Dueling Druids
From the Yale University collection (https://interactive.britishart.yale.edu/art-in-focus-wales/155/musical-and-poetical-relicks-of-the-welsh-bards)
Druids are back in fashion, not just in Japanese Role Playing Games on your Nintendo Switch, but even in real life for the large neo-pagan population which has embraced 21st-century druidry for religious purposes. (According to the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), today there are approximately 30,000 Druids in the United States alone!)
Even more excitingly, for some of us, Druids are also all the rage in academic history books, and there has been some great research done in recent decades, whose conclusions are grounded in linguistics, literary history, and archeology as well as sometimes being supported by the oral tradition. Barry Cunliffe’s awesome and definitive book, Druids: a Very Short Introduction (2010, highly recommended!) is a great stand-alone introduction to the topic, and beautifully supplements Ronald Hutton’s skeptical, mystical, and almost sublime book, Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain (2009, also a must-read!).
One thing one might think, when first thinking of Druids, is that the world can confidently be divided into exactly two camps: “Druids” and “Non-Druids,” as evidenced by the existence of multiple web pages entitled “who were the Druids.”
Druids themselves are quick to point out that it’s not that simple. Even if they are all wearing flowing white costumes and carrying sickles for harvesting the mistletoe at the full moon (prototypical Druid activities most can agree on), Druid society is subject to vicious in-fighting over nuance, just like societies made up of fly fishermen, plumbers, or the Greek factions in the Iliad led by Achilles and Agamemnon who spend most of that classic poem fighting with each other instead of besieging Troy.
For Druids, as for any grouping of people, the smaller the difference, the more violent the in-fighting. And this is how we come to be talking about a duel between two prominent Welsh bards in 1792.
Iolo Morganwg. (https://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/history/sites/themes/figures/iolo_morganwg.shtml)
The name-brand Druid of the 1790s, was the self-bardic-titled Iolo Morganwg (1747-1826), (aka Edward Williams). Iolo is a fantastically interesting person — he more or less single-handedly founded Druidry as we know it today in the 21st century, through a combination of hard work, a flair for marketing, and what turned out a century later to have been a massive amount of forgery. I have friends who have visited Wales for the annual Eisteddfod who have no idea that this festival may have ancient roots, but that it was revived in 1789, and that the Gorsedd ceremony of the assembled bards has only been celebrated in an organized manner since 1792, which is when Iolo relaunched the concept in a series of ceremonies he led on Primrose Hill, in London.
Iolo made himself famous between 1780 and 1820 with his “discovery” and published “translations” of huge volumes of ancient Welsh texts, laying out in excruciating detail the philosophies and practices of Druids and their successors, the bards. Iolo embraced harp playing, the oral transmission of history supplemented by texts which had moldered for years in Welsh castles, stone circles, swords, ceremonies, and flowing white gowns — all the trappings, in short, of a modern Eisteddfod, down to the color-coded gowns worn by the three orders (green for Bards, blue for Ovates, white for Druids).
What Iolo’s rediscovered Druidry also embraced was a major dismantling of the monarchy, in favor of a society living in harmony through a union with nature. Iolo was a fervent revolutionary—a literal supporter of the French revolution at a time that Britain was at war with France. If you listened to Iolo, and a lot of people did, the songs of the ancient Welsh bards who inherited the Druid mantle of old were songs of rage against the government machine.
One person who strenuously begged to differ about bardic heritage was, of course, another Welsh publicizer of Welsh harp music, Edward Jones, aka Bardd y Brenin, which means “bard to the King”. Jones came to London from Wales in the mid 1770s, and established himself with musicians such as C. P. E. Bach and Charles Burney as the kind of harp player you would find playing in classical music concerts given weekly in Hannover Square. Jones was harp-master to the Prince of Wales starting sometime in the 1790s, and later gave himself the “to the King” soubriquet when George himself became king in 1820.
As Meireion Hughs describes it, Jones’s most important publication, the Musical and Poetical Relicks of the Welsh Bards (1774 and 1802) was:
… a seminal text of ‘national music’ (Jones’s preferred term) [which] was intended to celebrate royalty as a governing principle, by giving ‘ dignity to the throne’ and ‘stability to the renown’ of the heir-apparent, the Prince of Wales, to whom it was dedicated.
Hughs argues persuasively that Jones thought Wales was the heart of Britain, and that the main point of bards, the natural descendants of the Druids, was to bear witness to the deep way in which the person of the hereditary monarch personified the unified state, with Wales at its heart.
