Contents

Preface

CHAPTER I : Why translate the Bible into Welsh?

CHAPTER II : Who was William Morgan?

CHAPTER III : The Bible of Bishop Morgan

CHAPTER IV : The significance of the translation

CHAPTER I : Why translate the Bible into Welsh?

Without the help of God's own book
Or learning of any kind,
Without true teaching given him,
The Welshman was quite blind.

But now it is my earnest hope,
In this my faith is bright,
That after suffering ages long
The Welshman is given sight.

And for this gift, give thanks to God,
O, Brutus's doughty race!
For never did the Welshman have
A present of such grace.

Now read the text both day and night
And diligently search
The letters of the Lord's own word
At home and when in church.

To Bishop Morgan for his pains
We must give thanks the most,
For putting into Welsh the Book
With the strength of the Holy Ghost.

Those are just a few verses translated from a long ballad to give thanks for the Bible in Welsh in 1588, composed by one Thomas Jones, vicar of Llanfair or Llandeilo Bertholau in Monmouthshire. The year 1588 was a troubled one in the history of Wales and of England, and Thomas Jones had already written a song of thanksgiving for relief from the Spanish Armada. The Bible in Welsh had come from the printers in London in the autumn, reaching Wales late in the year and hence it was a ‘present' around Christmas time. The most important thing for the balladist however was that the Bible opened the eyes of the Welsh, curing them of age-old blindness.

Many other Welshmen gave thanks for the good done by the new translation. Ieuan Tew, a bard from near Kidwelly, Carmarthenshire, says:

The great Bible in our tongue
Gives great light like unto the Sun.

Another bard, Sion Tudur, a native of Denbighshire, lamented the blindness of the Welsh before the Bible came:

The enmity of the Church of Rome
For us was a terrible anguish,
She played a dirty game with us -
Sour nurse that she was – a mumming game
Playing yesterday – we realize now -
At keeping us as a blind nation,
Shutting our heads inside a sack
With our eyes behind a mask.

Figure 2. Title page of the Welsh New Testament, 1567: the people awake from the darkness of great ignorance

The Welsh Bible completed in 1588 came towards the end of a century of unprecedented activity in translating the Bible throughout Christendom. For a century there had been a growing ferment of interest in the Scriptures. In the late fourteenth century John Wycliffe and his followers in England had tried to use an English version of the Scriptures. At the start of the fifteenth century the followers of Jan Hus in Bohemia were anxious to use versions of the Scriptures in Czech. In 1500, Cardinal Ximenes arranged for the printing of a Bible in Chaldean, Hebrew, Greek and Latin, ‘The Polyglot Bible', printed at the University of Alcalá de Henares in Spain. In 1516 the famous scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam published the Greek text and the New Testament together with detailed notes to explain it to priests and lay folk. The edition of 1516 had a profound effect on the German reformer Martin Luther. When in 1522 Luther was a fugitive hiding in the castle of Wartburg in the forests of Thuringia, he began to translate the New Testament into German, and in time, translated the whole of the Bible. His translation had a profound effect. Luther believed that ‘the Word would do it all', and throughout his life he devoted himself to publishing expositions of the Scriptures or arranging to publish and republish the Bible.

One who came under Luther's influence and who went to study in Luther's house at Wittenberg was the Englishman William Tyndale. Despite untoward circumstances, he succeeded in publishing a translation of several sections of the Bible into English. But he quarrelled with the government of Henry VIII, was hunted down, and in 1536 was caught and strangled to death before ever completing his task of translating the whole Bible. Other Englishmen such as Miles Coverdale were working at a fresh translation and in 1539 Coverdale edited a new edition of the English Bible, ‘The Great Bible', under the patronage and encouragement of Archbishop Cranmer, and with the agreement of the government of Henry VIII. Many other versions of the Bible subsequently appeared, until the Authorized Version published with the approval of James I in 1611 became the definitive text.

Figure 3. The Great Bible in English, 1539.

