Welsh Lessons

I suppose it never crossed my mind that people would go to evening classes to learn Welsh before, say, the 1960s.  Certainly clever chaps like Cyril Cule and Ffransis Payne picked up the language and thousands of  unremarked 19C migrants to the coal fields would have learnt a new tongue in the organic way that newcomers to any foreign country might ...... but evening classes?

Now clearly I'd got this all wrong, which was why I was surprised to read, in the latest tranche of newspapers uploaded by our National Library, that the Breconshire authorities were subsidising such classes during the First World War.  In the winter of 1914/15 classes in Llanganten had 24 students, Beulah and Troedrhiwdalar 50 between them and there were 23 in Builth.

The classes seem to have been aimed at teaching the old language to English speakers.  By that time Builth was as anglophone as it is today, as was Llanganten (readers probably know it better as Cilmeri).  There was still a good deal of Welsh spoken in Beulah and Troedrhiwdalar and native speakers as well as learners seem to have been catered for there.  How long did it last?  Well the Beulah teacher, local farmer Daniel Jones of Penrhiwmoch, was appointed for a third winter in 1916.  Coincidentally he was the grandfather of one of my rediscovered Radnorians, the racing driver Liz Jones.

Not everyone was supportive of this enlightened policy though. When Llangammarch applied to the Breconshire Education Committee for support in 1915, voices - well chiefly the Surbiton born manufacturer Arthur Beckwith -  were raised against it.  Like the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone Beckwith's comments are all too familiar:

classes like those for Welsh only are not a real and urgent need at the moment, and it is not one of the subjects on which we ought to spend public money.

It's easy enough to take a pop at Beckwith but at least he was an elected member and was out-voted by other elected members. The majority decided that the courses were popular and deserving of support. The virtue of councillors, you can get rid of them - much harder with the arms length quangocrats, third sector charities and out-of-control local officials you find  today.

At the end of their first winter the Welsh classes of Llanganten and Builth decided to engage in a little friendly competition to celebrate St David's Day 1915.  It was held at Builth's Forester's Hall (where? - Ed.) and the town defeated the village by 383 points to 354.  In addition to examples of our native flair for self-congratulation there were speeches from local bigwigs.  The town's Tory councillor Arthur Gwynne-Vaughan praised Lloyd George and his role in the war - a few months later residents would marvel at the popular solicitor's splendid masonic funeral - and the headmaster of Builth county school, Rees Thomas, made a well-received speech about Welsh nationalism.

Well actually it was also about the war.  Little Wales was part of a great Empire and its way of life was threatened by Germany.  If the enemy won all would have to learn the German language and the eisteddfod would be threatened.  Like the Poles the Welsh might become a minority in their own country (in the parallel universe called the present this nightmare scenario has actually come to pass in much of Mid-Wales ). Mr Thomas was overjoyed that Wales was in front of England, Ireland and Scotland in the matter of recruitment.  The best educated young men in Wales had volunteered to make up the Welsh battalions, which would emulate the valiancy ( is that a word? - Ed.) of Cromwell's Ironsides.

Perhaps Mr Thomas's heart was in the right place - his watchwords were justice, truth, good faith, humanity, mercy and education.  Who could disagree. He was greatly vexed by the suffering of gallant, little Belgium and it led him to head-up the committee charged with canvassing (pressurising?) the young men of the district to join the forces.  It seems that for the good headmaster Welsh nationalism could flourish as part of a great and virtuous Empire - in much the same way as so many of our modern day nationalists see the nation state as a thing of the past and Wales's destiny as part of another larger and supposedly virtuous entity. 

As we do call it

I recently had to admit that I know next to nothing about the history of the Welsh language in the Shropshire Hundred of Clun, other than that the bard Hywel ap Syr Mathew, who died in 1581, was a native of the district.

Help seems to be at hand though as some Aberystwyth academics are beavering away to produce a book on the Welsh place names of Shropshire.  The book - we'll have to wait until the end of 2016 - promises:

" ..... an an introductory chapter, examining the history of the Welsh language in Shropshire (and its neighbours)"

Reading about the project I discovered that one post-graduate has been examining field-names in north eastern Radnorshire from the period 1600 to 1900, in the hope that it will  "reveal information about the linguistic geography of the Welsh language in the border area."  Fascinating stuff.  I guess this may be along the lines of how placenames like llwyn, llyn and llain ended-up as llan as everyday knowledge of Welsh died out.

