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This article was downloaded by: [Temple University Libraries]On: 20 November 2014, At: 22:31Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number:1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street,London W1T 3JH, UK
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Ethnic jokes and socialchange: The case of theWelshChristie Davies aa University of ReadingPublished online: 21 Jun 2010.
To cite this article: Christie Davies (1985) Ethnic jokes and socialchange: The case of the Welsh, Immigrants & Minorities: HistoricalStudies in Ethnicity, Migration and Diaspora, 4:1, 46-63, DOI:10.1080/02619288.1985.9974596
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02619288.1985.9974596
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Ethnic Jokes and Social Change:The Case of the Welsh
Ethnic minorities and immigrants in most societies tend to becomethe subject of jokes told by the dominant majority. The Welsh,England's nearest neighbouring people, an aboriginal remnant ofthe autochthonous inhabitants of Britain have been the subjectof English jokes for well over 400 years. When under the Tudors,a dynasty with a Welsh name and a tinge of Welsh descent,Wales was merged with England both legally and politically by theAct of Union of 1536, the Welsh became England's oldest andmost prominent ethnic minority and significant numbers of themmigrated from their peripheral homeland to the more central areasof England.' At this point jokes about the Welsh began to pro-liferate1 based on a well-defined comic stereotype, though one thatwas to change significantly over time. This article traces the historyand assesses the character of these jokes
Analysts of the use of such ethnic stereotypes in jokes have often tendedto assume that they express or reflect a widely and intensely held socialprejudice about the group being mocked by the joke.3 In a few instancesthis may indeed be the case as in many anti-Semitic jokes, Texan jokesabout Mexicans or Singhalese jokes about Tamils. However, it is doubt-ful whether this kind of hostility is a significant factor in the genesis ofethnic jokes in general and it certainly is not in the case of jokes aboutthe Welsh, who have not been perceived as threatening by the Englishsince the time of Owain Glyndwr's revolt (1400-12) during the reignof Henry IV.4
Ethnic jokes can, of course, be a vehicle for various other kinds ofmuch more general social anxiety which are not primarily focused on theparticular group which is the butt of the jokes. It is these anxieties thathave given rise to the vast, multi-national array of jokes told aboutallegedly stupid ethnic or regional minorities (as in British jokes aboutthe Irish, American jokes about the Poles, French and Dutch jokes aboutBelgians, German Ostfriesenwitze, Indian 'Sardarji' jokes about Sikhs,etc.) and the equally popular jokes about their supposedly crafty andstingy opposite numbers (as in British jokes about the Scots, Germanjokes about Swabians, Belgian jokes about the Dutch, jokes about NewEngland Yankees, etc). Jokes of this type reflect diffuse anxieties aboutethnic identity and boundaries and about the stresses imposed on peopleby an increasingly rational, impersonal and complex society5 rather thanany marked hostility towards the groups who are the butt of this type ofhumour.
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ETHNIC JOKES AND SOCIAL CHANGE 47
Jokes about the Welsh do not seem to be rooted in the kind of generalanxieties that have led to the mass production of jokes about stupidIrishmen and canny Scots. Indeed, the view that will be put forward hereis that English jokes about the Welsh are and always have been primarilydescriptive. They belong to that class of ethnic jokes in which one peoplelaughs at the customs, behaviour and values of a neighbouring people oran ethnic minority simply because they are different from those of thejoke-makers themselves. The joke-makers and joke-tellers are naturallyselective in the traits displayed by the minority that they choose to mockbut where, as here, there is an absence of marked hostility and when thetheme of the jokes is highly individual rather than a reflection of moreuniversal social anxieties then a 'humour of description' can be clearlyidentified. English jokes about the Welsh are best seen as a comicdescription of the Welsh that is rooted in social reality. These jokesreflect real differences, in the culture and social structure of the twopeoples. The importance of studying such jokes is that they demonstratethat the ethnic relations of two dissimilar contiguous peoples need not beprimarily characterized by hostility or anxiety. Compromise and co-existence also have their humour, one that is rooted in curiosity,observation and a degree of exaggeration, distortion, and selection that issufficient to induce mirth but not so great that it obscures the underlyingdelineation of social reality.
Ethnic jokes alleged to be rooted in prejudice or hostility or involvinganxiety have been analysed by many scholars but relatively little has beenwritten about 'descriptive' jokes. Yet these constitute an interesting andimportant kind of ethnic joke which changes over time in response tochanges in the culture and social structure of the group featured in thejokes. The link between jokes and society is closer and less problematicfor this kind of ethnic joke than for most others. As a society changes sothe jokes about its people change albeit with a long time-lag. Thepopularity of a particular ethnic joke of this kind may rise or fall inconsequence but, more important, the nature of the comic ethnic stereo-type itself can change. Thus as Welsh society has changed during the last400 years, the perception by both English and Welsh observers of thoseaspects of Welsh life which they regard as distinctively and comicallydifferent from English norms has also changed. As Wales has evolved, sotoo have jokes about the Welsh.
Indeed, the change that has taken place in the content of jokes aboutthe Welsh has been quite remarkable. Whereas in the Tudor and Stuartperiods the Welsh were primarily depicted in jokes and comedies asproud, aggressive, boastful and quarrelsome, by the end of the nine-teenth century a new and quite different comic stereotype of the Welsh ascunning, devious and pious had emerged which was almost the oppositeof the old one."
In the oldest recorded jokes told about them such as those found in oldjest-books, the Welsh are shown as belligerent, fierce and litigious in thepursuit of disputes, proud and boastful especially about their valour and
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military prowess, the distinction of their ancestors and the length of theirpedigrees. Some of these characteristics are illustrated in the followingthree examples:
(1) I find written among old gests, how God made Saint Peter porter ofheaven, and that God of His goodness soon after His passion,suffered many men to come to the kingdom of heaven with smalldeserving - at which time there was in heaven a great company ofwelchmen, which with their craking (boasting) and babbling troubledall the others. Wherefore God said to Saint Peter that He was wearyof them, and that He would fain have them out of heaven.
