I went to what was called a ‘progressive’ comprehensive. It prided itself with being more liberal than other schools: no uniform, teachers addressed by their first names and subjects such as community studies, drama, ‘English’ and ‘design’ in mixed ability classes. I thought it wonderful, and looked forward to most days I went there. Sixth form continued in a similar vein: no prefects, no head girl or boy, and then there was the biology field trip.
I remember it in snapshots now: standing on Aberffraw beach and looking over the sea to Snowdon and thinking there could be no where, absolutely nowhere as beautiful as this; drinking in the bar with Forestry undergraduates – my first taste of being at university – and thinking how much I’d really like to do more of this; and then late at night encountering one of my teachers in the corridor, an upturned can of baked beans on his head, with a group of the more excitable members of the class draped in bed sheets behind him. His glasses fell from his face as the last of the beans fell from his hair so I picked them up and handed them to him. ’We found a druid’s ring,’ he said in thanks, and then explained that K had obliged with quite a convincing scream after agreeing to be sacrificed on the adjacent altar.
The ring, I found out later, was one of the mock stone circles left at the end of each National Eisteddfod to mark the event. This one was presumably from when there’d been an Eisteddfod in Bangor. There was one each year. I knew that. North Wales one year, south Wales the next. I knew because my brothers entered the competitions once or twice and played in them – a source of great pride to my father and mother. Today I learnt that this Eisteddfod-business was a modern re-invention. Before that, they’d been meetings called by the bards, the ancient Welsh class of performance poets, and the last one that had been called came at a time of crisis.
In the 17th century the bards were dying out. Their time had gone. Previously they had survived on the patronage of gentry, their habitat the grand halls and communal living. It had been like this since from their beginning with the early medieval princes. They had obligingly written praise poems, laments and benedictions to command. If a lord failed to hire them or paid insufficiently, they were punished with satire. Sometimes they were like prophets and predicted the future: the successful predictions selectively remembered to impress. But now times had changed. The halls were going and people were preferring to sleep privately in chambers, their entertainment confined to taverns, where the scorned amateurs were taking over. The verse of these usurpers was free-form and entertaining. They composed songs about prize dogs and conquests that could rise above the clamour in the taverns because people would want to listen.
For a while the bards writhed. They were proud of their bardic knowledge. This was something that had taken years of apprenticeship to perfect and they held onto their position with an unreasonable insistence. There were rules. Poems had to have a certain metre, rhythm and internal rhyme. It was one thing to know them and recite them and thereby preserve the language and ancient history, another thing entirely to make up something new. There was a danger that all this knowledge could be lost. Something had to be done. So they called for eisteddfodau in Caerwys in 1523 and 1527 to establish bardic regulations, and thereby stop these intolerable vagabonds and vagrants taking their place.
They didn’t succeed. The old forms were now seeming tired. Their insistence on correct form lacking in life. The patronage were more interested in the English way of doing things, and although they continued to have their supporters well into the seventeenth century when Sion Dafydd Lies died in 1695, the age of the traditional bards had gone.
So I suppose the ring that my contemporaries encountered in Bangor was nothing at all to do with druids at all, nothing much to do with traditional bards either, but still a sign that the spoke word, poetry and music is still celebrated in Wales as much as it always was.
The school continued to make field trips to Bangor in following years, once they’d sorted out some issue with the bedsheets.
Clare Dudman 