“Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foamOf perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.”
“Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foamOf perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.”
“Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foamOf perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.”
“Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.”
There lying before one over the summer sea is the rim of Anglesey, quiet in its mirage of white sand and the green land stretching away into gray distance. Still many portions of the old Roman road connecting Segontium and Heriri Mons may be seen in this valley, bridle-paths the Welsh call “Ffyrdd Elen,” “Elen’s Roads.” Towering above, Snowdon looks down, untroubled, from its splendid reach, upon these paths, from which, in sunshine and in mist, Druid and Roman, henchman of Edward and John, prince and poet and painter, have made the steep ascent and seen swimming before them, like the sea of time, a hundred hills; beyond, the wide glimmer of the ocean; and heard rising through the air the roar of torrent and stream. Halfway up Snowdon are the remains of a druidical temple. There, kneeling on some of the stones, I listened to the song of wind and sea, the Harp of Eryri, and tried to catch a little of the vast panorama, which was, somehow, strangely, mournfully human, holding in sky-line and sea-line dim shadow of the hearts which had knelt here before—the immemorial worshippers of untold beauty.
“Ah,” said Bishop Baldwin, recovering his breath, “the nightingale followed wise counsel and never came into Wales.” So, jocund as the most unordained, Baldwin’s holy company of the twelfth century moved on its way, gathering ever more and more to it cloaks signed with the crusading cross of red. To mind come other figures and to mind come other pictures—wild, powerful, beautiful, pathetic—of a past that is a thousand or two thousand years old. In some rock-strewn valley, bleak and barren as the uttermost parts of the earth or terrible as the valley of the shadow of death, rises the cry of human sacrifice. Hundreds of years later, down a roadway bordered then as now with foxglove and bluebells and heather, rides a gallant company, gentle-mannered, on pleasure bent. Or by the walls of Conway Castle, Edward I bears the body of his Eleanor to its far resting-place in Westminster Abbey, where the stones are still fresh from the chisels of the builders. Here is “theunimaginable touch of Time,” a Past that as it slips away joins the mystery of a Future even at this instant in retreat.
But the traveller does not go on foot week after week many scores of miles, with these thoughts always present, like Christian with a pack upon his back, and meeting as did Christian many difficulties. True, a good heart faces the open road expecting many obstacles, and can find its wonder-ways even if it loses a night’s rest. Giraldus Cambrensis, on the forward march with the Bishop through Wales, could vouch for an island in which no one dies, for a wandering bell, for a whale with three golden teeth, for grasshoppers that sing better when their heads are cut off. He tells the story of a lad, Sisillus Long Leg by name, who suffered a violent persecution from toads that in the end consumed the young man to the very bones. And like most ecclesiastics, Giraldus allows himself the relaxation of a good fish story.
This credulity, charming as it is and panacea for the physical tedium of the open road, is the faculty of which the pedestrian of to-day must strip himself. No other pilgrimages of which I know have been made to these little churches,except by Mr. Herbert North, of Wales,—who has studied the old churches of Arllechwyd simply, and to whose architectural insight I am greatly indebted,—and by myself. During many weeks my journey took me from hillside to hillside and mountain-top to mountain-top, studying these ancient foundations. My work was grounded upon incredulity; everything was recorded, nothing concluded. As a motto the remark of the only thoughtful sexton I have met out of literature might have been taken. Contemplating an old stone at St. Mary, Conway, inscribed “Y 1066,” he said, “Hit wants a wise ’ead to find hit out.” At Gyffin beyond Conway we pointed to one object after another in the church with the single question—an American question:—
“How old is it?”
“It’s very old, mum,” came the reply.
“How old?”
“Oh, very old, mum,” in an impressive voice.
THE GREAT HALL AT CONWAY CASTLEFrom an engraving by Cuitt
THE GREAT HALL AT CONWAY CASTLE
From an engraving by Cuitt
Having tested barrel vault, paintings, chancel, windows, rood screen, roof, walls, doors, in this fashion, we had worked ourselves out of the church, so to speak, and I pointed up to a shiny tin rooster crowing upon the bell-cot.
“How old is it, the rooster?” I said.
“Oh, very old, mum,” came the solemn reply.
At another place we were told that the bell swinging in the cot, and sounding sweetly after the long journey uphill, dated from the fourth century. It was useless to inform the poor soul that there were none but hand-bells then in North Wales, and that she was in this case only a little matter of one thousand years out of the way. After a mount up to Llangelynin, taken hastily, and much investigation of objects genuinely ancient, the woman who had us in thrall said, pointing to a dark recess under a narrow, fixed pew, black as darkness, and not more than one foot from the pew in front of it, “There’s a very old tablet there, mum, my son says.” Perhaps she had calculated the discrepancy between the width of the pew and myself; however, I got through to the floor, wiped off the dust with a handkerchief, and out blinked, as sleepily as if it were the very Rip Van Winkle of stones, the young date 1874! Wild steeple chases there were in plenty, with minor fatalities to limb and courage. It is useless, when one mountain-top has been achieved, to find that after all there is nothing left except the inconsiderablemountain itself,—it is useless then to discover upon an opposite summit, whose peak could be reached by a well-modulated voice, an extant church of indubitable antiquity, for to meet with that church would require an all-day’s walk. There was one steeple chase without even the comfort of another church in view.
