Ireland 12-16 Wales. Oh my oh my.
At this moment, Scotland and England are playing in simultaneously pouring rain and brilliant sunshine. A mudbath beckons. Yuck. Pretty rainbow though…
Update: A Scotland win! Well well well. England were as abysmal as the weather and Scotland were real gutsy scrapping buggers.
But those two other words beginning with G and S? Must not think about them.
We didn’t screw up yet. Yay!
Next up, the might of Italy. So many opportunities for humiliation…
I haven’t posted much about Wales’ rugby team since March 2005. Seeing as they’ve been mostly crap and there hasn’t been much worth saying.
And for about 2/3 of today’s game against England, that didn’t seem to be about to change.
So, bloody hell.
(I’m sure we’ll be back to normal viewing within the next couple of weeks. Still.)
The Old College was the original home of the university in Aberystwyth, opened in 1872 and the first university in Wales (grand total: 26 students; the first female students arrived in 1883). The Penglais campus on the hill (with important outliers at Llanbadarn) is now, with the expansion of the university in the second half of the twentieth century, the main site for teaching. Old College is now largely used for administration, although two major departments, Welsh and Education, still reside there.
In a period of building expansion with the coming of the railway line during the 1860s, it had originally been built as a hotel, but the company went bust before completion and offered it to the recently established university committee. It was a bargain; about £80,000 had already been spent on the building works, and the university got it (though incomplete) for £10,000. But it was still a struggle to get the university up and running. Much of the early funding came from public subscriptions within Wales (it’s clear that getting any aid at all from governments was an extremely difficult task until the mid-1880s), and many of those were very small sums, the “pennies from the people of Wales” as authors (rather sentimentally) put it. But perhaps that had advantages; as a result, they regarded it as their college and were prepared to fight for its survival at the most desperate time after the fire of 1885, and when official policy (and money) would have ignored Aberystwyth in favour of colleges at Cardiff and Bangor.
For fans of the great 13th-century Welsh poet, a lovely new online edition and translation of the poems of Dafydd ap Gwilym.
Incidentally, looking up Dafydd’s biography led to the discovery that the National Library of Wales has vastly improved the usability of its Welsh Biography Online. (Believe me, it used to be truly awful.) And the ever-expanding Digital Mirror has also had an overhaul of its user interface fairly recently.
In responding to a comment by Kristine on the post about ghosts, I brought up the strategies and choices of witnesses concerned to persuade local officials of the truth of their accounts of events. The use of the supernatural in narratives about murder was just one way, and a relatively unusual one, of doing that. Moving away from homicide (because sometimes I do!) to the more common and mundane area of theft, many witness testimonies in the early modern court records bring quite straightforward evidence of suspects caught in possession of stolen goods shortly after the theft. But not always, and the most interesting detective stories come when this sort of material evidence was unavailable.
Here’s an example from 1688. Hugh Dod was in charge of Mr Edward Brereton’s malting kiln, at Borras (near Wrexham). In his deposition, he explained that on the morning of 27 November he went into the kiln and on entering he noticed some “lyme mortar falln upon the killn floore” and saw that part of the wall was “broaken or crushd”. He asked his underling, John Griffith about the damage and John said that he didn’t know.
Hugh then went up the stairs to view the malt, and found that several measures had been taken out of a pile of dried malt in one corner; he noted that the malted barley that was still in the process of drying (”withering”) “was so spread over ye rest of ye floore & so neare to the heape of dryed malt, that noe stranger might have come to ye dryd malt without passing over ye withering malt”. He asked John Griffith, “What is gon with the malt, have ye sent any to ye mill, & it so lately dryed”, to which John answered, none that he knew of, unless Mrs Brereton had sent some while he was busy. Hugh sent John to ask (the answer came back negative).
Meanwhile, Hugh went round to the back of the kiln where the wall was broken and
found more mortar the outside then ye inside soe that he believes the wall was broak from within meerely out of colour & not to convey ye malt out that way for ye breach was so litle & noe malt spilt or lost within side or without side ye breach, & ye bricks were sett up againe & ye joynts or crevices were stopt up with fearne & grass…
So he concluded that the malt had in fact been taken out of the kiln door… and finished up by noting that “John Griffith had all ye keys belonging to ye said killn with him the begining of ye night that ye said malt was stolne”.
