Welsh Journals

Introduction Sir Joseph Bradney was born in 1859 in Shropshire, where his father, the Reverend Joseph Bradney, was incumbent of Greet. His father was a landowner as well as a parson and his mother, Sarah Decima, born Sarah Decima Jones, came from another family of clerical gentry. Joseph Alfred was educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge. On his father's death in 1868 he inherited estates in Somerset, Wiltshire and Shropshire, but he decided while still a student to settle in Gwent. His patrimony already included a farm in the parish of Llanfihangel Ystum Llywern, inherited from his father's ancestors, the Hopkinses of Llanfihangel. He added to this nucleus, purchasing the Llanfihangel estate in 1880 and building himself a new house there which he named Tal-y-coed. In 1883 he married Rosa Jenkins, only daughter of Edward Jenkins of Nant-y-groes in Radnorshire. She bore him five children, three sons and two daughters. It seems to have been soon after his marriage that he began to learn Welsh: he tried to appoint Welsh-speaking estate servants, and at one time it was the only language spoken in his household. At Tal-y-coed Bradney established himself as the complete country gentleman, hunting, shooting, improving his estates, planting trees, serving as county councillor, justice of the peace, lieutenant-colonel in the militia, high sheriff and deputy lieutenant. But as well as these multifarious activities, he was a prolific historian and genealogist and one of the pioneers of record publication in South Wales. His interest in local history began while he was still in his teens, and may even have originated in a rebellion against the sterile classicism of his public-school education. The young Bradney was surprisingly unsuccessful at school: in spite of the fact that he wrote and even published Latin verse later in life, he was regarded as particularly weak in the classics. His school reports also criticise his fondness for doing other work in school time, which may well be a reference to his growing passion for antiquarian history and genealogy. His letters home to his mother (preserved, like the school reports, in his papers in the Gwent Record Office)a are full of references to his researches in the school library. By the time he was 15, he was reading Dugdale's Warwickshire and the publications of the Camden Society and looking through back numbers of the Annual Register for obituaries. This was the historical tradition in which he was to find himself, not the narrative and analytical tradition of Macaulay and Sir John Lloyd but the antiquarian tradition of Sir William Dugdale and John Aubrey. Bradney's first published work was in 1889, a short book on the history of his own ancestors the Hopkins family of Llanfihangel and the Probyns of Newland. He was, however, already gathering material which would be used in the History of Monmouthshire. In 1895 he published the text of a lecture he had written on the topography of the hundred of Skenfrith. This was in effect the basis of the first volume of the History. It is on the same pattern, dealing with the hundred parish by parish, concentrating on administrative history and the genealogy of the landed families. The Skenfrith volume of the History was published in 1904. At first, Bradney concentrated on the part of the county he knew best: the Skenfrith volume was followed by volumes on the hundreds of Abergavenny, Raglan and Trelech. Nevertheless, he was collecting material for all the volumes more or less simultaneously: some of the notes on the hundred of Newport are dated as early as 1909. His research methods are well illustrated in his academic papers at the National Library of Wales. He is traditionally supposed to have had a standard questionnaire which he sent to the incumbent of every parish, but no example has ever been found. However, he was in regular touch with a wide range of correspondents and much of his material in fact came from them. He also employed a paid researcher, William Deane, who may have come from Abergavenny and who did most of the work at the Public Record Office and Somerset House. Bradney made little use of original documents at the Public Record Office: he preferred to work from published calendars or summaries, a practice which was generally accepted by academics in his time, though it is now regarded as unsound. He was happier working at the National Library