To whom Saint Peter said: 'Good Lord, I warrant you that shall beshortly done.'
Wherefore Saint Peter went out of heaven's gates and cried with aloud voice - 'Cause bob!' - that is as much to say as 'roasted cheese',which thing the welchmen hearing, ran out of heaven a great pace.And when Saint Peter saw them all out, he suddenly went into heavenand locked the door and so sparred (barred) all the welchmen out.
By this, ye may see that it is no wisdom for a man to love or to sethis mind too much upon any delicate or worldly pleasure whereby heshall lose the celestial and eternal joy.7
(Here the boastful Welsh are expelled from heaven for bragging andbabbling. The bait used to get them out is their favourite delicacy,toasted cheese.)
(2) In the reign of the most mighty and victorious Prince, King HenryVIII, cruel war began between Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Scots.The Englishmen were so mighty upon the sea that none other peopleof other realms were able to resist them, wherefore they took manygreat enterprises and many ships and many prisoners of other realmsthat were their enemies. Among the which, they happened on aseason to take a scots ship, and divers scots they slew, and tookprisoners. Among whom there was a welchman that had one of thescots prisoner and bad him that he should do off his harness. Which todo, the scot was very loath.
Howbeit, for fear at the last he pulled it off with an evil will and saidto the welchman: 'If thou wilt needs have my harness, take it there - 'and cast it over the board into the sea. The welchman, seeing that,said: 'By Cot's blut and her nail, I shall make her fet (fetch) it again - 'and took him by the legs and cast him after over the board into thesea.
By this tale a man may learn that he that is subject to another oughtto forsake his own will and follow his will and commandment that sohath subjection over him - lest it turn to his greater hurt and damage."
(Here the joke-writer having praised the English for having defeatedthe Scots, depicts a choleric, aggressive Welshman throwing a Scot
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into the sea with the characteristic Welsh oath 'By God's blood andHis nails'.)
(3) A Welchman that had one of his own Countrey men waiting uponhim, went to see a Comedy, and drawing out a Purse of gold andsilver at the door, was espied by a Cut purse and dog'd, who seatedhimself close by him, his servant having all this while a careful eyetowards his Master, and jealous of the Cut purse, so that whilest hisMaster was minding his sport, the Cheater got his gold and silver outof his pocket, and was about to be gone. The little Welchman's bloodrising at it, presently drew out his knife, and cut off his ear, whichmade the fellow startle, and troubled with the smart thereof, ask'twhat he meant by it? To whom the Welchman replied, shewing himhis ear in his hand, 'No great harm friend, onely give hur Master hurpurse, and I will give hur hur ear'.9
(Once again it is the little Welshman who is the aggressor and his'blood rising' he cuts a man's ear off.)
If we turn to the stage we find that Welsh characters in plays show thesame comic traits of pride and boastfulness as in the jest-books. Bartleywrites of the stage Welshman 1592-1659:
the playwrights are far more definite about Welsh temperamentthan about Irish and make it perfectly plain that the Welshwere expected to be impulsive, excitable, hot-headed and quick-tempered, ready to 'knog her pade' if anything offended themMost of the Welsh characters are also extremely voluble which goeswith their excitability; and they exhibit much personal, national andfamily pride. National pride is to some extent part of the stock intrade of all nationalizing characterization but it seems to bespecially emphasized in the Welsh and the opportunity it providesfor caricature is eagerly seized upon "' According to Englishnotions the Welsh were emotional and fiery. They were filled withnational and family pride, claimed descent from the Trojans orGreeks and were much exercised about pedigrees. Their namescontained 'ap' [son of] and were lengthy."
The use of a comic stereotype of the Welsh centred around the qualitiesof boastfulness, belligerence, personal and family pride can indeed beillustrated from the works of many Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrightsnotably Shakespeare (Fluellen in Henry V, Owen Glendower in HenryIV, Part I, and Sir Hugh Evans in The Merry Wives of Windsor) BenJonson (For the honour of Wales, Bartholomew Fair) and ThomasDekker (The Welsh Ambassador, Northward Ho, Patient Grissil).':
The stereotype of the Welsh that appears in the jokes and comedies is,as can be shown from other independent sources, an exaggerated butrealistic description of contemporary Welsh character. In particular thejokes accurately depict one specific social class in Wales at the time - the
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impoverished gentry. This is a group with whom English people wouldhave been likely to have had dealings especially in the Tudor period whenmany of them travelled to England."
The war-like character of the Welsh relative to the English had beenobserved well before the Tudor period, notably at the end of the twelfthcentury by Giraldus Cambrensis - Gerald the Welshman:
This people is light and active, hardy rather than strong and entirelybred up to the use of arms; for not only the nobles but all the peopleare trained to war, and when the trumpet sounds the alarm, thehusbandman rushes as eagerly from his plough as the courtier fromhis court They pay no attention to commerce, shipping ormanufactures and suffer no interruption but by martial exercises...they esteem it a disgrace to die in bed, an honour to die in the fieldof battle It is remarkable that this people though unarmed,dares attack an armed foe; the infantry defy the cavalry and bytheir activity and courage generally prove victors In our time,King Henry II, in reply to the inquiries of Emanuel, emperor ofConstantinople, concerning the situation, nature and strikingpeculiarities of the British island, among other remarkable circum-stances, mentioned the following: 'That in a certain part of theisland there was a people, called Welsh, so bold and ferocious, that,when unarmed, they did not fear to encounter an armed force;being ready to shed their blood in defence of their country and tosacrifice their lives for renown .. ,'14
In addition to portraying the Welsh as a proud warrior people Giraldusdrew attention to the importance of lineage in Welsh society and theproblems that always occur among an aggressive people with strongloyalties to kin:
The Welsh esteem noble birth and generous descent above allthings, and are, therefore, more desirous of marrying into noblethan rich families. Even the common people retain their genealogyand can not only readily recount the names of their grandfathersand great-grandfathers but even refer back to the sixth or seventhgeneration, or beyond them, in this manner: Rhys, son of Gruffydd,son of Rhys, son of Tewdwr, son of Eineon, son of Owen, son ofHowel, son of Cadell, son of Roderic Mawr and so on.
