Between Wales and England: Anglophone Welsh Writing of the Eighteenth Century

By Bethan Jenkins

Between Wales and England is an exploration of eighteenth-century anglophone Welsh writing by authors for whom English-language literature was mostly a secondary concern. In its process, the work interrogates these authors’ views on the newly-emerging sense of ‘Britishness’, finding them in many cases to be more nuanced and less resistant than has generally been considered. It looks primarily at the English-language works of Lewis Morris, Evan Evans, and Edward Williams (Iolo Morganwg) in the context of both their Welsh- and English-language influences and time spent travelling between the two countries, considering how these authors responded to and reimagined the new national identity through their poetry and prose.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Mar 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781786830326

Bethan Jenkins

Bethan Jenkins is Senior Library Assistant at the Bodleian History Faculty Library, Oxford University, and Librarian-in-Charge at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, Oxford.

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BETWEEN WALES AND ENGLAND

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WRITING WALES IN ENGLISH

CREW series of Critical and Scholarly Studies

General Editors: Kirsti Bohata and Daniel G. Williams (CREW, Swansea University)

This CREW series is dedicated to Emyr Humphreys, a major figure in the literary culture of modern Wales, a founding patron of the Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales. Grateful thanks are due to the late Richard Dynevor for making this series possible.

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Kirsti Bohata, Postcolonialism Revisited (978-0-7083-1892-8)

Chris Wigginton, Modernism from the Margins (978-0-7083-1927-7)

Linden Peach, Contemporary Irish and Welsh Women’s Fiction (978-0-7083-1998-7)

Sarah Prescott, Eighteenth-Century Writing from Wales: Bards and Britons (978-0-7083-2053-2)

Hywel Dix, After Raymond Williams: Cultural Materialism and the Break-Up of Britain (978-0-7083-2153-9)

Matthew Jarvis, Welsh Environments in Contemporary Welsh Poetry (978-0-7083-2152-2)

Harri Garrod Roberts, Embodying Identity: Representations of the Body in Welsh Literature (978-0-7083-2169-0)

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Daniel Westover, R. S. Thomas: A Stylistic Biography (978-0-7083-2413-4)

Jasmine Donahaye, Whose People? Wales, Israel, Palestine (978-0-7083-2483-7)

Judy Kendall, Edward Thomas: The Origins of His Poetry (978-0-7083-2403-5)

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Daniel G. Williams, Black Skin, Blue Books: African Americans and Wales 1845–1945 (978-0-7083-1987-1)

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Between Wales and England

Anglophone Welsh Writing

of the Eighteenth Century

WRITING WALES IN ENGLISH

Bethan M. Jenkins

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS

2017

© Bethan M. Jenkins, 2017

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library CIP Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN:     978-1-7868-3029-6 (hardback)

ISBN:     978-1-7868-3030-2 (paperback)

eISBN:   978-1-7868-3032-6

The right of Bethan M. Jenkins to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The publisher acknowledges the financial support of the Welsh Books Council.

Cover image The Bard (1774), Thomas Jones © National Museum Wales

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Yn gyflwynedig i mam, ac er cof am fy nhad

CONTENTS

Series Editors’ Preface

Acknowledgements

Preface

1   Welsh writing in English and the idea of Britishness

2   Lewis Morris: the proud, hot Welshman

3   Evan Evans: a multiplicity of discouraging circumstances

4   Edward Williams: the Jack daw in borrow’d plumes

5   Patronage: supported with insolence, paid with flattery

6   Translation: you must give them names in Welsh

Notes

Bibliography

SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE

The aim of this series, since its founding in 2004 by Professor M. Wynn Thomas, is to publish scholarly and critical work by established specialists and younger scholars that refects the richness and variety of the English-language literature of modern Wales. The studies published so far have amply demonstrated that concepts, models and discourses current in the best contemporary studies can illuminate aspects of Welsh culture, and have also foregrounded the potential of the Welsh example to draw attention to themes that are often neglected or marginalised in anglophone cultural studies. The series defines and explores that which distinguishes Wales’s anglophone literature, challenges critics to develop methods and approaches adequate to the task of interpreting Welsh culture, and invites its readers to locate the process of writing Wales in English within comparative and transnational contexts.

