Ignorance, Drunkenness and the Clergy

No doubt peeved by the unexpected defeat of Frank Edwards in the 1895 General Election by the Tory candidate Powlett Milbank, the newspaper Cymro returned to a familiar theme of the Victorian Welsh language press, the immorality of the Radnorshire population. How the 48.7% of the electorate who had actually supported Edwards fitted into their paganistic fantasy I don't know.

Meanwhile Baner ac Amserau Cymru put the defeat down to drunkenness, ignorance and the clergy. If that sounds a little similar to the usual Unionist accusations against the priest-ridden Irish then it was a tad ironic that Milbank's campaign had been supported by Ulstermen shipped into the county to canvass on behalf of the anti-Home Rulers. Poor Radnorshire in need of fire and brimstone missionaries from both the unionist and nationalist perspective.

Daniel Carter - Who He?

I thought my copy of Meic Stephens' Oxford Companion to the Literature of Wales was pretty well-thumbed but, somehow or other, one entry of Radnorshire interest managed to escape attention for the last 25 years.

Daniel Carter, it seems, was the author of a book-length descriptive poem published in Llanidloes in 1863 entitled Rhaiadr Gwy. Now this poem, the Radnorshire Museum have a copy, may well be worth reading for its "notes historical and topographical, antiquarian and archaeological." The Oxford Companion also mentions two other works - The Legend of Devil's Bridge and The Rose of Pont Vathew - although these have so far escaped the notice of the internet.

So who was this Daniel Carter, whose "life's work" was as Master of the Foundation Grammar School at Rhayader, an institution which seems to be as obscure as Carter's connection with the town? In 1840 when he wrote Rhaiadr Gwy he was living, by his own account, at Ffynnon Fair Cottage in the town. His full name was Daniel Pepper Carter, born in Lambeth around 1808 with no apparent connection to Wales. I can first spot him in the 1851 Census when he was living in Newtown and described as a teacher of languages. His wife Elizabeth, they had recently married, was from Hay, or more likely Betws Clyro. By 1861 the couple had moved to Ashby de la Zouch and Carter had promoted himself to be a professor of languages. In 1871 he is at Hereford, an author-miscellaneous and blind. Carter died a few weeks later on 30th June 1871.

Does someone know more about the elusive Mr Carter or his Foundation Grammar School at Rhayader?

Till the people will bear it no more.

A journalistic view of the Rhayader district from 1843

I wonder how accurate a description it was? Stuffing rags or turf in a window opening doesn't sound very likely. I know there was something similar in the Blue Books, turf walls, leaking roofs, dung heaps, but I do wonder if there is a degree of culture shock behind these viewpoints. Surely the Radnorshire housewife would have demanded as much comfort as possible in her hovel, a dry roof at least. While the dung/compost heap against the wall sounds like a good source of heat. I'm surprised that the councils haven't made it compulsory.

Er ... and the other 31% are what exactly?

Click to enlarge. As to the gist well it sounds like a good idea but what about the malicious and frivolous accusations it's bound to engender? More jobs for the salaried classes of course, more pressure on low paid carers doing their best to cope. Out-of-hours, unannounced, get-up-go-round-and-gaze inspections rather than relying on the current announced paper-trail visits might be an idea. Mind you this would involve public servants getting up in the middle of the night, so it's probably a no-no.

Oh and isn't there already a body who investigate all allegations of physical abuse...... the police.

Musical Interlude

Obviously the revival of Irish hasn't gone quite as well as it should have.

But never mind, here we have the best motor sport song since Arriva Tazio by Trio Lescano, plus some epic bad driving and a guest appearance by everyone's favourite rally marshal.

Nothing on the Blog?

No new posts? I'm blaming a bit of a breakthrough I recently made on the family history front in finally identifying a great grandfather from Monmouthshire's Black Domain. This led to far too much time spent investigating such interesting topics as the anti-Irish riots in Pontlottyn in 1869 - an idea for a future post here, Radnorians involved in South Wales riots.

