Williams

In 1292, 48 per cent of recorded Welsh names were patronymics, and in some parishes the figure ran past 70 per cent. A man was his father's son and nothing more fixed than that: Evan son of Thomas was Evan ap Thomas, Evan's son John was John ab Evan, and John's son Rees was Rees ap John, so that the identifying name of a household changed with every generation by design. Strings such as Llewelyn ap Dafydd ab Ieuan ap Gruffudd ap Meredydd ran back four, five, sometimes seven generations, because Welsh law made descent from a named ancestor a matter of legal fact rather than family sentiment.

When those laws decayed in the later Middle Ages, the patronymic had two exits. One kept the ap and welded it to the front of the name: ap Hywel became Powell, ap Rhys became Price, ap Hugh became Pugh, ap Richard became Pritchard, ab Owen became Bowen, ap John became Upjohn. The other dropped the ap altogether and took the genitive s that English clerks had been attaching to personal names since the Middle Ages. Williams took the second road, which is why Wales has no Pwilliam to set beside Powell, and why Williams stands in the same rank as Jones, Roberts and Edwards rather than with the ap-names.

The hardening came from above. Under Henry VIII fixed surnames became hereditary among the Welsh gentry and spread slowly downward; the union of 1536 pulled Welsh landholding and office into English legal forms, and Henry's order that marital births be recorded under the father's surname gave every parish clerk a standing reason to write one name and keep writing it. Districts under strong English influence gave up patronymics first, along with town families and the wealthy, while in the rural north and west the old system stayed in use into the early 19th century - which is where Williamses are thickest on the ground.

The stock of Welsh surnames is small, and the Reformation made it smaller: as the variety of baptismal names contracted, so did the pool of fathers' names available to freeze into surnames. Five names built from that narrow pool - Jones, Williams, Davies, Evans, Thomas - all sat inside the top ten surnames recorded for England and Wales in 2000. One mechanism, five outputs, and no common ancestor behind any of them. Two families named Williams in the same Caernarfonshire village may have reached the name independently, from two different men called William, within a generation of one another.

The trap runs deeper than coincidence. The English s was not always filial: servants commonly took a modified form of an employer's name by the same addition, which is why Vickers reads as the vicar's man and Roberts can mean either Robert's son or Robert's servant. A Williams entered in a 16th-century register may therefore record a William's household rather than a William's child, and nothing in the spelling separates the two.

Wales fixed the collision socially rather than legally. From the 19th century families began prefixing the name of a house, a parish or the mother's line to the surname, producing compounds like Griffith-Jones, with the hyphen often arriving a generation after the pairing was already in use. The Gwynedd line that produced Sir Clough Williams-Ellis reads as exactly that repair: a second name doing the work the plain surname could no longer do in a county where Williams distinguished nobody from anybody.

Above Llangibby in Monmouthshire stands Tregrug, which superseded a Norman motte-and-bailey first mentioned in 1262. The estate came to the de Clare family in 1245, and Bogo de Clare, third son of Richard de Clare, held it for some years before his death in 1294. An ambitious new residence enclosed by a high stone wall was begun in the early 14th century, probably by Gilbert de Clare; it then passed briefly to the Despensers, and it may have been Hugh Despenser who started the structure from which most of the standing ruin derives.

The scale still has no rival in the country. The bailey measures roughly 164 metres by 78, the largest single enclosure of any castle in England or Wales, entered through a huge gatehouse with two D-shaped towers of a design close to Beaumaris. Recent archaeological reading makes the place less a fortress than a pleasure ground: a hunting lodge with gardens in the manner of a late medieval pleasance, its latrine turrets finished in finely cut ashlar, which is not where a garrison commander spends his stone budget.

By the 16th century it had fallen out of use and into Crown hands, and in 1554 Queen Mary sold it to the Williams family of Usk. What they bought was less a working castle than a claim staked in masonry - the largest walled enclosure in Wales, empty, on the hill above their own valley. The family took the place into their name as Williams of Llangibby, and were still shaping the ground around it a century and a half later.

When the Civil War reached Monmouthshire, Sir Trevor Williams, 1st Baronet, refortified Tregrug and put a garrison inside it. He was manning walls raised for hunting parties, behind a gatehouse copied from a royal castle, in defences already three centuries out of date. The decision is a fair measure of how a Welsh gentry family read its own inheritance: obsolete or not, the Tudor purchase of 1554 was still the strongest thing the Williamses of Usk owned.

It did not survive the peace. The castle was slighted at the war's end and the family never rebuilt it. Instead they raised New Llangibby Castle nearby at the close of the century and turned the wreck into scenery for the new house, planting an avenue of Scots pines around 1707 to carry the eye up the hill toward it. The largest medieval enclosure in Wales finished its working life as a view from a drawing-room window.

Castell Deudraeth stands half a kilometre north-east of Portmeirion in Gwynedd, and despite the name the building is probably an 18th-century manor house rather than anything medieval. David Williams bought it in 1841 and spent the next two decades making the name accurate, enlarging and castellating it through the 1840s and 1850s. The result belongs to a recognisable Victorian moment in north Wales, when a landowner could buy a plain house and give it battlements without pretending they had ever been besieged.