Anyway that's the Christmas present for 2016 sorted .....  hopefully.

Update:  Interesting comments about identity from some young Clun people at around the 59 minute mark here.  Seemingly they are considered to be Welsh by other YFC clubs in Shropshire and suffer from some low-level ethnic prejudice as a result.  They don't think of themselves as Welsh though, the Welsh consider them to be English while the English consider them to be Welsh, they're happy to be Clun people.

Welsh-Speaking Radnorians in the 1911 Census

According to some of our leading historians the Welsh language died out in Radnorshire centuries ago. Take Glanmor Williams for example, who wrote of "border counties like Radnorshire which have been English in speech for some centuries" or Geraint H. Jenkins who, referring to the mid 18C, explained that "the language had receded westwards so rapidly in Radnorshire that it had vanished from the lips of all but the most aged inhabitants of the county."

Well there must be something about the Radnorshire air because some of those "aged inhabitants" were still alive and kicking  at the time of the 1911 Census, a handful were even teenagers.

Regular readers will know I'm going over old ground here.  It's quite correct that the Welsh language disappeared at an alarming rate in Radnorshire, as quickly as in Ireland where three generations could see a parish move from a 100% Irish speaking to virtually nil.  Where the experts - beguiled by the language of church services - go wrong, is in placing that process of language shift a hundred years or more too soon.

One wet afternoon I spent a couple of hours noting down Radnorshire-born Welsh speakers in the 1911 Census, I gave up at around 600.   Not all that 600 actually lived in Radnorshire, although there were still a fair number of locally born, let's call them indigenous, Welsh-speakers in the parishes of Cwmteuddwr, Rhaeadr and St Harmon - with the occasional Ned Maddrell and Dolly Pentreath in parishes further east.

Anyway let's get to the point of the post.  There's a theory which gets repeated now and then that language shift in Radnorshire was facilitated by incomers, sometimes said to be Cromwellian soldiery settled in the county after our neighbour's Civil War.  I don't think this theory stands up to much examination.  Firstly because some of the most common 'English surnames' pre-date the civil war, while others belong to the very real 16C plantation in West Montgomeryshire.  Look back at tax returns, wills etc and you'll find that the numbers of incomers settling in Radnorshire parishes were nowhere near enough to facilitate a language shift of their own accord.

And here my couple of hours spent noting down those 1911 Welsh-speaking, Radnorshire-born citizens might have had a purpose.  Amongst the 600 we find long-established local surnames of English origin like Bound, Bufton, Bywater, Hamer, Hope, Ingram, Mantle, Mason, Webb, Wilding, Worthing and Wozencraft.  Oh and Scott, descendants of a Renfrewshire family who turned up in the county in the early 19C and were perhaps the last incomers to be Cymricised in Radnorshire before the current revival.

Forgotten Radnorian

Live long enough and perhaps you'll achieve a whit of fame.  This is what happened to Evan Edwards of Torquay, described in the Edwardian press as the oldest Baptist minister in the world.  Born in Nantmel in February 1815, Edwards died just a few weeks before his 100th birthday in January 1914.  At the time of his death he had been a Baptist minister in Somerset and Devon for more than 80 years and was one of  the last witnesses to the preaching of such men as John Elias and Christmas Evans.

I'm more interested in his brief comment about the Nantmel of his youth and Dolau Baptist chapel:

"Cymraeg oedd iaith addoliad yn y capel ac yr aelwyd foreu a hwyr, ond ymledai y Saesneg i Faesyfed a mwy cyfarwydd oedd y plant yn y Saesneg"

"Welsh was the language of worship in the chapel and at home morn and night, but English had spread to Radnorshire and the children were more familiar with English."

Now this confirms that Ffransis Payne had the right idea when he wrote that Dolau Chapel turned to English around 1840.  It also shows how unreliable - in Radnorshire at least - it is to rely on the language of Anglican church services to estimate the date of language shift.  Nantmel parish church turned to English in 1755* and this very large parish (8 miles by 5) is consequently shown as thoroughly English on the published maps that illustrate language shift in Wales. Before the 1891 census such maps are mostly based on Anglican services.  I tend to think the dropping of Welsh services in the churches marked the disappearance of the last generation of monoglots rather than the demise of all local Welsh speakers as the maps assume.