Once reconciled to these surprises, for which no one can be held accountable, and to the ineffectiveness of the sextons whom no one must suppose responsible, there are no chances for disappointments except such as are self-created. The attendants in most cases are women, and wretched creatures some of them are. In one place a woman with a goitre, and one eye gone, kept the keys. She was admirably proud of her son because he did know something, but as the son spent all his days in a mine we were not in a way to inherit his wisdom. Another woman was deaf and dumb and foolish. A lad who took us through a church of considerable importance, if antiquity can make these deserted churches important, was so stupid he received a lecture upon his ignorance. His unanswerable sectarian reply was that he did not belong to that church anyway. We met with some smart young girlswho, with their twenty years of wisdom, were above knowledge concerning anything so rusty and tumble-down as the church by means of which they hoped to win sixpences for ribbons. There were two or three apple-cheeked old women clad in caps and bobbing their curtsies. To one, a sweet old soul, I was explaining that a certain door could not be very ancient and have the big nails it had in it. “Uch,” she replied, in distress. “Well, indeed, mum, perhaps they were put in later to hold it together.” It may be said, I think, that the keys are kept as far away as possible, why I cannot say. So is the vicar kept as far away as possible: even the curates get the habit and stay away when they can. As a rule, the churches are not set down in the midst of habitable villages, but most often upon remote hillsides or hilltops. There is another difficulty to be encountered also, in the person of the kindly individual who could show you what you wish, but wishes to show you something else. One old woman—the Ancient Mariner himself could not have been more irresistible—detained us endlessly while she searched for and displayed the Duchess of Westminster’s photograph.
These are some of the troubles in a progress otherwise enchanting; once realized, it is well to forget them, together with the feet that were sometimes too weary to travel five miles further and the shoulder that ached under the strap. With its ache of all the ages the dream of ancient beauty has no place in it for an hour’s weariness. As if the riddle of existence could be explained by a wall rain-washed and worn, upon which grow lichen, moss, rustling grass, and even trees, and by lintels tipping earthward, golden flowers blowing upon them! The eye travels thirstily from stone to stone, or to some peaceful bell-cot pointing the bare ridge of a bleak, sheep-covered hill, or to the far-away hills and gray sky and solemn, dreary places. Spiritually it is easy to understand why these churches are on the hills, and the controversy about their position seems a matter of no further moment. There are other pictures, too, of churches by the sea, in the main not as old as those upon the mountains, enclosures where even the tombstones are crowded together in their last sleep. Beyond these churchyards lies the encircling shore with ever the white lip of the sea at its edge; above, low-lying regiments of cloudsmarch Snowdon-wards. Upon one eminence is the church, upon another, nearer the water, a castle, and in the valley between these crumbling sanctities of power and spirit is the little town, busy still, its roofs making a joyous show of colour beneath the blue sky. Within these churches by the sea there is ever the tideless roar of the waters ringing upon the shores, and from these church doorways the eye dreams upon the castle wasting with the land at its feet, or the “llys” of King Mark, or upon the faint blue rim of some island, holy as the mother of good men. Along the road on one side is the sea; on the other, green hills rise into the blue of the sky, their slopes a mosaic of gray sheep walls. And here out of the village at the end of a grass-grown road, by the sea, lies a little church, around which the sands have blown through so many centuries that the windows show just the caps looking like sleepy eyes out of the huddled graves. One minute time rolls like a chariot wheel crushing all things, another moment and it is a mystic circle without beginning and without end. The graves upon the hillsides, young in their hundreds of years, look down upon the mounds of the British undisturbed ina millennial repose, and upon a stone lying as hands two thousand years ago placed it. And past the ears rush the centuries of all eternity, as in the travelling of a mighty wind.
Seeing with the eye of visions it is not hard to re-create a vanished past, to construct again the primitive British church of wood and wattle, with its beauty of oaken rafter and carved wood which stone now encloses. There is still an ancient wooden church in Greenstead, Essex, in plan much like little churches of North Wales,—the walls six feet high made of half trees side by side, the roof a tie beam, with struts, less than six feet from the floor. This parallelogram follows out the double square of what was undoubtedly the plan of the ancient British church, something that was still geometrically the square sanctuary with its square altar typifying the heavenly Jerusalem. Bede, in his “Ecclesiastical History,” speaks of “a church fit for an Episcopal See; which, however, after the manner of the Scots, he [Finan] did not erect of stone, but of sawn timber, covering it with reeds.” It is worth remembering that the little churches being discussed are unique examples of a national type based, notupon the Roman basilica, but upon the Temple, with its square Holy of Holies, and illustrating certain features; a square east end with east window, an altar concealed behind screens, and a south door instead of a western portal. The wood and wattle churches have disappeared, but upon the foundation lines have arisen the present stone churches of North Wales, dating back in general to the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Their walls of stone are daubed at the joints with mud, similar to the treatment the wattle buildings had received, and the whole whitewashed inside and out. The roof, later covered with oaken shingles and now with soft-coloured slates, was in the Middle Ages thatched deeply with reed or straw. At the east end was the small slit window, and at the south end a door so low that even a short person must stoop to enter it. Originally there were no bell turrets or porches, and at the eastern gable merely a wooden cross. Inside, a screen divided the building in half, the squints covered by veils, and several doors opening into the altar space. Probably the screen was decorated with painting as the barrel vaults came to be. Within and without, the sanctuarygleamed pure white. The Saxons learned the use of whitewash from the British, and St. Wilfrid gloried in having washed the York Minster of his day “whiter than snow.”
ST. WINIFRED’S WELL, HOLYHEADFrom an engraving by Cuitt, 1813
ST. WINIFRED’S WELL, HOLYHEAD
From an engraving by Cuitt, 1813
As the cottages, coloured white or yellow or pink, are seen nestling against the hills of Wales, one regrets that the church no longer receives as in olden days the same treatment. With the wash worn from the churches and never renewed, the country has lost in picturesque beauty. How pretty these buildings must have looked, with their steep thatched roofs and white bell-cots gleaming in the midst of dark yews, or perhaps some golden-tinted church glowing like a crocus in the midst of pines. Not only have the colours faded, as if the land were some bright missal turning gray, but the odd circular huts with their conical thatched roofs, in which the natives once lived, have tumbled down. In those days was a beautiful hospitality, the host and hostess serving until all were served, and in these rude dwellings the ancient harp was played; and from the wooden book, its revolving square crossbars inscribed with letters or notes of music, were read the ancient song and poetry of Wales.When the rectangular cottage came in it did not differ greatly from the circular hut. There were windows—“wind-eyes”—covered with a wooden lattice and shutter, the walls smoothly plastered, and the interior made less primitive by the use of three-legged tables and chairs. Still later, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the one space was divided off into kitchen, chamber, and loft, the kitchen open to the roof and airy, healthful, and clean. Hospitality was sacred then; any man might enter a dwelling, and delivering up his arms stay as long as he would.
