Pritchard

In 1292 some 48 per cent of recorded Welsh names were patronymics, and in certain parishes the figure passed 70 per cent. A man was not a Pritchard; he was ap Rhisiart, son of Richard, and his own son took his given name in turn. The strings ran back as far as seven generations, so that a name like Llewelyn ap Dafydd ab Ieuan ap Gruffudd ap Meredydd was a genealogy of the male line rather than a label. Welsh law wanted it so: descent from a named ancestor settled what a man could inherit.

Those laws were decaying by the later Middle Ages, and unification under Henry VIII in 1536 finished the job. Hereditary surnames took hold first among the Welsh gentry and spread only slowly to commoners; the same king ordered that marital births be recorded under the father's surname. Districts where English influence was strong, and town and wealthy families anywhere, had abandoned patronymics earlier, while in remoter parishes the old system survived into the early nineteenth century.

When the freeze came, some families kept the ap and swallowed it into the first letter of the new surname: Upjohn from ap John, Powell from ap Hywel, Price from ap Rhys, Pugh from ap Hugh, Bowen from ab Owen, Pritchard from ap Richard. Others dropped the prefix and added an English -s, which is why Jones, Roberts and Edwards now blanket the country. The stock of Welsh surnames stayed small, and two Pritchards in one village cannot be assumed to share an ancestor.

Llancaiach Fawr stands near Nelson in the Rhymney Valley, a semi-fortified Tudor manor house raised on the site of an earlier medieval structure. It is thought to date to about 1530 and to have been built for Dafydd ap Richard, though dendrochronology from a Time Team excavation puts the felling of the roof timbers between 1548 and 1565. Dafydd is recorded as lord of the manor in 1549, and his patronymic, ap Rhisiart, was modernised on paper to Prichard: the freeze happening here in one family, in stone.

The Prichards prospered in the house. In 1628 David Prichard extended it, adding the Grand Staircase that at last allowed easy access between floors, and had two family rooms panelled in oak to demonstrate their standing. Llancaiach Fawr is now reckoned one of the most important gentry houses to survive from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

When the Civil War broke out in 1642, David Prichard's son, Colonel Edward Prichard, was appointed Commissioner of Array, raising men and money for the King across Glamorganshire. In 1645 he hosted a visit by Charles I at Llancaiach Fawr. By February 1646 he was holding the same house staunchly for the Parliamentarians, against a siege headed by Edward Carne.

The house passed out of Prichard hands after 1645 and was put to work as a farmhouse; the Tithe Map of 1842 and the Ordnance Survey map of 1875 both show an orchard at the rear. Grade I listed, it operated as a living history museum until Caerphilly County Borough Council closed it permanently in December 2024 on budgetary grounds.

Rhys Pritchard was born at Llandovery in Carmarthenshire in 1579, the son of a small yeoman family of the town. He took his BA in 1602 at Jesus College, Oxford, the Welsh college founded in 1571, was ordained deacon that year and priest in 1603, and returned to his native town as curate. In 1614 he was instituted Vicar of Llandovery, and held that vicarage for thirty years.

In 1626 he was appointed Chancellor of St Davids Cathedral and held the chancellorship in plurality with the Llandovery cure. The two preferments gave him a comfortable rather than a lavish living, and that financial independence is the base on which an unusual ministerial career was built.

From about 1610 onward Pritchard took up the project that occupied the rest of his life. The Llandovery district was largely Welsh-speaking, and he set out to convert its parish vocabulary to the Christian moral life in Welsh: verse-tracts on the seven deadly sins, the Ten Commandments, the conduct of Christian household life, the duty of parents to children and of servants to masters, the observance of the Sabbath, and the avoidance of profanity and drunkenness.

He composed them in the simple four-line stanza forms of the popular Welsh ballad tradition, influenced by cynghanedd. He recited them at the parish weddings, christenings and funerals, then put them into print: broadside sheets at first, then small chap-book pamphlets through the Carmarthen and Cardiff printers from the 1620s. The parish handed them out, the country fairs carried them, and the carter-pedlars took them across south Wales.

That distribution made his name across the country in his own lifetime and earned him the cognomen Welsh memory has used since: Yr Hen Ficer, the Old Vicar. A loyal Royalist, he held the Llandovery vicarage through the early years of the Civil War. He died at Llandovery on the fifteenth of December 1644, in his sixty-fifth year, and was buried under the floor of his own church.

Pritchard never gathered the tracts himself. That was done after his death by the Puritan minister Stephen Hughes, who from a small Carmarthen press in the 1650s did more than anyone to print and distribute Welsh-language religious literature. Hughes brought out successive editions between 1646 and 1670 as Gwaith Mr Rees Pritchard, the Works of Mr Rees Pritchard, and gave the collection the title it has carried since: Canwyll y Cymry, the Welshmen's Candle.

It ran through fifty editions across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Methodist Charles of Bala alone printing over a hundred and twenty thousand copies between 1770 and 1810. Until the cheap Welsh Bible of the 1820s it was the most-printed Welsh-language book there was, and the popular religious culture of Wales for the following three centuries rests on it.

At the census of 1881 the frequency of Pritchard was highest on Anglesey, over thirty times the national average, with Caernarfonshire next. The ranking then runs Brecknockshire, Herefordshire, Radnorshire, Denbighshire, Monmouthshire, Flintshire, Merioneth and Shropshire: a hard north Welsh core with a long tail east over the border. Prichard and Pritchard are the same name.

The name went into English public life without letting go of Wales. Hannah Pritchard (1711-1768) was a leading English actress of the eighteenth century, of Welsh descent; Thomas Farnolls Pritchard (c.1723-1777) worked as an English architect, Andrew Pritchard (1804-1882) as an English microscopist, Charles Pritchard (1808-1893) as a British astronomer. Matthew Pritchard (1669-1750) was a Roman Catholic bishop, George Pritchard (1796-1883) a British missionary.

Later bearers carried it further: Harold Arthur Prichard (1871-1947), British philosopher; E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1902-1973), English anthropologist; Elaine Pritchard (1926-2012), English chess master; John Pritchard (1921-1989), conductor. Cliff Pritchard (1881-1954) and Charlie Pritchard (1882-1916) both played rugby for Wales, and Cecil Pritchard (1902-1966) played international rugby at hooker.

Welsh emigration was modest in proportion beside the Irish, but it ran in identifiable channels: Liverpool and Ashton-in-Makerfield within Britain, contract miners into the Pas-de-Calais coalfield, Newfoundland and the Labrador coast, Y Wladfa in Patagonia, and the United States, where Jackson County in Ohio was called Little Wales.

Pritchards appear all along those routes. Ada Pritchard (1898-1993) and William Arthur 'Bill' Pritchard (1888-1981) both entered Canadian politics, Bill as a socialist politician and publisher. Alexander Pritchard (1825-1898) sat as an Australian politician; Katharine Susannah Prichard wrote as an Australian author; Ethel Pritchard (1880-1964) served as a New Zealand military and civilian nurse.