they could have a little government of their own and live by themselves.” Accordingly, upon their arrival, this tract was surveyed for them in the high, rolling lands embraced chiefly within the present bounds of Montgomery and Delaware Counties, a section that more nearly resembled in character their beloved Wales than did any other part of this new country of their adoption. The tract was called the Welsh Barony for the sturdy, “red-haired, freckle-faced descendants of the ancient Britons insisted that this territory, specially set apart for them, was a barony or county palatine and, in very truth, it was a manor with the right of court baron.” These Owens and Joneses, Evanses and Wynnes, Powells and Pughs and all their kith and kin, managed their affairs according to their own notions and, at first, dispensed with the usual system of township and county organisation. Civil authority was vested in the Quaker meetings until, in 1690, the three townships of Merion, Haverford and Radnor were formed and the civil jurisdiction of the meetings superseded. Welsh was the official language of the courts and records and Welsh was the daily tongue of all the people in the barony and very few of them understood English, so that when William Penn preached at Haverford, in 1701, his hearers could not have been much edified, so far as his words were concerned. Closely bound together by the tie of language and separated by the same means from the other colonists who spoke English, Swedish or German, these Welsh gentry and yeomen held aloof from outside affairs, content with a mode of life that was “unusual on a provincial frontier” for its “amount of enjoyment and expenditure for dress and entertainment.” Local independence and self-sufficiency were only broken down when the barony was thrown open to outside settlers because the Welsh occupants refused to pay quit-rents on more land than they actually used or held. Their strong feeling of nationality, however, remained and nothing could have been more natural than that the architecture for which they were responsible should have had, as it did, a characteristic local flavour.