Welsh Journals

A FAMILY FEUD AT NEW RADNOR AND ITS RESULTS By W. H. HOWSE, F.S.A. Part 1 The Town Hall In the long search which has been made among thte archives at Brampton Bryan which Major J. R. H. Harley has kindly allowed me to undertake, yielding material from which various extracts have been published in the Transactions, the main difficulty has been to correlate items taken from a variety of unlabelled bundles in order to make a connected story of particular events or series of events. In- evitably there have been missing links. There appears, however, in the papers brought together on the subject of this paper to be a collection of facts which hang together remarkably well. In the Transactions, of 1943 (pp. 22-4) there appeared, in evidence brought before the Chief Justice presiding at the Court of Great Sessions, an account of the destruction at night in the year 1695 of the Town Hall of New Radnor. The destruction was proved to be the work of a number of the inhabitants (several of whom were named), and was clearly premeditated and unopposed, though no reason was given for such a wanton attack on this important town appendage. Discoveries made among Major Harley's papers contemporary with the event now made the matter clearer. At this period, and in fact for many years previously, a large part of the property in and around New Radnor, was owned by the Harley family, who, although not resident there, had iepresented the ancient Borough in Parliament in various years from as far back as 1604. At the period in question the sitting Member, first elected in 1690, was Robert Harley, who later (in 1711) was created Earl of Oxford, the famous statesman of Queen Anne's reign. Opposed to the Harleys was the important family of Lewis of Harpton Court, who, themselves local landowners, doubtless had reason to be jealous of the Harley influence in their midst. A Lewis had represented the Borough in Parliament in 1545, but no other member of the family had done so since. Evidence of the hostility of the Lewises towards the Harleys is provided in the murderous attack on Robert Harley which was made by Thomas Lewis and his brother Nourse at New Radnor in 1693, as described in the Transactions of 1956 (pp.50-3). It is probable too that even at that period the part played by the Harleys in the Civil War on the Parliament side still rankled in the minds of many in Radnorshire, so stoutly Royalist in its sympathies. In 1660, when it was known that Major Harley, uncle to the above Robert, was seeking the remuner-