Madam,

Low down on page 10 of last week’s Cambrian News you covered an item of great potential importance in the years to come: ‘Petition calls for Welsh history to be taught from a Welsh perspective’.

As a retired head of history at an English comprehensive school who chose to take a catch-up course on medieval Welsh history when researching a PhD on early history writing in Wales and England, I feel qualified to comment.

On the positive side, the Welsh perspective course rightly emphasised the colonial nature of castle-building and administration in Wales, a necessary corrective to the usual English view. However, whether it would be right, as my teacher did, to describe that as ‘early English imperialism’ is doubtful, too simplistic. Rather, this was an extension of that same Norman-Plantagenet royal colonialism that first conquered the English regions after the Norman conquest. This most aggressive of royal dynasties was always ready to absorb noble families with minority ethnic roots in newly conquered lands, just so long as they would swear to be loyal. In this perspective the Welsh national hero, Owen Glendower, was not so much a great patriot, as just another feudal landlord, exploiting the labour of his tenants in exchange for licence to pursue glory through war.

When countries or would-be independent countries seek to assert national identity against a dominant neighbour they often see the teaching of history primarily as a way to instil national identification, above all other possible reasons to study the subject. Taught in a biased way this can lead to distortion, the elevation of myth to the status of fact and to narrowness, the loss of wider awareness of common threads that cross ethnic and national borders.

As I see it we were all, nearly all of us, exploited in the past (and present?) by a small plundering upper class. Give our children a people’s history please!

Yours etc, Quentin Deakin, Corbett Avenue Tywyn.

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