg a’i ganlynwyr yn hollol anadnabyddus o hanesyddiaeth gyffredinol”, Iolo Morganwg and his followers were wholly ignorant of general history.Y Beirniad (Llanelli), Ebrill 1865, p. 307.

An English forgery for an English university, he let pass. Camden had printed a passage in Asser’s Life of Alfred giving Oxford an antiquity before Alfred: “bernir yn awr mai forgery ydoedd”, it is now judged to have been a forgery.Ibid., p. 306. One line for Oxford’s forger. A career for Iolo.

He moved Rheged three times in four years: out of the Loughor country, where the Iolo Manuscripts set it, to Lancashire in 1852 and to the river Swale in 1853 (John Gwenogvryn Evans, ¶632).

The defender of the poems found his method empty. W. F. Skene, in 1868: “his attempt to indicate their real authors breaks down”; “His reasoning appears to me to be quite inconclusive, the resemblances faint and uncertain, and the argument carries no conviction to the mind.”W. F. Skene, The Four Ancient Books of Wales (1868), vol. I, pp. 12–13. And his own admission undid him: “His admission that some of these poems are as old as the sixth century of course neutralises any argument drawn from their orthography and grammatical or poetical structure”.Ibid.

III. John Williams, Ab Ithel

He swore to the dead man’s honesty, and made him the exhibit. John Williams (1811–1862), “Ab Ithel”: Jesus College, Oxford; rector of Llanymawddwy; with H. Longueville Jones the founder, in 1846, of Archaeologia Cambrensis, which “laid the foundation-stone of the Cambrian Archaeological Association”; editor of the Cambrian Journal; “the leading light in the Welsh Manuscripts Society”; appointed by the government in 1858 to edit the old chronicles of Cymru; the organiser of the Llangollen eisteddfod of 1858; and the editor of Barddas (1862).R. T. Jenkins, Dictionary of Welsh Biography, s.v. Williams, John (Ab Ithel; 1811–1862). These are his counts.

Two judgments, made a generation apart and independently, agree. The national biography, by R. T. Jenkins, charges him with weak scholarship, incompetent editing of manuscripts, plagiarism, and an eisteddfod at which his own family took the prizes; the counts below quote it. Iolo’s own historians say the same of what he did with the papers: the contents of his Dosparth Edeyrn Davod Aur (1856) and of Barddas “were plundered from Iolo’s papers at Llanover”, and the Welsh Manuscripts Society, which Iolo’s son had served, “became a means for John Williams (Ab Ithel) to publish several of Iolo’s compilations”.Geraint H. Jenkins (ed.), A Rattleskull Genius: The Many Faces of Iolo Morganwg (Cardiff, 2005), p. 491; Brynley F. Roberts, “‘The Age of Restitution’: Taliesin ab Iolo and the Reception of Iolo Morganwg”, ibid., p. 476 n. 46, citing G. J. Williams, “Ab Ithel”, Y Llenor XII (1933), pp. 216–30.

He got at the papers through Llanover. The Halls of Llanover bought the literary manuscripts, “and scholars were encouraged to study them at their home at Llanover Court. One who seized the opportunity was John Williams (Ab Ithel)”.A Rattleskull Genius (2005), p. 264. His Barddas says so itself: “Our thanks are especially due to the Right Honourable Lord and Lady Llanover for their kindness in allowing us free access to the MSS. of Iolo Morganwg”.Barddas, vol. I (1862), p. xi, the Advertisement (the page carries no printed number; it falls between p. x and the motto leaf, p. xii). Iolo’s son had put the papers through the press noting “mistakes and doubtful readings” and raising “questions about the genuineness or authority of some pieces”;Roberts, in A Rattleskull Genius (2005), p. 478. Ab Ithel took them from Llanover and printed them as ancient doctrine.

He swore to Iolo’s honesty. Having been through the papers, he could “unhesitatingly pronounce him to be incapable of perpetrating literary deceit or forgery”.Barddas, vol. I (Llandovery, 1862), Preface, p. xvi.

Then he took papers Iolo had never published, and printed them as ancient doctrine. That book is Barddas, which came out in 1862, thirty-six years after Iolo’s death, in Ab Ithel’s arrangement and under Ab Ithel’s headings (Y Porth, ¶141). Every later charge of druidic forgery is a charge against that book.

He could have checked the sources, and did not. The prosecutor of 1926: “Petasai ab Ithel wedi ymchwilio dros drigain mlynedd yn ôl pan barotôi ei lyfr, Barddas, ar gyfair Eisteddfod Llangollen, gallasai weled disgynyddion y gwŷr y soniai Iolo am danynt, a chael hanes y llawysgrifau”: had Ab Ithel inquired, over sixty years ago, when he was preparing Barddas for the Llangollen eisteddfod, he could have seen the descendants of the men Iolo spoke of, and got the history of the manuscripts. On the same page, of the men of the century who lacked “cynheddfau meddwl yr ysgolhaig”, a scholar’s faculties: “Ni ellir cael gwell enghraifft o’r teip hwn nag ab Ithel”, there is no better example of the type than Ab Ithel.G. J. Williams, Iolo Morganwg a Chywyddau’r Ychwanegiad (1926), p. 159.

He threw out Caesar when Caesar did not suit. “It is possible that his narrative in this respect is correct; still his general character for veracity does not bind us to believe implicitly every word that he says.”Barddas, vol. I (1862), Preface, p. xxvii.

He read a saint into a stone that has nothing to do with him. Of the inscription at Tywyn, in 1850: “[Cyn]gen was probably the same with the son of Cadell, who would thus be a contemporary of Cadvan, for he flourished between 500 and 542.”Archaeologia Cambrensis, n.s. I (1850), p. 100. Morris-Jones: “an older antiquary thought, like Ab Ithel, that guadgan on the stone was an old spelling of Cadfan! It need hardly be said that the stone has nothing whatever to do with Cadfan”; and he took the stone’s Cingen for “the son of Cadell”, confusing him with a ninth-century king, so that “the stone was supposed to belong to the first half of the sixth century, though the lettering clearly indicates a later date.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, pp. 260–3. His own co-author, Westwood: he “tried to make nit mean ‘without,’ which certainly looks impossible.”J. O. Westwood, Lapidarium Walliae (Oxford, 1876–9), p. 159. Where a letter would not fit, he made it fit: “I have not been able to find daear elsewhere written tuar … so that I have no doubt both are intended to express the same thing.”Archaeologia Cambrensis 1850, p. 98. Then, having made Cadvan out of the letters GUADGAN: “But who are the persons here commemorated? As to Cadvan there can be no doubt. He was the son of Eneas Lydewig, by Gwenteirbron, a daughter of Emyr Llydaw, one of the princes of Armorica.”Ibid., pp. 99–100. A guess on one line, a saint’s whole pedigree on the next.

He could not edit a manuscript, and he took other men’s work. The national biography: “Ab Ithel had but little scholarship”; the Crown’s chronicles he edited in 1860 were “shot to pieces by later critics — not only because he was quite incapable of editing old manuscripts diplomatically but because he plagiarised the ideas of men like Aneurin Owen and Thomas Rowland without acknowledgement.”R. T. Jenkins, Dictionary of Welsh Biography, s.v. Ab Ithel.

At his own eisteddfod his family took the prizes, and the critic was refused. Llangollen, 1858: “his own family ‘won’ several of the prizes, and Thomas Stephens was the subject of an iniquitous decision because he had the audacity to suggest that the story of Madoc was not true.”R. T. Jenkins, Dictionary of Welsh Biography, s.v. Ab Ithel. He had “insisted that the Druids, Bards and Ovates wore white, blue and green robes”, and the press lampooned the platform.A Rattleskull Genius (2005), p. 492.

And the establishment nearly made him Oxford’s first professor of Celtic. “he was by this time generally regarded, except by a few people of more balanced judgement, as the principal Welsh scholar of his day, and his name was considered in all seriousness for the proposed chair of Celtic in the University of Oxford.”R. T. Jenkins, Dictionary of Welsh Biography, s.v. Ab Ithel. The chair went, in 1877, to John Rhŷs (Y Ffeil V).

IV. John Gwenogvryn Evans

The hundred and five counts. John Gwenogvryn Evans (1852–1930): a farmer’s son of Sir Gaerfyrddin, Unitarian minister until his voice failed, Civil List pensioner from 1893, Inspector of Welsh Manuscripts to the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts from 1894, and the man whose numbering every reader of a Peniarth manuscript has used for a hundred and twenty years. The counts are below.He is introduced in John Gwenogvryn Evans, ¶632, under John Gwenogvryn Evans, and what happened to him afterwards is under A Dim a Ddigwyddodd. The witnesses are Sir John Morris-Jones, in two hundred and ninety pages in the Cymmrodorion’s own journal in 1918; Ifor Williams in Y Beirniad in 1916; and Morgan Watkin in the Society’s Transactions in 1920. The chief of them was Iolo Morganwg’s own prosecutor, which is why his evidence here is no favour to us.

He wrote a new book, and signed it Taliesin. Ifor Williams began with praise, and it was not a courtesy: “Llyfr gwych yw hwn fel y disgwylid wrth gofio pwy yw ei olygydd”, this is a splendid book, as one would expect remembering who its editor is.Ifor Williams, review of Evans’s Facsimile and Text of the Book of Taliesin, Y Beirniad VI (1916), p. 129: “Y mae yn hyfrydwch digymysg i’r llygaid a’r llaw, a chyn belled ag y mae’r testun yn mynd, rhydd i ni well mantais i astudio Llyfr Taliesin na phe bai’r llawysgrif ei hun yn ein dwylaw”, an unmixed delight to the eye and the hand, and, as far as the text goes, a better advantage for studying the Book of Taliesin than if the manuscript itself were in our hands. Then he granted the editor his right to correct the scribes’ mistakes: “Petasai Dr. Evans wedi ymgymedroli wrth ddiwygio, ni chwynai neb”, had Dr Evans kept to moderation nobody would have complained; but he had meddled, Williams said, not only with the slips but with almost the whole text.Ifor Williams, Y Beirniad VI (1916), p. 203. Morris-Jones: “one sometimes wonders why he thought all this juggling with letters necessary when he can at one stroke ‘correct’ Owein ap Vryen into Owein rhywyssid, or wyr Bryneich into i Arddunwent, and can even introduce into his text whole lines written in a blundering travesty of Medieval Welsh, and representing nothing in the manuscript.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 130. And he did it silently: “I consider Dr. Evans’s method of altering the text, often without notice, and always without giving any indication of what has been altered, to be most misleading and unsatisfactory; it saves him trouble at the expense of the reader, who has to be constantly referring to the diplomatic text to verify the emendations. The manuscript reading should always be given, either in footnotes, marginal notes, or in some other manner.” Morris-Jones showed how an honest editor does it: “everything that appears in the manuscript is printed in Roman Type; letters or words that are not to be read are included in round brackets; my own insertions are printed in Italics. By omitting the italics and ignoring the brackets the reader gets the manuscript text; by omitting everything contained in brackets, and reading the rest, he has the amended text.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 153. Evans did not. Where italics were needed in his lines, Morris-Jones had to supply them: “in the text they are his own; in the translation they are mine, because he has not been candid enough to own them.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 107. He cited his rewritten lines by manuscript page, “as if the version represented the original text and not the garbled text.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 111. Ifor Williams gave the verdict two years before anyone: “gorfu iddo gyfnewid cymaint ar destun y caniadau hyn cyn medru eu deall … nes iddo gyfansoddi llyfr newydd”, he had to change so much of the text before he could understand it that he composed a new book.Ifor Williams, Y Beirniad VI (1916), p. 214. His history, Williams went on, sat comfortably on the new book and barely touched the old one, and set face to face with the manuscript it was plainly arbitrary and wrong.Ifor Williams, Y Beirniad VI (1916), read from the page images.

He made a man his own son, and cut the son out of a prayer for the dead. His theory needed Urien of Rheged to be a disguise for Owain Gwynedd, a prince of the twelfth century. But the Book of Taliesin mourns Urien’s son, Owain. “Now Owein Gwynedd cannot be the son of Urien if he is Urien, for even Dr. Evans understands that a man cannot be his own son … Therefore the very name Owein ap Urien shatters the theory — unless it can be got rid of.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 87. So he got rid of it. He headed the poem “Elegy to Owein Gwyned”, called ap Urien “unintelligible”, suggested in his note that Urien “might be a gloss on Owein”, cut it, and put in a word of his own, rhywyssid, “and pretends in his note that cynghanedd and metre demand this garbling, when nothing but his theory demands it.”Evans, Facsimile (1910), p. 116; Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, pp. 87, 88. At p. 87: “The ap is perfectly intelligible, and is stated to be ‘unintelligible’ only because it is inconsistent with his theory. For the statement that ‘cynghanedd and metre make both [Owein and Urien] impossible’ there is no justification whatever.” The couplet is a prayer: Eneit Owein ap Uryen, / Gobwyllit Reen oe reit, may the Lord look to the need of the soul of Owain son of Urien. “This very simple, almost beautiful, couplet has to be mutilated and turned into bathos in the interests of a mad theory. But the theory alone does not account for the vandalism; there is incompetence and blindness as well.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 88. Of reit, need, “he has not a glimmer”, and “for his mistranslation he has no excuse but his own blindness, for Robert Williams renders the line correctly.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, pp. 88, 89. His own version of the couplet: Eneid Owein, rhywyssid, Gobwyllid y ner o’i raid. And the elegy’s last line, ny rannet rac y eneit, carried the very proof he refused: “The initial n is a Hiberno-Saxon r misread as n; reading the positive ry instead of the negative ny, the line means it, his wealth, was given away for his soul. The editor never sees any error of reading from the Hiberno-Saxon script, because it upsets his theory; but he sees that the phrase is positive, and emends ny to in, to us, which is a jarring false note. He gives the rest of the line as rhagor i Eneid, which makes it too long, and renders this his soul goes marching on!” Rhag y enaid, “for his soul”, is in one of the best-known poems of the Dafydd ap Gwilym canon. “As ‘rhagor i Eneid’ is an idiom of his own invention, he can of course make it mean anything he likes.” And “while he flatters himself that he knows ‘the dainty tread of the Chief of Bards’, he recognises it as the tramp of ‘John Brown’s Body’.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 89. And because Owain Gwynedd never killed anyone called Fflamddwyn, the Flamebearer, lladd, to kill, became “pressed hard”. “It will not do. Lladd does not mean ‘to press hard’; in other combinations it may mean ‘to cut’, or ‘to strike’; but lladd dyn means ‘to kill a man’, and no quibbling can make it mean anything else. No one has ever dreamt that Na ladd means ‘thou shalt not press hard’, or imagined the ghost of an ambiguity in this very form lladdodd in the story of Cain and Abel, Gen. iv. 8; and what is true in this respect of the Welsh Bible is true of Welsh literature generally.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 90. Na ladd, the commandment, and Genesis 4:8, in the Bible in Cymraeg [POST-JUSTINIAN]; the Septuagint ou phoneuseis and Genesis 4:8 [PRE-JUSTINIAN].

