Eoin MacNeill has expressed (in Early Irish Laws and Institutions) a theory about the Renaissance: he says that because of its exclusively aristocratic nature, it damaged the old folk culture and drove a dividing line between high and low culture. Both sides have their adherents. The question is acute in the Celtic fringe of Europe, where the accessible resources of the new Italian culture were very few, and the vulnerability of the native culture was so high. If the Celtic matter has appeared for so long to be old-fashioned, poor, and in decline, the Renaissance was perhaps the turning-point. There is a huge resistance among European scholars to studying the Celtic languages or learning anything true about their cultures; the crop of fantasies about celtdom is a product of this resolute ignorance. Scholars are thorough fashion victims, and so their fear of being outside the circle of brightness reveals the kind of panics and negative associations which affect international literary taste. These negative associations also decided the upper strata of the nobility to stop patronising the local bards. Although the Renaissance may have initiated the system of division between "folk art" and "courtly art", of course the techniques of Renaissance art did not just stop in the aristocratic households and remain hermetically sealed. If Welsh nobles stopped building castles and started building beautiful Italianate mansions, this was hardly to the loss of Welsh architecture. Renaissance techniques in clothing, textiles, music, dance, cookery, drama, poetry, painting, and decoration were capable of inspiring regional traditions, although admittedly the flow of Italian masterpieces into places like Wales, Ireland, Scandinavia, and Scotland was not a mighty torrent.
The overall pattern of Tudor times, as Gwynfor Jones explains it, is the transformation of the gentry into English-speaking landowners who had no use for Welsh poetry; and the transition of eulogy from heroic virtues to Renaissance virtues suitable for JPs and successful farmers. It's quite true that the landowners of Wales became much richer with the arrival of law and peace. However, these flowing resources were not directed at the patronage of Welsh poetry, or rather ceased to be during the course of the 17th C. Meanwhile, English literature rose, out of a trough lasting several centuries, towards the dizzy heights of the Elizabethan period, skilfully adopting European models, from Petrarchan to baroque. The names of George Herbert and of the Countess of Pembroke arouse groans and chagrin among Welsh literati, because they belonged to families which had formerly been eminent in patronising Welsh poetry; the diversion of the Pembroke family revenues to English poets is peculiarly irritating to patriots. Wiliam Herbert, first Earl of Pembroke, rose to magnate status because he was Catherine Parr's brother-in-law. (Mary Sidney's father was Warden of the Marches, and had patronised Welsh poets although he was English; she married into the Pembroke family, representing the anglicisation of the high nobility.) Henry Vaughan is another symbol of Welsh talent lost to an alien language; the anglicisation of the upper classes spelt ruin for a literary system based on patronage and panegyric. At some point in the late 16th C, English poetry became more significant than Welsh, for the first time ever.
D J Bowen states that there were about 20 noble or rich gentry families to each county of Wales, along with some families of minor gentry. The former group were the patrons of the bards, whose numbers were limited by this.
The Stuart period saw the end of the cywydd tradition in Wales. It had been in artistic decline since the mid-sixteenth century, although quantitatively it reached its peak in this period. The last generation of great poets in this line arises in the generation after Tudur Aled's death; i.e. 1530-1560. The cywydd is an ornate poem in a complex metrical form, directed mostly at praise for the gentry, and written by specialist bards supported by the patrons about whom the poems were written. Here, as a single example, is the marwnad of Mredydd ap Gronwy ap Griffith, a Denbighshire nobleman, by Wiliam Llyn (1534-1580), in a barbarically crude translation.
The weeping of the world is in Maelor
like a torrent which is grinding the ground
like pains you often heard
like an earthquake, a horn or a bell,
like a crowd dragging its feet for the sake of a serene and beautiful lion
like one too lame to creep
like the blind for the light of day
is the grief for the death of Mredydd.
Woe betide us forever, was there ever more groaning than
(at) closing up the face of the son of Gronwy?
