Trade could never have entered very seriously into the life of the armiger in most Welsh counties before the eighteenth century, for the sufficient reason that there was none. What the Welsh younger son did must remain a mystery, for Welsh social life between the Reformation, which darkened rather than illuminated the Principality, and the Hanoverian period, is itself rather obscure. There is no reason to suppose that the predilection for pedigrees which distinguishes the Welsh would have included any prejudice against trade had the opportunity arisen. But the genealogical instinct of the Cambrian is not altogether due, I think, to pride of race. A venial vanity, no doubt, has a fair share in it, but genealogy of itself has a strong detached interest for Welshmen. You will find men among all classes with an entirely impersonal interest in the ancestry of their neighbours. ‘I should like to show you a little collection of pedigrees I have at home’ is an offer I have had frequently made to me in Wales, and I can assure the reader that a Welsh MS. pedigree is a tolerably formidable document. I myself knew well a working man in Cardiganshire who spent his leisure hours in walking about collecting such material purely for his own amusement. Imagine a Wiltshire ploughman thus occupied! Welsh social history is a thing apart. You do not expect to run up against a mercer or a goldsmith in a Welsh family tree which soars away through generations of virtual fixtures on the soil, and through a dim and pastoral past, till it finds its inevitable source in one or other of the five royal or fifteen noble tribes of Wales. And there you are! Rather disconcerting, however, is the small scale on which the dignity of a Welsh armiger must often have supported itself, not so very long ago. In the small grey stone houses still surviving in fair numbers, one seems to have arrived at a life so primitive as to require some readjustment of social values; men farming their own land, and not too much of it nor yet too fertile, beyond a doubt. I fear that, despite the pedigree, our London haberdasher’s well-dowered daughter would have turned up her nose at an average Welsh squire in Elizabeth’s golden days. The Welsh were never great sea-goers, though a few, like Morgan, rose to fame as buccaneers. The superfluous sons must have taken to farming in some fashion, and though never much given to colonising there was an agricultural movement into Pennsylvania early in the eighteenth century. This probably included a good many of the Welsh gentry, for a contemporary English traveller, describing the characteristics of the various groups of settlers, alludes to the Welsh as ‘greatly devoted to hunting and dogs.’[6]