If the excessive Anglophilia and colonial mentality traditionally known as Dic Siôn Dafydd was never challenged or defeated, Lewis predicted in 1918, "the Welsh Parliament would [only] be an enlarged County Council.

"[7] Even though his father was a scholar, "who liked solitude and study", and possessed a very large library of Welsh literature, the only Welsh-language books that Saunders Lewis read while growing up were Bishop Morgan's Bible, the hymnbook, and Sunday school commentaries.

[8] Lewis attended prestigious English-speaking Liscard High School for Boys[9] where he was bullied at first, due to the fact that what little English he could speak, "was full of Welsh words."

"[11] Lewis' earliest attempts at writing poems were in English and were inspired by William Wordsworth, Walter Pater, John Wesley and the King James Bible.

[14] After his aunt Ellen persuaded his father "to accept the inevitable", Lewis and Margaret Gilcriest (1891-1984) were married at Our Lady and St Michael Roman Catholic Church in Workington, Cumberland, on 31 July 1924.

[15][16] When the First World War broke out, an idealistic Lewis, feeling inspired by the Aesthete philosophy of Walter Pater to, "savour this experience of life-energy at the utmost", enlisted in the 3rd Battalion, King's Liverpool Regiment on 4 September 1914.

British Army records describe Lewis at the time as five-feet and three inches in height, weighing just over seven and a half stone, and as having red hair and grey eyes.

[20] Furthermore, according to Jelle Krol, Lewis, was amazed to see how his own father's recent words of advice were echoed by Barrès, who wrote, "the only way to cultivate your personality as an artist and to develop your own resources, is to go back to your roots".

[47] Protest against the project was summed up by Lewis when he wrote that the UK Government was intent upon turning one of the "essential homes of Welsh culture, idiom, and literature" into a place for promoting a "barbaric" method of warfare.

[46] Dafydd Glyn Jones wrote of the fire that it was "the first time in five centuries that Wales struck back at England with a measure of violence... To the Welsh people, who had long ceased to believe that they had it in them, it was a profound shock.

"[46] However, despite the acclaim the events of Tân yn Llŷn generated, by 1938 Lewis's concept of perchentyaeth ("home ownership") had been firmly rejected as not a fundamental tenet of the party.

[53][54] Assuming, "a gloomy sepulchral tone", Lewis argued that the Welsh language was, "driven into a corner, ready to be thrown, like a worthless rag, on the dung heap."

[56] According to Marcus Tanner, "For the first time, the British government was forced to recognise the existence of a substantial non-Anglophone culture, and to rethink attitudes that had been set in stone since Henry VIII's so-called Acts of Union.

Lewis's legacy remains a controversial one and his simultaneously anti-Marxist and anti-colonialist interpretation of Welsh history and distributist vision for the nation's future have often been the target of attacks from both the Far Left and the Far Right.

Without mentioning Pope Gregory XI or his 1373 "règle d'idiom", command for the Catholic clergy to both learn and communicate with their flocks in the local vernacular,[66] Lewis believed that the coercive Anglicisation of the Welsh people began with the Acts of Union passed under King Henry VIII following his break with the Holy See and commented, "it was this materialistic and pagan triumph that destroyed our Wales.

"[68] For example, historian John Davies writes that, "in a notable article", Saunders Lewis argued that the Welsh bards of the Medieval era, "were expressing in their poetry a love for a stable, deep-rooted civilization."

"[69] Unlike Marxist historians and politicians, Lewis' intense hostility to the Welsh nobility was not for existing at all, but for abandoning noblesse oblige and their traditional duties between the 16th and 18th centuries.

Instead of acting, as their ancestors had done, as the Welsh people's natural leaders and patrons of Welsh-language literature and the arts, the gentry completely assimilating into the British upper class between the 16th and 18th centuries.

Even worse, in Lewis's eyes, and was the Welsh gentry of the era's widespread practices of rackrenting and political bossism enforced by evicting the families of tenants who voted independently of how they were ordered.

"[70] Despite his many statements to the contrary, Lewis' allegedly "condescending attitude towards some aspects of the Nonconformist, radical and pacifist traditions of Wales", also drew extremely harsh criticism from fellow Welsh nationalists such as D. J. Davies, a Marxist Plaid Cymru member.

For example, he praised Methodism and Calvinism for preserving the uniqueness of Welsh-language literature and culture against the Anglophilia and linguistic imperialism favoured by the Victorian era Welsh gentry, the Government in Westminster, and the Established Church.

[71] Along with his careful study of what had worked and what had failed in Irish nationalism, these were the real roots of Lewis' beliefs that Welsh cultural and language revival, Christian democracy, rural landscape conservation, and an Irish-style Land War -- meaning direct action tactics intended to reduce rents and coerce an Irish-style breakup and sale of the gentry's estates to their tenants -- were preferable causes for the Welsh nationalist movement to embrace than Socialism and which have attracted such extreme criticism, both during Lewis' lifetime and since his death.

Davies also pointed towards Left Wing political parties in Scandinavia as a model for Plaid Cymru to emulate, and was accordingly far more interested in the "economic implications" of Welsh self-determination.

His reedy voice, bow tie, cerebral style and aristocratic contempt for the proletariat were hardly endearing qualities in a political leader, and his conversion to Catholicism lost him the sympathy of fervent Nonconformists.

It caused grave embarrassment to his socialist colleague D. J. Davies, a progressive economist who, writing with force and passion, showed a much better grasp of the economic realities of the time and greater sensitivity towards the plight of working people.

Even though Lewis' support for the latter was rooted in his horror over both the religious persecution of the Catholic Church in Spain and the Red Terror by the Second Spanish Republic, the Far Left political leadership of Plaid Cymru, reportedly, "have never forgiven him.

[47] For the remainder of his life, however, Saunders Lewis continued to fight for the causes he cared most deeply about and remained an ideological thorn in the side of the Far Left leadership of the very political party he had helped to found.

The same writer then sarcastically feigned sympathy for Plaid Cymru, a political party which was allegedly burdened by, "bitterness and hate and the (possibly unintentional) air of physical superiority with which only too many of its members have regarded the bulk of their countrymen.

It is the English-speaking monoglot who faces a problem in trying to work in the public sector, and the language sections of universities do a booming trade in teaching basic Welsh to English professionals who have taken up such posts.

"[79] Lewis' legacy is further reflected by the fact that, even in decaying and traditionally English-speaking Welsh colliery and industrial towns and cities, Welsh-medium education is increasingly used as a means of both heritage language learning and reasserting national identity.