Wales, a conglomerate of Celtic-speaking lordships briefly united in the 11th-12th century, was made subject to the English Crown in the course of the 13th century. English overlordship was consolidated in the later Middle Ages, the heir apparent to the English throne taking the title of Prince of Wales. Hostile relations were tempered when a Welsh-descended dynasty, the Tudors, mounted the English throne. Wales participated in the Anglican Reformation and combined its constitutional  integration into the English state (Act of Union, 1536) with a recognition of its cultural (linguistic) distinctness; this was consolidated thanks to the country having its own Bible translation, which aided Welsh literacy and print culture, and the use of a standardized language in public affairs. The integration of Wales into the larger state is demonstrated by the very early establishment of an association of Welsh-speakers in London, in 1751: the Cymmrodorion Society. Initially founded to support a Welsh charity school in the capital, it soon developed cultural activities, starting with a project to establish  a library of all books printed in Welsh and bringing a court case in the 1760s to ensure that no clergy were appointed to Welsh parishes who were ignorant of the language. After a period of dormancy from the mid-1780s on, the Cymmrodorion was re-established in 1820 with more explicitly cultural aims, centrally involving the sponsoring of eisteddfod festivals.

The Industrial Revolution came early to south Wales with its rich coal and iron deposits; slate-quarrying expanded in north Wales around the same time. From the mid- to late-18th century Wales also was marked particularly strongly by the Methodist movement; Welsh Methodists seceded from the Anglican Church in 1811, a Methodist Presbyterian Church was established in 1823, in turn stimulating other Nonconformist denominations. A well-established hymnal tradition provided a support base for the development of choral singing, also in the industrialized areas, as a form of cultural sociability. Worship and hymn-singing in the widely disseminated Nonconformist chapels relied more strongly on the Welsh language than the officially established Anglican Church, even though individual Anglican clergymen – the scholar Thomas Price or the poet John Blackwell (“Alun”) – showed great interest in Welsh language, culture and history. Eventually, in 1914, the Anglican church was “disestablished” in Wales (i.e. no longer enjoyed the income of compulsory church taxes from the entire population), following a similar disestablishment in (predominantly Catholic) Ireland in 1869.

Growing national-cultural awareness at first took the form of a Romantic cultivation of culture, manifested in antiquarian, linguistic and philological interest and channelled mainly in burgeoning publications on these subjects and the revived (and partly invented) tradition of the eisteddfod cultural festivals from the mid-1820s on. A tone of antagonism crept into this cultural movement as a result of growing official intolerance vis-à-vis the Welsh language in England. English Saxonism provoked vindications of Welsh (and, generally, Celtic) traditions, thus with J.C. Prichard (1786–1846) and Price.

The region’s “Rebecca Riots”, provoked by anger over road tolls in a context of dire economic hardship among the peasantry, were blamed by a Commission of Enquiry in 1844 on a popular truculence that was beyond the reach of civilizing measures owing to the language barrier between the elite (including the Anglican Church) and the poor. A public inquiry into the state of education in Wales amplified this linguistic disapproval: its findings, published in 1847 as a so-called “Blue Book” (Reports of the commissioners of enquiry into the state of education in Wales), found Welsh education slack and sub-standard, and correlated this with the prevalence of religious nonconformism and of the Welsh language. The report caused great offence in Wales. A publicity war ensued, which still affected Matthew Arnold’s lecture and article series “On the study of Celtic literature”. Following the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon ethnotypes current at the time, Arnold vindicated Wales’s “Celtic” culture as a necessary counterweight to England’s “Saxon” stolidity and unimaginative pragmatism, and successfully recommended the establishment of a chair of Celtic at Oxford.

From the 1870s onwards, a campaign was forming for higher education within Wales. A federal university with constituent colleges in Aberystwyth, Bangor and Cardiff was founded in 1891, along with key institutions such as a National Library and a National Museum. In each of these cases, Wales followed a template developed in Ireland in previous decades. That also goes for a nationalist group briefly active in 1886: Cymru Fydd or “Young Wales”, formed among London-based Welshmen and modelled on the Young Ireland movement. Some branches were formed within Wales as of 1892, the aim being to secure Welsh self-government (itself an idea calqued on the Irish Home Rule campaign); but the movement remained marginal and declined in the mid-1890s. Political activism was organized along class lines, with a strong Trade Union movement, rather than ethnonational ones; nationalist sentiment was closer to the Liberal Party, which was led by the charismatic Welshman Lloyd George (1863–1945; Prime Minister 1916-22). Lloyd George had run a Welsh-language periodical, Udgorn Rhyddid (“The bugle of freedom”) in 1888 and oversaw the 1914 disestablishment of the Anglican Church in Wales.

A nationalist party, Plaid Cymru, was formed in 1925, initially as a social and educational  pressure group.