It issignificant, nevertheless, that by the end of the decade the word ‘medievalism’ could beused in a much less judgemental way (to describe the whimsy of Dante GabrielRossetti’s paintings, for example). There was then a domestication of the medieval atthis time, a reclaiming of the period to make it part of the story of British history

that ‘an ageadvanced to the highest degree of refinement’ should be curious about ‘the transitionsfrom barbarism to civility’.

With Warton and Percy, thischanged, and the fact that in the nineteenth century (as still today) there was a positiveconception of a romantic Middle Ages to counterpose to a barbaric Middle Ages waslargely due to their work and that of their immediate followers, pre-eminently WalterScott.

n News from Nowhere (), composed in the medieval form of adream vision, William Morris shows his commitment not just to medieval politics andeconomics but also to style. When ‘William Guest’, a dreamer from the nineteenthcentury, finds himself in the peaceful, prosperous, and healthy England of the future, heasks how it is governed and receives the answer ‘the whole people is our parliament’

mong those advocating radical political reform for Britain in the late eighteenthand nineteenth centuries, appeals to medieval history are very common.

‘I shall desire you would take notice of the Windows, especially in the Church’supper part, which both for the Glass and Iron-work thereof are well worthy yourobservation’.¹⁷ He then records the subject of every window and the Latin verses thatexplain the parallelisms between the Old and New Testament scenes. Somner’sAntiquities offers an unprecedented way of looking at a medieval church: historicallyknowledgeable, articulate, appreciative, and contextua

the ‘Norman yoke’, the beliefthat the pre-Conquest English had enjoyed basic liberties subsequently overridden bytheir Norman overlords

scholars’ efforts were linked to a burgeoning sense of national identity as well asto the assertive separation of the English Church from its Roman Catholic ties.

the Arthurian tradition could also be mobilized for other ideologicalpurposes

Yet Prise was also able to bring forth early Welsh references to Arthur by the bardsTaliesin and Myrddin, and to cite the evidence of Welsh place-names and oraltradition. As Prise points out, ‘If all those famous men, about whom it will never bepossible to produce so many and such great pieces of evidence or records as areavailable for Arthur, were to be totally erased from our collective memory, a hugecrowd of distinguished people would undoubtedly have to be got rid of in a mightyjettisoning of antiquity.’¹⁸ Prise was not alone in this perception, and it must have beenshared by many, like Holinshed, who found themselves able neither to defend Arthurnor to discard him. For if Arthur were to be jettisoned, how many other figures ofBritish antiquity—from the Trojan Brutus to King Lear, King Lud, and old King Cole—would fall with him

A far more capable and learned defence of Arthur’s existence was undertaken by theWelsh scholar Sir John Prise, whose Historiae Britannicae Defensio was published someeighteen years after the author’s death in 

They also stress, however, that influence worked in both directions:just as English artists travelled to France to be inspired by medieval art and architec-ture, so French scholars journeyed to Britain to transcribe manuscripts

The nineteenth century saw theestablishment of many learned, literary, and antiquarian societies whose aim was tomake the remains of medieval culture accessible to the public, and to protect them forfuture generation

he TinternAbbey that features so famously in Wordsworth’s  poem had been represented inwatercolour by J. M. W. Turner a few years earlier and was painted in oil by WilliamHavell in . Engravings of these and other works inspired tourism to sites of ruinsas well as to Horace Walpole’s ‘new-build’ Gothic pile

he WelshMelodies of Felicia Hemans ().

ut the medieval-styletextiles produced by Morris & Co. decorated many affluent drawing rooms,

Unlocking the Church: The Lost Secrets ofVictorian Sacred Space ()

Medievalism: A Critical History ()

Architecture and Religious Communities –: Building theKingdom ()

The Pre-Raphaelites ()

Imperial Gothic:Religious Architecture and High Anglican Culture in the British Empire, c–()

