Introduction

Abstract

For more than a thousand years, Wales has been contested territory, and that contestation has been furthered and promoted as much by writers and scholars as by sovereigns and warlords. Throughout the medieval period, Wales suffered as the physical battleground for armies of opposing interests; but the textual battles to establish claims of justification and entitlement were no less important and scarcely less fierce. It is almost certainly the case that the importance in the subjugation of Wales of the role played by the colonizing history constructed by Bede exceeds even that of Edward I. The purpose of this volume is to draw back to prominence the role of English textual culture in inspiring and rationalizing these early campaigns in English Imperialism, and to set it alongside the complex and conflicted responses to that onslaught formulated in the Welsh literature of medieval Wales.