Pritchard · 1620
Yr Hen Ficer of Llandovery
From about 1614 to his death in 1644, the Reverend Rhys Prichard, vicar of Llandovery in the eastern marches of Carmarthenshire, wrote in his spare time a long sequence of metrical Welsh verses, simple in form, organised in stanzas of four lines, that were intended to be memorised and sung by his parishioners as a way of fixing Christian teaching in the heads of an illiterate population. He never published them in his own lifetime. After his death, the verses were collected by his son and friends and printed at London in 1659 as *Cannwyll y Cymry*, the Welsh-Man's Candle. By the reckoning of the Welsh historians of print, the *Cannwyll* was, after the Welsh Bible of 1588 itself, the most widely owned and most reprinted Welsh-language book of the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; over forty editions were printed before 1850. By the tradition of the chapel-Welsh culture of the eighteenth century, *Yr Hen Ficer* (*the Old Vicar*) was the household name for Prichard, and his verses were sung at hearths in every parish of South and central Wales for two hundred years.
It is the late evening of an unrecorded date in the autumn of 1620, in the upstairs study of the vicarage of Llandovery, in eastern Carmarthenshire, in candlelight. He is forty-one years old. He is the Reverend Rhys Prichard, vicar of Llandovery since 1602, sometime canon of St David's, son of a Carmarthen burgess and a Vaughan mother, schooled at Jesus College, Oxford, married thirteen years. He is in his shirtsleeves at the writing-desk with a quill in his hand and a folio in front of him, in which he has been writing, for the past half hour, in Welsh, a four-line stanza of metric verse in the form he calls cywydd byr (short cywydd), which is in the household ear of the parish.
On the desk, on his right, is a folder of forty pages of similar stanzas, in his own hand, accumulated over the past four or five years. The verses are, by his own private intention, not for the press; they are for memorisation. He has been giving the parishioners small sheets of them at the vestry door after morning service for some years, and the parishioners have been singing them at their hearths.
He thinks: the parish is illiterate. The parish is illiterate by the condition of every Welsh parish outside the four cathedral towns. The Welsh Bible of 1588 is in the chancel and the Welsh Bible of 1588 cannot be read by the parishioners.
He thinks: the parishioners can sing. The parishioners can hold a stanza of four lines for a generation. The parishioners cannot hold a sermon for a fortnight.
He thinks: if I give them four-line stanzas of doctrine in the metre they sing in, the doctrine will be in their heads forever.
He thinks: the English Puritan critique of metrical doctrine is that the metric form trivialises the Word. The English Puritan critique is wrong about an illiterate parish.
He writes through the rest of the evening. He has, by the time the candle burns down, six new stanzas. He puts them in the folder.
Rhys Prichard wrote in this manner for the next twenty-four years. He never published. He died at Llandovery on the fourth of December 1644, sixty-five years old. The verses were collected after his death by his son Samuel Prichard and the Methodist minister Stephen Hughes of Mydroilyn, and were first printed at London in 1659 in a octavo of one hundred and seventy-two pages, Cannwyll y Cymry: neu, Brydyddol Eiriau yn Cynnwys Holl Brif Ddyledswyddau y Bywyd Cristnogawl (The Welsh-Man's Candle: or, Poetic Words containing all the Chief Duties of the Christian Life). The book was reprinted continually thereafter: 1672, 1681, 1696, 1707, 1714, 1721, 1730, 1746, 1759, 1773, 1788, 1799, 1804, 1814, 1822, 1830, 1841, 1851, the twentieth and final pre-Edwardian Welsh edition. By the count of the Welsh National Library's catalogue, Cannwyll y Cymry went through forty-six separate Welsh editions between 1659 and 1908. The folklore of the eighteenth-century Welsh chapels held that every Methodist household in the country, between Carnarvon and Cardiff, owned three books: the Welsh Bible of 1588, the Cannwyll y Cymry of Yr Hen Ficer, and the hymn-book of William Williams Pantycelyn. The Llandovery vicarage where Prichard wrote was demolished in 1873; the Old Vicar's church, the parish church of Llandingad at Llandovery, is on a hill above the town, with his grave in the chancel and a brass plaque in the south wall, in Welsh: Y Ficer Prichard, awdur Cannwyll y Cymry, 1579–1644. The candle in the title is, on the tradition of his own parish, the candle the Vicar would set in the front window of the vicarage at dusk on Sunday evenings as the signal that anyone could come to the door and ask the Vicar to teach them the next stanza. The candle was, by the same tradition, kept burning until the last petitioner had gone home.