What explains such a frenzy of activity across Christendom to translate the Scriptures? It is true that Luther and Tyndale were religious reformers. Cardinal Ximenes and Erasmus of Rotterdam remained within the Catholic fold, and although Catholics in this period were not noted for putting the Scriptures into the hands of ignorant lay folk, they too published translations of the Bible. To understand this great interest in the texts of the Bible, one must turn back a long way into the history of the Middle Ages.

Figure 4. King Henry VIII. Engraving, c. 1700.

The Christian Bible was first put together during the time of the Early Church, the first few centuries after Christ's lifetime. The books written after Christ's lifetime formed the New Testament, but Christianity itself stemmed from the religion of the Jews, and Christ and the Apostle Paul refer back so often to the history and prophecies of the Hebrew Bible, that the Early Church felt that the one text was not complete without the other, and that the Hebrew Bible should be read in the light of that which was recorded in the New Testament. The New Testament was written in Greek but it was no difficult task to link it to the Hebrew Bible (which came to be called by the Early Church ‘The Old Testament') because a Greek version of the Hebrew Bible called the ‘Septuagint' had already been available for one or two centuries before the birth of Christ. A few of the books of the Septuagint were available in Greek and not in a Hebrew version, hence they could not be regarded by the Jews as the pure Word of God and were grouped together and called the ‘Apocrypha'.

To the Christians of Western Europe the Latin tongue was much more familiar than was Greek, and since the Early Church laid great emphasis on reading the Scriptures, a Latin version of the Bible was essential. The task of translation was done by St. Jerome. Vulgus is the Latin for ‘people' and the ‘Vulgate' (that is, ‘Bible in the people's language') is the name given to this translation. It was used by the Catholic Church throughout the Middle Ages. During that period readings from the Bible were included in the Church services, and so down the centuries the faithful listened to the Bible being read in the churches. If so, then what possible meaning could there be to a revival or a new enthusiasm for understanding the Bible towards the end of the Middle Ages?

Reading the Bible was only a part of the Catholic religion. As the centuries had gone on, the Bible had played less and less of a part in the religion and culture of Catholicism. The Early Church gradually developed into the medieval Catholic Church, the meaning of ‘Catholic' being "universal". Nation after nation was converted until the whole continent had become Christian. For this continent a powerful all-embracing culture was shaped, influencing every aspect of life. Besides the Bible, the Church had the writings of the Church Fathers, the thinkers, scholars and preachers of the Early Church. These had to be studied with no less attention than that given to the Bible. As nations were drawn into the Church, a vast Christian society was created, all parts of which had to be kept in unity. The culture of the Early Church had then to be welded to the tribal and kingly societies of Europe. So as to keep all these countries together, another force for unity was created, a Catholic civilization, an amalgam of the Early Church and the local native customs of each European people. On the one hand the feudal system appeared, a Christianized version of society's methods of self-defence by bands of warriors who swore allegiance to a prince or military leader. On the other hand Christianity was amalgamated with the lore and custom of European society. A vigorous and lusty civilization thus appeared, with its pagan traditions Christianized, with popular cults, pilgrimages to holy wells, local saints, magic and wizardry, parish wakes and miracle plays. It was unified and yet allowed great local variations, unified because it was under the discipline of the Pope at Rome, and his allies the feudal kings and princes, and his agents the international orders of monks and nuns.

This form of civilization went from strength to strength from the time of the Early Church up until around 1300, and medieval Catholic culture must be regarded as one of the marvels of history. But in the process of creating such an all-embracing religious society or civilization, the Scriptures appeared to be pushed further and further into the background. For one thing it was a mainly illiterate civilization, where the written word was not of great importance. In the Early Church by contrast the text of the Bible had been scrutinized with care, in search of clues as to the likelihood and timing of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, which would then herald the Day of Judgment. In that society, the faithful knew that they were still only a minority. To some extent they were familiar with the ancient Greek tradition of analysing words and arguing philosophically. The Early Church was a society of self-aware individuals who had gone through conversion as individuals, and to some extent knew what an individual personality was. But as the centuries wore on, and the Catholic Church created a religion for the whole of Christendom, the emphasis shifted from individual to the cosmos, to the whole community, and the ability of the Catholic community to co-operate with God and the sacrifice of Christ to gain salvation for God's people. The primary task seemed to be to save the world for Christ and not to save individual souls.

