University of Wales Press – serie

Born in 1473, Margaret Pole was the daughter of George, duke of Clarence, niece of both Edward IV and Richard III, and the only woman, apart from Anne Boleyn, to hold a peerage title in her own right during the sixteenth century. She was restored by Henry VIII to her executed brother's earldom of Salisbury in 1512. In the 1530s, however, her deep Catholic convictions became increasingly out of favour with Henry and she was executed on a charge of treason in 1541 aged sixty-seven. In 1886, Margaret Pole was among sixty-three martyrs beatified by Pope Leo XIII for not hesitating 'to lay down their lives by shedding of their blood' for the dignity of the Holy See.In this first biography of a significant female figure in the male-dominated world of Tudor politics, Hazel Pierce presents the life and culture of this propertied, titled lady against the social and political background of late Yorkist and early Tudor Britain. Containing important new research on aristocratic life and court politics in the period, and including a complete reappraisal of the so-called 'Exeter conspiracy', Margaret Pole is a major contribution to our understanding of Henry VIII's relationship with the nobility, and the political, social and cultural position of women in sixteenth-century England.

Sleepy rustic Carmarthenshire was secretly a hotbed of debauchery, violence and drunkenness according to Russell Davies in a new edition of his very successful book, Secret Sins. Behind the facade of idyllic rural life, there was a twilight world of mental illness, suicide, crime, vicious assaults, infanticide, cruelty and other assorted acts of depravity. This almost anecdotal historical study is often funny, sometimes disturbing, always revealing.

The Mabinogion Set is a book about the most famous of medieval Welsh stories: the Four Branches of the Mabinogi. It is also a book about a mathematical phenomenon: fractals. Fractals are mathematical patterns that repeat at every scale, and this study argues that, like natural fractals (snowflakes, tree branches), the Four Branches of the Mabinogi have a repeating structure. In putting forward this new theory, The Mabinogion Set proposes a new type of structural analysis: formal narrative topology, which pays attention not to themes or plot elements but to patterns of repetition within a story. The author also explores the implications of a topological analysis of the Four Branches on our understanding of their possible oral or written origins, authorship, transmission, memorability and performance.

This is the first scholarly study of Britain’s oldest pilgrimage site in continuous use, St Winefride’s Well. Since the martyrdom of its titular saint in the seventh century, pilgrims have flocked to the shrine in Holywell, north Wales, in search of healing and help in its icy waters. The shrine survived the ravages of the Reformation, and remained popular in an era when pilgrimage was suppressed; it exploded in popularity during the second half of the nineteenth century, when stories of miraculous cures and mass pilgrimages filled the columns of national and international newspapers. By the 1890s, St Winefride’s Well was being called the Lourdes of Wales. This book charts centuries of changing pilgrimage practices to the well – from the journeys to reach it, to the actions of pilgrims in and around the water, and their post-pilgrimage lives – alongside accounts of how the shrine has been attacked, defended, restored and promoted over time.

As Wales marks a quarter of a century of devolved policymaking in education, this edited volume celebrates the successes of – and grapples critically with the ongoing challenges faced by – Wales’s education system. Researchers from across the UK education landscape pose critical questions: about the leadership of reform; about where responsibility lies for the successful implementation of a number of post-devolution policy innovations, such as the Foundation Phase and the Curriculum for Wales; about the nature and ownership of accountability; about how professionals can best be developed and supported to deliver the current ambitious reform journey; and about a great deal more. In answer to the recurring question of ‘by whom shall Wales be raised’, this volume suggests the responsibility lies with all of us, at every level and in every domain of an education system that is unrecognisable from that which preceded devolution, and which today continues to evolve apace.

This volume provides a reference to Anglo-Welsh and Welsh literature. It has been corrected, updated and revised since its original printing in 1986 and includes over 150 new pages, 400 new sections including contemporary writers, and features over 320 contributors and 3300 entries.

Despite their great influence in prehistoric Europe, the knowledge and teaching of the druids was never committed to writing and so their prestige steadily declined. This study seeks to classify the evidence afresh and to place the druids in their historical setting.

This study of post-war Polish intellectual history analyzes the complex interface between politics and literature under communism. It suggests that it was not the Catholic Church but the writers of the lay-left who were the most consistent critics and opponents of Stalinism.

In this collection of essays, which considers the relationship between the novel and spirituality in the cultural setting of the present day, eight novelists draw upon their own experience of authorship.

