Cymru, Cymro, Cymraes. These are the names by which Wales, a Welshman, and a Welshwoman respectively are called in Welsh to this day. Cymru is a modern spelling for the country of Wales as distinct from the people, viz. Cymry, the latter formerly representing both. The singular Cymro stands, according to Sir John Rhys, for an earlier Cumbrox or Combrox, a compatriot, as opposed to Allobrox, Welsh allfro, a foreigner.[1] As the name seems to have been unknown among the Brittones of the Devonian peninsula or of Britanny, it could never have comprised the whole of the Brittones or Britanni of that western Britannia which was severed into two fragments by the famous Battle of Deorham in 577. Moreover, as the name Cymry is not found accepted by the whole of what is now Wales until about the twelfth century,[2] it is certain that a long period had elapsed before such a common national name could have won its way to general acceptance. In other words, it must have been long extant in Wales before it was finally adopted as a national name in lieu of Britannia and Brittones. There was a northern ' Cymru ' north-east of the Irish Sea (whence the modern name Cumberland), and it was from this quarter that Cunedda and his Sons migrated over the water to North Wales sometime about the commencement of the fifth century A. D., who occupied at first the land between the river Dee and the river Teify, and then pushed through the modern Carmarthenshire till they reached the Severn Sea. These were the Picti transmarini of the 'Roman' author of the Excidium Britanniae, being undoubtedly the ancestors of the Cymry, properly so called.[3] The advent of these Combroges to Wales under Cunedda about the time that the last Roman soldier quitted this island in 407 is the beginning of Welsh national history. It was these who in process of time imposed their name on the land, people, and language of Wales. From the definition of Cymro in the present text, and as pointed out by the authors of The Welsh People,[4] the term Cymry only included the men of pedigree and not the classes or persons subject to them. At first it was
- ↑ The Welsh People, 26.
- ↑ Only in the twelfth century it begins to be adopted as a national name in the Brut y Tywysogion, s. a. 1134 (Oxford Brut, 309).
- ↑ p. 350, note 1; Y Cymmrodor IX. 182, 183 ; Mommsen's Chronica Minora III. 33, 156. The Picti transmarini of the pseudo-Gildas were not necessarily the supposed ' non-Aryans ' to which the term is more strictly applied, but simply invaders or immigrants from beyond the Wall.
- ↑ 117, note 1.