Figure 5. Part of a fragment of the Bible translated into Welsh during the Middle Ages, taken from Peniarth 20 manuscript, National Library of Wales.

Of course, the Scriptures went on being studied during the Middle Ages, in schools and monasteries and in the universities which the Church founded, but they were studied from a certain distance, through commentaries on them, or to seek in them moral, allegorical or symbolic lessons. The scholar was likely to pay just as much attention to the lives of the saints, or the moral discussions of the Early Church Fathers, all those writings produced after the period of the Bible itself, what was loosely called ‘Church Tradition'. The Bible was thus one among many texts. It is thus easy to understand why so few parts of the Bible were available in any translations into European vernacular languages in the Middle Ages. In Welsh, for example, only a few fragments of the Bible were translated, and those probably from a compendium or anthology of Scripture rather than from the original texts themselves. The language of the Catholic services was Latin, the sacred tongue of the Church and the language of international organization. Anything which needed to be explained to lay folk could be explained to them by the priest, and nobody really needed to be able to read.

Latin was extremely important as a symbol of the unity of the Church across Western Christendom and of its unity down the centuries from the Roman Empire. Up until about 1300 or 1340 the Church succeeded remarkably well in keeping this civilization together and in silencing criticism. But after 1300 there came a period of cross-winds and buffeting storms. The society the Church had done so much to unite was beginning to show signs of pulling apart. There were arguments between the churchmen themselves. In the fourteenth century the Pope moved from Rome to Avignon, a town in France. The Church became divided; first there were two Popes and then there were three, each of them excommunicating the others. Heresy, that is, incorrect beliefs, was no new thing, but heresy after 1300 became more and more widespread and persistent, and much more difficult to put down. There was also a spread of anticlericalism, a dislike of the power of priests and a mockery of their morals. Lay folk felt a growing envy for their wealth in this world and their superior chances of salvation in the next.

The Church did not know how to cope with the new kind of society emerging around her. In previous centuries the Church usually tamed kings or feudal lords. The English King John, for example, was punished for disobeying the Pope. A century later in 1300 secular governments in Europe were not so ready to pay taxes to the Pope, or obey him, still less so in 1400 or 1500. In previous centuries the Popes ordered kings to put down heretics: the King of France had been ordered to put down the Albigensian heretics in the south of France, and this he did with terrible ferocity. But by the fifteenth century it proved impossible to persuade other kingdoms to unite to destroy the schismatic Church of Bohemia, a church which refused to pay taxes to Rome, which insisted on having the Scriptures in Czech, and which administered the Communion to the Czechs in the form of bread and wine, not through the bread only, as was the universal medieval custom of the Church.

The Church could not – or would not –see that lay governments had grown into mighty powers, or that thoughtful intelligent lay Christians had now appeared who wished to play a part in their own religious life, and were more and more dissatisfied with the secondary role played by such lay folk in the medieval Catholic Church. From 1300 onwards thoughtful lay folk grew more critical of the ecclesiastical system. The lesser clergy were also more critical of their superiors. All around them their familiar social and economic systems were in a state of crisis, since from 1349 onwards epidemics such as the Black Death were ravaging Europe, the economic system of the manors was in a state of decay, and the Turks attacked more boldly all over Eastern Christendom, spreading Islam by converting whole nations such as the Albanians or Bosnians to Islam, and in 1453 capturing the capital city of Eastern Christianity, Constantinople. Because of the divisions and uncertainties we have mentioned, the Church was unable to give practical or moral leadership at the time when it was most needed.

Figure 6. Bodidris at Llandegla. William Morgan delivered the sermon at the funeral of Squire Llwyd of Bodidris.

The consequences were serious. One result was that thoughtful lay folk began to look at religion to find their own answers to spiritual problems, and a simple way of doing this was to examine the ancient Scriptures themselves, to find guiding principles or true standards. Could not Popes and bishops be measured in the balance according to the weight of Christ's own words? Had not St. Paul himself written for tiny groups of thoughtful troubled individuals, rather than for huge universal organizations? Getting hold of the ancient Scriptures was an amazing revelation for such folk. These lay folk had an unquenchable thirst for reading Scriptures which could not be assuaged by manuscripts of morality or piety. One of the reasons why the printing press was invented around 1450, somewhere in Germany, probably in the city of Mainz, was to provide people with copies of the Bible. As it happens, the first book to be printed was the Latin Bible by the printer Johannes Gutenberg. In a troubled world of sickness, plague, and endless wars –for example the Hundred Years War between England and France-lay folk looked for answers, and failing to find them from the churchmen, they looked for them in the Scriptures.

