BRYNGWYN: A STUDY OF THE IMPACT OF FAMILY SETTLEMENTS, EXTRAVAGENCE AND DEBT ON A WELSH ESTATE* T. M. HUMPHREYS, B.A., Ph.D. Recent years have witnessed a growing discussion on the changing texture of landed society in England and, to a lesser extent, Wales during the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The acknowledged pre-eminence of the landowning elite during the Augustan Age remains an accepted orthodoxy. However, a number of historians have reacted to the considerable conveyancing of land that did occur through the transactions of inheritance, sale and purchase during this era of stability. Their conclusions are varied. Land in many regions apparently drifted into fewer and fewer hands, but the picture is extremely complex and the greatest owners as individuals were often found selling as well as acquiring. A glimpse through any collection of family pedigrees in this period is sufficient to reveal the remarkably high incidence of failures of direct male lines of inheritance. Even the stricter family settlements that evolved from the mid-seventeenth century did little to guarantee the perpetuation of estates, for these settlements frequently lapsed. Indeed, their concomitants in the form of compulsory money portions for younger children devoured some estates. The crucial era for the smaller landowner is often considered to have been the century prior to 1760, but the precise problems of this ailing group are not yet fully diagnosed. However, it is clear that land did not shed its attraction for the non-landed social groups. Many problems obviously remain in the debate. The dearth of quantitative evidence and the enormity of the task of reconstructing the pattern oflandownership (even for a single county) ensure that a complete story may never be told. Studies to date have been forced to concentrate on relatively small regions and on impressions obtained from the well-preserved records of an extreme minority of estates. This is not to criticise recent methodology; it is likely that only the gradual assimilation of these impression will approach a complete story. The present essay attempts to add a few words to the landownership debate by examining the fortunes of one Welsh estate in this period. For us in Wales the debate takes on an added significance, for within its confines there may lie some of the causes of the transformation of Wales from the paternalistic, gentry-dominated world of the poets to the fractious and contentious world of the religious and political radicals. Previous Welsh research on landownership has concentrated on Glamorgan, but it is necessary to occasionally glance away from this the most 'Welsh' and yet the least typical of the thirteen old Welsh counties! 1 *I am grateful to Dr David Howell of the University College of Swansea and to Mr E. R. Morris for reading a draft of this article and for all their valuable comments. The following abbreviations are used in footnotes: Arch Camb (Archaeologia Cambrensis), BL (British Library), EcHR (Economic History Review), Mont Coll (Montgomeryshire Collections), NLW (National Library of Wales), PRO (Public Record Office), SRO (Shropshire Record Office). All dates are in the new style; all quotations have been modernised in spelling and in punctuation, square brackets indicate my insertions. Place names have been modernised unless extinct. Christopher Clay, 'Marriage, Inheritance and the Rise of the Large Estates in England 1660-1815', EcHR second series XXI 1968; idem, 'Property Settlements, Financial Provisions for the Family, and the Sale of Land by the Greater Owners, 1660-1790', Journal of British Studies XXI no. 1 1981; J. V. Beckett, 'English Landownership in the later- seventeenth and eighteenth centuries', EcHR second series XXX 1977; idem, 'The pattern of Landownership in England and Wales, 1660-1880', EcHR second series XXXVII 1984; B. A. Holderness, 'The English Land Market in the Eighteenth Century: The case of Lincolnshire', EcHR second series XXVII 1974; H. J. Habbakuk, 'The Rise and Fall of English Landed Families 1600-1800', Transactions of The Royal Historical Society fifth series XXIX-XXX 1979-1980; Lloyd Bonfield, 'Marriage Settlements and the "Rise of Great Estates": The Demographic Aspect', EcHR second series XXXII