The church was but another sanctuary in olden days where men could take refuge from sin or foe. The “llan,” which is the prefix to fully eight tenths of all the names of ancient churches in North Wales, means “enclosure.” Probably in these places were the earliest monastic settlements, at a time when the “llan,” as the Irish “rath,” enclosed habitation as well as sanctuary. But as the years brought about greater specification in the functions of church and state the term narrowed itself down and was applied solely to the church. The old churchyard walls are still more or less circular like British fortwalls. Llangelynin has an enclosure that undoubtedly follows the old lines. The walls of the churchyard near Holyhead are extremely ancient, seventeen feet high and six feet thick. This masonry, from the presence of certain round towers and the particular plastering used, is known to be Roman. Set away from the world that is “too much with us,” these enclosures are charming old spaces, habitable in a sweet sense. The grass looks peace into tired eyes, and to eyes eager with plans rest here is merely an emphasis upon the joy of living. And here, as the stiles into the close show, the children play and have played from generation to generation. Here they climbed upon the roof, and here against the north and west walls, where burials are never made, they played ball and scratched upon the stone their scoring-marks.
At Llangelynin there are no yew trees; that windy height is too bleak for even the sturdy yew. Only white harebells and hardy grass blow about on its bare rock-strewn summit. But in most of the enclosures the yew still stands as the one enduring monument of a past whose very rocks have been covered by the silt of over a thousand years. Many of these trees date froma British period and remain emblematic to-day as they were then. Sometimes it is a single yew by the lychgate which one sees, or an alley of the deathless green, or perhaps yew branches completely veil a gable end of the little church. At Beddgelert, the oldest foundation in all Wales, the yew stands to-day as it stood some two thousand years ago; about its base have rushed the floods of wild mountain torrents, from its feet the graves of centuries have been washed away down to the all-embracing sea. Like children of yesterday are the mediæval lychgates through which one passes into the church enclosure and through which is often caught the first glimpse of the church bell-cot. At Caerhûn (the ancient Canovium), where the yew spreads over the gate is a double bell-cot, which, as it has the traditional straight ridge and gable in the middle, is amongst the oldest in Wales, of the fourteenth or fifteenth century, for the cots as well as the lychgates are “recent” in the life of these churches. The little crucifixes with their straight arms are also of this date. Before this time the local churches had nothing but hand-bells, which were held in great reverence. One of them may be seen in the stone coffin of Llewelyn the Greatat Llanrwst. It is about ten inches high and cast on an oblong plan. Gildas gave such a bell to St. David. Six hundred years later, in the twelfth century, Giraldus Cambrensis tells the story of a portable bell called “Bangu” which, when a certain woman carried it to a castle where her husband was wrongfully imprisoned, caused the destruction of the whole town except the church walls. The campanology of North Wales is a romance in itself, a collection of odd, interesting, pathetic tales of past miracles, past friendships, past enmities.
The original buildings not only did not have lychgates and bell-cots, they also did not have porches, and some to-day do not have them. But they are being added from time to time, and fearful are some of them to behold. At St. Mary’s, Llanfwrog Church, just across the bridge from quaint Ruthin, where the Duchess of Westminster has lived and is of vastly more interest to the people than gable ends and oaken rafters and other such stuff, fit only for the attics of men’s minds, is a bit of “restoration” suitable for display in the windows of a carriage-shop. The chancel railing is bright green, red, and black, the pews black and red,—a foretastepossibly of the landscape into which some of their occupants will one day take a dip,—and the stained glass vies with a refracted solar ray in yellows and oranges and reds and blues and greens. From this “restored” edifice drops a long flight of steps past the windows and signboard of an ancient hostelry, “Ye Labour in Vain Inn.” One cannot help wishing that the white gentleman upon the signboard, who is scrubbing a black man in a tub of water, would take his scrubbing-brush up to the church. Often, after all else has been hopelessly restored and all vestiges of harmonious beauty have disappeared, the old doorway remains, witness of an instinctive reverence for a threshold. Many of the circular-headed doorways, now hooded with porches, date from the eleventh and twelfth centuries and even earlier, and through them one passes over a mere sill into the sacred enclosure.
A few points, simple and easy to remember as well as easy to discover, give an added intelligent pleasure in the study of these churches. The oldest churches are generally from twelve feet six inches to fourteen feet wide; the early walls from three feet to three feet six inchesthick. Sixteenth-century walls rarely exceed two feet and a half in thickness. The old wattle buildings were daubed with a mixture of clay and cow dung; these church walls are built with earth and rendered on the face with lime and mortar. Buttresses are sometimes found, but they do not belong to early local work. The roofs are easy to examine and often of an enchanting beauty. At Llangelynin is a roof which is probably the original twelfth-century covering. The roof at Llanrhychwyn is also of the close couple type; here the struts are straight, but carved, and there are two ties across the nave. In some of these roofs are intermediary rafters, added when the thatch was replaced by slate.
