Welsh Journals

THOMAS JOHNES OF HAFOD (1748-1816): TRANSLATOR AND BIBLIOPHILE THE generalized criticism of the Welsh landowning class of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries levelled by twentieth-century historians no longer stands up to close examination. One charge, however, cannot be refuted: the more or less wholesale abandonment of native language and culture. By the turn of the eighteenth century, the overwhelming majority of the gentry had come to regard the Welsh language as more suited to the barn and byre than to the library and drawing room, with the inevitable result that a long tradition of patronage of Welsh scholarship began to wane, as did concern for the care and conservation of vernacular manuscript material. To this general rule, Thomas Johnes of Hafod was a notable exception. He was both an enthusiastic collector of Welsh manuscripts and an open-handed patron of the numerous scholars flocking to the Hafod library. Yet, for all his impeccable Welsh ancestry-he was a collateral descendant of Sir Rhys ap Thomas-Johnes was wholly ignorant of Welsh, a fact which he frequently confessed with some shame.2 Accordingly, the Lhuyd manuscripts in the Hafod library, the delight of Welsh scholars, would have been as obscure and inaccessible to their owner as the chatter of the labourers who shouldered the practical task of realizing the Hafod dream. If his ignorance of Welsh may occasionally have rankled, Johnes possibly took the view that since those of his fellow countrymen with whom he might wish to converse could do so with perfect facility in English, there was little purpose in attempting to master his native tongue. Equally, he may have thought that if he were going to bring his plans for Hafod to fruition and concurrently maintain the momentum of his literary activities, life was too short to learn Welsh. Again, however sympathetic Johnes may have been towards the ancient culture of Wales, its traditions perhaps seemed homely, if not banal, to a man who, during his European meanderings, had lived in Madame du Deffand's Paris and had savoured the splendours of the Roman campagna. Thomas Johnes's early life in Ludlow, his youth in his father's recently gothicized seat at Croft Castle, his adventures on the Grand Tour and, finally, his remarkable achievements in transforming the landscape of Hafod, where 1Q8?T' for example, B. Phillips, Peterwell, The History of a Mansion and its Infamous Squire (Uandysul, 3); R. J. Colyer, 'Nanteos, A Landed Estate in Decline, 1800-1930', Ceredigion, IX (1980), 58-78. hor example, to Walter Davies, N.L.W. MS. 1805 E, f. 517.