I have recently been appointed to the University of Sheffield as a Professor Associate to establish there a Centre for Research into Freemasonry, the first such centre established in a British university. In Europe there are a number of centres of this kind, and in both Europe and America freemasonry has long been accepted as an important area of scholarly inquiry. Despite the fact that freemasonry is of British origin, and is perhaps one of the cultural phenomena of British origin which has had the biggest international impact, professional scholars in Britain have only ever had a patchy interest in freemasonry, and the importance of its historical and cultural heritage in Britain has been largely neglected.

Inevitably, the establishment of the new Centre at Sheffield has attracted some media interest. The other day, I received a call from a producer at Radio Wales which was organizing a phone in on freemasonry, prompted by the debate in the National Assembly as to whether members of the assembly should be required to declare membership of the freemasons. I think the radio producer was hoping for some anti-Masonic tidbits, but I pointed out to her that freemasonry in Wales had a long and interesting history. The various Welsh Masonic halls are full of items which have fascinating connections with Welsh history. The last attempted invasion of Britain took place at Wales in 1797, when a French raiding party landed at Fishguard. If you go to the Masonic hall in Swansea, you will see there a sword which was seized from the hands of a French sailor at Fishguard in 1797, and which is still used by the tyler of the Indefatigable Lodge. Another treasure of the Indefatigable lodge is a glass vase inscribed with the name Brother Richard Trevithick, who built the first steam locomotive to pull a passenger train. This is one of the few relics left in Wales of Trevithick's stay at Merthyr, where he assisted in the building of a pioneering colliery tramway. There are equally interesting items at other Masonic halls.

At Abergavenny can be seen Masonic certificates associated with the lodges held by French prisoners of war billeted there during the Napoleonic Wars. The minute books of the Loyal Cambrian Lodge at Merthyr describe how a lodge meeting had to be postponed because of the riots there in 1831, one of the most important of the various working class disturbances at the time of the Reform Crisis.

In trying in this way to explain why historians should take an interest in freemasonry and its important cultural heritage, I inevitably stress its connections with what you might call hard history - the history of concrete events whose political importance is self-evident, such as the 1797 invasion or the riots at Merthyr.  But one of the reasons why freemasonry is such a fascinating historical subject are its complex interconnections with myth and tradition. I expect you imagine that historians are somehow not interested in myth and have a jaundiced view of tradition. Historians are supposed to be concerned only with facts, with those events which made up the long litany that we all learnt at school as representing the history of our country. But this is a very old fashioned view of history. This history of events was very much a nineteenth-century phenomenon. Historians are nowadays interested in much wider range of subjects, and are aware of a much more subtle interplay between myth and reality.

Here is a quote from the eminent historian Eric Hobsbawm which seems to me particularly pertinent: "History is the raw material for nationalist or ethnic or fundamentalist ideologies, as poppies are the raw material for heroin addiction. The past is an essential element, perhaps the essential element in these ideologies. If there is no suitable past, it can always be invented. Indeed, in the nature of things there is usually no entirely suitable past, because the phenomenon these ideologies claim to justify is not ancient or eternal but historically novel."

Hobsbawm edited a very influential book called The Invention of Tradition. This illustrates how many of the things that we think of as national traditions are of relatively recent origin and often reflect particular historical themes and movements. Some of these national traditions are the result of curious misunderstandings. You are all familiar, I am sure, with the Welsh national costume, worn by women and characterized by the famous tall black hat.

This form of dress is based on everyday seventeenth century dress, and there is little that is particularly Welsh about it. Wales being fairly backward, many women still wore this form of dress at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Lady Llanover, the wife of Benjamin Hall, Lord Llanover, the 'Big Ben' who supervised the building of the Houses of Parliament, was active in Wales in trying to promote a highly romanticized and anglicized view of Welsh culture. She thought that these quaint old women's costumes represented a distinctively Welsh form of dress, and adopted it herself as a Welsh folk costume.

Thus was born the Welsh national costume. The contributors to Hobsbawm's volume tell similar tales about, for example, the kilt or the royal ceremonial [royal pageantry is usually assumed to be very ancient, but significant parts of it are only about a hundred years old]. Hobsbawm in his introduction places freemasonry squarely in this context, and he cites freemasonry as a key example of an invented, innovative tradition.