Kirsti Bohata and Daniel G. Williams

Founding Editor: M. Wynn Thomas (2004–15)

CREW (Centre for Research into the English

Literature and Language of Wales)

Swansea University

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book has lived with me in various shapes and forms since I was a Masters student. During that course, and subsequently my doctoral studies, I was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the foundations of this work grew out of the research I was able to undertake with its support. I am supremely grateful to my first supervisor, Nicolas Jacobs, who introduced me to the works of J. R. Jones and the concepts of Prydeindod; and following his retirement, to my second supervisor, Freya Johnston, for her guidance in bringing my thesis to completion. Thanks must also go to my colleagues at the Bodleian History Faculty Library and the Radcliffe Camera of the Bodleian Library for employment, and encouragement with my on going studies – there are, after so many years, too many of you to mention, but know that you all have my thanks. Many segments of this book first saw the light of day at the conferences held by the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Association for Welsh Writing in English, and the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies. I am grateful in particular to the latter institution for the opportunity to work on the projects ‘Iolo Morganwg and the Romantic Tradition in Wales’ and ‘Wales and the French Revolution’, both enjoyable and stimulating experiences. The list of those who have with kindness and generosity given encouragement in various ways to my studies is long, and I would like to thank Jane Aaron, Dinah Birch, Cathryn Charnell-White, Mary-Ann Constantine, Geraint H. Jenkins, Dafydd Johnston, David Ceri Jones, Ffion Mair Jones, Marion Löffer, Jan Martin, Murray Pittock, Sarah Prescott, Rita Singer, Heather Williams and Margaret Williams who have each helped me along my way. Particular thanks must go to Gesine Bruss, Mary Chadwick, Lyn Jones and Milo Thurston, all of whom have borne more than their fair share of my fretting over this volume; like wise Llion Wigley of the University of Wales Press, who has shown great patience with me over the last few years, and Leah Jenkins for imposing order on my chaos. I am grateful to the general editors for allowing me a place in this series, and I am especially grateful to M. Wynn Thomas for his encouragement and his generous, meticulous and careful editorship; Welsh studies has no finer champion. Any errors remaining after his keen scrutiny are mine alone. Final thanks go to my parents, Tudor and Susan, who made many sacrifices to give me two languages and a love of my country; it is to them that this book is dedicated.

My little publication appears after a pretty long delay. Some obstacles occurred from the nature of my situation in life... I was also conscious of the numerous defects and crudities of my pieces, which made me frequently linger over them before I would put them to the press, whilst a dejection thus occasioned disqualified me for making some amendments that I saw so very requisite...

Iolo Morganwg, Poems, Lyric and Pastoral, pp. xi–xii.

PREFACE

The Scottish independence referendum of 2014 and the European Union referendum of 2016 have once more put questions of national, regional and personal identity at the forefront of people’s minds, inescapable on the front pages of the newspapers and flooding social media. Yet again, Britain was, is, and ever shall be in crisis, each element within the union jockeying for position as opportunities to renegotiate a constitution present themselves. For a union that so smoothly and swiftly adopted the rhetoric of ancient immutability, continuity and perpetuity, however, the United Kingdom seems rarely to have been out of crisis, lurching precariously from one calamity to the next like Dr Frankenstein’s stitched-together monster. So perhaps it is timely to look back to its beginnings in the eighteenth century, and to explore the relations between Wales and England, Welsh and English so as to better understand how these nations and identities intersect with ‘Britishness’, at the beginning of this new/ old, stable/unstable alliance – ‘hi hen, eleni y’i ganed’ [she is old, born this year].

This will not be a work concerned primarily, or indeed at all, with Scotland, though comparative work on Wales and her northern cousin is indeed sorely needed.¹ It may even with propriety be asked, what use is another work on Wales and her clichéd English Other in an already fairly crowded field? The contradictory nature of the Welsh relationship with England is one part of the answer; another, the state’s increased co-opting during the eighteenth century of the older word for Welsh – British – as its way of describing this new would-be-national identity.

