take refuge from sin or foe. The “llan,” which is the prefix to fully
eight tenths of all the names of ancient churches in North Wales,
means “enclosure.” Probably in these places were the earliest monastic
settlements, at a time when the “llan,” as the Irish “rath,” enclosed
habitation as well as sanctuary. But as the years brought about
greater specification in the functions of church and state the term
narrowed itself down and was applied solely to the church. The old
churchyard walls are still more or less circular like British fort
walls. Llangelynin has an enclosure that undoubtedly follows the old
lines. The walls of the churchyard near Holyhead are extremely ancient,
seventeen feet high and six feet thick. This masonry, from the presence
of certain round towers and the particular plastering used, is known
to be Roman. Set away from the world that is “too much with us,” these
enclosures are charming old spaces, habitable in a sweet sense. The
grass looks peace into tired eyes, and to eyes eager with plans rest
here is merely an emphasis upon the joy of living. And here, as the
stiles into the close show, the children play and have played from
generation to generation. Here they climbed upon the roof, and here
against the north and west walls, where burials are never made, they
played ball and scratched upon the stone their scoring-marks.
At Llangelynin there are no yew trees; that windy height is too bleak
for even the sturdy yew. Only white harebells and hardy grass blow
about on its bare rock-strewn summit. But in most of the enclosures
the yew still stands as the one enduring monument of a past whose very
rocks have been covered by the silt of over a thousand years. Many of
these trees date from a British period and remain emblematic to-day
as they were then. Sometimes it is a single yew by the lychgate which
one sees, or an alley of the deathless green, or perhaps yew branches
completely veil a gable end of the little church. At Beddgelert, the
oldest foundation in all Wales, the yew stands to-day as it stood
some two thousand years ago; about its base have rushed the floods of
wild mountain torrents, from its feet the graves of centuries have
been washed away down to the all-embracing sea. Like children of
yesterday are the mediæval lychgates through which one passes into the
church enclosure and through which is often caught the first glimpse
of the church bell-cot. At Caerhûn (the ancient Canovium), where the
yew spreads over the gate is a double bell-cot, which, as it has the
traditional straight ridge and gable in the middle, is amongst the
oldest in Wales, of the fourteenth or fifteenth century, for the cots
as well as the lychgates are “recent” in the life of these churches.
The little crucifixes with their straight arms are also of this date.
Before this time the local churches had nothing but hand-bells, which
were held in great reverence. One of them may be seen in the stone
coffin of Llewelyn the Great at Llanrwst. It is about ten inches high
and cast on an oblong plan. Gildas gave such a bell to St. David. Six
hundred years later, in the twelfth century, Giraldus Cambrensis tells
the story of a portable bell called “Bangu” which, when a certain woman
carried it to a castle where her husband was wrongfully imprisoned,
caused the destruction of the whole town except the church walls. The
campanology of North Wales is a romance in itself, a collection of odd,
interesting, pathetic tales of past miracles, past friendships, past
enmities.
The original buildings not only did not have lychgates and bell-cots,
they also did not have porches, and some to-day do not have them. But
they are being added from time to time, and fearful are some of them
to behold. At St. Mary’s, Llanfwrog Church, just across the bridge
from quaint Ruthin, where the Duchess of Westminster has lived and
is of vastly more interest to the people than gable ends and oaken
rafters and other such stuff, fit only for the attics of men’s minds,
is a bit of “restoration” suitable for display in the windows of a
carriage-shop. The chancel railing is bright green, red, and black,
the pews black and red,--a foretaste possibly of the landscape into
which some of their occupants will one day take a dip,--and the stained
glass vies with a refracted solar ray in yellows and oranges and reds
and blues and greens. From this “restored” edifice drops a long flight
of steps past the windows and signboard of an ancient hostelry, “Ye
Labour in Vain Inn.” One cannot help wishing that the white gentleman
upon the signboard, who is scrubbing a black man in a tub of water,
would take his scrubbing-brush up to the church. Often, after all else
has been hopelessly restored and all vestiges of harmonious beauty
have disappeared, the old doorway remains, witness of an instinctive
reverence for a threshold. Many of the circular-headed doorways, now
hooded with porches, date from the eleventh and twelfth centuries and
even earlier, and through them one passes over a mere sill into the
sacred enclosure.