Evan Edwards' family lived on the eastern side of the parish and it's a pity that no-one thought to ask him in greater detail about the linguistic ins-and-outs of his youth. The 19C Welsh language press was too busy trumpeting what a thoroughly pagan, immoral and stupid lot the Radnorians were to bother over-much about reporting on their recent history.  Even the Western Mail joined in the fun saying that the county's inhabitants lived in an "intellectual twilight, so inactive that a game of football would be a godsend to them."

* Nantmel is said to have had a monthly Welsh language service until 1807 but this has escaped the attention of the mappers.

The Census Again

No Welsh Identity

The 'no Welsh identity' figures for Radnorshire make grim reading for those with a patriotic outlook.  Readers may well be reminded of J R Jones' comment about a particular bitter form of exile; that where, rather than leaving your own country, your country leaves you.  Here are the figures:

Abbeycwmhir 47%, Aberedw 49%, Beguildy 67%, Clyro 68%, Diserth 62%, Glasbury 52%, Gladestry 62%, Glascwm 47%,  Knighton 67%, Llanbadarn Fawr 49%, Llanbadarn Fynydd 44%, Llanbister 44%, Llanddewi Ystradenni 47%, Llandrindod 56%, Llanelwedd 40%, Llanfihangel Rhydithon 60%, Llangynllo 63%, Llanyre 51%, Nantmel 52%, New Radnor 71%, Old Radnor 71%, Painscastle 52%, Penybont 49%, Presteigne 76%, Rhayader 45%, St Harmon 49%, Whitton 71%.

Of course it's not all doom and gloom, the figures are inflated by cross border births and the non-Welsh element will be over-represented in the older age groups - people who, in the rather blunt words of Dafydd Iwan, have come to Wales to die.  I doubt if Radnorian folk have ever given a more ringing endorsement of their Welsh identity than they did in the census of 2011.  They may be a minority in much of their own land, but at least they see themselves as a Welsh minority.

Builth Hundred

Here are the figures for that little piece of Radnorshire that somehow ended up in Brecknockshire:

Builth Town:  Welsh only 52%, English only 15%, British only 20% - NWI 41%
Cilmeri:  Welsh only 45%, English only 21%, British only 25% - NWI 48%
Duhonw:  Welsh only 45%, English only 21%, British only 20% - NWI 49%
Llanafan:  Welsh only 51%, English only 14%, British only 21% - NWI 41%
Llangammarch:  Welsh only 42%, English only 18%, British only 29% - NWI 52%
Llanwrthwl:  Welsh only 35%, English only 19%, British only 29% - NWI 54%
Llanwrtyd:  Welsh only 34%, English only 25%, British only 27% - NWI 59%
Treflys:  Welsh only 46%, English only 21%, British only 21% - NWI 46%

NWI = % of population recording no Welsh identity.

Llanwrtyd

Part of the charm of border towns like Knighton and Presteigne has been their long-standing mixed ethnicity, but what about Llanwrtyd?   In the 1911 census it was 80% Welsh speaking with 1 in 6 of its inhabitants not even  able to use the English tongue.  Even in 1951 after two World Wars and the depression Welsh was still spoken by two thirds of the town's inhabitants.  By 1971 the Welsh speaking population had fallen to 48%, while today it stands at an optimistic 18%.  According to the latest Estyn report no children at the local school come from Welsh speaking homes, and now we find that 59% of the population of this little town at the heart of Wales won't even claim any kind of Welsh identity.  This is what happens to a country's economy and culture when it allows its laws to be dictated by foreigners.

Welsh in England

Some folk have long asked that the Census enumerate Welsh speakers in England as well as those in Wales.  The 2011 census didn't do that, but it did require that the main language of the household be noted where it was not English.  With a Welsh born population living in England of 500K you'd expect around 50K to be Welsh speaking, infact the number recorded was just 8248.  No doubt this is an underestimation of the total number able to speak Welsh but at least it is a realistic figure and not overly inflated by patriotic zeal.  1310 of such folk live in London, but what about the Oswestry area.

As we have noted before Shropshire, rather than Cornwall, was the last county in England with indigenous speakers of a Celtic language, parishes such as Selattyn having home-grown Welsh speakers well into the 20C.  For example in 1946 five of the pupils at the local school were fluent Welsh speakers from Welsh speaking homes (cf present-day Llanwrtyd).  In 2011 just 10% of the inhabitants of Selattyn admitted to a Welsh identity, in nearby West Rhyn it was 15%, with 14% in St Martins and around 8% in Oswestry and Whittington.  Just over 200 residents of Oswestry and vicinity listed Welsh as the main language of their household.  Whether they were Salopians or incomers who knows?

