BISHOP William Morgan’s 16th-century Welsh-language Bible, Y Beibl Cyssegr-lan, can be found in a farmhouse at Ty Mawr Wybrnant, near Penmachno, in north Wales. Morgan, who was Bishop of Llandaff in 1595 and St Asaph in 1601, spent about ten years translating the Bible into Welsh at the request of Queen Elizabeth I.
One thousand copies were printed and distributed to every church in Wales. About 60 copies of the original 1588 Bibles survive. The copy at Ty Mawr attracts hundreds of pilgrims and visitors every year, and is featured in a new BBC series Hidden Treasures of the National Trust. The episode also documents the weatherproofing of the Ty Mawr farmhouse and the opening of a library there, containing donated Bibles in different languages from all over the world.
Bishop Morgan was born and raised at the rural farmhouse in Ty Mawr before being educated at St John’s College, Cambridge. He was ordained priest by the Bishop of Ely in 1568 and held several benefices across Wales. Twenty years later, when her kingdom was fighting off the Spanish Armada, Elizabeth I commissioned a Welsh Bible to help to secure the Church of England’s dioceses in Wales.
The documentary shows the Bible being restored before it was loaned to the Welsh Senedd for an exhibition. Fflur Medi Owen, programming and partnership officer for the National Trust, says that the translation of the Welsh Bible was pivotal for the preservation of the Welsh language: its timing was quite significan, because the language had become “very dialect-heavy”.
“I do think we would have been able to understand each other, but things were falling out of shape,” says Ms Owen. “The green light to commission the Bible into Welsh by William Morgan came at a time that meant the language could be given a form and structure.”
She says that the Ty Mawr farmhouse has about 500 visitors a year. Many of them are Americans on a quest to discover their ancestral roots, which she connects to the Welsh concept of “cynefin” — the deep sense of belonging to a particular place. “Their search for roots can be quite urgent within them. Every time I come to Ty Mawr, I realise how lucky we are to have that connection to that language with the land our feet are walking on. Welsh is an old, old Brittonic language — it’s like an umbilical cord. Had it not been for William Morgan, our Welsh language would have gone like Manx and Cornish.”
THE TY MAWR Bible did not cope very well with the light and heat in the Welsh Senedd, Ms Owen says, and “got a bit stressed”. It is due to return to the farmhouse at the end of May, where it will be available to visitors once more. It has been strange for it to be absent from its usual home, she says.
Matthew Horwood/National TrustLa Sankta Biblio Bible in Esperanto at the Senedd, Cardiff
“I miss it. It has a personality and a feel to it. We tried to put a facsimile in there, but it was terrible: it didn’t work. But it is important to take it out, as it is a pilgrimage to get to us. When we do take it out, such as to the Senedd in Cardiff, we had children from schools around the Bay area, many of whom are first generation BIPOC [black, indigenous, people of colour] Welsh-speakers; so it was such a joy to introduce them to this story.”
She says that watching the Bible being restored was like “watching surgery”, and she was very grateful for the work of the conservator. “It was quite moving. You can cultivate a relationship with an object,” she says.
Sharon Hodkinson is a library and archive conservator, who painstakingly restored the Ty Mawr Bible, which had become dog-eared and brittle. “It took three days to work on it,” she says. “The main thing was to remove the surface dirt on a microscopic level, which took quite a while as there were around 500 pages.
“I located edge tears and repaired them with tissue and paste, and finally I re-adhered some of the leather on the cover. It was basically stabilising the Bible to make sure it wouldn’t come to harm during its trip to the Senedd.”
She particularly enjoyed being able to work on site in the farmhouse. “It really is in the middle of nowhere, and when I first went there I thought I had gone the wrong way, but then it just appeared.”
She continues: “It was wonderful to have visitors arrive who were able to watch me work and it really was a privilege. A lot of the objects people want to see are in a display case, but I get to look at them and work with them with my own hands.”
The Revd Dr Aneurin Glyn, Guild Vicar of St Benet’s Welsh Church, Paul’s Wharf, in the City of London, remembers celebrating the 400th anniversary of the William Morgan Bible in his childhood. He was pleased to hear about the restoration of the Ty Mawr Bible.
“It’s probably true to say that it helped preserve the Welsh language: it came about around the same time as the King James Version in English and had a similar impact for Welsh people,” he says. “Growing up in Wales, it was still very culturally and religiously significant, and it is a big part of Welsh culture.”
Hidden Treasures of the National Trust will be shown tonight at 9 p.m. on BBC2 and and will be available on BBC iPlayer.