Griffiths

Gruffudd is Old Welsh for strong lord, and it was a name the ruling houses of Wales reached for first. Gruffydd ap Cynan (1055–1137) and Gruffydd ap Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, who died in 1244, were sovereign princes of Gwynedd, and the last sovereign Prince of Wales, who fell at Cilmeri in 1282, was Llywelyn ap Gruffydd: a man identified, in the ordinary Welsh way, as the son of a Gruffydd. The name ran in the family of Owain Glyndŵr as well. It was among the most prestigious personal names in Welsh use, carried especially in Gwynedd and along the Welsh borderlands.

That prestige is why the surname exists in quantity: a patronymic can only be as common as the given name behind it. What Griffiths records is not descent from a prince. It records a father, one man in one parish called Gruffydd, at the moment the naming system stopped turning over.

Before surnames, a Welshman's name was a sentence about his descent, his baptismal name linked by ap or ab (son of) to his father's, and the chain could run back seven generations: a genealogical history of the male line, kept because Welsh law made it essential to know how a person descended from an ancestor. In 1292, 48 per cent of Welsh names were patronymics, in some parishes over 70 per cent.

Those laws decayed in the later Middle Ages, and fixed surnames came in from the 15th century onwards. In the reign of Henry VIII (1509–1547) surnames became hereditary among the Welsh gentry and spread slowly among commoners, and the same king ordered that marital births be recorded under the surname of the father. Town families, the wealthy and the districts nearest England had given up patronymics earlier; in remote country the old system ran on into the early 19th century.

A freezing patronymic could go three ways: keep the ap in reduced form at the front, as in Powell (ap Hywel), Price (ap Rhys) and Bowen (ab Owen); drop the ap; or take the English genitive s that produced Jones, Roberts and Edwards. Gruffydd left no P-name in general use. It took the other two routes at once, giving the bare Griffith and the s-form Griffiths, two clerks' answers to the same question rather than two families.

Welsh surnames are patronymics drawn from a small stock of first names, so Welsh communities hold families of the same surname who are not related, and it cannot be assumed that two people of one name in one village share an ancestor. Every household with a father called Gruffydd founded a Griffiths line of its own, in parishes that had no dealings with each other: hence two Welsh rugby union players named Dan Griffiths, a forward born in 1857 and a fly-half born in 1979, with no kinship recorded between them. The 19th century answered that sameness with the double surname, prefixing a house, a parish or the mother's family, as in Griffith-Jones. Philip Jones Griffiths (1936–2008), the Welsh photojournalist, carried that shape of name.

The surname sits heaviest in Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire and in Gwynedd, where the princely given name ran longest, with older weight in Denbighshire, Flintshire, Powys and Ceredigion.

Ann Thomas was born in April 1776 at the farmhouse of Dolwar Fach, in the parish of Llanfihangel-yng-Ngwynfa in the high country of southern Montgomeryshire, fourth of the five children of John Evan Thomas and Jane Theodore, Anglicans of moderate Methodist sympathies and small means. She knew the Welsh Bible by heart in early adolescence and took over the household at eighteen when her mother died in 1794. At the Easter Communion at Llanfyllin in 1796 she came under the preaching of the Calvinistic Methodist itinerant Benjamin Jones, and in 1797 joined the society at Pontrobert under the seiat leader John Hughes. She took the surname in October 1804, on her marriage to Thomas Griffiths of Meifod.

From about 1802 she composed Welsh-language hymns at the hearth at Dolwar Fach, in the long evenings between the farm-work, at the spinning wheel and at the kitchen table. She did not write them down. She dictated them to the family servant Ruth Hughes of Dolwar Fach, who memorised them and could repeat them word-perfect on demand. For three years the whole body of work existed in one woman's head.

Ann Griffiths died at Dolwar Fach in August 1805, in her thirtieth year. On John Hughes's instruction, Ruth Hughes dictated the seventy-four surviving hymns to the Welsh-language Methodist press at Bala, and they were printed in 1806 in the second edition of Mary Jones of Llandinam's Hymnau a gyfansoddwyd ar amrywiol achosion. It ran to over a hundred editions in the next forty years, and twenty-six of the seventy-four are in continuous use still. Wele'n sefyll rhwng y myrtwydd is the central single hymn of the Welsh Methodist tradition.

The tradition Ann Griffiths wrote into was no minority interest. Welsh nonconformism and Methodism were strong enough to carry the Sunday Closing (Wales) Act 1881 through Parliament, the first legislation issued specifically for Wales since the Middle Ages.

Terry Griffiths (1947–2024) of Llanelli won the World Snooker Championship in 1979, only the second qualifier ever to take the title.

In rugby the name runs from Dan Griffiths (1857–1936), a forward, and Rowland Griffiths (1886–1914), a Wales international, to Mike Griffiths (born 1962) and Bryn Griffiths (born 1982). In football it runs from Llewelyn Griffiths (1877–1943) through Stan Griffiths (1911–2003) and Estyn Griffiths (1927–2017) to Rhys Griffiths (born 1980), player and manager; Leigh Griffiths (born 1990) carried it into the Scottish game. On the track, Cecil Griffiths (1901–1945) ran as a Welsh sprinter and middle-distance runner.

The name reaches the book trade with Ralph Griffiths (c. 1720–1803), the English editor and publisher. Two centuries later Trevor Griffiths (1935–2024), the Manchester-born dramatist of Welsh and Lancastrian descent, wrote Comedians and the screenplay for Reds. The novelists Elly Griffiths (born 1963) and Niall Griffiths (born 1966) and the Welsh poet Bryn Griffiths (1933–2025) carry the name in fiction and poetry.

Gwenny Griffiths (1867–1953) was a Welsh painter; Richard Griffiths (1947–2013) and Derek Griffiths (born 1946) made their careers as British actors; Jemma Griffiths (born 1975) is the Welsh singer-songwriter known as Jem.

Griffiths went with them. Eliezer Griffiths (1827–1920) served as a Welsh Congregationalist minister in Australia; Jennie Scott Griffiths (1875–1951) worked as a journalist and women's rights activist in America, Fiji and Australia; Bede Griffiths (1906–1993) was a British-born monk and missionary in India. Andy Griffiths (born 1961), whose Treehouse books are read across the English-speaking world, descends from a south Wales Griffiths line that settled in Melbourne in the gold rush of the 1850s.