Talk of the Town

The 2011 Census figures may well show an increase in the numbers of Welsh speakers, but this will only mask the continuing decline of Welsh as a community language or even - to use a useful term from the past - a hearth language.  Although Wales may have the appearance of being a bilingual country, in essence this is not the case - for example, while every public servant in Wales must be able to speak English, a knowledge of Welsh is not a necessity, even in those areas considered to be Welsh-speaking heartlands; while many local and central government policies, far from assisting the language, might just as well have been designed to hasten its demise.

It is with this surface appearance of bilingualism in mind that we should consider Llandrindod council's recent deliberations in respect of placenames in the town.   First up a request that Temple Drive should have a street sign, with the council agreeing that any sign also read  - Rhodfa'r Teml.  To me this is the worst kind of faux bilingualism.  It only serves to provide ammunition to the enemies of the language who could quite justly demand that Lon Cwm also read Valley Lane.  If councils really want fair play for the language then they should ensure that every new street have a name with some historical basis in the locality, which in most cases will mean a Welsh name.

Next the naming of the new court and police building in Llandrindod.  The town council preferring  Parc Neuadd Park but having to accept Powys Council's Parc Noyadd Park.  There are two issues here, firstly the demands of faux bilingualism which require both Parc and Park. Surely no-one would object to the use of Parc alone?  Secondly the use of Noyadd instead of Neuadd.  Now as it happens I'm all in favour of idiosyncratic spellings such as Noyadd, which reflect a traditional pronunciation and/or long historical usage.  It's why I'm quite happy to use Rhayader or Llandegley on this blog.  Mind you the town council did have a point, as this will from 1832 shows.

The original impulse to make Welsh visible as a public language was all well and good, but bilingualism will not be a reality until, for example, any police officer stopping a speeding motorist anywhere in Wales is able to converse  with the miscreant in either of the country's two languages.  Anything less is mere show.

Radnorshire Welsh

A fascinating comment has been left on an old post from 2008.  Anyone interested in the story of the Welsh Language in Radnorshire should check it out, you can find it here.

The comment also draws my attention to Meic Stephens' recent autobiography Cofnodion, which I see discusses the author's Radnorshire roots -  his father was born in Walton.  What to make of this blurb on his publisher's site though: "an account of how the young boy from an English-speaking household grew up to be a Welshman."  As Stephens was born in Treforest I would have thought he was a Welshman from the moment he gulped in a lungful of Glamorgan air.

Against the Odds

Just as  modern day censuses tend to exaggerate the strength of the Welsh language in Radnorshire, those of the late 19C and early 20C probably exaggerate its weakness, especially in the west of the county.  The rapid process of language shift - 19C observers describe the language retreating 20 miles in a lifetime - can surely be best explained by a deliberate rejection on the part of the local community.  The situation in Radnorshire may well have echoed that described by a witness who lived through a similar period of rapid language shift in Limerick in Ireland:  "the growing public feeling that Irish was a dying language, a mark of a degraded people who were not 'decent' - all this combined to produce a new people who from youth were pledged to speak no Irish. And so in West Limerick you had many who persisted in trying to speak a broken English and never again uttered a word in the old tongue they knew so well."

Given such attitudes it comes as a welcome surprise to come across a local Crossgates/Penybont family who actually seem to have passed on a knowledge of Welsh in the late 19C, when all around them were denying any connection with the native tongue.

Edward Stephens, an agricultural labourer, and his wife Elizabeth were born in Nantmel parish in the 1790s - a time and a place where you would expect them to have a knowledge of both languages.  By the time of the 1841 Census they were living at the Cummey, a place in Llanddewi Ystradenni parish, but nearer to the Gwystre Inn than the Walsh Arms.  By 1851 Edward has died and Elizabeth and her sons have moved to the Breconshire iron town of Beaufort, where in 1864 the youngest son, Hugh, marries a local girl called Ann Williams.  Perhaps it is Ann who is responsible for the subsequent linguistic history of the family.

Hugh and Ann have returned to Radnorshire by 1871 with their children Thomas and Sarah - both born in Beaufort.  Two more children, Elizabeth and Hugh jnr would be born in Llanddewi and Penybont respectively.  At first Hugh snr is as an agricultural labourer, later working as a plumber and glazier.

