Dr John Davies. who died recently aged 76, .A History of Wales described as one of the most influential Welshmen of our era with a plea to all active in the labour movement to read his book
The work tracks the development of Wales from its earliest days to modern times in page after page of interesting detail and great prose. A History of Wales stands besides EP Thompson’s The making of the English Working Class and AL Morton’s A Peoples History of England.
“The greatest book of Welsh history ever written” Lord Dafyd Ellis Thomas of Plaid Cymru.
The history of Wales is the history of Britain and Ireland tracing developments that brought rich and poor from the Viking across the sea and Britain’s across the border and the hordes that laboured through the industrial revolution in copper, steel and coal changing the nation’s i face more than once.
It gives due regard to Wales’ Kings and Princes but running through are the lives of ordinary people in every facet of their work, play and at prayer, religion on its own a fascinating part of Welsh history.
In 1994 RJW Evans in the New York Review of books wrote. making accessible and intelligible the evolution of Wales, and to chart its crucial relationship to Englishness,”
The concluding page of the book illustrates where Wales has been but looks to the future He tells of the scholar Thomas Jones who in 1688 expressed his concern that “the Welsh will be deleted from history” and others that “the Welsh language would be extinct by 1950.”
To which Davies adds “It would almost seem as if the history of the (Welsh) nation is an endless journey back and forth from the between the mortuary and the delivery room. Thus those who proclaim the funeral are singularly unwise, for tenacity is the hallmark of this ancient nation.”
John Davies ends by writing that; “This book was written in the faith and confidence that the in its fullness has yet to be.”
Those who wish to believe this will have their confidence boosted if armed with this remarkable book.