Peeps at many lands: WalesWilmot-Buxton, E. M. (Ethel Mary)
History
Peeps at many lands: Wales
Wilmot-Buxton, E. M. (Ethel Mary)
Wales -- Description and travel
To-day we will leave North Wales and travel south to take a glimpse at
Pembrokeshire, in some ways one of the most interesting counties in
Wales.
Between the northern and southern parts of the country runs a stream,
flowing into St. Bride’s Bay, which divides the Welsh Pembroke from a
district known as “Little England beyond Wales.”
Here, in this latter region, one hears nothing but English spoken.
The towns, the people, are typically English, or, at least, very far
from being typically Welsh. This is how a seventeenth-century writer
accounts for the fact:
“This same division was in ancient time inhabited wholly by Welshmen,
but a great part thereof was won from them by the Englishmen under the
conduct of Earl Strongbow, and divers others, and the same planted
with Englishmen whose posterity enjoys it to this day, and keep their
language among themselves without receiving the Welsh speech or
learning any part thereof, and hold themselves so close to the same
as to this day they wonder at a Welshman coming among them, the one
neighbour saying to the other: ‘Look! there goeth a Welshman!’”
The interesting thing about this is that these people of South Pembroke
were probably not English at all in origin, but Flemings, who came over
from Flanders many centuries ago, and settled there with their woollen
manufactures--a trade which perhaps accounts for the superiority of
“Welsh flannel” to-day.
These were, like their Welsh neighbours, a very religious and
emotional people, and more ready, perhaps, than the former to leave
the land of their adoption for the perils of the Holy War. For a
writer of the time of the early Crusades tells the story of a certain
Archbishop’s journey through Wales to rouse volunteers for the war in
far-off Palestine; and to him “it appears wonderful and miraculous
that, although he addressed the Pembroke people both in the Latin
and French tongues, these persons, who understood neither of these
languages, were much affected, and flocked in great numbers to the
cross.... They are,” he goes on to say, “a brave and robust people,
ever most hostile to the Welsh--a people well versed in commerce and
woollen manufactures, anxious to seek gain by sea or land, in defiance
of fatigue and danger, a hardy race, equally fitted for the plough or
the sword.”
Suppose we take a steamer from the charming little seaport town of
Tenby, and follow the coast-line of Pembroke up to Milford Haven.
Romantic cliffs guard the land, and limestone caverns hint at smuggling
expeditions in the good old days. Here is Caldy Island, where stood one
of the oldest of Benedictine priories; and here, at St. Gowan’s Head,
the cliff, rising to a great height above the sea, is split up into a
narrow cleft by the force of the waves.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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