Howells

Hywel comes from the Old Welsh Higuel, built from hy- ('good') and gwel ('sight') and understood as eminent or well-seen. Its first firm appearance in writing is in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 926, where a Brittonic ruler is entered as Huwal of the West Welsh. Most scholars take that entry to be Hywel Dda, Hywel ap Cadell, king of Seisyllwg from about 910 and of all Deheubarth from 920, who by 950 was being given the title King of the Britons.

What made the name travel was the law. Cyfraith Hywel, the native Welsh law tradition attached to it, survived in three regional redactions and remained in force across much of native Wales until the Statute of Rhuddlan of 1284. Parents who called a boy Hywel were reaching for that. Under the old system the son of such a man was Owain ap Hywel, 'Owain son of Hywel': a description, not a possession.

Wales did not drift into surnames; it was legislated into them. In 1292 some 48 per cent of recorded Welsh names were patronymics, and in some parishes above 70 per cent. A man's name changed every generation: Evan son of Thomas was Evan ap Thomas, Evan's son John was John ab Evan, John's son Rees was Rees ap John. The chain could run back to perhaps the seventh generation, so a name like Llewelyn ap Dafydd ab Ieuan ap Gruffudd ap Meredydd was a spoken genealogy of the male line.

Those laws decayed through the later Middle Ages, and under Henry VIII fixed surnames became hereditary among the Welsh gentry before spreading slowly to commoners. The Laws in Wales Acts of 1535 and 1542 brought Wales into the Kingdom of England, and Henry VIII ordered that marital births be recorded under the father's surname. Once a name was written into a register it stopped moving. In rural parishes the patronymic hung on into the early nineteenth century.

The old prefix survived two ways. Sometimes ap was welded on to the front, which is why Wales has Powell (ap Hywel), Price (ap Rhys), Pugh (ap Hugh) and Bowen (ab Owen). Sometimes it was dropped and an English genitive -s added instead. Howells belongs to that second group, with Jones, Roberts and Edwards. The Welsh Hywel and the anglicised Howell went on side by side, especially in Cardiganshire and Pembrokeshire.

The surnames came from a small pool of baptismal names, and that pool shrank further after the Protestant Reformation, so a thin stock of family names ended up covering an enormous number of people: Evans, Jones, Williams, Davies and Thomas were all in the top ten surnames recorded for England and Wales in 2000. It cannot be assumed that two people called Howells in one village inherited the name from a common ancestor. They may have had two different fathers named Hywel.

Many Howells families claim descent from Hywel Dda; what the record preserves is the given name, carried by thousands of unconnected men. Around 200,000 people now bear Howell worldwide, and a study of Welsh surname geography commissioned by the Welsh Government found 718,000 people in Wales, close to 35 per cent of the population, carrying a name of Welsh origin, against 4.7 per cent in New Zealand, 4.1 per cent in Australia and 3.8 per cent in the United States.

The English conquest of Wales in the thirteenth century and the union legislation of the sixteenth pushed Welsh families eastward, and Howell became common in the western English counties along the border, where settlers anglicised Hywel to Howell as they went. In the eastern counties the same sound arrived by another road: Breton settlers after the Norman Conquest brought the forms Houuel, Huwel, Huwal and Howael.

The nineteenth century redrew Wales around the coalfield. The population doubled from 587,000 in 1801 to 1,163,000 in 1851 and reached 2,421,000 by 1911, and most of that growth landed in the mining districts: Glamorganshire went from 71,000 in 1801 to 232,000 in 1851 and 1,122,000 in 1911. Over the same decades Welsh emigration ran to the United States, Pennsylvania above all, to Canada, and to Y Wladfa in Patagonia, and Jackson County in Ohio was known as Little Wales.

James Howells (1814-1892), a Cardiff draper, opened his store on St Mary Street in 1865. It traded on that one site for 152 years and did not close until 2017, so that for a century and a half the best-known Howells in Wales was not a person at all but a shopfront in the middle of Cardiff.

Herbert Norman Howells was born at Lydney in west Gloucestershire on 17 October 1892, sixth child of Oliver Howells, a Lydney plumber, painter and amateur organist, and Elizabeth Burgham. His father's organ-playing at the parish church made a musical household out of a modest one. At fourteen he was articled to Sir Herbert Brewer, organist of Gloucester Cathedral, and in October 1912 he took the open scholarship to the Royal College of Music, studying under Charles Villiers Stanford and Hubert Parry.

On 9 September 1935 his nine-year-old son Michael died of bulbar polio. Between 1936 and 1938, working privately at his house in Barnes, Howells wrote Hymnus Paradisi, a setting for soprano, tenor, chorus, semi-chorus and orchestra binding Latin texts of the Requiem to Psalms 23 and 121 in the King James version, the Salisbury Diurnal antiphon 'I Heard a Voice from Heaven' and the Pre-Sanctus 'Holy is the True Light'. He showed the score to no one and would not let it be performed; only the persistent persuasion of his Royal College colleague Ralph Vaughan Williams moved him. He released it in 1950 and conducted it that September at the Three Choirs Festival in Gloucester Cathedral, where its reception re-established him as one of the leading composers writing in English.

He took the teaching of composition at the Royal College in 1920 on Stanford's recommendation and held a post there for sixty-three years, the longest tenure in the College's history, teaching Lennox Berkeley, Malcolm Arnold, Richard Rodney Bennett, the early Britten, the early Imogen Holst, the early John Tavener and the future conductor John Eliot Gardiner. In 1936 he succeeded Gustav Holst as Director of Music at St Paul's Girls' School, holding the post until 1962.

The work that carries the name furthest is liturgical. The four Anglican service settings are Collegium Regale of 1944, the Gloucester Service in 1947, the St Paul's Service in 1951 and the Westminster Service in 1957, with a corpus of canticles and anthems that has sat at the centre of the cathedral repertoire without interruption since the 1940s.

He was appointed a Companion of the Order of the British Empire in 1953 and a Companion of Honour in 1972, and died at his Barnes home on 23 February 1983 in his ninety-first year. A surname that began as a claim about a father is now sung by cathedral choirs who know it chiefly as the name on the Gloucester Service.

Ursula Howells (1922-2005), the actress, was the composer's daughter, and hers is the one Howells-to-Howells descent on this page the record actually establishes. The others stand on their own. Anne Howells (1941-2022) was a British operatic mezzo-soprano; Callum Scott Howells, born in 1999, is a Welsh actor; Sarah Howells is a British singer-songwriter and trance vocalist; Glenn Howells, born in 1961, is a British architect.

The name went overseas early. William Dean Howells (1837-1920) was an American realist author and literary critic; John Mead Howells (1868-1959) an American architect; William W. Howells (1908-2005) professor of anthropology at Harvard; Adele C. Howells (1886-1951) president of the Mormon children's organisation; Philip Arthur Howells (1855-1921) a musical entrepreneur in South Australia. None need be kin to any other, and that is the point of a Welsh patronymic surname.