The Dinner—English Foibles—Pengwern—The
Yew-Tree—Carn-Lleidyr—Applications of a Term.
For dinner we had salmon and leg of mutton; the salmon from the Dee, the
leg from the neighbouring Berwyn. The salmon was good enough, but I had
eaten better; and here it will not be amiss to say, that the best salmon
in the world is caught in the Suir, a river that flows past the beautiful
town of Clonmel in Ireland. As for the leg of mutton, it was truly
wonderful; nothing so good had I ever tasted in the shape of a leg of
mutton. The leg of mutton of Wales beats the leg of mutton of any other
country, and I had never tasted a Welsh leg of mutton before. Certainly
I shall never forget the first Welsh leg of mutton which I tasted, rich
but delicate, replete with juices derived from the aromatic herbs of the
noble Berwyn, cooked to a turn, and weighing just four pounds.
“O its savoury smell was great,
Such as might well tempt, I trow,
One that’s dead to lift his brow.”
Let any one who wishes to eat leg of mutton in perfection go to Wales,
but mind you to eat leg of mutton only. Welsh leg of mutton is
superlative; but with the exception of the leg, the mutton of Wales is
decidedly inferior to that of many other parts of Britain.
Here, perhaps, as I have told the reader what we ate for dinner, it will
be as well to tell him what we drank at dinner. Let him know, then, that
with our salmon we drank water, and with our mutton ale, even ale of
Llangollen; but not the best ale of Llangollen; it was very fair; but I
subsequently drank far better Llangollen ale than that which I drank at
our first dinner in our cottage at Llangollen.
In the evening I went across the bridge and strolled along in a
south-east direction. Just as I had cleared the suburb a man joined me
from a cottage, on the top of a high bank, whom I recognized as the mower
with whom I had held discourse in the morning. He saluted me and asked
me if I were taking a walk. I told him I was, whereupon he said that if
I were not too proud to wish to be seen walking with a poor man like
himself, he should wish to join me. I told him I should be glad of his
company, and that I was not ashamed to be seen walking with any person,
however poor, who conducted himself with propriety. He replied that I
must be very different from my countrymen in general, who were ashamed to
be seen walking with any people who were not, at least, as well-dressed
as themselves. I said that my country-folk in general had a great many
admirable qualities, but at the same time a great many foibles, foremost
amongst which last was a crazy admiration for what they called gentility,
which made them sycophantic to their superiors in station, and extremely
insolent to those whom they considered below them. He said that I had
spoken his very thoughts, and then asked me whether I wished to be taken
the most agreeable walk near Llangollen.
On my replying by all means, he led me along the road to the south-east.
A pleasant road it proved: on our right at some distance was the mighty
Berwyn; close on our left the hill called Pen y Coed. I asked him what
was beyond the Berwyn?
“A very wild country, indeed,” he replied, “consisting of wood, rock, and
river; in fact, an anialwch.”
He then asked if I knew the meaning of anialwch.
“A wilderness,” I replied, “you will find the word in the Welsh Bible.”
“Very true, sir,” said he, “it was there I met it, but I did not know the
meaning of it, till it was explained to me by one of our teachers.”
On my inquiring of what religion he was, he told me he was a Calvinistic
Methodist.
We passed an ancient building which stood on our right. I turned round
to look at it. Its back was to the road: at its eastern end was a fine
arched window like the oriel window of a church.
“That building,” said my companion, “is called Pengwern Hall. It was
once a convent of nuns; a little time ago a farm-house, but is now used
as a barn, and a place of stowage. Till lately it belonged to the Mostyn
family, but they disposed of it, with the farm on which it stood,
together with several other farms, to certain people from Liverpool, who
now live yonder,” pointing to a house a little way farther on. I still
looked at the edifice.
“You seem to admire the old building,” said my companion.
“I was not admiring it,” said I; “I was thinking of the difference
between its present and former state. Formerly it was a place devoted to
gorgeous idolatry and obscene lust; now it is a quiet old barn in which
hay and straw are placed, and broken tumbrils stowed away: surely the
hand of God is visible here?”
“It is so, sir,” said the man in a respectful tone, “and so it is in
another place in this neighbourhood. About three miles from here, in the
north-west part of the valley, is an old edifice. It is now a
farm-house, but was once a splendid abbey, and was called—”
“The abbey of the vale of the cross,” said I; “I have read a deal about
it. Iolo Goch, the bard of your celebrated hero, Owen Glendower, was
buried somewhere in its precincts.”
We went on: my companion took me over a stile behind the house which he
had pointed out, and along a path through hazel coppices. After a little
time I inquired whether there were any Papists in Llangollen.
“No,” said he, “there is not one of that family at Llangollen, but I
believe there are some in Flintshire, at a place called Holywell, where
there is a pool or fountain, the waters of which it is said they
worship.”
“And so they do,” said I, “true to the old Indian superstition, of which
their religion is nothing but a modification. The Indians and sepoys
worship stocks and stones, and the river Ganges, and our Papists worship
stocks and stones, holy wells and fountains.”
