Harris · 1752
Howell Harris and Trefeca
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.
It is a quarter past nine on the morning of the eighteenth of August 1752, on the upper road outside the parish church of Talgarth in eastern Brecknockshire, with the view down the Black Mountains valley to the south-east toward Crickhowell. He is thirty-eight years old. He is Howell Harris, born at Trefeca on the twenty-third of January 1714, son of Howell Harris the small farmer and Susanna Powell, schooled at Trefeca and at the Talgarth grammar school, ordinand of the Church of England (refused holy orders four times by the bishops of St David's between 1735 and 1745 on grounds of irregular field-preaching), in his fifteenth year as a lay-Methodist itinerant preacher across South Wales.
On the rising ground a quarter-mile to the west, on the small farm of Trefeca-fawr (Trefeca-isaf is the lower farm, retained by his elder brother Joseph), stand the buildings he is in the process of converting into the accommodation of the religious community he intends to establish: the long farmhouse, two stone barns, the small chapel he has built in the previous summer, the dormitory for unmarried women, the dormitory for unmarried men, the printing-shed (which is at the moment empty; the press will arrive from Carmarthen in 1758).
He thinks: Daniel Rowland at Llangeitho has the south-west of the Methodist movement under his hand. Daniel Rowland is the better preacher, by his own admission, and is the man who has given the weekly Sunday-evening sermon at Llangeitho these past sixteen years.
He thinks: the weakness of the Methodist movement in this country is the absence of an institutional ground. The chapels of the Methodists are tenanted out of barns and parlours. The preachers are itinerants, without homes. The young men who come into the movement have no community to go into.
He thinks: the English Wesleyan equivalent is the New Room at Bristol, which has the central function of an institutional ground. We have, in Wales, no equivalent.
He thinks: if I make Trefeca the institutional ground, I withdraw from the itinerancy. I will not be the field-preacher I have been since 1735. I will be at Trefeca with the community.
He thinks: the country has, after fifteen years of revival preaching, the converts. The country does not have, in the converts, the formed Christians.
He thinks: Trefeca is the formation place. Trefeca is what comes next.
He goes down the road to Trefeca-fawr at half past nine. He gathers the core of the community (Anne Williams the housekeeper, John Owen the farm-hand, three young men of the locality who have moved in over the previous month) in the small chapel. He reads the form of dedication he has drafted in his journal the previous evening. The Trefeca Family is, by his own dating in his journal, formally constituted from this morning.
Howell Harris ran Trefeca as the institutional centre of the Welsh Methodist Revival from 1752 to his death on the twenty-first of July 1773. The community grew from about thirty people at the founding to about a hundred and twenty by 1770, working a thousand acres of farmland on the surrounding country, running the preachers' circuit of South Wales out of Trefeca, and printing the Welsh-Methodist literature on the press from 1758 onward. Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, the great English Methodist patron, established her Trevecca House college for her connection's preachers at Talgarth in 1768, next door to Harris's community, on the explicit model of his Family.
The Trefeca community continued under Harris's lieutenants for a generation after his death and was finally dissolved in 1799 with the dispersal of the membership to the surrounding chapels. The Trefeca-fawr farmhouse and the small chapel still stand and are, since 1971, the museum of the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist tradition under the trusteeship of the Presbyterian Church of Wales. Howell Harris is buried in the chancel of the parish church of Talgarth, with a small marble slab in the south aisle. The Welsh-Methodist tradition holds, by every chapel and every history of the movement since the 1820s, that the country went up at Trefeca. The country, in the terms of the Welsh chapel, did. The phrase is one of the founding sentences of the modern Welsh-Nonconformist self-image.