One evening in 1791, a room in Walbrook's Bull's Head inn began to fill with a rowdy London Welsh crowd, all members of the Caradogion – or ‘Caractacan’ – debating society. In a poem commemorating the night written by member David Samwell (1751–1798), he ironically declined to decide whether the society's round table reminded him of the one owned by King Arthur, or a modern cock-pit where ‘bloody fowl dispute’ – giving some indication of the lofty aims and raucous realities that fuelled these gatherings. Samwell was known to Welsh revivalists by his bardic name ‘Dafydd Ddu Feddyg’ (‘Dafydd the Black [i.e. dark-haired/complexioned] Doctor’), a bilingual poet and minor player in the revivalist Society of Gwyneddigion; but he was more widely renowned as a surgeon on Captain Cook's third voyage, and author of a famous account of Cook's death in conflict with Indigenous Hawaiians. It is appropriate, then, that the topic of Caractacan debate that night would involve another link between contemporary Welshness and Indigenous identity, namely the long-running controversy over Welsh claims to have ‘discovered’ and colonized America in the twelfth century, founding there a nation of so-called ‘Welsh Indians’. Samwell summed up the subject as follows:

One moon-light [sic] night it was decreed, To sift the tales that run; Concerning Owen Gwynedd's breed, Madog his gallant son.

Who, as our ancient bards explore, And histories a few; Found out America, before Columbus and his crew. (PH, p. 145)

This chapter will use Samwell's poem ‘The Padouca Hunt’ – named after a tribe supposed to be Madog's descendants – as a framework for investigating occasions when Welsh revivalism turned its gaze on the Indigenous peoples of Britain's wider empire.

INTRODUCTION

These trials originated with the illness of Sir George Maxwell, of Pollok House, south-west of Glasgow. On the morning of 14 October 1676, he was planning to visit the city. Prior to leaving, Sir George had called before him a servant, accusing him of having broken his orchard. The servant (whose name later emerged as Alan Dougal) admitted the offence, and added that Hugh Stewart, son of Janet Mathie, had been his accomplice. That night, Sir George fell ill and suffered for nearly seven weeks from pain in his right side. During his convalescence, an apparently deaf-mute girl aged 13, Janet Douglas, came to Pollok. Douglas identified Janet Mathie as having bewitched Maxwell, and led Maxwell's servants to Mathie's house where she ‘discovered’ a wax effigy, stuck with pins.

Janet Mathie was thus accused of witchcraft, along with two of her children: not Hugh, but her eldest son John Stewart, and their young sister Annabel Stewart, variously stated to be 12, 13 or 14 years old. Bessie Weir, Marjorie Craig and Margaret Jackson were also accused. Several of them were interrogated; Annabel Stewart seems to have been the first to confess, on 9 January 1677. Her confession brought demonology into the investigation. She confessed that she was present at a meeting in her mother's house, and that she saw a black man with white cuffs on his sleeves there. She had also been present at a meeting in her brother's house, where a ‘picture’ (effigy) of clay had been made. The stories of these two effigies, of wax and of clay, need to be distinguished in the testimonies. Later a third effigy, made of earth, was also mentioned.

Courtiers, officials, local notables, and petitioners followed the royal progress as the new king Charles visited the West Country in the autumn of 1625 to inspect his troops and fleet assembled for the expedition against Cadiz. A scandal unfolded nearby as the royal party broke its homeward journey in Somerset to enjoy the generous hospitality laid on at Hinton St George by John Poulet (1586–1649), ‘of whose nobleness all men talk’. According to hostile testimony, steeped in local gossip, the gentleman lawyer Hugh Pyne (1570–1628) said to a neighbour who had seen the king at Hinton,

These were dangerous words, sotto voce, not necessarily accurate, and best not repeated. But Pyne allegedly dug an even deeper hole for himself with expressions that were scandalous, undutiful, and arguably treasonous. Perhaps later at table, perhaps in drink, certainly in private, he was reported saying of King Charles, ‘he is to be carried any whither’, and then fumed aloud, ‘before God, he is no more fit to be king than Hickwright’, referring to ‘an old simple fellow who was then Mr Pyne's shepherd’ – as if fitness had anything to do with a monarch's right to reign and rule.

