Vanished Kingdoms the History of half forgotten Europe

The title is a new book from Professor and historian Norman Davies who explores Europe’s lost kingdoms including 'the Empire of Aragon' which once dominated the western Mediterranean; the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, for a time the largest country in Europe; the successive kingdoms (and one duchy) of Burgundy, but from a Welsh perspective 'Kingdom of the Rock' in what is now modern day Strathclyde in Scotland is what catches the eye and despite the book being finished some time ago he has some interesting things to say about the current European crisis and its effects on the future of United Kingdom.

Norman Davies spoke to Vaughan Roderick on BBC Wales Sunday Supplement about 20 mins in and is available till Sunday morning (27th November).

He has also given an interview to the Browser Magazine and here’s the part on Wales and the UK 'Whether by military defeat or political decline, if a state vanishes that doesn’t necessarily mean that its identity vanishes with it. The people and culture remain, surely?

That’s a good question. When the Visigoths were defeated, how many stayed behind to serve the Franks? The identity of a state is very fluid, and a lot depends on the fate of the people – what happens to the people when one country is conquered by another. Anglo-Saxon England is a perfect example. Before the Anglo-Saxons came there was no England. They came into Roman Britannia and they took over the lands of Britain. They slaughtered and drove out British leaders. The story is that the British retreated and made the Western peninsula their home – what we now call Wales. And it now seems that the Welsh founded Glasgow.

I’ve heard about this. What is this story?

You see, the whole of our island used to be Celtic, British. There were no Anglo-Saxons until they came over the sea. The Scots came from Ireland and gradually took over the north of the island, which we now call Scotland. Scotland was formed in the ninth century. The Anglo-Saxons came over from the east and they created England.

But before Scotland or England existed, there were a number of false Roman native kingdoms of which the culture and civilisation was Celtic, or what the English called Welsh – which is a very nasty word, meaning alien. The Germanic peoples, who couldn’t talk with these Celts, called them Welsh – aliens. And the indigenous population of the region where Glasgow is – Strathclyde, as it’s called now – was Welsh. The chief hero of medieval Scotland was William Wallace. Wallace means Welsh. The Scots don’t tell you that. They had this theory that William Wallace’s family came from Shropshire, which is how they try to explain how a Welshman could be in what they thought of as Scotland. They didn’t know that these Welsh of the north were not intruders from Wales, they were there long before the Scots.

The book is available from Amazon and other retailers.Any source