The Enlightenment & Awakening Era · 1735-1815 · Wales
The Welsh Revival Tradition
Not yet available
There's no built conversation for this tradition here yet.
About This Movement
The Welsh revival began independently of England and in its own language: in 1735 Howell Harris, a schoolmaster from Trefeca, and Daniel Rowland, a curate at Llangeitho, were converted within months of each other and began preaching to whoever would gather. What grew was not only a wave of feeling but a structure. The seiat, or experience meeting, a small society where members told one another honestly how things stood with their souls, described in a handbook written by the movement's poet, William Williams Pantycelyn. Williams gave Welsh Christianity a hymn corpus that became a national possession, and so, more quietly, did Ann Griffiths, a farmer's daughter who composed her hymns aloud and never wrote them down. They survive because her maid Ruth Evans held them in memory and Ruth's husband set them on paper after Ann died at twenty-nine.
Sources
- Howell Harris's Trevecka diaries (c. 300 ms. volumes, National Library of Wales) and autobiographical accounts (primary) — One of the century's densest self-records of an itinerant preacher; largely unpublished.
- Williams Pantycelyn: the hymn corpus (from Aleluia, 1744), Theomemphus (1764), The Experience Meeting (Drws y Society Profiad; Eng. trans. Bethan Lloyd-Jones, 1973) (primary) — Hymnody as actually used, plus the movement's own manual for its small-group structure. Available in English translation.
- Ann Griffiths: hymns and letters (d. 1805) - composed orally, held in Ruth Evans's memory, transcribed posthumously by John Hughes (primary) — A rare woman's voice from the revival. It reached us only through memory and a later transcription by someone else, so two layers of transmission stand between her and the page.
- The seiadau (experience meetings) records and rules, Daniel Rowland's Llangeitho communion seasons, the Trevecka letters (converts' correspondence) (primary) — The revival's lived organizational core, comparable to Methodism's class meetings. Records are archival, in Welsh.
- Derec Llwyd Morgan, The Great Awakening in Wales (Epworth, 1988), with Geraint Tudur, Howell Harris (2000) and Eryn White's seiadau scholarship (secondary)
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 7: nearest coverage in 'Great Britain and Ireland' (Clark) and Ward's awakenings chapter (reference)