Reinventing King Arthur(),

hester.107 Bycontrast, while Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, the prince of Wales killed in1282, was commemorated in verse and music, notably a highlypopular cantata first performed at the National Eisteddfod in 1863,nothing came of periodic attempts from the 1850s onwards to raisesubscriptions for a monument in his honour.108 The same was largelytrue of calls for the raising of statues of other Welsh heroes. Thus itwas that Tom Ellis, Liberal Member of Parliament and leading lightof the Cymru Fydd or Young Wales movement, still felt it necessaryin 1892 to urge his compatriots to cherish "the

astle," submitted to the Llangolleneisteddfod of 1858 and published two years later, may have been setin the late fourteenth century but its subject was the ideal VictorianWelsh woman, and thus, as one of its adjudicators observed, offereda riposte to the Blue Books' slurs on Welsh w

anwg. The Llangolleneisteddfod of 1858, masterminded by the Reverend John Williams(Ab Ithel; 1811-62), was the high tide of this ardent patriotism,prompting The Times to observe sourly: "For four days all that hastaken place in the world since the age of OWEN GLYNDWR isforgotte

o-Saxons. The popularity ofthis satirical characterization of the Blue Books testified to awidespread familiarity among the Welsh with legends about theirearly and medieval past.76 Indeed, one response to the Blue Bookswas to vindicate what was perceived to be traditional Welsh culturewith its roots in the Middle A

on, which asserted that the early Welsh church windependent of Rome; thus the end of the period covered in the stusaw, to quote Rees, "the Welsh in the possession of a NationaChurch and in the enjoyment of religious liberty," subsequentrestored at the Refor

f Anglicans were receptive to Pre-Raphaelite art, and byimplication its medieval exemplars, Evan Williams (18167-1878),Calvinist Methodist minister, artist, and pioneering Welsh-languageart critic was extremely hos

ar. However, though it lacks anyobvious Welsh affinities, it provided a fitting setting for a landownerintent on proclaiming his status as a latter-day lord of the manor, notsimply in the general terms so common at the time wherebyVictorian gentlemen identified themselves with the ethos ofmedieval chivalry, but more specifically as the self-proclaimedtwenty-third lord in succession of Cemais - a lordship in nearbynorthern Pembrokeshire established in the early twelfth ce

he early nineteenthcentury we find both established landed families and nouveau richeindustrialists following a wider trend of expressing their status by theerection of castles.

edieval.13 Nevertheless,religious affiliations certainly influenced Welsh attitudes to theMiddle Ages. For one thing, despite the influx of Irish Catholicimmigrants, and the restoration of the Roman Catholic hierarchy inEngland and Wales in 1850, Wales offered poor prospects for large-scale attempts to revive medieval forms of Catholic devotion of thekinds seen in countries with large Catholic populations such asFranc

. While provoking widespread condemnation,the report also stimulated efforts to prove that the Welsh were notonly respectable but fully equipped to participate in the commercialand industrial progress of imperial Brit

. Pugin displayed in his Mediaeval Courtat the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 were his fittings for thenew Roman Catholic friary church at Pantasaph in Flintshire, whileWilliam Burges's desig

located the Welsh tales in a broader context of medievalEuropean romance in her introduction and quoted extensively fromrelated French tales in her copious notes.3

Each glance that we take at the past offers us aclearer view of the future’

And the ability todress the old in perfect beauty is a sacred ability – this is how a nation declares itshighest aims in life’

They imagined that the old was better than it was, they made their princeperfect in their eyes’]. Edwards does not find the people at fault for imaginingperfection; rather, he finds in their imagining a force for developing as a nation

he figure of the hero allows the nation to take from the past what it needsto become confident and progressive in the future

Welsh historiography was written by antiquarians andlocal historians who were often concerned with specific aspects of Welsh history

history books were designed to guide y werin18 through their own past, thusmaking them more aware of their identity in the present. In so doing, his hopewas that Welsh identity could find its own way of progressing and developing.His history books were ‘refreshing’ 19 because he offered the people of Wales anaccessible interpretation of their own past.

