Welsh Gentry 1 prichard wales welsh ancestory ancestors pedigree genealogy

The Gentry 1

ANCESTRY OF ?MARGARETTA PRICHARD (est 1650 –?1728)

Wife of Oakley I Leigh. dau of John Prichard & descendant of Welsh knights and princes

The Gentry 1

J. Davies has summarized the process by which the Welsh gentry grew in size and importance even before the defeat of Llywelyn the Last. The process started early and often correlated with opportunities to work “as deputies of the leading officials and ... a number of more modest offices.... By 1300 it is possible to detect the existence of an embryonic Welsh official class” (p.179). Under the weak king Henry VI during his long reign (1422-61) “a power vacuum was created in Wales. It was filled by the Welsh gentry” (p.208). Here Davies describes three of our relatives: a direct ancestor GRUFFUDD ap NICHOLAS, a cousin Ieuan ap Llywelyn ap MORGAN of Tredegar, and the most successful, the stepfather of our ELIZABETH VAUGHAN, Sir William ap Thomas of Raglan Castle, whose own son became Baron Herbert and later the Earl of Pembroke. Finally, Davies lists the aspirations of the gentry: “What they sought was the opportunity to build up their estates unhindered, to be free from the interference of English officials, to become the masters of local government in Wales and to be assured that the Penal Code was a dead letter [so that public offices and legal rights were the same for the Welsh as for the English]. They were all achieved under the Tudors. When that dynasty came to an end in 1603, the Welsh gentry were firmly in place as the ruling class of Wales” (p.219).

?MARGARETTA PRICHARD descended from several gentry lines in addition to the princely lines that were just described. The long Gentry section can be conveniently divided into four subsections as follows, each comprising one or more of these lines.

The first subsection gives the line of EINION EFELL, illegitimate son of MADOG ap MAREDUDD, prince of Powys, which descended to HUGH VAUGHAN, the first of his family to move south to Carmarthenshire. This first subsection also includes our distant cousin Owain Glyn Dwr, who rebelled against English rule and declared himself prince of Wales in 1400.

We give the maternal ancestors of HUGH’S wife JANE BOWEN in The Gentry 2. The descent of JANE BOWEN’S mother JANE LEWIS is described from the Lords of Caerleon, and a daughter who married MAREDUDD GETHIN, son of the LORD RHYS. Their descendants in turn became the owners of major estates and castles in Monmouthshire. Through the female line, JANE LEWIS also descended from Sir ROGER VAUGHAN of Bredwardine and from Sir DAVY GAM, who fought alongside Henry V at Agincourt and became the grandfather of the Earl of Pembroke through his daughter’s second husband. This subsection also describes the Wars of the Roses, in which several Prichard relatives played a major part, and which led to the victory of Henry Tudor at Bosworth and his taking the English throne as Henry VII.

The Gentry 3 describes the ancestors of JANE LEWIS’S husband MORRIS BOWEN in Carmarthenshire including GRUFFUDD ap NICHOLAS, and also MORRIS’S cousin Sir Rhys ap Thomas who fought at Bosworth and was knighted, and became Henry VII’s viceroy in south Wales. Also described are the large and renowned DWNN family of GRUFFUDD’S wife MABLI. MORRIS’S daughter JANE BOWEN married HUGH VAUGHAN of The Gentry 1, and their descendants became the earls of Carbery at Golden Grove.

Through their daughter ELEN VAUGHAN, HUGH and JANE became the grandparents of ELIZABETH ferch THOMAS in The Gentry 4. In addition to ELIZABETH’S ancestors, this subsection also describes the ancestors of her husband JOHN ap REES, including the long line of gentry officials from GRONO GOCH in the 13th century and the female line who trace back to LLYWELYN FOETHUS (the Luxurious), Lord of Llangathen. JOHN and ELIZABETH were great-grandparents of ?MARGARETTA PRICHARD whose immediate family is given for four generations of the PRICHARD family in the male line. They were probably minor gentry merging with the upcoming commercial and artisan or producing class, though our knowledge of this family is too slight to be certain yet.

