The Bards of Wales

[1] This was because Emperor Franz Joseph had ascended to the throne during the 1848 revolutions throughout his Empire and had given the military carte blanche to defeat what he saw as both rebels against his crown and as a serious threat to the future survival of both the dynasty and the Roman Catholic Church.

Arany's poem was accordingly written "for the desk drawer" and published only six years later in 1863, disguised as a literary translation of a ballad from Middle English literature, as a means of evading the censorship that ended only with the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867.

[2] For this reason, a very similar denunciation of King Edward to his face had already been followed by the suicide of the last Welsh poet at the end of Thomas Gray's 1757 poem The Bard (set c. 1283), and which, along with the legend, may also have inspired Arany.

Gray's poem is also similar in being intended as an encoded criticism of Whig political ideology and the allegedly repressive policies enabled by the British royal family during a much later period.

An extremely stubborn determination to preserve Welsh literature and culture led in response to the late 18th-century revival of the Eisteddfod tradition, but without royal or noble patronage, first by the Gwyneddigion Society and then by Iolo Morganwg and the Gorsedd Cymru.