Jonathan Cawdo, a young servant, was the second witness. He told the magistrate that he had gone along with John Griffith into the kiln the previous evening at about 10pm, ostensibly to check that the fire was out. But another servant, Sarah Andrew, came after them and asked them what they were doing there “at that tyme of ye night & tould them that her master was very angry that they were at ye killn at that unseasonable tyme”. Jonathan left the kiln and told John to hurry up after him, “whereupon ye said John came out and lockt ye killn dore as this deponent thought, but left the inner dore that went in to ye withering floore unlock’d and delivered but one key & left ye other key in ye killn”.
John Griffith was charged with the theft at the next Great Sessions. The indictment notes that Hugh appeared as prosecutor. But his careful tracing of his process of observation and deduction, and the account of John’s possibly suspicious (but maybe just careless) behaviour the night before the theft, did not result in a conviction.
The problem was that the evidence against John was entirely circumstantial; what seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Denbighshire juries preferred was evidence directly and physically linking the accused to the stolen property. Prosecutors who could not produce such evidence might well set out in detail the detective work that had focused their suspicion on a particular person (and these narratives are fascinating to me as a historian); but this sort of evidence was much less effective in the court room.
But I rather doubt that John Griffith kept his job for very long.
I still have the plugin installed to auto-close the comments form 30 days after posting, and I’m not quite sure why. It was intended as an anti-spam device (though it wasn’t entirely effective anyway), but now that Spam Karma is doing such a good job it’s probably redundant. And it occasionally blocks people who have interesting things to say about old posts, like this one about William Salesbury and learning Welsh in the sixteenth century.
I don’t like to reproduce emails without permission, but I will give this interesting wikipedia entry on Salesbury that I was sent, for anyone who might be interested.
And I’ll deactivate the plugin, while I’m thinking of it. (Although, unfortunately, that won’t automatically re-open threads that are already closed. I would have to go back through the posts and do that manually. So not going to happen.)
(Because I am writing this conference paper and blogging is such a good form of avoidance…)
Yesterday evening there was the most spectacular thunderstorm we’ve had in quite a while. It had been building up all afternoon, really, horribly muggy. And then the sky started to turn this ominous shade of slate grey and there was only one way it could all end…
(Here is a more normal view from the same window as that last picture…)
I couldn’t get a picture of the lightning though. Now that was something.
A deal has been struck: students resident in Wales won’t have to pay top-up fees at Welsh universities, while English and Scottish students will (as will Welsh students who go to English universities). The National Assembly will compensate the universities for the difference (more than £50 million a year by 2009/10). It has also, apparently, pledged to address under-funding of Welsh universities compared to their English and Scottish counterparts, amounting to £100 million (per year?).
(I wonder if I’ll be in Wales for long enough to see whether the money makes any noticeable difference?)
I forgot to mention that the programme is available for the Celtic Studies ‘Milestones’ conference, which is in Aber in late June (download at the webpage).
Quite a few history sessions that I’ll probably gatecrash, especially the one on Iolo Morganwg (think Welsh Romantic-era literary forger, opium addict, ethnographer, poet…) that includes the paper entitled “‘Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it in for me’ – paranoia and persecution anxiety in Iolo Morganwg”…
I’ve just learned from our university email newsletter of the death of Professor Sir Rees Davies, a distinguished medieval Welsh/British historian with close ties to Aberystwyth, although he left UWA for Oxford just before I arrived here.
Rees took up his appointment to the Chair of History at Aberystwyth in 1976. He served both as Head of the Department of History and as a Vice-Principal of the University. He was appointed to the Chichele Chair of Medieval History at Oxford in 1995. Awarded the CBE in 1995, Rees received a Knighthood earlier this year.
The funeral is to be held in Aberystwyth this Saturday.
Update: A good report here.
