Welsh Journals

And now Gregynog Hall, famous in this generation for its splendid art collec- tions, for the former Gregynog Press, and not least for the notable services of its present owner, Miss Margaret Davies, and of her sister, the late Miss Gwendoline Davies, to the cause of Welsh culture, is to be given to the University of Wales with 750 acres and an endowment of £ 12,000 per annum. The house is not the same rather austere one that Arthur Blayney knew; but it occupies much the same site and includes, from the former Parlour, the magnificent Blayney armorial panelling of 1636, carved by Dutch craftsmen who were brought into the country for this purpose. The prodigious length of the Blayney pedigree, spanning to date about thirteen hundred years, which might cause some eyebrows to rise, was in fact vouched for by the eminent genealogist and Herald, Lewis Dwnn, in his Visitation of Wales in the XVIth century, and by the testimony of Bards in earlier times. It is to some extent paralleled in certain other Welsh pedigrees, the course of Welsh history, and the old Welsh system of inheritance having combined to foster long memories, which were kept alive by public recitation and scrutiny in generation after generation. The Brochwel Ysgythrog, or "Brochwel of the Tusks" as Sir John E. Lloyd refers to him in his History of Wales-conjuring up an unlovely picture of a dentist's problem-from whom the Blayneys have descended in the direct male line for thirty-two generations before we come to Arthur (obit. 1795), was Prince or King of Powys around A.D.600 with his capital at Pengwem, the modern Shrewsbury. His stronghold is thought to have been the present site of St. Chad's Church. "Brochwel's Well" is named after him. He and his son, Cynan Garwyn, and his grandson, Selyf (all in the Blayney line of descent), were leading figures in the long struggle of the Cymry or Welsh with the then still mainly pagan English. About A.D.615, Aethelfrith, King of Northumbria, in a movement to split the continuous front of the Welsh with the nothern Celts, fought a famous battle near Chester with the Cymry under Selyf, who, says Lloyd "as representative of the ancient line of the Kings of Powys (the line of Cadell from whom Selyf was seventh in line of descent), was the natural defender of the valley of the Dee." Selyf was slain, and so, later, were some 1,200 of the monks of Bangor Iscoed (Bangor-on-Dee), the celebrated religious house and seminary of the British Church, for injudiciously intervening in the struggle by publicly praying for Selyf's success. The "three nags' heads erased argent" of the Blayney arms are supposed to be based on the Welsh tradition-regarded sceptically by Lloyd-that subsequently