Welsh Not
Elementary Education and the Anglicisation of Nineteenth-Century Wales
Author(s) Martin Johnes
Language: English
Genre(s): Welsh Interest, History, Language and Linguistics
- October 2024 · 440 pages ·216x138mm
- · Paperback - 9781837721801
- · eBook - pdf - 9781837721818
- · eBook - epub - 9781837721825
About The Book
OPEN ACCESS
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Welsh Not: Elementary Education and the Anglicisation of Wales
This book is freely available on a Creative Commons licence thanks to the kind sponsorship of the libraries participating in the Jisc Open Access Community Framework OpenUP initiative.
The Welsh Not was a wooden token given to children caught speaking Welsh in nineteenth-century schools. It was often accompanied by corporal punishment, and is widely thought to have been responsible for the decline of the Welsh language. Despite having an iconic status in popular understandings of Wales’s history, there has never before been a study of where, when and why the Welsh Not was used. This book is an account of the different ways children were punished for speaking Welsh in nineteenth-century schools and the consequences of this for children, communities and the linguistic future of Wales. It shows how the exclusion of Welsh was not only traumatic for pupils but also hindered them in learning English – the very opposite of what it was meant to achieve. Gradually, Welsh came to be used increasingly in Victorian schools, making them more humane places but also more effective mechanisms in the anglicisation of Wales.
Endorsements
‘Few objects hold greater emotional sway in Wales than the Welsh Not. But did it actually exist? Martin Johnes shows that it did, but often in different ways to that imagined. This is a fascinating book about why and how a Welsh monoglot population was taught English, a pivotal event in the history of modern Wales.’
Simon Brooks, author of Why Wales never was (2017)
Contents
Abbreviations and notes on referencing
1.The Welsh Not in History and Memory
2.The Age of the Welsh Not: Language and Punishment before 1862
3.Learning without Understanding: The Problems of Education before 1862
4.The Welsh Not’s Afterlife: Punishing Welsh Speaking after the 1862 Revised Code
5.The Employment of Welsh in Schools after the 1862 Revised Code
6.Enemies of the Welsh Language? Her Majesty’s Inspectors and the British State
7.Victims and Rebels: Children and the Welsh Not
8.Parental and Community Attitudes towards Education and the Welsh Language
9. Education and the Anglicisation of Wales
Bibliography