Short History of Wales | Page 6

came a tall fair-haired people. They came in
families as well as in tribes. They had iron weapons and tools, and the
short dark people could not keep them at bay with their bone- tipped
spears and flint-headed arrows. We know nothing about the struggle
between them. But it may be that the fairy stories we were told when
children come from those far-off times. If a fairy maiden came from
lake or mound to live among men, she vanished at once if touched with
iron. Is this, learned men have asked, a dim memory of the victory of
iron over stone?
The name given to the short dark man is usually Iberian; the name
given to the tall fair man who followed him is Celt. The two learnt to
live together in the same country. The conqueror probably looked upon
himself at first as the master of the conquered, then as simply
belonging to a superior race, but gradually the distinction vanished. The
language remained the language of the Celt; it is called an Aryan
language, a language as noble among languages as the Aran is among
its hills. It is still spoken in Wales, in Brittany, in Ireland, in the
Highlands of Scotland, and in the Isle of Man. It was also spoken in
Cornwall till the eighteenth century; and Yorkshire dalesmen still count
their sheep in Welsh. English is another Aryan tongue.
The more mixed a nation is, the more rich its life and the greater its
future. Purity of blood is not a thing to boast of, and no great and
progressive nation comes from one breed of men. Some races have
more imagination than others, or a finer feeling for beauty; others have
more energy and practical wisdom. The best nations have both; and
they have both, probably, because many races have been blended in
their making. There is hardly a parish in Wales in which there are not
different types of faces and different kinds of character.

The wandering of nations has never really stopped. The Celt was
followed by his cousins--the Angle and the Saxon. These, again, were
followed by races still more closely related to them--the Normans and
the Danes and the Flemings. They have all left their mark on Wales and
on the Welsh character.
The migration is still going on. Trace the history of an upland Welsh
parish, and you will find that, in a surprisingly short time, the old
families, high and low, have given place to newcomers. Look into the
trains which carry emigrants from Hull or London to Liverpool on their
way west--they have the blue eyes and yellow hair of those who came
two thousand years ago. But this country is no longer their goal, the
great continent of America has been discovered beyond. Fits of longing
for wandering come over the Welsh periodically, as they came over the
Danes--caused by scarcity of food and density of population, or by a
sense of oppression and a yearning for freedom. An empty stomach
sometimes, and sometimes a fiery imagination, sent a crowd of
adventurers to new lands. And it is thus that every living nation is ever
renewing its youth.

CHAPTER III
--ROME

It is not a spirit of adventure and daring alone that makes a nation.
Rome rose to say that it must have the spirit of order and law too. It
rose in the path of the nations; it built the walls of its empire, guarded
by the camps of its legions, right across it. For four hundred years the
wandering of nations ceased; the nations stopped-- and they began to
till the ground, to live in cities, to form states. The hush of this peace
did not last, but the memory of it remained in the life of every nation
that felt it. Unity and law tempered freedom and change.
The name of Rome was made known, and made terrible, through Wales
by a great battle fought on the eastern slopes of the Berwyn. The
Romans had conquered the lands beyond the Severn, and had placed
themselves firmly near the banks of that river at Glevum and
Uriconium. Glevum is our Gloucester, and its streets are still as the
Roman architect planned them. Uriconium is the burnt and buried city

beyond Shrewsbury; the skulls found in it, and its implements of
industry, and the toys of its children, you can see in the Shrewsbury
Museum.
The British leader in the great battle was Caratacus, the general who
had fought the Romans step by step until he had come to the borders of
Wales, to summon the warlike Silures to save their country. We do not
know the site of the great battle, though the Roman historian Tacitus
gives a graphic description of it. The