the power of images of Welsh survival from the dangers of Welsh rebellion. Triumphant and angry predictions of Welsh revenge, predictions in Welsh vaticinative poetry that detail specific “oppositional” hopes for sovereign rule turn, in Middle English prophetic texts, into a melancholy apocalypticism.
Precisely because such efforts deploy prophecy for a productive English future, it is important to remember that, particularly during the early part of the century, some had more cause to mourn than others: the Welsh would remain under suspicion of sedition, their dealings with the English rigorously constrained. Legal discourse and statutes from the post-Glyn Dwr years describe the Welsh as a perfidious people like “the wild Irish, our enemies.” The infamous penal statutes of the early fifteenth century circumscribed the powers and activities of Welshmen as Welshmen. According to those laws no Welshman could buy land in England or in the “Englishries” within Wales; no Welshman, or Englishman married to a Welsh woman, could hold office in Wales; no Welshman could carry arms on the highway, or in any market or town; no Welshman could hold a castle or fortress, neither could men of mixed race; no Welshmen could bring legal suit against, or be used as a witness to secure the conviction of, an Englishman. R. R. Davies describes this body of legislation as both “more comprehensive by far than any other issued hitherto” and “more specifically racist in character” (Conquest, 458). While intermarriage between Welsh and English had long been a corollary of English and Anglo-Norman rule, in the wake of the Glyn Dwr rebellion such intercultural practices became illegal.25 This legislation was a distinct shift from earlier policies which had depended upon English and French-speaking Welshmen and Anglo-Welsh Lords for the governance of the area of the March.
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