The first language information is provided by the 1891 census. The Stephens family were then living in the part of Llandegley parish which fell under the Kington Union and did not bother itself with such details.  In 1901 Thomas and Sarah have married but Hugh, his wife and two younger children are all recorded as being able to speak Welsh.

Ann Stephens died in 1903, her husband in 1905, but the 1911 Census identifies all of their children, living in and around the Penybont area.  Thomas and Hugh have married English speaking wives but are still recorded as being able to speak Welsh themselves.  Elizabeth and Sarah, both dressmakers, are living together - Elizabeth's English-speaking husband, a coachman, was away, lodging in Garth Road, Builth.  Both Elizabeth and Sarah are recorded as being able to speak Welsh, as is Elizabeth's five year old son - the child of a Llanddewi born mother who has never lived outside the county.

If we look at this through modern-day eyes this example of language survival within a family must seem commonplace.  But in early 20C Penybont?  Without the benefit of Welsh medium education or S4C and in the face of an animus against the language which had seen it abandoned on hearths across the county.  No, this family's persistence is surely quite remarkable.

Welsh in New Radnor

How to reconcile these two quotes:

"New Radnor was planted as a Saxon colony by Harold, after his victory here over the Britons, two years before his death at Hastings. This people have never since had any sympathies with the Welsh in language, nor many in habits .." - Sir William Cockburn of Downton House, evidence to the Commission of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales, February 1847.

"... all English here, New Radnor is not four miles from hence, where there is nothing but Welsh." - Lewis Morris in a letter written from the King's Head, Kington, February 1742.

Of course Cockburn is correct in believing that there was Saxon settlement in the area, local placenames provide abundant evidence of that, but he is certainly wrong in believing that this was a district where the Welsh language never flourished. The local gentry were patrons of the bards until the 17C and a quick glance at the Lay Subsidy of 1543 should settle the matter. Nor was there any great divide between those with English style surnames and those with patronyms. Wills from the period and names like Morgan Hoddell or Dyddgu Stones - an interesting local surname probably derived from the Four Stones at Walton - are evidence of that. And what of Anne Sasnes - Anne the Englishwoman - who witnessed a New Radnor will in 1548, a strange name in a town which had no sympathy for the Welsh language.

Perhaps Cockburn thought he was doing his neighbours a favour by disassociating them from any taint Welshness. After all this was a time when the Eton boys who were the leading Liberal political bigwigs in the area believed the Welsh to be a race of "miserable Celtic savages."

So what then of Lewis Morris? Some Welsh academics have doubted his evidence but it seems to me that it was consistent with what we know. In 1827, while describing the Welsh dialect of Llandrindod, the correspondent of the monthly magazine Y Gwyliedydd informs us that the language had retreated twenty miles in living memory - more than enough to encompass New Radnor some 80 years before. James Beaumont of the Gore, the Methodist exhorter who died in 1750, was said to be happier preaching in Welsh than in English. In 1744 a traveller to Llandrindod encountered an old man in Bleddfa who could speak no English, and between there and Llanfihangel Rhydithon heard little Engish except for an innkeeper who spoke the language "indifferent good". If the language survived in these two parishes, which from surname evidence had seen a good deal of in-migration, why not in New Radnor which had not.

Finally Sir William Cockburn might have considered the field names of Downton itself. When the railway came to New Radnor around 1860, local fields such as Pwll Mawn, Clos y Garreg, Plocau Melyn and Maes Downton were mentioned - evidence of a Welsh speaking past and a fairly recent one at that.

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.

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."

Radnor on Taff

Your blogger has been looking at the 1901 Census for the town of Merthyr Tydfil, specifically at Radnorian migrants. At not much more than 1% of the population Radnorshire born folk were not a major element in the town, but with over 250 households headed by a Radnorian and an additional 90 householders having a Radnorian wife, they were not an insignificant contingent in Radnorshire terms. Indeed with some 750 sons and daughters in those households in 1901, a number which would have been swelled by off-spring who had already left home or had yet to be born, the town's influence on our county must have been sizeable.

What can we say about these migrants? Well the great majority were industrial workers, mainly in the mines (over 40%) but also in the steel works and on the railways. The town attracted it's share of craftsmen and traders - builders, tailors, drapers, half a dozen publicans, a watchmaker, even a town crier, one Richard Lewis Williams from Nantmel. A handful of residents of the town were even listed as agricultural labourers.