O.M. Edwards, on the other hand, took a different approach and wrotepopular histories and textbooks.

that historyprovided a means of legitimizing Welsh claims to nationhood. A

Dr Isambard Owen, in an address to the opening of the Cymmrodorion sectionof the National Eisteddfod in 1886, commented: ‘The history of the Welshpeople ... has become an almost forgotten study among its members. I do notknow if in a single school in all Wales instruction in it is at this day given.’ 11 Forindividuals such as O.M. Edwards and J.E. Lloyd who were not only historians byprofession but also actively engaged with questions of Welsh identity, it was clearthat an awareness of the Welsh past was crucial in fostering a sense of nationalidentity

it was ‘The Matterof England’ rather than ‘The Matter of Britain’ that was considered significant inhistorical works of the perio

These twovignettes demonstrate that Edwards was a popular teacher of history and thatthe images and symbolism that he used in his works resonated with his audience

rys Morgan, ‘Keeping the legends alive’, in Tony Curtis (ed.), Wales: The Imagined Nation: Essaysin Cultural and National Identity (Bridgend, 1986), pp. 19–41

8 John S. Ellis, ‘Reconciling the Celt: British national identity, empire, and the 1911 investiture of thePrince of Wales’, Journal of British Studies, 37 (1998), pp. 391–418

As the mock-medieval investiture of the future Edward VIII as Prince of Wales atCaernarfon Castle in 1911 showed, even the symbols of conquest wererecast to declare Wales as a partner rather than a subject of England

As the poet R. S. Thomas wrote in 1955,‘There is no present in Wales, | And no future; | There is only the past.

In respect of the jazz content of German propagandaSittler had this to say, using the series ‘Dance Tunes and Cabaret’ as a example:The ‘Dance Tunes and Cabaret’ programme is trying to build a bridge of jazz betweenGermany and America. The broadcast assumes that thousands of friendly disposedAmericans have gathered round their loudspeakers to hear how in poor old Hunlandthey treasure the cultural legacy of Jewish-American jazz. ‘Listen! We Germans cando it too!’ is what the announcer seems to be saying. The choice of material wouldmake you think you were in the heart of New York’s black ghetto — well, a few yearsback, actually, as the latest hits have not yet filtered through to us barbarians.

DanceandEntertainmentOrchestra

Asthewarcontinuedandpublicgloomdeepened, Goebbelsbecameincreasinglyemphaticabouttheimportanceofprogrammeswhichofferedlightrelieftothenation—entertainmentontheleveloftheenormouslypopularradiofeature,the‘WunschkonzertfiirdieWehrmacht(‘Forces’Choice’)withitsmixtureofsentimen-tality,oldfavouritesandcurrenthits—martialmusicsuchas‘EsistsoschénSoldatzusein’,‘Siegreichwoll’nwirFrankreichschlagen’,or‘Bomben aufEn-ge-land,withcheerfulgreetingsfromthefrontandforthefamily

his directive had the result of increasing the proportion of musical programmes tonearly seventy per cent in 19357, compared with sixty per cent in 1934. At the openingof the 1939 Funkausstellung, Goebbels again emphasized the importance of relaxationand entertainment on the radio, in addition to spiritual uplift and political dedication,pointing out that this made it, ‘next to the press, the most effective weapon in ourstruggle for national existence.

Kershaw clearly describes thehardships endured by the German people during these months, as the home front and thewar front merged together.

Whilst the application of censorship and the use of propaganda could conceal thenationwide extent of the bombing and strengthen hatred towards the enemy, theycould not hide the increasingly difficult and desperate situations faced by German civiliansin their daily lives.

The Nazi women’s organ-isations employed millions of German women, mainly as volunteers to take part in worksuch as air raid protection schemes, sewing for the Wehrmacht and distributing food,water and clothing to people affected by the air raids. They also assisted with evacuations,running service points to provide accommodation, help with baggage, care for the elderly,pregnant women and those with young children.

he population expects women from the higher levels of society to show a good example.Available information, they say, shows that [those who have taken on work] are almost exclu-sively women in humble circumstances, while often women from more favourable circum-stances produce a multitude of reasons which prevent them from working

Failure tohelp the war effort in this way was a signifier of dishonourable behaviour.

