&gt;England annexed Wales, so there must have been a country to annex. &#x2F;&#x2F;<p>I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s true, the premise is false.<p>There wasn&#x27;t a country to annex, there was a loose amalgamation of forces fighting under Gwynedd (from what I can tell), because Gwynedd had recently subdued those areas by force. Those areas hadn&#x27;t been annexed in to a collective country with a single ruler, just like Gwynedd when it paid fealty to the English crown wasn&#x27;t yet annexed. Alongside that some regions were already in effective possession of the English crown, and some few maybe were neither under Llywellyn&#x27;s nor John&#x27;s boot yet [I&#x27;ve not figured that out quite yet in my research].<p>[...cut for size...]<p>&gt;So, the question is in fact: Wales was once a country, got gobbled up and is slowly regaining some independence. &#x2F;&#x2F;<p>I think this is a nationalist misdirection. To recapitulate - Deheurbath and Gwynedd always seemed to be at odds, never united in to a common cause or stably under a common leader, nor common rule of law after the Romans, until they both came under the English Crown (just as it was in [the rest of] England). Wales was arguably a country - a single kingdom - for a very brief time but the people of the different kingdoms went their separate ways at the earliest opportunity. These separate kingdoms then got gobbled up, just like the separate Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were gobbled up by Wessex. Unless you consider Kent to have been a country in 1900, say, I can&#x27;t see how you can consider Wales to have been one then either.<p>I think you&#x27;re right that since the WAG was established Wales has had some claim to being a &quot;country&quot; but there seems a stronger claim that it&#x27;s counties, like those of the rest of England are still a part of the country that is the dominion of the English Crown.<p>There has certainly been an effort in the last 80 years or so, since the Council for Wales was created, to make a new country: I&#x27;m certainly happy to go along with the WAG being a strong weight in favour of calling Wales a country.<p>It&#x27;s strange to me that in the UK we had a great Welsh ruler of an historic Welsh line who ruled over all over England [aka &quot;England and Wales&quot;] as a unit, yet many in Wales instead want to look back to the time when the Wales was critically divided between two great powers and when it was most common for <i>Cymry</i> to be killing one another; a brief period that ended with Welsh killing their &quot;own&quot; king [Gruffydd ap Llewellyn].<p>It strikes me that had Henry VIII chosen a new name for the &quot;land of the Angles&quot;, perhaps Cymru, then those who imagine they descend from the Celtic <i>Cymry</i> would have no complaint and would take full part in being citizens of that country. I wonder how getting access to genetic markers will, in the near future, change people&#x27;s ideas of national identity - if people discover they descend from the invading Irish, Scots, Vikings, Romans, Angles, Jutes or some other group rather than the &quot;native&quot; Celts will they consider themselves less Welsh? More British?<p>Thanks for challenging my arguments and for walking through this with me, happy to get more responses to this if you have them.