The Customs and Traditions of Wales: A Pocket Guide Book Review
Read a book review of The Customs and Traditions of Wales.
By Trefor M. Owen
University of Wales Press, 1991
188 pp, paperback
ISBN: 978 0708 3111 89
Taking a deep dive into Welsh customs and traditions of the 18th to late 19th centuries, author Trevor Owen covers the interesting and mundane.
This book often reads like a college text, and the author expects that the reader already has a basic knowledge about Wales. He also expects the reader to have a good vocabulary as words such as quintain, nosegay, gainsaid, scrofulous, and antiquarianism appear. Of course, there are also Welsh words which the reader must remember from chapter to chapter.
Here is a sample sentence from page 2: “The system of migration or transhumance associated with the permanent settlement of the low¬lying hendre and the hafod (pl. hafodydd) or upland summer pasture, with its seasonally occupied dwelling or hafoty (pl. hafotai), was an important feature of Welsh rural life.”
Owen starts off with the basics, writing of the historical importance of the land and its connection to the people of Wales.
The second chapter, the longest chapter at 60 pages, talks of the all-important hearth and of the home, fire, cooking, heating, storytelling and home life.
Later chapters touch on folk customs and wedding and funeral practices. Also, numerous festivals are described which include various uses for horse heads! Community traditions often included lots and lots of drinking, which tapered off after the Methodist revivals. Some annual festivals were little more than organized, drunken fistfights, with women jumping in if their husbands or brothers were not faring particularly well.
There is mention of a four-day festival which concluded with the election of a “mayor” of the festival. A major qualification for election to this “office” was that “the candidate must have spent the whole of the time from Sunday morning until Wednesday night in the public houses in a state of drunken¬ness without once visiting his family.”
Interestingly, even during its darkest, more drunken times, the Welsh always had a safety value to somewhat take care of the poor.
Readers will find out about old-time laws such as (keep in mind, this was a law, not a custom): “when it is proved that a man has been beaten by his wife, he shall be carried about the town in a chair fixed to two poles, on the shoulders of four men, and exposed to all the ridicule of both sexes.”
Sports covered include football (soccer), cnapan (cq), bando and handball. The football games in some places were played with the goals being several miles apart, with each goal being near a church. Rules were only occasionally used in these games.
The later part of the book touches on the great influence of industrialization, especially the coming of the railroads. New education systems led to uniformity in education and the spread of English, to the detriment of the native Welsh language and a lot of long-established traditions.
Pictures are few and far between, as you might expect about a book focused on centuries past, but the pictures provided are interesting and provide context.
As amazing as the 1904-95 Great Revival was, it is barely mentioned, although that is probably due to the focus of the book being on earlier days. What the book calls the Methodist Revival is mentioned numerous times. Wales was quite a religious country, as shown by the fact that at the close of the 1800s Sunday school teachers outnumbered day school teachers by seven to one.
One stumbling block to the reader’s enjoyment is the occasional impossibly long paragraphs, which sometimes run for more than a page and a half. Sentences can be long and complex, reaching over 80 words at times.
Complete neophytes to Wales might struggle a bit with the book, but those with even a little curiosity of 18th and 19th Europe can learn a lot.
Marshall Hughes
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