(This is to certify that…)
It’s been more than a year since I attended any Welsh courses (what with spending several months in London and then getting distracted by teaching), but this morning I got a certificate from the South West Wales Open College Network. Woo hoo! I might think that my struggles with Cymraeg have pretty much stalled, but I have achieved 6 credits at level 2 (6 credydau ar lefel dau), whatever that might mean. (This is for the session 2003/4; let no one accuse these people of efficiency, eh?)
I may well do Wlpan Awst again this summer, but I suspect that I’m going to have to go back to Beginners level. Which is depressing.
And, given the remoteness of my chances of being able to stay in Wales after autumn next year (when this job ends), I’m not entirely sure why I’m still trying to do it at all.
(Largely because I can only read parts of it and might have completely misunderstood them.)
But, man, it doesn’t matter if you can read it: you’ve just got to see this photo.
I have a few Welsh blogs on my circuit; if I were less lazy and could remember more vocabulary, it would be great reading practice. Anyway, it’s Geraint’s birthday (soon? or now?), and he thinks this (in the picture) is the most beautiful place in Wales. (I think…)
Over this. The 18th-century diary of an Anglesey gentleman, William Bulkeley, is to be put online in its entirety.
You can already see a few pages of the diary at Gathering the Jewels. (And extracts were transcribed many years ago in the Transactions of the Anglesey Antiquarian Society, 1931.)
(I would write a lot more now, but I really have to go out. Later maybe.)
Yesterday was World Water Day; well, I probably wouldn’t have known either except that Google had one of its cute themes again.
So, did you know that there’s a field of water history? I did, because one of my colleagues has done really interesting research about public health and the politics of water supplies in 19th-century Wales, and the first international Water in History conference was held here in Aber.
Which is a pretty appropriate kind of place for it. We get about twice as much rain a year on the west coast of Wales as they do in south-east England (Met Office statistics: our nearest station (Trawscoed) 1961-90, annual average rainfall 1174mm; Greenwich, London, annual average in the same period: 586mm).
But hang on, you might be asking, what is Tryweryn? What is we have to remember?
A few miles south of Aberystwyth on the road to Aberaeron, there’s an old, crumbling wall painted with the words Cofiwch Dryweryn (an older picture, much less dilapidated). It’s a home-made memorial to the flooding of a village and a valley in the 1960s in order to create a reservoir that would supply English city-dwellers, and the campaign against the project; it was not the only such case during the 1960s, but it is probably now the best known. And the widespread outrage caused in Wales by the reservoirs contributed to the growth of Plaid Cymru and the Welsh nationalist movement.
The building of large-scale reservoirs in Wales (often - but not always - to supply English areas) had begun in the late 19th century. The largest, at the turn of the 20th century, was the Elan Valley, in Radnorshire, built to supply the rapidly growing population of Birmingham. The dams built there represented major feat of engineering. (Losses and gains: the Elan Valley now is an important wildlife reserve.)
And these projects were tiny in their impacts compared to recent and current projects around the world today. The problems driving many of those current projects are the same, though: pressures of growing populations in need of water (and, these days, electricity). Which is still not much consolation for those on the receiving end.
Water supplies and sanitation are crucial global issues. Millions of people live with water shortages; it’s expected that the problem is only going to get worse. Water has been a contributing factor in conflict and war in the past; there are growing fears of severe water wars soon to come. Water is political.
Cofiwch.
They’re singing Delilah in Cardiff, and there are some happy people outside my windows already too.
Gotta love this summary of the Welsh game: “No other country has such an easy mastery of the difficult; for Wales the problem remains the simple things of the game.”
(And something - albeit a bit sneery; jealousy, methinks? - for Hensonites.)
Update: Well, I missed the better half (they always seem to play best when I’m not looking). But hey, they won, 46 to 22.
And I am not saying, thinking, breathing those two words beginning G and S.
Saturday 19 March, GMT 3.30pm.
On 1 March, almost a week ago. How did that happen? If I’d been keeping up with Tony (the feed broke and I didn’t notice until I read a comment from him today), I’d have had a reminder.
My excuse is that I was busy busy busy last week. And it’s not going to be any better over the next 10 days or so, so blogging is probably going to be fairly light until I’ve done what must be done.
But then it will be Easter vacation! Hurrah!