Daunced ful ofte in many a grene mede;
This was the olde opinion, as I rede.
I speke of manye hundred yeres ago.
Chaucer.
I.
The best living authority I have found on the folklore of Beđgelert, Drws y Coed, and the surrounding district, is Mr. William Jones, of Ỻangoỻen. He has written a good deal on the subject in the Brython, and in essays intended for competition at various literary meetings in Wales. I had the loan from him of one such essay, and I have referred to the Brython; and I have also had from Mr. Jones a number of letters, most of which contain some additional information. In harmony, moreover, with my usual practice, I have asked Mr. Jones to give me a little of his own history. This he has been kind enough to do; and, as I have so far followed no particular order in these jottings, I shall now give the reader the substance of his letters in English, as I am anxious that no item should be lost or left inaccessible to English students of folklore. What is unintelligible to me may not be so to those who have made a serious study of the subject. Mr. Jones’ words are in substance to the following effect:—
‘I was bred and born in the parish of Beđgelert, one of the most rustic neighbourhoods and least subject to change in the whole country. Some of the old Welsh customs remained within my memory, in spite of the adverse influence of the Calvinistic Reformation, as it is termed, and I have myself witnessed several Knitting Nights and Nuptial Feasts (Neithiorau), which, be it noticed, are not to be confounded with weddings, as they were feasts which followed the weddings, at the interval of a week. At these gatherings song and story formed an element of prime importance in the entertainment at a time when the Reformation alluded to had already blown the blast of extinction on the Merry Nights (Noswyliau Ỻawen) and Saints’ Fêtes[1] (Gwyliau Mabsant) before the days of my youth, though many of my aged acquaintances remembered them well, and retained a vivid recollection of scores of the amusing tales which used to be related for the best at the last mentioned long-night meetings. I have heard not a few of them reproduced by men of that generation. As an example of the old-fashioned habits of the people of Beđgelert in my early days, I may mention the way in which wives and children used to be named. The custom was that the wife never took her husband’s family name, but retained the one she had as a spinster. Thus my grandmother on my mother’s side was called Ellen Hughes, daughter to Hugh Williams, of Gwastad Annas. The name of her husband, my grandfather, was William Prichard [= W. ab Rhisiart, or Richard’s son], son to Richard William, of the Efail Newyđ. The name of their eldest son, my uncle (brother to my mother), was Hugh Hughes, and the second son’s name was Richard William. The mother had the privilege of naming her first-born after her own family in case it was a boy; but if it happened to be a girl, she took her name from the father’s family, for which reason my mother’s maiden name was Catharine Williams. This remained her name to the day of her death: and the old people at Beđgelert persisted in calling me, so long as I was at home, William Prichard, after my grandfather, as I was my mother’s eldest child.
‘Most of the tales I have collected,’ says Mr. Jones, ‘relate to the parishes of Beđgelert and Dolwyđelen. My kindred have lived for generations in those two parishes, and they are very numerous: in fact, it used to be said that the people of Dolwyđelen and Beđgelert were all cousins. They were mostly small farmers, and jealous of all strangers, so that they married almost without exception from the one parish into the other. This intermixture helped to carry the tales of the one parish to the other, and to perpetuate them on the hearths of their homes from generation to generation, until they were swept away by another influence in this century. Many of my ancestors seem to have been very fond of stories, poetry, and singing, and I have been told that some of them were very skilled in these things. So also, in the case of my parents, the memory of the past had a great charm for them on both sides; and when the relatives from Dolwyđelen and Beđgelert met in either parish, there used to be no end to the recounting of pedigrees and the repeating of tales for the best. By listening to them, I had been filled with desire to become an adept in pedigrees and legends. My parents used to let me go every evening to the house of my grandfather, William ab Rhisiart, the clerk, to listen to tales, and to hear edifying books read. My grandfather was a reader “without his rival,” and “he used to beat the parson hollow.” Many people used to meet at Pen y Bont in the evenings to converse together, and the stories of some of them were now and then exceedingly eloquent. Of course, I listened with eager ears and open mouth, in order, if I heard anything new, to be able to repeat it to my mother. She, unwilling to let herself be beaten, would probably relate another like it, which she had heard from her mother, her grandmother, or her old aunt of Gwastad Annas, who was a fairly good verse-wright of the homely kind. Then my father, if he did not happen to be busy with his music-book, would also give us a tale which he had heard from his grandmother or grandfather, the old John Jones, of Tyn Ỻan Dolwyđelen, or somebody else would do so. That is one source from which I got my knowledge of folklore; but this ceased when we moved from Beđgelert to Carnarvon in the year 1841. My grandfather died in 1844, aged seventy-eight.
‘Besides those,’ Mr. Jones goes on to say, ‘who used to come to my grandfather’s house and to his workshop to relate stories, the blacksmith’s shop used to be, especially on a rainy day, a capital place for a story, and many a time did I lurk there instead of going to school, in order to hear old William Dafyđ, the sawyer, who, peace be to his ashes! drank many a hornful from the Big Quart without ever breaking down, and old Ifan Owen, the fisherman, tearing away for the best at their yarns, sometimes a tissue of lies and sometimes truth. The former was funny, and a great wag, up to all kinds of tricks. He made everybody laugh, whereas the latter would preserve the gravity of a saint, however lying might be the tale which he related. Ifan Owen’s best stories were about the Water Spirit, or, as he called it, Ỻamhigyn y Dwr, “the Water Leaper.” He had not himself seen the Ỻamhigyn, but his father had seen it “hundreds of times.” Many an evening it had prevented him from catching a single fish in Ỻyn Gwynan, and, when the fisherman got on this theme, his eloquence was apt to become highly polysyllabic in its adjectives. Once in particular, when he had been angling for hours towards the close of the day, without catching anything, he found that something took the fly clean off the hook each time he cast it. After moving from one spot to another on the lake, he fished opposite the Benlan Wen, when something gave his line a frightful pull, “and, by the gallows, I gave another pull,” the fisherman used to say, “with all the force of my arm: out it came, and up it went off the hook, whilst I turned round to see, as it dashed so against the cliff of Benlan that it blazed like a lightning.” He used to add, “If that was not the Ỻamhigyn, it must have been the very devil himself.” That cliff must be two hundred yards at least from the shore. As to his father, he had seen the Water Spirit many times, and he had also been fishing in the Ỻyn Glâs or Ffynnon Lâs, once upon a time, when he hooked a wonderful and fearful monster: it was not like a fish, but rather resembled a toad, except that it had a tail and wings instead of legs. He pulled it easily enough towards the shore, but, as its head was coming out of the water, it gave a terrible shriek that was enough to split the fisherman’s bones to the marrow, and, had there not been a friend standing by, he would have fallen headlong into the lake, and been possibly dragged like a sheep into the depth; for there is a tradition that if a sheep got into the Ỻyn Glâs, it could not be got out again, as something would at once drag it to the bottom. This used to be the belief of the shepherds of Cwm Dyli, within my memory, and they acted on it in never letting their dogs go after the sheep in the neighbourhood of this lake. These two funny fellows, William Dafyđ and Ifan Owen, died long ago, without leaving any of their descendants blessed with as much as the faintest gossamer thread of the story-teller’s mantle. The former, if he had been still living, would now be no less than 129 years of age, and the latter about 120.’