Welsh Journals

good for trade, just as the life of those big households and the comings and goings of the different families provided the gossips with plenty to talk about. For in the 1740's, when David Jones settled down at Derry-Ormond, the countryside was dominated by three important landowners- Thomas Johnes at Llanfair Manor, Sir Lucius Lloyd at Millfield, and Walter Lloyd at Peterwell. Each of these families had lived there for several generations, asserting their authority over the people as magistrates and members of Parliament. In the peasants' eyes they and their houses seemed as immutable, as firmly planted, as the hills around them. On the other side of the ridge of hills beyond the Dulas, facing Derry-Ormond, in the next valley, stood Llanfair Manor, one of the oldest houses in Cardiganshire. Samuel Lewis in his Topographical Dictionary says that' the walls in some parts were five yards in thickness and in several parts of the building there was the date 1080'. Though this last scarcely can have been the case, no doubt parts of the house were extremely ancient. It had passed to the Johnes family from an earlier owner, and now in the 1740'S Thomas Johnes lived there with his wife and family. His son was grown up and Mr. Johnes was providing him with the means to cut a dash in London. He is said to have made good use of his opportunities and to have frequented all the gayest haunts with the fashionable rakes with whom he associated, and whom he invited to stay at his home in the country. Only one anecdote has survived but it is enough to invest the old grey house on the banks of the Teifi with a strong whiff of fashionable dissipation, totally unrepresentative, no doubt, of the humdrum everyday round. But on this occasion at least it sheltered a very select little company. There was that great ambassador and polished courtier Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams and his friend the Lord of the Treasury, Henry Holland. There was another, much more youthful, politician, Richard Rigby, an intimate friend of young Thomas Johnes and a great favourite with the Prince of Wales. Another young blocd, John Lloyd of Peterwell, completed this memorable party, which turned out so disastrously for him and his young host. For night after night they played for high stakes and night after night they lost to the tyros from London. As an old manuscript relates, the country gentlemen were quite cut up by the time the party dispersed again. Perhaps this misfortune decided young Johnes's destiny which led to the ultimate destruction of the Manor. A year or two later he married the heiress of Croft Castle, near Ludlow, and went off to settle there happily for the rest of his life. Although he constantly visited Cardiganshire after this he never again lived there. When his father died early in the