Yr Hen Ficer of Llandovery

Some books are written for the press, to be read by strangers in cities the author will never visit. Others are written for a single parish, to be sung at hearths within walking distance of the vicarage gate. It happens, once in a long while, that the second kind outlasts the first by two hundred years.

THE PARISH AND THE BIBLE IN THE CHANCEL

Rhys Prichard was born at Llandovery in 1579, the son of a Carmarthen burgess and a Vaughan mother, schooled at Jesus College, Oxford, ordained into the Church of England, and presented to the vicarage of his own birth-town in 1602. By 1614 he was a canon of St David's. He had a wife, a son, a stipend, a stone church on the hill, and a parish of perhaps a thousand souls who tilled the Tywi valley and the slopes above it. In the chancel of Llandingad stood the great folio of William Morgan's Welsh Bible of 1588, the book that had made the Welsh tongue a vessel for Scripture. It stood there because the law required it. It stood unread because the parish could not read.

The condition was not local. Outside the four cathedral towns, the Welsh parishes of the seventeenth century were almost wholly illiterate in any tongue. The Welsh Bible was in the chancel of every church in the principality, and in almost every chancel it was a closed book. The Reformed religion the law required the parish to profess was, for the parish, the half-hour of pulpit Welsh on a Sunday morning, forgotten by Monday.

THE EVENING AT THE WRITING-DESK

It is an autumn evening of 1620, in the upstairs room of the vicarage. He is forty-one. The candle is lit, the folio is open, the quill is cut. On the desk to his right lies a folder of some forty pages of his own hand, four-line stanzas in the metre the parish sings in, the form he calls cywydd byr. He has been writing them for four or five years, slipping single sheets to parishioners at the vestry door after morning service, the way a physician hands out a powder.

The stanzas are not for the press. He has no patron in London and seeks none. They are for memorisation, for the hearth, for the walk to market, for the woman at the loom and the man at the plough. He hears them already in the parish: a verse on the Lord's Prayer carried in a child's mouth from the church door to the cottage; a stanza on drunkenness sung, with a certain edge, outside the alehouse at Llandovery on a Saturday night.

A SECOND AT THE QUILL

He sets the quill down. The Bible in the chancel is in Welsh, and the parish cannot read it. That is the whole of the case. A sermon will not lodge; a tract will not lodge; a catechism printed at London will not lodge in a head that cannot decipher a printed page. What lodges in the Welsh head is what the Welsh head has always carried, the four-line stanza in the singing metre, the form the harpers used and the drovers used and the women at the churn. Canu before reading, always. The doctrine must ride in on the metre or it will not ride in at all.

There is a Puritan voice in the back of his mind, the voice that says metrical doctrine trivialises the Word, that the sacred suffers when it is set to the tune of the marketplace. He has read the English controversialists. He answers the voice in the privacy of his own study: the sacred suffers more when it is not held at all. A stanza sung wrong is closer to Scripture than a Bible unopened. The parish is not a Cambridge college. The parish is a thousand souls who will die without the Word unless the Word is put into them in the only form their memory will keep.

He picks up the quill. He writes a stanza on the duty of the householder to teach his children. He writes a stanza on the folly of the man who drinks his wages. He writes a stanza on the mercy promised to the penitent. He writes through the burning down of the candle. By the time the wick gutters he has six new verses. He puts them in the folder with the others, closes the folio, and goes downstairs.

THE FOLDER THICKENS

He wrote in this manner for twenty-four years. The sheets accumulated. Parishioners learned them, and carried them out of the parish when they walked to fairs at Llandeilo and Carmarthen, and the verses travelled with the drovers along the cattle roads into Breconshire and Glamorgan. He never sent a page to a printer. He died at Llandovery on the fourth of December 1644, sixty-five years old, and was buried in the chancel of Llandingad church on the hill above the town.

THE SON AND THE PRINTER

Fifteen years after his death, his son Samuel and the Independent minister Stephen Hughes of Mydroilyn gathered the loose sheets that had been kept in the vicarage and in the hands of parishioners, and carried them to a printer in London. In 1659 the book appeared, an octavo of a hundred and seventy-two pages, under the title 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. It was reprinted in 1672, in 1681, in 1696, in 1707, in 1714, in 1721, in 1730, and onward, edition after edition, into the nineteenth century. Forty-six Welsh editions between 1659 and 1908, by the count of the National Library at Aberystwyth.

THE THREE BOOKS ON THE SHELF

By the eighteenth century the chapel-Welsh of South and central Wales had a saying: that every Methodist household between Carnarvon and Cardiff owned three books. The Welsh Bible of 1588. The Cannwyll y Cymry of Yr Hen Ficer. The hymn-book of William Williams Pantycelyn. The first was Scripture; the third was praise; the middle book, sitting between them on the kitchen shelf, was the doctrine the parish actually knew by heart, in the metre the parish actually sang in, in the voice of a country vicar who had reasoned, on an autumn evening in 1620, that a stanza memorised is worth more in an illiterate parish than a sermon preached. By that count he was, after Bishop Morgan himself, the most-read Welsh author of two centuries.

THE CANDLE IN THE WINDOW

The vicarage at Llandovery where he wrote was pulled down in 1873. The parish church of Llandingad still stands on its hill above the town, and his grave is in the chancel, with a brass on the south wall in Welsh: Y Ficer Prichard, awdur Cannwyll y Cymry, 1579-1644. The great moments of the Word in Wales are mostly quiet ones, made by men at writing-desks in country vicarages who never saw a press. The tradition of his own parish remembers him by a single image. On Sunday evenings at dusk the Old Vicar would set a lit candle in the front window of the vicarage, the signal that any soul in Llandovery could come to the door and ask to be taught the next stanza. The candle was kept burning, by the tradition, until the last petitioner had gone home.