He read Cymraeg backwards. Meeting euroi in the Book of Taliesin, he declared it a word “spelt backwards” by a medieval glossator: turn it round and you get ioruc, a South Walian word for ivy.Evans, Facsimile (1910), p. 124; Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 128. “A suggestion so desperately crazy that one knows not what to say.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 128. In 1924 he did not withdraw it. He told Morris-Jones “to learn before he sets out to teach”, and read a royal genealogy of the Britons backwards as well, map-luc into cuiwtpaut, cwympawdd, “he felled”, so that “the ninth genealogy is not a genealogy at all, but simply a perversion of a historical record.”Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), p. 38. His authority: soldiers in the Great War, who wrote words backwards to get their letters past the censor. Where a letter was missing, he supplied one. The Harleian note on the first British poets begins tunc, “then”, with its capital T left blank for the painter. Evans painted in an M. Munc: Magnus Barefoot of Norway, who raided Môn in 1098. With one letter that is not in the manuscript he moved Taliesin and his fellow poets five hundred years forward, and wrote a verse about it: “Twixt Munc and Tunc, remember, / There differs but a letter.”Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), p. 10. There does. It was his. What would not go backwards he turned inside out: “Os pery gair neu enw yn anhydrin, try ef y tu gwrthwyneb allan, fel Rheged yn Rhedeg, ac esbonia ef yn hwylus yn ei ffurf newydd”: if a word or a name stays stubborn, he turns it inside out, as Rheged into Rhedeg, and explains it neatly in its new form.Ifor Williams, Y Beirniad VI (1916), p. 129. And a few lines after the backwards genealogy he wrote: “It has been my lot to examine scores of Pedigree MSS., and to observe hundreds of changes and additions made in later copies, or fresh compilations, which are all wonderfully put together. Little wonder, therefore, that no one believes in any pedigree but his own.”Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), pp. 38–39. Hundreds of changes and additions: the normal state of the Britons’ pedigrees, when the Crown’s inspector found them. Forgery, when Iolo made them.Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924): Munc and the verse, pp. 7–10 and n.; the backwards genealogy and the soldiers, p. 38 and n. 34.

He threw every charge back at the man who caught him. Caught altering texts without notice, he wrote that Morris-Jones “manufactures his ‘facts’ as he goes along to suit his whims”, “is mentally incapable of seeing anything as it exists, or of stating things accurately … He builds on assumptions, and garbled evidence”.Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), p. 62. Caught holding back evidence indexed in his own book: “A man who suppresses facts in this way is not an ‘honest broker’”, and his critic’s work was “misleading from suppressio veri and suggestio falsi”, from hiding the true and suggesting the false.Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), pp. 62, 6. Caught conjuring a saint out of a manuscript that does not name her, “Thus a Saxon lady becomes a Welsh saint, though the MS. judiciously omits her name”, he wrote that Morris-Jones “‘judiciously omits’ to state” things.Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 74; Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), p. 24. Caught borrowing another man’s mistake without acknowledgment, he hinted that Morris-Jones had followed him: “In the Urien poems the agreement is remarkable, and had my efforts followed his, I should be accused of wholesale borrowings ‘without acknowledgment.’” Caught taking Caw out of Iolo’s book without a reference: “No more barefaced piece of plagiarism was ever perpetrated.”Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), pp. 64, 88. Having warned his reviewers that none of them could “in 7 minutes see what it has taken me 7 years to ‘grip’”, he found his critic’s “outstanding characteristic is egotism. Indeed he has no peer since the Kaiser went into exile.”Evans, Poems (1915), p. xiii; Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), p. 4. Told that his reasoning showed a mind that did not know what proof was: “Verily Sir John has painted his own portrait with a deft hand.”Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), p. 18. Then he copied out Morris-Jones’s words about him, that he hid his references and held back the evidence, turned them round, and wrote underneath: “How well he describes his own methods, and what he does he ‘obviously’ believes others do.”Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), p. 84. In 1906, rewriting a word of the Black Book of Carmarthen that did not suit him, he blamed the scribe: “Copyists were careless: they misread their originals, and not infrequently made deliberate alterations.”Evans, Black Book of Carmarthen (1906), pp. xvi–xvii. He had written his own charge sheet in 1899, praising a humble copyist for resisting the love of “‘airing knowledge’ which impels so many of the ‘learned’ to tamper with texts, to empty themselves in irrelevant comment, and to crowd their footnotes with references they have not verified.”Evans, Report, I, ii (1899), p. vii. He could see it perfectly well, in other men.“Judiciously omits” turns Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, pp. 74–75; “How well he describes” quotes Morris-Jones, pp. 57 and 65. In the same Black Book passage he emends Ihewon, Jews, to cerddorion, bards: Evans, Black Book of Carmarthen (1906), pp. xvi–xvii.

He wrote his own life into Taliesin’s. The poem says the poet “was not born in adversity”; “though he grew up in abject poverty,” adds Evans, against the line he has just quoted. He was “a prince in disguise”; “he had no settled home”; “he was carried off to Powys, and made a herdsman there. After a time he escaped.”Evans, Poems (1915), p. xiii. A poor boy put to work for his keep, better than his station, who got away and rose to serve a great lord. It is not Taliesin’s life.

And he dated the mysticism by a line of an English chronicle. Morris-Jones: “Dr. Evans believes that the mysticism ‘definitely marks the period of the composition of the poems’ as the twelfth century. Why? Because ‘Under the year 1200 Richard of Hoveden breaks his narrative to give a brief summary of the maxims of the philosopher Secundus’!”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, Y Cymmrodor XXVIII (1918), p. 243, quoting Evans, Poems from the Book of Taliesin (1915), pp. xl–xli. A body of British poetry redated because an English chronicler summarised a philosopher in 1200.

He burned his working, and entered it to his credit. “I went to Peniarth and saw the Book of Taliesin — I borrowed the MS., and copied it. To my surprise I found the meaning of a multitude of passages was clear as day-light and, like Tartini’s sixth Sonata, their pure, simple harmonies haunted me. To account for the obscurity of the other parts, I conceived the theory that the ‘sixth century’ work of Taliesin had been vamped in the twelfth, for I was nurtured in sixth century traditions. I elaborated my theory on 609 folios of foolscap … After a week or two I set to the work of testing my thesis at every point, and by degrees demolished my own superstructure to the last line. To my credit be it recorded the 609 folios of foolscap, with all their prettily turned passages, were consigned to the flames, leaving me sadder, but no whit wiser.”Evans, Poems (1915), p. vi. Not the Book of Taliesin: that he had borrowed, and it is Peniarth MS 2 today, under his number. He burned his own theory, and with it the only record of the testing he claims he did. Burned by him, boasted of by him, checkable by no one. The theory existed, by his own account, to explain the obscure parts: the parts he could not understand. He did not find the poems late. He found them hard, and put the date of his failure on the poet. “What is unintelligible to him is corrupt”;Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 128. “anything not immediately intelligible to himself he has at once altered, without attempting to understand it as it is.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 116. His own pages he burned. The scribe’s he rewrote. Morris-Jones took the confession apart a line at a time. On the daylight: “(fond delusion!)”. The theory was Matthew Arnold’s, “expressly set forth and defended in his Celtic Literature”, the same Arnold who wanted Cymraeg gone: “his theory! I have to say that this is news to me; but 609 is precise.” “What does ‘elaborating’ a theory mean if it does not include testing it at every point?” The demolition “is very unlike anything we see him do in the present work; whenever he has to pull down … he sets up something else in a frantic attempt to prop up the ramshackle structure.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 145. “No whit wiser, after so successfully disposing of the tradition!” “The romantic account of the holocaust of folios”.Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 146. And the dates convict him. Six years after the bonfire, his Black Book of Carmarthen of 1906 still put Taliesin at Maelgwn’s court, still called Prydyn “North Scotland”, put Maelgwn, dead in 547, at a battle in 573, and said: “The story of Taliessin contending with the bards in the court of Maelgwn Gwynedd is known to all readers of Lady Charlotte Guest’s Mabinogion. We have clearly a reference to the same tradition here … Thus the xvith century Hanes is confirmed by our xiith century manuscript.”Evans, Black Book of Carmarthen (1906), p. xvi. He was still printing the old view, and proving it. In the same pages he printed, from the Black Book, the poet’s greeting “Ugnach! blessings on thy Gorsedd. Grace and honour be thine. And I am Taliessin”, and noted that “there is a Gorsedd still, however, in the parish of Llan Dwrog”, setting beside it the line “Mi a fum ynghaer Wydion, ger gorsedd Deon”, I have been in Gwydion’s fort, beside the gorsedd of Deon.Evans, Black Book of Carmarthen (1906), pp. xvi, xvii. “What has become of the line by line demolition of 1900 or thereabouts?”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 147. Evans, The Black Book of Carmarthen (Pwllheli, 1906), pp. ix–x.

He was a copyist who wanted to be a prophet. His gift was copying manuscripts letter for letter. He wanted to be the man who told the Britons what they meant. “Why should he be a mere transcriber, a mere machine? Why should not he, too, have his say on matters of textual criticism and literary history?” “It is strange that the accurate palaeographer who most faithfully supplies us with the absolute facts of the manuscripts has no idea how to use the facts himself, or of the value of any evidence. His reasoning … is all purely subjective.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 38. “Dr. Evans is a belated disciple of the Nashian school of thought; his theory rests ultimately on an unwillingness to believe that anything contained in the manuscript can be much older than the manuscript itself”, a scepticism “akin to that of the person who is too knowing to be taken in by the truth.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 37. “The fact is, Dr. Evans’s theory is not the result of any detailed examination and demolition of Matthew Arnold’s theory, but represents his attempt to find a solution of the problem presented by the reluctance which he knew to be felt by scholars like Rhys and Anwyl to accept a sixth century origin of any of the poems. He imbibed the scepticism that was in the air, and it became an intuition, an instinctive conviction within him. This is the foundation of his theory, and the source of his confidence in it.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 147. Everyone who might have helped warned him off. A friend flung the Four Ancient Books on a table and asked him “with crushing emphasis: Do you think that you are going to get at the bottom of stuff like that?”, and he wrote: “Men and brethren! I thus became a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee of the straitest sect, and renounced Taliesin, as I thought and believed, for ever.” He gave up, in St Paul’s words. He plied the German Celticist Heinrich Zimmer with questions for a day at Tremfan and “received uniformly for answer: nis gwnn — nis gallav dywedyd, I do not know — I cannot say.”Evans, Poems (1915), p. vii. A respected scholar of Cymraeg refused to edit Taliesin with him; we shall meet him again. Only Professor Strachan told him to go on, and warned him he would “have to run the risk of making howlers.”Evans, Poems (1915), p. viii. He took the warning as a licence: “I have never received an inspired answer to a ‘wise’ question; but the imprudent sort is apt to find a hot response. Better, then, a ‘howler’ that may herald the light, than all the respectability of empty silence. I am content to become the whipping-boy of light & truth.” Morris-Jones: “He fully accepts the position”.Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 149. He came back anyway: “He issues his revelation in the tone and manner of a challenge to the world.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 38. “He makes a great show of following a scientific method, and evinces his usual confusion of thought.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 51. Evans, Facsimile (1910), p. vi, for the whipping-boy. The Pharisee: Acts 23:6 and 26:5 in the English Bible [POST-JUSTINIAN]; the Greek Pharisaios, huios Pharisaiōn [PRE-JUSTINIAN].

He announced a clean slate, and a theory no evidence could touch. Morris-Jones gave him his due for the years before it: “In those years he justly prided himself on having no theory.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 146. Then: “At last the policy of the ‘clean slate’ was adopted. I resolved to have no plan, no theory, no object but one — to get at the meaning of the text, and follow the evidence whithersoever it might lead.”Evans, Poems (1915), p. viii. Five pages later: “Even if it be proved that I have made a mistake in every line the time of composition, the chief actors, and the GEOGRAPHY will remain unaffected.”Evans, Poems (1915), p. xiii. The capitals are his. Morris-Jones: “Can a structure stand if the foundations be destroyed? No; but it would be a mistake to suppose that Dr. Evans’s theory is founded on his readings of the text. These may be ‘proved’ to be all wrong, but the theory ‘will remain unaffected’. They support it, no doubt; but it is not founded on them, or on any facts; the actors and the GEOGRAPHY rest securely on the time, and this has its foundation in an inner conviction which nothing can shake”; and “Like many others who labour under delusions he believes that he alone is sane”, Evans having written that the old names had “so hypnotized my precursors as to paralyse their critical faculty.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, pp. 148, 82. Ifor Williams: “syrthiodd i afael amryfusedd cadarn, a chollodd bob cydbwysedd barn”, he fell into the grip of a firm delusion and lost all balance of judgement;Ifor Williams, Y Beirniad VI (1916), p. 129. and “Ni bu erioed fwy o bendantrwydd mewn rhagymadrodd, a chasgliadau mwy chwyldroadol, nac ysywaeth resymau mwy sigledig i’w hategu”, never was an introduction more certain, its conclusions more revolutionary, or, alas, its reasons shakier; and “Gresyn yw dywedyd dim i darfu ffydd mor gadarn mewn damcaniaeth annwyl”, it seems a shame to disturb so firm a faith in a beloved theory.Ifor Williams, Y Beirniad VI (1916), pp. 129, 205. Evans, Facsimile (1910), p. xix.

He wrote the rule, and broke it. “Nothing is more dangerous to inquiry than an attempt to bring discoveries into conformity with some system or theory. It leads to undue emphasis being laid on what supports, and undue neglect of what saps such theory or system.” His own footnote, 1907. “It is to be regretted that he has not clung to this opinion.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 146. A twelfth-century poet names Taliesin as bard to Urien’s own father. “This twelfth century reference to Taliesin is not mentioned by Dr. Evans.” And: “‘undue neglect’ is, however, much too mild a term to apply to his treatment of the evidence that tells against him.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 171. Evans, The White Book Mabinogion (Pwllheli, 1907), introduction, n.

