British through and through
General Discussions ( Anything Goes )
There s an awful lot o tosh written and spoken about Welsh history and it frustrates me that people dont do their research themselves, how can they have an opinion on something without understanding the facts? I mean, come on, only English people are allowed to have opinions without understanding!!! Saxo-Norman trait innit?Now it wont suprise anyone here that Im no Oxford History Don, but I dam well should be. So here are a few FACTS for the benefit of the site.1. We are the only original Britons2. We were never truly defeated by Romans, the Irish, the Norse, the Saxon or the Norman.3. Our kin in middle England and the East and South became Romanised, we remained wild on the fringe.4. Vortigen was a King in those lands, he sold out, thought he was doing it for the best cos his people were weak, he probably never set foot in the lands of his kindered princes to the West.5. Ok. we tried to help out, sent some wild boys over with names like 'Gododdin' but the overwhelming waves across the North sea was too much, and besides, we had the Irish seadogs to ward off our coast6. The people and culture that swallowed up our kin race pretty much left us alone over here, so we got on with it7. There was no mass refugeeing Westwards going on in the 6th century - THAT IS TOSH,,they assimilated and sure there was some movement and lots of friction and bloodshed, but a coupla centuries later, the BRITISH tribes of what is now England ceased to exist. We didnt break our back to help them because over the last 500 years they had become alien to us, Romanised, even the language dialected to a great extent. A vauge common Celtic heritage had worn thin (will someone tell me who were the Celts anyway? Because I think its a 'catch all' portmanteau that is convenient for modern historians to categorise pre Romano British races, which was already multicultural)8. In the middle ages, the concept of England grew, but the common Yorkshire peasant would have viewed the Sussex peasant with the same alienation as he would a Gascon or a Welshman possibly even a Moor, ALMOST!! And that weak thread was what the Norman ruling class exploited, and nurtured to build EMPIRE ENGLAND9. A few Welsh Princes matched this but unfortunately it was not sustained and Glamorgan and Gwynedd did not manage to bond like Sussex and Yorkshire did gradually.10. Englands rulers defeated parochialism within its own realms11. But ultimately failed with the rest of the island but had a bloody good run for its money right up to 195012 Yep, we bought into EMPIRE ENGLAND eventually. Hell, the Tudors of Anglesey got the CEO job and their last one, Elizabeth, began the thinking EMPIRE BRITISH and beyond the shores of the long island off Europe.13. THE BRITISH EMPIRE could not have been built without the Welsh, Scots and Irish buying into it, for economic reasons (are there ever any other reasons in history?)14. So us here Welsh, well we've always been here and we are 'YMA O HYD ER GWAETHAF PAWB A PHOPETH'An analogy for US citizens is that of a Native American tribe that fought back but essentially kept its lands even though occupied, kept its language and even put a few Presidents in the White man's Whitehouse (which by the way is so named because Welsh troops burnt down the red brick one in 1812, and so proves that we bought into the Empire thing!!)
updated by @gareth-williams: 12/04/15 03:57:45PM
