A Book of North Wales

by S. Baring-Gould

“The Church has almost as many parsons or parties as there are principal men in the parish, and the sons, after the decease of their fathers, succeed to the ecclesiastical benefices, not by election, but by hereditary right; and if a bishop should dare to presume to appoint or to institute anyone else, the people would most certainly revenge the injury on the institution or the instituted.”

It was probably to get rid of this mischievous custom that the Norman conquerors and the English barons who occupied castles in Wales turned such benefices as they could lay their hands on into vicarages under monasteries. Then the abbots or priors appointed some of their monks to minister in these parishes, and these men were entirely detached from all family ties in the place, and could attend to its spiritual charge and to that only. But till this new order of things came in—and it came in slowly and by degrees, and was forced on a reluctant people—the genealogies of the saints and of their kin were preserved with the utmost care. People were much more anxious to remember their pedigrees than the stories of the lives of the founders. The pedigrees were the title deeds to the enjoyment of valuable rights to land and other endowments.

In the Latin Church a saint was remembered for what he had done, for his holy life; in the Celtic Church all that was nothing—he was valued for the land he had acquired, and which he transmitted to his posterity.

In the Welsh Church, saints, bishops, abbots, clergy, as a rule, were married, and took care to transmit their benefices parcelled up among their sons. When the Latin ecclesiastics condescended to write the lives of the Celtic saints they suppressed this fact. Thus Gildas the historian, Abbot of Ruys, and a reformer of the Irish Church after the reaction to paganism that followed the death of Patrick and his devoted band, was a married man, and the father of some half a dozen children. He had two biographers. Neither says a word about this; each asserts that from boyhood he was “crucified to the world and the world to him”; that he “scorned transitory things,” and lived a life of severe self-abnegation. His son Cenydd, or Keneth, was a hermit in Gower, and he also had wife and family. But those terrible genealogies, so carefully preserved by the Welsh, tell us facts not quite in harmony with the statements of these “Lives,” just as parish registers and the wills in probate courts make sad havoc of some of the pedigrees of our gentle families as given in “Burke” and in county histories.

Beddgelert is visited annually by a crowd of tourists, who drop a tear on the grave of Llewelyn’s faithful hound. Who Celer was, who has given a name to the place, is not known. Llewelyn may have had a dog called Kill-hart, as we shall see presently, that was true and dear to him, and the beast may have been buried here—that is possible enough; but the story of the death of Gelert, killed by his master in mistake, is not true—it is an importation. The full legend as connected with Beddgelert appears first of all in Jones’s Musical Relicks of the Welsh Bards (ed. 1794, p. 75) about a dog, Cylart, at Beddgelert. Then came Spencer’s poem, Beth-Gelert, or the Grave of the Greyhound, which was first printed privately as a broadsheet in 1800, when it was composed. He says: “The story of this ballad is traditionary in a village at the foot of Snowdon, where Llewelyn the Great had a house. The greyhound named Gelert was given him by his father-in-law, King John, in the year 1205.” This is taken straight out of the note of Jones, date and all. We may well inquire what was Jones’s authority. The legend had found its way into Wales at least in the sixteenth century, for there is an englyn, in a MS. written in that century, to Llewelyn’s hound, Kilhart, “when it was buried at Beddgelert”; and the legend occurs as one of the pseudonymous Allegories, or Fables of Catwg Ddoeth, in the Iolo MSS., written about the same century, and, as all the other documents there, in the South Welsh dialect. It is there entitled, “The Man who killed his Greyhound.” It is therein connected with a man “who formerly lived at Abergarwan.” The tale—infant in cradle, a greyhound, a wolf—is given complete, and one of the popular sayings it gave currency to—“As sorry as the man who killed his greyhound”—is found in most collections of Welsh proverbs. As to the allegories of Catwg Ddoeth, the collection was itself an importation from the popular mediæval volume The Sayings of Cato the Wise, and it was foisted on S. Cadog of Llancarfan.

BEDDGELERT

With respect to the grave of the greyhound at Beddgelert, Professor Rhys says that there are still alive old men there who remember and can testify to having seen the cairn erected by the landlord of the Goat Inn.

We have, then, the story traced so far. It was brought into Wales in one of the popular collections of tales that circulated in the Middle Ages; then it was applied to some man, nameless, at Abergarwan, in South Wales. Then it attached itself to Llewelyn; Jones took the englyn, invented the date and the fable that it was presented by King John to Llewelyn. Next, Spencer composed the ballad which at once became popular, and finally the innkeeper at Beddgelert manufactured the grave of the dog. But let us go a little further back, and track the still earlier history of the tale.