From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article describes the etymology of Wales, a country of the United Kingdom.
Origins[edit]
The English words «Wales» and «Welsh» derive from the same Old English root (singular Wealh, plural Wēalas), a descendant of Proto-Germanic *Walhaz, which was itself derived from the name of the Gaulish people known to the Romans as Volcae and which came to refer indiscriminately to inhabitants of the Western Roman Empire.[1] The Old English-speaking Anglo-Saxons came to use the term to refer to the Britons in particular; the plural form Wēalas evolved into the name for their territory, Wales.[2] The modern names for various Romance-speaking people in Continental Europe (e.g. Wallonia, Wallachia, Valais, Vlachs, the German Welsch, and Włochy, the Polish name for Italy) have a similar etymology.[2][3][4][5]
Historically in Britain, the words were not restricted to modern Wales or to the Welsh but were used to refer to anything that the Anglo-Saxons associated with the Britons, including other non-Germanic territories in Britain (e.g. Cornwall) and places in Anglo-Saxon territory associated with Britons (e.g. Walworth in County Durham and Walton in West Yorkshire).[6]
The modern Welsh name for themselves is Cymry, and Cymru is the Welsh name for Wales. These words (both of which are pronounced [ˈkəm.rɨ]) are descended from the Brythonic word combrogi, meaning «fellow-countrymen».[7] The use of the word Cymry as a self-designation derives from the location in the post-Roman Era (after the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons) of the Welsh (Brythonic-speaking) people in modern Wales as well as in northern England and southern Scotland (Yr Hen Ogledd) (English: The Old North). It emphasised that the Welsh in modern Wales and in the Hen Ogledd were one people, different from other peoples.[8] In particular, the term was not applied to the Cornish or the Breton peoples, who are of similar heritage, culture, and language to the Welsh. The word came into use as a self-description probably before the 7th century.[9]
It is attested in a praise poem to Cadwallon ap Cadfan (Moliant Cadwallon, by Afan Ferddig) c. 633.[10] In Welsh literature, the word Cymry was used throughout the Middle Ages to describe the Welsh, though the older, more generic term Brythoniaid continued to be used to describe any of the Britonnic peoples (including the Welsh) and was the more common literary term until c. 1200. Thereafter Cymry prevailed as a reference to the Welsh. Until c. 1560 the word was spelt Kymry or Cymry, regardless of whether it referred to the people or their homeland.[7]
The Latinised forms of these names, Cambrian, Cambric and Cambria, survive as lesser-used alternative names for Wales, Welsh and the Welsh people. Examples include the Cambrian Mountains (which cover much of Wales and gave their name to the Cambrian geological period), the newspaper Cambrian News, and the organisations Cambrian Airways, Cambrian Railways, Cambrian Archaeological Association and the Royal Cambrian Academy of Art.[11] Outside Wales, a related form survives as the name Cumbria in North West England, which was once a part of Yr Hen Ogledd. The Cumbric language, which is thought to have been closely related to Welsh, was spoken in this area until becoming extinct around the 12th century.[12]
References[edit]
- ^ Miller, Katherine L. (2014). «The Semantic Field of Slavery in Old English: Wealh, Esne, Þræl» (PDF) (Doctoral dissertation). University of Leeds. Retrieved August 8, 2019.
- ^ a b Davies (1994) p. 71
- ^ (in French) Albert Henry, Histoire des mots Wallons et Wallonie, Institut Jules Destrée, Coll. «Notre histoire», Mont-sur-Marchienne, 1990, 3rd ed. (1st ed. 1965), footnote 13 p. 86. Henry wrote the same about Wallachia.
- ^ Tolkien, J. R. R. (1963). Angles and Britons: O’Donnell Lectures. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. English and Welsh, an O’Donnell Lecture delivered at Oxford on 21 October 1955.
- ^ Gilleland, Michael (12 December 2007). «Laudator Temporis Acti: More on the Etymology of Walden». Laudator Temporis Acti website. Retrieved 29 October 2008.
