I had a very creative nights sleep as my brain is full of ideas about my book about Nash in his secret mission in Wales. Now i have an image of a team of ferocious Welsh magistrates at his command who thought nothing of hanging, drawing and quartering their fellow Welshmen for treason and drowning by ducking stool and then staking and burning Welshwomen for witchcraft if they harboured the slightest aspirations of republicanism. His main henchman was a non-magisterial disfigured dwarf by the name of Tom who lived at a farm Nash frequented quite a lot called Ffynnon Berw, Penbryn, Cardiganshire, where he developed a tropical trees and shrubs nursery, who took a leaf from the book of horror stories about Bavaria and Transylvania by acting as a troll at Nashs command throughout Wales, as his physical condition permitted him to hide under bridges and in culverts to attack any traveller passing over them. Officially he was Nashs bridge inspector, so he was paid a rich commission by the County Surveyors of Wales, all of whom were in on the Kings mission to eradicate his political opposition in Wales by his magistrates enforcing the Welsh Not law that Henry VII put in place in 1536-42. I remember seeing court records from the bad old days in Cardiganshire of women being punished for vagrancy by being striped; through the streets - i.e., whipped through the streets from one county to the next until the blood from the lashes striped the blouses on their backs red so the police in the next county would know it and stripe them through county too and on and on around Wales, until they expired from blood loss. It was a horrendously barbaric period in Welsh history. There is nothing new in what the world is finding out about sectarian violence in the Middle East and South West Asia. The medieval English suppressed Welsh, Scottish and Irish nationalism in equally brutal ways. They probably did it in America, Africa and Asia too in the early days of the Empire and just didnt have a high speed, electronic internet to publicize it. I do not intend my book turning into a political polemic but no doubt some people will make it so.
Posted on: Sat, 04 Oct 2014 07:22:38 +0000