It turns out that this difficult to track down ancestor's paternal line ends up in New Quay in Cardiganshire or Cei Newy as his father informed the census enumerator. The maternal line goes back to that little bit of Radnor irredenta that is the Herefordshire parish of Huntington.

More posts to come? Well Piers Corbyn is predicting a December as cold and as snowy as that of 2010. So hopefully enforced shopping trips, at least, will be at a minimum.

Hamlet the Dane

The Welsh Land Commission, set up by the government to enquire into the relationship between tenants and landlords, came to Rhayader to take evidence in May 1894. As well as hearing from tenants who had suffered injustices, such as being evicted without compensation for the improvements they had made to their holdings, the commissioners also took evidence from tenants who had nothing but praise for the landowning class. One such claimed that he doubted if many tenants would come forward to complain, "We take pride in believing that we are descended from Hamlet the Dane. We are not exactly Cymro in Radnorshire."

"Then how came you to have the name David Lloyd?" asked commissioner Rhys to laughter from the audience.

"A colony of Danes settled in Radnor from whom I say we are descended" replied the tenant, which was no doubt news to the eminent chair of Celtic at Jesus College, Oxford.

So why did Mr Lloyd claim kinship with the Danes? A hint of something had been reported in Archaeologia Cambrensis in 1881: "I have heard a legend in Radnorshire that the 'Denes' (Danes) ploughed the hills; and if you ask who the 'Denes' were, you will be told simply that the 'Denes' were red men."

So there may well have been some legend or other floating around. The real reason though must lie with the attitudes of the day. The Welsh, for "Radnorshire's most distinguished son" George Cornewall Lewis and his circle of Liberal Old Etonian chums, had been "a miserable race of Celtic savages." Meanwhile scientists obsessed about negrescence and the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon to the Celts of Wales and Ireland. Little wonder that the occasional Radnorian might clutch at the straw, however farfetched, of belonging to a Teutonic tribe.

Myfanwy Fenton

While wilfing around the internet I came across this reprint of a book originally published in 1863, you can actually read an online version if you have the time to spare!

So who was this Myfanwy Fenton who also translated a book from Icelandic, published in 1877, called Three Sketches of Life in Iceland and a book of poems, St. Lawrence Orphanage published in Copenhagen in 1874?

Myfanwy was the grand-daughter of the Pembrokeshire literary figure Richard Fenton, in the 1851 Census she is living at Glynamel, Fishguard with her uncle John Fenton. She is described as being a governess, 25, born in Waltham, Lincolnshire. From other sources she can be identified as being the daughter of John's brother Richard, a clergyman.

John Fenton was an interesting character, an artist, a musician and archaeologist and Examiner at the Foreign Branch of the War Office. According to his nephew he was "a man of dissipated life, learnt in the circle of Carlton House and association there with the Prince Regent and his companions."

Myfanwy/Myvanwy was an unusual name in Wales in the first half of the 19C, with just 3 examples in the 1851 Census, although maybe there were a few more transcribed incorrectly. In the 1841 Census John Fenton is recorded as staying in the Denbighshire home of Jane, wife of his brother-in-law the Welsh scholar Aneurin Owen. The Owens also had a daughter Myvanwy, born around the same time as Fenton's niece.

Myfanwy Fenton isn't found in any census after 1851. In the 1870s she was a language teacher living in Copenhagen. The book of poetry she published there was dedicated to Baroness Mohrenheim, wife of the Russian envoy to Denmark. Given her uncle's association with the War Office I'd like to imagine that Myfanwy was a spy.

A Radnorshire Jury ..... to be continued

It seemed an open and shut case, Samuel Williams of Norton had stolen Richard Stephens' coat. There was surprise when the jury asked if they could retire to consider the verdict and incredulity when they returned three hours later with a not guilty verdict. They had been unable to agree the jurymen admitted, so in the end they had cast lots. One public spirited member having sacrificed his walking stick for the purpose.

