Rhys Pritchard(1579–1644)

Rhys Pritchard was born at Llandovery in Carmarthenshire in 1579, son of a small Llandovery yeoman family. He took the BA at Jesus College, Oxford (the Welsh college, founded 1571), in 1602, was ordained deacon in 1602 and priest in 1603, returned to his native town as curate, was instituted Vicar of Llandovery in 1614, and held the vicarage of the parish for the next thirty years. He was appointed Chancellor of St Davids Cathedral in 1626 and held the chancellorship in plurality with the Llandovery cure, the two preferments giving him a comfortable but not lavish living, the financial independence on which his unusual ministerial career was based.

He took up, from about 1610 onward, the pastoral project that occupied the rest of his life: the conversion of the parish vocabulary of the largely-Welsh-speaking Llandovery district to the Christian moral life by way of Welsh-language verse-tracts on the seven deadly sins, the Ten Commandments, the practical conduct of Christian household life, the duty of parents to children, the duty of servants to masters and masters to servants, the proper observance of the Sabbath, the avoidance of profanity and drunkenness. He composed the tracts in the simple cynghanedd-influenced four-line stanza forms of the popular Welsh-language ballad tradition, recited them at the parish weddings, christenings and funerals, and published them at first as broadside sheets and then as small chap-book pamphlets through the Carmarthen and Cardiff printers from the 1620s onward.

The pamphlets, distributed by the parish, by the country fairs and by the carter-pedlars across south Wales, made his name across the country within his lifetime. He acquired the cognomen by which he is universally remembered in Welsh memory, Yr Hen Ficer, the Old Vicar, the title that has carried his Welsh-language reputation down the centuries. He held the Llandovery vicarage through the early years of the Civil War as a loyal Royalist (he attended Charles I at Raglan Castle in August 1645), and died at Llandovery on the fifteenth of December 1644 in his sixty-fifth year. He was buried under the floor of his own church at Llandovery.

His Welsh-language verse-tracts were gathered after his death by the Cardiganshire Puritan minister Stephen Hughes (the Anglesey-born Independent who from his small Carmarthen press of the 1650s did more than any other figure to print and distribute Welsh-language religious literature) and published in successive editions from 1646 to 1670 under the title Gwaith Mr Rees Pritchard (The Works of Mr Rees Pritchard). Hughes gave the collected work the title by which it has been known since: Canwyll y Cymry (The Welshmen's Candle). The collection ran through fifty editions across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (the Methodist Charles of Bala alone printed over a hundred and twenty thousand copies between 1770 and 1810), was the most-printed Welsh-language book of the period before the cheap Welsh Bible of the 1820s, and is at the foundation of the Welsh-language popular religious culture of the next three centuries. The Pritchard name in Welsh-language religious literature carries the weight of the verse-tracts of Yr Hen Ficer of Llandovery.