Abstract
The Quaker Iron Foundry of Neath Abbey founded by the Fox and Tregelles family and run by the Price family took on SPT as an apprentice. Although he respected the Quaker ethos, he found the work disagreeable and having a talent for languages, taught himself Hebrew and Welsh in his free moments. Having arrived in Wales at the time of the Welsh cultural reawakening, SPT immersed himself in Welsh history and literature, turning to respected Welsh scholars for guidance in his enquiries.
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Notes
- 1.
T.H. Bradley, ‘The Fox Family of Falmouth: Their Contribution to Cornish Industrial History, 1640–1860,’ Cornwall Association of Local Historians News Magazine 14 (October 1987): 12.
- 2.
W.W. Price, ‘Joseph Tregelles Price (1784–1854), Quaker and Ironmaster,’ in J.E. Lloyd, R.T. Jenkins [eds.], Dictionary of Welsh Biography Down to 1940 [DWB] (London: Society of Cymmrodorion, 1959).
- 3.
D. Rhys Phillips, The History of the Vale of Neath (Swansea: Beili Glas, 1925), 290.
- 4.
See Hannah Southall, ‘The Price Family of Neath ,’ in FQE, 28 (1894) 189–90, reproduced in Friends’ Intelligencer and Journal 51 (Philadelphia, 22, 29 September 1894): 601–602, 619–20 and cited in article ‘Peter Price’ in DQB (typescript in London/LSF). Cf. Rev. T. Mardy Rees, A History of the Quakers in Wales and Their Emigration to North America (Carmarthen: Spurrell and Son, 1925), 95–96. ‘Unlike other ironmasters in South Wales, they did not get together a fortune by casting or boring cannon for scenes of warfare’, J. Lloyd, The Early History of the Old South Wales Ironworks (1760 to 1840) (London: Bedford Press, 1906), 102.
- 5.
For Joseph Tregelles Price, see DWB. s.n; G. Eaton, Joseph Tregelles Price, 1784–1854: Quaker Industrialist and Moral Crusader: A Portrait of His Life and Work (Neath: Glamorgan Press, 1987). Cf. Laurence Ince, Neath Abbey and the Industrial Revolution (Stroud: Tempus, 2001), 82.
- 6.
If his uncle Edwin’s experience, eight years earlier, was anything to go by, they would have taken a boat from Portreath (on the northern Cornish coast) to Ilfracombe, and from there the packet boat to Swansea whence on a pony to Neath Abbey; Sarah E. Fox [ed.], Edwin Octavius Tregelles: Civil Engineer and Minister of the Gospel (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1892), 3–4.
- 7.
Minutes of West Divisional Monthly Meeting of Cornwall 1824–29 (Truro/CRO, SF/113), and ibid., 1829–1834 (SF/114).
- 8.
The contents of SPT’s letter (which apparently has not survived) were known to Hannah Southall when writing her account of ‘The Price Family of Neath ,’ Friends Intelligencer and Journal (1894): 620.
- 9.
Phillips, Vale of Neath, 439.
- 10.
According to SPT’s cousin, George Fox Tregelles, ‘He did not go through all the processes and departments, like other youths, but had some superintendence over the forge…’ ‘The Life of a Scholar,’ in FQE (October 1897): 449. In confirmation of this, Rev. J. Vernon Lewis writing in 1933 claimed that E.R. Phillips, of Neath Abbey, had seen a bill in the works signed by Tregelles in his own hand, and he gathered from that that he was a clerk in the office of the ironworks. J. Vernon Lewis, ‘S.P. Tregelles ac Eben Fardd,’ Y Dysgedydd (March 1933): 69.
- 11.
Prideaux, MS Life [p. 4].
- 12.
Tregelles, ‘Life of a Scholar,’ 450. George Fox Tregelles (1853–1943) was a son of SPT’s uncle Edwin Octavius Tregelles, the youngest son of Samuel Tregelles, snr (1766–1831).
- 13.
Tregelles, ‘Life of a Scholar,’ 450.
- 14.
For this Welsh cultural awakening, see Shawna Lichtenwalner, Claiming Cambria: Invoking the Welsh in the Romantic Era (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2008); cf. C. Charnell-White, Bardic Circles: National, Regional and Personal Identity in the Bardic Vision of Iolo Morganwg (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007), especially Chapter 3, ‘Wales: A Civilized Nation,’ 44–81.
