Families of Powys

Families seated in Powys

• EvansSon of John, by the Welsh road, the cousin name of Jones.
• LewisLlywelyn anglicised, a princely name carried into common use across the Marches and the south.
• OwenThe princely name, Owain in Welsh, the surname of the last revolt and the first Tudor.
• LloydLlwyd, the grey one, the great descriptive surname of the central Welsh ridge.
• Powellap Hywel, the contracted patronymic that descends from Hywel Dda, the king who wrote Welsh law.
• VaughanFychan, the younger, the descriptive surname that marks a son.
• Pughap Hugh, the Welsh contraction working on a Norman name.
• GlyndŵrThe last native-born Prince of Wales, and the longest revolt the Welsh would ever raise.
• WatkinsSon of little Walter, the Norman first name that took Welsh root.
• MeredithSon of the great lord, princely surname of Deheubarth.
• House of MathrafalRoyal house of Powys, central kingdom of medieval Wales.
• ParrySon of Harry, the Welsh ap-Harry compressed into a single syllable.

Historic ties to Powys

Families with historic but not core ground here.

• Jones
• Williams
• Davies
• Thomas
• Roberts
• Hughes
• Edwards
• Pritchard
• Bevan
• Rees
• Price
• Richards
• House of Tudor
• House of Herbert
• House of Aberffraw
• Griffiths
• Llewellyn
• Howells
• Bowen

Champions made here

Famous bearers whose lives or work root in Powys.

• George EliotThe Warwickshire land-agent's daughter who translated the German biblical critics, edited the Westminster Review, and wrote Middlemarch, The Mill on the Floss and Daniel Deronda as the foundational moral-realist novelist of the Victorian English language.
• George MeredithThe Portsmouth tailor's grandson of Welsh descent who wrote The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, The Egoist and the Modern Love sonnet sequence, was the English literary figure of the late Victorian period, and was awarded the Order of Merit on its founding.
• Alfred WatkinsThe Hereford brewer's son and travelling brewery-rep who photographed the parish churches, dolmens and Roman roads of the Welsh Marches across a forty-year career, invented the first commercial photographic exposure meter, and in 1921 conceived the ley lines on which a century of British landscape writing has been built.
• Robert OwenThe Newtown saddler's son who at twenty-eight took on the cotton mills at New Lanark and built there the model that became the foundation of the modern cooperative movement.
• Owain GlyndŵrThe Welsh prince of Powys Fadog who on the sixteenth of September 1400 raised the standard of an independent Wales at Glyndyfrdwy and held the principality through a fifteen-year war that produced the first Welsh parliament, the first Welsh university plan, and the last native sovereign claim to the title Prince of Wales.
• Ann GriffithsThe Montgomeryshire farmer's daughter whose seventy-four hymns, composed at the hearth at Dolwar Fach between 1802 and her death in 1805 and preserved by the family servant Ruth Hughes, are at the centre of the Welsh-language hymn tradition.
• George HerbertThe Montgomery-born metaphysical poet of the seventeenth-century English religious tradition whose collection The Temple, prepared on his death-bed at Bemerton in 1633 and posthumously published the same year, ran through thirteen editions in fifty years and stands at the centre of the English-language devotional lyric tradition.
• Henry VaughanThe Brecknockshire physician whose 1650 and 1655 collection Silex Scintillans put a fresh devotional lyric onto the metaphysical-poetry shelf of the mid-seventeenth century and whose poems The World, The Retreat and They Are All Gone into the World of Light remain on every modern anthology of seventeenth-century English verse.
• Madog ap MareduddThe last king of an undivided Powys, whose thirty-eight-year reign from 1132 to 1160 made the central Welsh kingdom the diplomatic and cultural equal of Gwynedd and Deheubarth in the high medieval period, and whose court at Mathrafal patronised the great early-twelfth-century Welsh poets Gwalchmai ap Meilyr and Cynddelw Brydydd Mawr.