- ^ Rollason, David (2003). «Origins of a People». Northumbria, 500–1100. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 60. ISBN 978-0-521-04102-7.
- ^ a b Davies (1994) p. 69
- ^ Lloyd, John Edward (1911). «A History of Wales from the Earliest Times to the Edwardian Conquest (Note to Chapter VI, the Name «Cymry»)». I (Second ed.). London: Longmans, Green, and Co. (published 1912): 191–192.
- ^ Phillimore, Egerton (1891). «Note (a) to The Settlement of Brittany». In Phillimore, Egerton (ed.). Y Cymmrodor. Vol. XI. London: Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion (published 1892). pp. 97–101.
- ^ Davies (1994) p. 71; the poem contains the line: ‘Ar wynep Kymry Cadwallawn was’.
- ^ Chambers 21st Century Dictionary. Chambers Dictionary (Revised ed.). New Delhi: Allied Publishers. 2008. p. 203. ISBN 978-81-8424-329-1.
- ^ Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). «Cambria» . Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
The Modern English word Wales has its origin in the prehistoric Nordic iron age
The history of the word Welsh takes us far back into the past, c. 500 B.C., to the time when Germanic tribes first started moving into Northern Germany from their homeland in Scandinavia. Here, they encountered, displaced and assimilated Celtic tribes. One of the most powerful Celtic people they met was called ‘Volcae.’ Caesar mentions them in his commentaries on the Gallic War:
«And there was formerly a time when the Gauls excelled the Germans in prowess, and waged war on them offensively […]. Accordingly, the Volcae Tectosages, seized on those parts of Germany which are the most fruitful […] and settled there.» (Caesar’s Gallic War 6.24)
The Germanic new-comers then took over and generalized the name ‘Volca’ to refer to any foreigner or group of foreigners — primarily Celts or Romans, who spoke a foreign, non-Germanic tongue. The Latin letter v usually represents a w-like sound at the beginning of words. The Indo-European o shows up as a in the Germanic languages, as in Latin quod but Old English hwæt ‘what’ or Latin octo but Gothic ahtau ‘eight.’ Finally, the Latin symbol c corresponds to a Germanic fricative x later h. For example, Latin cordis — English heart or Latin centum — English hundred. Correspondingly, the Germanic speakers would eventually pronounce their freshly-borrowed word Volcae as walha. This reconstructed base can explain a large number of descendant reflexes in the Germanic languages.
Evidence for the Proto-Germanic word walha ‘foreigner, stranger, Romance-speaker’ comes from many literary sources
The earliest known attestation of the root walha appears in the form of a runic inscription on a gold coin called the ‘Tjurkö Bracteate,’ which was found in Sweden in 1817 and is dated to 400 to 650 AD. The word appears in the nominal compound walha-kurne, ‘foreign-corn.’ A foreign (Roman or Gallic) grain can be interpreted metaphorically as a gold coin. Therefore, walha-kurne appears to be a poetic paraphrase — a so-called kenning — for the bracteate itself:
| wurte | runoz | an | walha-kurne | heldaz | kunimundiu |
| worked | runes | on | foreign-corn | Held | for.Kunimund |
‘Held worked runes on [this]
foreign-grain [=gold coin] for Kunimund’
 |
Old High German documents record the adjective related to walha, variably spelled as walask, walahisk, walhisk etc. ‘strange, foreign, Romance.’ |
|
Reconstruction of the Tjurkö Bracteate |
In the West-Germanic languages, the a in walha was transformed into an e under the influence of a following i (for example Gothic harjis, but Old High German heri, Old English here ‘army;’ this also explains the difference between Modern English man — men, tale — tell etc.). Therefore, the adjective walhisk shows up as welisc from Middle High German on and still exists in Modern German as welsch ‘strange.’ The word is used particularly frequently in Swiss German, where Welschschweiz designates ‘French-speaking Switzerland,’ Welschgraben refers to a former Burgundian defensive barrier, or Churwelsch is the term for a Romansh dialect once spoken in the city of Chur.
