In A.D. 844 Rhodri Mawr (Rhodri the Great) became king of Gwynedd, the main north Wales kingdom, and also inherited the kingdom of Powys. Rhodri found Wales a collection of small states and left it a united country. He was still called "king of the Britons" (Annals of UlIter, A.D. 876). In A.D. 916 his grandson Hywel Dda (Hywel the Good) consolidated this unity .He is reported as calling the first recorded parliament, and under his direction the law system was first codified. The Welsh law system became known as the Laws of Hywel Dda. Comparison to the Irish Brehon Law system shows their common Celtic origins. [ The Latin Text of the Welsh Laws, H. D. Emanuel, Cardiff, 1967, and Welsh Medieval Law, A. W. Wade-Evans, Oxford, 1909.] Hywel Dda was king when the last great Celtic alliance was defeated by Athelstan. Athelstan had united the English kingdoms and in A.D. 937, at Brunanburh, Celts from all the remaining Celtic countries united to attempt to drive the Anglo-Saxons out of Britain. A poem entitledArmes Prydein Fawr (The Prophecy of Great Britain) was, composed in support of this attempt. But the Celts were defeated.

At the time of Hywel Dda's death in A.D. 940, Cymru as a kingdom had consolidated itself and no longer thought of itself as British. To England, however, Cymru (land of compatriots) was Wales (the land of foreigners). Both the Anglo-Saxons and later the Normans continued their policy of expansion through Britain, making continued attempts at conquest. In A.D. 1282 LIywellyn ap Gruffydd ap LIywellyn was killed by an Englishman at Cilmeri and his brother Dafydd ap Gruffydd ap LIywellyn became the last native monarch of Wales. But six months later he was captured and beheaded by the English. From 1287 until 1400 Wales was a restless country, continually engaged in insurrection against English rule. Then Owain Glyn Dwr reasserted Welsh independence. However, by 1409 the English were once more attempting a reconquest, and by 1415 Wales was back under English control.

The English parliament passed acts in 1535 and 1542 that annexed Wales to England, incorporating it fully-politically, administratively, and culturally-into England. The Welsh lan- guage and culture was to be utterly destroyed. In 1968 a Welsh Language Act relieved the cultural conquest to some extent, but administratively Wales continues to be part of England.

Wells. The veneration of water, in the form of rivers and wells, was dominant in ancient Celtic society. It has been argued by Professor Richard Bradley, of Reading University, that the Thames ( Tamesis= the sluggish river) occupied a place with the Britons paralleled by the Ganges with the Hindus. Certainly many items, skulls, swords, shields, and other items, which have been deemed votive offerings, have been found in the Thames, especially in the London area.

Nowhere is this religious observance more clearly seen than with regard to springs and wells. Like many aspects of the landscape- with which the Celts felt at one-wells were formed by the deities. In Gaul, Grannos and Borvo were said to be especially connected with wells. But it seems from the long list made by the Romans of Celtic "well nymphs"that each well had its own indwelling spirit.

Those who did not observe the taboos connected with wells, even though they be deities themselves, could be in trouble. The Well of Segais rose up and drowned Boann, and the path it made chasing her became the Boyne. In medieval times, as reflected in certain Arthurian tales, the spirits of the wells were still there. Indeed veneration at wells could not be stamped out by the new Christian religion. Therefore, it was adapted to it. Pope Gregory, writing in A.D. 601, told the missionaries of the church not to destroy the pre-Christian sites of worship but to bless them and convert them from "the worship of devils to the service of the true God." There- fore, throughout the Celtic lands, Holy Wells still survive that were once the sites of pagan veneration.

Welsh. The name given to the British Celts by the Anglo-Saxons, from welisc andwealh, meaning "foreigners." Many names with the prefix Wal in England refer to places where the British Celts last held out against the encroaching Anglo-Saxonconquest. In London there is Walbrook (brook of the Welsh); in Yorkshire, the Walburn, which is similarly derived; in Kent there is Walmer (mere of the Welsh); Walcot in Berkshire (cottage of the Welsh); Saffron Walden in Essex (valley of the Welsh); Wallasey in Cheshire (island of the Welsh); and so on. Until the tenth century the evidence is that the British Celts continued to call themselves Britons. As they were slowly pushed back and separated into the western peninsulas, they called themselves "compatriots," a sign of feeling under pressure from the invading Anglo-Saxons. The word in British was combrogos, from which Cymru and hence Cymric were derived. Cymru is the mod- ern name for what the English now call Wales (land of foreigners) but which, in Welsh, means "land of compatriots." The same term, Cymru (pronounced Cum-ree), was given to Cumbria, which was annexed to England in the late eleventh century and where the Celtic language died out in the fourteenth century. As Dumnonia vanished in the westward sweep of the English, the kingdom of Cornwall emerged. This was called Kernow in Cornish, but the English called it Kern-wealh-Cornwall.

Welsh Language. Cymraeg. At the time of the last census, only 18.9 percent of the population of Wales (503,549) spoke Welsh. However, the census does not extend to Welsh people living in England, and some Welsh-speaking communities actually straddle the border-the current border being arbitrarily fixed at the time of the acts annexing Wales. There is also a large Welsh-speaking immigrant population in England. Similarly, there is Y Wladfa, the Welsh-speaking colony set up in the 1860s in Patagonia, Argentina. Welsh-speaking communities can also be found in North America. The survival of Welsh, in spite of the Acts of 1535 and 1542, whose stated aim was to "utterly extirp" the language and its culture, is a remarkable tribute to the tenacity of the Welsh to retain their language and culture.

By 1961 some 656,000 people spoke the language in Wales. Within a year Cymdeithas yr laith Gymraeg had started a campaign of civil disobedience to win government recognition and status for the language in Wales. A royal commission on the language was set up and recommended that Welsh should have equal validity with English. A Welsh Language Act in 1968 fell marginally short of this recommendation. However, Welsh is now by far the best-supported Celtic language in terms of English government recognition and support.

Welsh literature dates from the sixth century, although surviving manuscripts are from a later period. Certainly by the eighth century it was a flourishing literary language. Apart from fragmentary re- mains, the oldest manuscript book wholly in Welsh is the Black Book ofCarmarthen, from the twelfth century. The Book of Aneirin,ca. 1250, contains work that can be positively claimed to date to the sixth century. The Book of Taliesin, ca. A.D. 1275, contains 58 poems but not more than a dozen or so can be dated (textually or linguistically) to the sixth century at the time when Taliesin is said to have flourished.The White Book of Rhydderch, ca. 1325, andThe Red Book of Hergest, ca. 1400, make up the early literary records. Obviously, much has been destroyed. Of the Laws of Hywel Dda, for example, we have only the "Computus Fragment" (now in Cambridge University Library), while the complete laws are found in earliest record in a manuscript of A.D. 1200.

Wren. [W] A bird of augury among the Britons.

Wridstan. A ninth century monk at the monastery of Landevennec in Brittany. His Life of Winwaloe, the sixth century abbot, known as Guenole in Brittany and as Gunwalloe in Cornwall, gives details about the struggle between the British Celts and Anglo-Saxons, confirming the line taken by Gildas and Nennius.