"When Edward the First conquered the country, and subjected the natives to English rule, he was deeply sensible of the difficulty which now paralyses education commissioners, and he dealt with it in a manner characteristic of the monarch and the times. Of him Carlyle would say, he was a real man, and no sham; and did not believe in any distracted jargon of universal rose-water in this world still so full of sin. Accordingly, he gathered all the Welsh bards together, and put them to death; and Hume, a philosophic and ordinarily not a cruel historian, says this policy was not absurd. English legislation, between the conquest of the country by Edward the First and its incorporation with England by Henry the Eighth, was characterised by a deliberate and pertinacious endeavour to extirpate the language and subjugate the spirit of the inhabitants. By laws of the Lancastrian princes, (whose usurpation was long resisted by the Welsh people,) 'rhymers, minstrels, and other Welsh vagabonds,' were forbidden to burden the country; the natives were not permitted to have any house of defence, to bear arms, or to exercise any authority; and an Englishman, by the act of marrying a Welsh woman, became ineligible to hold office in his adopted country. By statutes of Henry the Eighth, it was enacted, that law proceedings should be in the English tongue; that all oaths, affidavits, and verdicts, should be given and made in English; and that no Welsh person, 'who did not use the English speech' should hold office within the King's dominions. Even at the Reformation, which secured the sacred volume to Englishmen 'in their own tongue wherein they were born,' the revelation to man of God's will was not given to Welshmen in a language understood by the people. In 1562, however, provision was made for translating the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer into the British or Welsh tongue, by an act which declared that the most and greatest part of the Queen's loving subjects in Wales did not understand the English tongue, and therefore were utterly destitute of God's holy Word, and did remain in the like, or rather more, darkness and ignorance than they were in the time of papistry, and required that not only a Welsh, but also an English, Bible and Book of Common Prayer should be laid in every church throughout Wales, there to remain, that such as understood them might read and peruse the same; and that such as understood them not might, by conferring both tongues together, the sooner attain to the knowledge of the English tongue.