As the first colony of the British Empire and devoid of any governmental centre, Wales naturally looked towards England as the seat of power, whilst the difficulty of physical as well as linguistic communication between the two countries meant that the English tended to see Wales, if they considered her at all, as somewhat akin to a foreign country. Welsh attraction to England was not unproblematic. Thomas Jones, in the preface to his 1688 Welsh–English dictionary, was critical of those of his countrymen who succumbed to the gravitational pull of the larger country, even whilst providing them with the tools to assist in that endeavour:

...megis ag y mae’r Season [sic] yn gwyllt serchu ar y Castiau Cyfnewidiol ar ddillad y ffraingeig-wŷr, felly i mae’r Cymrŷ yn ynfydu am lediaith y Saesonaeg, yn gymmaint hyd oni ddaeth Iaith y Cymrŷ yr awron mor llygredig ag ymadrodd eu Cymmydogion.

...as the Englishman is enamoured with the tricks and quillets of the Frenchman’s garments, so are the Britains enchanted with the Englishman’s dialect, insomuch that the Britains own Language is now become as barbarous as their neighbours.²

Lacking a capital, a separate state or a legal system meant that the location of state and bureaucratic functions, if nothing else, would draw Wales closer to England. The concomitant centring of power in England would mean that the fashions, manners and language of London would take on a particularly attractive lustre by association, making the draw for the gentry and the professional classes especially powerful.

This absorption with England, so obvious as to be cliché from a Welsh perspective, partly accounts for Wales’s relative invisibility in many even of the most recent works on eighteenth-century Britain and Britishness, including some written from an archipelagic or four-nations perspective.³ With a few notable exceptions, the binaries of Scotland/England and Ireland/England are the more usual foci for discussion of the negotiations of national identity during a century bookended by unions in 1707 and 1801 – unions that, it must be recalled, were not with England alone, but with England and Wales.⁴ There remains the lingering view in contemporary scholarship that Wales’s early absorption into the union meant that her situation by the eighteenth century was one of quiet complaisance. This situation is exacerbated by the perception of the Welsh language as being an insurmountable barrier to accessing Welsh views on Britain, and so the assumption is often made that there are no views, dissenting or otherwise, to be found.⁵ Coupled with Wales’s lack of political autonomy, this often means that a Welsh gap in the narrative is not counted as much of a loss, if it is even noticed, where similar omissions regarding Scotland or Ireland would be criticised as serious flaws.

In reality, eighteenth-century Welsh writers display a complex attitude towards Britain and Britishness, bound up with their sense of themselves as the aboriginal inhabitants of the island, which can be seen in Thomas Jones’s own translation of Cymry as Britains above – the Englishmen are kept separate, in contrast with the more usual Anglocentric elision of England/Britain. Rather than accepting the imposition of a centralised Britishness, these Welsh authors question provocatively, exploring its implications and seeking to refashion it in their own ways. In the study that follows, I seek to explore constructions of and reactions to Welshness, Englishness, and Britishness through the literature produced by several hands over the course of the century, and I do so mostly by examining the English-language work of writers who are more commonly known for their Welsh-language productions. In scrutinising the interstices between Welsh and English and the interplay of languages used by these bilingual authors we may come closer to understanding their multifaceted, complementary and conflicting identities – their Welshness and their avowed Britishness.

Is Britishness to be located in or between this bicultural hybridity, between languages and cultures, between Wales and England? In chapter 1, I will begin by discussing the place of Welsh writing in English before the twentieth century, and then go on to look at some theories of Britishness as an identity that suggest ways in which we can approach the English writing of Welsh-speaking authors in the eighteenth century. This was the period when the state consolidated its power, and during which it is generally agreed that the concept of Great Britain crystallised. From a Welsh point of view, this century saw an increase in literacy rates, significant contributions to the historiography and literature of the country, and the gradual spread of English. The further investigations will all be based on the relations between, and manifestations of Britishness in three Anglo-Welsh authors of the eighteenth century, and the ‘thorny question’ posed by J. R. Jones (1911–1970), an influential philosophical thinker of the twentieth century, of what becomes of one’s identity when writing in a language not one’s own:

Eithr y mae un broblem. Bydd yn eglur i’r craff y rhoddais le i godi un cwestiwn dreiniog iawn ynghylch y Gymru gyfoes, sef, os yw iaith Pobl, yn ogystal a’u tir, yn elfen mor anhebgor yn ffurfiad eu gwahanrwydd, beth am y Cymro a gollodd ei Gymraeg? A beidiodd ef â bod yn Gymro? Achoswyd mynydd o boendod a thramgwydd yng Nghymru o ddiffyg offer dirnadol i drafod y cwestiwn hwn ar wastad digon dwfn.⁶

[However, there is one problem. It will be clear to the astute that I left room to raise one very thorny question about modern Wales, to wit, if a People’s language, as well as their territory, is such an indispensable element in the formation of their otherness, what about the Welshman who lost his Welsh? Did he cease to be a Welshman? A mountain of torment and offence has been caused in Wales because of the lack of conceptual tools to discuss this question on a deep enough level.]