The picturewas similar in Germany; farming families regarded some of the women mi-grants and evacuees as greedy and lazy, if notdownrightpromiscuous inaddition. The townies, for their part, sometimes despised the simple andstubborn – as they saw it – rural people. 63 From Aalen, it was reported, afterthe evacuees had left, that “One of the little madams wrote on the school’stable: ‘We bought everything from the Swabians except their stupidity.’” 64And sometimes resentful urban evacuees denounced farmers to the Naziauthorities for treating foreign workers better than themselves.65

By December 1942, almost a million mothers and childrenhad been evacuated from cities to the countryside, and the numbers wouldonly increase. 55 In all, perhaps ten million German women and childrenwere evacuated by the end of the war

Whereas in Britain, fraternization with POWs wasan issue chiefly of loyalty and the maintenance of traditional sexual morality,in Germany, the regime’s overriding racial priorities demanded Draconianpunishment for “pollution of the blood.”

Fourth, inGermany the agrarian sector remained significant, with 4.4 million womenworking in agriculture in 1933, many of whom were farmers’ wives: in1939, women accounted for 54.5 percent of the agricultural workforce. 24By contrast, “the farmwife all but disappeared in England” in the interwaryears, with women in agriculture accounting for only 1 or 2 percent of thetotal female workforce

Thus, the balance of thecivilian population was altered – even distorted – with the home front con-sisting disproportionately of women, children, and older men

In both countries, censorship was imposed, the dissemination of newswas manipulated, and propaganda was issued; on the whole, however, thiswas a break with peacetime practice for Britons but a continuation of it forGermans.

he domes-tic economy of Nazi Germany relied on 7.5 million forced laborers, whosecontribution allowed the Third Reich to limit the industrial mobilization ofGerman women.

Taking 1936 as the base (100), retail prices reached only 113 in 1944. However,as Jeremy Noakes has pointed out, civilian consumption was a better indicatorof the “extent of the sacrifices made by the populations.” On this measure, thedifficulties of both Germany and Japan were apparent. Compared to prewarlevels, civilian consumption fell in these countries respectively by 24 and 31percent; by contrast, it fell by only 16 percent in Britain, and it rose by an equalpercentage in the United States.

But their economic preparations were also a function ofattitudes toward war in the interwar period itself. For this reason preparationswere extensive in Germany, much less so in the United Kingdom, and almostnonexistent in the United States.

ecause the out-come on the battlefield depended on the productive apparatus of the homefront.

, the relations between urban dwellers and rural populations exacer-bated these tensions as soon as access to foodstuffs became problemati

Aswomen’s contributions to the war effort challenged conventional gendereddefinitions of patriotic service, the demands of mobilization bore heavily on allsections of society.2

During this time, from a mixture of realityand propaganda, an image of the nation at war was created whose accuracywas later largely accepted by commentators

invasion

One of the most often cited ways in which the war impacted on the homewas the provisions made by the state and by employers for childcare, mostnotably in the provision of workplace nurseries and the schemes to evacuatechildren, with their mothers if they were young, away from the cities thatwere expected to be the main targets for aerial bombardment.

robably of more practical help to working women was the growth ofcommunal feeding centres such as ‘British Restaurants’ and the developmentof time and labour-saving devices and products for the home.

While the conditions described here could be alleviated for women of theupper and middle classes, who were more likely than others to be in aposition to afford access to childcare and to some domestic support, theresponsibility for maintaining the family home was understood during thewar as being a specifically feminine responsibility

Despite this, women on the gun sites were subject tocontinual rumours regarding their alleged immorality and promiscuity.

the ATS, initially opened up five different trades to women: clerk, cook,storewoman, driver and orderly, all of which, with the possible exception ofdriver, reflected the kinds of paid work that women had been employed inbefore the war.

Married women without young children and with husbands absent on warwork or military service could be conscripted, but only into part-time, localwork. The maintenance of the domestic home thus superseded the needs ofproduction, demonstrating the importance attributed to retaining linksbetween femininity and domesticity in wartime, even when this linkthreatened the efficiency of the war effort

future generations ... than filling shells with which to kill some othermother’s son’

women would not be subject to conscriptionand direction, but instead the State would rely upon their patriotism andsense of duty as a means of ensuring that they volunteered their labour.

As Antonia Lant hasargued, the conflict between these two opposing demands can be seenespecially clearly in the figure of the ‘mobile woman’, the (usually) young,single woman, living away from the home and occupied in war work.

Industrial legislation and trade union activism reduced the work week, result-ing in a Saturday half-holiday for many workers. All the while wages rosesteadily, and newly efficient and cheap means of intracity transport allowedlaborers to leave their ghettos for places of leisure.

