Regency Christmas in Wales

 

A charming drawing of a Regency Christmas in Wales -- from Nanteos.  Note the old folks sitting by the roaring fire in the simnai fawr, the string orchestra, the children looking on, and the hanging holly and mistletoe festive ormament!  This looks like a relatively modest house -- maybe Plas Ingli around 1800 would not have been so different.......

A farm kitchen in Wales

 

This is a very touching and respectful painting entitled "Welsh Peasants Reading the Franchise Bill". The artist was Jenny Bond and the date was 1884. It will have surprised many who saw it, around the time it was painted, since the idea that Welsh peasants could read must have been surprising to say the least.  But many of them could read, thanks to the chapels, the Sunday schools and the circulating schools -- and many were quite aware of what was going on in the world.  And many small farmers and labourers were members of the nonconformist chapels too -- where they read the scriptures and even became involved in matters of theological interpretation as deacons and congregation members.

Actually the building in this painting is not a peasant's hovel -- it is a substantial stone interior with beams, reasonable furniture and a simnai fawr.  I would say that this is a typical kitchen of a tenant farmer who maybe had his own animals and who aspired to greater things.  Just like some of Martha's tenants in the Angel Mountain saga.

Ceffyl Pren and Rebecca Riots

A 2017 thesis on the Rebecca Riots has just been made available via the Gutenberg web site.  It's a good introduction as to what happened between 1839 and 1843, and why.  It's written in good simple language and is mercifully free of academic lingo.  Below is an extract which deals with the influence of the "ceffyl pren" tradition on the manner in which the Rebecca Riots were conceived and carried out.  The main emphasis of the study is on the reasons for the "hiatus" in rioting in the years 1840, 1841 and 1842, but there is a lot here which is of interest, with a good citation of sources. 

Finch, A. C. (2017). Rebecca’s Silence: The Rebecca Riots and Why They Vanished for Three Years.
Retrieved from https://ir.una.edu/hmt/1

https://ir.una.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=hmt

Extract:

Another example of civil unrest - the common man taking laws into his own hands - and precursor to the Rebecca Riots was what was known as the ceffyl pren, or the “wooden horse.” Events such as these foreshadowed the desire for the theatrics and costumes that were so prevalent in the riots. During the ceffyl pren, the events that usually occurred involved an effigy of a person who had broken what was then considered to be the “moral code;” this effigy was carried either on a wooden stick or chair that was held up by the people involved in the event, or on a ladder at the front of a procession.

This procession would parade outside the house of the “guilty” person, to the accompaniment of various noises made by the group, such as the beating of saucepans and other utensils. The purpose of this procession was to draw attention to the breaking of the moral code and to make a laughing stock of the person who had supposedly done the offence. In reference to the view of the ceffyl pren by the people of the time, the newspaper The Welshman notes that:

"Some married parties in the parish of Newchurch, in this County, having been suspected of matrimonial infidelity, the disgraceful exhibition called ceffyl pren, and known in some parts of England by the term riding stang, was paraded through our streets on Wednesday night last, with the usual paraphernalia of torches, &c., at a late hour, and was accompanied by actings……"

This form of the common people taking the law into their own hands naturally was aimed toward fellow citizens and not the government, but it is considered to have inspired many aspects of the Rebecca Riots.

It was not only the style of events such as the ceffyl pren that inspired the Welsh commoners to take the law into their own hands, but the success of these events. Had the ceffyl pren been ineffective, and those involved punished to some extent by the law enforcement of the time, the desire to continue taking the law into their own hands and commit acts of civil disobedience may have waned. However, while the acts involved in the ceffyl pren were ultimately successful, the results were often unpredictable.

No matter the unpredictability, “as a means of social control...there can be no doubt that the ceffyl pren was generally effective. An old woman, who was aged ninety-six in 1858, reported that she had often seen the ceffyl pren in Breconshire used ‘with great effect, as quarrelsome women had a great dread of its appearance’.” The purpose, use, unpredictability, and, yet, ultimate effectiveness of the ceffyl pren is seen by many to foreshadow why the Rebecca Riots were so popular among common people, why the attacks were often sporadic and unpredictable, and, finally, why the people felt their actions would be effective to make some kind of difference regarding the tollbooths of southwest Wales.

Audiobooks on loan

The Angel Mountain novels are at last featuring on the Pembs County Library Borrowbox system, meaning that they are available on loan as downloads.  or they will be -- for some reason they are not actually available until January and February next year.........

Welsh libraries and the Welsh book trade generally are taking a bit of time to adapt to the arrival of audiobooks -- although they have been around for many years now.  We'll get there in the end!

On Angel Mountain:

 https://fe.bolindadigital.com/wldcs_bol_fo/b2i/productDetail.html?productId=BOL_776568&fromPage=1&b2bSite=4170

House of Angels:

https://fe.bolindadigital.com/wldcs_bol_fo/b2i/productDetail.html?productId=BOL_925324&fromPage=1&b2bSite=4170

Dark Angel:

https://fe.bolindadigital.com/wldcs_bol_fo/b2i/productDetail.html?productId=BOL_963571&fromPage=1&b2bSite=4170

It doesn't look as if the physical CDs are available on loan to library subscribers just yet -- but I believe that is coming.

A snippet from Martha's narrative

We have extracted a short section from Martha's narrative in "On Angel Mountain" and have put it onto YouTube.  We hope that it might find a new group of listeners as a result.  Thanks to Steve for his technical help!

Here is the link:

https://youtu.be/Htl64L-aTwA

You may notice that we have used the same music (composed and performed by Steve) as we used in the short film trailer featuring Anna Munro which we released a couple ofyears ago.

House of Angels -- a lost cover

 

When you publish a new edition of a book, you play around with assorted cover designs.  This is one of them for "House of Angels" that didn't get the final vote.......

It's nevertheless rather a nice cover, I reckon.  Created as usual by my son Martin...........

Another romantic ruin

 

I just love these ruins that one picks up every now and then on the satellite imagery.  This one is called Ty-Col, and it's on the mountainside above Dinas.  It appears to be associated with a group of small fields or paddocks, and so it may be something more substantial than a "ty unnos" or one-night cottage that started as an illegal hovel and somehow managed to survive.  From the shape of this one, it looks as if it might have been a typical "longhouse" -- but more research is needed.

Lost farmsteads

Paul Sambrook's map of a mysterious structure at Waun Maes, on the boggy moorland south of Waun Mawn.  It was probably a sheepfold, but are there signs of dwellings and other features nearby?

Came across this very interesting publication: "Lost farmsteads: deserted rural settlements in Wales" (ed. Kathryn Roberts), 2006, CBA Research Report 148, 326 pp.

It's nicely laid out and well illustrated, and of particular interest to Pembrokeshire is Chapter 5, by Paul Sambrook, entitled "Deserted rural settlements in south-west Wales."

 https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archiveDS/archiveDownload?t=arch-281-1/dissemination/pdf/RR148.pdf

Paul made a special study of the Preseli uplands  -- and he describes and classifies several cottage / farmstead types, including shepherds' cottages, hafod or summer settlements, and hovels built and used by vagrants or seasonal workers.  The ones that are difficult to classify or identify are of course the "ty unnos" cottages built illegally and overnight to start with, and then improved and made respectable later on.......

In Martha's story there are a number of episodes involving the building of cottages on the edge of the common and the bitter disputes involving landless peasants and the powerful gentry who sometimes evicted poor people from the common and then illegally enclosed chunks of it themselves........

The terms "hafod", "lluest" and "tyddyn" are often used for these ruined old buildings out in the middle of nowhere.......