They came from every part of Radnorshire including places like Presteigne and Knighton. In the 1851 census migrants from those border towns were absent and one wonders if this was because much less English would have been spoken in Merthyr at the earlier date? Could migration figures perhaps reveal which parts of Radnorshire were more at ease moving to an over-whelmingly Welsh speaking locality in the days before the census took an interest in linguistic matters?

30% of the Radnorshire born householders had married spouses born in the county, 57% were married to wives from elsewhere in Wales and 12% had married English women. When we look at the Radnorshire born wives of non-Radnorian householders we find 45% had married Englishmen. Now getting on for half those marriages involved men from parishes just across the border in Herefordshire and Shropshire but there is a marked difference between the marriage preferences of men and women. One wonders why?

Some 17% of Radnorian householders in Merthyr in 1901 could speak Welsh, the figure was nearer 30% for their wives (remember this figure includes wives born elsewhere), around 17% of sons and daughters in Radnorian households could also speak Welsh - not necessarily in households where a parent was bilingual. Merthyr was in the process of language shift at this time and Radnorian migrants would obviously have contributed to the anglicisation of the town. As a supporter of bilingualism Radnorian was pleased to see that his great great uncle, Septimus Mantle, originally from Crossgates, spoke both languages, as did his wife and four offspring.

Of course there were many other valley towns to which Radnorians had migrated: the Rhondda Valleys (which had at least as many Radnorians as Merthyr), Aberdare, Ebbw Vale, Tredegar - over 500 household heads in Monmouthshire, more than a 1000 in Glamorgan in 1901. Far from being "backward and beautiful" as the seekers after a rural idyll are prone to suggest, even the remotest Radnorshire farmstead would have had family ties with the vibrant, proletarian culture of the despoiled industrial south.

Mere Welsh

Researchers sometimes fail to note that the boundaries of Wales in the Victorian census records are not the same as the borders we take for granted today. Parishes were assigned to the country where their local workhouse was situated. So in 1891, for example,Welsh language statistics were collected for Bedstone in Shropshire (part of the Knighton Union) but not for Glascwm in Radnorshire (part of the Kington Union).

This anomaly could have been useful if some of the Shropshire parishes where Welsh survived - Llanyblodwel, Sychtyn and Selattyn - had been in a Welsh Union. It would have provided evidence of the language's strength in those districts at the end of the 19C. The inhabitants of many English parishes were indeed asked about their ability to speak Welsh - from the Gloucester parish of Tidenham to Shocklach in Cheshire. Unfortunately none of these places were in areas where one or two old people born in the locality might still have spoken the language, Llanveynoe in Herefordshire for example. As a reader of the blog recently pointed out, there were certainly Welsh speakers native to the neighbouring Monmouthshire parish of Cwmyoy at this time.

Now as it happens there was, until it was transferred to Monmouthshire in 1893, a small detached part of Herefordshire within Cwmyoy parish called Fwthog. And here in 1891 there were still a handful of locally born Herefordians who spoke Welsh, this household for example, click to enlarge.

Forgotten Voices

In 1946 the headmistress of the primary school in Selattyn, Shropshire, in reply to a query, stated that just 5 of her 46 pupils were fluent in the Welsh language.

I guess for most the obvious riposte to this information is "So what!" After all, at around the same time, there were first language Welsh speakers in John Lennon's class at the Dovedale Primary School in Mossley Hill, Liverpool and compared to the 957,490 pupils currently in English schools, for whom English is not a first language, it's a fact of no importance whatsoever.

At the same time there is a difference between John Lennon's school pals and those million non-English pupils on the one hand and the five stalwarts of Selattyn school on the other. The Shropshire children were speaking a language that was indigenous to their parish and had been spoken by natives of the place for generations.

Beast House

Here's a pretty little map from the National Museum of Wales showing Welsh dialect words for cowshed.

I think it's obvious from the map that any remaining Welsh speakers in Builth Hundred don't keep cows, or if they do, they all live outside - the cows that is.

I suppose it is possible that the last Welsh speakers around Llanwrtyd and Llangammarch have finally passed away, or more likely the map is based on that 1970s volume The Linguistic Geography of Wales, which for some strange reason consigned Builth Hundred to the lands where the traditional Welsh dialects had died out. Yes I have moaned about this before.

As it happens in the 1970s Welsh speakers made up 48% of the population of Llanwrtyd town, in the Upper Irfon Valley it was 73%, in and around Tirabad 32%, and in and around Llangammarch 37%. Surely some old fellow could have been found to tell the researchers the local Welsh name for a cowshed. The trouble is maps like these may get re-used to tell a story that isn't necessarily true. Who knows what a decision maker with such a map in the back of their mind might decide.

