Harris

On the morning of the eighteenth of August 1752, in the small parish church of Talgarth in eastern Brecknockshire (the Welsh county on the southern edge of the Black Mountains), Howell Harris, a thirty-eight-year-old former schoolmaster of nearby Trefeca who had been the principal lay-evangelical preacher of the Welsh Methodist Revival of the previous fifteen years, formally founded a Christian commune at his family farm at Trefeca, three miles outside Talgarth. The Trefeca Family, as the community would call itself for the next twenty-one years, was a deliberately experimental Christian community of about a hundred and twenty people at peak, organised around shared work, common worship, and the printing of Welsh-language religious literature on the country's first Welsh-Methodist press, set up at Trefeca in 1758. The Family lived under Harris's direct guidance until his death in 1773. By the assessment of every careful Welsh church historian, Trefeca was the institutional pivot of the Welsh Methodist movement of the eighteenth century, and the model from which every later Welsh dissenting community drew. Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, the great English Methodist patron, took Trefeca as the model for her own connection's preachers' college and built her Trevecca House at Talgarth in 1768 next door.

Read the story →