The earliest mention of a chancel of which I know is that in the poems of Cynddelw, who lived in the twelfth century, in his ode to Tysilio, when he speaks of a certain church as the “light or shining church” with a chancel for mass. We cannot assume that even in the twelfth century chancels were by any means common in North Wales. At Mallwyd Church there was, not so long ago, a communion table in the centre of the building, and there is noquestion but that holy ceremonies were performed originally, instead of at a chancel end, in the midst of this rectangular Holy of Holies. At Bardsey, Pennant found an insulated stone altar rather nearer the east end than the centre. The rough, uneven slate paving in these churches is comparatively modern, and it might be added comparatively luxurious. The first paving was mud and sometimes flat stones. Formerly the windows were covered by wooden shutters or lattices; that was the usage in all conventual buildings. Now the windows are either well or illy filled with coloured glass. In many of the churches falling into great dilapidation the windows have been stuffed with stone and mortar, or rudely boarded over. Some of the stained glass is genuinely ugly and some of it genuinely and anciently lovely. That at Llanrhychwyn, coloured in brown line and yellow stain and representing the Virgin and Child and the Holy Trinity, is of the fifteenth century and still beautiful. Probably the use of glass was not introduced into Wales till the thirteenth century. West windows were unknown in local Welsh work. Where a window with such an exposure is found, the opening did not belong to the earlychurch. There are windows of great antiquity in these churches. Look at the lintelled window in the passageway into St. Beuno’s Chapel. Courage hesitates at assigning a date to this bit of work. There are windows far more elaborate of a comparatively early date, but they are the work of Latin monks and do not follow the straight lines of the native British architecture. An exquisite example of early Latin work is that of the Gilbertine monks upon the Beddgelert triplet.
The barrel vaults in these churches are curious concave coverings over the chancel end, ark-like in form and supposed type of the ancient church. These oaken canopies have been elaborately painted in the past; now they are to be seen in every stage of dilapidation, provoking the eye by their interrupted pictures or faint lines of red and blue. They are approximately of the same date, although not in the same condition, for their destruction is due to leaky roofs and not to age. The ground colour was the green-blue the Middle Ages loved so well, and the other colours red, yellow, and white. At Llandanwg, where the sea would flow into the western door were it not for a big embankment,there is a barrel vault with faint traces of painting upon it. An old man whose father and mother were the last people to be married there told us he took an interest in it, it was the only church in Harlech Parish fifty years ago, and “the only service held there then was when the parson and the clerk used to go over and enjoy drinking their beer on the gravestones.” English came stiff to his tongue, but he described the fearful condition of the church, and the way the people took off the seats for firewood and the children made a playhouse of the abandoned structure. In one corner of the barrel vault was a picture of the Devil prodding people down into hell. The children threw things at these paintings, mud and other articles, till the pictures were completely destroyed. Whatever the subject, it is pleasant to recall the colouring of the barrel vaults, for, executed five or six hundred years ago, they must have been brightly beautiful like the margins of an illuminated book, radiant with something of the blue and gold of very heaven itself. Of the rood screens and lofts that veiled the chancel space, there are but few left intact; of the sacred rood itself, no vestige except the socket on the candlebeam into whichits pedestal slipped. Fanaticism has swept this feature away. In Beddgelert their rood-screen carving was converted into chairs for household use or fuel for warmth. Strangely enough, Queen Elizabeth was the last defender of the screen’s mystical beauty of carven wood and the silent admonishing figure stretched upon its façade. At Llanengan there is a screen of rare delicacy, stolen, together with some elbow stalls and silver bells, from Bardsey, that resting-place of saints which seems to have been to the ecclesiastical world what Fuseli said Blake was to the art world, “good to steal from.” Chests, worm-eaten and with rusty bolts, are often among the church treasures. St. Beuno’s chest at Clynnog is as old as the saint himself. And at Clynnog, too, are dog tongs, or lazy tongs as they were sometimes called, in each paddle four sharpened nails which must have seemed bitter to any doggie’s sides, lean or fat, as he was lifted ignominiously out of the sanctuary. And, oh, woe if it caught him by the tail or foot! There are different types of fonts in these churches: small square fonts like the earliest of Palestine, Asia Minor, Egypt; extremely small fonts of various shapes dating from the eleventh to the fourteenthcentury; large fonts used for immersion, and belonging to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. At Llanderfel near Corwen is a wooden image, never, I imagine, satisfactorily accounted for. It is a horse, though curiously like a deer in appearance. This figure was the standard for the image that rested upon it and which went, several hundred years ago, to help in the burning of poor Friar Forest at Smithfield, to whom, while the fire crackled about his feet, Latimer preached a sermon. Now even the brass tablet on the standard has been sent to the British Museum, and the standard itself, till within the last few years, used for a pig-trough.
Apparently London thought a Welshman who denied the supremacy of the king worth burning, difficult to be rid of. Well might Englishmen consider such a man’s forebears in saintship. The Latins tried to rid the Western world of these anomalies in spiritual heritage—in vain! The Reformation burnt them. In vain, too, for the Welshman to-day, nonconformist and conformist alike, is as tenacious of the lists of his hagiology as ever he was a thousand years ago. To the ancient Celt there were three free dignitaries: church, land, and poet. To-daythese remain the revered dignitaries to the Welshman. In the past these offices had been closely united, for to a Welshman saintship came by birth, celebrity depended afterwards upon how he acted. There is an odd title to a Welsh catalogue of saints: “Bonedd Saint ynys Prydain,”—the Gentility of the Saints of the Isle of Britain. An old Irish song says of St. Patrick that he “was a gentleman and came of decent people,” a fact which to us does not seem prerequisite for saintdom. Not so to the Celt; and it is best to keep this essential difference in mind, or one might be puzzled by running across the annals, some day, of a saint in so cheery a state that he fell into his own holy well and escaped drowning only because of the good luck universally known to attend people in a similar condition. The object of the Celtic saint, till he became Latinized, was to serve his tribe by increasing its riches and enlarging its boundaries. It was not necessary for him, as it was for his brother Latin, to receive any papal sanction for his sainthood or to work any miracles. Hiscarteto sanctity was membership in a certain family or monastery. The Latin Christian world, establishing its supremacy bydegrees, could not fail to scoff at the temporal emphasis of Welsh saintdom. Even Giraldus, a Welshman, comments mildly upon the vindictiveness of certain saints, of whom he often knew more than he cared to tell. Gradually, by ridicule chiefly, the lists of Celtic holy men were closed. Even Bardsey, theInsula Sanctorumof the Welsh, does not escape a laugh from many critics, one of whom observes that “It would be more facile to find graves in Bardsey for so many saints than saints for so many graves”; a remark grudging and ungracious, for the world has condescended to steal everything from Bardsey and might leave it at least the glory of claiming as many dead saints as it pleases.