Crying was there everywhere at seeing him
because of the hiding of one of the line of Marchudd of old.
Our gift is inside the stone and the water
there is earth wrapping one of the blood of Tewdwr.
The sound of the sea is great now:
(there is) a greater (one for) the lineage of Hedd Molwynog.
Who (from) Llywarch, his family was a great honour to him,
who is (now) strong of the Pigotts?
Was the penalty not very great
when the crowd were walking with their heads down?
In the place where he went into the church of Llansannan
we are going wild
many know this.
Seeing the longing we cry
for how good and generous this one was.
Woe recognised where gain had been,
losing the food from the storerooms of Mredydd.
Woe for Annes who is complaining long
with heavy shout for his hiding on the far side.
Although Olwen is crying to the lord
he does not hear her shout from the height of heaven.
Where there were wine and song
there is a frosty moon around the family of Heilin.
Gwen is weeping for sadness
for her getting the chagrin for a good husband.
Last year there was the couture of clothing
and the silk making things shapely;
this year there is—woe to all weak—
the stolid unmoving earth instead of silk.
Who will give judgment and be quick to help?
Who will be there in battle since Mredydd is not living?
The slope closed over the grey-black stag
his verdict was just in every matter.
He did not crush the weak with excessive work,
did not raise a row, did not talk loud flattery.
Woe us, God, mourning for the gift of him
losing one thoughtful, wise, and just.
If my gold chieftain has gone to the grave
he was the tree which brought every virtue
The sprig of blood with its big produce
like wine or apples from the orchard
his grandson is the apples
and his grandson is worth two.
Tomas, cuirass of fidelity,
may he reach three times the age of his grandfather.
There is a grove of children, fountain of faith,
the lineage of Mredydd is making the grove large.
Who is like the father who left stainless?
if not Wiliam, leader of godliness,
Tomas, David, a gain to any family;
Alis, Sebel, who are hoping.
Elin, Catrin, rod of gold, and Elsbeth fair(...)
Annes, a girl whose bosom is golden,
a good sign, Sioned and Gwen?
The three stags of generous nature
and the eight hinds of splendid address
are in affliction, whole grief, because of the time
of their father coming to its end.
Was any thing ever created
that did not pass away
or will not pass away?
The animals of mighty physique
in my judgment, will die;
the young salmon with its green-white coat about it
—death will strike it in the middle of the lake.
The wild stag above the castle of the slopes
he will be getting his stopping after his day;
the slender hawk, he is beautifully pivoting around the manor
—until the same hour;
the brave and the brilliant of old
the deliverers, are dead.
Mredydd too, hoar governor, he was a brave man,
has been set into the earth.
The good blessed God,
publisher of the verdict on us,
the hawk invested with the authority of a man
let it be for God, judge of His peace
—a gold ornament—
to carry him to heaven.
The final form of the cywydd was developed in the 14th C, but it is a continuation of a line of Celtic praise poems which goes back, not just to sub-Roman times, but in all probability to the Bronze Age. It is right for a genre to be conservative when it recites so much genealogy, and its subject is a class whose status is hereditary, and intended to continue. This is the end of an old song: however prosperous the Tudor gentry of Wales, the whole bardic tradition is about to come to an end. The precious information enshrined in cywyddau is ceasing to play a political function and becoming the matter of antiquaries, copying and collecting manuscripts.
We are entitled to speculate that the order in which the family members appear in the poem exactly reflects their genealogical distance from the deceased Meredith, and perhaps that the amount of space given to each one reflects their status and wealth (less space for unmarried girls, hinds). A tractate lays out the rules of bardic verse:
A lord, like a king, or an emperor, or a prince, or an earl, or a baron, or any other chief, is praised for his strength, and his courage, and his military skill, and his power over men and horses and arms, and (his) wealth, and his expenditure, and his neatness in ruling land and principality, and (his) cruelty to his enemies, and gentleness and love towards his men and friends, and generosity of gifts and feasts, and grandeur of actions, and merriness, and genealogy, and fairness of mind and form, and adornment of clothes with gold or jewels, and grandeur of thoughts, and courage of actions, and other things fine and honourable.
