Vaughan

Vaughan is the English spelling of the Welsh fychan, the soft-mutated form of bychan, little or younger. It was never a surname to begin with, but a working label, hung on a man to tell him from someone standing next to him: the second Rhys in a household, the smaller of two cousins. The name only makes sense as one half of a pair. Behind every Vaughan alive today is an argument about which of two men you meant.

It is a descriptive byname, not a trade or a patronymic. Welsh produced a set of them that froze into surnames together: Lloyd from llwyd, grey; Goch, red; Gwyn, white; Crych, curly. Vaughan is the age-marker in that set, and the one that travelled furthest: the same work Young did in England, Òg in Gaelic Scotland and Óg in Ireland.

Before fixed surnames, Wales ran on patronymics. Evan son of Thomas was Evan ap Thomas, his son John was John ab Evan, John's son Rees was Rees ap John: the name changed every generation on purpose. In 1292, 48 per cent of recorded Welsh names were patronymics, over 70 per cent in some parishes, and where lineage mattered the chain got longer: Llewelyn ap Dafydd ab Ieuan ap Gruffudd ap Meredydd was an unremarkable way to be named, a spoken pedigree kept because Welsh law required a man to know his own descent. A system like that leaves a village full of men sharing two or three baptismal names, and Fychan was one of the ordinary repairs.

That law decayed through the later Middle Ages and the patronymics went with it. Fixed surnames were adopted in Wales from the 15th century onwards; under Henry VIII they became hereditary among the gentry and spread only slowly to everyone else, with the union of Wales and England in 1536 as the administrative hinge. Some names kept the ap in reduced form: Powell from ap Hywel, Price from ap Rhys, Bowen from ab Owen. Fychan went a third way: the byname itself became the surname, and English clerks with no letter for the soft Welsh f wrote what they heard.

One consequence deserves saying plainly. Welsh surnames come from so small a stock that communities are full of families sharing a surname without sharing a line. Several unconnected kindreds took Fychan for the same obvious reason at the same time, so two Vaughans in one village cannot be assumed to share an ancestor. The name is genuinely yours; the pedigree behind it is a separate question, worth researching rather than assuming.

One kindred carried the name into the front rank of Welsh politics. Sir Roger Vaughan of Tretower was the son of Gwladus ferch Dafydd Gam, called Gwladus the Star, and through her the half-brother of William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. The two houses rose together out of the Welsh march in the middle of the 15th century (Raglan and Tretower, Hergest and Pembroke) as the new Yorkist captains of a country that had been Owain Glyndŵr's within living memory. Edward IV gave them Wales in all but name, and gave Herbert the wardship of the boy Henry Tudor.

Vaughan stood at his half-brother's right hand at Mortimer's Cross in 1461, and by tradition it was he who took the captured Owen Tudor to the block at Hereford afterwards. He received Tretower from Herbert around 1450, and the family held the fortified manor at the foot of the Black Mountains until 1783. Its stone ranges, gatehouse and courtyard are largely Vaughan work, and the Great Hall still stands.

On 26 July 1469, at Edgecote Moor in Northamptonshire, the Welsh-speaking Yorkist army of Herbert and Vaughan (about ten thousand men) was caught in the early morning by a flank attack from Warwick's lieutenant Sir Geoffrey Gate. Lord Stafford of Devon's English archers, expected on the right, had gone south in the night after a quarrel. The line broke after Pembroke fell. About two thousand Welshmen died on the field, principally of the Herbert and Vaughan affinities; Sir Roger Vaughan was killed in the press, and Herbert and his brother Sir Richard were beheaded the next morning at Northampton, without trial.

Guto'r Glyn wrote the elegy within the year. Marwnad William Herbert called Edgecote y dydd y gweddwyd Cymru, the day Wales was widowed, and the phrase has held for five and a half centuries: a generation of Welsh landed leadership was eliminated in one morning. Redress came sixteen years later at Bosworth in 1485, when another Welsh army crossed the marches behind Henry Tudor, the boy warded at Raglan in 1469, kin to the Vaughans through Gwladus the Star. Roger Vaughan's grave-slab, the effigy in plate with the Vaughan arms cut on the breastplate, lies in Bredwardine church in Herefordshire.

The Vaughans of Hergest, on the Herefordshire side of the border, hold a different claim on Welsh memory. They were the keepers of Llyfr Coch Hergest, the Red Book of Hergest, written between 1375 and 1425 and the greatest manuscript anthology of medieval Welsh prose and poetry: the Mabinogion, Brut y Tywysogion, and much of the Cynfeirdd, the earliest Welsh poets.

Almost everything a reader knows as Welsh legend comes down through books like this one, and books survive because somebody pays to keep them. The Hergest line patronised Welsh-language writing in exactly the period when patronage was thinning everywhere else. The Red Book is now in the Bodleian Library at Oxford; a family of the name Vaughan kept it alive long enough to get there.

Vaughan branches emerged across Wales from the 13th century, traditionally claiming descent from the royal house of Powys, a tradition, not a charter. The two leading lines were the Vaughans of Trawscoed in Ceredigion, who became Earls of Lisburne, and the Vaughans of Golden Grove in Carmarthenshire, who became Earls of Carbery. The 2nd Earl of Carbery governed the principality as Lord President of Wales and the Marches from Ludlow Castle under Charles II; Trawscoed produced Sir John Vaughan, Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas from 1668 to 1674. The Earldom of Lisburne continues today.

The property record runs the length of the march. Carreg Cennen passed to the Vaughans after the Yorkists slighted it in 1462; a Vaughan manor house stood at Dunraven on the Glamorgan coast by the 16th century, recorded by John Leland, and went to the Wyndhams in 1642; Roger Vaughan bought Kinnersley in Herefordshire in 1588. The spread is the point: a web of cadet branches holding mid-Wales and the border.

The name's finest hour was not military. Henry Vaughan was born on 17 April 1621 at Newton-by-Usk in Llansantffraed, Brecknockshire, son of a small Welsh-speaking laird descended from the Vaughans of Tretower. He went up to Jesus College, Oxford, in 1638, took no degree when the Civil War broke out in 1642, served briefly as a Royalist soldier, and lost his elder brother William to wounds at Rowton Heath in 1645, the bereavement that turned him inward. From about 1648 he practised as a country physician in the upper Usk valley for forty-seven years, to his death.

Silex Scintillans, the Flashing Flint, appeared in 1650 and enlarged in 1655. The Retreat, The World, The Night and They Are All Gone into the World of Light sit in every modern anthology of 17th-century English verse, and Wordsworth's Intimations of Immortality of 1804 descends directly from The Retreat. He signed himself Silurist, the Welshman of the country of the ancient Silures, and died at Llansantffraed on 23 April 1695, buried under a Latin epitaph he wrote himself.

Carry the name abroad and you carry a Welsh one. An analysis commissioned by the Welsh Government found 16.3 million people bearing a name of Welsh origin: 3.8 per cent of the United States, 4.1 per cent of Australia, 4.7 per cent of New Zealand, against nearly 35 per cent of Wales itself. Vaughan began as a word meaning the younger, said about one man to tell him from another. It has ended on a grave-slab at Bredwardine, on a manuscript in the Bodleian, and on a book of poems still in print three centuries on.