Being particularly attached to family descent, they revenge withvehemence the injuries which may tend to the disgrace of theirblood; and being naturally of a vindictive and passionate dispositionthey are ever ready to avenge not only recent but ancient affronts
15
It may be that to some extent Giraldus depicts the Welsh as they wouldlike to be rather than as they were but even if this were the case, it is stillsignificant that the Welsh should place such a high value on pride, honourand belligerence. The Welsh were clearly, to use Herbert Spencer's
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terms, a militant rather than an industrial society.1" When compared withtheir English contemporaries, the Welsh must have been and must havebeen perceived to have been the more militant and the less industrial ofthe two societies. Relative to their more peaceful and settled Englishneighbours, the Welsh were more preoccupied with fighting and less withproduction.
The unsettled state of Wales during Owain Glyndwr's revolt, the Warsof the Roses17 and even, to some extent, after Tudor pacification18
ensured that the traditions of this war-like society especially concernedwith questions of lineage and family pride remained alive though increas-ingly anachronistic at the end of the sixteenth century. The class thatparticularly expressed these traditions was that uniquely Welsh class, thepoor gentry.
The Welsh gentry during the Tudor period consisted of a large classof small poor landowners whose annual income would generally havebeen less than a hundred pounds. These impoverished squires clungdesperately to their rank as gentry but their rustic way of life was verysimilar to that of the richer yeomen and their precarious economicposition meant that only a very narrow margin separated them from thelandless and the lower orders.'''
During the Tudor period a few of the gentry were able to becomewealthy by the acquisition of crown or monastic lands, by trade andcommerce or by practising law,3' but most of them remained poor and theWelsh economy in the sixteenth century was generally backward andimpoverished. Many of the gentry must have felt threatened both by theeconomic stresses that characterized the Tudor period11 and by the know-ledge that most of the English gentry and a few fortunate Welsh familiesenjoyed a standard of living far higher than they would ever be able toafford.
Under these circumstances it is not surprising that the poor gentry hungon desperately to the meagre estates and the honourable ancestry thatwere the basis of their status as gentry. Their marginal economic positionled them to lay enormous stress on their status and particularly on thenon-economic bases of this status. With the change from the old Welshcustom of gavelkind (whereby land was divided equally between the maleheirs) to the English Law of primogeniture following the act of Union,"pedigrees and genealogies lost their economic importance. They ceasedto be the key to a man's property rights. However, they remained thejustification for the social pretensions and self-esteem of the poor Welshgentry.-' 'The poverty of Wales in the sixteenth century . . . meant thatmany of the gentry, circumscribed in their scope for material ostentation,made much more of their pedigrees than would otherwise have been thecase."4
Faced with (a) the uncertain Tudor economy, (b) the threat of socialand economic change following the reform of the laws of inheritancewhich must have tended to concentrate land ownership in fewer hands,:5
and (c) a sense of relative deprivation vis-a-vis the English gentry and
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those few Welsh gentry wealthy enough to emulate them, the poor Welshgentry clung to a past where status was determined by lineage andmilitary prowess and not by mere wealth and consumption.
Their position has been well summed up by Professor W. OgwenWilliams:
Many of these freeholders clung tenaciously to their lands, all themore so because of their fierce pride in their ancestry, for they, too,could lay claim to as good a descent and often enough to the samepedigree as those of the leading squires in the neighbourhood. Forthe men in sixteenth-century Wales who owned freehold land,however small its extent, were generally descendants of the Welshmilitary class of the Middle Ages. They were still in the indigenoussociety of Wales uchelwyr (noblemen, gentlemen) and brehyrion(barons, chiefs) and so they regarded themselves and were regardedin their own community There was in fact in Tudor Wales apurely Welsh concept of boneddigeiddrwydd or nobility, of thatwhich identified the higher classes in the social order . . . it attri-buted nobility to those distinguished by ancestry and pride in armsrather than by landed possessions and ostentation.26
The very precariousness of the gentry's status made them proud,touchy and aggressive. Their anachronistic concept of status based onmilitary valour rather than wealth reinforced this tendency towardsaggressiveness. The touchiness and pride of the Welsh gentry indeedoften led to strife and disorder in the Tudor period. Finnemore commentsthat:
Among these proud and fiery Welshmen the cause of a murderousfeud was often of the most trifling nature. Nine times out often it layin a question of rank and dignity, who should have the higher placeat a feast, who should have a right to the first good-morrow, somematter, small in itself, but bringing to the fore all the stiffness offamily pride and the resolution to avenge an insult whether real orfancied.27
Some of the observations made about Tudor Wales and its gentry applyequally to England and the gentry there. None the less it is clear that atthis time England was more peaceful, more advanced economically andin the arts of civilization. The gentry in England were a smaller pro-portion of the total population and though an important and powerfulclass, not as dominant and as nationally typical a group as their Welshcounterparts. The English gentry were economically more secure and lessobsessed with questions of pride and pedigree. They were more given tothe rational pursuit of economic goals and less inclined to waste their timeand substance in fighting. 'The English gentry too were proud of theirancestry but in England possession of land, manors and wealth and whatSir Thomas Smith called "port, charge and countenance" were moreimportant in the cult of gentryhood than was the case in Wales.":s
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The Welsh stereotype in Tudor and Jacobean jokes and plays is realisti-cally based on actual differences between Welsh and English. The attri-butes of pride and pugnacity, boastfulness and touchiness, ascribed to theWelsh in the jokes make up a reasonably accurate description of theWelsh gentry of the time. The English in everyday life found the personalpride of the Welsh gentry and 'their insistence upon the importance ofpedigree as a cardinal criterion of social standing' excessive and ludi-crous,39 and 'the poor Welsh gentleman with a pedigree as long as his armwas almost a standing joke'.1" The jokes are always realistic though theysometimes exaggerate. They range from true stories retold with slightembellishments to grotesquely exaggerated inventions. An example ofthe former is derived from Yorke's Royal Tribes of Wales:
When King James I was visiting Chester, he was met by a greatnumber of horsemen who formed a guard of honour. The weatherwas warm and the road dusty and his majesty was greatly incon-venienced by the crowd pressing round his coach. So he told one ofhis attendents to disperse them politely. The nobleman thereuponput his head out of the window and said 'It is the King's pleasure thatall who are gentlemen should ride forward'. Away they all rode as iffor life, save one man, 'And so sir, you are not a gentleman then',observed the King, 'Oh yes please your majesty', was the reply; 'buthur ceffyl [my horse], God help hur is not so good'. 'Every man is agentleman in Wales', remarked his majesty."