A nobleman is praised for his courage, and his strength, and his military skill, and his mind, and his genealogy, and his fineness, and his generosity, and his merriment, and his wisdom, and his neatness, and his goodness, and his maintenance, and his wealth, and his grandeur of actions, and his governance, and his fidelity of word and action and thought to his lord.
('men" is in the feudal sense of homme, i.e. retainer or dependent, one who gives hommage.) This treatise dates from sometime after 1335, and is ascribed to Einion Offeiriad ("the priest'); it was printed in 1570, and was still of practical use then. In order to get anywhere with this fascinating set of rules, we would have to throw all the nouns away and work out "meaning rules" for their meanings: what does an arglwydd do? how would you tell an arglywdd from a tywyssawc? what are the features of cymhendawd ("neatness" "properness") of government? how much should expenditure be? Every phrase, in these rambling sentences, has the same structure: the identification of a behavioural norm and the naming of an overfulfilment of that norm. Indeed, structurally, the poem excels verbal norms and is occasioned by excellence.
The poems are responses to occasions, which are in fact moments of transition in the family cycle of patron families: marriages and deaths, for example. Although tied, thus, to transience, the poems assert the stability of the whole structure, for example by displaying genealogy. However much the status of the nobility relies on a whole social order to sustain it, the excellences recorded in the cywyddau belong essentially to individuals. The contrast between social structure and individual character is already present. The poems, by rule, describe exceptional character qualities, not just average ones.
The poets must be part of noble households (upper servants) in order to have the information (gifts detailed, character judgements) which the poems contain. The listing of virtues supplies models for noble behaviour, and suggests ways in which real nobles might be betraying these publicly named ideals. The bard's inside knowledge also allows him to write poems of satire (dychanu) which use the ethical ideals in the opposite sense.
Because of the link between poems and the family cycle, their function can be compared to that of photographs in modern society. The logical structure of a "book", in those days, would have been as a collection of the praise-poems referring to a particular family: resembling, in design, our photograph albums. (I am not sure we know this to be the case; such family collections are known for Ireland, but many of the manuscripts of Welsh poetry we have were made for enthusiasts in post-Tudor times, and are already based on literary merit, and detached from a purely family context.) An essential part of "modernising" was, then, to remove poems from their genealogical context and organise them around the author; sidelining the real protagonist. There are trends towards the first person poem in Wales before the decline of patronage; these are probably influenced by Provençal and French lyric poetry, and may be connected with the planting of Norman families in the Marches.
Bardic poetry is in line with the overall power structure of society; the assets it praises are the maximum available within that society; it is an audible version of visible power, and draws on the most impressive resources available within its horizon. The power of the nobility enhances the power of the poems.
The poems are frequently descriptions of prestige objects as gifts; the poem is also a gift and a prestance. The gift allows the poet to represent abstract virtues in three-dimensional form. It seems poetry works better with a sensuous basis.
There are certain charged words which repeat constantly; more exactly, there are socially charged concepts, for which a number of synonyms exist, and these are frequently repeated. This patterned tautology is contrary to originality; but because the occasions of poems are preset, originality is the only way of attaining memorability. The words are pregnant because they articulate social values.
The poetic lore which the bards possessed (the cof, as they called it) was not operative knowledge, like a rent-roll; nor symbolic knowledge, like the theology of angels, or the number of gates to the city Jerusalem; it was symbolic operative knowledge, tied to the social structure but also functioning on the plane of beauty and ideals. It did not mean autonomy for poetry; because it was real knowledge, the poets actually had to get the genealogies right. Because it was a solution to a number of problems simultaneously, it was rather hard to change; as society changed, the bards complained, and eventually became unemployed. There is some doubt that any modern poet has truly found an operative symbolic knowledge appropriate to the real society we live in. Once the nobility had changed, the cywydd style came to seem unreal and stylised, and it was not used for personal poetry. It was not "unreal", but the qualities of artificiality and stylisation, which had made it "symbolic-operative" in its day, seemed unbalanced once the nobility had developed away from the 'reality' (of behavioural ideals) idealised in the cywydd.
