A Book of North Wales

by S. Baring-Gould

My dear father had been impressed with some of Robert Owen’s doctrines, specially with this, and he set to work to shape my brothers and me each for a special profession, and to give each a separate bent; and the result was that we all went in clean opposite directions to what he purposed, and adopted professions which he had intended the others to enter.

Owen finally took up with table-rapping and Spiritualism, and supposed himself to be a medium through whom the Duke of Kent revealed the mysteries of the other world. Finally, as his health failed, a great longing came over him to return to his native place and die there.

“And as a hare, when hounds and horns pursue,
Pants for the place from whence at first it flew,”

so did he come back to Newtown, and there shortly after expired.

A little way down the Severn below Newtown is Llanllwchaiarn, a church founded by a brother of S. Aelhaiarn of Guilsfield. The parish is not of interest in itself, except as having given birth to, and been the residence of, a remarkable man, Henry Williams, of Ysgafell, one of the sturdiest Nonconformists of the time of the Restoration. His father owned the farm, which had belonged to the family for several generations.

The Conventicle Act, which came into force in 1664, imposed a penalty of £5 or three months’ imprisonment on anyone frequenting a dissenting meeting, for the first offence; £10 or six months’ imprisonment for a second offence; and for a third offence a fine of £100 or transportation beyond the seas.

Henry Williams was in prison from time to time during nine years. On one occasion a party of soldiers beset his house, and in the skirmish, as they attempted to enter, his father was knocked down and killed. On another the house was fired, and Mrs. Williams, taking one child in her arms and leading another, attempted to cross the Severn from the soldiery, when one of them cocked his pistol and vowed to shoot her. However, the officer knocked the man down, and sent an escort to attend her to a friend’s house.

Another time when Henry Williams was preaching the soldiers fell on him, beat, and nearly killed him. They seized his stock and devastated his farm. There was, however, one field that had been sown with wheat, not yet sprung up, which they could not or did not harm. That field throve amazingly, and the crop next summer surpassed in yield every other in the neighbourhood. Nothing like it had been seen, and at harvest the produce was so abundant as to repay the family for all its losses. There were six, seven, and eight full ears upon each stalk. Two of these stalk-heads have been preserved to the present day; one has on it seven ears, the other eight. The field where this marvellous crop was grown is known to this day as Cae’r Fendith, the Field of Blessing.

Some of the principal persecutors of Henry Williams died so strangely that it was regarded as a judgment of heaven upon them. One dropped suddenly from his chair dead whilst eating his dinner, a second was drowned in the Severn when drunk, and a third fell from his horse and broke his neck close to the house of Henry Williams, which he had plundered.

About half-way between Caersws and Machynlleth is Llanbrynmair, the birthplace of Richard Davies, known in Wales by his bardic name of Mynyddog, who is regarded as the Burns of his native land. He was born in 1833, and his father was a farmer. At an early age the poetic faculty displayed itself in him, and he wrote for several Welsh magazines, and won prizes at local literary meetings. As his education had been but scanty, he laboured hard as a young man to make up for this deficiency. He was a tall, fine man, with an open, pleasant face, was full of a kindly, never caustic, wit; and he speedily became one of the most popular of Welsh poets. There is a freshness and flavour of the soil in his compositions, like those of Burns, but none of the coarseness of the Scotch poet. He died in 1877 at his residence, Bronygân, in Cemmes. It is hard, almost impossible, to give anything of the charm of his compositions in a translation, and I venture on one with the utmost diffidence.