T. M. Charles-Edwards - Wales and the Britons 350-1064

(The History of Wales, Oxford University Press), 2013

795pp., £95, hard, ISBN 978-0-19-821731-2

This is the first volume of the highly regarded History of Wales series and provides a detailed history of Wales in the centuries during which it emerged out of the remnants of Roman Britain. The narrative begins in the fourth century with accelerating external attacks and ends shortly before the Norman Conquest of England. The narrative account is interspersed with chapters on the principal sources, the social history of Wales, the Church, the early history of the Welsh language, and its early literature, both in Welsh and in Latin. In the fourth century, contemporaries knew of the Britons but not of Wales in the modern sense. Charles-Edwards, includes the history of the other Britons when it helps to illuminate the history of what we now know as Wales. Although an early form of the name Wales existed, it was a word in the Germanic languages and covered inhabitants of the former Roman Empire; it therefore covered the Gallo-Romans of what we know as France as well as the Britons.   This is the most important study of early Wales published in the last half century and considers all the available primary and secondary material in an accessible form.  It will undoubtedly become the study of choice for any student who wants to examine and understand how Wales came into existence.