Stripped of every vestige of the older Roman civilization by ages of bitter warfare, of civil strife, of estrangement from the general culture of Christendom, the unconquered Britons had sunk into a mass of savage herdsmen, clad in the skins and fed by the milk of the cattle they tended.

Faithless, greedy, and revengeful, retaining no higher political organization than that of the clan, their strength was broken by ruthless feuds, and they were united only in battle or in raid against the stranger.

But in the heart of the wild people there still lingered a spark of the poetic fire which had nerved it four hundred years before through Aneurin and Llywarch Hen to its struggle with the earliest Englishmen.

At the hour of its lowest degradation the silence of Wales was suddenly broken by a crowd of singers.

The song of the twelfth century burst forth, not from one bard or another, but from the nation at large.
The Welsh temper indeed was steeped in poetry.