Welsh Journals

THE MOSTYNS OF MOSTYN, 1540-1642 Part I By A. D. CARR, M.A., Ph.D. When Richard ap Hywel of Mostyn died early in 1540 his eldest son Thomas inherited all the Five Courts, that bardic conceit which described the ancestry of a family which owed its rise to a series of judicious marriages in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.! He was the first to do so; Gloddaith and Tregarnedd, which had been the inheritance of his grandmother, had not come into the possession of the family until she died in 1532. Thus Thomas ap Richard ap Hywel could be called the first of the Mostyns; indeed, he was literally the first, since he and his younger brother Piers of Talacre were the first to adopt the surname. This was the period when the greater Welsh families were beginning to substitute surnames for the traditional Welsh form of nomenclature and, according to tradition, Thomas adopted his in 1539 by order of Rowland Lee, the president of the Council in the Marches. Lee, so the story goes, was attending the Flintshire Great Sessions; an irascible man, he had had enough of all the 'aps' among the jurors which made each one a walking pedigree, and he ordered that each one should either assume his patronymic or the name of his residence.2 However, documents reveal that Thomas's change of name was a gradual one. In a deed of 1541 he was Thomas ap Richard ap Hywel, while in 1544 he had become Thomas Mostyn alias Thomas ap Richard ap Hywel. In 1545 he was again Thomas ap Richard ap Hywel, though yet another document from the previous year had described him as Thomas Mostyn. By 1547 the surname seems to have become established. Thomas was born on 2 May 1490 and was therefore nearly fifty when he 1 The Five Courts were Pengwem, near Llangollen, Trecastell, between Beaumaris and Penmon in Anglesey, Mostyn, Gloddaith in the Creuddyn peninsula, and Tregamedd, near Llangefni in Anglesey; they are listed and described in U.C.N.W., (Bangor) Mostyn 6476, f.lla. 2 Lord Mostyn and T. A. Glenn, History of the Family of Mostyn of Mostyn (1925), p. 83; T. Pennant, Tours in Wales I (1810), 19. 'U.C.N.W., (Bangor) Mostyn 4175, 1016; N.L.W., Thome 46, 150; U.C.N.W., (Bangor) Mostyn 756.