He put some questions to me about the origin of nuns and friars. I told
him they originated in India, and made him laugh heartily by showing him
the original identity of nuns and nautch-girls, begging priests and
begging Brahmins. We passed by a small house with an enormous yew-tree
before it; I asked him who lived there.
“No one,” he replied, “it is to let. It was originally a cottage, but
the proprietors have furbished it up a little, and call it yew-tree
villa.”
“I suppose they would let it cheap,” said I.
“By no means,” he replied, “they ask eighty pounds a year for it.”
“What could have induced them to set such a rent upon it?” I demanded.
“The yew-tree, sir, which is said to be the largest in Wales. They hope
that some of the grand gentry will take the house for the romance of the
yew-tree, but somehow or other nobody has taken it, though it has been to
let for three seasons.”
We soon came to a road leading east and west.
“This way,” said he, pointing in the direction of the west, “leads back
to Llangollen, the other to Offa’s Dyke and England.”
We turned to the west. He inquired if I had ever heard before of Offa’s
Dyke.
“O yes,” said I, “it was built by an old Saxon king called Offa, against
the incursions of the Welsh.”
“There was a time,” said my companion, “when it was customary for the
English to cut off the ears of every Welshman who was found to the east
of the dyke, and for the Welsh to hang every Englishman whom they found
to the west of it. Let us be thankful that we are now more humane to
each other. We are now on the north side of Pen y Coed. Do you know the
meaning of Pen y Coed, sir?”
“Pen y Coed,” said I, “means the head of the wood. I suppose that in the
old time the mountain looked over some extensive forest, even as the
nunnery of Pengwern looked originally over an alder-swamp, for Pengwern
means the head of the alder-swamp.”
“So it does, sir; I shouldn’t wonder if you could tell me the real
meaning of a word, about which I have thought a good deal, and about
which I was puzzling my head last night as I lay in bed.”
“What may it be?” said I.
“Carn-lleidyr,” he replied: “now, sir, do you know the meaning of that
word?”
“I think I do,” said I.
“What may it be, sir?”
“First let me hear what you conceive its meaning to be,” said I.
“Why, sir, I should say that Carn-lleidyr is an out-and-out thief—one
worse than a thief of the common sort. Now, if I steal a matrass I am a
lleidyr, that is a thief of the common sort; but if I carry it to a
person, and he buys it, knowing it to be stolen, I conceive he is a far
worse thief than I; in fact, a carn-lleidyr.”
“The word is a double word,” said I, “compounded of carn and lleidyr.
The original meaning of carn is a heap of stones, and carn-lleidyr means
properly a thief without house or home, and with no place on which to
rest his head, save the carn or heap of stones on the bleak top of the
mountain. For a long time the word was only applied to a thief of that
description, who, being without house and home, was more desperate than
other thieves, and as savage and brutish as the wolves and foxes with
whom he occasionally shared his pillow, the carn. In course of time,
however, the original meaning was lost or disregarded, and the term
carn-lleidyr was applied to any particular dishonest person. At present
there can be no impropriety in calling a person who receives a matrass,
knowing it to be stolen, a carn-lleidyr, seeing that he is worse than the
thief who stole it, or in calling a knavish attorney a carn-lleidyr,
seeing that he does far more harm than a common pick-pocket; or in
calling the Pope so, seeing that he gets huge sums of money out of people
by pretending to be able to admit their souls to heaven, or to hurl them
to the other place, knowing all the time that he has no such power;
perhaps, indeed, at the present day the term carn-lleidyr is more
applicable to the Pope than to any one else, for he is certainly the
arch-thief of the world. So much for Carn-lleidyr. But I must here tell
you that the term carn may be applied to any one who is particularly bad
or disagreeable in any respect, and now I remember, has been applied for
centuries both in prose and poetry. One Lewis Glyn Cothi, a poet, who
lived more than three hundred years ago, uses the word carn in the sense
of arrant or exceedingly bad, for in his abusive ode to the town of
Chester, he says that the women of London itself were never more carn
strumpets than those of Chester, by which he means that there were never
more arrant harlots in the world than those of the cheese capital. And
the last of your great poets, Gronwy Owen, who flourished about the
middle of the last century, complains in a letter to a friend, whilst
living in a village of Lancashire, that he was amongst Carn Saeson. He
found all English disagreeable enough, but those of Lancashire
particularly so—savage, brutish louts, out-and-out John Bulls, and
therefore he called them Carn Saeson.”
“Thank you, sir,” said my companion; “I now thoroughly understand the
meaning of carn. Whenever I go to Chester, and a dressed-up madam
jostles against me, I shall call her carn-butein. The Pope of Rome I
shall in future term carn-lleidyr y byd, or the arch-thief of the world.
And whenever I see a stupid, brutal Englishman swaggering about
Llangollen, and looking down upon us poor Welsh, I shall say to myself,
Get home, you carn Sais! Well, sir, we are now near Llangollen; I must
turn to the left. You go straight forward. I never had such an
agreeable walk in my life. May I ask your name?”
I told him my name, and asked him for his.
“Edward Jones,” he replied.