THE EAGLE TOWER OF CARNARVON CASTLEFrom an engraving by Cuitt
THE EAGLE TOWER OF CARNARVON CASTLE
From an engraving by Cuitt
The tales, fabulous and odd, told of Welsh saints, Welsh relics, and holy wells, are particularly charming because they are not marred by over-didacticism. Tydecho was an illustrious saint who lived in the time of King Arthur. Retiring from the world, he led a life of mingled austerity in penance and of useful hours of ploughing. One day a youth seized his oxen, but the next day wild stags were drawing the plough, and a wolf harrowing after them. Furious,the youth brought his dogs to chase away Tydecho’s wild friends. While enjoying this diversion he seated himself upon a stone; attempting to rise he found himself fixed to the rock. Truly a humiliating position for a proud-spirited youth who enjoys taunting an old man! Friendship between man and beast is woven into these tales like the bright colours threading the letters of an ancient bestiary. St. Monacella protected hares from Brochwel Yscythrog, who was hunting them. She hid the trembling little beasts under her robe and, praying devoutly, faced the dogs. The dogs ceased their running, and even when the horn was blown as a command to them to follow the hare, they stole away howling and the horn stuck to the huntsman’s lips. After Brochwel had listened to Monacella’s plea, the little creatures were released, and to this day no one in the parish will hunt one of Monacella’s lambs.
Many and attractively full of poetry are the superstitions that still live in the solitudes of northern Wales. “Bees were created in paradise,” say the “Leges Wallicæ,” “and no light save beeswax is to be used at mass.” When on the fall of man they left paradise, God Himselfis said to have blessed them. They produced, too, the nectarious “medd” of which the ancient Britons thought so much. One day we encountered a hillside woman in great distress, breathless and flapping her apron; her bees were running away and apparently the worldly creature had no intention of letting them run back to paradise. Bent pins are still to be found at the bottom of the sacred well within the church close, pins dropped in before bathing to cure warts. Woe to the bather who failed to drop in the propitiatory pin, for he promptly caught the warts of which others had got rid. And in these holy wells the clothes of sick children were washed, with happy auguries if the little garments floated, with fell portent if they sank. At Llangelynin, where the well is still in excellent condition, an old woman told me that to cure a sick child a stranger to the family must dip the child in after sundown. Spitting upon hearing the name of the Devil may not be polite, but it is a simple way of expressing contempt, and so, too, is smiting the breast in self-condemnatory woe at the name of Judas. Some of their superstitions and customs, despite the smack of folly, are wise intheir emphasis upon the power of the imagination.
There are, too, some wholesome customs of precedence. The parson always used to go out of chapel first,—in some places he does so still,—and the parishioner who disputed this order of rank might have his ears boxed for his trouble. After the baptism of a little child old women wash their failing eyes in the font with pathetic faith in the virtue of new, God-given life. There used to be some sweet customs, not entirely lost yet, connected with burial. As the coffin rested on the bier outside the door, the next of kin among the women gave to the poorest persons in the parish, over the body of the dead, a great dish filled with white bread. Then a cup of drink was handed across the bier to the same poor and all knelt to repeat the Lord’s Prayer. At every crossroad between the house and church they knelt again to pray, the sexton’s hand-bell quiet only when all knees were on the earth.
On the way from church to church many tablets arrest the eye, kneeling fathers and mothers with processions of kneeling children in a line behind them. Theviva vocehistory ofthese reliefs suggests the less quaint and more beautiful and enduringrelievoof sepulchral urns. At Clynnog I counted thirteen children in happy procession after one father. At Conway I might have counted twenty-nine if I had wished to, but I had no such wish. At Corwen we found knee-holes in both footstones and headstones to make comfortable the knees of friends while they prayed,—or meditated, as I confess I did, upon the hideousness of most sepulchral carving and inscription. There was one part of these records which, with even the best traditions behind me, could not be undertaken—the epitaph or similar memento. Early in the journey this inscription was encountered:
Heare lyeth the body ofJohn, ap Robert, ap Porth, apDavid, ap Griffith, ap DavidVauchan, ap Blethyn, apGriffith, ap Meredith,ap Jerworth, ap Llewelyn,ap Jerorh, ap Heilin, apCowryd, ap Cadvan, apAlawgwa, ap Cadell, theKing of Powys, whodeparted this life theXX day of March, in theYear of our Lord God1642, and ofhis age XCV.
Now it was plain that this was one of the results of the saints’ unsaintly emphasis upon a family-tree. Certainly a man has a right to as many ancestors as he can compass. But thereafter, when I saw the usual clusters of “aps” and “Griffyevanjoneses,” I experienced a reluctant and fluttering sensation within accompanied by external haste to get elsewhere. Just one other epitaph, by reason of its brevity, caught my pencil:—
Here lies John Shore,I say no more;Who was aliveIn sixty-five.
Here lies John Shore,I say no more;Who was aliveIn sixty-five.
Here lies John Shore,I say no more;Who was aliveIn sixty-five.
Here lies John Shore,
I say no more;
Who was alive
In sixty-five.
“What should we speak ofWhen we are as old as you? When we shall hearThe rain and wind beat dark December, howIn this our pinching cave, shall we discourseThe freezing hours away? We have seen nothing.”
“What should we speak ofWhen we are as old as you? When we shall hearThe rain and wind beat dark December, howIn this our pinching cave, shall we discourseThe freezing hours away? We have seen nothing.”
“What should we speak ofWhen we are as old as you? When we shall hearThe rain and wind beat dark December, howIn this our pinching cave, shall we discourseThe freezing hours away? We have seen nothing.”
