Elegies for Welsh Princes

Abstract

Abstract This chapter turns to elegy as a mode of historical writing deeply rooted in memory and affective experience. It focuses on English chroniclers’ inclusion of elegies to Welsh princes of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Rhys ap Gruffudd (d. 1197) and Llywelyn ap Gruffudd (d. 1282). Written in Wales, these elegies, included in Latin chronicles from England and the Marches, such as Higden’s Polychronicon, Trevisa’s Chronicle, the Annals of Chester, and Camden’s Britannia, record English perspectives on Welsh history. In memorializing fallen leaders, chroniclers used elevated rhetoric to heighten the immediacy of the past. Heightened rhetoric immersed the reader in the past and created a sense of continuity across historical time, particularly through references to Greek and Latin heroes. The elegy also provided a crucial sense of distance by portraying threatening Welsh leaders as unequivocally past. The reader was meant to identify with the Welsh and experience the deep sense of loss and fragmentation that the deaths of their princes represented. But the elegiac mode also provided a crucial sense of remove, memorializing Welsh princes as if they were classical heroes: evocative, but no longer a threat. These chronicles’ recollections of Welsh loss attest to the ability of elegiac verse to transgress and to break down boundaries of culture through affective experience while still protecting cultural dominance. This study of Welsh elegies in English contexts demonstrates a key outcome of marcher interest in Wales and the Welsh past: the transmission of Welsh texts beyond the borderlands of Wales and into England.