Jones’s analysis of Britishness, which he terms Prydeindod, provides an alternative reading to the normative model of an ultimately consensual, Anglocentric identity promoted by Linda Colley and those who followed her.

The three subsequent chapters will focus, in the light of the above concerns, on how we can then read the expressions, questions and complications of Britishness and Welshness in the works of three eighteenth-century Welsh authors for whom travel between England and Wales was a frequent occurrence. This brought them into closer contact with the world of English literature than might otherwise have been the case, and provided conditions for the interplay of the two cultures within their work, especially their English-language productions. Chapter 2 will focus on the oldest of the famed Morris brothers of Anglesey, Lewis Morris (Llewelyn Ddu o Fôn), and in particular on his satirical prose work, Dialogue Between a Highland Welshman newly come to London and a Citizen, upon the situation of affairs in Britain, and on his work in mapping the Welsh coastline. Morris is the subject in this study most comfortable with the idea of Great Britain, straddling English and Welsh cultures and languages with confident ease. As he can look on the union between the two countries as of equals, he can negotiate fruitfully the gaps and the similarities between them, and take an unconventional view of contemporary British political events and concerns. His confidence is refected in his literary output, and I will argue that his is the most robustly healthy response to the new dynamic of union.

The subject of chapter 3 is Lewis’s bardic student, Evan Evans (Ieuan Fardd). Evans had the greatest influence of any Welshman of his day on English literature and the study of antiquities. Looking both at his original poetry and his seminal collection and translations of old Welsh poetry, I will argue that, although he was loyal to the union and to the Anglican established church, he had considerable difficulty in reconciling his Welsh and his British identities. This is reflected in the intertextuality and imitation in his English-language poetry, and his refusal to conform in his translations to English expectations and tastes.

Edward Williams (Iolo Morganwg) features in chapter 4. Writing at the end of the century, he benefited from the renewed English post-Evans interest in Welshness, Celticism, primitivism and druidism. The two languages of Williams’s writing constitute the most complete example of bilingualism of these three authors. He was an adept forger of Welsh textual history, and his talent for imitation had differing results in each language, with a corresponding impact on his ability to bridge the two cultures to which he had access. In trying to make a name for himself in the world of English letters, he adopted multiple personae, with which, I argue, he attempted to reconcile conflicting identities and re-forge Britishness with a more significant Welsh element, moving towards a restoration of Britishness as a bardo-druidic inflected Britonism.

The final two chapters will focus on patronage and translation in connection with ideas of Britain. Patronage was particularly affected by the relative status of Welsh and English literature and the changing economy of Britain in this period, and provides some instructive examples of the practical difficulties of living and working as an author caught between two languages and two cultures. Translation, particularly at the interface between Welsh and English, exemplifies further the disjunct between two disparate cultures attempting to co-exist as one, as well as highlighting some points of intersection between them. I end with a brief assessment of the place of Welsh writing in English in an eighteenth-century context, and of the place of the authors discussed in the broader ‘Anglo-Welsh’ literary tradition. In looking specifically at the English-language works of authors primarily known for their Welsh-language writing, I hope to engage with a more neglected facet of eighteenth-century identity.

Notes

¹  A three-year Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded joint project between the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies and the University of Glasgow, Curious Travellers, studying tours to Wales and Scotland by Thomas Pennant and others, began in 2014, and it is to be hoped that it is the beginning of many such collaborative and comparative endeavours.

²  Thomas Jones, Y Gymraeg yn ei Disgleirdeb (London, 1688), sig. a2v. The translation is Jones’s own, and the whole of the introduction is written with facing English and Welsh versions of the text.

