The Legal History of Wales by Thomas Glyn Watkin

Alan saw this and commented “that looks like an insanely dull book” and I would admit taking account of the title alone this reaction if not totally unreasonable, however...

The scope of the book, packing over 2000 years of history in to a little over 200 pages, is not the dry and straight laced functioning of legal process but the dynamics of power and identity.

This is a book about much more than “the Law”. There are some fascinating insights, for example any enhanced status of women within the Welsh Laws relative to their Anglo-Saxon neighbours was not due to any links to some Celtic Earth Mother (as at times some will suggest) but in fact due to the Welsh seeking to preserve their “civilised” identity as Roman Citizens and continuing significant aspects of Roman Law. While are certain times “Welsh” legal provisions and structures, often arrived at accidentally, set the pattern for future reform in England.

I also learn a lot about the evolution of the legal system in England, which from the time of the Norman conquest onwards has had growing influence in Wales. This speaks about the source of power and authority, such as the ways in which the Crown and, in particular, the Church wrestled with one another as alternate sources of authority.

For so long there has been a single entity “England and Wales” it is important to understand the origins of that status, and the time before when there was “England” and “Wales” (if in fact such a time existed as both England and Wales were slow to form as separate unified entities), if we are to thinking purposefully about the extent of devolution, the potential for independence. While we can go beyond the confines of history as we make the future, we are foolish if we do so without regard for the past.

When we think of “nationhood” we can not avoid Benedict Anderson's “Imagined Communities” - all concepts of “nation” are fictions, that crossing a line drawn on a map you become a foreigner is in essence a nonsense. But some fictions speak truths, while others are clanging bells. The search for the Welsh is to find a fiction, to find a truth, that speaks of a common identity that is more that is more that a negative definition (ie the people who aren't English).