The house stayed in the family until the death of Sir Osmond Williams in 1931. Sir Clough Williams-Ellis, Osmond's nephew by marriage and by then already at work on Portmeirion immediately to the south-west, bought the building and its parkland from the trustees of the estate, which brought the castellated Williams house inside the boundary of Portmeirion. After restoration it reopened in 2001, still carrying the name David Williams had spent twenty years earning for it.

The transaction shows the 19th-century hyphen doing its intended work. An estate passes from a Williams to a Williams-Ellis, uncle to nephew, and the compound surname is the only element in the sentence that identifies which Gwynedd family is meant. In a county where the plain name settled nothing, the added element was not decoration but administration.

Caerhays in Cornwall was Arundell land in the early Middle Ages and passed by marriage about 1379, when Robert Trevanion married Johanna Arundell, daughter and heiress of Rudolph Arundell of Caerhays. The Trevanions held it for close to four centuries; with the death of William Trevanion in 1767 the estate went to his sister's son, John Bettesworth. The present semi-castellated house is later still, built between 1807 and 1810 half a mile south of the village of St Michael Caerhays, its long crenellated southern frontage closed at each end by a round tower, set against a wooded hillside above Porthluney Cove.

The Williams family came to it afterwards, and what they did with the place was not architectural. They gardened it. The estate holds a large collection of magnolias on a wooded hillside above the Channel, and the house holds an important mineral collection, much of it raised from the family's own Cornish mines. A working fortune ended as two collections, one under glass and one in flower, on an estate whose walls the family had no hand in building. Older fabric survives around the grounds, including an ancient chapel and the Watchhouse Walk down to the sea.

Roger Williams was born at Smithfield in the City of London about 1603, son of James Williams, a merchant tailor of the Welsh Williams line, and Alice Pemberton of St Sepulchre Holborn. Sir Edward Coke noticed the boy taking shorthand testimony in the Star Chamber and put him through Charterhouse and then Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he took his BA in 1627 and his MA in 1630. Ordained in the Church of England and serving as private chaplain to Sir William Masham of Otes in Essex, he sailed from Bristol on the Lyon on 1 December 1630 with his wife Mary Barnard and reached Boston in February 1631.

He refused the senior teaching ministry at Boston's First Church within weeks of landing, on the ground that the congregation had not formally separated from the Church of England. From the pastorate at Salem he pressed three arguments through 1634 and 1635: that the civil magistrate held no authority over the First Table of the Decalogue, that the colony's land patents from the King were void because title lay with the tribes and had to be purchased separately, and that compelling an oath of fidelity from every adult freeman violated liberty of conscience. In October 1635 the Massachusetts General Court convicted him of holding diverse new and dangerous opinions and ordered him out of the colony inside six weeks.

He left in January 1636 into the snow with a small group of followers, was sheltered through the winter by the sachems Massasoit of the Wampanoag and Canonicus of the Narragansett, bought land at the head of Narragansett Bay from Canonicus by formal deed of bargain, and founded Providence there in February 1636, naming it for the deliverance. Its compact carried no established church and no religious test for civil office, the first government in the English-settled colonies to work that way. He argued the case in print in The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution in 1644 against John Cotton, took the parliamentary patent of March 1644, served three terms as President of Providence Plantations to 1657, and died at Providence in April 1683.

Welsh emigration was never heavy in proportion - Irish emigration to the United States may have run twenty-six times greater - but it was concentrated enough to plant the name in identifiable places. Contract miners from Wales went to the coal towns of the Pas-de-Calais and clustered in communities around their churches. In 1819 the Albion sailed from Cardigan for New Brunswick carrying twenty-seven Cardiganshire families, most of them farmers. In 1852 Thomas Benbow Phillips of Tregaron settled about a hundred Welsh people in Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil.

Where they landed thickly the language went with them. Jackson County in Ohio was known as Little Wales, one of several communities where Welsh was widely spoken; Malad City in Idaho, which began as a Welsh Mormon settlement, still claims a greater proportion of Welsh-descended inhabitants than anywhere outside Wales itself; Y Wladfa in Patagonia carried the same movement to Argentina; and the Welsh-language paper y Drych ran on until it gave up Welsh for English in the late 1940s. Inside Britain the movement was shorter and heavier, into Liverpool and Ashton-in-Makerfield during the Industrial Revolution, which is why English, Scottish and Irish families carry Welsh surnames today with no Welsh ancestor they can name.

A survey commissioned by the Welsh Government put the scale in figures: about 718,000 people in Wales, nearly 35 per cent of the population, hold a family name of Welsh origin, against 5.3 per cent in the rest of the United Kingdom, 4.7 in New Zealand, 4.1 in Australia and 3.8 in the United States - 16.3 million people in the countries studied. Williams is a large share of that, carried out by people who mostly owned no land at all, and what they took travelled better than an estate: the hymn a Williams of Pantycelyn wrote in 1762, sung as Guide me, O Thou Great Jehovah, went everywhere the name went.