He did not argue; he pronounced. “Nid rhesymu o blaid ei ddyfarniad a wna’r Doctor fel rheol”: the Doctor does not, as a rule, give reasons for his verdict.Ifor Williams, Y Beirniad VI (1916), p. 129. “When the evidence is against it, he simply asserts it against the evidence.” Every manuscript calls the poet Prydydd y Moch; Evans renamed him Prydydd y Mochnant, with the note “Always mistakenly written ‘Prydydd y moch’.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 39. “The evidence of manuscripts is nothing — it is the record of a mistake.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 40. And his invented name was bad Cymraeg too: “he really has only the vaguest notions of Welsh syntax.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 39. Arguing in a circle, said Morris-Jones, was “the editor’s persistent habit”.Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 91. Ifor Williams: “Y mae fel gŵr yn ceisio agor clo dieithr â’i allwedd ei hun, ac yn meddwl y byd o’i allwedd. Os gwrthyd y clo ag agor, nid ar yr allwedd y mae’r bai ond ar y clo, a’r clo sy’n gorfod dioddef.”Ifor Williams, Y Beirniad VI (1916), p. 129. He is like a man trying a strange lock with his own key, and thinking the world of his key. If the lock will not open, the fault is the lock’s, and the lock is made to suffer.Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, pp. 38, 56.

He demanded the evidence, and when it was shown him, he moved the manuscript. Of the Taliesin of tradition he asked: “Where is the evidence for this ghost, this birth of fraud, this tattle of public platforms? Might-have-been is not evidence, but the offspring of indolent belief, which shirks the effort to think.”Evans, Facsimile (1910), p. iii. The evidence is a note in a British Library manuscript, Harleian MS 3859, saying that in the time of Ida, in the sixth century, Talhaearn, Aneirin, Taliesin, Bluchbard and Cian were famous poets. Evans had printed that note himself, at the head of his own introduction. “Y mae’r ‘evidence’ yn gnepyn sylweddol yn Harley 3859”: the evidence is a solid lump in Harley 3859.Ifor Williams, Y Beirniad VI (1916), p. 130. So he re-dated the manuscript, three times in one year, later each time: “circa 1100” in his report to the Crown;Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 43. On pp. 43–4 he gives the authorities’ date for Harley MS 3859: Mommsen’s edition of 1894 has it “the end of the eleventh century according to Henry Bradshaw … or the beginning of the twelfth in the opinion of Sir E. Maunde Thompson (Keeper of Manuscripts)”. “after 1125” in his Taliesin, “giving no reasons, and making no reference at all to his own official report”;Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 41. “about 1130” a few pages on.Evans, Facsimile (1910), p. xxxvi; Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 42. The later the manuscript, the closer it came to his twelfth-century Taliesin. But then its writer would be telling readers who knew a famous living poet that the man had lived six hundred years before. Ifor Williams: “Ni fedraf yn fy myw lyncu’r posibilrwydd … Pwy a fynnai ef ei dwyllo? Pwy a fedrai ei dwyllo?”Ifor Williams, Y Beirniad VI (1916), p. 130. I cannot for the life of me swallow it. Whom would he want to fool? Whom could he? Morris-Jones: “There is no need to waste words on the ineptitude of the suggestion that the Taliesin named in it is a person who was composing poetry in 1176.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 45. So Evans waved the note away as dogma and turned to “the earliest recorded use of words in our text”, “that is, by inquiring into something else. He looks the fact straight in the face, and passes by on the other side”, like the priest in the parable who crossed the road.Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 42. And he gave Evans’s sneer back to him: “I have to remind Dr. Evans that ‘might-have-been is not evidence’. Or rather, perhaps one ought to say that all this might-have-been, much of which is improbable in the highest degree, is very satisfactory evidence that the theory which calls for it is a delusion.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 43. Luke 10:31–32 in the English Bible [POST-JUSTINIAN]; the Greek antiparēlthen [PRE-JUSTINIAN].

He left the oldest law book out. The Black Book of Chirk, the oldest copy of the Laws in Cymraeg, records the Men of the North raiding Arfon under Clydno Eidyn and Rhydderch Hael, Rhun son of Maelgwn marching north against them, and Taliesin singing on the march: sixth-century men, every one. “Even by itself, it is absolutely decisive against the theory that Taliesin lived in the twelfth century. How does Dr. Gwenogvryn Evans deal with this evidence? He does not mention it at all as bearing on the question of Taliesin’s date. He misquotes part of it to prove that y Gogledd (the North) was the district around Chester.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 48. He printed “Rhun …” with the father’s name dotted out, “then palms him off as Rhun son of Owein Gwynedd”.Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 49. Elsewhere he wrote that Maelgwn “is the eponym of Owein Gwynedd, whose son Rhun is said, in the Chirk Codex, to be the son of Maelgwn”: “There is not a syllable of truth in the statement … Rhun ab Owein Gwynedd is not mentioned at all in the manuscript; nothing is said about him. Rhun vab Maelcun is mentioned, and the context and the whole purpose of the memorandum, which is to account for ancient privileges, show that Rhun vab Maelgwn is meant.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 92. “He probably intended to say that Rhun ab Owein is called in the Codex the son of Maelgwn; but is said, in the Chirk Codex, to be the son of Maelgwn, is more effective, and gives the impression that the Codex itself says so. Undoubtedly the editor deceives himself by these verbal tricks, as much as he deceives his confiding readers.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 93. The poets who name Taliesin as a bard of the past, the Black Book’s dialogue of Myrddin and Taliesin, the Gododdin’s “Taliesin of noble thought”: “What does Dr. Gwenogvryn Evans say about all this? Not one word.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 50. And he had the nerve to ask where the evidence was. Of Urien in the poems: “He is seen not in the glamour of romance, not even through the haze of a century or two, but as the real prince of Rheged by a man who knew him, and loved him … it breathes an intimacy which could hardly be simulated in a production founded on hearsay or tradition.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 193. And the conclusion: “the existence in the sixth century of a bard of the name of Taliesin is a historical fact as well authenticated as most facts of British history in that century.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, pp. 46–47, 151.

He called the royal genealogies of the Britons a fraud, on a spelling he made up. “But ‘Cunedda’ is an impossible derivative of Cuno-dag, which would give Cyndda in twelfth century Welsh. The very form ‘Cunedda’ shows that the compiler of the Harleian pedigrees was combining material of various dates and origin. I do not question Cuno-dag being an ancient form picked up somewhere. But its transformation into ‘Cunedda’ proves that the compiler was a late, i.e., twelfth century fabricator.” “‘Cunodag’ does not occur at all! It is a hypothetical or imaginary form ‘picked up somewhere’ by Dr. Evans himself.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 91. “The statement that the fact (Cuneda) is ‘impossible’ because it does not accord with the supposition (Cuno-dag) is characteristic.” The older form, Cunedag, stands in the same manuscript; Morris-Jones printed the page as his frontispiece. And the vowel Evans called late “betrays the editor’s ignorance of the fact that the stem-vowel often appears as -e- in the sixth century, as in Gildas’ Cuneglase.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 92. He called the compiler of the royal genealogies of the Britons a fabricator, on a word that was never written anywhere but in his own book.Evans, Facsimile (1910), p. xxiv.

He built the whole theory on two woods with one name. There was a wood called Llwyfein in the North and another in Flintshire. “His mistake consists in the not unnatural supposition that the two Llwyfeins are one and the same; this error of rolling two places into one became the starting point of the new geography and the eponym theory; it brought Taliesin into the twelfth century, and made Owein Gwynedd his hero.” “There is therefore no conceivable reason why there should not be a coed Llwyfein in Flintshire in the twelfth century and a coed Llwyfein in the North in the sixth.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 170. And from that one muddle, a circle: “The twelfth century geography of the poems, which has been revealed only to Dr. Evans, is the complement of another revelation, namely, that the sixth century personal names are eponyms of twelfth century characters. To his mind the one proves the other. Urien is Owein Gwynedd because Urien prevailed in Gogledd; and Gogledd is Cheshire because Owein Gwynedd never was in Scotland.” A proves B because B proves A. “The geographical theory is based on the eponym theory, and on misrepresentations; the proof of the eponym theory from the geographical theory must therefore be disallowed.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, pp. 84, 171.

He moved the Old North to the country round Chester, fourteen places, every one the same way. Yr Hen Ogledd, the Old North, is the ground of Urien and Taliesin: the British kingdoms of the sixth century in what is now southern Scotland and northern England, the oldest territorial memory in Cymraeg. Evans set it down inside a sixty-mile circle round Chester. In the one Taliesin volume: Gogledd, the North, to Chester; Alclud to Aldford; Din Eidyn to Caergwrle; Din Alawg to Hawarden; the Gweryd to the Dee; Caer Weir to Bangor; Caer Liwelydd to Chester again; llychwr to Lache Lane; porffor to Pulford; Rheged to Oswestry; Llyminawg to Beaumaris; Foyn to Penmon; Blathaon to the Wirral; Ardunwen to Mold. Not one moves the other way. Honest mistakes scatter. Purpose does not.Linda Tuhiwai Smith opens Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London, 1999), p. 1: “The word itself, ‘research’, is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary.” The discipline did not arrive after the conquest to describe it. It came as part of the apparatus: it classified, named, mapped, dated and archived the conquered, and its findings became the record on which policy rested. Evans is that sentence in one man, in his own language, against his own country, at public expense. His tools were Domesday Book, the Conqueror’s tax roll, and Ormerod’s History of Cheshire. He learned the method, he said, at Professor Freeman’s lectures at Oxford: “visiting the scene of action, going over the entire ground with a mind stored with facts.”Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), p. 5. Freeman was the loudest voice of the school that traced England’s freedom to the Germanic settlers who took Britain from the Britons. Evans walked the ground with his mind made up, his theory in one hand and a map of Cheshire in the other.Evans’s notes and introductions to the Facsimile (1910) and Poems (1915), tracked one by one at Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, pp. 40–86.

He made the North into Cheshire. Y Gogledd became “the country bordering on the lower half of the Dee.”Evans, Facsimile (1910), p. xvii; Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 55. To prove it he quoted Gwalchmai, and slipped yn Nyfed, “in Dyfed”, into the quotation where the manuscript has dyhed, “war”: “Thus he begins with a gross misquotation; he substitutes one word for another, and says nothing about it.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 55. He glossed the Men of the North in Armes Prydein as “the men of Hugh Lupus, Earl of Chester”: “It need hardly be said that there is no Hugh Lupus in the text, which is that of the ninth century Armes. We have here only another example of the editor’s habit of arguing in a circle — of proving a thing by assuming it in his premises. It is because Gogledd is Cheshire that Hugh Lupus is dragged in; and because Gwyr Gogledd are Hugh’s men, therefore Gogledd is Cheshire.”Evans, Facsimile (1910), p. xvii; Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 56. And the five passages in the Bruts that settle it, Albanactus taking the North “which is called after his name yr Alban”, the North running to Caithness, Cadwallon meeting Edwin in Northumberland, he left out: “they are all indexed in his Bruts volume, so that I was able to find the five in as many minutes. He thus manifestly holds back the relevant evidence, while he insultingly accuses others of inventing its plain implication … It is almost incredible to what lengths an illogical mind may be driven when labouring under a ‘strong delusion’.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, pp. 56, 57. “It is as remarkable for what it omits as for what it contains.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 56. By 1924 his North had grown into the whole Earldom of Chester, “stretching from Rhuddlan on the Clwyd to the Cheviot Hills”, and anyone who doubted it had an ignorance that “has no frontiers, and whose effrontery knows no bounds.”Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), pp. 22–25. “Strong delusion”: 2 Thessalonians 2:11 in the English Bible [POST-JUSTINIAN]; the Greek energeian planēs [PRE-JUSTINIAN].

He moved Scotland to Flintshire. Prydyn, the land of the Picts, became “the modern counties of Flint and Denbigh.” A line listing Cymry, English, Irish and Picts he quoted with Kymry left out, “in order that it may appear that ‘gwyr Prydyn’ are Welshmen; and thus we have the funny collocation ‘Irishmen, Englishmen, and men of Flint-and-Denbigh’, which reminds one of ‘Cymru, Lloegr, a Llanrwst’.” Wales, England and Llanrwst. Into another poem he inserted the Cymry himself, “(the Kymry) will defend their coast”. “He is quite unable to detect in his reasoning the childish fallacy of petitio principii”: the schoolboy’s trick of assuming what you set out to prove.Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 63.

He built Dumbarton out of two Cheshire villages. Alclud is Dumbarton Rock. Bede: “Alcluith, quod lingua eorum significat petram Cluith; est enim juxta fluvium nominis illius”, Alcluith, which in their language means the rock of the Clyde, for it stands beside the river of that name; Petra Cloithe in Adamnán, Arx alt clut in the Annals, “Kaer Alclut” in the Bruts. “No one has ever suggested before that Alclut in Welsh literature does not mean Dumbarton.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 60. Evans found a Clutton in Cheshire, “old and authentic, for it appears in the Domesday CLUT-tone”: “Because the town-name is old, therefore Clud must be the brook!”Evans, Facsimile (1910), p. xix; Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 61. Aldford stands on the brook and supplied the Al-. “Our good editor invites us to accept a name made by himself, à la Lewis Carroll, from the Al of Aldford and the Clut of Clutton, in place of the Alclyde of history.” Where even that would not do, ryt alclut, the Ford of Alclud, was “pure gibberish here.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 61.

He took Caer Liwelydd to Chester, by cutting a couplet in half. Caer Liwelydd is Carlisle: Luguvallium to the Romans; in Bede, “venit ad Lugubaliam, quae a populis Anglorum corrupte Luel vocatur”, he came to Lugubalia, which the English corruptly call Luel; and “as British Lugu-belinos gave Welsh Llywelyn, so British Lugu-balion gave Welsh Llywelydd exactly.” “Nothing in British topography is more certain.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 59. The couplet of Prydydd y Moch runs “to Lliwelydd thy praise will spread, Llywelyn, and Llywarch has sung it”. Evans quoted the first half, dropped the half that spoiled it, and wrote: “here we have a pointed reference to the alliance of Ll’n with the earl of Chester.” “It is seen that the words omitted by Dr. Evans put a different complexion on the matter … We have the usual misquotation, mis-translation, and suppression of context.” The name, he offered, was “possibly a cpd. of Lli + Gwelydd, ? the stream of the Laches”.Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 58. The first sighting of the puddles.

