In May 1900 Professor John Edward Lloyd of Bangor delivered a lecture, entitled ‘Wales and the coming of the Normans’, to the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion in London. Dressed in an immaculate dark grey suit and with his high collar, shirt front and cuffs heavily starched, Lloyd spoke with the austere elegance and luminous clarity of the quintessential Victorian don, and even at this early stage in his career the superior talents of a historian who later became known as ‘the lantern-bearer of the lost centuries’ were widely appreciated. Although Lloyd was not the most inspiring lecturer – he preferred, for instance, to say ‘King Henry dismounted from his steed’ rather than ‘Henry got off his horse’ – he had an unsurpassed knowledge of his field and an unflagging desire to raise intellectual standards. Indeed, Lloyd was the founding father of Welsh medieval studies. His address to the Cymmrodorion provided a foretaste of his magisterial two-volume A History of Wales from the Earliest Times to the Edwardian Conquest, published in 1911, a work which stands as a major landmark in the historiography of Wales. Whereas his predecessors had written from their hearts rather than with their heads, Lloyd turned the history of medieval Wales into a serious academic exercise. His work still occupies a hallowed place in Welsh historical writing, and scholars continue to consult his books with profit and pleasure.

King Edward VIII was one of the few English monarchs who managed to combine an air of effortless superiority with the common touch. In November 1936, amid much cheering, hymn-singing and some grovelling, this glamorous playboy visited the derelict Dowlais ironworks, whose flaming labyrinths had until recently lit up the skies above Merthyr since the late eighteenth century. Keenly aware that Baldwin's government had virtually washed its hands of its responsibility to alleviate the social wounds caused by poverty, malnourishment and unemployment, the king moved among the people, pressing the flesh and visibly expressing his sense of shock and disbelief. There is no reason to believe that he was not speaking from the heart when he uttered the words, ‘something must be done’, a comment which passed into the folklore of Welsh working-class history. Nothing was done, however, and following a brief reign of ten months and nineteen days Edward VIII abdicated in order to marry a twice-divorced American. To most adult males in the South Wales Coalfield, whose lives had been disfigured by long-term unemployment and deprivation, this episode simply confirmed their belief that both kings and governments did not care a fig about their plight.

By contrast, the public mood in the pre-war years had been markedly different. All the evidence seemed to point to blooming material prosperity and vitality. The Welsh were bursting with confidence.

Few twentieth-century poets who composed in Welsh were more widely admired than Waldo Williams. Although he did not produce a large corpus of work, as an imaginative interpreter of the Welsh sense of identity he had few equals. Poems such as Cofio (Remember) and Cymru'n Un (Wales Is One) resonate with historians as compelling expressions of the interdependence of geography, history, landscape, people and language. He referred to ‘things that are long forgotten, / Now lost in dust of eras that have passed’ and viewed the role of the remembrancer as ‘keeping house amid a cloud of witnesses’. Thus, despite the title of this postscript, that which lies in the lap of the future is not part of a historian's remit. A nation is shaped by its history and by its people, and Wales, like every other nation, whether of long-standing or recent construction, requires a bank of cultural memory. History in all its forms, whether true or false, imagined or invented, spoken or written, told or retold, plays a critical role in a people's view of their identity. It is therefore worth considering how talismans of national identity have changed over the centuries and how historians have examined and fostered, according to the needs of their own times, an appreciation of the otherness of Wales. It bears repeating that Wales is an imagined community, a construct which, amoeba-like, changes its shape and character according to the desires of its people and the influence of external forces.

In the twenty-seventh year of the reign of Henry VIII, a Putney-born state-builder set Wales on the path towards integration within a Greater Britain, a process which reached its conclusion with the Anglo-Scottish Union in 1707 and the Union of Great Britain and Ireland in 1800. Such a future, of course, was hardly discernible in 1536 to Thomas Cromwell, the king's chief minister and the architect of the Act of Union (1536), for he was essentially a ruthless pragmatist whose incorporation of Wales into England was part of an overall strategy of recasting diverse elements of the commonwealth into a unitary state. Although he was a master of the perfidious politics of his age, Cromwell was no stranger to Erasmian idealism nor did he lack creative intelligence. The cornerstone of his policy was the concept of ‘unification’, and he was determined to bring good governance to Wales. Cromwell went to the block at the command of his royal master in 1540, but by that stage he had begun a new drive to impose order and ‘civility’ upon the Welsh within an administrative and legal dispensation known as ‘England and Wales’. His blueprint stood the test of time: the Act of Union remained on the statute books until 1993.

In the sixteenth year of the reign of George III, a Llangeinor-born philosopher, writing at a time when British authority in colonial America was disintegrating, published a pamphlet which provided the thirteen American colonies with a powerful ideological justification for rising in rebellion.