The magistrates were outraged, the verdict was set aside and the matter sent forward to the next Assize. As for the jurymen they were fined £5 each, a sizeable sum in 1834.

Jo-Jo and the Chambermaid

In 1910 it seems that a husband was legally responsible for the slanderous words uttered by his wife, which is why Mr J found himself as a defendant in a slander case brought at Glamorgan Assizes by a former employee of his Llandrindod hotel.

The plaintiff, 25 year old Miss L, owed her French surname not to Paris but to her Jersey born father. Infact she was from Brynmelin in Swansea. Mary, the hotel management insisted on calling her Edith, had something of a chequered past, having been dismissed from previous posts for dishonesty. Still Mr J, a prominent Liberal politician in the county, had given the girl a second chance, although, no doubt, his wife kept a watchful eye on the new recruit.

One permanent resident of the hotel was the talented Mr B. He had previously been engaged to Mr J's daughter but she had tragically died. A favourite of the maids who christened him Jo-Jo, the young but sickly Mr B was manager of the town's Electric Light Company and chairman of its Steam Laundry Company.

One evening Mrs J suspected that Mr B was entertaining Miss L in his room and barged in, conducting a search by looking under the bed and in the wardrobe. Finding nothing Mrs J went to look for Miss L, only to catch a glimpse of the errant maid leaving the room she had just examined. Accusations were levelled and the maid dismissed from her employment. This it was that led the blameless Mr J and his accusatory spouse to be sat in Cardiff while the hotel's dirty washing was displayed before a courtroom audience populated, the papers sniggered, by a large number of ministers of religion.

Yes, said one witness, a couple of the maids at the hotel, let's call it Hill Breeze, did spend time in guests' rooms of an evening. Maggie and Hetty and Polly gave evidence that favoured their mistress, while Miss L's employment history was dissected by the hotel owners' counsel, the MP for Carmarthenshire East and the MP for Anglesey - I did mention that Mr J was a prominent local Liberal. Mind you the maid (a labourer's daughter, so hardly wealthy) was represented by a KC. It makes one think that there may have been some political skulduggery afoot.

Indeed it was the maid's counsel who won the day, producing a medical certificate which confirmed that Miss L was ........ well the newspapers didn't spell it out. In the light of this revelation Mrs J was forced to concede that her suspicions must have been ill-founded. Verdict £100 and costs to the plaintiff.

Nothing in the Papers

I bought this book - it's a general history of Britain up to the present day - a few years ago and I'd happily pass it on to Oxfam except for the fact I wouldn't want the unsuspecting to read nonsense like this:

"If she could speak, would her words be in Old English - a Germanic language - rather than the Gaelic and Latin used by the townspeople of Roman Dorchester."

It isn't an isolated example of the author - he was Chief Archaeologist with English Heritage - using Gaelic when he means Brythonic, the ancestral language of Welsh not Irish.

According to the Sunday Times this "massively informative" volume will help cure "our current identity crisis." If the English do have an identity crisis it might help if widely held prejudices be put aside and the Welsh/British contribution to their history be given a little more consideration.

All in all a book that suggests that archaeologists should stick to bonekicking.

Moving on .......... There are those who believe that the 15C bard Llawdden comes from Loughor while others maintain he was from Machynlleth. I think I'm correct in saying that the earliest manuscript reference to his origins says he was Maelienydd, which later went to contribute much of modern day Radnorshire. Certainly there is agreement that his poems show that he lived here, possibly in Cefnllys. It seems that Llawdden was a very rare Welsh forename, and here's an example from 16C Radnorshire. It's from the 1546 Lay Subsidy for that part of Llanddewi Ystradenni parish in Knighton hundred: Llowthen ap David. It's Lloyden in the 1543 version and in the Radnorshire Society's index to the Lay Subsidy, so I guess it could get overlooked. Who knows, maybe a grandson of the bard.