He moved Chester to Holt, and went on calling it Chester. Having spent Chester on Carlisle, he needed a new home for Caer Lleon, the City of the Legions: “Can it be that the Cair legion of the Nennian list means Holt, to which the name of ‘Caer lleon’ has adhered?” “The name has not ‘adhered’ to Holt”; Holt was Castell Lleon.Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 59. “Caer Lleon has adhered to Chester by a tradition so universal and so insistent that our editor himself cannot escape from its grip: he writes ‘Caer lleon on the Dee, or Chester’, at page ix, and renders Iarll Kaer Llion ‘earl of Chester’ at page 100.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 60. Evans, Poems (1915), p. xiii.

He made the Forth into the Dee, because both rivers have a border on them. A description of Scotland of 1165, which Evans printed in his own apparatus, says the Forth was called in British Werid. He went on: “Similarly part of the lower Dee divided Saxon and Brython”, and indexed the Gweryd as the Dee.Evans, Facsimile (1910), p. 86. “Because the Dee is ‘similar’ to the Forth in being on a border, therefore he considers that he is justified in asserting, without a scrap of evidence, that it had the same name.” He spelled the name Gweryð, “and it is simple misrepresentation to write the name Gweryð, as he persists in doing.” He gave the Scottish chronicle a Latin title: “another title of Dr. Evans’s invention. He quotes at second hand from F.A.B., and gives no reference. If he had consulted the Chron. he would have seen that the Latin title is De Situ Albanie.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 62. And the Wall in o wawl hyd weryd, “from the Wall to the Forth”, became “Domesday’s Waure, now Woore in the parish of Mucklestone”, a wawl that “has nothing to do with any Roman, or other Wall”, though the Historia Brittonum says the Wall was called in British Guaul.Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 62; Evans, Facsimile (1910), p. 86.

He moved John o’ Groats to the Wirral. The island’s old measure in Cymraeg runs, in the words of Brut y Saeson, “from the extreme point of Cornwall which is called Pengwaedd to the extreme point of Prydyn which is called Penblathaon”, “clearly the Medieval Welsh equivalent of ‘from Land’s End to John o’Groats’.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, pp. 57, 58. Evans: “This is the headland of Wirral between the Balas of the Dee and the Mersey. Blataon is clearly a scr(ibal) err(or) for Balaon.” “Unfortunately for him bala is not the mouth of a river but its ‘efflux from a lake’; the bala of the Dee is at Bala in Merioneth. This disposes of Wirral.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 57.

He put Durham in Bangor Cathedral. Caer Weir, on the Wear, is Durham. Evans: “K(aer) Feir, i.e. Bangor Cathedral, which is dedicated to Meir.” “So is the church of Llanfair Pwll Gwyngyll, and I put in a claim for this, though, I confess, I have never heard either church called a caer.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 61.

He moved Edinburgh to Caergwrle, and a prince to a hamlet. Din Eidyn is Edinburgh. He spelled it Eiðin, against “the clear and conclusive evidence of the manuscripts”, “actually cites this as the form in the Black Book”, and found it in Breiddin Hill; pressed with the northern reading, he jeered that the name “has no more to do with ‘Tintock’ than with ‘Tin tacks’”.Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 78; Evans, Facsimile (1910), p. 92. In 1924 Clydno Eidyn, a prince of the Men of the North, became a Cheshire township: “the Welsh of Cluton Edwin, situated east of Farndon.”Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), p. 19. Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, pp. 77, 79.

He fitted a kingdom into six miles, and then made it a brook. Aeron, the northern kingdom beside Strathclyde, became “a district — extending, apparently, from Eulo to Chester”: “a distance of about six miles as the crow flies — it has been difficult to find room for this ‘district’.” His proof that Henry II went to “sojourn and shelter in Aeron”: “In the passage referred to there is no mention of Henry II, or of Ceiriog, or of ‘sojourn’ or ‘shelter’.” His proof that Owain Gwynedd ruled “from Anglesey to Tegeingl, to Aeron, to Chester”: the poem says East Anglia, and he wrote Tegeingl, so that “Aeron takes its place nicely between Tegeingl (Flintshire) and Chester, as it should according to the theory.”Evans, Facsimile (1910), p. xix; Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 75. Then “Aeron was also the Welsh name of the ‘Pulford’ brook”: “It is not thought necessary to offer any proof of this astonishing statement.”Evans, Facsimile (1910), p. xix; Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 76. And Cynddelw’s “renowned ruler of Clud and Aeron” became lord of two Cheshire streams: “(In passing, is not the ‘renowned ruler’ of two little brooks a trifle absurd?)” When Morris-Jones put Aeron in Ayrshire, Evans sneered at “the Bangor philology in excelsis which discovered … that Aer-on is simply Ayr with a tail!”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 76; Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), p. 81.

He put Rheged beside Oswestry, by a night’s ride that took all night and all day. Rheged, he said, “means a Run or March, for it is obviously a metathesis of Rhedeg.” “‘Obviously’! though neither rhedeg in Welsh nor run in English ever means a ‘march’ or ‘border’.” His first proof: “He quotes a line from Cynddelw in which redeg has its usual meaning”, gave the word a capital letter, “and because tervyn Caer lleon occurs four lines before, claims that Rheged is not far from Chester.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 66. His other was a poet riding “from Maelienydd to the land of Rheged in one night”, Esgyneis ar Velyn o Vaelenydd hyd yn hir Reged rhwng nos a dydd, “borrowing without acknowledgment Stephens’s mistake”: rhwng nos a dydd means night and day, riding without rest, as the messengers of Macsen rode from Arfon to Rome.Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, pp. 66–67. “This shows that ‘a night’s ride’ is nonsense.” And in the line before, “which Dr. Evans as usual omits”, the rider cries out at the distance: Mor bell o Geri Gaer Liwelydd!Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 66. How far from Ceri is Carlisle! The poem he used to put Rheged by Oswestry names Caer Liwelydd one line above his quotation. Ifor Williams: “Ni bu erioed fwy o gamgymeriad”, there was never a bigger mistake.Ifor Williams, Y Beirniad VI (1916), p. 132. In 1924 Evans measured it: twenty-four miles as the crow flies, easy in a night.Evans, Poems (1915), p. xiii; Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), pp. 29–30.

He turned a forest into a bag of pea-pods. Goddeu, the forest country of the North, he derived from cod, a pod, “the same meaning as the second element in the English word peas-cod”, and put it in Shropshire.Evans, Facsimile (1910), p. xiv; Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 72. “Apparently he does not know that the Welsh cod is borrowed from the English.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 72. His ffagodeu, “bean-stalks tied in bundles”, is the plural, in Cymraeg, of the English faggot.Evans, Facsimile (1910), p. xiv; Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 72. “It is unnecessary to dwell on this helpless floundering.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 72. Ifor Williams put it on the same footing as Gwraig Sam, “Sam’s wife”, for Wrecsam, the very joke Evans laughs at in his own footnote: “ni fuasai un llwyth o Gymry byth yn arddel gair Saesneg yn golygu bagiau fel enw arnynt hwy eu hunain”, no tribe of the Cymry would ever take an English word for bags as its own name; and “Tawaf ar hyn trwy ddyfynnu Dr. Evans ei hun”, I shall fall silent on this by quoting Dr Evans himself: “Unregenerate man might delight in making our high priests bite the dust. It would be easy writing and entertaining reading.”Ifor Williams, Y Beirniad VI (1916), p. 133. In 1924 Evans quietly accepted Goddeu, because a Mr Timothy Lewis had convinced him, and complained of Morris-Jones’s “ungainly gambols and much elephantine humour.”Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), pp. 30–31. Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 73.

He moved the battle of Catraeth to a beach in Môn, in 1098. The Gododdin’s Catraeth is Catterick. By 1924 it was Aber Lleiniog, a mile and a half north of Beaumaris, against Magnus Barefoot’s Norsemen: cad traeth, “the battle of the strand”. To read it as Catterick “damns Bangor philology for ever”, and those who did had a “love of scribal carrion”.Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), p. 32. The Society printed his photograph of the beach as its frontispiece.Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), p. iii, frontispiece, pp. 31–35 and n. 28.

He sent the prophecy’s leaper to Beaumaris and the English fleet’s harbour to Holyhead. Llyminawg, “the leaper”, became a “scribal error for Lleinawg, north of Beaumaris.”Ifor Williams, Y Beirniad VI (1916), p. 131. Where the prophecy drives the English to their ships hyd yn Aber Santwig, to Sandwich, the most famous English port of the Middle Ages, Evans found a “holy bay” near Holyhead: “there will be sorrowing as far as Kaer (Gybi)’s Holy Bay.”Ifor Williams, Y Beirniad VI (1916), p. 136.

He took Dyfed out of a poem in Cymraeg and put it back as a pub joke. He would not write yn Nyfed, “in Dyfed”; he wrote yn Yved, “in drinking”. “In the early seventeenth century it was a ‘merrye jest’ to pretend that yn Nyfed was yn yfed … Dr. Evans writes yn Yved in all seriousness, … and is angry with others because they are not equally lacking in a sense of humour.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, pp. 177–178.

He put the chief of the bards in a puddle outside Chester. In the Book of Taliesin, the only copy there is, the scribe wrote: Gwaryeis yn llychwr, kysceis ym porffor. The record Iolo carried to the press kept the line whole, and read it as the place it names: “I have played at Loughor, and slept in purple.” In his introduction, where he set out to “summon the poet to tell his own story”, Evans put both words in Cheshire.Evans, Facsimile (1910), p. xxix; Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 101. Porffor, the purple of kings, became Pulford, five miles south of Chester; llychwr became Lache, a township beside it, which “The English Dialect Dictionary defines … as ‘a pond, a pool, a swamp,’” and “every child’s ‘sleeping place’ is his home, and his ‘playground’ is usually near”.Evans, Facsimile (1910), p. xxx. Then his Corrections improved it: “The rhyme suggests Llychffordd for Llychwr, and topography confirms it, for the English of the emendation is Lache Lane. Lache means ‘a pool, ditch, deep cart-rut’, etc. Now what playground can be imagined more delightful to a boy than a lane abounding in ruts filled with water?” The chief bard of the Island of Britain, splashing in cart-ruts outside Chester. Morris-Jones: “There are boys and boys, no doubt; speaking for myself, puddles awaken no joyful memories in me. But all this about Taliesin’s being born at Pulford and delighting in puddles is derived from a hopeless misunderstanding of the following short couplet … The name of Pulford is written Porford in Breuddwyd Rhonabwy … and as the place is near Chester, it was perhaps inevitable that Dr. Evans should jump to the conclusion that porffor in the couplet was a mistake for Porford.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 102. Ifor Williams: “Eto myn Dr. Evans ei fod wedi lleoli’r bardd yn Sir Gaer”, and yet Dr Evans insists he has located the bard in Cheshire, by “lliw dillad ei wely!”, the colour of his bedclothes.Ifor Williams, Y Beirniad VI (1916), p. 134.

He changed llychwr to Llychffordd for the rhyme. The rhyme with what? With Pulford, which is not in the manuscript either: it is his own change of porffor, one line above. The rhyme that justifies the first alteration exists only because of the second, and the “topography” that confirms it is the lane the alteration was made to reach.Evans, Facsimile (1910), “Corrections”, p. xlvii. “At first he was satisfied with Llychwr — the rhyme did not matter; but then it occurred to him that if this were changed into Llychffordd it would correspond better to Lache Lane, and then the rhyme did matter.” Morris-Jones called it “the ‘Art of Lubrication’”: greasing the slide from what you assume to what you want.Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 102. And Ifor Williams: “ni rydd awgrym mai ei ddychymyg ef a roes Pulford i mewn”, he gives no hint that it was his own imagination that put Pulford in.Ifor Williams, Y Beirniad VI (1916), p. 133. The reading that leaves the skin alone needs no changes. His needs two, each holding up the other. And the rhyme never needed mending: “The rhyme is -or, which is continued in the next couplet, as is often done in these poems. The -wr of llychwr is a half-rhyme, which is called proest by Welsh prosodists, and frequently takes the place of exact rhyme in the oldest poetry. There is therefore every reason to suppose that both llychwr and porffor are correct readings.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 103.

In the oldest verse in Cymraeg, rhyme is a lock. Change a word and every trained ear hears the chime break, so a poem held in many memories could not be altered by any one of them. It is also a clock. Sounds shift with the centuries, so a rhyme carries its date where no later hand can reach it. Ifor Williams read the clock. The oldest poems in the Book of Taliesin rhyme consonants of the same class, as old Irish verse does. He searched the twelfth-century poets for one rhyme of that kind, “na welais gymaint ag un odl o’r math hwn … er chwilio’n ddyfal”, and found not one, though he searched hard; but the englynion of the Juvencus manuscript, “a ysgrifennwyd yn y nawfed ganrif”, written in the ninth century, have them.Ifor Williams, Y Beirniad VI (1916), p. 205. The clock said ninth century, in plain sight, and the book he read it in was the Myvyrian Archaiology, which Iolo carried to the press. Morris-Jones read the metres the same way: “Some of the metres were obsolete in the twelfth century, and all are old; but what possible reason can there be for supposing that they are not older than the eighth century? Had not Gildas’ praecones metres?”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 226. Gildas, in the sixth century, already complained of the court poets. Evans heard neither lock nor clock. “Ni phetrusaf am funud … na chyfeiliornodd y Dr. wrth gywiro llawer o’r odlau yn Llyfr Taliesin”: I do not hesitate for a minute to say the Doctor went astray in “correcting” many of the rhymes in the Book of Taliesin.Ifor Williams, Y Beirniad VI (1916), p. 203. “Metre and orthography were regularised,” he wrote of his method; “This tour de force lasted over a year, and seven times was it repeated.”Evans, Poems (1915), p. viii. “Weithiau gollyngodd yn angof fod y fath beth a phroest yn bod mewn barddoniaeth Gymraeg; bryd arall anghofiodd yn llwyr y gallai odl fod yn hollol anghywir wrth safonau’r ugeinfed ganrif, ac eto fod yn hollol gywir a rheolaidd yn ol safonau’r Cynfeirdd”: sometimes he forgot that half-rhyme exists in the poetry of Cymru at all; at other times he forgot that a rhyme can be wrong by the standards of the twentieth century and perfectly right by the standards of the oldest poets. Where a rhyme “Nid oedd hyn yn gywir i glust Dr. Evans”, was not right to Dr Evans’s ear, he rewrote the line.Ifor Williams, Y Beirniad VI (1916), p. 203. Where -eir answered -ein, “yr oedd yn ormod o dreth arno”, it was too much for him, “a throes diweir yn ‘gweirydd’”, and he turned diweir into gweirydd.Ifor Williams, Y Beirniad VI (1916), p. 204. When a medieval glossator did the same, Morris-Jones had the comparison ready: he “was as ignorant as Dr. Evans of the old system of rhyming.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 207. “Lle dylasai ganfod olion hynafiaeth ddigamsyniol, gwelodd aflerwch ysgrifennydd”: where he should have seen unmistakable antiquity, he saw a scribe’s untidiness.Ifor Williams, Y Beirniad VI (1916), p. 203. “Numerous rhyming words have been changed simply because the emendator was ignorant of the rules of rhyme in the oldest poetry.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 124. The boy who gave up the metres at fourteen took a file to the lock, smashed the clock, and called it correction.