There are many more examples that testify to the Proto-Germanic root walha, like the Modern Dutch word waals ‘Waloon’ for the predominantly French-speaking southern part of Belgium or the Old Norse adjective valskr ‘French, Romance.’ Even Wallachia, a region in Romania famous for Bram Stoker’s Dracula, or the Vlahs, an antiquated name for Romanians themselves, ultimately derive from the same base: Slavic speakers took over the word from German and continued the tradition to use it for foreign people, except that it was now applied to Romance speakers in Eastern instead of Western Europe.
In Great Britain the meaning of Welsh undergoes a more ferocious development
The Germanic tribes of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes invaded England in the fifth century and also brought along with them the word walha. They used it to refer to the local Romanized Celtic population. But the encounter between British Celts and Anglo-Saxons was not a peaceful one: The invaders quickly displaced, murdered or enslaved the Celtic-speaking peoples. Gildas, a sixth century British cleric, writes about his fellow Celtic countrymen:
«Some […] were murdered in great numbers; others, constrained by famine, came and yielded themselves to be slaves for ever to their foes, running the risk of being instantly slain, which truly was the greatest favour that could be offered to them. […] Others remained still in their country, committing the safeguard of their lives, which were in continual jeopardy, to the mountains, precipices, thickly wooded forests, and to the rocks of the seas.» (Gildas’ On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain, 25)
Even though the attackers were the newcomers to the land, they called the ancestral population the wealas, ‘strangers.’ The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records,
473 A.D. þa wealas flugon þa Englan swa fyr.
‘473 A.D. the Welsh fled from the English like fire.’
607 A.D. And her Æþelfried lædde ferde to Legaceastre & þær ofsloh unrim Wealana. & swa wearþ gefylld Augustinus witegunge þe he cwæð, «gif Wealas nellaþ sibbe wið us, hie sculon æt Seaxena handa forweorþan.»
‘607 A.D. And this year Ethelfrith led a troop to Chester and there murdered a huge number of Welsh people and thus was fulfilled Augustine’s prophecy when he said, “if the Welsh don’t wish peace with us, they shall perish at the hands of the Saxons.»‘
More clearly than in other languages, walha took on the meaning not just of foreigner but of ‘the other’ in Old English; it became a term for an inferior race, worthy of enslavement. Without mercy or shame, the Anglo-Saxon invaders gradually forced the Welsh from the rich, arable plains of the East to the rough, barren mountains in the West. And these are still the regions where the English Celtic-speaking minorities live to this day, Wales ‘(the land of the) foreigners’ and Cornwall, with Corn— referring to the original tribal name of the inhabitants and -wall from Old English ‘foreigner.’ Welsh comes from the corresponding adjective, welisc, wælisc ‘foreign.’
|
Subsequently, the Old English word Welsh even allowed for its interpretation as ‘slave.’ For example, the Old English rendition of the Old Testament directly translates Latin seruus with wealh. |
 |
| Romano-British Celts attacked by Anglo-Saxon raiders and burying treasure as they escape from the invaders |
Old English: Se Ebreiscea wealh, þe ðu hider brohtest, eode in to me þæt he me bysmrude
Latin: Ingressus est ad me seruus Hebræus, quem adduxisti, ut illuderet mihi.
Modern English: ‘The Hebrew slave, whom you brought hither, came in to me to ridicule me.’
(Genesis 39:17)
Another reference to Welsh as a slave comes from Riddle number twelve of the Exeter book. It asks for the name of a thing that first moves around on green meadows, but, once dead, is turned into thongs, shoes or wine flasks, which are then served and cleaned by Welsh slave girls. What could that be? Well, most scholars believe the answer to the riddle should be «leather.»
The word wealh is also used in a racially discriminatory sense in the Laws of King Ine of Wessex from the late seventh century. The law assigns — even to free wealas — a lower social rank than to an Englishman, as the compensation paid for killing them was lower for the former than for the latter.