As Gwynfor Jones documents, the cywydd of the Tudor period is using a whole new vocabulary for the virtues and enviable possessions of the gentleman, and this new vocabulary is drawn from the international culture of the Renaissance. The identification of the highest noble virtues in Italy invalidates the life wisdom of nobles in Wales, and so of the whole ramified system of records and feats of the Welsh past; meanwhile, one of the main urges of humanist scholars is to demolish the traditional and fabulous antiquarian lore of the Middle Ages. One of the prominent victims of this was Geoffrey of Monmouth, one of the founders of the Welsh myth and its incalculable irrational power. Welsh poetry was, in this way, susceptible to the results of critical scholarship in Latin. The bards lament, in many poems, this shift of opinion, because it destroys the value of their unique and painfully acquired knowledge.
The Tudor settlement had already paved the way for the end of bardic tradition. Before the arrival of reliable, governmental law in Wales, a family could only hang on to its wealth and lands by efficient use of force. The expected virtues of noblemen ceased to be those of martial skill, courage, and the qualities (such as generosity) needed to inspire a war-band of retainers; and shifted to an array of peaceful virtues, a cluster which we can associate with the Renaissance, as that suggests admiration for civility, urban life, and Italy or France. Warfare becomes much less important as a function in politics, and abilities as a judge and governor become the keys to advancement in government service, and so guarantees of success in business. It seems that the introduction of English law reduced the importance of the kindred (in terms, incomprehensible to us, like galanas, sarhad, cyfran) in favour of the autonomous household. Individuals acquire an unbounded right over property in land. The key to ownership of land, when in dispute, ceases to be genealogical memory, or armed force controlled by alliances based on kinship, but documents recording transfers and accepted by the courts. Lawyers come to be more important than men in armour (and, perhaps, than bards). Two new sources of assets arrive: office within the newly significant apparatus of lawcourts and local government, and relations with the Crown (or, with magnates enjoying national-level alliances including the favour of the Crown). The new settlement in Wales followed an old English pattern whereby the gentry ran local government, but the Crown had the right to appoint them to office. In fact, the arrival of the Crown as the guarantor of property rights brought the Crown into the local scene, as a major player. Even if your lands could not be seized by warlike neighbours, they could be seized by the Crown, judging you criminal or disloyal. It ceases to be necessary to win the loyalty of retainers, but it becomes important to impress other nobles, and so to be an attractive son-in-law or brother-in-law. The arrival of English-speaking nobles with vast lands out of Crown grants, and the need to form alliances at national level, reduced the political value of the Welsh language; the public one had to impress ceased to be Welsh, and there was a shift of patronage to English poetry. The gentry had more local horizons, and local reputations. The nobles were a shower of fugitives (yn gawod o ffoedigion), Ambrose Bebb remarks; going to England to engage in the service of the king and building of relationships which would guarantee their survival; or to conduct lawsuits. Tudor Welsh poets were acutely aware of the threat to their existence, and frequently write about the need to maintain the old values, and the old stock of knowledge, which was their asset. This in fact makes them conservative. For want of information about the circulation of these poems, in a mainly illiterate society, we cannot say whether they were part of a 'national' culture or just of a class one.