Coastal resorts were, then, often to be found in symbiosis with fishing and commercial ports, evenwith associated manufacturing and import processing industries, and each function could benefit fromthe presence of the other, although the more exclusive resort interests were sometimes reluctant torecognise this.

Industrial towns created the demand for seaside pleasures, whereasresorts helped produce a more refreshed and efficient workforce.

Nor should it be assumedautomatically that landscapes of work and pleasure did not mix. Severalguidebooks encourage their readers to visit the harbour areas, docks andfish markets, 66 in part to admire them as examples of industrialimprovement, in part – particularly later in the period – to engage inplebeian voyeurism by observing ‘authentic’ working people such asfishermen and fisherwomen.A resort’s development, therefore, needs to be placed within thebroader context of its multifaceted character as a town.

ort and resort werenot mutually exclusive categories, and this prompts another issue forconsideration. By and large, port and resort historiographies havefollowed separate paths and historians examining the seaside have tendedto focus on new settlements, such as a Blackpool or a Rhyl, or to ignorethe non-resort element in the economic profile of a mixed functionsettlement

it does not conform to any of the dominantimages of national identity.

At the same time he acknowledgesthat resorts themselves can be divided into two groups, those where theresort function is dominant, and those where it is shared with anotherfunction, most notably a port.37

Walton’s first volume on the rise of resorts contains a gooddeal of Welsh material, despite somewhat curiously being called TheEnglish Seaside Resort, perhaps an indication of how easy it was (and forsome still is) to use the terms English and British interchangeably

. In these hopes the volumes for Glamorganprove disappointing for the resort historian. Volume Five on IndustrialGlamorgan, 1700–1960 focuses entirely on traditional definitions ofindustry (ignoring the fact that tourism might reasonably be defined asan industry), while Volume Six, Glamorgan Society, 1780–1980, wouldappear to make only passing reference to the county’s resorts or seasideculture.18

Most of these studies are essentially ‘biographical’, with very limitedreference to other settlements or areas, and little sense of being part of awider genre of regional, resort or urban history.

eil Evans has perceptivelydrawn out the link between production and pleasure: ‘Resorts were theproduct of an industrial society ... Industry’s effect on the urban patternwas fundamental but never simple; it impinged ... far beyondproduction into distribution, exchange and leisure. It made countinghouses and playgrounds as well as workshops and dormitories.’10

ohn Davies has acknowledged that: ‘A newindustry came into existence as a result of the creation of the railwaynetwork. This was the tourist industry. The custom of taking annualholidays developed in the wake of the Industrial Revolution’

A. H. Dodd’s Short History of Wales (1972) managestwo indexed references to Tenby, three to Aberystwyth and seven toSwansea, yet none of these allude to their roles as resorts

Visitors from the mining valleys were often described asbeing mesmerized by the impressive consignments of coal that leftthe dock. Colliers, of course, were looking at the results of their ownarduous labour float past.

At Barry, the coal port breathed life back into Whitmore Bay asa visitor attraction

‘good number’had been spotted on the beach, bathing machines had been installedon the sands and were ‘well patronised’

Barry’s beach could not yet compete with such entertainment. InMay 1888, the editor of the Barry and Cadoxton Journal lamented thesad ‘neglect’ of Whitmore Bay by locals. He explained that a ‘great manyinhabitants of Cadoxton have never seen it [the beach], although it isso close at hand’. Aware that most Barrians were new arrivals and wereunfamiliar with the district, the editor helpfully included directions onhow to get to the seashore from east Barry and Cadoxton. It was worththe effort, he assured his readers, for it was a ‘delightful spot’ – ‘verypretty’ and made of ‘real sand’, not the ‘muddy black sand’ found atPenarth.51

The rapidly urbanizing settlements of Barry and Cadoxton quicklyfilled up with new residents. For the first time, large numbers were liv-ing within walking distance of the beach.

