The Place of the Welsh in the History of Britain

The Place Of The Welsh In The History Of Britain - is a book, which was published in 1889 and written by Boyd Dawkins, a British geologist and archaeologist. The questions "Who are the Welsh and what is their place in the history of Britain?" are of great interest in themselves, and require more than a cursory remark at a time when they are trying to create antagonism between the races inhabiting the British Isles, and when it is insisted that there is some essential difference between them which makes it necessary that they lived farther apart than they had lived for centuries. It is assumed that there is something in the nature of these peoples, called Celtic, that prevents them from living under the same system of laws as those used by the peoples called English; and this assumption is based on the idea that there is very little in common between the Celts on the one hand and the English on the other. In fact, they are both mixed races, separated from each other mainly by language, and consisting of the same ethnological elements, with some predominating in one place, others in another. The main difference between them is only in the different proportions in which these elements are mixed in different places. The author proposes to consider these questions, as they concern the Welsh, from the point of view of the most recent research on their history and the contribution that the sciences of ethnology and archeology have made to our knowledge of people. We shall see that the Welsh have played a good part in the history of these islands, and that some of them are descended from those who in ancient times brought the first beginnings of civilization, not only to these islands, but to the whole of Europe, from the Rhine to the Straits of Gibraltar and from the Alps to the shores of the Atlantic.