Then he stretched the conclusion a little at each step: slept at Pulford, so Pulford was his home, so his native home. “Thus by suffixing a mere -d, and adding a little meaning at each step, the editor believes that from words which mean ‘I slept in purple’ he has legitimately drawn the conclusion that Taliesin was a native of Pulford. It is not cunning, but mere inability to handle words with accuracy.” He italicised native in a note, “and wrote ‘native’ without the least thought of what it means.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 103. The couplet sits in a poem where the bard has been a sword, a word, a book and a harpstring, beside the enchanters Math and Gwydion: “And out of this mystical-mythical stuff Dr. Evans derives the information that Taliesin was a native of Pulford!”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 104. He called it “the first item” in Taliesin’s life.Evans, Facsimile (1910), p. xxx. On the same page of Corrections, Cunedda’s name is “a fake of the scribe”, and Owain of Powys is to be read Owain of Gwynedd.Evans, Facsimile (1910), “Corrections”, p. xlvii. One southern royal name deleted, one prince moved north, one river moved to a lane in Cheshire. Not a scatter. A heading. In 1924 he still listed Morris-Jones’s llychwr among his “emphatic howlers”.Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), p. 116.

And he knew the river. A native speaker of Cymraeg from Sir Gaerfyrddin, ordained thirteen miles from the Llwchwr, was handed a word his own tongue reads as the river of his county, and went to Chester for it. Seventeen years earlier, editing the Book of Llandaf, he had met King Meurig’s grant of Lann Gemei with Llandeilo Talybont, whose bounds end bet lychur, at the Llwchwr, spelled as the poem spells it. Rees, in 1840, had noted the church as “either Llangenydd, in Gower, or Llangennech, Carmarthenshire”.W. J. Rees, The Liber Landavensis (Llandovery, 1840), p. 382 n. Evans headed the charter “? Gower” and corrected the name in his index: “L. Gemei (read L. Genvei)”.Evans and Rhys, The Text of the Book of Llan Dâv (Oxford, 1893), index. It is the only name in all the land grants that his index corrects: the word read occurs five times in that index and its errata, three times against his own misprints, once against a Latin spelling of Llandaff, and once here.Evans and Rhys, The Text of the Book of Llan Dâv (Oxford, 1893), index and Errata. And his own index tells you he knew. Turn to the back of that 1893 edition and the river is there, placed without a flicker of doubt: “Luchur… Lychur… Llwchwr… Between Carm. & Glam.”, the Loughor, running between Sir Gaerfyrddin and Morgannwg, on page 140, the very page of the charter he had headed “? Gower.” So the doubt was never about the water. It was about the church standing on its bank. And while the entries all round it in that index carry a county, Glam., Carm., Mon., Her.; the one he had altered, L. Gemei, carries none at all. He gave the river its two counties and left the church without one.Evans and Rhys, The Text of the Book of Llan Dâv (Oxford, 1893): index s.vv. Luchur and L. Gemei, and the boundary note at page 140, line 25, which is headed in full “Lann Gemei vel TERRA CONVOI, ? Gower.” These three readings are taken from it directly. The manuscript writes Lanngemei three times on one leaf, in two hands: three strokes where Genvei needs four, and no n. And in the same edition he reprinted Haddan’s charge against Rees: “Mr Rees has obviously added to the number out of his own ingenuity.”Arthur W. Haddan, Archaeologia Cambrensis, 3rd ser., XIV (1868), 311–328, reprinted by Evans. Set every boundary clause of Rees’s edition against the manuscript, charter by charter, and Rees adds not one bound and not one landmark. What he did was leave things out.Every boundary clause in W. J. Rees, The Liber Landavensis (Llandovery, 1840), collated against Evans and Rhys, The Text of the Book of Llan Dâv (Oxford, 1893): no bound or landmark stands in Rees that the manuscript lacks. Rees drops the repeated steps of the Llandeilo Fawr perambulation, the word duas at Lann Cyngualan, and fotul at Lanntypallai. Twice, in two books, seventeen years apart, a reading that pointed to the Llwchwr was altered out of the record.The line: Book of Taliesin (Peniarth MS 2), p. 26, ll. 8–9. Evans’s notes to the line: “26.8 llychwr. ? scrib. er. for Llychffor(dd) = Lache Lane” and “26.9 porffor: Pwlffordd”. “Emphatic howlers”: Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), p. 116. Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, pp. 101–104, 124, 208, 226; Gildas’s praecones, De Excidio Britanniae, §34. Ifor Williams, Y Beirniad VI, pp. 133–134, 203–205, the Cymraeg read from the page images, whose gutter has cropped a few first letters, each the only letters that fit. The line as Iolo’s record keeps it: The Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales, i, 32 (1870). W. J. Rees, The Liber Landavensis (Llandovery, 1840), pp. 132–133 and n. at p. 382; Evans and Rhys, The Text of the Book of Llan Dâv (Oxford, 1893), heading and index; NLW MS 17110E, f. 69v; Arthur W. Haddan, Archaeologia Cambrensis, 3rd ser., XIV (1868), 311–328, reprinted by Evans in vol. II.

He gave one prince four false names, and the fourth arrived at the printer. Owain Gwynedd, his twelfth-century hero, was Urien; he was also Cunedda; he was also Maelgwn; and a line in the Corrections, “For Owein Keveliog read Owein Gwynedd”, gave him a fourth, “so during the passage of the book through the press Owein Gwynedd acquired a fourth eponym.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 95. There is, “of course, no mention of Owein Gwynedd in the Book of Taliesin.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 54. The man the theory is about is not in the book. And the proof that Urien was Owain: “Cynddelw calls Owein Gwynedd one thing, and Taliesin calls Urien another thing, and … Cynddelw compares Owein Gwynedd to Taliesin’s hero Owein ap Urien. That is the whole of the proof.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, pp. 85, 90–94.

He let the rhyme decide who a man was. Where “prince of Rheged” did not suit, glyw Reget was “corrected” to glyw rygas, “behated prince”, and “Urien, 57.8, is used for Owein because of cynghanedd”; elsewhere Urien was Owain Cyfeiliog “to rhyme with Dygen”. “So if the easy demands of the rhyme require it, Urien, the special eponym of Owein Gwynedd, may be used for Owein ap Kadwgan or Owein Kyveiliog at will!”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 86. Llyw Catraeth, prince of Catraeth, became llyw can draeth and was explained as Henry II, “‘along the shore’!”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 87.

He proved Cunedda gave land to a church, on nobody’s word. Cunedda “is said to have been the first to bestow land on a church.” “By whom, or where, it ‘is said’ we are not told.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 90. The proof that Owain Gwynedd “did likewise” was that he was buried at Bangor.Evans, Facsimile (1910), p. xxiv; Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 90. “As a proof of the theory that Cunedda means Owein Gwynedd, this reasoning may be allowed to speak for itself.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 91.

He found the Normans in French he could not spell. The warrior Hyfeidd, he explained, “means the intrepid, courageaux — suggested, perhaps, by Courcy”! A slip was pasted in: “Delete x in ‘courageau-x’”. “He evidently misread his friend’s a as x!”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 95. “He translates Hyveidd into French which he cannot spell.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 96. In 1924 the x was a private mark of his, set in type by mistake by his compositor’s assistant.Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), p. 49 n. 40.

He drowned a sixth-century king in a twelfth-century shipwreck. Gwallawg son of Lleenawg, Urien’s kinsman, “means missing or lost (at sea)”, and so was Henry fitz Henry.Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 95. “If something is to be supplied, ‘wanting (in sense)’ is more likely than ‘lost (at sea)’; and there are plenty of people to whom such an ‘epithet’ would apply.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 96. By 1924 Gwallawg had been shot in the eye by Magnus Barefoot and was the Earl of Shrewsbury.Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), pp. 37–40.

He made Taliesin a bastard. Where the bard sings that he was not born of father and mother but made from primroses and the flowers of the hill, Evans read autobiography: “His father might have been a bird of passage — say a Norman baron: his mother might have perished, or abandoned him before memory began”. “Taliesin was a bastard! … As deductions from the evidence, it will be agreed that these suggestions are preposterous. I prefer to say nothing further on this matter.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 109. Evans, Facsimile (1910), pp. xxxi–xxxii.

He made Taliesin a slave and a swineherd. “I have been a billhook … I have been a pointed hunting-spear,” says the poem.Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, pp. 110–111. Evans turned the billhook into a word of his own for “slave” and the spear into “herd”, and quoted his changes as the poet’s confession: “I was a slave of Kynvyn; I was a herd besides”, “without giving any indication of the changes made.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, pp. 110, 111. Taliesin, he concluded, may have learnt Cymraeg “in servitude, as the youthful Patrick learnt Irish”!Evans, Facsimile (1910), p. xxxii; Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 112. “It is all so delightfully probable.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 112. Evans, Facsimile (1910), pp. xxxii–xxxiii.

He made Taliesin an Englishman and a turncoat. “Taliesin felt, as all feel, towards an invading stranger … But he soon changed his attitude, & wrote a poem to propitiate the new lord”.Evans, Facsimile (1910), p. xxxiii; Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 112. The good word for the Earl of Chester was “the editor’s own, who changed yny ‘where, when’ into ny ‘not’.” Morris-Jones, in wartime: “Thus Taliesin was a renegade Englishman, a Herr Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose Kaiser was Owein Gwynedd!”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 112. Chamberlain was the English-born writer who went over to the Kaiser. “I refrain from comment because it is clear that the imputation is as fatuous as it is odious.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 113.

He made Taliesin a coward. Evans: “When times are out of joint, men and places are not spoken of by their normal names. Mystification becomes expedient in order to protect life and liberty … Under such circumstances when the friendships of one day were the enmities of the next, a border bard like Taliesin could not, perhaps, sing with safety to himself and his patrons, except cryptically and pseudonymously.”Evans, Facsimile (1910), p. xv. “So he did it to save his skin. And the curious thing is that he was never found out — until our editor divined his secret! His being ‘a border bard’ is rather a poor excuse for the despicable cowardice which so signally marks him off from his fellow bards. The works of the twelfth century poets present many difficulties, but this particular form of intentional mystification is not one of them.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 97. The bard, Evans added, “or bards, after the fashion of this time, sang of contemporaries under assumed names”. “The suggestio falsi ‘after the fashion of this time’ is inserted in order to make the statement more convincing. Anyone who will run his eye over the Contents of the Myvyrian will see at once how false the suggestion is; all the bards of the twelfth century sing of the princes under their own names.” The one poem Evans held up as his example, Cynddelw’s elegy, calls Owain Gwynedd by his own name, “a fact which Dr. Evans omits to mention. It is, however, a fact that is vital; it constitutes a difference not in degree, but in character, between the things compared. A bard commonly enough styles his patron ‘Nudd’ if he is generous, ‘Arthur’ if he is valiant, ‘Cei Hir’ if he is tall, and so on; but it is always a passing compliment, predicated of an expressed subject. There are no poems ‘To Nudd,’ ‘To Arthur,’ ‘To Cei,’ in which, as in Milton’s Lycidas for example, the pseudonym is itself the subject of the poem, taking the place of the real name.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 96. Evans “is thinking of the use of pseudonyms as predicates, which was common; he confuses that with their use as subjects, which was, to say the very least, unusual; and he adduces the commonness of the first use in support of his assumption of the second.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 97. Evans, Poems (1915), p. 1.

He put his own grudges in Taliesin’s mouth, and called his critics harlots. Where the bard boasts that he silences the other poets, Evans misread the Cymraeg as “anathemas” and wrote: “if a man excel in any direction, were it only in industry and single-minded devotion to duty, there is no calumny too foul for envy to whisper by those who wander upon every high hill, and play under every green tree.”Evans, Facsimile (1910), p. xxxiv. The high hill and the green tree are the prophet Jeremiah’s words for the harlot. The man who numbered the National Library’s manuscripts called the scholars who doubted him harlots, by scripture, and signed it Taliesin. Then Taliesin “revenged himself by studying the books of the bards”, a line not in the manuscript at all: “the interpolation of a whole line composed by the editor himself.”Evans, Facsimile (1910), p. xxxiv; Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 114. His bards “bring forth what is in them: What is in them, that is what they are.”Evans, Facsimile (1910), p. xxxiv; Ifor Williams, Y Beirniad VI (1916), p. 134. Morris-Jones turned it round: “he brings forth what is in him, not what is in the text. And what is in him, that is what he is”. “As the amended text is for the most part the product of the editor’s imagination, it is natural that it should breathe his sentiments and gibbet his pet aversions. The Taliesin whom he sees in it and behind it is his own shadow.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 115. Ifor Williams: “Bydd yn syn gan y darllenydd glywed nad oes cymaint ag un gair o hyn yn y gwreiddiol”, the reader will be astonished to hear there is not one word of this in the original; the line came “o’i ben a’i bastwn ei hun”, out of his own head.Ifor Williams, Y Beirniad VI (1916), pp. 134, 135. “Ond mewn difrif, pa werth sydd i’r cyfryw ‘dystiolaeth’?”Ifor Williams, Y Beirniad VI (1916), p. 135. But seriously, what is such “evidence” worth?Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, pp. 113–115, citing Jeremiah 2:20 and 3:6 in the English and Cymraeg Bibles [POST-JUSTINIAN], the Septuagint hypokatō pantos xylou alsōdous [PRE-JUSTINIAN].

