tack was aided
by strife in the country itself. Robert Fitz-Hamo, the lord of Gloucester,
was summoned to his aid by a Welsh chieftain; and his defeat of Rhys ap
Tewdor, the last prince under whom Southern Wales was united, produced an
anarchy which enabled Robert to land safely on the coast of Glamorgan, to
conquer the country round, and to divide it among his soldiers. A force of
Flemings and Englishmen followed the Earl of Clare as he landed near
Milford Haven and pushing back the British inhabitants settled a "Little
England" in the present Pembrokeshire. A few daring adventurers accompanied
the Norman Lord of Kemeys into Cardigan, where land might be had for the
winning by any one who would "wage war on the Welsh."

[Sidenote: The Welsh Revival]

It was at this moment, when the utter subjugation of the British race
seemed at hand, that a new outburst of energy rolled back the tide of
invasion and changed the fitful resistance of the separate Welsh provinces
into a national effort to regain independence. To all outer seeming Wales
had become utterly barbarous. Stripped of every vestige of the older Roman
civilization by ages of bitter warfare, of civil strife, of estrangement
from the general culture of Christendom, the unconquered Britons had sunk
into a mass of savage herdsmen, clad in the skins and fed by the milk of
the cattle they tended. Faithless, greedy, and revengeful, retaining no
higher political organization than that of the clan, their strength was
broken by ruthless feuds, and they were united only in battle or in raid
against the stranger. But in the heart of the wild people there still
lingered a spark of the poetic fire which had nerved it four hundred years
before through Aneurin and Llywarch Hen to its struggle with the earliest
Englishmen. At the hour of its lowest degradation the silence of Wales was
suddenly broken by a crowd of singers. The song of the twelfth century
burst forth, not from one bard or another, but from the nation at large.
The Welsh temper indeed was steeped in poetry. "In every house," says the
shrewd Gerald de Barri, "strangers who arrived in the morning were
entertained till eventide with the talk of maidens and the music of the
harp." A romantic literature, which was destined to leaven the fancy of
western Europe, had grown up among this wild people and found an admirable
means of utterance in its tongue. The Welsh language was as real a
developement of the old Celtic la