Rewriting Welsh History

Chapter 11 explores Jones’s participation in a movement involving historians, such as Arthur Wade Wade-Evans, and prominent members of Plaid Cymru, which strove for a radical revision of Welsh history. Wales, in their estimation, was a nation that emerged from the Roman Empire, preserved its Roman religion and traditions, and upheld this unique inheritance into modernity. This chapter traces Jones’s deep engagement with Welsh nationalist ideas around Wales’s Roman origins. It highlights the reasons why these arguments challenged accepted visions of the Welsh as a historically defeated people and examines how Jones interweaved these provocative claims into his essays, poetry, paintings and letters. It pursues this analysis across key areas of his thought, including his characterisation of Welsh historical figures—such as Cunedda and Llywelyn the Last—his assertion of a Catholic tradition in Wales, and his belief that Welsh myth and literature preserved the remnants of Rome in Welsh culture.