The politics of Ngugi in translation, especially in English, raises a number of questions, some of which are linked to his decision and reasons to abandon the English language and to write in Gikuyu. This chapter seeks to understand the implications of Ngugi’s translated works for his vision to write in his mother tongue, as both a political and an ideological strategy, and to stop enriching the English heritage at the expense of his mother tongue. And although Ngugi’s novels and essays have been translated into a number of languages across the globe, he has paid closer attention to the translation of his works into English almost immediately after their publication. It also forces us to ask what the straddling between mother tongue and English translation means for Ngugi’s imagined and targeted readers?

Institutions, like the materials contained within them, can have long histories of their own. Founded in 1613, the Bristol Library was not the first public library in Britain as was once assumed by its nineteenth-century librarian, being preceded by libraries in both Norwich (1608) and Ipswich (1612), but it could proudly boast of being one of only a couple of dozen active during the seventeenth century. Nor was it necessarily the first accessible library in Bristol, with one held and managed by the Guild of Kalendars at All Saints Church (see Map) and active from 1464. The earliest iteration of what would one day become Bristol Central Library began its existence as a small collection of books managed by the city's civic governance, the Corporation, on King Street, then situated on the western edge of the city close to an area of marsh. Throughout its history, this library existed within a wider ecosystem of public and private repositories and archives, including that of church, club, and university libraries. Over centuries, interactions across these institutions, whether motivated by civic benevolence or private interests, influenced the form, functions, building and collections of Bristol Central Library today. The first home of the Bristol Library was a ‘lodge’ on King Street, south of Bristol Bridge, donated to the city in 1613 by Robert Redwood, a local merchant, as a ‘place to put bookes for the furtherance of Learninge’. Redwood would augment his gift with a further bequest of ten pounds, in 1630, to fund the acquisition of books, but the earliest texts in the library were chiefly the donation of Tobias Matthew (c. 1544–1628), the Bristol-born Archbishop of York.

The act of reading literature or watching drama is partly also an act of (re-)construction: piecing together the meaning, or at least one possible meaning, of a literary or dramatic narrative, including constructing the fictional lives and history of that narrative's characters. In the case of Classical, medieval, and Early Modern texts, such interpretative reconstruction is usually dependent upon not just the reader's literary– critical judgement – a judgement Fiona Tolhurst so ably illustrated in everything she wrote — but also the textual–critical decisions of the editor who stands between the modern audience and the pre-modern artefact or manuscript. The manuscript editor and codicologist must also reconstruct meaning by recapturing or even reconstructing the voices of the past that are recorded in these manuscripts. In this sense, as Ralph Hanna notes, textual criticism is partly ‘an act of cultural recuperation’ that ‘attempts to effect an historical bridge between a lost productive past and a consuming present’. In the case of the textual and critical reception of Sir Thomas Malory's ‘Boke of Sir Trystram’, however, the bridge leading the modern reader to the medieval text is littered with warning signs. My current argument was written as a prefatory addendum to, and is not a précis or reproduction of, the work Tolhurst and I have been doing trying to recuperate Malory's ‘Boke of Sir Trystram’ and its most famous protagonists; by a happenstance of publishing timelines, however, this current chapter will appear in print as a preface to, or very close contemporary of, our previously finished ‘Trystram’ theses.

The sixain, expertly used by William Shakespeare and Robert Southwell in their bestselling works of poetry, Venus and Adonis (1593) and Saint Peters Complaint (1595), moved through the hands of an extraordinary multitude of poets in the early modern period, from the sacred to the profane. The six-line stanza form has become known for both its capacity to hold together the play of paradox and antithesis and its ability to test a poet's control of metre and metaphor. In this chapter I suggest that the sixain offers an ideal case study for thinking about what might make good and bad poetry and how we might connect critical judgements concerning the use and misuse of particular poetic forms to intertextual and marketable phenomena. In so doing, I build on recent work by Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and Ben Burton that establishes a ‘genealogy of the sixain’ and contests the idea that the form is ‘Shakespearean’, as suggested by popular reference to it as the Venus and Adonis stanza; as they note, ‘between 1476 and 1603, some 2445 poems were written entirely or partly in this stanza (7.5% of the total poems published or transcribed in the period), confirming it as one of the most popular English verse forms’. In looking beyond the sixain's use in Venus and Adonis they propose recognition of a countertradition that associates the sixain with poetry written ‘in the complaint mode and expressing amatory (or religious) distress’.