This story has a ring of authenticity about it. It brings together the twodistinctive attributes of the Welsh gentry, their poverty and their pride intheir status. The contradiction between the rider's class position and hisclaims to a high status is beautifully expressed in this joke. An instancefrom the ludicrous end of the spectrum is cited by Bartley from ThomasRandolph's play Hey for honesty of 1629. Caradock a Welsh beggarcompares his lice with those of the other beggars: 'Her lice are betterpedigree as the goodst of them all. Her lice come ap Shinkin, ap Shon, apOwen, ap Richard, ap Morgan, ap Hugh, ap Brutus, ap Silvius, ap Eneasand so up my shoulder. An't her lice will not deshenerate from herpetticree.'32
The idea of a Welsh beggar bragging of the pedigree of his lice isludicrous but the joke is none the less realistic in that it is based on a realsocial phenomenon - the antithesis between the pride and the poverty ofthe Welsh of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Because Welsh jokes and comedy had their roots in a particularsocial reality, as soon as that reality changed, the Welsh joke stereotypedeclined in vividness and importance. In time the Welsh gentry becameAnglicized and 'more and more it was "the curtisie, humanite and civilliteof England", as one of the Welsh gentry themselves put it, that were
coming to be recognized and commended as the hallmarks of gentry-hood'." As Welsh society became less violent, the Welsh gentry neces-sarily acquired more peaceful habits, and looked to the English gentry as
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their model of correct behaviour.* In turn as the gentry acquired morepeaceful habits, Welsh society became less violent. A virtuous circle wasestablished.
Legal and economic changes in Wales further transformed the positionof the gentry. The abolition of gavelkind in favour of primogeniture as themode of succession to property following the Act of Union of 1536 had adecisive long-run effect on the economic and social position of the gentry.G. Dyfnallt Owen suggests that:
The government may have hoped that primogeniture would gradu-ally displace the immemorial ties of tribal kinship and weaken theties of personal loyalty, dependence and service by reducing thenumber of people who profited by them and so contributing to thepacification of the Welsh countryside.'5
The change from gavelkind to primogeniture also led to a more peace-ful Wales in two other ways. In the first place, it reduced the number andintensity of disputes over inheritance and property rights.36 Second, it ledto the concentration of land ownership in fewer hands. The poor gentrygradually disappeared to be replaced by a smaller class of more sub-stantial gentry while many of the less successful gentleman freeholderswere reduced to the status of tenant farmers, or even landless labourers.'7
The poor gentry fiercely resisted these tendencies and their pride andbellicosity in the Tudor period reflected their resistance, but in the longrun their position was eroded by the forces of the market. The prosperoussurvivors who constituted the new landed gentry, came to base theirstatus on wealth rather than military pride or lineage while the descen-dants of the downwardly mobile in time lost caste altogether. The socialclass that English observers regarded as typically Welsh, shrank in sizeand anglicized its attitudes and behaviour.
The decline in Welsh bellicosity and the assimilation and partial eclipseof the poor gentry undermined the social base of the Welsh joke stereo-type , and as a result there was a steady decline in the popularity of Welshjokes and comedy parts from about 1620 and the old aggressive stereo-type gradually disappeared. As it disappeared, it also decayed. The stageWelshman, the Welshman of the joke became an anachronism, hisqualities determined by the obsolete conventions of an earlier age.Bartley writes of the stage Welshman of the eighteenth century:
The Welsh characters when they are significantly nationalized showlittle change from those of the preceding period and that little is inthe direction of an even more rigid and automatic conventionality.The stock figure now seems to be accepted wholly without questionand to be not so much unreal as conceived without reference toreality.*
Similarly the number of jokes about Welsh boastfulness, choler orpedigrees declined and the few such jokes of this kind that survive as lateas the twentieth century have an air of dusty antiquity about them.
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Something for Dr. DarwinSir Watkin Williams Wynne, talking to a friend about the antiquity of hisfamily, which he carried up to Noah, was told that he was a meremushroom of yesterday. 'How so, pray?' said the baronet - 'Why,'continued the other, 'when I was in Wales, a pedigree of a particularfamily was shown to me: it filled five large skins of parchment, and nearthe middle of it was a note in the margin: - About this time the world wascreated.'"