We start here with the line of EINION EFELL ap MADOG of Powys because this line to HUGH VAUGHAN was clearly a gentry line, not a royal line, from the illegitimate son of the prince of Powys who died in 1160.

Pedigree from II-23,552.EINION EFELL ap MADOG to HUGH VAUGHAN

II-23,552.EINION EFELL of Cynllaith

According to a pedigree recorded in 1497, EINION lived in Cynllaith in the south of Powys Fadog, close to what later became the border with England. Many of his later descendants, including the VAUGHANS of Golden Grove, bore arms attributed to him, Per fess Sable and Argent, a lion rampant counter-charged (on a shield horizontally divided black above silver, an upright lion in profile silver above black).

The VAUGHAN arms
(from Gelli Aur Country Park)

EINION’S great-grandson CYHELYN was recorded by Lewys Dwnn in about 1600 as having lived in Llansilin in 1230, and a pedigree in Burke’s Landed Gentry says that according to a Welsh poem it was at that date that CYHELYN rebuilt a mansion house in the area at Lloran Uchaf close to the southern border of Cynllaith.

We know little of the following generations of IEUAF, MADOG GOCH (Madog the ruddy referring to his hair or complexion), and MADOG KYFFIN. Kyffin means border, and some of MADOG’S descendants who took the name adopted the arms, Argent, a chevron between three pheons Sable (on a silver shield a black chevron between three black arrowheads). This was often quartered in the VAUGHAN arms. In the Kyffin family we have found so far at least some early support for the famous though unsuccessful insurrection from 1400 to 1409 when Owain Glyn Dwr revolted against English rule over Wales (R.R. Davies, Glyn Dwr, pp.59,142).

MADOG KYFFIN’S son DAFYDD had a son called DAFYDD FYCHAN, meaning Dafydd junior. DAFYDD FYCHAN’S son GRUFFUDD became HUGH VAUGHAN’S father, and thereafter FYCHAN became a fixed surname and was anglicized to VAUGHAN. Gruffudd Hiraethog recorded that GRUFFUDD lived at the gentry house Gartheryr (eagle’s headland), which was only 2 miles south of Lloran Uchaf, and that his son Morris continued to live there (Peniarth 135). An interesting but so far unanswered question is whether this family of DAFYDD also supported their distant cousin Owain Glyn Dwr and if so whether their support lasted longer than the scant year of Kyffin family support. It seems likely that this family would support the rebellion, because R.R. Davies believes that Owain’s support came very heavily from his large extended family. ”Lineage was fundamental to Owain Glyn Dwr” (p. 131). Owain’s home at Sycharth on the river Cynllaith was less than 3 miles west of Gartheryr.

The story of this revolt by Owain Glyn Dwr is told next, as it impinged on the lives of most of the people of his time who are described in this Narrative. We note that he was not an ancestor, but a distant cousin in several collateral lines.

Owain Glyn Dwr (about 1354 – after 1413)

Exactly 118 years after the death of Llywelyn the Last, another revolt was begun by a royal descendant who wanted to restore the lost princedom of Wales. Owain Glyn Dwr’s lineage combined the royal lines that remained after the two Llywelyns. Through his mother he descended from the Deheubarth princes, the LORD RHYS and his eldest son Gruffudd (our LEWIS line goes through a younger son), and through his father he descended from MADOG ap MAREDUDD, prince of Powys, following the legitimate line, so he was a distant half-cousin of the HUGH VAUGHAN line. He lacked a direct male line to the Gwynedd dynasty, but the Welsh were aware that the last male heir of the Llywelyns had been assassinated two decades earlier by an English spy in France. Therefore Glyn Dwr had no rival claimant for the title Prince of Wales to head his revolt, which he announced in September 1400 at his manor of Glyndyfrdwy (valley of the two waters, from which the name Glyn Dwr is derived).