“What should we speak of
When we are as old as you? When we shall hear
The rain and wind beat dark December, how
In this our pinching cave, shall we discourse
The freezing hours away? We have seen nothing.”
Even the motion of driving in a post-chaise captivated the fancy of Dr. Johnson, for he said, “If I had no duties, and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman; but she should be one who could understand me, and would add something to the conversation.” Mrs. Piozzi, who, except for that of prettiness, fulfilled these requirements both as a brilliant conversationalist and owner of a post-chaise, asked her beloved Doctor why he doted on a coach. Johnson’s reply was, that in the first place the company was shut in with him “and could not escape as out of a room,” and that in the second place, he could hear all the conversation in acarriage. Any lamentations while travelling thus he considered proof of an empty head or tongue that wished to talk and had nothing about which to talk. “A mill that goes without grist,” he exclaimed, “is as good a companion as such creatures.” As for himself, he felt no inconvenience upon the road and he expected others to feel none. He allowed nobody to complain of rain, sun, or dust. And so greatly did he love this act of going forward that Mrs. Thrale (Mrs. Piozzi) said she could not tell how far he might be taken before he would think of refreshments.
Yet the impression which Macaulay gave of Johnson’s attitude towards travelling is the one generally held: “Of foreign travel and of history he spoke with the fierce and boisterous contempt of ignorance. ‘What does a man learn by travelling? Is Beauclerk the better for travelling? What did Lord Claremount learn in his travels, except that there was a snake in one of the pyramids of Egypt?’” History has proved that Macaulay could be brilliantly inaccurate; certainly in this estimate of Johnson he was so. In still another passage Macaulay says that Dr. Johnson “took it for granted that everybodywho lived in the country was either stupid or miserable.” The first twenty-seven years of his life Johnson spent in small country towns and, although he was sometimes miserable, because he was wretchedly poor, he was never stupid.
It was the young traveller whom he censured, not the mature traveller or travelling in general. It was characteristic of him to say, “I never like young travellers; they go too raw to make any great remarks.” Indeed, so grave was his sense of the value of travel that he took it upon himself to rebuke Boswell, as Boswell records: “Dr. Johnson expressed a particular enthusiasm with respect to visiting the Wall of China. I catched it for the moment, and said I really believed I should go and see the Wall of China had I not children, of whom it was my duty to take care. ‘Sir,’ (said he), ‘by doing so you would do what would be of importance in raising your children to eminence. There would be a lustre reflected upon them from your spirit and curiosity. They would be at all times as the children of a man who had gone to view the Wall of China. I am serious, sir.’”
In his college days Johnson may not have had the same reasons as the young poet Keatsfor going “wonder-ways,” but reasons he had. With the Doctor, perhaps even more truly than with Keats, curiosity was “the first passion and the last.” While an undergraduate he was heard to say, “I have a mind to see what is done in other places of learning. I’ll go and visit the universities abroad. I’ll go to France and Italy. I’ll go to Padua.” Twice he urged Boswell “to perambulate Spain,” and of their tour to the Hebrides everybody knows. There was talk of his going to Iceland, and for a time the great Doctor discussed travelling around the world with two friends.
Of the existence of the journal of Johnson’s tour in North Wales even Boswell did not know. This journey was begun by the Thrales and the Doctor leaving Streatham at eleven o’clock on Tuesday morning of July 15, 1774. On their way they stopped at Litchfield at the house of Dr. Darwin, psychologist, poet, and grandfather of Charles Darwin, of whose roses Mrs. Piozzi wrote, “I have no roses equal to those at Litchfield, where on one tree I recollect counting eighty-four within my own reach; it grew against the house of Dr. Darwin.”
After passing through several towns on theirroute to North Wales they came, a party of four, Mr. and Mrs. Thrale, little Queenie and Johnson, to Chester on July twenty-seventh. Of Chester the Doctor made short work. He was more interested in a grammar school held in part of the Abbey refectory than in aught else, and wrote particularly, “The Master seemed glad to see me.” Of course the Master was glad, for was not Johnson the greatest man of his day? There is not one word for the quiet beauty of the Dee, no mention of Cheshire cheese, and nothing about Chester ale, which perhaps Johnson found as bad as did Sion Tudor. Of their sojourn in Chester we get a more lively picture from Mrs. Thrale’s comment on the entry in the Doctor’s journal than from the journal itself. Johnson wrote, “We walked round the walls, which are compleat.” Mrs. Piozzi observed, “Of thoseill-fatedwalls Dr. Johnson might have learned the extent from any one. He has since put me fairly out of countenance by saying, ‘I have knownmy mistressfifteen years, and never saw her fairly out of humour but on Chester wall’; it was because he would keep Miss Thrale beyond her hour of going to bed to walk on the wall, where from the want oflight, I apprehended some accident to her,—perhaps to him.” Probably nine-year-old “Miss Thrale” did not mind being kept beyond her hour of going to bed by a stout gentleman who was her devoted slave!
The next day they entered Wales, dined at Mold and came to Llewenni. Mrs. Thrale’s cousin, Robert Cotton, was living at Llewenni Hall, which in 1817, after having been one thousand years in possession of the family, was torn down. At Whitchurch, a few miles away, is an alabaster altar monument to one of the Salusbury’s who owned this hall, Sir John, or Syr John y Bodiau (“Sir John of the Thumbs”). This ancestor of Mrs. Piozzi was not only distinguished by two thumbs on either hand, but also by a giant’s strength. With his bare fist he is supposed to have slain a white lioness in the Tower of London. Since then white lionesses have all disappeared. Sir John of the Thumbs also killed a mythical beast in a lair below a near-by castle, and overthrew a famous giant. Is it any wonder that Mrs. Thrale, with such a forefather, should sometimes have painted thingsplus beau que le vérité, and that, even as her ancestor was fond of pulling up trees by the roots when hehad nothing better to do, his descendant should once in a while give truth a little tug?
