Welsh Journals

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Wanderings of a Royal Tribe A genealogical sidelight on the Welsh migration into Shropshire during the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries. By S. P. THOMAS 1. THE Tribe The thriftily compendious Blayney Monument in Tregynon Church, Mont- gomeryshire, just manages to include within a modest oval on the West wall the names and brief biographies of no fewer than thirteen members of the family buried there. Such economy does not appear to have been really necessary since the monument (the oval referred to), suitably embellished and surmounted by the family arms sable, three nags' heads erased argent in wood painted to resemble marble and slate, was evidently erected during the middle XVIII century when the family rent-roll was over £ 7,000 per annum (present value, say, £ 70,000 and no Income Tax) and the Gregynog estate one of the biggest in Montgomery- shire. At one time it extended over 18,000 acres (according to some accounts over double that figure): there was also the Morville estate in Shropshire. No, the seeming parsimony was probably another instance of the modest frugality of Arthur Blayney, the last to own Gregynog. Of him there is an attractive account in Yorke's Royal Tribes of Wales begin- ning: "Arthur Blayney of Gregynog was descended from Brochwel Ysgythrog, a Prince of Powys in the seventh century, but he valued himself on his predigree no otherwise than by taking care that his conduct should not disgrace it." Williams' Montgomeryshire Worthies says that he served the office of Sheriff in 1764, and was much respected as a fine specimen of a country gentlemen of the old school: his engraved portrait was still to be met with in many old Montgomeryshire houses. When this Arthur died unmarried in 1795 in his eightieth year, he left both his Montgomeryshire and his Shropshire estates to his cousin, Susan Tracy, nee Weaver, from whose grandfather, Arthur Weaver, Arthur's own father, John Blayney, had originally inherited Morville. Through her daughter they passed away from the Blayneys to the Sudeley family, and from them in their turn towards the end of the nineteenth century. It was Susan's husband, Henry Lord Viscount Tracy, who put up the other Blayney tablet in Tregynon Church, a memorial with a ring of sincerity about it, to his friend Arthur, who certainly made his quiet local mark on his times.