A few points, simple and easy to remember as well as easy to discover,
give an added intelligent pleasure in the study of these churches. The
oldest churches are generally from twelve feet six inches to fourteen
feet wide; the early walls from three feet to three feet six inches
thick. Sixteenth-century walls rarely exceed two feet and a half in
thickness. The old wattle buildings were daubed with a mixture of clay
and cow dung; these church walls are built with earth and rendered
on the face with lime and mortar. Buttresses are sometimes found,
but they do not belong to early local work. The roofs are easy to
examine and often of an enchanting beauty. At Llangelynin is a roof
which is probably the original twelfth-century covering. The roof at
Llanrhychwyn is also of the close couple type; here the struts are
straight, but carved, and there are two ties across the nave. In some
of these roofs are intermediary rafters, added when the thatch was
replaced by slate.
The earliest mention of a chancel of which I know is that in the
poems of Cynddelw, who lived in the twelfth century, in his ode to
Tysilio, when he speaks of a certain church as the “light or shining
church” with a chancel for mass. We cannot assume that even in the
twelfth century chancels were by any means common in North Wales.
At Mallwyd Church there was, not so long ago, a communion table in
the centre of the building, and there is no question but that holy
ceremonies were performed originally, instead of at a chancel end, in
the midst of this rectangular Holy of Holies. At Bardsey, Pennant found
an insulated stone altar rather nearer the east end than the centre.
The rough, uneven slate paving in these churches is comparatively
modern, and it might be added comparatively luxurious. The first paving
was mud and sometimes flat stones. Formerly the windows were covered
by wooden shutters or lattices; that was the usage in all conventual
buildings. Now the windows are either well or illy filled with coloured
glass. In many of the churches falling into great dilapidation the
windows have been stuffed with stone and mortar, or rudely boarded
over. Some of the stained glass is genuinely ugly and some of it
genuinely and anciently lovely. That at Llanrhychwyn, coloured in brown
line and yellow stain and representing the Virgin and Child and the
Holy Trinity, is of the fifteenth century and still beautiful. Probably
the use of glass was not introduced into Wales till the thirteenth
century. West windows were unknown in local Welsh work. Where a window
with such an exposure is found, the opening did not belong to the early
church. There are windows of great antiquity in these churches. Look at
the lintelled window in the passageway into St. Beuno’s Chapel. Courage
hesitates at assigning a date to this bit of work. There are windows
far more elaborate of a comparatively early date, but they are the
work of Latin monks and do not follow the straight lines of the native
British architecture. An exquisite example of early Latin work is that
of the Gilbertine monks upon the Beddgelert triplet.
The barrel vaults in these churches are curious concave coverings
over the chancel end, ark-like in form and supposed type of the ancient
church. These oaken canopies have been elaborately painted in the past;
now they are to be seen in every stage of dilapidation, provoking the
eye by their interrupted pictures or faint lines of red and blue. They
are approximately of the same date, although not in the same condition,
for their destruction is due to leaky roofs and not to age. The ground
colour was the green-blue the Middle Ages loved so well, and the other
colours red, yellow, and white. At Llandanwg, where the sea would flow
into the western door were it not for a big embankment, there is a
barrel vault with faint traces of painting upon it. An old man whose
father and mother were the last people to be married there told us he
took an interest in it, it was the only church in Harlech Parish fifty
years ago, and “the only service held there then was when the parson
and the clerk used to go over and enjoy drinking their beer on the
gravestones.” English came stiff to his tongue, but he described the
fearful condition of the church, and the way the people took off the
seats for firewood and the children made a playhouse of the abandoned
structure. In one corner of the barrel vault was a picture of the Devil
prodding people down into hell. The children threw things at these
paintings, mud and other articles, till the pictures were completely
destroyed. Whatever the subject, it is pleasant to recall the colouring
of the barrel vaults, for, executed five or six hundred years ago, they
must have been brightly beautiful like the margins of an illuminated
book, radiant with something of the blue and gold of very heaven
itself. Of the rood screens and lofts that veiled the chancel space,
there are but few left intact; of the sacred rood itself, no vestige
except the socket on the candlebeam into which its pedestal slipped.