³  The invisibility of Wales in contemporary eighteenth-century and Romantic criticism is explored in depth in Mary-Ann Constantine, ‘Beauty Spot, Blind Spot: Romantic Wales’, Literature Compass (Blackwell Synergy), 5, 3 (2008), 577–90, and in the introduction to Mary-Ann Constantine and Dafydd Johnston (eds), Footsteps of Liberty & Revolt: Essays on Wales and the French Revolution (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), pp. 1–10.

⁴  Students of Welsh history will be well used to the sinking feeling upon turning to ‘W’ in the index of a book on ‘British’ history and finding little there. If one reduces the analysis merely to the numbers of references in indices, Wales scores poorly in comparison with Scotland. Even in Linda Colley’s Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (London: Pimlico, 2003), Wales has thirty-four references, compared with Scotland’s 112 (not counting references to Jacobitism!). Frank O’Gorman’s The Long Eighteenth Century (London: Arnold, 1997) has twenty- six references to Wales, Scotland 104; Julian Hoppit’s A Land of Liberty?: England, 1689–1727 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), nominally about England specifically, counts fifty-four Scottish references, and three to Wales, where these Welsh references are merely mentions of the country in roll-calls of England’s dominions. Paul Langford’s The Eighteenth Century, 1688–1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) has seventy references to Scotland compared with Wales’s twelve; the same author’s A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727–1783 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) has forty references to Scotland, as opposed to Wales’s fourteen (one of which is ‘Welsh superstition’). These modern works are an improvement on previous histories, such as Dorothy Marshall’s Eighteenth- Century England (London: Longman, 1962), which does not mention Wales once, and even Scotland registers a mere six references, but all inevitably share an Anglocentric viewpoint that sees Scotland as an important counterpoint, but Wales as a subsumed part of a greater England.

⁵  To take one example only, Wales barely earns a footnote in books on ‘British’ responses to the French Revolution, such as in Clive Emsley’s Britain and the French Revolution (Harlow: Longman, 2000) or Mark Philp’s The French Revolution and British Popular Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), giving the impression that, at best, Wales was indifferent to the events in France, or that her responses were naturally the same as England’s. In contrast, the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies series on Wales and the French Revolution currently numbers nine volumes, with more still to come.

⁶  J. R. Jones, Prydeindod (Llandybïe: Llyfrau’r Dryw, 1966), p. 15.

1

WELSH WRITING IN ENGLISH AND THE IDEA OF BRITISHNESS

‘What have I, who am a Welshman, to do with English Poetry?’ So wrote Evan Evans (Ieuan Fardd or Ieuan Brydydd Hir; 1731–1788) in 1772, in the preface to his English-language poem The Love of our Country. So far is that question from being answered even today that the English-language productions of primarily Welsh-language authors in the eighteenth century continue to be neglected or ignored. Even following Raymond Garlick and Roland Mathias’s efforts in The Anglo-Welsh Review and the anthology Anglo-Welsh Poetry: 1480–1980 in tracing Welsh writing in English back as far as c.1480, or more recently Sarah Prescott’s 2008 analysis of eighteenth-century examples, Elizabeth Edwards’s 2013 work on Anglophone Welsh responses to the French Revolution, and Jane Aaron’s work on nineteenth-century Women’s writing, there is still a pervasive notion that the movement – if it can be so termed – began in the twentieth century with Caradoc Evans’s My People (1915), or the late nineteenth century at a stretch.¹ English works of earlier authors such as those I will go on to discuss have often been treated as aberrations if they are noticed at all, as shameful examples of the ‘contributionism’ of a willingly assimilated people, perhaps, or coded resistance to the dominant Anglophone hegemony.