But the Anglo-Saxons also coined much more innocent expressions from the word wealh. For example, the compound walhhnutu — Modern English walnut — is first documented c. 1050. The nut is «foreign» because it was originally native to France and Italy.
All’s Welsh that ends Welsh
The word Wales has a long, sometimes purely practical, sometimes more prejudiced history. But the meaning of ‘serf’ for wealh has long died out and the modern day usage of Welsh is often associated with positive connotations and noble attributes. After all, French managed to develop a proud tradition of l’esprit gaulois, despite the fact that this word, too, originally merely meant ‘foreigner.’ Go ahead and articulate the word Wales with similar pride and elation!
Briton settlements in the 6th century – settlements of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes in Britain, circa 600
In the following, Briton will refer to the Celtic Brittonic-speaking peoples who inhabited Britain south of the Firth of Forth, and who, following the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in the 5th century, gradually retreated until the area under their influence consisted of Strathclyde (until the 12th century), Cornwall, present-day Wales and Brittany.
Brittonic was the language of Britain in the Roman and early Anglo-Saxon periods, the ancestor language of Welsh, Cornish and Breton.
Of Germanic origin, the noun Welsh is from Old English Wealh, which meant Briton. In Old English, Wealh and its compounds or derivatives were occasionally used of foreigners more generally, particularly in names referring to Gaul or France and their inhabitants. For example, the Old English compound Galwalas meant Gauls, hence Gaul, and Rōmwalas, Rūmwalas, meant Romans.
– Notes:
1: In southern England, Old English wealh was also sometimes used as a common noun to denote a slave or serf, probably on account of many slaves being of British origin in the Anglo-Saxon period.
2: Etymologically, walnut means the nut of the Roman lands (Gaul and Italy) as distinguished from the native hazel. In the languages of these countries the words descending from Latin nux, French noix and Italian noce, when used without qualification, denote the walnut.
Similarly, the cognates of Wealh in other Germanic languages (for instance Old High German Walh, Walah) were used to refer to Romance-speakers. Other examples include Middle High German Walch, Walhe, which meant foreigner, speaker of a Romance language, specifically French person or Italian, and Middle Dutch Wale, which meant speaker of a Romance language, specifically Walloon or French person. Modern Dutch Waal has the same meaning. In modern German, the adjective welsch means Romance-speaking (it particularly refers to Romansh, the Rhaeto-Romance language spoken in the Swiss canton of Grisons).
These Germanic words were probably derived from a Gaulish name recorded in Latin as Volcae, first in Commentarii de Bello Gallico (Commentaries on the Gallic War) by the Roman general and statesman Julius Caesar (100-44 BC). It was the name of several groups of Celtic people, especially a numerous and powerful people in Gallia Narbonensis, in southern Gaul. They were divided into the Volcae Arecomici and the Volcae Tectosages. The former had for their chief town Nemausus, the modern Nîmes, the latter, Tolosa, the modern Toulouse. For Germanic-speakers in the west, this name came to be used as a generic term for speakers of non-Germanic languages, originally Gaulish and, after the Romanisation of Gaul, also Latin and subsequently Romance languages.
Wales, the name of the country in English, is from Old English Wealas, plural of Wealh, which was often used to denote the Britons collectively and hence their lands. There was no unified polity in medieval western Britain, and the concept of Wales as a geographical, ethnic or political unit was a very gradual development. Old English Wealas could refer to Britons in Cornwall, Wales and northern Britain, and also historically to the inhabitants of other parts of Britain before the Anglo-Saxon settlement. Consequently, the name Wealas was sometimes qualified in order to denote a more specific application. For example, Cornwealas and Westwealas designated the Britons of Cornwall, Norðwealas the Britons of (parts of) Wales, that is, of north of Cornwall, Stræcledwalas the Strathclyde Britons. In each case, the word also denoted their respective lands. The compound Brytwealas usually denoted the early Britons.