Frontispiece of the second volume to his Relicks, (1802) this is rumored to be the only known portrait of Edward Jones. (https://www.lubranomusic.com/pages/books/26089/edward-jones/musical-and-poetical-relicks-of-the-welsh-bards-preserved-by-tradition-and-authentic-manuscripts)
So here we have the classic confrontation of the irresistable force meeting the immovable object: two rival sub-factions within a minority group, holding deeply held disagreements.
What was going to happen? We could start by considering the central piece of symbolism of the Gorsedd, as established at Primrose Hill at the summer solstice in 1792: in a reversal of Arthur’s move, the modern druids assembled in a circle to work together to sheathe a sword placed on a central stone. Surely, this group would be defined by “who were the Druids”-style unity?
It is indeed the case that everyone started more or less as friends at that first Gorsedd meeting on Primrose Hill on 21 June, 1792. Iolo, Edward, and the third major figure in the Welsh druid scene of the day, David Samwell (who is now more famous for sailing with Captain Cook), all gathered in a circle and sang songs in Welsh and English, and then Iolo wrote an account of the meeting for the Gentleman’s Magazine beginning:
Saturday, Sept. 21 (1792). This being the day on which the autumnal equinox occurred, some Welsh Bards, resident in London, assembled in congress on Primrose Hill, according to ancient usage, ... The wonted ceremonies were observed. A circle of stones formed, in the middle of which was the Maen Gorsedd, or altar, on which a naked sword being placed, all the Bards assisted to sheathe it. This ceremony was attended with a proclamation, the substance of which was, that the Bards of the Island of Britain (for such is their antient title) were the heralds and ministers of peace ... ((Iolo Morganwg’s letter to The Gentleman’s Magazine, 1792, vol. LXII, pp. 956–7)
By winter solstice of the same year, however, relationships had begun to fray. A different published account of the June meeting had emphasized that the winter meeting would forment revolution:
Lest anyone miss the radical credentials of the group, one published acount ended with the announcement that at the next meeting…an ode would be read on an ancient British chief called Ritta Gawr. He, readers had been informed, had made himself notable for making himself a robe out of the beards of tyrants. Iolo added an extract from a poem of his own, calling for the return of liberty to Britain. (Ronald Hutton, Blood and Mistletoe).
When the group convened, Jones, far from sounding this promised clarion note, led the company in words set to the tune of the national anthem, concluding (sing it with me!):
Blessed is our happy land
Let us, a faithful band,
Together cling;
Bold in the glorious cause,
George and Britannia’s laws,
Shouting with loud applause,
God save the king.
Quite pointedly not on message, you have to agree. And as 1793 began, and the French revolutionaries guillotined Louis XVI, the group splintered further, with Jones continuing to support the government line, and Iolo continuing to rant against it.
Things got worse. In 1794, Jones reported Iolo to the William Pitt government for sedition at a time Habeas Corpus had been suspended, and Iolo was brought in for questioning with Henry Dundas, War Secretary, who was rude to him, and Pitt, who was not. Iolo had somehow managed to avoid leaving incriminating papers in his room at the time they were raided, and got off without any charges being laid. Iolo could have died, and he sent a heated letter to a friend saying he thought Jones deserved to be hanged too, if possible.
But did they duel? Well, according to Hutton, yes they did, although, disappointingly for this blog post, not as the culmination of the feud. Hutton reports that in November, 1792, “Iolo and other bards issued a challenge to Jones to meet them on the day of the next new moon, in the fields behind the British Museum. There he was to prove his continued fitness to be one of them.”
When I first read this, I pictured a bunch of very geeky men, dressed in bunched up pastel colored bed sheets, all having a big fist fight. But in reading this again, I’m really not sure. Behind the British Museum? On the day of the next new moon? When we keep in mind that winter solstice is a month after this November meeting, and that everyone gathered on Primrose Hill in perfect good health to recite contrary poems to each other, one begins to think that perhaps even in issuing and answering a challenge, these nature-loving Druids got together to settle their differences in a sturdy sing-off, and then went off to drink a pint of mead.
At any rate, I was surprised to find rival political factions within the Druids in Britain in the 1790s, and I thought you might be entertained by this as well.
Iolo Morganwg’s sword, now in the collection of the British Museum.
If you’re interested in Iolo (and who wouldn’t be?) you must read a wonderful anthology about him edited by Geraint Jenkins, Rattleskull Genius: the Many Faces of Iolo Morganwg, (2005).