The cywydd poetry is notably circular; privileged acts are described in a manner which elevates them, the same motions are repeated endlessly, and words like 'fame" and "praise" are frequent in poems which are creating fame and praise. The poems carry out rigid metrical and lexical patterns in the same way that their noble subjects do the praiseworthy thing. The whole act of formal praising must have had an emotional stature in that era which it has no longer. In this array of system-reinforcing praise, the role of antilanguage is missing. This simplifies the picture somewhat; the line of apocalyptic anti-English prophecy, which had long been a feature of Welsh literature, contains the classic "antilanguage" features. In the 17th C, this genre was adapted to radical Protestantism, and so to anti-system attacks on the power of the landowners and the established church.
It would be unfair to discuss Tudor Welsh poetry without mentioning religious verse; which, notably, lowers the social rank of the human protagonist of poetry. Transcendence implicitly levels all distinctions of rank, and indeed is structurally defined by its rejection of the power order (i.e. that which the panegyric glorifies and makes explicit). Only with this proviso can we state that "Tudor Welsh poetry is not oppositional and extols the values of the ruling class". The supposition that political struggle was, for this society, one between kindreds, not one between classes, remains intact, although the evidence we do not have might, of course, disprove it.
The shift towards the modern condition is, then, partly one of lowering of the sublime: it becomes secular, attached to causes of social reform, and so, inevitably, compromised. Rejection of the power order becomes a practical thing, and no longer involves anakhoresis, or withdrawal from the world. Indeed, it involves an ideal of comfort. Insofar as Protestantism wished for the closure of monasteries, with their ideal of mortification and chastity, and resited holiness in marriage, in the home, and in the modest enjoyment of earthly pleasures, we can envisage that it was the forerunner of 20th C ideals of comfort; and so perhaps that the Reformation, however slow its progress in Wales, was the forerunner of non-aristocratic poetry.
Transparently, modernity has meant the removal of the noble, as the protagonist in poetry, to be replaced by someone both secular and bourgeois: the poet. We can suspect that this shift was pioneered in countries, chiefly the Netherlands, where the number of aristocrats was small to begin with, and where they merged, as far as lifestyle goes, with the prosperous and luxurious bourgeoisie. The absence of a bourgeoisie in Wales, up until very recent times, prevented a similar process from completing its course; the Welsh middle class is concentrated in local government.
Because modern poetry does not deal with the greatest known local assets, it can be described as puritanical; it involves self-denial, and it is parsimonious with its attachments. This carefulness goes along with the sense of comfort allowed in bourgeois households. Maximums are carefully eschewed, but independence, comfort, and self-control are grasped.
If we look for the other principle of Tudor verse, that of the panegyric, in modern times, the most likely candidate seems to be education. The child is offered, in school, a mighty celebration of certain virtues which, even if they do not seek such virtues for themselves, must impress them, in the long run. The classroom itself is, then, the equivalent of panegyric poetry as a way of inculcating the values held by the government into the heads of the masses. The pupil is tested, just as the noble is tested (and praised) by the bard. In poetry, we should logically look for the demonstration of the values of the education system, as mastered and over-fulfilled by the poet, who is now the protagonist of the poem; the panegyric is enacted in the first person.
The Tudor nobility of Wales entered into local government, as a career which dictated the new values celebrated by their court poets. Stretching comparison to its utmost, we may recognise that teachers are also part of local government, that they represent power and moral influence, and that the modern teacher may incorporate, in flattened and massified form, the virtues striven for by 16th C nobles. This may be the logic of inheritance by which someone, with a capability for geometry, could map cywydd poetry onto the poetry of contemporary Wales. A certain number of Welsh-language poets are—this is traditional—postmen; another function within local government.
In a landscape flattened by lack of luxurious wealth, dramatic displays of expense are out of court, and display is likely to take a linguistic form. In a context where, historically, high language is associated with high status, the flat plane asks for flattened language. A life like everyone else's is profoundly boring, yet linguistic display is likely to be challenged, as a sign with no meaning. This, in fact, is the problem of poetry in a society with a huge middle class. The classic way of escape is through the cognitive practices by which everyday life is carried out: by altering these, in the way that one might invent a new dance, one can create a new reality which justifies the high-flown poem. The possibility of escape from the flatness of the infinite suburb lies in epistemology and reflexivity. Or: in critical sociology. These effect a ritualisation of everyday parts of life, in the same way that connoisseurship of wine transforms the acts of tasting and drinking. This solves the problems of excess leisure, and of carrying out competition while reducing the element of conflict (and defeat) to a game.
