Vol 13: A Prism for his times: Late-Tudor Anglesey & Hugh Hughes of Plas Coch

A Prism for his times. By Robin Grove-White, 2020. ISBN 978-0-9568769-1-1

Price £20.00 postage £3.50 in UK

Sixteenth-Century Anglesey – isolated, yet surprisingly connected. Through Henry VIII’s acts of union of 1536 and 1543, the island, like the rest of Wales, was becoming folded into the new emergent entity of ‘Britain’. Yet its people remained resolutely Welsh, with their own culture and language.

Through the life and career of Hugh Hughes of Plas Coch, a previously-unknown Anglesey landowner-lawyer, fresh light is thrown on the island’s evolution and governance across the late-Tudor period, a time of turbulence and opportunity – of the first Welsh-language Bible, the Spanish Armada and William Shakespeare.

• How were the island’s MPs chosen in Tudor times?
• How were the Welsh and the English getting on?
• Who looked after the poor in north Wales?
• Who enforced the law in Elizabethan Anglesey?

This study uses one man’s life to reconsider some settled assumptions, with echoes for present-day discussions of Welsh identity.

“This wonderfully-researched case study of Hugh Hughes shows how one educated uchelwr took advantage of changing opportunities for Welshmen, to emerge as a major figure in sixteenth-century Anglesey and beyond. Hughes’s life and career, as presented here, makes an important contribution to Anglesey’s history, as well as to wider understandings of sixteenth-century Wales and its incorporation within the Tudor state”
(Dr Shaun Evans Director, Institute for the Study of Welsh Estates, Bangor University)

Robin Grove-White was raised on Anglesey and lives at Llanfechell in the north-west of the island. Long ago he was a comedy-scriptwriter of TV, including BBC’s That Was The Week That Was, but now he is Professor Emeritus of Environment and Society at Lancaster University and chair of the Institute for the Study of Welsh Estates at Bangor University. At earlier stages he was full-time Director of the Council for the Protection of Rural England, and chair of Greenpeace UK.

Professor Grove-White has a PhD in Welsh History and has published widely. He is the Anglesey Antiquarian Society’s current vice-chairman.

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Reviews

What the reviewers are saying (extracts) –
Dr Sadie Jarrett, Queen’s College Oxford, in The Local Historian, October 2021: ‘An important and timely book for Welsh History, with…a distinctive and confident authorial voice. Those new to Welsh history will find it an accessible introduction to the subject, while those more familiar with it will appreciate the contribution to the ‘Anglicisation’ debate. It is an excellent case study and will be of interest as a meticulously well-researched account of an early modern estate and its owner. The ability to place local history in its national context is one of the book’s particular strengths…’

Professor Madeleine Gray, University of South Wales, in Welsh History Review, December 2020: ‘…Excellent close-focus revisionist thinking on late sixteenth- and early seventeenth century Wales…A biography of a relatively inconspicuous Anglesey lawyer and landowner, it engages with current debates about the Acts of Union, Wales’s position in the Tudor and early Stuart state, and the contested subject of the anglicisation of the culture. Grove-White makes a compelling case for regarding men like Hughes as hinges between Westminster and Wales….’

Professor Emeritus Prys Morgan, Swansea University, in Transactions of the Anglesey Antiquarian Society, 2020: ‘…Introduces Hugh Hughes as a specimen to be dissected and analysed to decide which interpretation of the gentry of the ‘Acts of Union’ period is lifelike, that of the earlier school of Glanmor Williams and Geraint Dyfnallt Owen and others, or the more recent school of AD Carr, WO Griffith, J Gwynfor Jones and ‘revisionist’ historians. This approach alerts readers to a lively debate in Welsh history… a most lively picture of the immense importance of lawyers in English or ‘British’ culture in the sixteenth century and indeed in politics in the early seventeenth century… (including) a superb account of the development of a complex system of courts in Wales after the Acts of Union…. The author brings his most stimulating discussion – may one call it dadley? – right up to the present age of Devolution. In this sense Hugh Hughes was not just a prism for his times, but a prism for our times too.’

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