the Madoc legend

Prince Madoc Leaving Wales, by William Cullen Bryant / C. Scribner’s Sons (1888) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

So here’s the story: after the death of Owein Gwynedd in 1170, his five million sons immediately began fighting over who would reign over the kingdom of Gwynedd in his stead. One of these sons–Madoc–decided that he was not interested in internecine warfare and set sail to the West, where he eventually landed some-undetermined-where on the shores of North America. Pleased with what he found, he returned to Wales and spread word of this Elysium to the West, gathered together a couple of shiploads of colonists equally fed up with intrafamilial squabbling, and sailed back into the West, never to be heard from again … until the more well-known colonization of the Americas in the early modern period, when stories of “Welsh-speaking Indians” began to spread, with some interesting results.

Okay, five million sons is a bit of an exaggeration; the whole population of Wales in the late thirteenth century has been estimated at about 100,000, so presumably the population was even lower a hundred years earlier, and even less than that in the kingdom of Gwynedd. However, Owein Gwynedd did have some thirteen children, at least seven of them sons, both legitimate and illegitimate. In medieval Welsh law, acknowledged illegitimate sons were equal heirs in a system that divided the inheritance among all male offspring (daughters got their cut as dowry), rather than the eldest-takes-all system of primogeniture. On the surface, this seems like a much more equitable–dare one say, socialist–method of providing for one’s progeny; the problem arises when some smartypants thinks things through, sees that even the most wealthy parent’s estate is still finite, and realizes that they will be better off in the long run with fewer siblings. Likewise, the medieval Welsh theory that a king should be elected by the kinship group of the previous king’s extended family sounds nascently democratic; the lingering archaic notion that a king must be physically whole and perfect, however, led ambitious warriors to industriously scuttle the chances of their brothers and uncles by blinding and/or castrating as many as they could get their hands on. They usually tried to avoid actually killing any of their rivals, though, because that would be murder! (See Thomas Charles-Edwards on Welsh dynastic succession in his Wales and the Welsh in the Middle Ages, chapter 6.) Madoc was said to be one of Owein’s acknowledged illegitimate sons, and an unlikely heir to his father’s throne, but he realized that his chances of reaching a ripe old age with all his bodily members intact increased exponentially the further he got from the bosom of his loving family.

“Excalibur novel” by Source. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Excalibur_novel.jpg#/media/File:Excalibur_novel.jpg

I first encountered the Madoc legend when I was about 14, in the novel Excalibur by Sanders Anne Laubenthal–one of those life-changing novels you pick up almost by accident in your early teens and nothing is ever the same. My father covered motor sports for Sports Illustrated at the time, and it was decided that the whole family would accompany him to Florida, where he was covering the Daytona 500, and then proceed to visit my grandfather and his new wife in Naples. I have about three vague fragments of memory of sitting in the stand at the Daytona Speedway, a relatively vivid one of going shopping for crates of oranges to send back to the other grandparents up in the frozen wastelands of suburban New York, and a conglomerate, ineradicable memory of the bookstore in a shopping center down the street from our hotel that I think we must have visited every day we were there. Because that’s what we do, we Joneses, when we are on vacation: we go to bookstores, buy books, and sit together in a room, reading. The bookstore was utterly charmless–as far as I can reconstruct from my memory, it was an old supermarket where they had swept away the canned goods and filled all the shelves with books, or that’s what it felt like. (It was probably a nascent Barnes and Noble, before they got the idea of setting different book sections at angles to each other.) But it was huge. I had never seen so many books all in one place outside of a library–in other words, it was a library that all could, potentially, be mine. Forever. And they had pretty much the entire run of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, which is where I found Excalibur. I think I read it in one swallow, out by the hotel pool and late into the night in bed.