The archaic nature of these jokes is equally well illustrated by the long-surviving anecdote 'An unfortunate Welshman';
An Unfortunate WelshmanAn Englishman, riding on a very dark night among the Welsh mountains,was attracted by a cry of distress, proceeding apparently from a man whohad fallen into a ravine near the highway. On listening attentively, heheard the words, 'Help, master, help!' in a voice truly Cambrian. 'Help!what, who are you?' inquired the traveller. 'Jenkin-ap-Griffith-ap-Robin-ap-William-ap-Rees-ap-Evan', was the response; 'Lazy fellowsthat ye be', rejoined the Englishman, setting spurs to his horse, 'to berolling in that hole, half-a-dozen of ye! why, in the name of common-sense, don't you help one another out?'4"
The stilted language of these jokes and the use of archaic wordsand phrases such as 'how so, pray?' or 'ye be' for 'you are' revealthat they are not contemporary jokes of the late nineteenth or earlytwentieth centuries but fossilized jokes of a previous era.41 No new jokesof this type have been invented and indeed Welsh jokes have appeared•which actually invert the old stereotype completely as in the followingjoke:
Even today there seems to linger an idea in the mind of some peoplethat to enter the army is somewhat akin to going to prison. Someyears before the war, a distinguished Welsh regiment performed arecruiting march through its territorial district. In one town itsecured one recruit. The following Sunday, in the nonconformistchapel at which this one bold recruit had occasionally attended, theminister announced from the pulpit, 'we will now take up a collec-tion for the purpose of buying the discharge of our brother MorganA. P. Jones, who has gone for a soldier.'42
In this joke we see embodied the dislike of the army, of soldiering andof militarism that characterized British Protestant nonconformists in thenineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was true of England as wellas Wales but in England the nonconformists were a minority concen-trated in the lower middle class. In Wales the bulk of the population wasattached to the nonconformist chapels- Baptists and Independents (Con-gregationalists), Wesleyan and Calvinistic Methodists being the main
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denominations. Hence the distrust of the army would have been morewidely diffused throughout the society.
Robert Graves writes of his experiences as an officer in the famousWelsh regiment - the Royal Welch Fusiliers - during the First WorldWar:
In peacetime the regular battalionsof the regiment, though officeredmainly by Anglo-Welshmen of county families, did not containmore than about one Welsh-speaking Welshman in fifty. Mostrecruits came from Birmingham The chapels held soldiering tobe sinful and in Merioneth the chapels had the last word. Prayerswere offered for me by the chapels, not because of the physicaldangers 1 would run in France but because of the moral dangersthreatening me at home. However, when Lloyd George becameMinister of Munitions in 1915 and persuaded the chapels that warwas a Crusade, we had a sudden tremendous influx of Welshmenfrom North Wales. They were difficult soldiers who particularlyresented having to stand still while N.C.O.s swore at them.45
Graves himself recognizes how profoundly the Welsh character musthave changed since the Tudor period. He justifies the use of the old-fashioned spelling 'Welch' in the regimental title 'The Royal Welch' byreference to this change:
Welch referred us somehow to the archaic North Wales of HenryTudor and Owen Glendower and Lord Herbert of Cherbury, thefounder of the regiment; it dissociated us from the modern NorthWales of chapels, Liberalism, the dairy and drapery business, slatemines and the tourist trade.44
The Anglo-Welsh army officers of county families of whom Graveswrites were the prosperous and Anglicized twentieth-century remnant ofthe old gentry class. They were by this time few in number and in no senserepresentative of the Welsh people as a whole. The curious paradox isthat this tiny group, highly anglicized and very cut off from the other classthat made up Welsh society, was now the main bearer of the ancientmartial tradition. However, the very fact that it was this group, a groupperceived as alien by most Welsh people, that upheld the martial tradi-tion, served only to increase the determination with which the Welshnonconformist majority rejected it.
Economic, cultural, and religious divisions coincided in nineteenth-century Wales in such a way as to alienate the gentry from their tenants.As Cecil Price has put it:
The squirearchy and parsons were quite out of touch with thecommon people - landlords and land-grabbers who had long for-gotten Welsh and had taken everything English for their model.Their identification with the Church of England helped to increasereligious bitterness and to turn the Welsh from a lax. happy-go-
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lucky people into a nation conscious of its sins and its grievances.45
It is the people 'conscious of their sins and grievances' who now becomeregarded as the typical comic Welshmen of the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies. They constitute a group better defined in religious rather thanclass terms, for the Welsh nonconformists came to include not merely thepeasants and traders of rural Wales, but also the entrepreneurs andindustrial workers of the coalfields and the Welsh emigres who made up ahigh proportion of the drapers, dairymen and schoolteachers of England.
The new comic stereotype of the Welsh describes them as essentiallypious, crafty and devious, and jokes about the Welsh from the nineteenthcentury onwards tend to depict a crafty Welshman either successfullytricking someone or attempting to do so but accidentally giving the gameaway. The fiery Welsh soldier has been replaced by the cunning yet piousWelsh deacon, minister, politician or tradesman as we can see from thefollowing examples taken from Scottish, Irish and French as well asEnglish and Welsh sources:
A certain political appointment once lay between a Welsh and a ScotchM.P. On being asked which man he thought ought to get the job, FatherHealy remarked: 'well if we get the Welshman he'll pray on his knees allSunday and then prey on his neighbours the other six days of the week;whilst if we get the Scotsman, he'll keep the Sabbath and any other littletrifles he can lay his hands on'.*"
IRISH/SCOTS
A Welsh proverb says: If your conscience tells you not to do something,which, although greatly to your advantage is obviously wrong, then youshould more carefully examine into the state of your conscience.47
SCOTTISH
I heard him [David Stephens] also preach from the text, 'give meneither poverty nor riches'. He said:'... Don't be like the hearers of Mr.Jonathan Jones of Rhyd-y-bont'. When the old man quoted the words,'Give me neither poverty', all the farmers responded vigorously, 'Amen,Amen', but when he went on to repeat the words 'nor riches' their voicessubsided into a moan - 'H'm! H'm!' They lost the hwyland collapsed all atonce.4li
WELSH
'LOOK YOU! Y CAPEL''Cenelir Cyfarddfod Blynyddol un y Capel Uchod; Nos Yau; Nos
Wener; Parch. Rev. Hugh Hughes, M.A. Llwys. Admission 1/-.'4V
SCOTTISH
The widow of a Welsh banker asked the local minister how much hewould charge to give a funeral oration for her late husband.
