Canadians of Welsh background trace their ancestral origins to Wales, a small country located along the western shore of Britain. Its population is 2.7 million, of whom nearly 19 percent were Welsh-speaking in 1991. The Welsh people evolved from a fusion of the indigenous Neolithic inhabitants of Britain with Celtic and subsequent peoples who arrived from mainland Europe after 500 b.c.e. Welsh is a Celtic language, most closely related to Cornish in the British Isles and to Breton in France.
Wales, like most of Celtic Britain, was conquered by the Romans in the first century c.e The Roman presence for the next four centuries brought Wales within a wider European political and cultural realm, and the impact of the Roman occupation on the landscape and culture of Wales itself was profound. The Anglo-Saxon invaders who succeeded the Romans referred to the romanized and partly Christian inhabitants of west Britain as the Weleas (foreigners). The Welsh called themselves Y Cymry (fellow Welsh), their country Cymru (Wales), and their language Cymraeg (Welsh).
Constant friction caused by Saxon incursions into Wales and Welsh raids into lowland England led to the construction of a massive earthwork military frontier by Offa, the king of Mercia, during the last decades of the eighth century. Known as Offa’s Dyke, it became the basis for much of the subsequent national boundary separating England from Wales. After their invasion of Britain, the Normans conquered coastal Wales and the Welsh border areas during the last decades of the eleventh century and eventually sought to incorporate Celtic Christianity into the framework of European Catholicism.
For nearly two more centuries, the Welsh undertook sporadic resistance to foreign rule. These efforts culminated during the reign of Llywelyn, the last indigenous Prince of Wales, who tried to resist amalgamation with England. He was defeated, however, by King Edward I of England, who in 1282 conquered the country and two decades later invested his son, the future Edward II, as Prince of Wales at Caernarfon castle. Since then the formerly close connection between Wales and mainland Europe has been overshadowed by its incorporation into England. English rule developed into a form of shared power following the Acts of Union of 1536 and 1542. A county system of administration was established and English law was extended to Wales through a system of county sheriffs and justices of the peace.
The Acts of Union expelled the Welsh language from official public life and required that all official transactions should henceforth be conducted only in English. England did, however, authorize a translation of the New Testament (1536) and the Book of Common Prayer (1567) into Welsh in order to protect Protestantism among the Welsh population against Roman Catholic incursions at home and from Ireland. A critical milestone in the maintenance of a distinct Welsh identity was the translation and distribution to each parish of the entire Bible, completed under Bishop William Morgan in 1588. Morgan’s translation in a modern, standardized, and highly elegant version of Welsh encouraged scholarship and publication of related literature, and it established the basis upon which a national network of church-sponsored agencies fostered the emergence of a literate and culturally sophisticated population.
It was during the great age of nonconformist dissent (a label embracing all the religious groups that dissented from the established state church, the Church of England), lasting from the mid-eighteenth century to the period of liberal radicalism at the turn of the twentieth century, that the values associated with modern Welsh political culture were formed. It was also during this era, in particular during the period 1840 to 1913, that industrialization and urbanization reached Wales, transforming it into one of Britain’s leading producers of coal, slate, iron, and steel, as well as tin plate and chemical products.
Along with industrialization came the anglicization of Wales, hastened by the steady out-migration of people from the Welsh-speaking heartland of the country and the destruction of the traditional agricultural economy of rural counties. The demographic composition of Wales changed, since, aside from Welsh rural dwellers, the slate and coalfield regions attracted an influx of non-Welsh immigrants from England and Ireland. Although relatively fewer Welsh than other Celtic peoples from Britain emigrated abroad, those who did go to places like Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were skilled workers able to adapt easily to a society undergoing rapid industrialization.
At present, Wales is both a constituent part of the United Kingdom and a relatively well-integrated region of the European Union. It has a strong sense of national identity that has been bolstered by a recent revival of the Welsh language. In the course of the past two decades, Wales’s economic base, which was traditionally centred on heavy industry, has been transformed by a burgeoning service sector and newer high-technology industries that are largely European, American, and Japanese in origin. Although having less than 6 percent of the United Kingdom’s population, Wales has in the past decade been able to attract more than 20 percent of the country’s internal investment. Despite such economic successes, Wales is still experiencing difficult social and economic problems as well as a relatively high out-migration of its population to neighbouring parts of the United Kingdom and elsewhere.
