Cities and towns -- Growth -- Fiction; Wales -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
There was no doubt that the flame was fanned largely by the Chapels.
These were, respectively, of the three denominations most common in
Wales, namely, Baptist, Calvinistic Methodist, and Independent; and
Terry Armfield, coming down presently to see for himself what all the
trouble was about, gave one affrighted look at their architecture,
gasped, "Shade of Pugin!" and fled. The Baptist Chapel was a plain
slate-roofed Noah's Ark of stone that, with the day-school adjoining it,
stood alone in the middle of the sandhills. At one end of its roof-ridge
was a small structure in which a bell swung, and the building had this
further peculiarity, that, good stone being cheaper at Llanyglo than
common bricks, the latter material had been used wherever an
embellishment had been desired. The Independent Chapel was also of
stone, with zinc ventilators like those of a weaving-shed; these looked
over the fishermen's cottages out to sea not far from Edward Garden's
house. And the third Chapel, that of the Methodists, of which body
Howell Gruffydd was the principal pillar, lay behind the farms. It was
of corrugated iron and wood, painted inside with a skirting of chocolate
brown and upper walls of a peculiarly sickly light blue. On the walls
were stencilled ribbons with V-shaped ends, and these bore texts in
Welsh. Architecturally all these were hideous, but, to those whose
grandfathers had worshipped in the fields and in clefts of the barren
mountains and on the wide seashore, they had the beauty of a thing that
has been ardently desired, and long suffered for, and passionately
loved.
For from these three Chapels came not only the impulse of the spiritual
life of Llanyglo, but its local politics of dissent also. Education, the
Poor Law, matters of Local Government, Temperance, Tenure, the
Eisteddfod, and the nursing of Nationalism--if these things were not
actually Llanyglo's religion, they were hardly divisible from it. And
this welding of Faith with secular works was helped by two other
circumstances. The first circumstance was that no language was heard in
the chapels but Welsh; and the second was that, as a result of the
local-preacher system, three times out of four the Welsh issued from the
same mouths--from Howell Gruffydd's mouth at the Methodist Chapel, from
big John Pritchard at the Baptists', and from Owen Morgan's among the
Independents. None of these went quite so far as openly to incite to the
destruction of fences.
They merely prayed to be delivered from the situation in which they
found themselves.
Whereupon, like Drake's men, heartened by prayer, they rose from their
knees again to take another pull on the rope.
So three times in six weeks those fences were set up and laid flat
again; and then it was that Terry Armfield came down, saw the Chapels
(as above mentioned), gasped "Shade of Pugin!" and straightway sought
Squire Wynne.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account