Lewis Morris (Llewelyn Ddu o Fôn; 1701–1765), Evan Evans and Edward Williams (Iolo Morganwg; 1747–1826), the three main focal points of this study, produced the majority of their literary works in Welsh, and it is upon these works that their modern reputation rests. Lewis Morris was a prolific letter-writer, noted polymath and antiquary, driving force behind the founding of the still-extant Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, and poetic tutor. Evan Evans’s poetic reputation hangs on a single work, Englynion Llys Ifor Hael [The Englynion of the Court of Ivor the Generous], and his fame as a scholar upon his collection and publication of the poets of the Age of Princes in Some Specimens of the Poetry of the Antient Welsh Bards (1764). Edward Williams’s reputation, for good and ill, rests mainly upon poetic forgeries successfully presented to the world as the rediscovered work of great medieval Welsh poets, and his elaborate invented tradition of Gorsedd Beirdd Ynys Prydain, the Bardic Assembly of the Island of Britain, whose grand pageant still presides over the major prizes at the National Eisteddfod today. The deprecation of these poets’ English-language output has a political dynamic, as well as a (debatable) aesthetic one. As a consequence of the dominant position of English within the post-1536 British polity, it became important to emphasise the pre-eminent literary worth of Welsh-language poetry within Wales and to the rest of the world, a process begun with Evans’s Specimens, and which became especially critical in the twentieth century with the more dramatic decline in numbers of Welsh speakers and a further marginalisation of Welsh culture. This neglect of prominent Welsh-language authors’ English works can be traced to the supreme over-determination of language as the last remaining marker of difference between a politically united Wales and England, and the heavy and conflicting moral burden placed upon authorial language choice.

This marker of difference was potentially a hindrance to the creation of a unified British identity. The now-infamous ‘language clause’ of the 1536 Act of Union, which finally incorporated Wales legally as ‘part of an expanded England or Greater Britain’,² laid out the reasons for the desirability of unity in language:

[T]he people of the same dominion [Wales] have and do daily use a speche nothing like ne consonaunt to the naturall mother tonge used within this Realme... his highnes therefore of a singuler love and favour that he beareth towardes his subiectes of his said dominion of Wales minding and entending to reduce them to the perfecte order notice and knowlege of the lawes of this his Realme and utterly to extirpe alle and singuler the sinister usages and customes differinge frome the same and to bring his said subiectes of this his Realme and of his said dominion of Wales to an amiable concorde...³

Branding the language unnatural whilst offering the gentry an opportunity to participate fully in the English-language machinery of the state accelerated the pace of linguistic change, creating the conditions for a potential psychological rift for those trying to live between two countries which were now ostensibly one. Though Welsh was not banned, the provision that no-one could hold state office ‘unless he or they use and exercise the English speech or language’ had the result of raising the status of English at the expense of Welsh. The attempt at ‘extirping’ the language that was the one distinction left between the two countries was a deliberate act of colonial imposition, and resulted in English gradually becoming the means of polite, educated and ecclesiastical communication, proficiency in that language being required for social acceptability in court and gentry society.

One need only look at the stock Welsh caricatures in English drama to see the derision heaped upon Welsh English.⁴ Enshrining the relative status of each language in law brought the process of denigrating Welsh to the fore, and began a tendency among some of its speakers to debase their own language. Gruffydd Robert’s 1567 personification of the Welsh language surveyed the traffic between Wales and England, condemning what would now be termed ‘code-switching’ as an outright betrayal of an identity now entirely embodied in the language.

E fydd weithiau’n dostur fynghalon wrth weled llawer a anwyd ag a fagwyd im doedyd, yn ddiystr genthynt amdanaf, tan geissio ymwrthod a mi, ag ymgystlwng ag astroniaith cyn adnabod ddim honi. Canys chwi a gewch rai yn gyttrym ag y gweland afon Hafren, ne glochdai ymwithig, a chlowed sais yn doedyd unwaith good morow, a ddechreuant ollwng i cymraeg tros gof, ai doedyd yn fawr i llediaith: i cymraeg a fydd saesnigaidd, ai saesneg (dyw a wyr) yn rhy gymreigaidd. A hyn sy’n dyfod naill ai o wir pholder, yntau o goeg falchder a gorwagrwydd. Canys ni welir fyth yn ddyn cyweithas, rhinweddol mo’r neb a wado nai dad, nai fam, nai wlad, nai iaith...⁵

[Sometimes my heart feels pity when I see many, who were born and bred to speak me, speaking unmindfully about me, even trying to reject me and dallying with a foreign tongue before knowing her at all properly. For you find some as soon as they spy the River Severn or the spires of Shrewsbury town, and hear an Englishman saying once ‘Good Morrow’ beginning to forget their Welsh and pronounce it with an affected accent: their Welsh becomes anglicised, and their English (God knows) is too Welshified. And this arises either out of sheer coquetry, or from a false pride and vanity, for one would never see a virtuous balanced man denying his own father and mother and country and language... ]

To switch between languages is evidently seen as switching between