From Britons to Cymry

When the Romans invaded Britain, the Celtic peoples of what is now Wales, such as the Silures and Ordovices, resisted for decades before being conquered. After Roman rule collapsed in the early fifth century, the British language and its people survived in the west while the English took the east, and by around 600 the Britons of Wales had become a distinct people who called themselves Cymry, “fellow countrymen”.^•

Rome in Wales

Roman campaigns against the tribes of Wales began around 48 CE. The resistance leader Caratacus fought on among the Silures and Ordovices; in 60 or 61 CE the governor Suetonius Paulinus attacked the druids’ stronghold on Anglesey, as the Roman historian Tacitus described. Legionary fortresses were built at Caerleon and Chester, with forts such as Segontium at Caernarfon, and gold was mined at Dolaucothi. Rome left a lasting memory: medieval Welsh legend made the emperor Magnus Maximus, Macsen Wledig, an ancestor of Welsh kings.^•

A British language survives

The Britons spoke a Brythonic Celtic language, ancestor of Welsh, Cornish and Breton. As English kingdoms spread west, the British-speaking world was cut into pieces, and Welsh emerged as its own language by about the sixth century. The oldest Welsh poetry, attributed to Aneirin and Taliesin around 600, is actually set in the “Old North” of what is now southern Scotland and northern England, a reminder of how much of Britain was once British-speaking. The English called these people wealas, foreigners or Romanised people, the root of “Welsh” and “Wales”; the Welsh call their land Cymru.^•

Saints and kingdoms

Christianity survived from Roman times and flourished in the “age of the saints”. David, Dewi Sant, founded a monastery at what became St Davids in the sixth century and is the patron saint whose day, 1 March, is celebrated across Wales. Wales was divided into kingdoms such as Gwynedd, Powys, Deheubarth and Morgannwg. In the eighth century the Mercian king Offa built the great earthwork that bears his name, roughly marking a border that still feels real.^•

Hywel Dda

Rhodri Mawr (d. 878) and his grandson Hywel Dda, “Hywel the Good” (d. c. 950), brought much of Wales under one rule. Tradition credits Hywel with gathering Welsh customary law into a single code at Whitland. The surviving law books date from the thirteenth century, but they describe a distinctive society: one that preferred compensation to punishment, divided land among all sons, and gave women rights to property on divorce that were generous for medieval Europe. Welsh people still point to Cyfraith Hywel, the Law of Hywel, as a sign of an old and civilised nation.^•

Behind all of this lies an idea that has never quite gone away: that the Welsh are the true Britons, the island’s oldest people. Medieval Welsh prophecy promised that the Britons would one day reclaim the island, a hope later attached to Owain Glyndŵr and even to the Tudors.^•

Why it matters today