LITTLE ENGLAND BEYOND WALES.
.ALMOST every one can talk about Cornwall, yet how many visit Pembrokeshire, not more remote ? If it were relevant to the subject, one might well ask, for that matter, why Breconshire, with mountains approaching those of Merioneth and Carnarvon in dignity and river valleys cut- classed by nothing in Britain, is a terra incognita, while Devonshire, though neither more nor less accessible, is a household word.
But regarding Pembrokeshire, with its long curving coast line, almost throughout of the Cornish pattern; with the same wild cliffs flung out into fierce, pitiless-looking headlands or riven into sounding and shoreless coves; the same clear green water booming in inaccessible caverns—why is it practically ignored ? Pembrokeshire, again, with trifling exceptions, is free from the eyesore of dump heaps and mine shafts; indeed, there is not a sweeter or cleaner county in all Great Britain. One half of it, the Welsh half speaking broadly, is broken upland or genuine mountain; the other, the English portion, pleasant undulating lowland, indented with winding fiords, and musical with the sound of hill-born streams that have not time to lose their voice in the short space between the moun- tains and the se& Of prehistoric relics the Welsh county shows, we believe, a longer list even than Cornwall, while for the number and splendour of its ruined castles it shares with Glamorgan a pre-eminence that we should imagine is nowhere disputed within these islands. Lastly, it possesses a Cathedral which for romance of situation and eventful story is beyond doubt unique in this country. An uninterested layman in such matters might readily forget or confuse in his memory most of the Cathedrals he has seen in his life, but he could never forget St. David'a, or by any possibility confuse it with another,
If all these things fail to • attract more than a mere sprinkling of English visitors to Pembrokeshire, it is hardly to be expected that its remarkable cleavage of race and language should do so, though considering the advanced state of civilisa- tion enjoyed by the county as a normal part of Britain, there is probably nothing like it in Europe. How many people are aware that occupying just half a county at the far end of Wales is a large and ancient community who in blood, speech, temperament, and habit of thought are practically as English as the people of Suffolk or Hampshire ? A knowledgable Pembroke man will take a county map and draw you a waving line from the north-eastern corner of St. Bride's Bay to the mouth of the Taff just over the Carmarthen border. This line, which is only to a small degree guided by natural barriers, divides two peoples who have kept distinct and separate from each other for eight hundred years, though for more than half that period they have had no cause or desire for mutual strife. Yet, speaking in the general terms alone possible in a short article, there has been between them neither intermarriage nor social sympathy, nor as communities have they understood each other's tongues. On the north of this capricious line, which wanders so strangely through the heart of Pembrokeshire, are Welsh-speaking Celts, own brothers to the men of Cardigan and Carmarthen. On the south, rubbing shoulders with them, are the compact popula- tion of "Little England beyond Wales," the descendants of Normans, Saxons, and Flemings, who occupied it in the eleventh and twelfth centuries to the entire exclusion of the original inhabitants. The Flemings, most authorities agree, were sent down there by Henry L for the double purpose of re- ducing their formidable numbers in England and helping to keep down the Welsh. The fusion of the colonists was simple and rapid. The transformation of a Fleming of those days into an Englishman under such conditions of mutual interest and a common danger was easy enough, and recruits came no doubt in plenty across the Severn sea from Devonshire to stiffen the Engliah clement. The colony grew upon the lines of an English county, strong in local patriotism, priding itself on being English, not Welsh, and sharing few or none of the .charaeteristics, antipathies, and affections of Welehmen. The Pembrokeshire rustic of the Hundreds of Roos or Castle-Martin would to-day speak of a fellow-county- man a few miles to the north very much as a Salopian would allude to a Montgomeryshire mountaineer, only the Shrop- shire Saxon has in many districts a touch of the Welsh " sing• song" in his intonation, while the true South Pembrokeshire man has none whatever,—at any rate, we have failed to detect it. This dividing line, as we have remarked, is but little assisted by Nature. A brook that you might leap is for many miles the Rubicon. In one place it is popularly said to pass down the centre of a village street one side of which speaks English and the other Welsh ! These somewhat highly coloured illustrations, however, only serve to emphasise the real state of things, which is sufficiently remarkable. And indeed they a. e so near the truth that the stranger might to advantage take them literally for the sake of the impression they leave.
Pembrokeshire has been unusually rich in historical and antiquarian writers, and it may be imagined how much expert discussion so interesting a county has created. Ireland, to which one at first naturally turns for a parallel, presents nothing half so strange. These Pembrokeshire folk are not Papists and Protestants, they are all amicable Churchmen or Dissenters together. Their last blood feuds, unless the Civil War, when the English faction was divided, may count, were in Glyndwr's time, a period long forgotten by such practical, peaceable people. So far as we know, they do not even crack each other's heads at fairs, like the Radnor and Breconsbire Welshmen of fifty or a hundred years ago. They have lived side by side much longer than Celt and Saxon in any part of Ireland, and, furthermore, the Pembrokeshire Saxon (to use a convenient term) has been virtually cut off for that whole period from all direct intercourse with kith and kin, as the map of England proclaims with sufficient emphasis. Yet the two peoples have mixed far less than the two factions of Ulster. It is not our business to put a name to the extraordinary racial antipathy, instinct, or prejudice that has kept people in neighbouring parishes as foreigners to one another for centuries, and caused a remote corner of Wales, about six hundred square miles in area, to resist and resent through all that time the imputation of Welsh nationality,— i.e., in its usually accepted meaning. Nor does it matter in the least to our purpose here that the last twenty or thirty years (and who can wonder ?) have witnessed a considerable modification of the old cleavage. And, furthermore, it may be of passing interest to note what particular influences, in the opinion of one of the first living authorities on Pem- brokeshire, have conduced to this. Hard times in agriculture, which brought farmers of both races together in such land or tithe agitations as were going forward in the " eighties " and afterwards, seem to have been one of them. For Pembroke- shire was mainly a tillage country till the collapse in the price of grain. Another bond, in our informant's opinion, is the increased number of Welsh preachers serving Saxon chapels; and, lastly, the democratic movement in politics which has swept over Wales within recent years. The vernacular of Anglo-Flemish Pembroke, as will be readily understood, is not Welsh-English at all. It is distinct and racy, but with the character and intonation of an English country dialect. It has two varieties at least, for the folk of Tenby or Pembroke will tell you that they can distinguish a fi. ery erfordwest man the moment he opens his month. People, and there are many such, who are apt to regard the extremities of Wales as historically unimportant would receive a shock when they reached Southern Pembroke and came face to face with the magnificent ruins of Roche and Haverfordwest, of Pembroke. Llawhaden and Lamphey, of Carew and Manorbier, all within a half-day's drive. Where else, indeed, within so small a compass can such a sight be seen? It was from here that the Norman-Welsh went out to the first conquest of Ireland in 1171. It was here that the last French army to march about Britain (in Glyndwr's time) disembarked. It was in North Pembrokeshire that the last French army to occupy English soil at all landed, those fifteen hundred disreputable soldiers of Napoleon whom the local Yeomanry, with the aid of the immortal], 03191oeke of the peasant women. so glorious/1r raptured. It was Pembrokeshire, again, that in the. Civil War formed the chief Welsh stronghold of the Parlia mentary cause, while throughout the whole medbeval and Tudor period it was the lords of these mighty, castles in e Little England beyond Wales" who figured among the most potent of British subjects for good or ill.
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