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    Re: Wales was about as much a single country as The Ukraine .. ? :-) Archived Message

    Posted by Ken Waldron on June 8, 2020, 6:06 pm, in reply to "Wales was about as much a single country as The Ukraine .. ? :-)"

    "I thought the earliest recording was as an Irish settlement"

    There were apparently Irish settlements as said, removed by the Cunedda dynasty.
    Prior to that Mon was a British /Brythonic druidic centre of power: as attested by the attack on them there by Suetonius Paulinus.

    Gwynedd is from the tribal nameVenedoti. :not a problem being P Celtic cf: Veneti which similarly gives Guened in Brittany: (Vannes): cognate with Ir: fine yes, but not originating in Irish. cf. also the Brythonic /Pictish tribe of my area: Veniconi "Hound kindred".

    Venedoti effectively means something like "the Kindred" similar in manner to Cymry itself "Combrogi" "fellow countrymen".

    The taking of Gwynedd by Cunedda and his sons is of note as the naming of the regions after those sons follows the same pattern as that of the Pictish provinces likewise named after the seven sons of the eponymous Cruithne: it's effectively an origin legend following a Pictish model.
    Wikipedia and many other authors make the mistake of thinking that Cunedda came from Gododdin: the Brythonic kingdom of Lothian, but in fact the name Manaw Gododdin only refers to adjacent Gododdin to discriminate it from that other Manaw: the Isle of man.
    The Manaw of Cunedda spanned the forth adjacent to Pictland, so the Cunedda narrative of Gwynedd kingship origins seems to hold some truth,though there's a lot of rubbish talked about them being some kind of semi Roman command etc. in Wiki and elsewhere: theres no evidence- its just that 19th-20c British historians just loved them Romans...

    "So basically...Wales was a bunch of local principalities w. tribal warfare..."

    Yes: Pretty much the same as in England and Scotland...

    then about 8 years of almost-welsh unity under Ap-Llewelyn...

    -well thats a long time after keeping the early Anglo and Anglo British states to the east at arms length for many hundreds of years.

    Wales was moving towards a centralised state, much as Scotland & England... and after Ap-Llewelyn near again centralised under Owain Glyndwr ...


    " then the norman invasion."

    -You forgot the Norse...

    ...then of course with Edward we are in the era of the centralised king as magnate with vast resources at his command:
    take a trip to Conwy and see what Colonialism looked like in the 14th c: very pretty now & beautifully preserved but in its day a brutal oppressive fortress and walled garrison town utterly removed from the people around it.

    If you're interested for an intro I suggest you read "When was Wales" Gwyn A. Williams. 1985















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