Hwch Ddu (Black Sow) and Chwilen Bwm (Beatle the Cockchafer) are two rough-hewn fictional characters in one of the most exuberant and successful Welsh-language novels of recent times. Written in the genre favoured by Boccaccio (who also makes a cameo appearance in the tale), Pestilence (Y Pla) (1991) recounts the odyssey of Salah Ibn al Khatib, a young Islamic student, who was dispatched from Cairo to assassinate the King of France at a time when the calamitous pandemic known as the Black Death was remorselessly pruning the population of Europe. During this picaresque adventure the student found himself in the upland demesne estate of Dolbenmaen in Eifionydd, at a time when the pestilence was threatening to destroy the socio-economic fabric of this small medieval community in north-west Wales. On his arrival, he was immediately dubbed the ‘Dark One’, a satanic figure whose presence boded nothing but ill for the traumatized peasants. The serf girl, Hwch Ddu, gloomily predicted that ‘we'll be no more than flies on a bullock's arse, to be whipped by the devil's tail’, a reminder not only of the transience of human life but also of the sheer impotence of men and women in the face of such a deadly, killing disease. Unfit for the squeamish, this harrowing tale offers a far more convincing insight into the plague-ridden world of fourteenth-century Wales than any conventional historical account based on official documents can provide.

In late Georgian Wales, Cardiff was a small, modest, down-at-heel market town nestling in the shadow of a ruined castle. Cattle and swine roamed the streets, and the main function of the town was to distribute agricultural goods from surrounding rural areas and manufacturing goods from West Country ports. It was a Tory stronghold and the 1,871 inhabitants enumerated in the 1801 census, most of whom spoke Welsh, bowed to the will of the Bute family. By 1900, however, Cardiff had become, by some distance, the most populous town in Wales and the gateway through which millions of tons of coal travelled in railway wagons to the holds of steam-powered ships in its impressive docks. Prosperous colliery proprietors, shipowners, merchants and bankers basked in Cardiff's reputation as the coal metropolis of the world. It had elected Liberal MPs between 1852 and 1895, and did so again from 1900 to 1910. This dynamic, heavily anglicized and cosmopolitan urban conglomeration had increased its population a hundredfold, and its reward in 1905 was to be granted city status. Fifty more years would pass before it was officially recognized as the capital of Wales, but from 1871 onwards no other town could legitimately challenge its primacy. This astonishing transformation epitomized the changing geography and socio-economic experience of large parts of Wales.

From time to time, slipshod historians do the history of Wales a disservice by clinging to outdated or inappropriate labels. Perhaps the most deeply entrenched concept in the interpretation of the period from the withdrawal of Rome to the coming of the Normans is the depiction ‘Dark Age Wales’. When this epithet was first used, it was meant to be a commentary on the relative dearth of historical data rather than a pejorative statement. Scholars to this day are painfully aware that this is one of the most obscure and complicated periods in Welsh annals. So much of the historical record, to quote an eleventh-century Welsh commentator, has been lost as a result of ‘the constant devourings of moths and the yearly borings of ages through times and seasons’ and, in spite of the valiant efforts of scholars, who acquire gainful employment and a sense of worth from subjecting scattered, barely legible and incomplete sources to meticulous scrutiny and analysis, our knowledge of the period remains disturbingly patchy. In the restricted sense that it is a poorly documented period, this was certainly a ‘dark age’ and it is easy to see why some historians are tempted to quote later evidence to light up the darkness. Even key figures like Cunedda, Arthur and St David are wraiths shrouded in mystery.

Formidable though the task promised to be, for a variety of reasons I was very pleased to accept this commission. I had always believed, and still do, that no self-respecting historian should forego the opportunity of writing the entire history of his or her native land. I also relished the intellectual challenge of preparing a concise and digestible account that would not fall into the trap of squeezing the life out of the past. Moreover, the prospect of completing a work which would meet the needs of an international audience as well as the people of Wales was too tempting to resist. Wales and its history deserves to be much more widely known and appreciated.

I have tried to give due weight to events, movements and ideas in each period, and if the chapters on the modern period are somewhat longer than the others this simply reflects the fact that the material available since the coming of the printed word is much more voluminous and diverse. A book of this kind inevitably owes an irredeemable debt to a great many scholars, both past and present, whose work has stimulated me profoundly. The further reading list at the end of the volume indicates my principal debts, though I have also ventured (gingerly in some periods) into the thickets of original sources, as well as into a mass of articles and Welsh-language publications.

In a dimly lit room in a secluded but sturdy farmhouse in early eighteenth-century Cardiganshire, a gifted young Anglican ordinand, aptly named Theophilus Evans, composed in his native language an epic history of Wales which remained a bestseller until the twilight of the Victorian era. Entitled Drych y Prif Oesoedd (A Mirror of the First Ages) (1716), this racy historical narrative of the allegedly glorious origins of the Welsh was Evans's spirited riposte to English satirists who had painted unflattering portraits of Wales as ‘a country in the world's backside’ and as ‘the very rubbish of Noah's flood’. A superb storyteller, he packed his pages with more heroes and gripping incidents than any novel of blood and thunder might have done, and by conjuring up images of luminaries like Gomer, Brutus, Beli, Brân and Arthur (Boudica, styled ‘Buddug’ by Evans, was the only heroine to elbow her way into this pageant) he caught the imagination of the Welsh reading public and deeply shaped their view of the distant past. This was history, or perhaps mythical writing, on a grand scale, and the vivid tales and heroic victories and defeats in this unashamedly Cambrocentric work were so well tailored to the needs of a people desperately searching for their own national identity that it became a popular classic, especially when editions in the Victorian era began including vivid engraved illustrations.