Between the northern and southern parts of the country runs a stream, flowing into St. Bride’s Bay, which divides the Welsh Pembroke from a district known as “Little England beyond Wales.”
Here, in this latter region, one hears nothing but English spoken. The towns, the people, are typically English, or, at least, very far from being typically Welsh. This is how a seventeenth-century writer accounts for the fact:
“This same division was in ancient time inhabited wholly by Welshmen, but a great part thereof was won from them by the Englishmen under the conduct of Earl Strongbow, and divers others, and the same planted with Englishmen whose posterity enjoys it to this day, and keep their language among themselves without receiving the Welsh speech or learning any part thereof, and hold themselves so close to the same as to this day they wonder at a Welshman coming among them, the one neighbour saying to the other: ‘Look! there goeth a Welshman!’”
The interesting thing about this is that these people of South Pembroke were probably not English at all in origin, but Flemings, who came over from Flanders many centuries ago, and settled there with their woollen manufactures—a trade which perhaps accounts for the superiority of “Welsh flannel” to-day.
These were, like their Welsh neighbours, a very religious and emotional people, and more ready, perhaps, than the former to leave the land of their adoption for the perils of the Holy War. For a writer of the time of the early Crusades tells the story of a certain Archbishop’s journey through Wales to rouse volunteers for the war in far-off Palestine; and to him “it appears wonderful and miraculous that, although he addressed the Pembroke people both in the Latin and French tongues, these persons, who understood neither of these languages, were much affected, and flocked in great numbers to the cross.... They are,” he goes on to say, “a brave and robust people, ever most hostile to the Welsh—a people well versed in commerce and woollen manufactures, anxious to seek gain by sea or land, in defiance of fatigue and danger, a hardy race, equally fitted for the plough or the sword.”
Suppose we take a steamer from the charming little seaport town of Tenby, and follow the coast-line of Pembroke up to Milford Haven. Romantic cliffs guard the land, and limestone caverns hint at smuggling expeditions in the good old days. Here is Caldy Island, where stood one of the oldest of Benedictine priories; and here, at St. Gowan’s Head, the cliff, rising to a great height above the sea, is split up into a narrow cleft by the force of the waves.
Across this chasm is built a little cell, known as St. Gowan’s Chapel, from which a doorway leads to a cave in the cliff, shaped exactly like a human figure. The legend says that St. Gowan, a holy man of God, was praying in his cell when his heathen foes came battering at the door. He called upon the rock to be his shelter, and immediately it opened to admit him. When his enemies had gone away baffled, and the saint had emerged, the impression of his form was found in the cliff; and nowadays they say that if you stand in the cavity and wish, and then turn round without changing your mind, the wish is sure to come true.
Now we are entering Milford Haven, “the finest harbour in the United Kingdom,” stretching ten miles inland, with its many bays, creeks, and roadsteads. Sailing up the right-hand shore, we presently reach Pembroke Dock, two miles from the town of Pembroke, where stand the ruins of one of the earliest built and strongest of the many castles of Wales.
From its huge towers and turrets Strongbow started on that adventurous journey of his with the aim of conquering Ireland. For many years after the conquest of Wales its grim keep, with its conical roof capped by an enormous millstone, menaced the rebel Welsh. There, in 1456, was born Henry Tudor, one day to be Henry VII. of England, and there he spent the first ten years of his boyhood. There also was his landing-place when he came to drive the usurping Richard from the throne.