One of the places where Madoc is said to have landed is Mobile, Alabama, where the Daughters of the American Revolution raised a plaque in his memory in 1953 (eventually removed in 2008). Laubenthal’s story takes place in Mobile, where a Welsh archaeologist is searching for the remains of Madoc’s settlement–and for the treasure Madoc brought with him: Arthur’s sword, Excalibur. The archaeologist is opposed by the undying sorceress, Morgan le Fay, and his quest for the sword, interwoven with another character’s quest for the Grail, proceeds on several levels, pagan and Christian, Welsh and American, this-worldly and Otherworldly. I was already vaguely interested in Arthurian literature and early medieval British archaeology; this is one of the books that set me firmly on the road to studying the Welsh stratum of Arthuriana.

Here’s the problem: Owein Gwynedd had too many sons, but until about the fifteenth century, none of them was named Madoc. Madoc doesn’t appear in any of the Welsh genealogies–and the medieval Welsh were serious about their geneaologies–and the story bears a striking resemblance to Irish legends of both pagan and Christian seafarers setting off to the West and discovering wondrous lands. The Voyage of Bran, son of Febal and The Voyage of Saint Brendan are the two most famous of these. Medieval Welsh princes who found the homeland too hot for them often set off to the West with an entourage, but usually only made it as far as Ireland–where they would likely have heard stories like those of Bran and Brendan. It’s probable that the story of Madoc began as a Welsh version of this kind of voyage tale.

Humphrey Llwyd’s Cronica Walliae, the first printed reference to Madoc’s voyage.
By David Powel [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

In 1559, Humphrey Llwyd published his Cronica Walliae, a Latin version of the Welsh Brut y Tywysogion (the Chronicle of the Princes, a follow-on of sorts to the Brut y Brenhinedd or Chronicle of the Kings, itself a Welsh version of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century Historia Regum Brittaniae where Arthur makes his debut in the broader world of European letters–all this material cycling and circling in and out and between and among Welsh and Latin versions, with correspondingly small and large audiences. The Welsh tell each other stories; some of them seep out to the larger British populace and everyone goes nuts over them; the Welsh get quite proud of them and retranslate them back into Welsh and add their own embellishments; lather, rinse, repeat). Llwyd included Madoc’s discovery of the New World in his Cronica, and some twenty years later, Dr. John Dee–London-born but proudly of Welsh descent–presented the notion to Queen Elizabeth that, by a tortuous route through the Tudors’ own Welsh ancestry, she had, through Madoc, a far more legitimate claim to the riches of the Americas than those irritating Spaniards, ptui.

As a propaganda point, the late-Tudor legend of Madoc exploded from whatever backwater it had inhabited into the mainstream. It was particularly attractive to the Welsh, many of whom had followed their Mab Darogan (“prophesied son”), Henry VII, to London in search of greater opportunity. English people thus became somewhat accustomed to the sounds–but not the sense–of the Welsh language, and when immigration to the Americas brought them in contact with other peoples speaking equally incomprehensible languages, it appears that they frequently jumped to the conclusion that these guttural babblers were speaking Welsh. The Welsh, meanwhile, not finding quite as many opportunities as hoped for in England and becoming increasingly oppressed in Wales, began to dream of another prophesied land in the Americas, where they would be reunited with their long-lost Welsh-speaking brothers. By the eighteenth century, there were Welsh-backed expeditions mounted to discover these Welsh Indians–who always lived just over the mountain or just down the river from whoever had told the story to whoever was telling it now–and while they never did find Welsh-speaking Indians, they did trek through large swaths of the interior of the continent in the attempt. Thus, while it is unlikely that a twelfth-century Welshman discovered the Americas, the search for traces of him led to the discovery of much about them.

But what would have happened if “Madoc” and his followers did settle and prosper in North America in the twelfth century? The whole interface between Europeans and Americans would have gone down a completely different path. For one thing, these settlers would have arrived looking for a quiet place to live, rather than a source of riches to haul back home. Presumably they would have had the sense to approach the natives of the place with somewhat more humility and a cooperative mindset. There would not have been as big a difference in the two peoples’ respective military technologies in the age before the invention of muskets, and since the Welsh were not traveling back and forth across the Atlantic, their inadvertent importation of Old World diseases might not have had such a catastrophic effect on the Americans. Perhaps a less drastic introduction to diseases like smallpox would have served to immunize the Americans rather than decimate them. By the time early modern European navigation and the exploratory mindset had developed, Americans might have been much better ready to stand up to them. Think of Madoc and his Welsh as a hypothetical Euro-vaccination for the New World.

