r/HistoryWales

I am very curious about this false English Elizabethan narrative. What if we move this man’s possible existence to 400-600 AD? Even though there is zero surviving evidence for him, there are aspects of his story that fit better with Welsh history as it is known. I’ve seen enough monk mis scribing that I could easily believe a wrong era vs a completely invented story. Both are possible but what do you think?

why does everyone compare wales and Cornwall?

So hear me out right? Like I’m fed up when anyone mentions wales a lot of people are always like oh Cornwall I’m a little fed up okay everyone wants Cornwall to be a country but it physically cannot it was never a full country in history it’s always been a part of England otherwise Scotland Northern Ireland wales has always been a country so can people just stop comparing the two cause it generally just irritates me. And also I get Cornwall is old and ancient but so is Wales and fun fact Wales is the only Celtic country that has their ancient language alive Cornwall try to bring it back but because it was so dead no one knows how to speak it or use the vowels but end of story can we just stop comparing it and you know when people mention anything about? wales stop saying Cornwall does this because it irritates me it irritates a lot of Welsh because we are different. We are also a country we are a lot older than Cornwell

I know the Groans of the Britons occurred around 450AD, so Britain must have largely been governed in the manner of a Roman state at this point. Less than a century later though Gildas writes his diatribe against five British kings.

So I was curious… was the term “King” a title that was retroactively given to the warlords who filled the void after direct Roman rule ended? Were there always royal families from pre-Roman tribes in the background anyway? Or is there a period we can pinpoint where the warlords started to stylise themselves as “Kings” of new “Kingdoms”?

If the latter, who is the earliest known Romano-British King?

Can anyone here help me understand why the Viking impact on Wales was immaterial compared to the rest of Britain and Ireland .

I know they called us the Bretar, and Wales Bretland. That’s probably influenced by the Gaels as in old Irish we are known as Bretnas.

The argument usually goes that Wales was poorer and less worth the effort than England . Maybe so but the outer Hebrides and eastern Ireland were also extremely poor .

This argument also fails to consider the main resource of the Viking economy was people , they were a brutal slave trading society, from Ireland to Ukraine their economy is centred on capturing and selling usually defenceless people .

Is it because Rhodri Mawr smashed a large raiding party at the height of the Viking age? The raider Gorm was defeated. There never seems to be a large raid again, only hit and run. There’s no Welsh equivalent of Dublin or York.

We also weirdly have mostly Norse names in English for every island in Wales . Why? It’s actually a strange paradox

Every Welsh island endonym is completely different to the English one , which essentially didn’t matter in Wales became majority English speaking in the late 1800s. This is because the English name was inherited from the Norse name into Anglo Saxon showing how the Anglo Saxon and Welsh worlds were completely alien to each other .