Given that Builth Hundred has been reduced to the ranks of the terminally anglicised - and OK there have been more realistic studies such as this chapter on the dialect of the area, starting at page 97 of this book - is there any chance of a study of the lost Welsh dialect(s) of Radnorshire? I'm sure there is enough material in field names, slander cases and a study of vowel sounds to come up with something worthwhile. Radnorshire would have been an area where the dialects of North, South East and West Wales came into contact. My uneducated guess would be to agree with John Rhys, see here, with perhaps the dialect of Gwent a stronger iinfluence in Painscastle Hundred and up the eastern side of the county.

Anyway all this is inspired by the fact that S4C is screening a series on dialects called Ar Lafar, facebook page here.

Gone Tomorrow

When I started wilfing around the internet nine or ten years ago one of the few web resources for language shift in Wales and also the English counties of Herefordshire and Shropshire was a site called Gwefan Catalunya-Cymru, indeed it seems to have been on-line since 1995. As far as I can tell the tri-lingual site - Catalan, Welsh and English - has now disappeared except for the odd page and what has been preserved in Google cache.

From what remains of the site here's a letter writer to the journal Seren Gomer in 1845, describing a snippet of conversation illustrating the process of language shift in Newbridge-on-Wye:

“Evan,” meddai un hen ŵr wrth y Bontnewydd, yn swydd Faesyfed, ag oedd yn tybied ei fod yn gryn dalp mewn gwybodaeth Seisnig, “go and fetch me the bar harn from the beudy.”
“Daid,” meddai y bachgenyn, which shall I bring from the beudy, the bar harn bach or the bar harn mawr?”

"Evan," said one old man from by Newbridge, in Radnorshire, who believed he had a fair grasp of English, "go and fetch me the iron bar from the cowshed."
"Grandfather," said the lad, "which shall I bring from the cowshed, the little iron bar or the big iron bar?"

UPDATE: It seems the Catalunya-Cymru site is back on line. Good, hope it stays that way, a lot of interesting info there.

From A Family Album, 1

My great grandparents Charles and Mary Jones and their offspring in a photograph taken around 1897.

Mary was born in Llansawel and brought up in Llandeilo Fawr in Carmarthenshire - she's always shown in the census returns as speaking both Welsh and English. Her husband was born in Llandrindod and is always shown as speaking only English. At the same time my grandfather, he's the lad with his hands in his pockets, said that the two sometimes conversed in Welsh.

Two of Charles' brothers, who moved away from Radnorshire, are shown in the census returns as being able to speak Welsh. One was married to a monoglot Welsh speaker from Llangammarch and the other, with a Radnorian wife, lived in Bargoed where the entire family is shown as being bilingual. I found a similar situation with my mother's family and it does make me wonder if Welsh was quite as dead in Victorian Radnorshire as most suppose.

I once asked my great uncle, the little lad seen sat on his father's knee, about his parents ability to speak Welsh, I might just as well have accused them of being thieves. I think his animus suggests that the situation in Victorian Radnorshire, well in the west, was similar to that in Victorian Limerick where:

"Up to about 1830, or so, the entire Rathkeale countryside spoke Irish. Then the new schools, the pro-English clergy , the influence of the landlords and agents, as well as the political leaders, the use of English in the law-courts, at gatherings and public meetings, in sermons and religious functions, the growing public feeling that Irish was a dying language, a mark of a degraded people who were not 'decent' - all this combined to produce a new people who from youth were pledged to speak no Irish. And so in West Limerick you had many who persisted in trying to speak a broken English and never again uttered a word in the old tongue they knew so well."

I wonder if that last sentence might be echoed in O. M. Edwards' reported comments about Radnorshire speech:

"Such a jumbled up, untidy hybrid language, that isn't proper Welsh or English."

Given the context I think Edwards was speaking about the west of the county next to Builth Hundred rather than the older Herefordshire influenced dialects of the east. I wonder when Edwards formed this opinion? If it was earlier in his life then it would make sense in describing a generation of older Welsh speakers trying to get by in English. A few years later and it wouldn't be an accurate description of west Radnorshire speech at all, in which case he might just have been being rude.

"Coming from the border means that I feel like I am from Wales."