Barry Island’s navvies were the first group to have unrestrictedaccess to the sands of Whitmore Bay since Windsor’s ban came intoforce. Sadly, we have no evidence of how they made use of the beach.Journalists tended only to pay attention to navvies when they wereworking, fighting and drinking

Thus did theconstruction of the dock stimulate tourists’ interest both in Barry andin Barry Island

hought of as a site of ‘industrial tourism’ was underlined by a newspa-per correspondent who paid a ‘holiday visit to Barry dock’.

Even the Cardiff Naturalists’ Society – oldfriends of Barry Island, it will be remembered – temporarily put asidetheir interest in flora and fauna and allowed themselves to be bewitchedby the ingenuity of humans.

Barry as a place worth seeing, vividly describing the extraordinaryscenes that were, day and night, enacted there: the fantastic explo-sions, the immense clouds of steam and dust that periodically engulfedthe area, and the sudden appearance of huge earthworks and deeptrenches.

it was to be the largest single dock in the countryand cost £2 million – that it was regarded as ‘the wonder of Wales’ andbecame a visitor attraction in its own right.3

However, these were visitors of a verydifferent stamp from those who had headed to the island in the decadesbefore Windsor’s takeover. These were ‘industrial tourists’

It was all very well having a new railway, but it was still an openquestion as to whether tourists would be welcomed back to BarryIsland.

By the early 1890s, the Merthyrvalley had more than 61,000 residents; the Cynon valley had a popu-lation of some 43,000. More than 40,000 lived in the Rhymney valleywhilst nearly 90,000 lived in the Rhondda, by then ‘the most thicklypopulated valley in South Wales’.

Contemporaries were certain that the running of the first passen-ger train into the district in December 1888 constituted a red-letterday in Barry’s history. The Barry and Cadoxton Journal declared therailway to be the ‘great civilizer’ for it would end Barry’s era as a roughfrontier distric

The Barry district was no longer a place for those holidaymakerswho valued solitude and quiet, rural surroundings. It was a site of steamhammers, raucous workers and earth-shaking explosions

In short order, Barry had gone from being a place that sickly visi-tors headed to for the benefit of their health, to an insanitary settlementin which inhabitants lived in fear of deadly epidemic diseases.

Whatever picturesque charms the Barry district had possessedbefore the mid-1880s, they were soon severely compromised.

Poor little Cadoxton looksas if it had been shovelled on one side, preparatory to being removed– a heap of rubbish blocking up the way’, remarked the South WalesDaily News in May 1887.9

Poor little Cadoxton’: from ‘pleasantvillage’ to a ‘phenomenal town’

nce

in the later 1880s and early 1890s, the dock itselfbecame a tourist attraction and many visitors came from the coalfieldspecifically to see it

nd that railway ran right up to the Rhondda valleys, home to morethan 80,000 inhabitants and growing steadily.3 The railway was built toconvey coal to Barry, but it would eventually be used by trippers.

t was also the catalyst for the tourist rediscovery of theIsland in the late 1880s

The demand for Welsh steam coal had grownexponentially, and the lack of capacity in the existing ports of southWales was acting as a brake on further growth.

PeterBorsay

Themovement west of sea-bathing areas in Swansea in some respects anticipated the development ofseparate docks and seaside space in the late nineteenth-century at Barry and Penarth

influenced perhaps by Gladstone's visit in

Fred Gray demonstrates in his essay on Brighton, there were some directconflicts of interest between fishing and tourism

Thomas Brookman, pictured barefoot, in his ragged workingclothes, with a net slung over his shoulder and basket at his waist, must have presented an image ofworking life which appeared to the well-to-do Mumbles tourist to be remote and other-worldly.

and by the end of the nineteenth century, there was, as Peter Borsay's chapter shows, a ‘fashionable cult’of the sea as a place of work

Those visitors who did arrive during the fishing season were sometimes encouraged42to add the industry to their itinerary of sightseeing

The Swansea Bay to Rhondda line, built in1895 to improve access to the growing coalfield, provided a convenient passenger service to the coastfor the district's workers

As new railway lines34were constructed, the accessibility of the coast increased

One local guidebook of the period noted that ‘since the advent of the South Wales Railway,the resort of sea-bathing people has been very considerable’

That their wishes prevailed was not merely an example of commercialinterests outweighing the needs of visitors. The town's preparedness to sacrifice the burrows seems alsoto have been based on a belief that tourism would not be stifled as a result.

