Wales in Britain

Historically, the idea of Britain is closely tied to Wales and the Welsh people, who saw themselves as the sovereign rulers of the island nation of Britain, cruelly dispossessed by the Saxons. This chapter traces the historical processes by which the kingdom of England first asserted and then legally established its right to include Wales within the nation of England, appropriating Britishness as a proxy for Englishness. This ideological strategy, first normalised by the Tudors and resisted through Welsh literary production, continues to the present day. In the twentieth century, the rise of Anglophone writing in Wales challenged the link between the Welsh language and Welsh nationhood, but increasing immigration and the achievement of devolution in 1999 encouraged a more inclusive and multilingual national identity. Though political devolution has enabled Wales to define itself as a substate nation within a federated state, the ideological impetus to claim Britishness for itself continues across the border in England

Middle Welsh

This chapter discusses the relationship between Middle Welsh and Middle English up to about 1500, with reference to language, literature, and manuscript production. The chapter describes the political and cultural processes behind the borrowing of English words into Welsh and the fields where this typically occurred. The practice of Welsh poets of composing praise poetry to English patrons is discussed, along with key examples of macaronic poetry containing both Middle Welsh and Middle English. The importance of the March of Wales as a particular locus of bilingualism and the emergence of a bilingual culture is explored, in the context of manuscript production and the circulation of multilingual manuscripts containing combinations of Welsh, English, French, and Latin

The Poetry of William Dunbar

William Dunbar (c.1460-c.1520) was a court poet, a 'makar', to the Scottish king James IV, who reigned from 1488 to 1513.1 Like many medieval writers, Dunbar trained as a cleric, graduating from the University ofSt Andrews before entering the service of the royal court. Living mainly in Edinburgh, Dunbar travelled regularly to France as a member of various Scottish embassies and was greatly influenced by French and English styles of court poetry. His greatest achievement was to transform these styles into the language now known as Scots