WALES

HAY-ON-WYE

SEPTEMBER 2018

Hay is an old market town about half way along the river Wye between its source on Plynlimon mountain in central Wales and its confluence with the River Severn at Chepstow. 

The Severn also rises on Plynlimon but takes a more leisurely course through English lowlands to the start of its estuary, with Chepstow on the right bank and the small village of Aust on the left between Bristol and Gloucester.

It is likely Hay was first put on the map as early as 1070 when William Fitz Osbern, a cousin of William the Conqueror, was ennobled to become the first Earl of Hereford and built a castle there to aid his campaign against the Welsh.

Fighting between the Normans and the Welsh continued sporadically for the next 300 years until the Glendower rebellion (the Welsh called it the War of Independence) in the early fifteenth century. 

In the first five years Glendower drove back the English until he controlled most of Wales and the adjacent English counties.    He formed an alliance with the French in the hope of further success but they were more concerned with events on the continent and Glendower himself lacked a navy and, critically, canon with which to overcome and capture castles. 

The English King, Henry IV, was accomplished in pitched battles but unused to the guerilla tactics of the Welsh. 

His son gained command around 1405 and gradually turned the course of events by using the numerous castles still in English hands as bases from which to attack the Welsh in the field and to deny them supplies.

These tactics succeeded and Prince Henry recaptured territory and castles previously lost to the Welsh.     By 1410 the tide had turned completely and although Glendower was never captured he disappeared in 1412. 

A year later the old king died and the Prince became King Henry V. He brought an end to most of the fighting by offering a general pardon to all who surrendered (except for Glendower himself and his committed followers the Tudors).

That left Henry free to pursue the Hundred Years War in France during which he gained his famous victory at Agincourt in 1415, commemorated in  Michael Drayton's (1563 - 1631) famous ballad starting with the lines -  

Fair stood the wind for France,

When we our sails advance,

Although Glendower's rebellion was defeated there is no doubt his defiance stimulated a sense of National Identity in the Welsh that continues to the present day. 

That is why road signs in Hay are displayed in both Welsh and English even though it is only just within the national boundary and 20 miles from Hereford, a quintessential English city.

The wars of the Roses started 40 years after Glendower's rebellion but their origin lay a few years before in a fight for succession between descendants of King Edward III's four eldest sons.    

When they ended, all male descendants in a direct line had either died naturally or been killed - it was a distant cousin of the Lancastrian's, Henry Tudor, who became Henry VII and achieved reconciliation of a sort by marrying Elizabeth of York. 

Prominent along the Borders were members of the Mortimer family, ennobled as the Earls of March, who were local rulers of the English-Welsh borderlands south of Shropshire and deeply involved in both the Glendower rebellion and the wars of the Roses in the second half of the 15th Century. 

I've found no record of specific incidents in or near Hay during either conflict but think the inhabitants must have been severely affected as they were so close to the Mortimer heartlands. 

Its similarly hard to believe Hay's inhabitants escaped involvement 200 years later during the English Civil Wars.    Shropshire, Hereford and most of Wales were Royalist and Gloucester Parliamentarian.        Hay, along with other border towns must have suffered as the fighting ebbed and flowed, if only as the armies foraged for food and recruits.

It was after these turbulent times that Hay became a quiet market town - no doubt to the relief of the inhabitants - but in 1962 a Welsh collector and vendor of specialist and second-hand books named Richard Booth set up shop in Hay and encouraged others to do the same. 

Many others had opened similar shops by the late 1970s and in 1988 Peter Florence, who made his living by organising Arts Festivals of various types, financed the first Hay Literary Festival that has been held every year since, in late May and early June.

I attended in June 2016 whilst staying in Hereford and an account of my visit is included in a blog entry posted in February 2017.

This year I decided to revisit the town and browse one or two bookshops in the off-season. I stayed at two sites, one quite near town south of the river and one up in the hills on the opposite side of the valley.       I preferred the second because it was less open and with fewer visitors at this time of year.

I did browse the shelves and bought a couple of books – a young writer's fictional story about life in the San Blas Islands, interesting to me because of my own cruise there in Alchemi (Grandpa's Voyages March 2014 Post) – and a biography of EM Forster bought on the spur of the moment because I found he had lived with his mother at Tunbridge Wells and concluded that English Suburban Life was pretty repulsive. 

But I also found standing in narrow aisles between shelves with hundreds and hundreds of books lost its appeal after a bit so I also toured locally by car on one or two days and soon moved on.