The workscomprise a spacious trumpet-mouth entrance, a half-tide basin, an immense lock, an iron bridge, and aninner dock of sufficient acre to allow some hundreds of ships to repose majestically on their shadows inperfect safety.’ The report also conveyed the impact of a special branch line, which linked the new dockto the South Wales Railway, bisecting some of the main pedestrian and vehicle routes between the townand the bay:Wind Street is crossed by an iron bridge, and the line passes along towards the Royal Institution,where another iron bridge spans the main thoroughfare leading to Fisher Street and down to theBurrows. From this point its course is through Burrows Lodge-grounds where the arches terminate.

The decades of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Britain are associated byhistorians of tourism and leisure with the growth in popularity of sea bathing as a health and leisureactivity among the fashionable elite. By economic historians, they are viewed as decades of industrial1take-off, when the pace of output from textile manufactories, smelting works and mines quickened tounprecedented levels

storian of the copper industry, Ronald Rees

One passenger wrote approvingly of ‘thescenery being grand, particularly Oystermouth Castle and the bay of Swansea’. Local guidebooks27directed visitors to the town's manufacturing premises as well as the more natural appeal of its bay andsands. The 1802 presented the proximity of bathing facilities and commercial sites as aSwansea Guidepositive advantage, drawing visitors’ attention, for example, to the Cambrian pottery operated by GeorgeHaynes, which was arranged ‘on Mr Wedgwood's plan’, and situated ‘contiguous to ... [his] Cold andHot Sea Water Baths’

In fact, tourism in Swansea derived some indirectbenefits from industry in the town in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. T

The drive to lure fashionable tourists at the same time as expanding as a centre for copper smeltingwas not unproblematic. One guidebook author while describing Swansea as ‘a favourite resort in thesummer for bathing’, also warned that ‘the volumes of smoke from the different manufactories are agreat deduction to the general attraction of the place’.

a weekly English language newspaper, the, in 1804. The new publication placed Swansea on a par with other resort towns whereCambriannewspapers served as a useful organ of the tourist trade, announcing the arrival of the well-heeled andfashionable and informing visitors of the events and services on offer throughout the season

The Duke of Beaufort, Swansea's principal landowner, added further momentum by creating a publicwalk on an area of recently enclosed corporation land lying between the town and the sea known as ‘theburrows’. This became the town's first real visitor hub with a ‘pleasant promenade’, ‘many good lodginghouses’ and ‘two convenient bathing-houses

he building of commercial docks in the nineteenth century, as far as seaside historians are5concerned, diverted coastal towns such as these away from becoming tourist centres, with the two rolesbeing seen as incompatible.

In the1790s, James Baker recorded that the town ‘had a very considerable share of resort from the mostdistinguished persons of fashion in the kingdom; it is found a most convenient trip for the inhabitants ofBristol, Bath and the counties adjoining the Severn Sea’

health tourism, with wealthy visitors flocking in duringthe summer months to bathe in the sheltered bay

uidebooks, newspaper columns and visitor comments of the day andcrucial to understanding the urban environment of Swansea

in the second half of the nineteenth century,with more day-trippers and working-class visitors from the surrounding industrial suburbs and furtherafield.

Thischapter re-evaluates the history of one south Wales coastal town by merging these two previouslyseparate strands of research to form a new analysis of interactivity between industry and tourism

P. Borsay,

As the79commercial business of the harbour declined, so it would seem that its resources were turned to theleisure sector

There were two solutions to managing the clash between port and resort: segregation or incorporation

Guide literatureis particularly prone to adopting this perspective since its market is the visitor population, for whom itsupplies not only empirical data but also appropriate cultural images

At the heart of this economy, and its physical interface with the town,was the harbour. During the nineteenth century, this remained an important and vital area of activity andthe subject of regular maintenance and improvement

from the dynamic South Wales industrial areas werebeginning to make a mark, particularly during periods such as bank holidays

his left a good portion, indeed the majority of the promontory on which the town sat,21undeveloped. There is little to suggest that the failure to establish an early railway link to the towncurtailed expansion

