Myddleton, by which he is best known, is his translation of the Psalms (1603) into Welsh cywydd metre, a difficult and profitless experiment.
With Edmwnd Prys (1541–1624), the famous archdeacon of Merioneth, we come to distinctly modern times. He is hardly a great poet, if we judge him by the canons which are now popular. His gift was a gift of terse and biting statement, and his cywyddau on the whole have more of literary than of poetical merit. He was a man of vast learning, and his works are full of scholastic and often difficult allusions. His most famous cywyddau are those written in the literary quarrel between him and Wiliam Cynwal. “Wiliam Cynwal,” says Goronwy Owen, “though the greater poet, was like a man fighting with bare fists against complete armour,” and it may be freely granted that in this, the most famous quarrel in Welsh literature, the palm of victory rested with the contentious old ecclesiastic. We shall deal with the rest of Edmwnd Prys’s literary work in the section on the rise of popular poetry.
Here the age of the cywydd and the awdl, as the chief forms of verse, ends. They appear again in the succeeding centuries, but as aliens among a nation that no longer paid them homage. The distinctly Welsh fashion in song was dying out.
6. Prose, 1550–1750.—One of the most striking features of Welsh literature is the almost entire absence of prose between 1300 and 1550. The genius of the people has always been an eminently poetical and imaginative one, and the history of Wales, politically and socially, has always been a fitter subject for poetry than for prose. During this period, Wales enjoyed a rest from propagandists and revolutionaries which has seldom been the happy lot of any other nation—they lay content with their own old traditions, acquiescing proudly in their separation from the other nations of Europe, and in their aloofness from all the movements which shook England and the continent during those years. Dynasties came and went, one religion ousted another religion, a new learning exposed the absurdities of the old, but the Welsh, among their hills, knew nothing of it; and when new ideas began to brood over the consciousness of the nation, they never got beyond the stage of providing new subjects for cywyddau. The Peasant Revolt, for instance, had but little effect on Welsh history, its most important contribution to the heritage of the nation being Iolo Goch’s superb “Cywydd to the Labourer.” Even the Reformation, which helped to change the whole fabric of English literature, had little effect on that of Wales, and the age of the cywydd dragged out wearily its last years without experiencing the slightest quickening from the great movement which was remaking Europe. Hardly a prophet or reactionary raised his voice in defence or condemnation, and the Welsh went on serenely making and reading poetry. The two political movements in which Wales was really interested, the revolt of Glyndŵr and the accession of Henry VII., paid their tribute to its poetry alone, and both enterprises had sufficient of romance in them to repel the historian and to capture the poet. Naturally, therefore, we have no prose in this period, because there was no cause strong enough to produce it. What prose the nation required they found in the tales of romance, in the legends of Arthur and Charlemagne and the Grail, and, as for pedigrees and history, were they not written in the cywyddau of the poets?
The little prose that was produced during this period (1300–1550) was of an extraordinary kind. It was simply an exercise in long sentences and in curiously built compounds, and therefore more nearly allied to poetry. It generally took the form of dewisbethau, a list of the “choice things” of such and such a person, or of the later triads (trioedd), which, starting from an ancient nucleus, gradually grew till, at the present day, Wales has a gnomic literature out of all proportion to the rest of its prose. Modern Welsh prose, however, is only very indirectly connected with these compositions. It is almost altogether a product of the Biblical literature which began to appear after the Reformation, and we shall proceed to give here the main facts and dates in its development. The first Welsh book was printed in 1546. It consisted of extracts in Welsh from the Bible and the Prayer Book, and a calendar. The author was Sir John Prys (1502–1555). The most important name in the early part of this period is William Salesbury (1520?–1600?). His chief books were, A Dictionary in Englyshe and Welshe (printed in 1547, and published in facsimile reprint by the Cymmrodorion Society), Kynniver Llith a Ban (1551), the Prayer Book in Welsh (1567), and the most important of all his works, the translation of the New Testament (1567). It is difficult to form any estimate, at this distance of time, of the impetus which William Salesbury gave to Welsh prose, but it must be regretfully admitted that his great work was marred by many defects. He had a theory that Welsh ought to be written as much like Latin as possible, and the result is that his language is very poor Welsh, both in spelling and idiom; it is an artificial dialect. It is a striking testimony, however, to his influence that many of the constructions and words which he manufactured are found to this day in correct literary Welsh.
In 1567 was published a Welsh Grammar by Dr Gruffydd Roberts, a Roman Catholic priest living at Milan (reprinted in facsimile, Paris, 1883), and in 1583, under the direction of Dr Rhosier Smyth, his Drych Cristionogawl was published at Rouen. Many other important Welsh books were produced during these years, but the work which may be regarded as having the greatest influence on the subsequent literature of Wales was the translation of the Welsh Bible (1588) by Dr William Morgan (1547?–1604), bishop of Llandaff, and afterwards of St Asaph. The Authorized Version (1620) now in use is a revision of this work by Dr Richard Parry, bishop of St Asaph (1560–1623). In 1592 the Welsh Grammar of Sion Dafydd Rhŷs (1534–1609) was published—a most valuable treatise on the language and on the rules of Welsh poetry. It was followed in 1621 by the Welsh Grammar, and in 1632 by the Welsh Dictionary of Dr John Davies o Fallwyd (1570?–1644).
There are two prose compositions which stand entirely by themselves in this period of Bibles and grammars—the History of Ellis Gruffydd, and Morris Kyffin’s Deffyniad y Ffydd. The former was a soldier in the English army during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and wrote a long history of England from the earliest times to his own day. This document, which has never been published, and which lies hidden away among the Mostyn MSS., is a most important and valuable original contribution to the history of the author’s contemporaries, and it sheds considerable light on the inner life of the court and the army. It is written in a delightfully easy style, contrasting favourably with the stiff diction of this period of translations. The work of Morris Kyffin (1555?–1598?) which we have mentioned is a translation of Bishop Jewel’s Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae (1562) and was published in 1595. This work is the first piece of modern Welsh prose within reach of the ordinary reader, written in the rich idiom of the spoken Welsh. It is a precursor of many other books of its kind, a long series culminating in the immortal Bardd Cwsc. In this sense Morris Kyffin may with perfect justice be hailed as the father of modern Welsh prose.
Most of the works which were afterwards written in the strong idiomatic Welsh of Morris Kyffin were on religious subjects, and many of them were translated from the English. The first was Ymarfer o Dduwioldeb (1630) by Rowland Vychan o Gaergai (a translation of Bailey’s Practice of Piety), which was followed in 1632 by Dr John Davies’s Llyfr y Resolution, and in 1666 by Hanes y Ffydd Ddiffuant (A History of the True Faith) by Charles Edwards. All these authors and many of their successors were strong adherents of the Established Church, which was then intensely Welsh in sentiment. But in the midst of these churchmen, a flame-bearer of dissent appeared—Morgan Llwyd o Wynedd, who published in 1653 “a mystery to be understood of some, and scorned of others”—Llyfr y Tri Aderyn (The Book of the Three Birds). It is in the form of a discussion between the eagle (Cromwell), the dove (Dissent) and the raven (the Established Church). This book is certainly the most important original composition published during the 17th century, and to this day remains one of the widely-read classics of the Welsh
