The Adventures and Vagaries of Twm Shôn Catti / Descriptive of Life in Wales: Interspersed with Poems

Transcribed from the 1828 John Cox edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
DESCRIPTIVE OF
LIFE IN WALES:
Interspersed with Poems.
BY T. J. LLEWELYN PRICHARD.
Mae llevain mawr a gwaeddi Yn Ystrad Fîn eleni A cherrig nadd yn toddi ’n blwm Rhag ovn Twm Shôn Catti.
In Ystrad Fîn this year, appalling The tumult loud, the weeping, wailing, That thrills with fear and pity; The lightning scathes the mountain’s head, The massy stones dissolve like lead, All nature shudders at the tread And shout of Twm Shôn Catti.
ABERYSTWYTH: PRINTED FOR THE AUTHOR, BY JOHN COX.
1828
The popularity of Twm Shôn Catti’s name in Wales. The resemblance of his character to that of Robin Hood and others. An exposition of the spurious account of our hero in the “Innkeeper’s Album,” and in the drama founded thereon. The honor of his birth claimed by different towns. A true account of his birth and parentage.
The preface to the once popular farce of “Killing no Murder” informs us, that many a fry of infant Methodists are terrified and frightened to bed by the cry of “the Bishop is coming!”—That the right reverend prelates of the realm should become bugbears and buggaboos to frighten the children of Dissenters, is curious enough, and evinces a considerable degree of ingenious malignity in bringing Episcopacy into contempt, if true. Be that as it may in England, in Wales it is not so; for the demon of terror and monster of the nursery there, to check the shrill cry of infancy, and enforce silent obedience to the nurse or mother, is Twm Shôn Catti. But “babes and sucklings” are not the only ones on whom that name has continued to act as a spell; nor are fear and wonder its only attributes, for the knavish exploits and comic feats of the celebrated freebooter Twm Shôn Catti, are, like those of Robin Hood in England, the themes of many a rural rhyme, and the subject of many a village tale; where, seated round the ample hearth of the farm house, or the more limited one of the lowly cottage, an attentive audience is ever found, where his mirth-exciting tricks are told and listened to with vast satisfaction, unsated by the frequency of repetition: for the “lowly train” are generally strangers to that fastidiousness which turns, disgusted, from the twice-told tale.