The 1588 Welsh Bible

A language does not die in a single generation, and it is not saved in one either. It is saved, when it is saved at all, by a book heavy enough to anchor it: a book read aloud in the same words from one valley to the next, Sunday after Sunday, until the cadence of that book becomes the cadence of the tongue itself. The men who produce such a book are seldom the men one would have chosen. They are parish rectors on the wrong side of a mountain, scholars of obscure colleges, sons of tenant farmers. They are not asked to be brilliant. They are asked to last.

THE PARISH ON THE BORDER

William Morgan was born around 1545 at Tŷ Mawr in Penmachno, on land his father held as tenant of the Wynn estate of Gwydir. He went up to St John's College, Cambridge, took Hebrew under Antoine Chevallier and divinity under William Whitaker, and in 1578 was instituted to the rectory of Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant, a village split between Denbighshire, Montgomeryshire and Shropshire, on the Welsh side of the Berwyn. The country he served had no complete Bible in its own tongue. William Salesbury and Bishop Richard Davies had given the Welsh a New Testament in 1567, but the prose was over-Latinised and the orthography private to its author; a farmer in Llanrhaeadr could not read it aloud without stumbling. The Act of Uniformity required English in the parish churches of the realm. Wales had been granted a single statutory exception: a Welsh Bible and Prayer Book, to be produced by the bishops, by 1567. It was now 1578 and the work was not done. The bishops had given up. Morgan, with no commission and no salary for the task, took it on.

THE TEN WINTERS

He worked in the parsonage at Llanrhaeadr through ten winters. The tools at his elbow were the Hebrew of the Masoretes, the Septuagint, Pagninus, Tremellius, the Vulgate, the Geneva Bible, and Salesbury's flawed Testament, which he corrected line by line. The language he was reaching for was not the Welsh of the marketplace, which was already fraying under English, but the Welsh of the bards, the Welsh of Dafydd ap Gwilym and the Mabinogi, regularised and brought under the spine of a sacred book. The work was done between baptisms, between funerals, between visitations to the dying in farmsteads three valleys deep. It was done through a famine and through two waves of plague. His first wife died. He married Catrin ferch George. A neighbour, Ifan Maredudd of Lloran Uchaf, brought a tithe-suit against him that ran for years and at one point in 1585 nearly cost him his life; he was hauled before the Council in the Marches at Ludlow and only the intercession of Archbishop Whitgift kept him in his living. Whitgift, when he understood what Morgan was doing in the parsonage on his off-hours, sent him on to London with letters of commendation and an order to finish.

THE PRESS ON THE STRAND

In the autumn of 1587 Morgan rode east with the manuscript in his saddlebag and presented himself at Bacon House on the Strand, the printing-house of Christopher Barker, the Queen's Printer. Barker did not read Welsh. Neither did his compositors. Morgan was given a small office above the press-room and told that if he wanted the book to come out clean he would have to correct every sheet himself, as it came off the forme, in proof. He took lodging at Westminster and walked to Bacon House each morning. He stayed thirteen months. He read every page of the Pentateuch, every page of the Prophets, every page of the Gospels, in proof and again in revise, against the Hebrew and the Greek and against his own ear. The compositors set sorts they could not pronounce. He sat at their elbow and pointed. The double-l, the dd, the circumflex over the long vowel: each had to be invented in metal for an English shop. He slept, when he slept, on a settle in the room above the press.

A WEDNESDAY IN SEPTEMBER

It is late on a Wednesday in September 1588. The bell of St Clement Danes is striking eleven. The last sheet of the New Testament has been pulled and bound in with the rest, and the first complete copy of Y Beibl Cyssegr-lan lies on the table in front of him, the leather still warm from the binder's iron. He is forty-three. He has not slept seven hours in any one night for eighteen months. He runs a finger down the spine, the way a farmer runs a hand along the flank of a beast he has raised from a calf, and he opens it at the first page of John. The Welsh reads back at him in his own orthography, the orthography he has fought the compositors for, sheet by sheet: Yn y dechreuad yr oedd y Gair. In the beginning was the Word. He has carried that line in his head for a year. He says it aloud, in Welsh, to no one, because there is no one in the room. He thinks of the eight hundred copies that will come off this run and the second pressing the printer has already promised, and of the royal order that will set one in every parish church in Wales at the parish's cost, around a pound a copy, more than a labourer earns in a month. He thinks of the children in Llanrhaeadr who will learn their letters from this book and not from the dog-Latin of the office nor the kitchen-English of the fair. He thinks, with the dry clarity of a man who has worked too long to be sentimental, that he will be dead in twenty years and the book will outlast him by four centuries. He closes it. He goes downstairs to thank the night compositor who has set the last sheet, and walks back across the river to his lodging at Westminster in the rain.

THE PARISH CHURCHES

By Christmas the copies were being carted out of London in bales for Bristol and Chester, and from there by packhorse over the hills into Wales. The Privy Council's order was peremptory: one Bible in every parish church in the principality, the cost to be borne by the parish. There were around nine hundred parishes. Some grumbled at the pound. Most paid. The book was chained to a lectern in the chancel, and on Sundays the rector read from it, and for the first time in the lives of the men and women in the pews the words of the Hebrew prophets came at them in the consonants of their own tongue. A second, smaller pressing followed within months. The bards heard the cadence and bent their own metres towards it. A boy in Llanrhaeadr who in 1587 could not have written his own name in his own language could, by 1600, hear that language spoken from a pulpit with the weight of Isaiah behind it. That was the hinge. Everything after followed from it.

THE BISHOP AT ST ASAPH

Morgan was made Bishop of Llandaff in 1595 and translated to St Asaph in 1601. He spent the last years of his life revising the Prayer Book and beginning a second, corrected edition of the Bible, in his own hand, the manuscript of which was the most valuable thing in his library at his death. He died at Bishop's Court, St Asaph, on the tenth of September 1604, leaving an estate of less than fifty pounds and some four hundred books. He is buried in the cathedral, in an unmarked grave, the location of which is no longer known with certainty. The revised edition was carried through the press after his death by Bishop Richard Parry and the scholar John Davies of Mallwyd, and it is the 1620 Parry-Davies recension, built on Morgan's spine, that became the Welsh Bible read in the chapels for the next three hundred years.

THE LANGUAGE THAT WAS KEPT

When the coal pits of Glamorgan and the iron works of Monmouthshire pulled hundreds of thousands of Welsh speakers down out of the hill parishes in the nineteenth century, they took Morgan's cadences with them into the chapels of Merthyr and the Rhondda, and their children learned to read on the same text their great-grandfathers had heard chained to a lectern at Llanrhaeadr. The language did not fracture into mutually unintelligible dialects, because there was a single book sitting under all of them. Cornish, the sister tongue across the Severn Sea, had no such book. Cornish has about six hundred speakers today. Welsh has nine hundred thousand. The difference is, in significant part, the volume bound in Bacon House on a wet September Wednesday in 1588. A copy of that first edition sits in the library of St Asaph Cathedral. Another is at the National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth. Another is in the British Library. The lectern at Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant where the parish copy was chained is gone, but the parish church still stands, and on the wall inside is a tablet with the rector's name, and underneath it, in his own orthography, the line he carried in his head across the Berwyn and down the Strand: Yn y dechreuad yr oedd y Gair.