Bishop William Morgan translated the bible into Welsh in 1588 (before the King James Bible in 1611). We visited the farm house where he was born in Tŷ Mawr Wybrnant (near Penmachno, in North Wales), now owned by the National Trust. Born to poor farmers, William was sent at a young age to be schooled with the landlord’s children and was subsequently educated for 10 years at Cambridge including Divinity, Greek and Hebrew.
In the process of translating the bible, William Morgan created the first standard version of written Welsh. Prior to this, Welsh was banned from formal use, including within the church. By the following century, literacy in Wales was at one of the highest levels in Europe, and the Welsh language was preserved, still very much in use today.
The early Methodists were usually very disadvantaged in both education and material possessions. Bibles were very difficult to afford, and schools were not established in all rural areas. Mary Jones World is near Lake Bala in Wales and commemorates the establishment of the Bible Society. I read what I thought was the biography of Mary Jones as a child and reread the book prior to our visit. Mary Jones first attended school at the age of ten and her driving motivation was to learn to read the Bible. In the year 1800, after saving for six years, Mary Jones walked 25 miles barefoot through the mountains from her home in Llanfihangel-y-Pennant, to Bala, to buy a bible from Thomas Charles. Her story was one of the driving forces behind his determination to form a society to supply bibles. I found there were differences between the accounts held in the museum and the biography. Mary Jones’ father died when she was very young and she was raised by her mother, a hard-working weaver. However, in the book her father has a prominent role. I queried this with the museum attendant who, no doubt inured to the question, responded that the bare bones of the story of Mary Jones’ walk were true, as was the response of Thomas Charles, but that the rest of the biography could well be fiction. I think it is sad when real people and their lives are misrepresented, but it is nevertheless a story of strong faith, determination and conviction.