I like to think, on absolutely no evidence at all, that the Madocian Welsh landed in the vicinity of Cape May, New Jersey, where they would have first encountered the Lenni-Lenape, an Eastern Algonquian-speaking group whose culture had some interesting consonances with the traces of ancient Brythonic culture and mythology that survive in the medieval Welsh tales of the Mabinogi (which were probably in their early stages of being compiled and/or written down from oral tradition when Madoc left Wales). Chief among these is “the avunculate” (see Tomas O Cathasaigh, “The Sister’s Son in Early Irish Literature,” Peritia 5 [1986]:128-60) in which the raising of children is the primary responsibility, not of their father, but of their mother’s brother. And if, as I have absolutely no evidence for proposing, the real reason Madoc left Wales was that he was the chief of the last Welsh druids, the leader of a band of pagan Pilgrims, perhaps the structure of the Celtic religion was more consonant with that of the Lenni-Lenape. The chief god among Algonqiuan peoples took the form of a large rabbit; Dio Cassius implies that Andraste, the goddess of the Iceni, was linked with the hare when he describes Boudicca releasing a hare to take omens from its running before declaring war on the Romans. The clannish structure of medieval Welsh kingdoms was certainly congruous with the clans and phratries of the Lenni-Lenape. And one can’t help thinking that the Lenni-Lenape’s somewhat underdog position among their neighbors, nonetheless united with a status as the oldest group, the “grandfathers,” of the area, is consonant with the status and reputation of the Welsh among the English.

At any rate, it’s fun to think so.

 

Further reading:

The best book on the Madoc legend is still Gwyn A. Williams’ Madoc: The Making of a Myth (Oxford University Press, 1988), which is the only work I’ve come across that digs deeply into what the legend meant to the Welsh. The Wikipedia article on Madoc is quite good for a quick introduction. Ronald H. Fritze discusses the Madoc legend in the context of other legends of pre-Columbian European discovery of the Americas in Invented Knowledge: False History, Fake Sciences, and Pseudo-Religions (Reaktion Books, 2011). There have been a couple of recent biographies of Dr. John Dee–The Queen’s Conjuror: The Science and Magic of Doctor John Dee, Advisor to Queen Elizabeth I by Benjamin Woolley (Henry Holt, 2001) and The Arch Conjuror of England: John Dee by Glyn Parry (Yale University Press, 2013)–that touch on his promotion of the Madoc legend and thus place the story in the larger context of Elizabethan empire-building and propaganda.

A couple of recent interesting books on Lenni-Lenape society are The Memory of All Ancient Customs: Native American Diplomacy in the Colonial Hudson Valley by Tom Arne Midtrod (Cornell University Press, 2012) and Lenape Country: Delaware Valley Society Before William Penn by Jean R. Soderlund (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), both of which illustrate how the Lenni-Lenape interacted with neighboring peoples and with the Europeans when they did arrive.

The Romantic poet Robert Southey wrote a long epic poem, Madoc (1805) (his prince’s first American encounter is with the Aztecs–well, hey, the druids are supposed to have been nearly as enthusiastic human sacrificers as the Aztecs, come to think of it), hoping that he would earn enough money from its publication to emigrate to America and start a new society based on his Romantic political principles. The modern Irish poet Paul Muldoon composed his poem Madoc: A Mystery (1990) in reaction to Southey’s work, imagining that Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in fact succeeded in creating this Utopia.

Sadly, Sanders Anne Laubenthal’s Excalibur is pretty seriously out of print, but there seem to be a fair number of used copies available on Amazon. I still have that copy I bought in Daytona in 1974, and it will never leave my clutches. Madoc features prominently in Madeleine L’Engel’s A Swiftly Tilting Planet (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1978); an eighteenth-century search for the lost Madocians drives the plot of Matthew J. Kirby’s alternate history YA novel The Lost Kingdom (Scholastic, 2013), which I have to confess is lingering on page 16 of the “still to be read” collection on my Kindle.