In the Middle Ages, the Welsh territories consisted of several former kingdoms, subsequently ruled by princes. In the 13th century, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, prince of Gwynedd, established overlordship over all remaining independent parts of Wales and was acknowledged as Prince of Wales by Henry III in 1267 (Treaty of Montgomery). His principality in turn was conquered by Edward I in 1282. Edward conferred the title Prince of Wales on his son and heir to consolidate this conquest. Wales was formally incorporated into the English realm in 1536, and remains part of the United Kingdom, although granted partial self-government in 1999.
In Welsh, the name of Wales is Cymru, the self-designation of its inhabitants is Cymry (singular Cymro, masculine, and Cymraes, feminine), and the corresponding adjective is Cymreig. The name of the language (and the corresponding adjective) is Cymraeg. Cymro probably derives from an unattested Old Welsh combrog, co-lander, compatriot, from com-, with, and brog (modern Welsh bro), region. The latter word is cognate with Old Irish bruig, mruig, boundary, region, and with Old English mearc (modern English mark), boundary, sign, mark. By contrast with combrog, the Latin Allobroges, from Gaulish, meant those from another land. It was the name of a warlike Gaulish people who occupied the region between the Rhône and Lake Geneva.
Cambria was originally the same word as Cumbria, Latinised derivative of Cymry or of Cymru. Cambria and Cumbria were subsequently differentiated, the former being applied to Wales, the latter to the ancient British kingdom which included Cumberland. Cumbria continued to be used for the hilly north-western region of England containing the Lake District. The county of Cumbria was formed in 1974 from Cumberland, Westmorland and northern Lancashire.
The French name for Wales is le pays de Galles because in words of Germanic origin, when initial, the labio-velar approximant /w/ has regularly become the velar /g/. For instance, in the French noun loup-garou, garou corresponds to werewolf (loup was added when the notion of wolf expressed by garou had been forgotten), gaufre corresponds to wafer, and gardien to warden (English guardian is a later borrowing from French). This velar is spelt gu before the vowels e and i, as in guerre, corresponding to war, and Guillaume, to William.
Wales
(wālz)
A principality of the United Kingdom west of England on the island of Great Britain. Incorporated with England since the Act of Union (1536), Wales has maintained its own distinct culture and a strong nationalist sentiment. Cardiff is the capital and the largest city.
Word History: Although Celtic-speaking peoples were living in Britain long before the arrival of the invaders from Friesland and Jutland whose languages would eventually develop into English, it was the Celts and not the invaders who came to be called «strangers» in Old English. The English words for the descendants of one of these Celtic peoples, Welsh, and for their homeland, Wales, come from the Old English word wealh, meaning «foreigner, stranger, Celt.» Its plural wealas is the direct ancestor of Wales, literally «foreigners, Celts.» An Old English adjective derived from wealh, wælisc or welisc, is the source of our Welsh. The Germanic form for the root from which wealh descended was *walh-, «foreign.» A form of *walh- can also be seen in a word attested once in the surviving manuscripts of Old English, the compound walhhnutu found in a document from around 1050. This word eventually became Middle English walnotte and Modern English walnut, which is thus literally the «foreign nut.» The English walnut is native to Asia (and perhaps also to some parts of Eastern Europe), and the cultivation of the tree is a relatively new practice in Europe. The Roman author Pliny the Elder, for example, says that the ancient Greeks received their first walnut trees from the Persians. Eventually, the walnut came to be cultivated extensively in western Europe by the Romans and Gauls, and the ancient Germanic peoples knew walnuts primarily as a product of Roman Gaul and later medieval France. In the Germanic languages, the walnut eventually came to be named with words made up of the reflex of Germanic *walh-, «foreigner, Celt» added to the Germanic word for «nut,»—as in Old Norse valhnot, Middle Dutch walnote, and Old English walhhnutu.
