ABSTRACT
A whole new dimension was added to the misty perception of the past which Iolo and the Gwyneddigion were cultivating; Iolo came to see Druids as Patriarchal figures of vast Celtic lands, charged with the Jewish Cabala, key to the language which God gave to Moses, antecedent to both Christianity and Hebraism. The history of the first Welsh working class, in the industrial valleys of Gwent and Glamorgan, around the textile townships of mid-Wales, in the smouldering hinterland of sans-culotte Carmarthen, is largely the history of the interplay between Unitarian and Infidel heirs of the Jacobin tradition and the leaders and organic intellectuals of the newer plebeian and proletarian people. Those common people of Wales, the gwerin as they were later to be called in idealistic salute after their conversion to Nonconformist radicalism, were largely monoglot Welsh, though an instrumental knowledge of English, spreading from the borders and the market towns, was more widespread than has been assumed.