He crowned Richard the Lionheart in the Book of Taliesin, and King John six times over. “The Teyrnon of 34.15–26 is, clearly, Richard I, who figures as Arthur in 54.15 to 56. Richard was a poet”.Evans, Facsimile (1910), p. 94; Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 101. Cú Roí the Irish hero was King John; “Mab Dairi = mab Harri, i.e., John”; John was also Caw, and Erov, and Hercules; and where a poem names Ynyr, “Ynyr, then, is an ‘eponym’ of John.” Cú Chulainn was Llywelyn ap Iorwerth. “I do not propose to tax the reader’s patience (or my own) with a detailed examination of these absurdities.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 101. Evans, Facsimile (1910), pp. 94, 115–116 and index; Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 100.

He turned Alexander the Great into Saladin, and Darius into a border. A poem on Alexander and Darius, told as Orosius tells it, he made into an elegy for Richard I. Alexander was glossed “? Saladin”; Darius’s name, twice in nine lines, was emended once into ardal, “border”; and “Further on, he changes the name dar into i dad ‘his father’!” “It is wilful blindness, for Skene’s translator gives the name in each case.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 99. The golden fetters became King Richard’s prison, “though no authority for such an interpretation is even hinted at”; and where Evans heard “an echo of the Crusades, and plaints about taxing the monasteries to release King Richard from the Hual Eurin”, “there is not so much as his own translation to vouch for their being dreamt of in the poem.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 100; Evans, Facsimile (1910), p. xxviii. A catchword at the foot of a page, kynheilwat, “poet, supporter”, “suggests a calling together of men for the Crusades”: “he mistakes the -at for an abstract noun ending, and takes the stem to be galw, call”.Evans, Facsimile (1910), p. 105; Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 98. The Amazons, bron loscedigion, “breast-burnt”, became men “whose breasts burnt with constant humiliation”.Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 100. Ifor Williams: “Gellid profi unrhyw beth pe bai rhyddid i drin testun mor rhydd â hyn”, you could prove anything with that much freedom. By the same method, he showed, Myrddin had foretold the Great War, the German Eagle, Flanders, airships and submarines, “eto ni thybia neb oherwydd hynny mai yn 1916 y daroganodd Myrddin”: yet nobody thinks Myrddin prophesied in 1916.Ifor Williams, Y Beirniad VI (1916), p. 137. Evans, Facsimile (1910), p. 106.

He wrote King John into a poem, and cited it as history. For John’s campaign of 1209 he printed as “from the Book of Taliesin”: “John disarmed the Promontory at the Gate of Godobin: / And, at the great Ubbanford, the shank-plaided King; / I leave the Scot to his fears.” “The italics are the editor’s own, and denote that the words so printed are supplied by himself. There is no John in the text — the verb is in the first person singular ‘I disarmed’; and there is nothing about a ‘promontory’ or ‘Ubbanford’ or a ‘King’, or about leaving anyone to his fears.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 100.

He wrote Nest of Deheubarth into two lines that name no woman. “‘Ny llefessit neb,’ meddai Llyfr Taliesin; ‘ni lyvessid Nest,’ meddai’r golygydd”: “no one dared,” says the Book of Taliesin; “Nest dared not,” says the editor. “‘Kat gormes,’ meddai’r scrif; ‘Am Nest cad gormes,’ meddai’r golygydd.”Ifor Williams, Y Beirniad VI (1916), p. 137.

He took the first poets’ names off the first poets. By 1924 “Aneirin” was “a mistake for ‘aneir im’, and not a proper name at all”, or else “the nom de plume of Griffith ap Cynan.”Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), p. 75. Cian “stands for Cîan = Cynan”.Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), p. 90. Talhaearn, Tad Awen, the Father of the Muse, was court bard to Hugh Lupus, Earl of Chester. Llywarch Hen’s elegy mourned the hostages King John put to death. Urien was “simply the ghost in borrowed plumes” of a Roman legate, Lollius Urbicus.Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), p. 37. Nudd Hael and Mordaf Hael, of the Three Generous Men of the Island of Britain, were “mere ‘will o’ the wisps’”.Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), p. 79. And the genealogies that carry their names were “the golden age of the Welsh myths”: “Genealogies, Pedigrees, Triads, and compilations like Iorwerth’s, — on such precarious foundations as these no one will build who has first-hand knowledge of materials.”Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), p. 80. Take the places out of the North and the names out of the poems, and there is nothing left for anyone to be lord of.Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924): Talhaearn, pp. 73–74; Llywarch Hen, p. 98.

He did not know the Cymraeg he was correcting. “Dr. Evans is ignorant of the meaning of a large number of old words which are familiar to Welsh scholars, and most of which were made out long ago.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 115. He did not know pet, “how many”, “a word familiar to every Keltic scholar”, which is in Dr John Davies’s dictionary of 1632, “so here is our editor’s difficulty solved in the 17th century.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, pp. 114, 116. He took llys, a plant, for a court; blawd, blossom, for flour; canwr, a hundred men, for “centurion”; cylched, a bed, for “borders”; llad, liquor, for “wafer” on one line and “good” at the foot of the page, and then “amended” the text to match.Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, pp. 116, 117. Plagawd lys, the plant Gwydion made his magic horses from, was “a bogus form”, “for no other reason than his own ignorance.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 116. “The line is quite simple, and the editor understands it; but he cannot keep his fingers off a plain line like this.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 107. “He mistakes an old idiom for modern journalese.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 105. And where a word meant “before” he made it “against”: “Simply because ‘against’ is what the theory requires here”.Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 106.

He turned midnight into refined stones. In the poem of the Plagues of Egypt the last plague falls meinyoeth, at midnight, as in Exodus: “About midnight will I go out into the midst of Egypt: and all the firstborn in the land of Egypt shall die.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 117. Evans did not know the word, decided a line was missing, and wrote one: meini coeth, “refined stones”. “Coeth, ‘refined (by fire)’, is used of metals, not of stones. … Can anything more helplessly futile be imagined?”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 118. And in his note: “Prof. J. M. J. falls into a strange error here.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 117. Exodus 11:4–5 in the Bible in Cymraeg [POST-JUSTINIAN]; the Septuagint peri mesas nyktas [PRE-JUSTINIAN].

He wrote newspaper Cymraeg into a medieval manuscript. “Medieval forms, spurious modern forms, dialect and even slang words, jostle each other in the most grotesque confusion.” Y Weryd for the ocean “is modern newspaper Welsh.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 118. A pronoun unknown before the late fifteenth century; a bogus nineteenth-century plural; a verb made from the English slang “brawl”; tra mi yn aros, “while I waiting”, a construction “which is neither Welsh nor English”: “this muddle-headed neologism we, of course, find in our ‘amended’ text.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 120. The man “is unable to distinguish not only between medieval and modern, but between good and bad Welsh.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 121. In 1924 he said it was on purpose: “the modernizings throughout … were deliberate.”Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), p. 116. Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 119.

He made schoolboy howlers. His verb forms were the very mistakes the Central Welsh Board’s examiners had marked down in that year’s school papers: “Teryð is the same school-boy error as taraf.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 122. “Following this childish ‘howler’ is the oracular statement that Sir John Rhys’s translation of the poem ‘may be assigned’ ‘to the realm of twilight and darkness’.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 123. Ifor Williams printed the sentence about Rhys in italics, “canys yr hyn a ddywed am waith Syr John sydd wir am gyfieithiad Dr. Evans ei hun”: what he says of Sir John’s work is true of his own.Ifor Williams, Y Beirniad VI (1916), p. 136.

He did not know what his own technical words meant, and printed his arrows backwards. His account of one sound change “is on a level with the schoolboy’s ‘A circle is a round straight line with a hole in the middle’ … To speak of the ‘explosive f’ is like speaking of the ‘planet Sirius’ or the ‘metal sulphur’.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 123. He used > for “comes from” through the whole book, when it means “becomes”, and found out “only just in time to paste in front of the page of ‘Corrections’, a small slip of paper with the following legend: ‘For > read < wherever it occurs’.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 124. In 1924 it was the printer’s fault.Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), p. 49 n. 40.

He heard thunder, saw a bishop and conducted an orchestra where the poems had none. Gweleis twrwf, “I saw a host”, got “the sapient note, ‘Gweleis twrwf = I saw thunder!’”, “mistaking, as usual, the old twrwf for the modern twrw, ‘noise, thunder’.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 164. A scribe’s garbled word for forts became a “crosier-bearer”, and by 1924 the crosier-bearer was Arthur, Bishop of Bangor.Evans, Facsimile (1910), p. xxv; Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 212. A line about a man’s nature “harmonizes the orchestra”!Evans, Facsimile (1910), p. xxxviii. The house of Coel became “superstitious (dread)”!Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 219. And on a perfectly regular construction he wrote “amwyth ae. Inadmissible construction”, “one of his incomprehensible utterances on points of grammar”, since it is the only construction the verb takes, as his own introduction shows.Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, pp. 166, 201, 211. Evans, Facsimile (1910), p. xx, for his own use of the construction; Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), p. 56.

He made the dog shiver. Ci i dynnu, march i ryniaw, eidion i wân: the dog to sniff, the horse to snort, the ox to gore. Evans “amended” tynnu to rynnu: “The dog is wont to shiver, the horse to shy.” Where the poet says the monks do not know which way the wind goes, or who drives it, he found “the Crusade”, and “who it is that protects them”.Ifor Williams, Y Beirniad VI (1916), pp. 135–136.

He could not count, and did not know a riddle when he heard one. Pympwnt, fifty: “Dr. Evans does not know this numeral; he guesses it wrongly each time; here it is ‘pytri piont, five spikes’!”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 133. The Song of the Wind opens Dychymyg pwy yw, “Guess who it is”, as folk riddles in Cymraeg still began in Môn; Evans opened his translation with “Whose idea was the wind?” “He has obviously never heard an old Welsh folk-riddle.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 256. Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 133 n., pp. 255–256.

He made hell cold, and a foaming horse into buttermilk. The poem asks pwy maint enneinheu, how great are the baths of hell, the hot baths of the old tales. “Ymrwystrodd y golygydd gyda’r syniad ‘the baths of hell,’ a gwnaeth air i olygu ‘oerni’ yn ei le”: he stumbled over the baths of hell and made up a word meaning “coldness” instead: “How great its degrees of cold?”Ifor Williams, Y Beirniad VI (1916), p. 205. And in Addwynau Taliesin, the list of fair things, a gift became “a betrothal to one that is loved”, a slim-waisted horse became “a huntsman to guide me”, riding a foaming horse became “the buttermilk of the dairy”, and heather in bloom became “the heath when it is green”, because he had decided every line must have nine syllables.Ifor Williams, Y Beirniad VI (1916), pp. 206, 207. “Rhoddodd i mewn a thynnodd allan”: he put words in and took words out, and rebuilt thirty lines of fifty-eight. “Cymerodd ei gyllell allan a naddodd yn ddidrugaredd nes eu cael i ateb i’r patrwm oedd yn ei feddwl ei hun”, he took out his knife and whittled without mercy until they fitted the pattern in his own head.Ifor Williams, Y Beirniad VI (1916), p. 207.

He could not hear the metre he was mending. “He upsets the metrical balance of the verse because he has no notion that such a thing exists.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 108. “Dr. Evans, who knows nothing whatever about these things, violates half the ‘cymeriadau’ in his ‘amended’ text.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 177. Of one line: “Dr. Evans’s lop-sided caricature of the line betrays his complete ignorance of its structure; he had clearly no inkling of it”. Of a careless medieval scribe: “like Dr. Evans, had no ear for cynghanedd.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 108. Of the oldest rhymes: “Of these things Dr. Evans had not dreamt.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 124. A fifteenth-century hand wrote in the margin of the manuscript that it held the best of Taliesin. “We expect a palaeographer to take some notice of interesting marginalia … But Dr. Evans simply ignores it. The reason is, of course, that it conveys nothing to him: he has no knowledge of metres, and the poem as mangled by him is rather a poor thing.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 194. “He has never appreciated or understood this distinctive feature of Welsh poetry; he has no ear for its effects, and therefore has never been able to grasp its principles; the ‘secret of the bards’, as it is sometimes called, is a closed book to him.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 124. The secret of the bards: Cyfrinach y Beirdd, the book his uncle locked away. And in 1924, answering all this: “Sir John sneers at my ‘ignorance of Welsh metres.’ He has made a special study of them, and I have not.”Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), p. 63. Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, pp. 108, 124, 176–177, 193–194 n.

A quarryman knew his grammar better. Cysc, vad gun, “sleep, dear lord”, “shows that he is more ignorant of Welsh grammar than the quarryman poet, Glan Padarn, author of ‘Cwsg, fy anwylyd di-nam’.”Evans, Poems (1915), p. 125; Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 220. “He has less of the scholar’s instinct than almost any of the Eisteddfodic bards whom he scoffs at in his footnotes.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 150.

He got whole poems wrong. Of one poem to Urien: “Dr. Evans has not a single line right; his version bears almost no relation to the original.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 163. Of two lines of another, set beside every earlier translator: “The average number of words correctly rendered is one.” His one word was “chieftains”.Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 166. “All the translators, from Lewis Morris to Dr. Evans, have gone hopelessly wrong.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 160. “Nothing could induce me to undergo the ordeal of systematically reading through the volume of ‘amended’ text and ‘translation’.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 115.