If things were dark in western Europe, they were darker still in Wales, according to our chief authority in this field, Professor Glanmor Williams. He has drawn a gloomy if not wholly tragic picture of religion in Wales from about 1340 onwards. It was a period of decline in the calibre of the clergymen, and that was because of the squabbling between bishops and local clergy, the chief offices tending to go to outsiders (usually Englishmen) and the lesser clergy being Welshmen, who resented the way in which the greater clergy lorded it arrogantly over the natives. Professor Williams concludes that the sad effect of the decline of the calibre of clergymen was to make religion more mechanical, outward and ritualistic. This is to some extent true of most parts of Christendom, for this was an age of building chapels and shrines, of organizing pilgrimages, of worshipping relics and so on. In Wales there was no urban society which would be most likely to produce learned lay folk who had critical minds and who might turn to the Bible for help as a court of appeal in which to judge professed clergymen. The initiative rather would have to come from England or the Continent –there were to be found cities and universities and printing presses.

Even in England the path towards obtaining Scriptures in English was fraught with difficulties. Vernacular Scriptures were associated with heretics such as the followers of John Wycliffe. Even in the 1530s, when Henry VIII had broken all connections with the Pope, and had made the Church of England independent of Rome, there was little encouragement to lay folk to read the Scriptures as they pleased in English. William Tyndale met his death while only halfway through translating the Bible into English. In 1539 an English Bible was eventually placed in the churches, but soon after that date, a ban was put on anyone but clergymen reading it. It was only during the reign of Henry's son Edward VI (who reigned from 1547 to 1553) that zealous Reformers came to power in the Church of England and changed the services so as to give a prominent place to the Scriptures. Under the rule of Archbishop Cranmer in 1549 the Book of Common Prayer was introduced into every church with the intention that the Scriptures should be read regularly as part of the services in that Book, and in English.

Figure 7. A page from the first printed Welsh book Yny llyvyr hwnn, 1546.

Cornishmen protested in 1549 that they did not understand the new Prayer Book and that the new English services were as incomprehensible to them as a ‘Christmas game'. In Wales there were individual Reformers who felt the need for Scriptures which the Welsh would understand. As the printing press had been in existence since about 1450 there was no real excuse. This is how Sir John Price argued in 1546:

Now God has given us the printing press in order to broadcast the knowledge of his blessed words to us, as he has made the whole of Christendom besides us, partake in that goodness with the others, so that such a gift is not fruitless with us, any more than it is with the others.

Go barefoot like pilgrims to his Grace the King and his Council, to get permission to have the Holy Scriptures in your language, for the sake of those among you that cannot or are unlikely to learn English ... get the Scriptures in your own language.

In the 1530s, the very period when Henry VIII's government made the Church of England independent of Rome, it also strengthened its hold over the kingdom by binding the varied regions of the realm more closely to the central authority of the state. In 1536 and 1542/3 two laws were passed which reorganized entirely the administration of Wales, laws which today are called ‘The Act of Union'. Among the many changes ushered in was one that forbade the use of Welsh in public life. If people wanted public office in Wales they would have to use English. Of course almost everybody in Wales spoke Welsh, and continued to do so, and so the language did not disappear. But officially its status was lowered to that of a dialect. Some far-sighted Welshmen realized what had happened. Salesbury mentions the need ‘to sustain a language which now is starting a period of misfortune'. When the Book of Common Prayer was enforced by act of Parliament in 1549, English was the only language permitted in churches, and so for the first time English was heard week in week out in every corner of Wales.

