Curating the Past in a Conquered Land, 1282–1540

Abstract This chapter assesses the significance of the unprecedented growth in Welsh historical writing, mostly in the Welsh language, in the period from the Edwardian conquest of Wales to the Reformation and Acts of Union. This consisted mainly of curating and consolidating works produced earlier in the Middle Ages rather than the composition of new texts. For scribes and patrons, the history that mattered most concerned the Britons and their Welsh successors under the princes whose rule had ended in 1282. By contrast, accounts of the period after the Edwardian conquest were few, brief, and focused on events in England more than those in Wales. The first part of the discussion surveys the main Welsh historical texts composed from the late thirteenth to early sixteenth centuries, with particular attention to the efforts, deeply influenced by Geoffrey of Monmouth, to give the history of the Welsh canonical form in a sequence of texts which between them narrated events from the Trojan War to 1282. The second part focuses on the poet, genealogist, and scribe Gutun Owain (fl. c.1451–1499), the most prolific writer of history in medieval Wales, including his borrowings from the first printed edition of the Middle English prose Brut chronicle published by William Caxton in 1480. These borrowings reflect how, for Gutun Owain, the history of the Welsh in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was inextricably linked to the kingdom of England and predicated on loyalty to its monarch, while nevertheless retaining a distinctively Welsh inflection.