THOMAS JONES, son of John Williams, was born in Oswestry, and distinguished himself as an able defender of the Protestant faith. Having received his early education in his native town, he was entered at Jesus College, Oxford, at the commencement of the rebellion, but he left the University soon after, and returned when Oxford was surrendered to the Parliament, in 1646. He became Fellow of University College, by authority, of the parliamentary visitors, in 1648, and was remarkably zealous in the republican cause. He took the degree of M.A. in the year following, and in 1655 became rector of Castell Caerinion, in Montgomeryshire, where he acquired a knowledge of the Welsh language, to serve those parts where the orthodox clergy were rejected. His subsequent life was marked by strong zeal against papacy, and in an action for slander brought against him by Dr. Morley, Bishop of Winchester, whom he charged as a promoter of popery, he was fined £300, and the rectory of Llandyrnog, to which he had been appointed, was sequestered for the payment of it. He continued this severe course of polemic warfare, and published several other works, amongst which, in 1682, “Elymas the Sorcerer; or a memorial towards the discovery of the bottom of this Popish Plot.” This effusion exposed him to much persecution, and would have subjected him to further punishment, had he not escaped by his decease, which occurred at Totteridge, Herts, in the same year. HUMPHREY KYNASTON, surnamed _The Wild_.—This remarkable man, whose exploits would furnish skilful romance-writers with materials for at least three entertaining volumes, was not a native of Oswestry, but as there is a tradition that his first wife was Elizabeth, daughter of Meredydd ab Hywel ab Morris, of Oswestry, and another that she was Margaret, daughter of William Griffith, of Oswestry, called Coch-William, or the _Red_, we have deemed his history worthy of brief narration in this volume. Kynaston was son of Sir Roger Kynaston, of Hordley, by Elizabeth, daughter of Henry Grey, Earl of Tankerville, by Antigony, daughter of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. The enormous debts he contracted by his imprudent life and conduct caused him to be outlawed, upon which he fled from Middle Castle, his usual place of residence, but which he had so neglected that it was falling into ruins, and sheltered himself in a cave in the western point of Nesscliff Rock, called to this day _Kynaston’s Cave_. The cave is large, and divided into two rooms by a pillar of the rock, upon which is carved “H. K. 1564.” Yorke says of him, that “he was a gentleman of many strange pranks, still the talk of the neighbouring peasantry. The cave in the rock, at Nesscliff, called Kynaston’s Cave, was the retreat of himself and mad companions. He was outlawed the sixth of Henry VII., pardoned the next year, and died in 1531.” Kynaston’s career was brief, but his exploits and vagaries within