He was a wealthy middle-aged squire well connected with the English upper class, so he must have had a strong motivation to make him rebel. The revolt was triggered by his dispute with a difficult neighbor, but it developed its own momentum because of the pent-up feeling of resentment of the Welsh at their inferior status. As R.R. Davies summarized, “They felt like exiles in their own country”. Owain must have felt a tremendous sense of mission as he wrote to HENRY DWNN of Kidwelly that he had been appointed by God to release the Welsh from bondage. Tradition has it that he held a parliament in Machynlleth in 1404, and that he was crowned prince of Wales there in the presence of envoys from France, Scotland and Castile (J.Davies p.200).

In 1402 he defeated the English in a set battle, and when the revolt was at its peak by 1403-5 many castles and most of the countryside of Wales was either under Welsh control or subject to Welsh raids. The rebellion lasted at least seven years with varying participation, including an alliance with the French king and an expeditionary force that landed in 1405, marched about in southern Wales and west England, but went back to France without waging a major campaign. The tide was turning against the revolt by mid-year in 1405 (R.R.Davies, Glyn Dwr, pp.116-26). It ended slowly: “Rebel activity continued spasmodically for years in different parts of Wales” (p.126). Though in many ways like a guerilla war, Davies shows it as a national revolt. It “began as the conspiracy and vision of a group, or possibly two groups, of men in north Wales in autumn 1400; by midsummer 1403 it had become a movement which took the whole of Wales for its stage and drew its support from all corners of the country” (p.197). In 1412 Owain captured and ransomed DAFYDD GAM, a leading Welsh supporter of the king’s son, the future Henry V, who by that time was using his military skill to defeat the revolt. This was the last time Owain was reported alive. He was never captured, and it is thought he died before 1416, perhaps at his daughter’s home. Glyn Dwr took on the status of the primary Welsh national hero, and he maintains that status to the present, on a par with King Arthur. According to R.R. Davies, “He established for himself both in popular consciousness and in written histories a role that no other Welshman could emulate” (p.325).

The immediate outcome for Wales, nevertheless, was the opposite of what Glyn Dwr had hoped. The most destructive effects of the rebellion were its appalling economic and social consequences, especially in the north east, where the “scorched-earth” policy adopted by both sides added to the depression which had been felt throughout Europe, resulting from the years of plague epidemics called the Black Death, the worsening of the climate, and the expense of the Hundred Years War with the French. Those already living at the margin were seriously afflicted, though matters gradually improved, and prosperity returned to at least some towns including Carmarthen by 1420.

The patriotic fervor of the Welsh and their bitter antagonism toward the English – and vice-versa – were intensified, though the bitterness faded as the years passed. As an emergency measure, the Government issued a set of harsh Penal Laws in 1402 discriminating against the Welsh, giving statutory form to the restrictions originally imposed by king Edward I a hundred years earlier. By these laws, Welshmen were not allowed to acquire lands within or near town boroughs, could not serve on juries, could not intermarry with the English, and could not hold office under the crown, and the oath of a Welshman could not lead to the conviction of an Englishman. However, it is likely that there was never any intention of literally enforcing these measures in all cases. Even though the Laws were reaffirmed in 1447 and not legally removed until 1624, in fact, certain Welshmen including those in our ancestry were too important to the Crown in local administration to be excluded permanently, and they obtained exemption from the Penal Laws by petition to parliament. Therefore, they managed to continue their careers and maintain their life as Welsh gentry. Essentially, the process involved seeking reclassification as an English subject of the Crown instead of a Welsh subject, which was called acquiring denizenship. We shall see this privilege exercised in our own lines (J.Davies, pp.203-213; R.R.Davies, Glyn Dwr passim Chaps.10-11; Glanmor Williams, Renewal and Reformation, Chapter 1).

Our attention now turns from Powys in north east Wales to Monmouthshire in the south east, and to the illustrious line of JANE LEWIS, who became the mother-in-law of HUGH VAUGHAN

Continued in The Gentry 2