In the examples assembled in The Invention of Tradition, one can see that myth, legend and tradition operate in history at a number of different levels. At one level are traditions, often regarded as a folk origin, which frequently bolster national self-perception, but which on closer examination turn out to be of relatively recent origin. At another level are myths, where information about a particular historical figure is very limited or shadowy, and what is interesting about that figure is the way in which myths grow up around him or her, and the way in which these myths change and develop over the centuries.

A familiar example of this would be King Arthur. The amount of factual information available about Arthur is negligible, and tells us little more than that he was a Romano-British leader who fought some battles against the Germanic invaders. What is interesting about Arthur is not this negligible factual information, but rather the way in which the legend of Arthur has grown over the centuries. The early Welsh and Brithonic legends about him dating from the seventh century onwards were a means of bolstering an early sense of Romano-British self-identity in the wake of the Anglo-Saxon invasions. With the inventive romances of Geoffrey of Monmouth, this mythical figure of Arthur is taken onto a wider stage.

Through the French romances based on Geoffrey's work, Arthur becomes a pivotal figure in the development of the international cult of chivalry. From these French sources, the idea of Arthur is then ironically annexed by the English kings to support their various territorial ambitions, an early example of the way in which Welsh legendary material has consistently been annexed to support English national ideologies. Through Caxton's translation of Malory's Morte d'Arthur, the legend of Arthur became even more firmly embedded in English national ideology, reaching its unlikely apotheosis in the nineteenth century in the identification of Prince Albert as the returned King Arthur. For historians, then, the myth of Arthur is far more interesting and important than the paltry and rather frustrating information about the historical Arthur. 

The title of my talk today 'The Voice Conventional' is taken from the title of a poem written by a Welsh stonemason, poet and social reformer, Edward Williams, who lived from 1747 to 1826 and is normally known by his bardic name of Iolo Morganwg, which means 'Ned of Glamorgan'. 

Iolo is a key figure in understanding and investigating the role of myth in history. He was a tireless publicist for Welsh poetry and culture, inspiring such figures as Robert southey, who wrote of 'Iolo, Old Iolo, he who knows/The virtues of all herbs of mount or vale/ Whatever lore of science or of song/Sages and bards of old have handed down'. Iolo was a highly accomplished Welsh poet, whose poems rivaled those of the great bards of the middle ages. But, in his determination to ensure the preservation of a vibrant Welsh national culture in the face of such threats as Anglicization, industrial development and the growth of non-conformity, Iolo used his unrivalled knowledge of Welsh literary traditions to fabricate a body of legendary lore which was until recently accepted as a genuine survival of ancient Welsh culture. Iola's poem, 'The Voice Conventional of the Bards of Britain', purported to describe the structure of an order of bards which he portrayed as representing an authentic tradition stretching back to the pre-Christian era.

Iolo's inventions, grafted onto the revived Welsh cultural institution of the eisteddfod, were at the heart of the creation of a modern Welsh national culture in the nineteenth century. At the centre of Iolo's creations was the figure of the Druid. Much of the inspiration behind Iolo's bardic-druidic fantasies lay ultimately in freemasonry, but this influence was expressed by a very complex patterns, which illustrates vividly the very complex cross-currents by which myth, legend and modern invention intersect to produce national traditions. 

We know a little more about the druids than we do about Arthur, but nevertheless the reliable historical information about the druids is very fragmentary and a great deal of the surviving information relates to druids in Gaul rather than Britain. As with Arthur, it is the later career of the druids, and the way in which since the sixteenth century they have exercised a recurrent fascination for the British, which is more interesting. It is striking that many of the figures in this story, such as John Aubrey, John Toland, and William Stukeley, are names that are also important in the early history of freemasonry. 

The druid first starts to appear as a stock literary figure, an ancient British priest and philosopher-seer, in the sixteenth century. Inigo Jones included in one of his masques a druid portrayed as a bare legged, long-haired, bearded figure in a shaggy tunic, wearing an oak garland and carrying a phial and dagger. This was apparently based on a description by John Selden of ancient German statues thought wrongly to represent druids. This was to become the standard visual representation of the druid, right down to the present day. This early interest in druids perhaps reflected the concern of sixteenth-century English writers in the wake of the Reformation to show that there was a distinctive indigenous religious tradition. These concerns were to become more evident as druidic lore became more established in the eighteenth century. This growing body of speculative romance about the Druids was to be further complicated by the cross-currents associated with the formation of a unified British state in the wake of the Hanoverian succession and the defeat of the Jacobite rebellions in the eighteenth century. 

[ Druid Part Two ]