Welsh Journals

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WILLIAM SALESBURY. By R. Brinley Jones. Writers of Wales Series. University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1994. Pp. 72. £ 4.95. Dr. Brinley Jones, to whom we have been indebted for many years as one of the editors of this series, has on this occasion turned author. His subject, William Salesbury, is a man to whom Wales owes a unique debt. To an extent never approached by any other of his contemporaries, he appreciated the scale and nature of linguistic, literary, and cultural change in the sixteenth century. This was not just an intellectual assess- ment; he achieved far more in practice than anyone else to adapt Wales to embrace these changes. A native of Denbighshire, that astonishing cradle of medieval culture, he had been thoroughly immersed in the Welsh language and its literature. His friends and mentors included such major exponents of the native bardic art as Gruffudd Hiraethog. His later experience at Oxford University and in London opened his eyes wider to the significance of the Renaissance and the Reformation ('Christ's second birth', he called it) than those of any contemporary Welshman. He became, in Dr. Jones's memorable phrase, 'the ear and mouthpiece' of these great cultural upheavals. He also envisaged more perceptively than any other Welshman what a revolution the printing press had wrought, and sensed that if Welsh was to survive in a flourishing state, it had to avail itself of the printed word. Dr. Jones's own personality and career have equipped him admirably to interpret Salesbury's contribution. He is himself a man of deep and cultivated tastes, who has always had a profound intellectual interest in language and a commendable practical gift for the technique of printing and publishing. Ever since the publication of his first book, The Old British Tongue, he has been absorbed by the transition from the medieval world to that of the Renaissance and Reformation. He recognizes in Salesbury an archetypal figure in the process. In this short book he gives us a brilliant insight into the problems as Salesbury saw them and his extraordinarily resourceful answers to them. Salesbury's English books tend to be overlooked, but he was, in fact, an accom- plished writer in the language. During the years between 1547 and 1552, that is, the reign of the Protestant Edward VI, and the busiest period in Salesbury's life, when he may have been intending to become a professional writer, he published seven printed books, including a number of English ones, and a substantial Welsh manuscript. The author neatly sums up Salesbury's characteristics as an English author: an elegance of phrase, a design of sentence and paragraph, and a use of metaphor, alliteration, and other devices, together with an ingenious use of everyday phrase, reveal that he knew how language could be harnessed and directed. But Dr. Jones is, of course, under no illusions that Salesbury's indispensable gift to Wales was his attempt to translate the Scriptures and the Prayer Book into Welsh. Without them, the Reformation would have continued to be an unmeaning charade for most of the Welsh population. First came the courageous bid, on his own initiative, to translate large parts of the Scriptures In Kynniver Llith a Ban (1551), the first time any Welshman had gone ad fontes1 to the improved sources of the original versions of the Bible in order to get a better translation. It was to be sadly ironic that, within two years, Catholic Mary was installed and nulli- fied his efforts. When he took up the work again in Elizabeth's reign, the interesting