Reimagining Cultural Decline

Chapter 10 explores Jones’s sense of Welsh identity. While he had felt Welsh since childhood, Jones’s association with Wales became far more politicised across the later decades of his life. As an Anglo–Welsh writer—who lamented his inability to master the language—Jones was in some ways an outsider. Nevertheless, he fought alongside Welsh friends and contemporaries for the protection of the Welsh language and landscape. This chapter contextualises both Jones’s fear for the decline of Welsh culture and his responding decision to argue for a unique Roman inheritance for Wales, within the wider dialogues shaping twentieth-century Welsh nationalism. It demonstrates not only the similarities between Jones’s ideas and those of key members of Plaid Cymru—such as his close friend Saunders Lewis and Gwynfor Evans—but also highlights the ways in which these conceptions of Wales’s Roman origin were used to challenge prevailing assumptions around the value of English and Welsh inheritance.