During the first half of the nineteenth century, the town acquired the17essential package of ingredients for a fashionable resort: good indoor and outdoor bathing facilities,assembly rooms, a theatre, markets and shops stocked with fresh food and luxury products, a circulatinglibrary, formal promenades, a network of informal walks and excursions in the neighbouring environsand region, comfortable lodgings and residences and a dedicated guidebook to inform visitors andstructure their expectations

It co existed with English andMarcher law; it was pock marked with local customs and variations; in its substance and procedure it was being heavily influenced by English law and practice; andthere is no reason to believe that there was an articulated pattern of jurisdiction or even a recognized curriculum of legal learning which prevailed throughout nativeWales.

hen the tide of fortune turned, especially after 1277, the appeal toWelsh law came into its own as a way to counter English interpretations of the obligations of feudal relationship.

Notions ofthe status (status) of the principality, of the prince and of Wales itself were valuable ingredients in developing an ideology of the separateness of Wales which might beused to challenge English notions of feudal dependence

he kings of England had also on occasion realised the political advantages of proclaiming themselves as champions of Welsh law intheir attempts to exploit the fissures within the dynasty of Gwynedd and to impose the Welsh custom of partibility for their own advantage.

n a shared belief in a particularversion of historical mythology and prophecy, i

L Wales Annexed to Crown of ENGLAND

he impact of the final Edwardian conquestof Wales 1277–83 was, it is true, greatly reduced by the fact that much ofeastern and southern Wales had already been conquered in a piecemealfashion over two centuries; the inhabitants of those districts had thereby hadample opportunity to come to terms with Anglo-Norman rule over manygenerations

Thebones of Arthur were supposedly “discovered” in a grave at the monastery of Glaston-bury about 1190, as reported by Gerald of Wales (in two of his works, De PrincipisInstructione, “On the Instruction of Princes,” c. 1193, and Speculum Ecclesiae, “Mirrorof the Church,” c. 1217), who claimed to have been present at the exhumation.Though the discovery may well have been part of a ploy by the Glastonbury monksto attract financial support, it had the additional effect of proving not only that Arthurhad been a “real” person but that, far from planning a return from the Isle of Avalon,he was indisputably dead. Since the figure of Arthur had long been regarded byNorman conservatives as a politically dangerous messianic symbol who incited theremaining British peoples (mainly in Wales and Cornwall) to rebellion, the discoveryof his bones was a convenient sign which discredited Geoffrey’s hints of a Britishreturn to power and enabled the Norman monarchy to appropriate Arthur as an earlyancestor of their own royal line

Just as he is aboutto return to Britain from his exile in Brittany, an angelic vision warns him thatGod did not wish the Britons to rule in Britain any longer, not until Merlin’sprophecy of a triumphant return of the heirs of the British kings was fulfilled (HRBbook 12).

Even the character of Gawain,Arthur’s nephew, and the removal of the wounded Arthur to Avalon, both staplefeatures of later Arthurian stories, appear first in Geoffrey’s account.

dward Iliked to think of himself as Arthur reborn and he and Eleanor presided over a grand reopening of theGlastonbury tomb just after Easter in 1278, by which he orchestrated the connection (Loomis 1953

Arthur had, of course, to be laid to rest, and so disabled as a symbol of Welsh resistance to Anglo-Norman domination, and this was achieved spectacularly at Glastonbury, where his remains(alongside those of Guinevere) were ‘discovered’ in 1191 ( ).

Many, most obviously Edward I, made extensive use of his reign asa source of political precedent and propaganda to be reformulated for present purposes of politicalstatus and aggrandizement.

From Henry II onwards until at least Henry VIII,L’Estoire des EngleisEnglish kings, their courtiers and their apologists took the existence of Geoffrey’s Arthur as a matterof fact which was beyond doubt

It has reasonably been suggested that this political and dynastic utility was always Geoffrey’sintention (e.g. Tatlock 1950: 426), given that he was competing with other writers of history for élitepatronage

In particular, it provided the new Anglo-Norman kings with a predecessor of heroicsize, a great pan-British king in a long line of monarchs capable of countering contemporary pressuresfor decentralization, as had occurred in France, and reinforcing claims of political superiority over theCeltic lands

However, Anglo-Saxon history was ill-suited to legitimizing the new Norman regime in Britain