Fanaticism has swept this feature away. In Beddgelert their rood-screen
carving was converted into chairs for household use or fuel for warmth.
Strangely enough, Queen Elizabeth was the last defender of the screen’s
mystical beauty of carven wood and the silent admonishing figure
stretched upon its façade. At Llanengan there is a screen of rare
delicacy, stolen, together with some elbow stalls and silver bells,
from Bardsey, that resting-place of saints which seems to have been to
the ecclesiastical world what Fuseli said Blake was to the art world,
“good to steal from.” Chests, worm-eaten and with rusty bolts, are
often among the church treasures. St. Beuno’s chest at Clynnog is as
old as the saint himself. And at Clynnog, too, are dog tongs, or lazy
tongs as they were sometimes called, in each paddle four sharpened
nails which must have seemed bitter to any doggie’s sides, lean or fat,
as he was lifted ignominiously out of the sanctuary. And, oh, woe if it
caught him by the tail or foot! There are different types of fonts in
these churches: small square fonts like the earliest of Palestine, Asia
Minor, Egypt; extremely small fonts of various shapes dating from the
eleventh to the fourteenth century; large fonts used for immersion, and
belonging to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. At Llanderfel near
Corwen is a wooden image, never, I imagine, satisfactorily accounted
for. It is a horse, though curiously like a deer in appearance. This
figure was the standard for the image that rested upon it and which
went, several hundred years ago, to help in the burning of poor Friar
Forest at Smithfield, to whom, while the fire crackled about his feet,
Latimer preached a sermon. Now even the brass tablet on the standard
has been sent to the British Museum, and the standard itself, till
within the last few years, used for a pig-trough.
Apparently London thought a Welshman who denied the supremacy of
the king worth burning, difficult to be rid of. Well might Englishmen
consider such a man’s forebears in saintship. The Latins tried to rid
the Western world of these anomalies in spiritual heritage--in vain!
The Reformation burnt them. In vain, too, for the Welshman to-day,
nonconformist and conformist alike, is as tenacious of the lists of
his hagiology as ever he was a thousand years ago. To the ancient Celt
there were three free dignitaries: church, land, and poet. To-day these
remain the revered dignitaries to the Welshman. In the past these
offices had been closely united, for to a Welshman saintship came by
birth, celebrity depended afterwards upon how he acted. There is an odd
title to a Welsh catalogue of saints: “Bonedd Saint ynys Prydain,”--the
Gentility of the Saints of the Isle of Britain. An old Irish song says
of St. Patrick that he “was a gentleman and came of decent people,” a
fact which to us does not seem prerequisite for saintdom. Not so to the
Celt; and it is best to keep this essential difference in mind, or one
might be puzzled by running across the annals, some day, of a saint
in so cheery a state that he fell into his own holy well and escaped
drowning only because of the good luck universally known to attend
people in a similar condition. The object of the Celtic saint, till
he became Latinized, was to serve his tribe by increasing its riches
and enlarging its boundaries. It was not necessary for him, as it was
for his brother Latin, to receive any papal sanction for his sainthood
or to work any miracles. His _carte_ to sanctity was membership in a
certain family or monastery. The Latin Christian world, establishing
its supremacy by degrees, could not fail to scoff at the temporal
emphasis of Welsh saintdom. Even Giraldus, a Welshman, comments mildly
upon the vindictiveness of certain saints, of whom he often knew more
than he cared to tell. Gradually, by ridicule chiefly, the lists of
Celtic holy men were closed. Even Bardsey, the _Insula Sanctorum_ of
the Welsh, does not escape a laugh from many critics, one of whom
observes that “It would be more facile to find graves in Bardsey for
so many saints than saints for so many graves”; a remark grudging and
ungracious, for the world has condescended to steal everything from
Bardsey and might leave it at least the glory of claiming as many dead
saints as it pleases.