But if Mrs. Thrale had a distinguished progenitor, she had an even more distinguished ancestress, for there at Llewenni Hall lived “Mam Cymru,” the Mother of Wales. This Catherine de Berain’s first husband was a Salusbury, her second husband was Sir Richard Clough. The second daughter of the second marriage married Salusbury of Bachycraig, and from this marriage Mrs. Piozzi was descended. Later, Catherine de Berain became the third wife of Maurice Wynne, who was her third husband. It is said that on the way home from the funeral of her first husband, Wynne asked her to marry him. She had to refuse, however, as Sir Richard Clough had asked her on the waytothe church. But she assured him that she was not superstitious about the number 3, and agreed to give Wynne the next opportunity. She kept her word.
When the Welsh used to speak of a rich person, they did not say “rich as Crœsus” but “rich as a Clough.” On July thirtieth, Johnson and the Thrales visited a remarkable house built by Sir Richard, the second husband of “Mam Cymru.” On the thirty-first day theydrove to the Cathedral of St. Asaph, once the even smaller church of Llanelwy, to which Giraldus Cambrensis in his tour in 1188 referred as “paupercula.” About that time this tiny cathedral was changed from wickerwork or wood to stone. On the same day they saw the Chapel of Llewenni, founded by one of the Salusburys, where Johnson was surprised because the service, read thrice on Sundays, was read only once in English.
GATEWAY OF CARNARVON CASTLEFrom an engraving by Cuitt
GATEWAY OF CARNARVON CASTLE
From an engraving by Cuitt
He was dissatisfied not only with the order of Welsh services, but also with the behaviour of Welsh rivers. On this day he writes: “The rivers here are mere torrents which are suddenly swelled by the rain to great breadth and great violence, but have very little constant stream; such are the Clwyd and the Elwy.” About Welsh rivers Johnson makes a great many remarks. He is as scornful of them as an American is of the Thames. Mrs. Piozzi says that his “ideas of anything not positively large were ever mingled with contempt.” He asked of one of the sharp currents in North Wales, “Has thisbrooke’er a name?” “Why, dear Sir, this is theRiverUstrad.” “Let us,” said Dr. Johnson, turning to his friend, “jump over it directly,and show them how an Englishman should treat a Welsh river.” Johnson was always of opinion that when one had seen the ocean, cascades were but little things. He used to laugh at Shenstone most unmercifully for not caring whether there was anything good to eat in the streams he was so fond of. “As if,” says Johnson, “one could fill one’s belly with hearing soft murmurs, or looking at rough cascades!”
It would be difficult to make a summary of all the objects Johnson called “mean” in North Wales. Among them were towns, rivers, inns, dinners, churches, houses, choirs. It is safe to say that the great Doctor could not rid himself altogether of English prejudices against the Welsh and all things Welsh. George Borrow’s experience on the summit of Snowdon was not at all unusual, except that in this instance an Englishman in the presence of English people became the champion of the Welsh. Undoubtedly Johnson was influenced in his contempt not only by his English feeling, but also by the fact that he was a true son of the eighteenth century, with all that century’s emphasis on power, on size, on utility.
Yet Johnson was not totally incapable of appreciating the romantic scenery of Wales. Some part of it, the more cultivated, he seems to have felt, for on the very next day there is this record: “The way lay through pleasant lanes, and overlooked a region beautifully diversified with trees and grass.” It mortified Mrs. Thrale because Mr. Thrale, a lover of landscapes, could not enjoy them with the great Doctor, who would say, “Never heed such nonsense, a blade of grass is always a blade of grass, whether in one country or another. Let us, if wedotalk, talk about something; men and women are my subject of enquiry; let us see how these differ from those we have left behind.” However, Johnson was certainly not insensible to the beauty of nature. In describing his emotions at the sight of Iona, he wrote: “Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses, whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings.” In his tour in the Hebrides he welcomed even the inconveniences of travelling, such as wind and rain, when they meant finer scenery and more pictures for the mind.
Much on this same August second was found “mean,” including Mrs. Thrale’s gift to the romantic old clerk of the parish church of Bachycraig where Mrs. Thrale’s father was buried. The day following, on their arrival in Holywell, Johnson had to admit that the town was “neither very small nor very mean.” He was amazed and impressed by the yield of water from St. Winifred’s Well, and the number of mill wheels the water turned. But when they went down by the stream to see a prospect, Johnson adds very specifically that he “had no part” in it. He was vastly more interested in some brass and copper works, inlapis calaminaris, in pigs of copper, and in some ironworks where he saw iron half an inch thick “square-cut with shears worked by water,” and hammers that moved as quick “as by the hand.” One has a curious feeling that, were the Doctor suddenly translated to this world again, foundries would interest him vastly more than any natural panorama. In this Johnson was truly a man of his times, which were epoch-making because of their new interest in the mechanics of industry, their gigantic industrial impulse. Without a word for the singular beauties of Holywell, without referenceto the legend of St. Winifred or mention of the ruins of the Abbey, he concludes his journal for August third: “I then saw wire drawn, and gave a shilling. I have enlarged my notion, though not being able to see the movements, and not having time to peep closely, I know less than I might.”
Another feature of the land impressed him favourably, the houses of country gentlemen. “This country seems full of very splendid houses,” he notes on August fourth, after visiting a Mr. Lloyd’s house near Ruthin, where he had been to see the castle. He writes quite at length on the ruins of Ruthin and ends characteristically, “Only one tower had a chimney, so that there was [little] commodity of living. It was only a place of strength.” It was on this day that the keep of the castle, when he heard that Mrs. Thrale was a native of North Wales, told her that his wife had been a Welshwoman, and had desired to be buried at Ruthin. “So,” said the man, “I went with the corpse myself, because I thought it would be a pleasant journey, and indeed I found Ruthin a very beautiful place.”
