That Edward I. ordered a massacre of the Welsh bards and minstrels is a mere fiction.
“That Edward did this,” says Sharon Turner, “seems rather a vindictive tradition of an irritated nation than an historical fact. The destruction of the independent sovereignties of Wales abolished the patronage of the bards, and in the cessation of internal warfare, and of external ravages, they lost their favourite subjects and most familiar imagery. They declined because they were no longer encouraged.”
The early Welsh harps seem to have been strung with hair. Dafydd ab Gwilym, a contemporary of Chaucer, boasts that his harp had not “one string from a dead sheep” in it, but “hair glossy black.” The Irish harp was strung with wire. Some of the Welsh harps of an inferior kind were of leather, and Dafydd pours scorn on such:—
“The din of the leathern harp” (presupposes it shall not be played with a horny nail), “of unpleasing form, only the graceless bears it, and I love not its button-covered trough, nor its music, nor its guts, sounding disgustingly, nor its yellow colour ... nor its bent column; only the vile love it. Under the touch of the eight fingers, ugly is the bulge of its belly, with the canvas cover; its hoarse sound is only fit for an aged Saxon.”
The bards, according to Taliessin, himself one of them, do not seem to have had a high character, although, according to the Triad, the bard is equal to the king.
Taliessin is supposed to have lived in the time of Maelgwn Gwynedd, in the first half of the sixth century, and is credited with a satire on the king’s bards; but the poem was actually composed in the thirteenth century, and satirises the bards of the writer’s own day:—
“Minstrels persevere in their false custom,
Immoral ditties are their delight;
Vain and tasteless praises theirs.
At all times falsehood they utter.
Innocent people they turn to jest,
Married women’s character they take away
And destroy the innocence of maids.
They drink all night; they sleep all day,
The Church they hate, and the tavern they haunt.
Tithes and offerings to God they do not pay,
Nor worship Him Sunday or Holyday.
Everything travails to obtain its food,
Save the minstrel and the lazy thief.”
It was the degradation of the minstrel that led to such severe Acts being passed to put him down. But the harper and minstrel remained attached to the household of a gentleman as a matter of course in Wales till the eighteenth century, and, as we have seen, so late as in the first half of the nineteenth century an Anglesey parson had his harper as one of his household.
