Cymru kept a Celtic language after Edward’s conquest
Wales—Cymru in Welsh—is a UK country on Great Britain bordered by the Irish Sea, England, the Bristol Channel, and the Celtic Sea. Distinct Welsh culture rose among Britons after Rome left in the fifth century; Gruffudd ap Llywelyn briefly united the land in 1055 before Edward I finished conquest after two centuries of war.
People have lived here continuously since the end of the last ice age, and the first farmers left striking burial monuments and scattered settlements. In the Bronze Age the Great Orme in the north became Britain’s leading copper source. Mineral wealth probably helped draw the Romans, by which time Celtic culture had largely replaced the Neolithic population; the Romans called these Iron Age people Britons.
The English words Wales and Welsh come from Old English Wealh, plural Wēalas, descended from a Germanic term based on the Volcae, a Gaulish tribe, which came to mean any inhabitant of the western Roman world. Anglo-Saxons applied it to Britons in general, which is why places such as Cornwall, Walworth and Walton carry the same root. The Welsh call themselves Cymry and their land Cymru, from Brythonic combrogi, fellow countrymen, probably in use before the seventh century; the Latinised Cambria survives in the Cambrian Mountains and the Cambrian geological period.
Distinct Welsh culture emerged among the Britons after Rome withdrew in the fifth century. Gruffudd ap Llywelyn briefly united the country in 1055, and after some two hundred years of warfare Edward I completed the English conquest.
Industrialisation, above all coal and metal from the South Wales Coalfield, turned a farming society into a crowded industrial one, and roughly two-thirds of the population still lives in the south. Welsh and English are both official; about 538,300 people speak Welsh, most densely in parts of the north and west. The country has four UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
Source: Wales