Salesbury was an exception, a strange and curious man, a Welsh patriot whose heart bled for the decline of Welsh, a humanist longing to bring modern trends in European culture and education to Wales, and a zealous Protestant burning with desire to save the souls of the Welsh through having a Welsh Bible. Salesbury gave his energies to publish Welsh books to modernize the antiquated culture of the people, and to show that Welsh was as flexible and copious in its vocabulary as any modern European language such as Italian or English. He would need some time in which to translate the whole of the Scriptures, so as a foretaste he published in 1551 an anthology called Kynniver Llith a Bann, containing a selection of lessons which could be read (if Welsh were not proscribed) in the churches. He believed that through Welsh alone Welsh souls could be saved. All the Welsh would not succeed in learning English for another century. In the meantime perhaps three generations of people would very likely go to hell. Was anybody in 1551 listening to Salesbury's earnest plea? If so, there was no response. Then in 1553 Edward VI died and the throne was occupied by his sister, Mary Tudor, a convinced and unyielding Catholic. Some of Salesbury's friends, such as Richard Davies (a native of Gyffin near Conwy), went into hiding and by 1555 we find Davies at Frankfurt in Germany. Others fled to Geneva where they came under the influence of John Calvin. In England and Wales, Latin was once again the language of worship and the project to translate the Bible laid aside.

Figure 8. Title-page of William Salesbury's Kynniver Llith a Bann, 1551.

Mary's reign was brief and ended in 1558, five years recalled by the Reformers as a nightmare of burning Protestants at the stake – ‘the Protestant Martyrs'. In 1558 Mary's sister Elizabeth came to the throne and in two acts of Parliament in 1559 and 1563 re-established a moderate régime in the Church of England. The emphasis in religion under the new regime was upon unity and uniformity. People had to go to church regularly, conform and follow the services of the parish church. The services would be in English. But also in 1563 there came a great surprise.

In that year, Parliament passed an act which allowed the translation of the Scriptures and Book of Common Prayer into Welsh. As soon as those things were done, it would be compulsory to use the Welsh versions everywhere where Welsh was the commonly-used language in Wales. The bishops of Wales and of Hereford (parts of that county were of course Welsh-speaking in that period) were commanded to carry out the work of translation at once. Professor Glanmor Williams has said of this act:

It could well be argued that the Act of 1563 to translate the Bible was as important in its consequences as the Act of Union of 1536.

As we have said, Salesbury's friend Richard Davies had been in exile in Frankfurt but he returned in 1558, a figure of considerable standing among the Reformers. Before long he was made Bishop of St. Asaph and in 1561 became Bishop of St. Davids where he remained until his death in 1581. Davies is the man most likely to have framed the unusual act of Parliament. He was a friend of Matthew Parker, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and of William Cecil, the chief adviser of Queen Elizabeth I (a man descended from the race of Seisyll of Alltyrynys, and conscious of his Welsh ancestry). Davies probably piloted the bill on its difficult path through Parliament. How did he manage to win over the hearts of men like Parker and Cecil? One can only guess. Possibly he argued that unity in religion was of more overriding importance than unity in language, also that all Christians must be allowed to hear the Gospel message in their own language. To save souls in Wales, Welsh would have to be used. What if the Welsh should remain Welsh-speaking? Was that not a small price to pay for their becoming resolute Protestants?

He may have needed to argue thus, but it is also likely that even before 1563 there was some sort of change in the air, which made the atmosphere more tolerant towards Welsh. In 1561 in the St. Asaph diocese, large sections of the Welsh Scriptures were read following the readings in English. A permit to print and publish a Welsh translation of the Litany (a section of the church service) was announced in 1562, and apparently this was published in London in that year, although every copy of it has been lost. These minor considerations, of course, should not in any way belittle the epoch-making significance of the 1563 Act.

Figure 9. St. Asaph Cathedral, where Bishop Morgan was buried. Here also Richard Parry served as bishop. Watercolour by John Josiah Dodd, (1821?-1894) 19th cent.