Hwntws or Gogs (part One)

If the Welsh dialect of St Harmon and Cwmteuddwr was similar to that of neighbouring Montgomeryshire and the lost dialects of places like Glasbury and Boughrood were similar to close at hand Breconshire parishes such as Talgarth, then somewhere within Radnorshire, south must have met with north.

As far as I know the dialectologists never managed to get hold of a speaker of Radnorian Welsh from the Rhayader area, even though some, doubtless as rare and unnoticed as pine martens, must have lived on well into the 20C. Fat chance of them interviewing folk who lived in parishes where Welsh had disappeared by the 19C then.

But hang on, riding to the rescue is Richard Suggett, the fellow who authored that splendid book on Radnorshire houses. Rotting away in the archives he discovered reports of slander cases where the words of long dead Radnorians come back to life. An example from Gladestry in 1726 "Di gyrn di dorrws y twlle sydd in di hatt di" - "Your horns tore the holes that are in your hat." Now the interesting thing here is the use of the verb ending ws rather than odd - dorrws not dorrodd - this is a feature of the dialects of South East Wales. The map shows the use of these two endings in Radnorshire slander cases from the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries - info from here.

From the look of things Elfael - at least the hundred of Painscastle and maybe Colwyn as well - seems more influenced by Gwenhwyseg (Gwentian Welsh) than do Maelienydd and Gwerthrynion - the hundreds of Knighton, Cefnllys and Rhayader.

Nothing to report

Just imagine what the BBC and its media pals would have made of this if it had been said by someone whose politics they didn't like, Condi Rice for example.

Keywords

It's always interesting to check out the keywords used to find the blog. Some provide ideas for a post, while others just leave you puzzled. Why for example should I get regular hits from searchers looking for "London transport bus found on the moon?"

I'm not sure what to make of the following search term that popped up a couple of days ago. I could understand if it originated in Builth, but this was from Lyon in France:

The Spannerman's Tale

Maybe it's old age but even today's stars seem less interesting than the spannermen of the 1950s. I doubt for example if Button or Hamilton will ever inspire a volume as good as the 1957 autobiography (as told to Peter Lewis) Alf Francis, Racing Mechanic.

Someone who figured prominently in that book was Alf's youthful protege Tony Robinson. Now, getting on for 60 years after he first worked with the Polish-born Francis, we're promised an autobiography of Robinson himself (as told to Ian Wagstaff).

No doubt tales of Stirling Moss will dominate but hopefully Innes Ireland will get a look-in, Robinson was chief mechanic with the BRP team when the Scotsman led them on the track in 1962, 1963 and 1964. You can watch the pair around the 0.54 mark in this rather wonderful footage as Innes explains to a patient Tony how he's just bent the car.

Will it match up to the Francis book? With a promised 160 pages and 120 photographs compared to the dense, 300 plus information packed pages of the 1950s page-turner it's doubtful. But at least it's not another Hamilton bio.

"Died for England"

Above is the somewhat Gothic war memorial in the Radnorshire village of Norton, it was designed to serve as a horse trough and drinking fountain. The wording on the memorial is of interest since it was "erected by the grateful village of Norton to commemorate the names of its faithful sons who fought and died for England and liberty."

Should this wording annoy patriotic Cymry? There was a time when no sooner had some Welsh folk set foot on mainland Europe than they would boast, maddeningly, about England or how they had met "another English couple." As if their new found friends were saying the same about them! Nowadays I think we can excuse the good villagers of Norton for this historical anomaly. In any case the wording on the memorial is probably quite accurate. I did look-up the census records of the two First World War names on the monument and was surprised that the elder brother of one, a 20 year old born in Heyop, was listed as being able to speak Welsh. An error or perhaps the result of a period of work in a Welsh speaking area?