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
Wales
(weɪlz)
n
(Placename) a principality that is part of the United Kingdom, in the west of Great Britain; conquered by the English in 1282; parliamentary union with England took place in 1536: a separate Welsh Assembly with limited powers was established in 1999. Wales consists mainly of moorlands and mountains and has an economy that is chiefly agricultural, with an industrial and former coal-mining area in the south. Capital: Cardiff. Pop: 3 063 456 (2011 est). Area: 20 768 sq km (8017 sq miles). Welsh name: Cymru Medieval Latin name: Cambria
Wales
(weɪlz)
n
(Biography) Jimmy (Donal). born 1966, US internet entrepreneur and educator; co-founder (2001) of the open-source online encyclopedia Wikipedia
Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014
Wales
(weɪlz)
n.
a division of the United Kingdom, in SW Great Britain. 2,886,400; 8018 sq. mi. (20,768 sq. km). Medieval, Cambria.
Random House Kernerman Webster’s College Dictionary, © 2010 K Dictionaries Ltd. Copyright 2005, 1997, 1991 by Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.
Meaning of WALES in English
Welsh Cymru component of the United Kingdom that forms a westward extension of the island of Great Britain. Wales is bounded by the Dee estuary and Liverpool Bay to the north, the Irish Sea to the west, the Severn estuary and the Bristol Channel to the south, and England to the east. Anglesey (Mn), the largest island in England and Wales, lies off the northwestern coast and is linked to the mainland by road and rail bridges. The varied coastline of Wales measures about 600 miles (970 km); the country stretches some 130 miles (210 km) from north to south, and its east-west width varies, reaching 90 miles (145 km) across in the north, narrowing to about 40 miles (65 km) in the centre, and widening again to more than 100 miles (160 km) across the southern portion. The capital and main commercial and financial centre is Cardiff. The Act of Union of 1536, which finally and effectively linked England and Wales, delineated an administrative boundary loosely following the line of Offa’s Dyke-a defensive earthwork built by King Offa of Mercia in the 8th century AD-generally running from north to south through the region where the upland massif of Wales gives way to the lower western Midlands of England. Though not strictly a natural frontier, it separates distinctive cultural regions, and the borderland zone through which it runs has its own manifest character. Although geographic connections have intimately linked the destiny of Wales to that of Britain, Wales has remained historically and culturally associated with other Celtic regions on the western fringes of Europe. These factors have brought about cultural, social, and economic developments that are unique and often unstable, with effects that continue to permeate Welsh life. Partly owing to these contradictory influences, Wales exhibits many of the problems encountered by the smaller nations of the world, although it does not have a similarly independent status. Area 8,015 square miles (20,758 square km). Pop. (1998 est.) 2,933,500. Welsh Cymru component country of the United Kingdom-with England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. It occupies a peninsula jutting westward from England into the Irish Sea. On three sides the boundaries of Wales are natural, with the shores of Liverpool Bay and the River Dee’s estuary to the north, the Irish Sea and St. George’s Channel to the west, and the coastline of Bristol Channel and the River Severn’s estuary on the south. The eastern boundary-that with England-is an administrative frontier created in 1536 as part of the Act of Union that linked England with Wales. For current history and for statistics on society and economy, see Britannica Book Of The Year. Additional reading Geography Harold Carter and H.M. Griffiths (eds.), National Atlas of Wales (1980, reissued 1989), provides wide-ranging coverage, with explanatory text in both English and Welsh. David Thomas (ed.), Wales: A New Study (1977), is a comprehensive volume, now somewhat out-of-date but still valuable. Eric H. Brown, The Relief and Drainage of Wales: A Study in Geomorphological Development (1960), examines the physiographic evolution of the Welsh landscape.Paul Cloke, Mark Goodwin, and Paul Milbourne, Rural Wales: Community and Marginalization (1997), addresses the changing and problematic nature of rural Wales. Noragh Jones, Living in