Light deepening the profoundest sleep of shade
Wordsworth, “Ruins of a Castle in North Wales.”
The more one lives in Wales the more one recognizes the need for nonconformity. The Established Church has frequently conformed too much, certainly to the bars found in all public inns, and probably to the “jorum” measure set by castle life and even by the abbey life that is now no more. No doubt, if there were less poverty, there might be less drinking; on the other hand, if there were less drinking, there would certainly be less poverty. Even now, as I write in the most respectable old inn in Denbigh,—the place where all the gentry go,—for an inn sign I am looking out on three liquor kegs crossed one above another with a bunch of grapes pendant.
But the hill on which this quaint, small, prosperous town of Denbigh is built does the best it can by its steepness to keep the people in good condition. In Welsh Denbigh Castle is called “Castell Caledfryn-yn-Rhos,” the “Castle of the Craggy Hill in Rhos.” From the “bottom,” as the natives call the foot of the town and hill,—they are identical,—it is a sheer climb to the top where the castle is situated, and in that climb one has traversed the entire village. Close by the castle is the Church of St. Hilary, more or less falling to pieces now, where once masses were said for the soul of Henry de Lacy. Within the castle enclosure, in a tiny cottage, John Henry Rowlands, or Stanley, the African explorer, was born. Very eager is Denbigh to claim this distinguished man, and but little can you get them to say about the brutal treatment which drove him away from home and made him a wanderer upon the face of the earth. Denbigh claims Twm o’r Nant also,—he is buried at the bottom of the town in Whitchurch,—but not content with claiming him, they canonize him with the absurd name of “Welsh Shakespeare.” Born in 1739, he developed, without any educational advantages whatsoever, remarkable skill in the writing of interludes, which for many years he himself played up and down the country, and by which, because he championed the cause of the people “against the evils of the day,” he got the ear of his popular audiences. Denbigh claims Dr. Samuel Johnson, too, and exaggerates his brief visit to Middleton at Gwaenynog. They have even photographed one cottage and called it Johnson’s.
A few miles west from Denbigh, at Rhuddlan, they have made the most of their history, but it is not recent; rather it is standardized and dignified by an antiquity which antedates even the ivy-covered ruins of the castle. There starlings flutter in and out,—perhaps a descendant of that starling which Branwen had taught to speak and who carried across the sea to Carnarvon, to her brother, Bendigeid Vran, the tale of her sufferings. There, too, are the fireplaces of an ample hospitality which is no more. I thought of the promise Edward had made in Rhuddlan that he would give the people a prince born in Wales and who could speak no English. I thought of that battle between Saxon and Welsh, in 769, on Morfa (marsh) Rhuddlan, which, before our eyes, stretched gently and mysteriously away to the sea, and of the song that had commemorated it and of the defeat of the Cymru:—
“Calm the sun sets o’er the hills of Carnarvon,
Deep fall the shadows on valley and lea,
Scarce a breath ripples the breast of old ocean,
Faint on the ear falls the roll of the sea.”
Also in the old song is heard again the din of weapons, the hissing of arrows, and the cries of those who fought and those who fell. Even in its English translation it is still a stirring old song.