A couple of months ago I was quite unkind to Ellie Goulding - for any old fogeys reading, she's a rising young pop singer - because, bamboozled by the hopeless Western Mail, I believed she was from Knighton, a fact which she seemed to ignore on her twitter page. Now it turned out that the WM had confused Knighton with Kington, well it is a long way north of the Gabalfa flyover, so apologies to Ellie who actually hails from Lyonshall. What is interesting is that Ms Goulding herself does on occasions express a certain ambiguity about her ethnicity.

Perhaps someone will remind me who it was remarked that the border between England and Wales was a gradual progression, with England proper not starting until east of Llanllieni (Leominster). Anyway, I've always been interested in those snippets of history, uncontaminated by academic veracity, which ordinary folk believe - the kind of thing you read on tea-towels about Welsh being the oldest language for example. One such is the belief that Herefordshire used to be a Welsh county but that every hundred years or so a Welsh county is transferred to England. This belief actually contains a grain of truth, namely that, objectively, the aim of the powers-that-be has always been the destruction of a separate Welsh identity.

According to the historian Percy Enderbie, writing in 1661, Welsh was spoken over a large part of Herefordshire. Not just in the districts of Erging (Archenfield) and Ewias, south of the Wye, but also in the old Marcher lordships of Clifford, Winforton, Willersley, Eardisley, Huntington and Lugharness - the parishes of Stapleton, Willey, Kinsham, Combe, Rodd, Nash, Lttle Brampton and Titley. No doubt Welsh disappeared from these areas fairly soon after Enderbie's time, although a browse through the field names of some of these places north of the Wye will show plenty of examples of Welsh names surviving until the mid-nineteenth century.

Of course the real stronghold of the Welsh language in Herefordshire was south of the Wye in parishes such as Craswell, Clodock, Longtown, Llanveynoe and Michaelchurch Escley. Here eight out of nine defamation cases between 1712 and 1774 were in Welsh and a 19 year old from Michaelchurch Escley who came before a court in 1757 was described as a "strainger to the English tongue." It's usually cited that the last speakers of Herefordshire Welsh died in the mid-nineteenth century and an initial glance at the 1891 Census doesn't show any residual bilingualism amongst folk from Herefordshire parishes who had migrated to the coalfield.

Even before DNA, bloodgroup evidence suggested a divide between the east and west of the county and surnames are another example of the Welsh origins of many Herefordians. How Welsh any of these folk actually feel is debatable however, perhaps someone could research the loyalties of public house boozers during Wales/England rugby matches. Unlike Cornwall, there seems little evidence of Herefordians acknowledging it's old language and culture.

Over the years there have been various half-hearted calls for parts of Herefordshire to be included in Wales. I remember a parish council in the 1960s, Brilley perhaps, voting to join Radnorshire. More recently an NFU official caused a stir by claiming that Herefordshire farmers would be better off in Wales. The subsequent comments on a local BBC website are interesting as some of the most vehement opponents of reunion are those with Welsh surnames, one can hazard a guess as to why.

Welsh Language Circulating Schools in Radnorshire

Between 1736 and 1776 over 300,000 adults and children were taught to read in the Circulating schools established by Griffith Jones and paid for and later managed by the philanthropist Bridget Bevan.

In Radnorshire, schools were held in fourteen parishes up to 1774, and although their impact was certainly less than in many other parts of Wales, in the best year, 1740, around 600 Radnorians were taught to read.

Academics occasionally express surprise that schools were held in parishes where the Welsh language was no longer used in church services. I think the mistake the academics make is assuming that the switch to English-only services denotes that a parish has become wholly English in speech. A more likely explanation is that folk unable to speak any English were no longer a significant factor in the parish. For example the cleric of Abbeycwmhir writing in 1813 confirming that church services had been in English for many years, added: "the young people do not in general understand Welsh, but the old people do understand English." To me this suggests that not only was the older generation bilingual but, in view of the qualifying term "in general," so too were some of the younger.

Incidentally the Welsh school referred to in the letter was held at Wernfawr farm.

Talgarth

Browsing the 1891 Census I was surprised to discover that a majority of the Talgarth born population of the town aged over 30 were able to speak Welsh. Look at the wider parish and there must have been bilingual natives of the district who spoke the language - presumably the historic dialects of the place - well into the Twentieth Century. I suppose most people will shrug their shoulders at this, but it left me a little bit amazed. Of course big Victorian families being raised as monoglot English speakers put paid to any chance of bilingualism persisting.

Looking at wikipedia I see that "Talgarth is also becoming a place for artists and writers." Oh well.