Mind you when I saw this during a Google search I did have a potentially dangerous rise in blood pressure, only saved by the realisation that it was a cock-up confusion with some place in Leicestershire rather than a plot to tweeify Radnorshire :

Averse to acknowledge any Lord

In the early 1630s a strapped-for-cash King Charles sold the crown estate of Maelienydd to some rogues or other, much to the consternation of the citizenry of Radnorshire. Their solution was to make a collection, they raised £741 12s, which they then gave to the king as a gift, with the helpful suggestion that he might like to use the windfall to buy back what he had so recently sold. Charles did indeed re-purchase the lordship of Maelienydd but was soon in negotiation with Thomas Harley of Brampton Bryan to lease out the land. Harley's plan was to charge rent to the many hundreds of squatters on the commons. This caused such a kerfuffle that the plan was abandoned, although the Harleys were able to get their paws on the lordship during Cromwell's dictatorship.

Moving on to 1758 and King George leased out the wastes and commons of the lordship of Maelienydd - a substantial portion of the parishes of Llanddewi, Llanbister, Bugeildy, Heyop, Llanbadarn Fynydd, Llananno, Llanfihangel Rhydeithon, Llangynllo, Gladestry, Colfa, St Harmon, Cwmteuddwr and Nantmel. Again the plan was to squeeze the hundreds of squatter families by charging them rent. Such was the opposition both physical and legal, that the scheme was abandoned, the crown agent, John Lewis of Harpton, complaining of "'the natural dispositions of people being averse to turn tenants and acknowledge any Lord."

Of course the resistance of the cottagers to enclosure was to be a feature of 19C Radnorshire, just as it had been in the previous two centuries. Radnorshire had a larger percentage of freeholders than in some Welsh counties and these, together with the squatters, meant that there were a substantial number of folk who were indeed "averse to turn tenants and acknowledge any Lord." I wonder if they were the descendants of the troublesome class called manwyr in the works of the bard Sion Ceri, poor folk with a pedigree, the younger sons of younger sons. They certainly seem ready to use the law and even physical force to uphold their rights.

Perhaps these independently minded folk were responsible for the very rapid process of language shift in Radnorshire. Firstly they lived in proximity to England and so had the possiblity of picking up the English language through everyday discourse. Secondly they had every reason to learn English in order to protect themselves from men who would be their masters.

A 150 years before Saunders Lewis' lecture Tynged yr Iaith the Radnorshire historian Jonathan Williams discussed language shift in the border parish of Bugeildy. His analysis of why this had occured seems very modern:

"An increased intercourse with England, a more general interchange of the commodities and produce of these two countries respectively, and, above all, the introduction of that jurisprudence with which the inhabitants of Wales found it necessary to be familiarized, as well as the diction in which all legal pleadings, deeds, conveyances, processes, &c., are executed, soon undermined that predilection for their mother tongue which was before their distinguishing character, and rendered the study and acquisition of the English language necessary, not only as an accomplishment, but also as a matter of indispensable interest."

Well it made me laugh

An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman walked into a bar ............ the Welshman was still in New Zealand.

Forgotten Radnorian?

On the face of it Enoch Powell isn't a Forgotten Radnorian at all. His Radnorshire connections are mentioned in biographies written by competent authors and put out by reliable publishers.

Mr Powell would make a worthy addition to the list of those Radnorians who have made a contribution to Welsh scholarship. After all he was the joint editor of Llyfr Blegywryd, an edition of a version of the Laws of Hywel Dda published by the University Of Wales.

Unfortunately when we look for a Radnorian connection what do we find? It's easy enough to trace the Powells as far back as the mid 18C, they come from Somerset. Likewise his mother's family, the Breezes, are found in Newport, Shropshire. His other grandparents' lines show no recent Radnorshire roots either.

A case of authors repeating "a fact" for which they have no evidence?

At Least it's not a €

So the new £50 note, featuring former Radnorshire resident James Watt, comes into circulation on 2nd November.

By the time the current generation of politicians have finished bailing out their banker pals we'll be lucky if it'll buy a packet of wine gums from Doldowlod's Spar Shop.