The modern problem is then that of the feasibility of separating a new sublime from secular reform movements, whose goals are inherently non-sublime, but which have absorbed the Christian ideals. In Wales, this could be the problem for a poet of writing something aesthetically sublime about a nationalist movement which, while it claims to have the sublime on board in the shape of a nation transcending individuals and generations, seems to be all too visible and earthly, in the form of cunning and rather doltish politicians, childish in their enmity, out of date in their sociology, and obsessed with EU agricultural subsidies.
The poetic system of panegyric is much more intact in Wales and Scotland than in early modern England, where it never really recovered from the arrival of the Normans and their solidarity with the French-speaking world. English was not prestigious enough for panegyric, and praise-poetry in French was of nil political use in a country where everyone you wanted to intimidate spoke English. Wales and (in particular) Western Scotland were much more intact societies.
The shift from mediaeval disorder to Tudor order and prosperity may be misleading: possibly, there was an oscillation between order (and strong authority) and disorder (with strong and licentious nobles), and the 15th century, with the Wars of the Roses, had simply been an extreme state of the latter. This is less persuasive, in Wales, because we know that the wars of conquest by the Anglo-Normans had caused great disorder, and because we know that the Normans of the Marches were little controlled by authority except their own. For lack of evidence, we cannot measure how much lawlessness and retinue violence decreased in Wales after the Law of Union; we have ample evidence of lawlessness after its enactment, from reports to the government.
The comparison was between modern English poetry and Tudor Welsh poetry, but the latter sheds also some light on modern Welsh poetry, in either language. Early modern Welsh society was homogeneous apart from the nobles; the secession of the latter into Englishness left a classless society, pastoral and quite different from one based on arable farming, and able to grow into a modern society with a strong ethos of the folk, gwerin, to which all belong. The absence of a prosperous bourgeoisie left literature in the hands of the clergy; a typical feature is the adoption of bourgeois forms by the clergy, so that the two most distinguished novelists, Daniel Owen and Islwyn Ffowc Elis, were both in holy orders. (Emyr Humphreys thought of taking orders, but decided against it.) Modern Welsh secular poets have had some difficulty with the self-determination demanded by modernity in other, more divided, countries; abstract thought is unnecessary in a folk culture. Much of the poetry is about the contradictions between feeling identity with a mass of people, and the modern, foreign, demand to have your own voice and to be original. They tend to believe that to possess authority they must simply tell the truth; the moral authority of the clergy (Methodist but also Baptist, Anglican, etc.) has not really been forsaken by poets. In the past fifty years or so, society has become more consumerist, and something like a prosperous middle class has developed; half-heartedly, perhaps.
It would be a mistake to take the features which we can compare for 'structural' features, revealing the essence of a poem. Equally, if we reduce hundreds of poems to a poem-type, we cannot believe that the common features are more significant than the divergent ones, which we are—evidently—not examining. We do not accept that poetic quality inheres in predictable features rather than in the overall sound of the poem, a product of all the parts and of their rate of change.
Comparison of Tudor Welsh poetry with 20th C English poetry acts to demonstrate the infinite possibilities of the human imagination, although offering slight points of similarity for us to dwell on.
There is another stratum of Welsh poetry in Tudor times, called free (rhydd) because it does not use the strict sound patterns of the aristocratic verse. It is collected in an anthology Canu rhydd cynnar. It may be that this poetry was produced by poets who had not undergone the complex training of the bards. The quatrains called penillion may be even folk productions; they are anonymous, simple, and hard to date.