If Richard Davies was responsible for the 1563 act, then he was amazingly confident to imagine that the whole Bible and Book of Common Prayer could be translated by 1567 and then immediately put into use. A start was made, however, and Davies gathered around himself at his palace at Abergwili near Carmarthen –the palace at St. Davids itself being in a poor condition – a circle of scholars who worked on the translations. By 1567 a part of the work was complete, and it was possible to publish the Book of Common Prayer and the New Testament. The precentor of St. Davids, Thomas Huet (a native of Breconshire), translated the Book of Revelation, Davies himself some of the epistles of St. Paul, and the great bulk of the work was done by William Salesbury. It should be remembered that all the while Davies was busy with his work as a bishop, his see being the largest in Wales, and also busy as a member of the committee preparing the ‘Bishops' Bible' published in English in 1568. Davies was the author of the preface to the New Testament and the ‘Epistle to the Welsh People', and the latter is a most interesting revelation of the motives of the translators. In addition to the usual Protestant arguments justifying a Welsh Bible, which we have already mentioned above, there were others.

Davies's argument is that the Welsh had been chosen by God for a special mission in the world, a special contribution to the heritage of the Church in Britain. Christianity had come first to these islands soon after the Crucifixion, direct from Palestine through Joseph of Arimathea, the Jew who had taken charge of the burial of Jesus. Joseph was supposed to have founded a Church in Britain, independent of Rome, a Church for the Britons, the ancestors of the modern Welsh. The Saxons then arrived here as pagans and were later on converted to Christianity by Augustine of Canterbury, the envoy of the Pope. In their turn the Normans had come, had invaded, and after their conquest in 1066 had greatly strengthened the Pope's hold over the Church. But after centuries of blindness or enslavement, the son of a Welshman, namely King Henry VIII, had led the Church out of the thrall of Rome and restored its independence. The Welsh alone were a living link with the origins of the Church, the descendants of the Ancient Britons who still spoke their ancient language. Did the Welsh then not deserve respect?

This argument, of course, is a myth or fable. Yet it is a myth which helped to justify the Welsh Bible.

Davies also explained that the New Testament translated in 1567 was merely a foretaste:

The latter part is ready, the part called the New Testament, while you will have to wait (not for long, let God see to that) for the former part called the Old Testament.

Figure 10. Title-page of the Welsh Book of Common Prayer, 1567.

The main fault was Salesbury's bizarre way of writing Welsh, not the translation itself, which was excellent. The Welsh had a remarkably unified way of writing their language, far more so than was usually the case in European languages. Salesbury was determined to show the Latin word-origins of Welsh. Instead of sacramentau "sacraments" he wrote sacramentae, instead of seremoniau "ceremonies" he wrote seremoniae, and since the Welsh eglwys came from ecclesia, he wrote eglwys down as eccles, assuming that those reading the text would make the adjustments. Salesbury also tried to show the copiousness of Welsh by putting several different words for the same things, and put dialect alternatives in the margins. All in all, the texts were inconsistent in tone, and confusing.

The end result was an unreadable or incomprehensible text. Some contemporaries complained that it was agony to listen to clergymen stumbling through the liturgy on a Sunday.

Sir John Wynn's opinion was that a good deal of the Old Testament had been completed at the point at which Davies and Salesbury fell out, and that all this material was eventually transferred to the hands of William Morgan. This of course would imply that Morgan was a harvester of other men's corn. But it should be recalled that when Wynn wrote these words he had quarrelled bitterly with William Morgan, and so it is unwise to depend much on his testimony.

Figure 11. Sir John of Gwydir, parton and friend of Bishop Morgan. Engraving by R. Vaughan, c. 1700.

Richard Davies, it is clear, was a warm and sociable character, a keen Protestant who had suffered sorely for his faith, and also a keen Welshman anxious to patronize traditional bards and to appoint Welshmen to offices in the Church in Wales. Sir John Wynn went a little further and said that he was anxious to appoint the men of Gwynedd, his own native heath:

loving entirely the North Wales men, whom he placed in great numbers ... having ever this saying in his mouth ... I will plant you, North Wales men, grow if you list.

One of the promising North Wales men whom Davies planted in his bishopric in 1572 was one William Morgan, not only from North Wales, but from Penmachno which was a few miles from Davies's home, but a few miles south in the Conwy valley. Davies appointed the young scholar to be curate of Llanbadarn Fawr in Cardiganshire. It was this man who would bring the great work to completion – but not before the year 1588.