Rural Wales (1993), gives a more personal account of social and cultural change. Urban and rural planning are discussed in Roderick Macdonald and Huw Thomas (eds.), Nationality and Planning in Scotland and Wales (1997). Harold Carter, The Towns of Wales, 2nd ed. (1966); and D. Huw Owen (ed.), Settlement and Society in Wales (1989), consider the growth, functions, and morphology of urban areas.Social and economic themes are profiled in David Dunkerley and Andrew Thompson (eds.), Wales Today (1999), a collection of essays; Ralph Fevre and Andrew Thompson (eds.), Nation, Identity, and Social Theory: Perspectives from Wales (1999); and Contemporary Wales: An Annual Review of Economic and Social Research. Language issues are analyzed in John Aitchison and Harold Carter, A Geography of the Welsh Language, 1961-1991 (1994), and in Language, Economy, and Society: The Changing Fortunes of the Welsh Language in the Twentieth Century, updated ed. (2000). Bridget Taylor and Katarina Thomson (eds.), Scotland and Wales: Nations Again? (1999), analyzes the effects of devolution on the contemporary political scene in Wales. History General historical surveys include Gwyn A. Williams, When Was Wales?: A History of the Welsh (1985); and Prys Morgan and David Thomas, Wales: The Shaping of a Nation (1984). The early period is examined in Colin Renfrew, Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins (1987), reflecting recent scholarly thought; while T.G.E. Powell, The Celts, new ed. (1980), represents more traditional views. Important studies of Roman and post-Roman Wales include V.E. Nash-Williams, The Roman Frontier in Wales, 2nd ed., rev. by Michael G. Jarrett (1969), and The Early Christian Monuments of Wales (1950).The Middle Ages are covered in John Edward Lloyd, A History of Wales from the Earliest Times to the Edwardian Conquest, 2 vol. (1911; available also in many later editions), a classic work still not superseded; Wendy Davies, Wales in the Early Middle Ages (1982); and R.R. Davies, Conquest, Coexistence, and Change: Wales, 1063-1415 (1987). The key works for modern Welsh history are Glanmor Williams, Recovery, Reorientation, and Reformation: Wales, c. 1415-1642 (1987); Geraint H. Jenkins, The Foundations of Modern Wales: Wales 1642-1780 (1987); and Kenneth O. Morgan, Rebirth of a Nation: Wales, 1880-1980 (1981).Valuable specialist histories include Geraint H. Jenkins, Literature, Religion, and Society in Wales, 1660-1730 (1978); Ieuan Gwynedd Jones, Communities: Essays in the Social History of Victorian Wales (1987); and Kenneth O. Morgan, Wales in British Politics, 1868-1922, 3rd ed. (1980). Meic Stephens (ed.), The Oxford Companion to the Literature of Wales (1986), includes historical information on people. Pyrs Gruffudd Administration and social conditions Government National framework Foreign relations and many domestic matters for Wales are determined in London by the British government and Parliament’s House of Commons, which includes 40 Welsh members; thus, the British prime minister is the head of state and chief executive. However, the National Assembly for Wales (Cynulliad Cenedlaethol Cymru), established in Cardiff in 1999, has assumed several responsibilities, including urban and rural development, economic planning, health and welfare, culture, education, transportation, tourism, and environmental matters. Unlike the Scottish Parliament, the National Assembly does not have the power to levy taxes or frame primary legislation, yet it can amend some acts of Parliament and allocate the spending of national funds within Wales. The 60-seat National Assembly consists of 40 members who are directly elected from the 40 parliamentary constituencies and an additional 20 members elected through proportional representation. The National Assembly elects a first secretary who leads the government with the aid of a cabinet of departmental secretaries. Justice and security Unlike Scotland, Wales has no separate justice system; criminal and civil cases are heard by magistrates’ courts and by a circuit of the Crown Court. The Home Office in Whitehall, London, is responsible for police services in Wales, which are administered through local police headquarters or constabularies. The country has no independent defense forces, although three British army regiments are directly associated with Wales-the Welsh Guards, the Royal Welch Fusiliers, and the Royal Regiment of Wales.
Britannica English vocabulary.
Английский словарь Британика.
2012