- 15.
For Aneurin Owen (1792–1851), see W.L. Davies, art s.n., DWB. His edition of the Brut y Tywysogion was only properly published more than ten years after his death. He was a son of William Owen (-Pughe) the lexicographer whose mistaken theories dominated the study of the Welsh language in the first half of the nineteenth century (see G.J. Williams, art. s.n., DWB).
- 16.
S.P. Tregelles (12 September 1833) to Aneurin Owen (Aberystwyth/NLW, Pughe papers, MS 13232E #33).
- 17.
For Traherne, see D.L. Thomas, rev. B.F. Roberts, art. s.n. in ODNB. Cf. ‘the most distinguished Glamorgan antiquary of his time,’ H.J. Randall, art. s.n. in DWB.
- 18.
For Henry Hey Knight (1795–1857), see R.T. Jenkins, art. s.n. in DWB. Among the books mentioned in his letter, Tregelles had evidently consulted (probably in Knight’s library) The Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales Being a Collection of Historical Documents from Ancient Manuscripts. Volume II: Poetry (London: Rousseau, 1801); Thomas Gale, Historiae Anglicanae Scriptores veteres (Oxford 1687); and Gerardus Ioannis Vossius, De Historicis Latinis, Libri Tres (Leyden: Maire, 1627).
- 19.
Seventeen years later when arguing that Papias’s written testimony concerning the early Christians was a more reliable source of evidence than conjectures based on ‘probability’, Tregelles suggested, by way of analogy, that although it might seem logically ‘probable’ that Matthew Henry would have written his commentary in Welsh, the evidence of Tregelles’s testimony, as an eyewitness of Evan Griffith’s work of translation, was superior to such conjecture; S.P. Tregelles, ‘On the Original Language of St Matthew’s Gospel,’ JSL 5 (January 1850): 167–68.
- 20.
For Evan Griffiths (1795–1873), Independent minister in Swansea from 1828, see R.M.J. Jones, Mari A. Williams, art. s.n., ODNB.
- 21.
Y Brython [The Briton] 5:41 (Summer 1862–1863): 344; Y Traethodydd [The Essayist] 29 (July 1884): 292–93 (letter from Granada, in Spain, [June 30th 1860] to Eben Fardd); S.P. Tregelles, Notes of a Tour in Brittany (Edinburgh: Johnstone and Hunter [1881]), 17–18, 27, 51–54, 58–62. For help (very many years ago) with the translation of several lengthy pieces of Welsh writing (see Chapters 4 and 5), I am hugely indebted to Mrs. Olwen Wonnacott (née Williams) of Bristol, a musician who taught my younger sister some fifty years ago.
- 22.
Writing from Paris in 1849 SPT mentions his visit ‘eighteen years ago [sc 1831] … when we found he [the Bard] was buried in a dismal corner of the church. I have been [in Italy] at the grave of Tasso [1544–95] … and that of Alfieri [1749–1803], … but these, and many others, have not made me the less remember the Bard of Glamorgan’. Elijah Waring, Recollections and Anecdotes of Edward Williams, the Bard of Glamorgan, or Iolo Morganwg, B.B.D. (London: Charles Gilpin 1850) 198–99.
- 23.
Williams, Taliesin. (ab Iolo), Coelbren Y Beirdd; A Welsh Essay on the Bardic Alphabet (Llandovery: W. Rees, 1840).
- 24.
Waring, Recollections of Iolo Morganwg, 198. For some essays on a variety of aspects of the Bard of Glamorgan’s life, see G.H. Jenkins [ed.], A Rattleskull Genius: The Many Faces of Iolo Morganwg (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005). See also Prys Morgan, art. ‘Williams, Edward’ in ODNB. We do not know how SPT may have reacted to the growing awareness, later in the century, that Iolo Morganwg was an accomplished forger of Welsh manuscripts (and an alphabet to go with them!), which he used to perpetuate his romantic nationalist myths and inventions. Perhaps SPT’s focus on biblical studies enabled him to ignore it.
- 25.
Samuel Prideaux Tregelles to Taliesin ab Iolo, undated letter (Aberystwyth/NLW, Iolo Morganwg Papers, MS 21277E #770).
- 26.
Phillips, Vale of Neath, 439, n.1.
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Stunt, T.C.F. (2020). A Welsh Interlude. In: The Life and Times of Samuel Prideaux Tregelles. Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32266-3_2
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