[Illustration: THE EAGLE TOWER OF CARNARVON CASTLE
_From an engraving by Cuitt_]
The tales, fabulous and odd, told of Welsh saints, Welsh relics, and
holy wells, are particularly charming because they are not marred by
over-didacticism. Tydecho was an illustrious saint who lived in the
time of King Arthur. Retiring from the world, he led a life of mingled
austerity in penance and of useful hours of ploughing. One day a youth
seized his oxen, but the next day wild stags were drawing the plough,
and a wolf harrowing after them. Furious, the youth brought his dogs
to chase away Tydecho’s wild friends. While enjoying this diversion he
seated himself upon a stone; attempting to rise he found himself fixed
to the rock. Truly a humiliating position for a proud-spirited youth
who enjoys taunting an old man! Friendship between man and beast is
woven into these tales like the bright colours threading the letters
of an ancient bestiary. St. Monacella protected hares from Brochwel
Yscythrog, who was hunting them. She hid the trembling little beasts
under her robe and, praying devoutly, faced the dogs. The dogs ceased
their running, and even when the horn was blown as a command to them
to follow the hare, they stole away howling and the horn stuck to the
huntsman’s lips. After Brochwel had listened to Monacella’s plea, the
little creatures were released, and to this day no one in the parish
will hunt one of Monacella’s lambs.
Many and attractively full of poetry are the superstitions that
still live in the solitudes of northern Wales. “Bees were created in
paradise,” say the “Leges Wallicæ,” “and no light save beeswax is to be
used at mass.” When on the fall of man they left paradise, God Himself
is said to have blessed them. They produced, too, the nectarious “medd”
of which the ancient Britons thought so much. One day we encountered a
hillside woman in great distress, breathless and flapping her apron;
her bees were running away and apparently the worldly creature had no
intention of letting them run back to paradise. Bent pins are still to
be found at the bottom of the sacred well within the church close, pins
dropped in before bathing to cure warts. Woe to the bather who failed
to drop in the propitiatory pin, for he promptly caught the warts
of which others had got rid. And in these holy wells the clothes of
sick children were washed, with happy auguries if the little garments
floated, with fell portent if they sank. At Llangelynin, where the
well is still in excellent condition, an old woman told me that to
cure a sick child a stranger to the family must dip the child in after
sundown. Spitting upon hearing the name of the Devil may not be polite,
but it is a simple way of expressing contempt, and so, too, is smiting
the breast in self-condemnatory woe at the name of Judas. Some of their
superstitions and customs, despite the smack of folly, are wise in
their emphasis upon the power of the imagination.
There are, too, some wholesome customs of precedence. The parson always
used to go out of chapel first,--in some places he does so still,--and
the parishioner who disputed this order of rank might have his ears
boxed for his trouble. After the baptism of a little child old women
wash their failing eyes in the font with pathetic faith in the virtue
of new, God-given life. There used to be some sweet customs, not
entirely lost yet, connected with burial. As the coffin rested on the
bier outside the door, the next of kin among the women gave to the
poorest persons in the parish, over the body of the dead, a great dish
filled with white bread. Then a cup of drink was handed across the bier
to the same poor and all knelt to repeat the Lord’s Prayer. At every
crossroad between the house and church they knelt again to pray, the
sexton’s hand-bell quiet only when all knees were on the earth.
On the way from church to church many tablets arrest the eye, kneeling
fathers and mothers with processions of kneeling children in a line
behind them. The _viva voce_ history of these reliefs suggests the
less quaint and more beautiful and enduring _relievo_ of sepulchral
urns. At Clynnog I counted thirteen children in happy procession
after one father. At Conway I might have counted twenty-nine if I
had wished to, but I had no such wish. At Corwen we found knee-holes
in both footstones and headstones to make comfortable the knees of
friends while they prayed,--or meditated, as I confess I did, upon the
hideousness of most sepulchral carving and inscription. There was one
part of these records which, with even the best traditions behind me,
could not be undertaken--the epitaph or similar memento. Early in the
journey this inscription was encountered:
Heare lyeth the body of
John, ap Robert, ap Porth, ap
David, ap Griffith, ap David
Vauchan, ap Blethyn, ap
Griffith, ap Meredith,
ap Jerworth, ap Llewelyn,
ap Jerorh, ap Heilin, ap
Cowryd, ap Cadvan, ap
Alawgwa, ap Cadell, the
King of Powys, who
departed this life the
XX day of March, in the
Year of our Lord God
1642, and of
his age XCV.
