Welsh Journals

Williams, over the Tory landowner, Townshend Mainwaring, in the boroughs, and the replacement of the 'Adullamite' Whig, Colonel Biddulph of Chirk Castle, by the radical, George Osborne Morgan, in the county revealed new forces at work. Yet in Denbighshire, as elsewhere in Wales, the election results as a whole showed far less clearly a breach with the traditional pattern. The results of the 1868 election did not herald the supremacy of y werin, or signalise an immediate blow to the old 'feudal' order. On the contrary, they confirmed in some respects the existing social pattern of the county. The outcome of the election here can only be explained by a close analysis of the rural and urban society of the county during the nineteenth century. The 1867 Reform Act was a pre-condition for the new pattern of politics which emerged in Denbighshire in 1868 at the general election. In the county areas it conferred the franchise on the £ 12 leaseholders; in the boroughs, male household suffrage was introduced.4 Yet the creation of the type of electorate which emerged could only arise in a largely rural county like Denbighshire, which also contained some heavily industrialised areas. In both the county and the borough elections a breach had been made in the traditional pattern of returning members of landed families to represent them in parliament; but only in the boroughs was the victory complete with the return of Watkin Williams. Although in the county the custom of returning two members of the landed gentry had been broken by the return of George Osborne Morgan, the victory of Sir Watkin Williams Wynn at the head of the poll proved that adherence to custom, deference and tradition was far from obsolete in Denbighshire in 1868. The pattern of landownership in Denbighshire in the nineteenth century was similar to that throughout Wales. This was one of extreme simplicity and glaring contrasts. Only 1,486 people held land over £ 50 per year in value. Of these, there were only sixteen proprietors who held land in excess of 3,000 acres and of annual value exceeding £ 3,000 a year. A mere thirty-eight proprietors held land to the extent of over 1,000 acres and of substantial annual value. Thus, 194,765 acres of land in Denbighshire (or 53 per cent of the total) were in the hands of men who could claim considerable 4 C. T. Seymour, Electoral Reform in England and Wales, 1832-1885 (1915), ch. IX. J. Bateman, The Great Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland (1883 edition), pp. 168, 295, 491, ch. IX passim.