Two days later they dined at Mr. Myddleton’s, of Gwaenynog, the gentleman who raisedthe unwelcome monument to Johnson’s memory before the Doctor had had a chance to die, and while he still considered himself very much alive. This memorial is on the site at Gwaenynog where Johnson used to stroll up and down. It reads: “This spot was often dignified by the presence of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., whose moral writings, exactly conformable to the precepts of Christianity, gave ardour to Virtue and confidence to Truth.” Perhaps it is not strange that Johnson was not pleased with the monument. He wrote to Mrs. Thrale, “Mr. Myddleton’s attention looks like an intention to bury me alive. I would as willingly see my friend, however benevolent and hospitable, quietly inurned. Let him think, for the present, of some more acceptable memorial.”
To the Doctor death was always an enemy who would, he knew, outwit him in the end, a terrifying presence against which he struggled. “But who can run the race with death?” he cries despairingly. This premature memorial must have revolted everything in him, for to him “the whole of life” was but keeping away the thoughts of death. Even a dark road troubled him.
Leaving Llewenni on August eighteenth, they started definitely forward on their journey. They passed through Abergele, “a mean little town,” to Bangor, where they found “a very mean inn.” Certainly meanness is accumulating in Wales! Johnson had the instinctive contempt for things Welsh which so many English people hold. But, after finding Lord Bulkely’s house at Bangor also “very mean,” this is the point in the great Doctor’s journal where the lover of Wales may take heart.
There was one contrivance of the hand and mind of man which impressed Dr. Johnson tremendously. Where such works of the Creator as Snowdon, for example, failed, where the mystery of this land of legend passed him by, castles succeeded by virtue of their size, the strength of their walls, the completeness of their equipment. In Denbigh, Johnson had eagerly tried to trace the lines of that “prodigious pile” of a castle. So much of the comment we get in this neglected Welsh journal and in Johnson’s other writings seems to summarize itself in two words: size and power. He told Mrs. Piozzi to get a book on gardening, since she would stay in the country, feed the chickens, and starveher intellect, “and learn,” he said, “to raise thelargestturnips, and to breed thebiggestfowls.” It was in vain that Mrs. Piozzi told him that the goodness of these dishes did not depend upon their size.
From Beaumaris Castle to Carnarvon there is a crescendo of praise, ending in the memorable words about Carnarvon: “To survey this place would take much time. I did not think there had been such buildings; it surpassed my ideas.” Of Beaumaris, Johnson wrote: “The Castle is a mighty pile.… This Castle corresponds with all the representatives of romancing narratives. Here is not wanting the private passage, the dark cavity, the deep dungeon, or the lofty tower. We did not discover the well. This is the most compleat view that I have yet had of an old Castle.” And then came four last delighted words, “It had a moat.”
Nor was the next day, August twentieth, less of a success. After meeting with some friends they went to see the castle in Carnarvon, which Johnson describes as “an edifice of stupendous magnitude and strength; it has in it all that we observed at Beaumaris, and much greater dimensions, many of the smaller rooms flooredwith stone are entire; of the larger rooms, the beams and planks are all left; this is the state of all buildings left to time. We mounted the Eagle Tower by one hundred and sixty-nine steps, each of ten inches. We did not find the well; nor did I trace the moat; but moats there were, I believe, to all castles on the plain, which not only hindered access, but prevented mines. We saw but a very small part of the mighty ruin, and in all these old buildings, the subterraneous works are concealed by the rubbish.”
When Johnson and the Thrales were on their way from Llewenni to Bangor, they passed through Conway. The Doctor was much exercised in Conway because of the plight of an Irish gentlewoman and her young family who could get no beds to sleep in, but the one feature in this rare old town which might have impressed him, its castle, he did not notice in the journal. Built by the same architect who planned Carnarvon, it has much of its grace and is in some respects even more beautifully placed. With its machicolated towers, its vast banqueting-hall, Queen Eleanor’s oratory, and the river washing at its foundations, it is still a wonderful old pile. On the return trip Johnson makesa short, practical note to the effect that the castle afforded them nothing new, and that if it was larger than that of Beaumaris, it was smaller than that of Carnarvon. Carnarvon was the largest, and the Doctor was not to be weaned from it any more than from the idea that Mrs. Thrale ought to raise the largest turnips.
The day following this memorable inspection of Carnarvon Castle, they dined with Sir Thomas Wynne and his Lady. Johnson’s comment was brief,—“the dinner mean, Sir Thomas civil, his Lady nothing.” It would seem that Lady Wynne failed to recognize the greatness of her visitor, and, accustomed to a distinguished reception, the great man’s vanity was hurt. Afterwards he made remarks about Sir Thomas’s Lady, in which she was compared to “sour small beer” and “run tea.” Of a lady in Scotland he had said “that she resembled a dead nettle; were she alive she would sting.”
This mean dinner and, we presume, its meaner hostess were but a sorry prelude to a melancholy journey which the party had to take to Mrs. Thrale’s old home at Bodvel. They found nothing there as in Mrs. Thrale’s childhood; the walk was cut down, the pondwas dry. The near-by churches which Mrs. Thrale held by impropriation Johnson thought “mean and neglected to a degree scarcely imaginable. They have no pavement, and the earth is full of holes. The seats are rude benches; the altars have no rails. One of them has a breach in the roof. On the desk, I think, of each lay a folio Welsh Bible of the black letter, which the curate cannot easily read.” Over one hundred and thirty years later it was that I made the tour, which I have described for you, of these Welsh churches of early foundation. Mysterious, desolate, dilapidated old places they are; in comparison with the ugly, comfortable nonconformist chapels, spectacles for the prosperous to jeer at.
Mrs. Piozzi tells a story which shows that the great Doctor brought terror to the hearts of the Welsh parsons. “It was impossible not to laugh at the patience Dr. Johnson showed, when a Welsh parson of mean abilities, though a good heart, struck with reverence at the sight of Dr. Johnson, whom he had heard of as the greatest man living, could not find any words to answer his enquiries concerning a motto around somebody’s arms which adorned a tombstonein Ruabon Churchyard. If I remember right, the words were,—