The teaching of our history in Welsh Schools matters.
The past informs the future.
The loss of the past would mean the most thoughless of ages.
History teaches us that Welsh means British.
Both England and Scotland are named after their invaders. However, the Britons remained.
Wales is named after the term used by the invaders, meaning foreigner in their language, to describe the Britons across our Islands who referred to each other as fellow country men and women, Y Cymry.
We hear of the Iron Ring of Castles built in North Wales after Anglo-Norman conquest, but we hear little of the 100,000 fellow Britons who died in the attempted genocide in Northern England by the Normans, the Harrying of the North, 2 Centuries previously.
The 1st Petition we are debating refers to the Glyndŵr Rising.
We hear of his dream of a Welsh Parliament, two Welsh Universities and a Welsh Free Church.
However, History also teaches us that he previously dutifully served the last Plantagenet King, and joined the Army which he led against Scotland, before rebelling against the first King since the Norman conquest whose Mother tongue was not French, in a plot with Mortimer and Percy to divide the Kingdom into three parts.
The first petition also refers to the Drowning of Capel Celyn, which belongs to every community in Wales.
However, History teaches us that this is also part of a wider British experience, where communities were flooded when the Rivington Reservoirs were constructed to supply water to Liverpool a Century earlier.
Myths tell stories about the early history of a people, and there are those who believe that the Destiny of mystical of Britain, Albion, Alba, Alban, is waiting to be awoken as a spiritual leader of the World.
According to the 12th-century “History of The Kings of Britain" by Geoffrey of Monmouth, the exiled Brutus of Troy was told by the goddess Diana;
Brutus! there lies beyond the Gallic bounds
An island which the western sea surrounds,
By giants once possessed, now few remain
To bar thy entrance, or obstruct thy reign.
To reach that happy shore thy sails employ
There fate decrees to raise a second Troy
And found an empire in thy royal line,
Which time shall ne'er destroy, nor bounds confine.
Although commonly dismissed now, Geoffrey of Monmouth's work was regarded as fact until the late 17th century, and the story appears in most early histories of Britain.
The teaching of Black and POC UK histories in Welsh Schools matters.
From one of the first black people to have lived in Wales, named John Ystumllyn, brought to Wales in the eighteenth century and believed to have to have married a local woman,to the likes of Shirley Bassey, Colin Jackson, Cardiff’s current Mayor and the former Mayor of Colwyn Bay, Dr Sibani Roy, the BAME population of Wales has made significant contributions.
Most societies have exploited slave labour at some stage in their history. This is also true of Wales.
A slave chain discovered on Anglesey, made to fit five people, can be dated to the Iron Age, about 2,300 years ago.
When the Romans invaded, they brought their own slaves with them – slaves from nations across the Roman Empire in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.
After the Romans left, British tribes enslaved those they defeated in battle.
The transatlantic slave trade flourished from the early sixteenth century until 1807, when, the British parliament passed an Act to abolish trading slaves within the British Empire.
Campaigns to stop slavery had been started by black and white people more than thirty years before the Act was finally passed.
The British abolition movement got underway in earnest in 1787, when Thomas Clarkson founded a committee to fight the slave trade. One member, William Dilwyn, was an American Quaker of Welsh descent.
Campaigners had been laying the groundwork by publishing documents about the cruelty of slavery.
One of those was William Williams of Pantycelyn – who wrote the hymn Bread of Heaven. In the 1770s a number of former slaves published their life stories and Williams was the first to translate one of these into Welsh.
Although Britain was the pre-eminent slave trading nation during the 18th Century and illegal British slave trading continued for many years after the passing of the 1807 Act, the Royal Navy's role in the suppression of the transoceanic slave trades represents a remarkable episode of sustained humanitarian activity.
However, illegal slavery still continues in many parts of the world today — even in Wales.
“I have a dream. Let freedom rein”.