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'1 can recommend you my £50 speech', said the minister, 'Ten yearsfrom now those who heard it will still speak with amazement about yourhusband's fine qualities'.
'No', protested the widow, '£50 is too much'.'Well then try my £25 speech. I will say what a good and worthy man he
was'.'I'm afraid I still think that's too much to pay.''Fair enough. I'll give my £10 speech - but at that price, I will have to
tell the truth.'"FRENCH
There was a great disestablishment meeting with Lloyd George as oratorand a local non-conformist minister naturally in the chair. The chairmanbegan: Everybody knows that the greatest ly-yar [i.e. liar but with astrong Welsh stress on the first syllable] in the Principality is the Bishop ofSt. David's. But thank God! he will find his match here tonight'51
ENGLISH/WELSH
Overheard in a Welsh rugby changing room: 'I thought you playedbrilliantly Dai - [pause] - how did I play?'52
ENGLISH
When Sir Elwyn Jones . . . was once asked why the acquittal rate in someWelsh counties was as high as 90% he said, 'Well ladies and gentlemen,Welsh juries are generally in favour of justice but they are not bigotedabout it!'51
WELSH/ENGLISH
The stereotype of the pious devious Welshman found in these jokesis also exploited in much of the humorous literature of period notablyin Arthur Tysilio Johnson (Draig Glas)'s The Perfidious Welshman,Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Woodor Kingsley Amis' That Uncertain Feeling." The devious Welshman isindeed almost as well known a feature of modern literature as the proudand quarrelsome Welshman of Shakespeare's day. Possibly a transitionbetween the two stereotypes can be seen in the work of Tobias Smollettwhere both types of Welshman are satirized.55
The new comic stereotype of the Welsh is essentially a product ofEnglish (and come to that, other peoples', including the Welsh them-selves) perceptions of Welsh nonconformist Protestantism. Indeed, themodern satirical portrayal of the Welsh Protestant ethic combination ofpiety and acquisitiveness is in many ways similar to the comic stereotypeof Dissenters in English jokes and literature from the early seventeenthcentury onwards. English nonconformists are likely to be made fun of inthe same way as their Welsh counterparts but they are seen as meresectarian minorities in England, where in Wales they once constituted theentire nation. Indeed, the growth of Welsh nonconformity is one of the
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most remarkable social and religious changes to have taken place any-where in Britain. It has been estimated that in 1676 there were only11,000 nonconforming Puritans in Wales compared with nearly 400,000orthodox adherents of the Church of England. By 1801 the Noncon-formists constituted perhaps half of the Welsh church-going populationand by 1851 they exceeded the members of the Church of England by afactor of three or four to one.5" By 1891 Gladstone could truly declare that'the Nonconformists of Wales are the people of Wales'." This was truenot merely in a statistical but in a broader social sense for the Welsh sawtheir entire national, moral and political identity as essentially bound upwith their Protestant nonconformist religious allegiance. Religion wasthe crucial, indeed perhaps the only, factor uniting the Welsh into a singlepeople and this essential fact was realized both by the Welsh themselvesand by outsiders. It was for this reason that the humorous attributes of aparticular religious outlook became the basis of the comic stereotype ofthe Welsh people as a whole.
With the decline of Welsh Nonconformity in the latter half of thetwentieth century,5" the distinctive separate identity of the Welsh peopleis being steadily eroded59 and the jokes about pious, cunning Welshnonconformists that were so vivid in the late nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries are beginning to show signs of rigidity and obsoleteconventionality much as the jokes about the proud and martial Welshdid in the late eighteenth century. Jokes about the Welsh have alwaysreflected social reality but have lagged on it so that the jokes alwaysemploy a view of Welsh society that is slightly out of date.6" It remains tobe seen what new comic stereotype of the Welsh will emerge from thenew modern secular bureaucratic world of large, highly anglicized sub-urban communities in which an increasing proportion of Welsh peoplenow live.
In the past the changing comic stereotype of the Welsh in jokes hasreflected two of the most important social changes that took place inWales between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, namely, thedecline and disappearance of most of the small gentry and the Angliciza-tion of the remainder and the conversion of rural, urban and later indus-trial Wales to Protestant Nonconformity. The changing jokes reflectedthe social changes that took place in a fairly direct way because of therelative absence of anti-Welsh prejudice and because the Welsh neverbecame the focus for jokes based on someone else's fundamental socialanxieties. There has been some prejudice, of course, against the Welsh inthe past and this is at times reflected in jokes, but in general it may be saidthat the Welsh have for long been too familiar, too long established andtoo assimilated an ethnic minority to be seen as a threat or to be thesubject of violent feelings of rejection by their English neighbours oranyone else."1 The Welsh are unimportant and the main English sinagainst them has been indifference not hostility. Further, the comicqualities of which the Welsh have stood accused have tended to beanachronistic ones rather than expressions of some central social concern
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of their larger neighbour. Pride and belligerence, piety and deviousnesswere not central concerns of the society that laughed at them in the waythat stupidity, or its opposite, calculativeness, reflect the central pre-occupations of a modern society whose key institutions are bureaucracyand the market. Only 'deviousness' could really be said to come any-where near these central sources of anxiety and here Welsh jokes comeoff a bad third in comparison with jokes about the Scots or the Jews. Thethemes of rationality, calculation, business acumen and trickery arereally adequately covered by jokes about these latter groups and theWelsh tend to occupy a special little comic niche of their own. In thatniche, far from the storms of prejudice and incessant anxieties thatdetermine the form and content of other ethnic jokes, a purely descrip-tive humour has emerged and survived.
