The Call for Peace

The call for peace descends from a specific, dateable event rather than from unbroken practice. In 1792 the Welsh poet Edward Williams, writing and performing under the bardic name Iolo Morganwg, held a ceremony he called a Gorsedd on Primrose Hill in London, presenting it as the revival of an ancient bardic order whose rites had supposedly survived in secret. Ronald Hutton's research into Iolo's own papers established what modern Druid orders themselves now generally accept, that the ceremony was Iolo's invention, assembled from his own reading and his own poetic sensibility rather than recovered from any surviving druidic tradition stretching back to antiquity. The invented ceremony nonetheless proved durable. Welsh cultural institutions adopted the Gorsedd form for their own eisteddfod festivals within Iolo's lifetime, and the call for peace performed at the opening of a rite, addressed to each quarter in turn, spread from there into the wider modern Druid movement that grew through the twentieth century, carried by orders that in most cases knew Iolo had made it up and kept the form anyway because it did the work they wanted, publicly renouncing violence at the start of every gathering regardless of what the classical sources said the ancient druids had done.