Welsh Journals

POETS OF BRECONSHIRE By ROLAND MATHIAS If this title is not to mislead, it needs immediate qualification. I am con- cerned, in this essay, with the poets of our former county who wrote (or are writing still) in English. There are, of course, a great many who wrote in Welsh, thought perhaps not many of stature. But whatever their quality I am not competent to write of them and they must remain altogether outside my concern in what follows. Then again, the intention of my title is to include whatever poets wrote in English in Breconshire, whether they were born in the county or not. There is, therefore, a slightly larger agglomeration of verse than may have been expected. But only slightly larger. For, with very few exceptions, Breconshire's poets did not venture far afield, and those who came into the county stayed-a conclusion those who appreciate the beauties of its landscape ought not to find surprising. A preliminary word of explanation is needed about the social and geogra- phical connotations of writing in English before the second half of the nine- teenth century, during which the English language penetrated widely into south-east Wales, as it had done earlier into south Pembrokeshire, Gower, Radnorshire and the eastern borders of Flintshire, Denbighshire and Mont- gomeryshire. Those who could speak and write English in 'Welsh' Wales in centuries before the nineteenth can be classified with reasonable clarity. As early as the thirteenth, for example, commerce was a preserve of English Welshmen were forbidden to become burgesses in royal boroughs until the reign of the Tudors, and in certain Anglo-Norman towns-Hay was almost certainly one-English was the dominant language of the townspeople as early as the mid-seventeenth century. In Brecon, on the other hand, the pendulum had long swung the other way. A plantation town', like most of the med- iaeval boroughs of Wales, Brecon boasts a 1411 charter (by no means its earliest which shows only six out of eighty-six names of burgesses that are reco- gnisably Welsh. But the foreigners from the countryside around began to creep in, so much so that Hugh Thomas in 1698 could declare of the town "The language is generally Welsh, as good as any in Wales". Law, government and social aspiration, however, beckoned strongly towards English. The Acts of Union of 1536 and 1542 compelled all gentry who sought legal office as justices of the peace, sheriffs or escheators to be capable of con- ducting their business in English, and since such offices proved to be the chiefest means to riches as well as status there was a steady anglicisation of gentry families from that time on. It may be of importance that John Wesley on his preaching expeditions into Wales in the mid-eighteenth century noted more gentry in Breconshire than anywhere else except in Pembrokeshire-that is, they were able, as monoglot English-speakers, to live on their estates in these