CHRISTIE DAVIESUniversity of Reading
NOTES
1. See R. T. Jenkins and Helen Ramage, A History of the Honorable Society of Cymmro-dorion (London, 1951), pp.3-4, 8.
2. See J. O. Bartley, Teague, Shenkin and Sawney being a historical study of the earliestIrish, Welsh and Scots characters in English plays (Cork, 1954), p.48. By the earlyseventeenth century the English saw the Welsh as 'the most remote and strange ofprovincials and the nearest and most intimate of foreigners' . . . 'more a member of thefamily than the Scot and less of a foreigner than the Irishman' . . . must better liked thaneither of them'. Bartley, p.48.
3. See, for instance, Andrea Greenburg, 'Forms and Functions of the Ethnic Joke',Keystone Folklore Quarterly (Winter 1972), Vol.XVII, pp. 144-62; Sig Altman, TheComic Image of the Jew (Rutherford, 1971).
4. See J.R. Lander, Conflict and stability in Fifteenth Century England (London, 1977),pp.183-4.
5. Christie Davies, 'Ethnic Jokes, Moral Values and Social Boundaries', British Journal ofSociology, Vol.XXXIII, No.3 (Sept. 1982), pp.383-403. See also Christie Davies,Jokes are about peoples, Indiana University Press (forthcoming).
6. There is some trace of the comic devious Welshman in the earlier period - see, forinstance, Keith Thomas, 'The Place of Laughter in Tudor and Stuart England', TimesLiterary Supplement, 21 Jan. 1977, p.77 and Paul Ferris, Dylan Thomas (London,1977), p.25. In general, however, this is not stressed in the literature of the earlierperiod. See Bartley, op. cit., p.64.
7. From the Tudor Jest-Book, A. C. Mery Talys (John Rastell, 1526) in P. M. Zall (ed.). AHundred Merry Tales and other English Jestbooks of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth century(Lincoln, NB, 1977), p. 132, joke 78. See also Shakespeare's Jest Book, an edition of 'Ahundred mery talys', edited in 1866 by Hermann Oesterly, facsimile reproduction byLeonard R. A. Ashley. Scholar's facsimiles and reprints (Gainesville, FL, 1970), p. 106,and W. Carcw Hazlitt (ed.), A hundred merry tales (London, 1887). Most of the book isalso to be found in W. Carcw Hazlitt (ed.), Shakespeare Jest Books, Vol. 1 (London,1884). This particular joke is also in John Wardroper 'Jest Upon Jest' (London, 1970).p. 119. An apparently even earlier version is quoted in Dorothy Hartley, Food inEngland (London. 1979), p.492. For further discussion of the choleric character of theWelsh as revealed in this joke, and the one below (see note 8) see T. Powell. 'The Welshas pictured in Old English Jest books'. Y Cymmrodor, Vol. III, Part I (1880), pp. 10 and114. T. Powell also comments on St. Peter's use of Welsh in the previous joke and says
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that it should read 'caws wedi ei bobi'. Powell notes (pp. 115-6) that 'The chief of theApostles apparently had only a rather imperfect knowledge of Welsh which is not to bewondered at as we know that even his Hebrew was far from giving satisfaction to thepurists of the capital.'
8. Zall, op. cit., p. 119. joke 61. See also note 7.9. John Ashton, Humour, Wit and Satire of the Seventeenth Century (London, 1883),
p. 435. Taken from A Choice Banquet of Witty Jests, Rare Fancies and Pleasant Novels.Catalogued as by Archie Armstrong, Jester. Published by Peter Dring (London, 1660).There is an earlier version in A Banquet of Jests (London, 1630).
10. Bartley, op. cit., pp.60-61. This characteristic is also stressed albeit in a much moreprejudiced way in W. R. 'Wallography or the Britton Described (by W. R, a mighty loverof Welch Travels] (London, 1682), see pp.83, 114-24.
11. Bartley, op. cit., p. 69. See also W. R., op. cit., pp. 83-4, 101. For a full discussion of theorigins of and arguments about the myth of British and particularly Welsh descent fromthe Trojans see T.D. Kendrick 'British Antiquity' (New York, 1970).
12. See, in particular, Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part I, Act 3, Scene I; Henry V, Act 3,Scene 2; Act 4, Scenes 1, 7, and 8; Act 5, Scene I; and The Merry Wives of Windsor, ActI, Scene 4 to Act 3, Scene 1; Ben Jonson 'For the Honour of Wales'', lines 215-25;Thomas Dekker, 'The Welsh Embassador', Act II, Scene ii, lines 70-83; Act IV, Sceneii, lines 65-80; and Act V, Scene ii, lines 1-4; 'Northward Ho', Act II, Scene (i) and ActIV, Scene (i); and 'Patient Crissel', Act II, Scene (i) line 80, etc. See also in Sir ThomasOverbury 'Miscellaneous Works' (London, 1890), p.87, 'A Bragadachio Welshman'.
13. See Jenkins and Ramage, op. cit., pp.3-4.14. Giraldus Cambrensis, The Itinerary Through Wales and the Description of Wales
(London, 1908), pp. 166-7. See also David Lewis, 'The Welshman of English litera-ture', Y Cymmrodor, Vol.V (1882), p.226.
15. Giraldus Cambrensis, pp. 183-4. See also comments on Giraldus' writings in J.E.Lloyd, 'A History of Wales from the Earliest Times to the Edwardian Conquest'(London, 1912), Vol. II, pp. 60-9 and T. Jones Pierce, Medieval Welsh Society, selectedessays edited by J. Beverley Smith (Cardiff, 1972), pp. 19-20, especially with regard tothe changing attitudes to homicide after Giraldus' day.
16. See Herbert Spencer, Principles of Sociology (London, 1969 edn.), pp.499-571.17. See Lander, op. cit., p.35.18. For instances of fights between factions of gentry in Tudor Wales, see C. J.O. Evans,
Glamorgan its history and topography and Monmouthshire its history and topography(Cardiff, 1938 and 1953).