Now it was plain that this was one of the results of the saints’
unsaintly emphasis upon a family-tree. Certainly a man has a right
to as many ancestors as he can compass. But thereafter, when I saw
the usual clusters of “aps” and “Griffyevanjoneses,” I experienced a
reluctant and fluttering sensation within accompanied by external haste
to get elsewhere. Just one other epitaph, by reason of its brevity,
caught my pencil:--
Here lies John Shore,
I say no more;
Who was alive
In sixty-five.
IV
_Dr. Johnson’s Tour of North Wales_
“What should we speak of
When we are as old as you? When we shall hear
The rain and wind beat dark December, how
In this our pinching cave, shall we discourse
The freezing hours away? We have seen nothing.”
Even the motion of driving in a post-chaise captivated the fancy of
Dr. Johnson, for he said, “If I had no duties, and no reference to
futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise
with a pretty woman; but she should be one who could understand me, and
would add something to the conversation.” Mrs. Piozzi, who, except for
that of prettiness, fulfilled these requirements both as a brilliant
conversationalist and owner of a post-chaise, asked her beloved Doctor
why he doted on a coach. Johnson’s reply was, that in the first place
the company was shut in with him “and could not escape as out of a
room,” and that in the second place, he could hear all the conversation
in a carriage. Any lamentations while travelling thus he considered
proof of an empty head or tongue that wished to talk and had nothing
about which to talk. “A mill that goes without grist,” he exclaimed,
“is as good a companion as such creatures.” As for himself, he felt no
inconvenience upon the road and he expected others to feel none. He
allowed nobody to complain of rain, sun, or dust. And so greatly did
he love this act of going forward that Mrs. Thrale (Mrs. Piozzi) said
she could not tell how far he might be taken before he would think of
refreshments.
Yet the impression which Macaulay gave of Johnson’s attitude towards
travelling is the one generally held: “Of foreign travel and of history
he spoke with the fierce and boisterous contempt of ignorance. ‘What
does a man learn by travelling? Is Beauclerk the better for travelling?
What did Lord Claremount learn in his travels, except that there was
a snake in one of the pyramids of Egypt?’” History has proved that
Macaulay could be brilliantly inaccurate; certainly in this estimate
of Johnson he was so. In still another passage Macaulay says that Dr.
Johnson “took it for granted that everybody who lived in the country
was either stupid or miserable.” The first twenty-seven years of
his life Johnson spent in small country towns and, although he was
sometimes miserable, because he was wretchedly poor, he was never
stupid.
It was the young traveller whom he censured, not the mature traveller
or travelling in general. It was characteristic of him to say, “I never
like young travellers; they go too raw to make any great remarks.”
Indeed, so grave was his sense of the value of travel that he took
it upon himself to rebuke Boswell, as Boswell records: “Dr. Johnson
expressed a particular enthusiasm with respect to visiting the Wall of
China. I catched it for the moment, and said I really believed I should
go and see the Wall of China had I not children, of whom it was my duty
to take care. ‘Sir,’ (said he), ‘by doing so you would do what would be
of importance in raising your children to eminence. There would be a
lustre reflected upon them from your spirit and curiosity. They would
be at all times as the children of a man who had gone to view the Wall
of China. I am serious, sir.’”
In his college days Johnson may not have had the same reasons as the
young poet Keats for going “wonder-ways,” but reasons he had. With the
Doctor, perhaps even more truly than with Keats, curiosity was “the
first passion and the last.” While an undergraduate he was heard to
say, “I have a mind to see what is done in other places of learning.
I’ll go and visit the universities abroad. I’ll go to France and Italy.
I’ll go to Padua.” Twice he urged Boswell “to perambulate Spain,” and
of their tour to the Hebrides everybody knows. There was talk of his
going to Iceland, and for a time the great Doctor discussed travelling
around the world with two friends.
Of the existence of the journal of Johnson’s tour in North Wales even
Boswell did not know. This journey was begun by the Thrales and the
Doctor leaving Streatham at eleven o’clock on Tuesday morning of July
15, 1774. On their way they stopped at Litchfield at the house of Dr.
Darwin, psychologist, poet, and grandfather of Charles Darwin, of whose
roses Mrs. Piozzi wrote, “I have no roses equal to those at Litchfield,
where on one tree I recollect counting eighty-four within my own reach;
it grew against the house of Dr. Darwin.”