Madog ab Owain Gwynedd

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Madog ab Owain Gwynedd. Legendary hero. Madog was reputed to have sailed westwards c.1180, never reappeared, and was supposed to have discovered America. In 1790 John Evans set off to find the lost Welsh tribes but was disappointed: Robert Southey wrote a poem ‘Madoc’ in 1805. The first mention of the story is in Tudor times, 400 years after the event, and it is merely one of countless heroic myths. But John Dee in 1577 used the legend of Madog to argue that a great Welsh colony had been established in America by King Arthur, and he coined the term ‘British empire’.

J. A. Cannon

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