Divided into five parts: the legal regulation of the Church; the institutional organization of the Church; the ministry of the Church; the doctrine, liturgy and rites of the Church; and the property and finance of the Church, this text puts the laws of the Church in Wales into a historical context.

In the week following the death of Princess Diana, the media presented images of the entire British nation united in tearful hysterical grief to mourn their 'People's Princess'. However, despite this emphasis on the response of the 'people', their has so far been no detailed examination of popular attitudes or media coverage during September 1997. James Thomas radically challenges the myths surrounding the mourning with the first ever 'people's history' of the week. He combines a detailed survey of media coverage with analysis of a range of qualitative and quantitative evidence about popular attitudes, especially those of the 'ordinary' people across Britain who recorded their views and actions for the Mass-Observation of Britain project. 'Diana's Mourning' provides fascinating evidence of the diversity, complexity and ambiguity of popular reactions to Diana's death, and demonstrates that far from being united, the British people were in fact deeply divided in grief in September 1997. It not only questions the accuracy of media representations of popular opinion, but also illustrates the media's power to influence attitudes and shape the myth of a nation in mourning.

Welsh Communities is a critical examination of the diverse Welsh experiences of community: rural and urban; traditional and alternative; inward and outward migrations. The essays in the volume - the first collection of ethnographic writing on Wales for a number of decades - advocate a contemporary theoretical approach to the study of communities. Each essay is based on original ethnographic research, using methods that involve a long-term and comparatively intimate relationship between researchers and their research subjects and locales. The contributors analyse the nature of community and explore how different groups symbolically construct and experience 'community' on a day-to-day basis. The groups and topics considered include: a former mining village in south Wales; traditional healing in mid-Wales; farming; incomers and alternative lifestyles in west Wales; two contrasting neighbourhoods in Swansea; and the London Welsh community. In the course of these studies, various questions are also raised concerning how or whether the contributors as 'native ethnographers' belong to those communities they are studying. Welsh Communities represents a major original contribution to the development of anthropological studies of Welsh society and culture.

This book looks at the ways in which negation works in Welsh. It shows that there are a number of ways of forming a negative sentence, and explains the conventions which native speakers follow when they use negative patterns. It also considers the implications of the Welsh facts for general theories of negation.

Sir John Perrot of Carew, Pembrokeshire was Lord Deputy of Ireland, member of parliament and member of the Queen's privy council. It is speculated that he was also the illegitimate son of Henry VIII. He dominated the political stage in Wales and Ireland and was, in the words of Sir Glanmor Williams, 'a man of Shakespearean proportions'.

A fully illustrated exploration of the inscribed medieval stones of Wales which commemorated the elite of Welsh society at the time, and are crucial to the understanding of the degree of continuity with preceding Roman culture, Irish settlement, and the development of the church; the book offers fresh aspects and new interpretations of inscriptions; 390 photographs/170 drawings.

Inscribed stones and stone sculpture forms the most prolific body of material evidence which survives for Wales in the period c AD 400-1100. Stones inscribed in Latin or Old Irish ogam (or both), which date to the fifth to seventh centuries, commemorate the elite of Welsh society. They are crucial to understanding the degree of Roman continuity, the impact of Irish settlement and the development of both the early kingdoms and Christianity in Wales. The inscriptions on these and the later sculpture are a major source for the Latin, Welsh and Irish languages and early medieval literacy. The cross-carved stones, which probably begin in the seventh century, and the larger freestanding crosses and other monuments, which are mostly of ninth- to eleventh-century date, allow us to identify a range of early medieval ecclesiastical sites within a wider landscape and trace the patronage of the church by the secular elite. The ornament, iconography and inscriptions allow a study of the impact and interchange of cultural contacts with Ireland, the Irish Sea zone, Anglo-Saxon England, the Vikings and the Continent.

Why are we drawn to the work of Alfred Hitchcock so long after his final film appeared? What is the source of Hitchcock's magic? This book answers these questions by focussing upon the fabric of the films themselves, upon the way in which they enlist and sustain our desire, holding our attention by constantly withholding something from us.