In seeking to further the notion of a counter-history of poetic form, then, this chapter also builds on a research project led by Lukas Erne that had the aim of establishing a quantitative approach to the popularity of printed books of poetry during the period 1583–1622.

After the end of the common stock annals c.892 we can more accurately refer to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles in the plural, as the work of many authors, revisers and scribes working in many different places across the following two-and-a-half centuries. The evidence of the surviving OE versions and other witnesses points to a pattern of dispersal, divergence and at times neglect of the annals across the following century, beside recurrent contact between the developing Chronicle texts. In various places, especially in relation to annals across the second half of the tenth century, points of contact provide evidence for the retrospective work of eleventh-century chronicle making.

This chapter explores the authoring and compilation the Chronicles across the tenth century, beginning with the annals of the so-called ‘First Continuation’ (893–96). This group of annals, authored c.900, takes up the story of the viking army that appeared in Wessex in 892 and is shared by ABC, but is also found in D as the result of a collation of a Northern Recension text with a *BC-type Chronicle. Other witnesses – the E Chronicle, the Mercian Register, Æthelweard's Chronicon and St Neots – present varying patterns of convergence and difference at this point, signalling a dispersal of copies of the common stock annals from the 890s. A, B and C continue to share annals as far as 914, after which A and *BC part company. A continues the annals of the reign of Edward the Elder as far as 920, after which this manuscript was neglected for some decades, until a revival of interest at Winchester in the middle of the tenth century.

Three consecutive texts in Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Brogyntyn ii.1, all copied by the scribe who has been identified as the chief organizer of the manuscript, form a sophisticated memento mori sequence dedicated to guiding the gentry owners of the manuscript to prepare their souls for the inexorable coming of death: item 24, The Father of Pity (DIMEV 5256, fols. 63v–79r); item 25, ‘Lo Worldly Folks’ (DIMEV 3160, fol. 79v); and item 26, ‘Earth upon Earth’ (DIMEV 1170, fols. 79v–81v). The Father of Pity is a unique Middle English rhyme royal translation of a popular Latin verse debate between the body and soul known as the Visio Philiberti. Prefacing the translation is a translator's prologue, explaining his purpose and methods in translating the Visio Philiberti. The poem concludes with a homiletic address to readers, reminding them of the inevitability of death and instructing them in right behavior while alive. ‘Lo Worldly Folks’, also unique to Brogyntyn ii.1, is a transitional piece between The Father of Pity and ‘Earth upon Earth’. Written in rhyme royal, like The Father of Pity, it recapitulates the moral lessons of the preceding text and instructs readers to ‘thynke uppon youre end’ (l. 14). Finally, ‘Earth upon Earth’ is part of a popular tradition of poems punning on the multiple possible interpretations of the word ‘earth’, including (but not limited to) humanity, worldly goods and the literal soil. Its central theme is admonishing readers about the futility of amassing riches in the world when they are destined to return to dust.

Deep inside State Papers, among a gathering of obscure and barely legible manuscripts, lies an extensive ‘relation’ by W. M., dated 19 May 1630. It presents an anxious argument, with stressful moral consequences, about a subject's lawful duty, career anxiety, faith, altruism, and readiness to die so that another might live. It introduces a forgotten life of thwarted clerical ambition, lived in the shadow of the religious troubles of the age. It opens a chain of letters and papers, up to the eve of the civil war, involving a network of associates who considered themselves ‘the well-affected people of God’. Never previously published, the Morton materials are worth close scrutiny. Any glossing necessary to identify named individuals is indicated here in square brackets.

The W. M. who agonized at length on paper in 1630 was William Morton, a member, perhaps a young fellow, of Sidney Sussex College. The biographical register Alumni Cantabrigienses appears to have confused him with another William Morton, appending the one's academic degrees to the legal and political career of another. This misidentification persists in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and The History of Parliament, though the online Clergy Database notes the ordination as deacon on 20 September 1628 of William Morton, M.A., by the bishop of Coventry and Lichfield Thomas Morton, a possible relation. There is no record of his subsequent ordination as priest, though gaps in such records are not unusual.