Still Toye hits a fine authentic note with her description of the ghastly Bunty Hebden’s

Still, Toye hits a fine authentic note with her description of the ghastly Bunty Hebden’s lounge, with its matching salmon-pink soft furnishings and its gas log-effect fire.When you read this kind of thing, you catch yourself wondering if she made it up or did Shula herself describe the room, in a rare bitchy moment that you might have missed on air. Such a heroine deserves special attention and now she has acquired her own book It is extraordinary You can’t call it a novel, though it is undoubtedly fiction Nor is it strictly biography – for the same reason. If you have ever listened to Radio 4’s best-loved and longest-running soap, you must be there by now Yes, they have all been in love with Shula. Shula is the golden girl of The Archers, victim of a thousand disasters, whose lambent beauty and indomitable courage have enslaved these men, and millions of enraptured listeners, through a good 20 years of devotion. There was more hwyl in the very type-face of the Thirties, and if scholars and researchers from now on will inevitably turn to Davies, old-fashioned patriots like me will still be rereading Lloyd in our baths.. What do Pedro from Spain, Nick Wearing and Charles Hodgeson have in common? No idea? How about Robin Catchpole, Martin Lambert and Bill Morrison? Getting warmer? Try Neil Carter, Nigel Pargetter, Simon Pemberton and Mark Hebdon. What has been gained in knowledge, reason and technique has somehow been lost in magic.

But as a Welshman himself – and from Glyn Dwr’s own part of the country, too – Professor Rees will forgive me, I know, if I say that his superb book can never quite replace its predecessor of 1931 It is like a paradigm of Wales itself. It is a wonderfully learned and enlightened survey of one corner of Europe at a particularly significant moment of its history. And there is a splendid epilogue in which Professor Davies pulls it all altogether, the legacy of the fighting, the effects of the rising upon the subsequent history of Wales, Glyn Dwr’s elevation into mythical status and his recreation as a nationalist champion.It is not revisionary or debunking history, but it is a world away from Lloyd’s little book of long ago. We learn about his lofty aims – national self-rule, of course, national universities, ecclesiastical autonomy. We hear about all the skimble-scamble stuff that Shakespeare’s Hotspur mocked, immemorial prophecies, portentous folk-lore, dragons and moldwarps too.

Relations between the two peoples had been shattered, severe racial laws had been introduced in reprisal by the English, and it might well be said, though Professor Davies doesn’t, that things in Wales were never to be the same again.Davies tells us clearly how all this came about – the combination of conspiratorial politics, dynastic pretensions, vatic mysticism, guerrilla skill, nationalist vision and undoubted personal charisma which enabled Glyn Dwr to establish such an ascendancy over his volatile compatriots, and to polarize their emotions. Yet by the time his rebellion petered out it was generally recognized as being a war between the Welsh and the English. Glyn Dwr had succeeded in coalescing the disoriented conglomeration of traditional loyalties that was Welsh Wales into something like a true sovereignty. The first is made by an official of the King’s administration, passing from one outpost of the English Establishment to another, mostly on the coast; the second is made by a professional Welsh poet moving among the semi-private, half-parallel society of the indigenous Welsh, mostly in the back-country. So different are their two excursions, passing among such alien societies, that they might almost be happening in separate countries, yet their routes never diverge by many miles: and this juxtaposition of conqueror and conquered, sometimes overlapping, sometimes just rubbing along, sometimes resentful, sometimes actually hostile, is the key to the whole story.Glyn Dwr himself was English-educated, and had fought for the King of England against the Scots Many Welsh leaders opposed him He had English allies and lieutenants.