He rewrote the prophecy of the nations against the English into a poem about Norman barons. Armes Prydein, the Prophecy of Britain, is a tenth-century poem that sees the Cymry, the men of Dublin, the Irish, the Cornish, the Bretons and the men of Strathclyde joining to drive the English out, and has the Cymry ask the English by what title they hold the land: the very question the Crown’s circular forbade its inspector to examine. Ifor Williams: “bwriadwn ei chymryd lin ar lin: ond wedi dechreu, a chael fy mod yn gorfod gwrthdystio yn erbyn cyfieithiad a diwygiad Dr. Evans ar bron bob un o’r ddau gan llinell sydd ynddi, gorfu i mi ymatal”: I meant to take it line by line; but having begun, and finding I had to protest against Dr Evans’s translation and emendation in almost every one of its two hundred lines, I had to stop. Evans put in the French, “the French will hie away”: “Nid oes air o sôn am y Ffrancod trwy’r gân”, there is not one word about the French in the poem.Ifor Williams, Y Beirniad VI (1916), p. 207. He turned kechmyn Danet, the churls of Thanet, the English, into Normanieid. He put in “Magnus will attack the men of Dee”.Ifor Williams, Y Beirniad VI (1916), p. 208. He put in the river Ceiriog, and wrote: “This war was fought on the banks of the Ceiriog in 1165.” He made the English, fleeing “like foxes”, flee to Boras near Pulford, and marched the King “along the Ceiriog to Chirk, thence to Rhiw-Abon, Wrexham, Boras and Pulford into Aeron”: “campwaith Dr. Evans fel Uwch Feirniad”, his masterpiece as a Higher Critic.Ifor Williams, Y Beirniad VI (1916), p. 209. He dated the first half to 1165 and the second to 1228, so that wounded soldiers told their wives the story and washed their bloody shirts sixty-three years after the battle: “‘Which is absurd,’ chwedl Euclid. Y mae tair blynedd a thrigain braidd yn rhy hir i filwyr clwyfedig aros mewn crysau gwaedlyd”: “which is absurd,” as Euclid says; sixty-three years is rather long for wounded soldiers to wait in bloody shirts.Ifor Williams, Y Beirniad VI (1916), p. 210. He turned the Irish allies into enemies, fleeing “by water to the Northmen of Dublin”: “Y mae ei hanes yn hollol groes i’r llawysgrif”, the flat opposite of the manuscript, and emended the Bretons out of existence: “Gwnaeth gynghreiriaid y Cymry yn elynion iddynt yma eto”, he made the allies of the Cymry their enemies, here again.Ifor Williams, Y Beirniad VI (1916), pp. 211, 212. Where the poet wishes on the English “Boet creu boet agheu eu kyweithyd”, may blood and death be their company, Evans wrote “Let him shed blood and bring death to the allies.” “Nid oes raid, ac nid oes modd manylu ar gynnyrch dychymyg fel hyn”: there is no need, and no way, to go into the detail of products of the imagination like this.Ifor Williams, Y Beirniad VI (1916), p. 214. “Methodd weld yr ystyr syml, ac aeth i gyfansoddi drosto’i hun”: he missed the simple meaning, and went off to compose for himself.Ifor Williams, Y Beirniad VI (1916), p. 208. And the verdict, the charge of forgery turned exactly round:

“Nid oes cymaint ag un cyfeiriad atynt [y Normaniaid] yn yr holl ddau can llinell … oddieithr — a dyma’r pwynt — y pethau a roes Dr. Gwenogvryn Evans ei hun i mewn yn y gân.” There is not one reference to the Normans in all two hundred lines, except, and this is the point, what Dr Gwenogvryn Evans put into the poem himself. Every reference in it to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, he said, could be dated to 1916, and every one was the editor’s own. “Ond nid diwygio yw peth fel hyn ond creu”: this is not emending.Ifor Williams, Y Beirniad VI (1916), p. 208. It is creating.Ifor Williams, Y Beirniad VI (1916), pp. 207–214, the last page read from the page image. The question of title: Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 51.

He hid the proof that the book was old. “The most interesting, and perhaps the most important, palaeographical question connected with the Book of Taliesin is whether it contains any evidence of transcription … from a copy in Hiberno-Saxon, or Insular, script.” In the old Insular hand of the Brythonic and Irish scribes before about 1100, r and n are all but one letter; in later hands they differ as plainly as in print. A copyist who keeps confusing them has an older book open in front of him, and the twelfth-century Taliesin falls. “If, therefore, the manuscript bears witness to a prototype in the older character, the foundation of his theory is swept away. The possibility of such a thing does not seem to have suggested itself to him; in his own domain of palaeography, as in other matters, he is blind to everything which tells against the theory.” It is the same blindness we met in the prayer for Owain. “All the Welsh written in Insular script appears in Old Welsh orthography … which is found in the later Continental script only when the scribe is copying literally or mechanically from an older document. The old hand and the old spelling go together; both belong to the earlier period, and the evidence of the one corroborates that of the other.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 130. “There is thus ample evidence, though Dr. Evans has been blind to it all, that many of the poems in the Book of Taliesin have been copied from manuscripts of the Old Welsh period … The evidence is cumulative and self-consistent; it is partly orthographical, partly palaeographical, and the parts dovetail in such a manner as to admit of only one conclusion.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 138. And his own late dating of the hand rested on a spelling. A “form like ‘trevbret’”, he wrote, “is not a ‘mistake’ but evidence of our MS. being written at the very beginning of a transition period. After 1300 it was not an uncommon practice to flank (b and) f by a v or u when they had the sound of v”. “Why does he put ‘(b and)’ in brackets? Because the statement is not true of b, which is not sounded v after 1300, and is not ‘flanked’ by v to denote such sound. Thus vb is taken to indicate the beginning of a period in which no vb for v is ever used. Furthermore, will it be believed that the vb, on which the argument is founded, actually does not exist in our MS.? The form in the MS. is tref- | bret … the tref- coming at the end of l. 11 and the bret at the beginning of l. 12.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 131. The two letters he dated the book by are the last letter of one line and the first letter of the next.Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, pp. 130–131, 138–139, the vb passage read from the page image of p. 131; Evans, Facsimile (1910), p. xliii.

He knew that proof all along, used it on another book, and claimed the credit. Four years later, in his own Book of Aneirin: “hence the recurrent confusion between r & n … This confusion in our text proves that its originals were written in Hiberno-Saxon characters.”Evans, Facsimile and Text of the Book of Aneirin (Pwllheli, 1922), p. xlvi. And in 1924: “In 1887 I called attention to the mistakes arising from misreading the characters r and n in ‘old Kymric’ script, and gave facsimiles of the two letters. Now Sir John Morris-Jones claims this discovery for himself.”Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), p. 88. By his own claim, he had known since 1887 what an r read as n proves. He knew it when he dated the Book of Taliesin to the twelfth century, when he listed its r/n slips as “scribal errors”, and when he was told in print that he could not see it.Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), p. 14. In the same reply he argued that the old letters had lingered “far into the twelfth century” in Cymru: a door built for one book only.Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), p. 12. Morris-Jones had allowed that Evans deceived himself first. Evans’s own footnote takes that excuse away. He was not blind. He chose when to look.Evans, Facsimile and Text of the Book of Aneirin (Pwllheli, 1922), p. xlvi; Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), pp. 12–13, 88 n.

He set the scribe’s cancelled letter in type and said nothing about it. In the Book of Taliesin the scribe “began to write the Old Welsh g- of his copy, but left off before drawing the indispensable tag at the top right-hand corner, and put a dot of deletion under the unfinished letter.” The dot is on the vellum, in the National Library’s own photograph. A man composing does not cancel a spelling he never meant to use; a copyist does, when the old book in front of him pulls his hand into the old spelling. “Dr. Evans in his diplomatic text represents the result in type thus: g(uth; but in his notes he ignores this eloquent slip of the pen. Did he fail to perceive its plain significance? It shows the scribe in the act of checking himself in an error of transliteration which proves that he was transcribing the poem from a copy in Old Welsh orthography.” Where the scribe forgot to dot out an old spelling, “as he often did,” it stood, “much to the bewilderment of Dr. Evans.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 133. The scribe “was well acquainted with the Welsh of his own day … But much of what he copied was unintelligible to him”, and some of his slips “are explicable only under the supposition that the scribe was transcribing directly from such an early copy”.Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 144. A fluent man who cannot follow what he copies is copying something far older than himself.Peniarth MS 2, f. 29r, p. 61, l. 6, National Library of Wales image read at full resolution; Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 137.

One date he could not move. He made Brochfael of Powys and his son Cynan Garwyn cover-names for Owain Cyfeiliog, prince of Powys, and Cynan ab Owain Gwynedd, lord of Meirionnydd. “Selyf, the son of Cynan Garwyn, fell in the battle of Chester, in 616 at the very latest; his father Cynan and his grandfather Brochfael must therefore, by normal computation, have been contemporaries of the Taliesin of tradition.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 95.

He kept quiet where he knew something, and pronounced where he knew nothing. On the one subject his word was worth having, the hand of the scribe, “by a peculiar perversity Dr. Evans hardly deigns to discuss matters on which he is entitled to speak”: the date of the writing “is huddled into a footnote”; a manuscript “in the same hand” in his Report was now “apparently by the same hand”, with “no grounds for the original opinion, or for the later modification.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, pp. 125–126. Instead, remarks on the “Science of Diplomatics”, “and a handsome tribute to its master — by the same.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 127. His proof that the scribe came from Morgannwg, because he wrote hyny, “proves nothing but the editor’s ignorance of the fact that hyny is the old form of this word.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 126. He had copied “tens of thousands of final -c”, “but that has not availed to impress on his mind the fact that -c is the only possible medieval spelling.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 134.

He knocked his own theory on the head and never noticed. The manuscript, he wrote, “is beautifully written, and one of the easiest to read”, but “among the least faithful of transcripts”: “what text has suffered like the Taliesin text at the hand of scribes? … hundreds of lines marred in transcription; syllables, words, clauses, sentences, lines dropped.”Evans, Facsimile (1910), pp. i, xxxvi; Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, pp. 125, 127. On his own dates Taliesin died about 1176 and the book was written about 1275: all that damage within a century, while Gwalchmai and Cynddelw, who really were twelfth-century poets, came down whole. “The supposition has only to be stated to show how incompatible it is with common sense … the question so innocently put by him knocks his theory on the head.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 127.

He read the same words one way in his text and another in his notes. Ny chyrchaf Gogledd: “a palaeographically violent emendation; he subsequently changed his mind … because his Cheshire Gogledd seemed a place to which his Taliesin would not wish to go.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 137. Where a reading beat him, “he confesses that II, 158·16 is ‘a bad shot’ … a t is supplied, and the g is assumed to be an error for wr!”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 132. His r/n notes: “his theory affords no explanation of them. They are mere shots.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 137.

He buried a wrong date for the most important book in his report. He dated the Book of Aneirin “circa 1350”, a century out, and put it right in a footnote to a later part. “Such an error in reporting the most important fact in the volume ought at least to have been corrected in large type in a prominent position, and not hidden away without even an apology”.Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 7. Report, ii, p. 91, and a later Introduction, p. iv n.

He called everything he could not read a scribe’s error, and listed his own changes under the dead scribe’s name. Nine lists, “A List of Scribal Errors”, with tables arranged by the letter the scribe was supposed to have misread: “a classification of these ‘emendations’.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 128. Cian, the sixth-century poet, was an “error”. Godoðin was an “error”. A Chludwys, “and the Clydemen”, was an “error”, and they went out of the index too: “the ‘theory’ does not admit the existence of the Clydemen, and the index suffers.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 53. Iwerddon, Ireland: “error”. O Lydaw, from Brittany: “error”. Gwŷr Bryneich, the men of Bernicia, went the same way. “Many of the editor’s other corrections, though perhaps less ludicrous, are inherently not less absurd.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 128. Argoed Llwyfein: “Locality and metre both wrong.”Evans, Facsimile (1910), p. 110; Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 128. The peoples of the North and the allies over the sea, struck out one by one. “A large number of the ‘errors’ are imaginary, and the bulk of the solutions chimerical.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 129. Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, pp. 53 n. 2, 128–130.

He explained words that are not there. His glosses were mostly “glosses for”: “we are to understand that the word so described might have been a gloss on a word which is not in the manuscript, but might have been in the scribe’s copy!”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 139. “Thus the bulk of Dr. Evans’s list is worthless … But he has seen none of the obvious cases.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 140. “In the midst of the grammatical and historical inanities of the notes we look in vain for the palaeographical notes we had a right to expect.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, pp. 141–144.

He left out the line that names the man. To prove Urien was Owain Gwynedd he set a poem of Cynddelw beside Taliesin’s. “A detail which is omitted here, and which invalidates the comparison, is that in Cynddelw’s elegy Owein Gwynedd is named.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 84. Cynddelw’s own words are Am Owein Gwynedd yd gwynant. And where Evans called Owain ap Urien impossible, the manuscript repeats the name in full at the end of the poem: “thus the reading which Dr. Evans asserts to be ‘impossible’ is repeated and confirmed, a fact which he passes over in silence.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 193.

He cited sources for what the sources do not say. Urien “prevailed at Rhuddlan”: “This looks like a pure invention, and one wonders how the editor came to make such a statement. I turn up Rhuddlan in the index, and find the references xvi, n. 35.7. The reference xvi is to this very statement; the other is to this note: 35.7 teir caer = ? Conwy, Deganwy, and Rhuddlan. The expression teir caer occurs in a cryptic poem, in which Arthur is mentioned but Urien is not. It is seen then that on the assumption, which the editor himself queries, that Rhuddlan may be one of three forts alluded to in an obscure poem which has nothing to do with Urien, he bases the categorical statement that Taliesin’s Urien prevailed at Rhuddlan.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 86. Prydein in the Brut meant Cymru, he implied: “The unsuspecting reader will be deceived. I turn the name up in the index, and find that in those fifty-two pages Prydein occurs once only, and then means Scotland.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, pp. 51, 85.

He handed his critics the proof against himself. To show the poems were late he quoted Empedocles, “I have been a youth, and a maiden, and a bush, and a bird, and a gleaming fish in the sea”, “which show that the Pythagorean doctrine found expression a thousand years before Taliesin’s time in a formula identical with his.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 246. He had written about Taliesin for years “without once looking up what Rhys has to say about him”, had to be reminded by Dr Mary Williams of the Irish poem of Amairgen, the best-known parallel in Celtic literature, suggested that one bard had borrowed from the other (“I am not aware that anyone but Dr. Evans has suggested that either the Welsh or the Irish bard has borrowed from the other; the relation between them is that they have both inherited the same traditions, the existence of which in Britain is as certain as in Ireland, and, as we shall see, more directly attested”), and then “has the hardihood to declare … that ‘It is fatuous folly to imagine that early Welsh literature is a thing apart’.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, pp. 243–245. He prints Amairgen’s song there from Alfred Nutt, The Voyage of Bran ii, 91, with Nutt’s dating: the poems belonged to the original Lebor Gabála, known to the early ninth-century Nennius, and so “must be a product of the eighth century at the latest”.

He never read the men he claimed to overturn, and was proud of it. No word of Sharon Turner’s Vindication, “the main points of which remain unanswered”; none of Nash, “in which a twelfth century origin of the poems was maintained sixty years ago”, the theory Evans announced as his own revelation.Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 83. In 1924: “I have never seen a copy of the work of Sharon Turner … nor have I ever read a line written by D. W. Nash. To these two I owe absolutely nothing.”Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), p. 87.