This book honours the achievement of J. Beverley Smith during a notable career as a teacher and writer of history, and an editor in the service of his profession. The essays are contributed by fellow historians from across Britain and include some of the country's outstanding scholars. 'Wales and the Welsh in the Middle Ages' has three overlapping themes that offer new insights: (1) the politics and political culture of Wales, from early kingdoms and the succession of their rulers, the clash of Welsh, French and English cultures and the inter-relationships forged, two of hitherto puzzling chronicle sources associated with the abbeys of Cwmhir and Neath, to the implications of the Edwardian conquest as revealed by later medieval poetry and the reputation of Welsh soldiers in English armies; (2) the comparative study of law, the economy and society, not only in English, Welsh and Marcher contexts but also drawing comparisons with Spain and Brittany, opportunities for social advancement in town and country, including the patronage of church building, with illustrative narratives at St David's cathedral, Grosmont and Newton Nottage in south Wales, and Llanidloes in central Wales; and (3) the emergence of approaches to the study of medieval Wales in the early twentieth century that added new strands to our understanding of Wales's history, taking William Rees as a pioneer example. And each theme is seen in a wide historical context. A memoir of Beverley Smith and a list of his writings complete the book.

A timely and up-to-date history of a place and people embroiled in an enduring international dispute.

Political prophecy was a common mode of literature in the British Isles and much of Europe from the Middle Ages to at least as late as the Renaissance. At times of political instability especially, the manuscript record bristles with prophetic works that promise knowledge of dynastic futures. In Welsh, the later development of this mode is best known through the figure of the mab darogan, the 'son of prophecy', who - variously named as Arthur, Owain or a number of other heroes - will return to re-establish sovereignty. Such a returning hero is also a potent figure in English, Scottish and wider European traditions. This book explores the large body of prophetic poetry and prose contained in the earliest Welsh-language manuscripts, exploring the complexity of an essentially multilingual, multi-ethnic and multinational literary tradition, and with reference to this wider tradition critical and theoretical questions are raised of genre, signification and significance.

This new edition tells the story of the Merthyr Rising, the first move to independent political action by the ironstone miners and puddlers of William Crawshay II following the Reform Bill of 1831, tabled after many years of an unjust electoral system.On 2 June 1831, thousands of workers under a red flag broke into insurrection. The rebels drove the military out of the town and were crushed only after some 800 troops had concentrated at Merthyr. One man was hanged as an example: Richard Lewis, a miner of 23, known as Dic Penderyn. Today, Dic Penderyn is more alive than Richard Lewis ever was: as a martyr and folk hero, he has lived on in the memory of south Wales. The author examines in depth the reality and the mythology of that martyrdom; he tells the story of this remarkable year in detail and largely through the words of the people who bore witness. He argues that the events of 1831 in Merthyr were central to the emergence of a working class in south Wales: in that year its pre-history came to an end and its history began.

The Hanoverian Succession of 1714 has not attracted the scholarly attention that it deserves. This is partly because the idea of the ‘long eighteenth century’, stretching from 1688 to 1832, has tended to treat the period as one without breaks. However, 1714 was in some respects as significant a date as 1688. It was the last time in British history that there was a dynastic change and one in which religious issues were at the forefront in people’s minds.This collection of essays were among the papers delivered at conferences in 2014 to mark the tercentenary of the Hanoverian Succession of 1714, held at Oxford Brookes University and Bath Spa University. They reflect some of the major issues that were evident in the period before, during and after 1714. In particular, they deal with how disloyalty was managed by the government and by individuals. They also demonstrate how central religion was to the process of securing the Hanoverian Succession and to the identity of the new regime established by George I. Disloyalty – real or imagined – was apparent in legal suits, in sermons and preaching, and in the material culture of the period. And once the Jacobite rebellion of 1715 had been overcome, the need to secure the loyalty of the Church and clergy was a key objective of the government.

This is a study of the landed gentry of north Wales from the Edwardian conquest in the thirteenth century to the incorporation of Wales in the Tudor state in the sixteenth. The limitation of the discussion to north Wales is deliberate; there has often been a tendency to treat Wales as a single region, but it is important to stress that, like any other country, it is itself made up of regions and that a uniformity based on generalisation cannot be imposed. This book describes the development of the gentry in one part of Wales from an earlier social structure and an earlier pattern of land tenure, and how the gentry came to rule their localities. There have been a number of studies of the medieval English gentry, usually based on individual counties, but the emphasis in a Welsh study is not necessarily the same as that in one relating to England. The rich corpus of medieval poetry addressed to the leaders of native society and the wealth of genealogical material and its potential are two examples of this difference in emphasis.