19. See G. Dyfnallt Owen, Elizabethan Wales, The Social Scene (Cardiff, 1964), p. 12.20. See W. Ogwen Williams, The Social Order in Tudor Wales (The Cecil Williams
Memorial Lecture, 1967), Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion,Session 1967, Part II, London, p.177.
21. Ibid., p.177.22. Ibid., p.169.23. See Owen, op. cit., p.28-9.24. Williams, op. cit., p.170.25. See Owen. op. cit., pp.29-30 and 75-6.26. Williams, op. cit., p.177. Translation added - see also Ibid., p. 174.27. John Finnemore, Social Life in Wales (London, 1915), p.115. See also J. B. Nevins,
Picture of Wales During the Tudor Period (Liverpool, 1893), pp.16-26 and 113-30.28. Williams, op. cit., p.168.29. Owen, op. cit., p.13.30. Williams, op. cit., p.168.31. Quoted in F.J. Harries, Shakespeare and the Welsh (London. 1919). pp. 86-7. See also
Bartley, op. cit., pp. 61-2. where the incident is stated to have occurred during James I'svisit to Wales in 1607. W. R., op. cit. mentions it on p.84 bui mistakes 'ceffyl' (horse)for cattle.
32. Bartley, op. cit., p.62.33. Williams, op. cit., p.178.
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34. See Williams, op. cit., p.174.35. Owen, op. cit., pp.75-6.36. The Welsh historian and genealogist, Philip Yorke, wrote in the eighteenth century of
the old system of inheritance: 'our law of distribution - the law of gavelkind - balancedthe power and raised the competition of the younger branches against the elder: aTheban war of Welsh brethren ending in family bloodshed and national destruction.'Quoted in Nevins, op. cit., p. 14.
37. See Williams, op. cit., pp. 176-7.38. Bartley, op. cit., p.251.39. Mark Lemon, The Jest Book, the Choicest Sayings and Anecdotes (London, 1891), Joke
23.40. George Seton, A Budget of Anecdotes Chiefly Relating to the Nineteenth Century
(London, 1903), p.22, Joke 49.41. For a discussion of archaic Welsh characters in eminent nineteenth-century English
authors (for example, Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe, W.M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair andCharles Dickens, Bleak House) see David Lewis, 'The Welshman of English Litera-ture', Y Cymmrodor, Vol.V (1882), pp.224-60.
42. John Aye, Humour in the Army (London, 1931), pp.9-10.43. Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That (Harmondsworth, 1970), p.71. But see also 'An
Englishman', The Welshman's Reputation (London, 1913).44. Graves, op. cit., p.75.45. Cecil Price in the 'Introduction' to George Borrow's Wild Wales (London, 1955), p. 18.
See also Jenkins and Ramage, op. cit., p. 138.46. George A. Birmingham, Now You Tell One - Stories of Irish Wit and Humour
(Dundee, 1927), p.33.47. C.W. Miles, Taffy Tales from Welsh Wales (Dundee, 1926), p.6.48. David Davies, Echoes from the Welsh Hills (London, 1883), p.321.49. Miles, op. cit., p.16.50. Mina et Andre Guillois, Les meilleures histories Ecossaises, Anglaises, Irlandaises,
Galloises (Paris, 1979), p.169.51. G. G. Coulton, Four-Score years, an autobiography (London, 1945), p.173. This story
is also to be found in W.H. Macdonald, Yarns ancient and modern (Edinburgh, 1943),p.89. In Macdonald's version the bishop has been translated to St. Asaph's.
52. Lt.-Col. Dicky Dickinson and Bill Hooper, Clangers in Uniform (Tunbridge Wells,1975), p. 17.
53. Robert Mark, Minority Verdict, the BBC 1973 Dimbleby lecture (London, 1973), p. 10.54. Arthur Tysilio Johnson, The Perfidious Welshman (London, 1911); Evelyn Waugh,
Decline and Fall (Harmondsworth, 1965); Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood (London,1954); Kingsley Amis, That Uncertain Feeling (London, 1962).
55. See Tobias Smollett, The Works of Tobias Smollett (ed. David Herbert) (Edinburgh,1885), and especially The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker.
56. See W. Pritchard Morgan, in Parliamentary Debates (Commons), Vol.CCCL, Feb.1891, Cols. 1245-6, and for a slightly later period 'Report of the Commission on theChurch of England and other religious bodies in Wales and Monmouthshire', Cmnd.5432, 1910, Vol.1, Part I. pp.20, 54, 160-61.
57. W. E. Gladstone, in Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 20 Feb. 1891, Col. 1265.58. See D. Ben Rees. Chapels in the Valley, a Study in the Sociology of Welsh Non-
Conformity (Upton, Wirral, Merseyside, 1975).59. Here I agree with Gwyn A. Williams' diagnosis but not his analysis. See Gwyn A.
Williams, When was Wales? (London, 1979).60. Jokes always tend to be slightly out of date. They tend to celebrate the established and
the familiar because these are what everyone understands. Hence the dated humour ofjokes about nonconformity survives in a secular era as do. for example, jokes about lifein the mining valleys despite the long irreversible decline of the Welsh mining industry.For instances of this latter genre, see Clay Pipe and Carbon (pseudonym) Humour ofthe Underground (Cardiff, 1949); Tales from Wales (Cardiff, 1946); Ffraethebion yglowr Cymreig (Cardiff, 1978) (based on material from a competition at the National
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Eisteddfod. Treorchy, 1928); W. R. Jones, Isaac Lewis: A Humorous Welsh Character(Ferndale, n.d.).
61. See the conclusion of Rees Davies's 'Race Relations in Post-Conquest Wales: Con-frontation and Compromise' (the Cecil Williams Lecture for 1973), Transactions of theHonourable Society of Cymmrodorion, Sessions 1974-75 (London, 1975), pp. 32-56.
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