Howell Harris and Trefeca

A revival is not sealed by the man who lights it. It is sealed by the man who, fifteen years in, looks at the crowds he has gathered and understands that conversion without formation is a fire that warms a field for one night and leaves it colder by morning. The hinge in such a movement is rarely the open-air sermon. It is the day a preacher comes down off the road, locks a door behind him, and begins to build walls.

THE PREACHER OF BRECKNOCKSHIRE

Howell Harris was born at Trefeca on the twenty-third of January 1714, the second son of Howell Harris the small farmer and Susanna Powell, schooled at the parish and at Talgarth grammar. He had wanted holy orders. The bishops of St David's refused him four times between 1735 and 1745, on the steady ground that he preached in fields, in barns, on the open mountain, to congregations not parcelled into any parish on the bishop's books. So he preached without orders. For fifteen years he rode the South Wales circuit, from Brecon to Carmarthen to Pembroke and back through Glamorgan, sometimes three sermons in a day, often beaten in market towns, once stoned at Bala. The Welsh Methodist Revival, in its first generation, had two heads: Daniel Rowland at Llangeitho in the south-west, who out-preached him and admitted it; and Harris, who out-organised every other man in the country. By 1750 the converts were past counting. The chapels were tenanted out of parlours. The young men who came in had nowhere to go.

THE UPPER ROAD AT TALGARTH

The morning of the eighteenth of August 1752 is dry and high-skied, with the Black Mountains showing clean to the south-east toward Crickhowell. He has come up from Trefeca on foot at first light to hear the parish service at Talgarth, three miles down. It is a quarter past nine when he stands on the upper road outside the church, looking west across the rising ground to his own farm. He can see, from where he stands, the long farmhouse of Trefeca-fawr; the two stone barns; the small chapel he raised himself in the previous summer; the dormitory for the unmarried women; the dormitory for the unmarried men; and the empty printing-shed, where in six years' time a press from Carmarthen will stand. Trefeca-isaf, the lower farm, belongs to his brother Joseph. The upper farm is his.

A SECOND OF TIME IN BRECKNOCKSHIRE

The road is empty. He stands a moment on it. The whole question of the Welsh revival presses on him as a single weight, and he sorts it as a farmer sorts seed corn, by hand, by the feel of the grain. Rowland has Llangeitho; Rowland is the better preacher and has had the Sunday evening sermon there these sixteen years; that ground is settled. The English Wesleyans have the New Room at Bristol, a roofed and ordered place a preacher may go home to. Wales has nothing of the kind. The converts are in the country in their thousands, and the country has no house for them. A revival without a house is weather. He has been weather for fifteen years. To make Trefeca the institutional ground is to come down off the road for good, to stop being the field-preacher he has been since 1735, to give the itinerancy to younger men and to take, instead, the slower work of forming Christians out of converts. The country has, by these fifteen years, the converts; the country has not, in the converts, the formed Christians. The sentence settles in him the way a stone settles in a wall. He has the press to bring up. He has the dormitories to fill. He has Anne Williams the housekeeper waiting in the kitchen at Trefeca-fawr with John Owen the farm-hand and three young men of the locality who have moved in over the past month. He has the form of dedication, drafted last night by candle into his journal, folded in the breast pocket of his coat. He turns west off the road.

THE FORM OF DEDICATION

He comes down to Trefeca-fawr at half past nine. He gathers the core of the community into the small chapel: Anne, John, the three young men. He reads the form he drafted the previous evening. By his own dating in his journal, the Trefeca Family is constituted from this morning. There is no crowd. There is no sermon in the field sense. He records the act in his diary that night in the plain hand he kept for thirty years, and he goes out to see to the stock before dark.

THE FAMILY AT WORK

The Family grew from about thirty at the founding to about a hundred and twenty at its height in 1770. They worked a thousand acres of the surrounding country between them, ran the preachers' circuit of South Wales out of Trefeca, kept common worship morning and evening, and held all goods in common after the first apostolic pattern. In 1758 the press arrived from Carmarthen and the printing-shed filled: the first Welsh-Methodist press in the country, throwing off catechisms, hymn-books, sermons in Welsh for chapels that could not yet afford an English book. Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, came down to see it in 1768, took its order as her model, and built her Trevecca House college for her connection's preachers at Talgarth that same year, three minutes' walk from Harris's gate. He had stopped being the loudest voice of the revival. He had become its quartermaster.

THE FIELD-PREACHER WHO STAYED HOME

Daniel Rowland kept Llangeitho and kept the pulpit. He out-preached Harris to the end and knew it, and the south-west of the country remained his. But Llangeitho was a chapel and a Sunday; Trefeca was a working week and a roof. The two men did not always agree, and for a stretch in the 1750s the breach between them was open and bitter. The revival held, in the country, because between them they had divided the labour without quite knowing they had done it. One kept the fire. The other built the hearth.

THE RETURN

Howell Harris died at Trefeca on the twenty-first of July 1773 and was buried in the chancel of the parish church at Talgarth, where a small marble slab marks him in the south aisle. The Family continued under his lieutenants for a generation and was dissolved in 1799, the membership going out to the surrounding chapels with the order of the house in them. The Welsh Calvinistic Methodist tradition, formally constituted as a denomination in 1811, took Trefeca for its mother house in everything but name; every later Welsh dissenting community in the long nineteenth century, from the chapel-and-schoolroom plan of the valleys to the eisteddfod-and-prayer-meeting culture of the north, drew on the Trefeca order. The chapel and the farmhouse still stand. Since 1971 they have been the museum of the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist tradition under the Presbyterian Church of Wales. The phrase the chapels kept of him, repeated from pulpit to pulpit through the 1820s and after, is the founding sentence of the modern Welsh-Nonconformist self-image: that the country went up at Trefeca. The country, in the terms of the Welsh chapel, did. A revival is not sealed by the man who lights it. It is sealed by the man who builds the house. On the upper road outside Talgarth, on the rising ground three miles west, the small chapel he raised in the summer of 1751 is still standing, and the door is still hung on the iron hinges he set into the stone.