Welsh Journals

SIRJOHN PRYSE OF BRECON [This was delivered as the Sir John Lloyd Memorial Lecture at Christ College, Brecon, on 26 March 1999. I should like to thank the members of the Brecknock Society and Museum Friends very warmly for their invitation to deliver the talk and for their delightful welcome to Brecon.] Sir John Pryse is one of Brecon's most accomplished sons; and yet he is not very well known to the citizens of this ancient borough. Indeed, he was not all that familiar even to Brecon's greatest historian, Theophilus Jones. Perhaps that is because no one has seen fit to write a biography of him, or even a full-length article covering the more important aspects of his life.' May I say at once that this lecture will only go a small part of the way towards making good that deficiency? John Pryse was born in the year 1502, on the threshold of a new and momentous century in British history. It often happens that we cannot be sure of the date of birth of a figure of the early Tudor age, but John Pryse himself tells us the year in which he was born. In his commonplace book, which still survives in manuscript form and a copy of which can be seen in the National Library of Wales,2 he records that when he was married in 1534 he was thirty-two years old. Even my shaky arithmetic is capable of working out that thirty-two from 1534 is 1502. He was, therefore, born into a Europe, a Britain, and a Wales all on the brink of epoch- making changes. Four of the most memorable among them were: first, the rise of new and more powerful rulers; second the spread of the Renaissance, the rebirth of Greek and Latin learning; third, the rapid extension of printing; and fourth, the outbreak of the Reformation and the break-up of the medieval church.3 To each of these four major developments John Pryse would have a notable contribution to make. He would become a greatly-valued and amply-rewarded servant of three successive Tudor monarchs; one of the earliest and most distinguished of Welsh Renaissance scholars; the first man to publish a printed book in the Welsh language; and one of the foremost visitors of the dissolved monasteries, who would make his own and his family's homes in two of the former priories: St John's Priory, Brecon, and St Guthlac's Priory, Hereford. Taking all these achievements into account, it would not be unjust to characterize him as the outstanding figure of Brecon in the Tudor era. By 1502 the Brecon into which Pryse was born was busy and prosperous, and, second only to Carmarthen, the largest town in Wales, with a population of about 1,500.4 It had, by this time, made an excellent recovery from those setbacks caused by the plagues of the fourteenth century and the Glyndwr Rebellion of the early fifteenth. It flourished as a market-town and trading centre for the whole region and acted as its administrative and judicial capital as well. It also housed two important religious institutions which acted as magnets to draw in many