He libelled the Britons’ own historians with a mistake they had warned against. “If we credit the Chronicles, Brochvael died in 662; while his son, Cynan Garwyn, was living in 870 … History of this sort reduces one to a melancholy, thoughtful silence — not with regard to Taliesin, but in respect of his commentators.”Evans, Facsimile (1910), p. xxv; Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 93. The standard edition says Brochwel Ysgythrog “cannot possibly be meant if the date 662 is right”; Lloyd keeps the two Cynans apart.Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 94. “The libel on the writers of Welsh history which is insinuated in the whole quotation is not to be tolerated”.Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, pp. 83, 93.

He promised to take the blame, and handed it to everyone else. In 1899, in the Crown’s report: “For whatever departures there may be from the originals, the writer must sadly accept the responsibility, except in those cases where letters have been dropped out and transposed, while the sheets were passing through the press.”Evans, Report, I, ii (1899), p. ix. One door, and when the departures were counted he walked every one of them out through it. The backwards arrows were the printer’s. The x was the compositor’s assistant’s. The only help he admits, in 123 pages, from the man who listed his mistakes by the hundred: “Sir John’s mistakes have helped me to make verbal corrections here and there.”Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), p. 64. Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), p. 49 n. 40.

At the back of the 1915 volume is a page headed CORRECTIONS, and it is the most honest page he ever printed. It begins by handing the blame to the men who set the type: the inconsistencies, he says, were “mainly introduced by the Compositors, who could not unlearn old ways”, and his punctuation was “persistently edited”, the same move he had made in the Crown’s report of 1899. Then it lists forty passages “amended” by number alone, telling the reader nothing about what changed in any of them. And then it stops correcting spelling and starts correcting the poems. A name struck out: Delete ‘Owein Kyveilog.’ A tree changed: for Gwern read Derw, oak. A fruit: for medlar read briar. And twice, a whole line of translation thrown away and a new one printed in its place. Call it an errata list if you like; it is a second edition, smuggled in at the back of the first.Evans, Poems from the Book of Taliesin (1915), the page headed CORRECTIONS. Read from the printed page. The same page carries the alterations quoted in the paragraph following.

One entry says why. Against line 3 of page 78 he prints: “History suggests reading: … (Rhun) mastered the rather near neighbourhood of the Laches.” Read that slowly. The Cymraeg is being changed because the history he wants needs it to change, and he says so in four words, in public, in his own book. Four entries above it another passage is sent “from ‘Holy-head’ to ‘Lache eyes’”. The Laches is Lache, a mile outside Chester, the ground onto which this file has already watched him carry the river Loughor. And eight years earlier he had written the rule himself: “Nothing is more dangerous to inquiry than an attempt to bring discoveries into conformity with some system or theory.” Morris-Jones needed two hundred and ninety pages to prove Evans did that. Evans admitted it on one line of his own errata, and nobody read it for a hundred and ten years.Evans, Poems from the Book of Taliesin (1915), CORRECTIONS, entries at 78·3 and 55·119. The rule is his own footnote of 1907, quoted earlier in this section. The entry is given here as it stands in the printed page and the underlying manuscript reading at 78·3 has not been checked against the facsimile here; what is established is the stated ground of the alteration, not its rightness or wrongness as Cymraeg.

He said the great palaeographers’ opinions were on loose sheets. They were on the fly-leaves. Accused of hiding the opinions of Hardy, Madden and Macray on the Black Book of Carmarthen, he wrote: “those opinions are written on loose sheets which were not forwarded with the MS. when I had it. I had no knowledge of them at the time. Insinuations of this kind should not be made without good reason.”Evans, Book of Aneirin (1922), p. xlv. It was no insinuation. Morgan Watkin had charged him in the Cymmrodorion’s own Transactions: he “overlooked to quote, along with the judgment of Thompson, the views of Hardy, Madden and Macray recorded in the hand of Mr. Wynne on the fly-leaves of the manuscript.”Watkin, Trans. Cymmrodorion 1919–20, p. 74. A fly-leaf is bound into the book. It cannot fail to be forwarded. The Black Book still has nine leaves before its text, numbered i to ix, and they are the nine leaves the National Library has not photographed. Nor was the accuser a stranger. In the corrections printed at the end of the same article, Watkin wrote: “Page 169, l. 32. Add ‘(or t)’ after ‘=d’. Dr. Evans reminds me that the writing of cunedda is of later date than the rest of the MS.”Watkin, Trans. Cymmrodorion 1919–20, p. 80. Evans had been writing to Watkin. The “insinuation” came from a man he corresponded with.Evans, Book of Aneirin (1922), p. xlv; Morgan Watkin, “The French Literary Influence in Mediaeval Wales”, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1919–20, pp. 73–74, 80. Peniarth MS 1: “70 ff. (foliated i–ix, 1–61)”, re-bound at the National Library in 1976 with its late nineteenth-century British Museum covers kept; the digitised copy runs from the inside front cover to folio 1.

He could not print one word the same way twice. Morgan Watkin went through the “diplomatic” texts, the ones meant to show the page exactly as it stands. Of a letter-form the scribes used: “This artistic character is unknown to all save the few who read the original manuscripts, for the reason that the editors of the texts just named have in every case printed in its stead the ordinary Roman w, thus dissimulating altogether its palæographical features. Anyone desirous of examining this sign should consult the facsimiles given in the two volumes of selections from the Red Book of Hergest by Sir John Rhys and Dr. Evans.”Watkin, Trans. Cymmrodorion 1918–19, p. 179. The page’s own letter swapped for a plain one, every time, without a word. Of the Black Book of Carmarthen: “Dr. Evans has lengthened out all these in his notes on the Black Book, but he forgot to tell us that the symbol w is a frequent contraction of vu in Anglo-Norman palæography”.Watkin, Trans. Cymmrodorion 1918–19, p. 176. He set Evans’s texts of the same manuscripts side by side: “In the Rhys-Evans text we read lact6n, while in the White Book Mabinogion, printed some years later by Dr. Evans himself, the group ct has been supplanted by tt”; “As both editions are diplomatic, one or the other must be wrong here”;Watkin, Trans. Cymmrodorion 1919–20, p. 59. “The Rhys-Evans diplomatic edition of the Dream of Rhonabwy has ver, whereas Dr. Evans in his diplomatic edition prints vet”;Watkin, Trans. Cymmrodorion 1919–20, p. 58. “Thus we have haccraf in the Rhys-Evans edition of the Dream of Rhonabwy and hacrraf in the reproduction of the same manuscript by Dr. Evans.”Watkin, Trans. Cymmrodorion 1919–20, p. 65. And of “the oldest law codex written in the Welsh language”, the Black Book of Chirk: “Our national palæographer, Dr. Evans, in his analysis of this manuscript states that forms like dressou, troith, ecchen, bucc, hycc, etc., ‘testify that the MS. must be a copy of one considerably older, and that Welsh can hardly have been the language of the scribe’”.Watkin, Trans. Cymmrodorion 1918–19, p. 194. Watkin: “It is, therefore, unnecessary to suppose, as Dr. Evans has done, that the copyist of the Chirk codex was ignorant of Welsh … The fact that a man takes the trouble to copy a document like the Black Book of Chirk pretty well constitutes in itself a prima facie case in favour of his Welsh extraction.”Watkin, Trans. Cymmrodorion 1918–19, p. 215. An older exemplar granted freely where it took the law out of the Britons’ hands, and refused where it would have given Taliesin back.Morgan Watkin, “The French Linguistic Influence in Mediaeval Wales”, Trans. Cymmrodorion, 1918–19: the w and vu, p. 176; “The French Literary Influence in Mediaeval Wales”, Trans. Cymmrodorion, 1919–20: ver, vet and lact6n, pp. 58–59 and p. 59 n. 3.

And when Watkin caught him, he charged Watkin with his own faults. In the notes to his Book of Aneirin two years later he answered the man who had set his texts side by side: “inaccuracy, discursiveness, and chanticleering go far to mar the meritorious kernel of the contributions.” Watkin’s account of how Evans had dated the Black Book of Carmarthen was “sheer fiction”, and: “There is something wrong with Prof. Watkin’s patent. Let me invite him to give us an accurate, concise statement of verified facts.”Evans, Facsimile and Text of the Book of Aneirin (Pwllheli, 1922), p. xlv. A remark of Watkin’s on the spelling of that manuscript: “Random statements of this kind are unpardonable where the facts are easily accessible.” Another: “This pure fiction is apparently contradicted on p. 191, & leaves one bewildered & suspicious of other statements.”Evans, Book of Aneirin (1922), p. xlvi. Every one of those charges had already been printed against him, with the pages, by the men he was answering.

He sneered at every Briton who kept faith with his own tradition. “On the other hand ‘patriots’ of the mythological school tell us that Taliesin flourished in the sixth century … ‘It will be wise to hearken not to me but to my arguments.’ However, we have Mr. Lloyd George’s assurance that ‘there is nothing a man likes less than to be convinced by argument.’ And I have myself observed that there is always in fact something trivial not to the taste of poetic minds. It has ever been so. The Greek Atomists were proof against the discovery that the earth was round — they preferred a world shaped ‘like a tambourine’ that rested elegantly ‘on air.’ Similarly the Welsh Atomist hugs tradition, repels discovery, and loves not the truth.” Under it he set a mock litany, “From idle dreams, and rant — / From tambourines aslant. / Good Lord! deliver us”, and in the footnote the believer “cannot construe a dozen lines of early Welsh poetry, nor write a modern dozen with decency, but he struts before the public with hat a-tilt, deceiving himself and some others by the tinkle of his tambourine.”Evans, Poems (1915), p. xiv.

He was humiliated that a Scot had translated the old books of Cymru, and never read the page where the Scot said two Britons did it. He “felt humiliated that it had been left to a Scot” to translate the Four Ancient Books of Wales, “did he not understand and translate the whole?”, and the translations were “entirely disastrous to my patriotism.”Evans, Poems (1915), pp. v, vi; Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 83. In his first volume, W. F. Skene says the translations were made for him by the Reverend D. Silvan Evans and the Reverend Robert Williams, “in order to avoid any risk of its being coloured by my own views.” “How unlike Dr. Gwenogvryn Evans!”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 83. Skene, Four Ancient Books of Wales (1868), i, p. 17.

He sneered at the scholars before him, and at the man who made him. They were “learned professors”, lost “in a fog of their own creation”, who “trod the path of faith … without once verifying their references”: “This forcible-feeble rant bears the same relation to the truth as his ‘further testimony’ of the Chirk Codex.”Evans, Facsimile (1910), pp. xi, xiii, xvii; Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 64. Sir John Rhŷs, whose lectures had made him, “has published a romantic translation”.Evans, Facsimile (1910), p. 116. Romantic: the word that was about to be used on Iolo. “The references to the late Sir John Rhys, in particular, are deplorable.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 151. And the scholars who read the text as it stood were, in Morris-Jones’s mockery, “perverse people”, who would “simply refuse to accept it on the mere dictum of the seer of Tremvan.”Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 54. Evans, Facsimile (1910), p. xvi; Morris-Jones, “Taliesin”, p. 148.

In 1924 he turned on the Cymry themselves. He opened with a parable. As a small farmer he had taken his geese good white oats and been hissed out of the field, until an old farmer told him: “Man alive, you should feed geese with bad potatoes, and a handful of winnowings.”Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), p. 2. “As with anserine so with human fare. People who have been brought up on Tradition find it has a richer flavour than Truth.”Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), p. 3. The Cymraeg reading public are geese, and their history is rotten potatoes. The Britons’ chief scholar was “the high priest of toothless old wives’ tales”; heaven’s store of genius spent on him “is like the Atlantic Ocean producing a sprat”; his students were “youths from the rural districts, who know less than he does on every subject”.Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), pp. 3, 4. “The English of the Welsh class-room is not the English of the Englishman.”Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), p. 41. A Briton’s English cannot be “free from the taint of its origin … men who have spent all their days in Wales are not conscious of their defect”; he himself had only understood The Pickwick Papers once he “had lived in the meantime in England.”Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), pp. 42, 70. He quoted Henry Sweet of Oxford, “who was wont to say that ‘Wales had never bred a philologist’”.Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), p. 35. The Britons who followed Geoffrey of Monmouth “corrupted everything they touched, and the race is not yet extinct.”Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), p. 26. “There is no absurdity that Welsh philology will not support.”Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), p. 67. Cymraeg in the University colleges was “largely a failure”; the old bardic grammarians’ rules were “fetishes”; and “The ‘Cymraeg coeth’ of the ‘Llenorion’, and the ‘Cymraeg Cymreig’ of the would-be patriots are most nauseous.”Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), pp. 70, 105. Cymraeg Cymreig, Welsh Welsh, made him sick. The telephone and the teapot should keep their English names: “if we accept them, why not their baptismal names as well?”Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), p. 103. Tradition was “Time’s Hold-all”, stuffed with “the uncritical lumber, the perversions and the forgeries of past ages … no better than a milliner’s rubbish heap”;Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), p. 36. “the grandmother of all sorts of fantastic pedigrees unknown to fact and history.”Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), p. 13. Forty years earlier he had taken the prize at the Liverpool National Eisteddfod for a collection of proverbs in Cymraeg, the sayings of that same tradition, gathered out of the old manuscripts.Dictionary of Welsh Biography, s.v. Evans, John Gwenogvryn, by E. D. Jones: the proverbs were “a by-product” of his study of old manuscripts, “awarded the prize at the Liverpool national eisteddfod of 1884 and printed in its Transactions in 1885”. Morris-Jones was the “judge of Llanfair P.G.”, doing what Sir Matthew Hale did when he sent old women to the fire as witches, and those who kept the tradition were one-eyed mules grazing a rubbish heap, blind to the good grass across the road.Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924), p. 35. Evans, Y Cymmrodor XXXIV (1924): the geese, pp. 1–3; the old wives’ tales, the sprat, the rural youths, pp. 3–4; “the grandmother”, p. 13; the race “not yet extinct”, p. 26; Sweet, p. 35; Time’s Hold-all, the judge, the mules, pp. 35–36; “the taint”, pp. 42–43; “largely a failure”, “no absurdity”, pp. 67, 70; Pickwick, pp. 69–70; “fetishes”, p. 82 n.; the teapot and “most nauseous”, pp. 102–105.