Gwyn A. Williams 'When Was Wales?'

GWYN A. WILLIAMS.

When was Wales?

British Welsh.

Excerpt from 'The Wars of British Independence'

".....Anthemius, a distinguished officer from the eastern empire, won many victories and re-established a Roman presence in Gaul. And central to the force which Anthemius led against the Visigoths in 467 was a powerful army of Britons under Riothamus, king of the Armoricans.

Large groups of Britons, driven by the plagues, the Saxons and recruitment by the Romans, were crossing into Gaul. They seem to have moved in organized communities; in 461 one of their bishops attended a conference in Tours. It grew into a mass migration which continued over many years, another of those 'migrations of the peoples' which characterized the times. These Britons seem to have swallowed up whatever was left of the Armoricans and they were present in force along the Loire. They played an important role in a confederacy which buttressed a Roman enclave around Soissons. Not until 496 did the new power of Clovis and the Franks extinguish this last survivor of the Empire in the west.

The incomers finally settled in Armorica. By this time its whole population were known as Britons. Their language was Brittonic and in due course produced Breton, close cousin to the Cymraeg of the Welsh. Brittany was central to the history of those Welsh: indeed Riothamus has been put forward as a candidate for the historical Arthur. Churchmen crossed and recrossed endlessly between Brittany, Cornwall and Wales; lives of the Welsh saints were produced in Brittany and the earliest known collection called or calling itself the Canon Laws of the Welsh came out of Brittany. The connection remained intimate for generations. And it was this sequence of temporary Roman success along the Loire which initiated that brief but potent period in the history of the adjacent island which it is difficult to avoid calling the age of Arthur."