Yeah, it was all a mighty wave of Welshness without a single English supporter in sight. Really?
Henry BII used the future Welsh flag as his battle standard. He considered himself Welsh and he was fighting against mostly-English forces.
He was fighting against the quasi-legitimate king of England, of course he's going to be facing mostly English forces.
And I'm not sure him considering himself Welsh means given that his claim to England (in any sense not based on myth) is as English as his opponent.
Henry VII was using Breton and Welsh forces against English forces. He was fighting under the future Welsh flag, He was Welsh. He had a claim to the English throne. What is the problem with Wales conquering England?
All the kinds of stuff that happened post-Union, only earlier.
but Wales, as a state, was pretty minor. And Henry Tudor is not an exception.
Really more the kind of stuff that didn't happen by virtue of the Treaty, which preserved the whole apparatus of Scottish law, education, and religion headquarters at Edinburgh.
DrTron said:I agree with that, but the Welsh did many things that was unlikely for some people in a small land.
Ireland's harder, mind. Preventing the "Old English" (who were Anglo-Norman, though there were a few Irish Saxons) from becoming more Irish than the Irish probably requires no Black Death.
Where'd the Irish Saxons come from? There are some Irish historical documents pre-1066 talking about how the kings should join together to fight Saxons, but I wasn't aware if they'd ever managed to get any territory in Ireland.
Huh.
You're on my list of people to brain-pick when my just-started timeline hits England and Scotland now, if you don't mind. My ignorance is showing too clearly to rely on the scraps I do have any idea on.
No trouble.I like to think I'm pretty grounded in my native country's history, though I certainly wouldn't describe you as ignorant.
To expand on what I said, the Union kept intact the separate Scottish system of law and courts (which survives to this day: we have 15-person criminal juries and 3 verdicts, although even a lot of Scots don't actually know this), the education system (ferociously Presbyterian, but rather more effective than its English counterpart; it, too, survives today), and most importantly at that time, the I-can't-believe-it's-not-established kirk.
Interesting, but not necessarily good, times.We weren't to be autonomous as everything was now to be legislated on by Westminster - although the Scottish MPs were in the 18th century something of a parliament under the same roof, and Scotland was in the pre-railway era run by some powerful landowner (even a landowner and clan chief earlier on) who controlled patronage and used it to deliver lots of corrupt seats to the governments - but the expectation from our side was that nothing was going to be drastically changed.
That of course didn't last long: the Tories got in and raised hackles by trying to induce us to tolerate prelatery and pay a tax on malt, among other things, which led to a brief scare about both violent and parliamentary assaults on Union; then the Whigs got back in and imposed English-level taxation, which led to the Scotland of endemic smuggling and riots in which so much adventury literature has been set.
Scotland the theocratic?
Definitely yes, a reputation that we retained into the 20th century, although we did calm down a bit. But in the 17th century, it was not merely Scotland the theocratic but Scotland the hilly clan-ridden land of beardy misogynists with fiery religious convictions engaged in lengthy internicine insurgencies. Hum.![]()