2017 was, among many other things, the ‘Year of Legends’ in Wales, a thematic designation by Visit Wales to promote the Welsh tourist experience, following the 2016 ‘Year of Epic’ and preceding the 2018 ‘Year of the Sea’. You may be excused for having missed it, but it did produce quite a few notable discussions, resources, and even controversies. Among the best of its outcomes has been the Literature Wales website, Land of Legends, a wonderful, interactive map of Welsh myth and legendry, and an exhibition on King Arthur at the National Library. And so, with the ‘Year of Legends’ drawing to a close, I think one character from Welsh history (whom this blog has discussed often in the past) needs a bit more treatment ­– the Revd Edmund Jones (1702–1793), the ‘Old Prophet’, a real Welsh legend.

Edmund Jones has had a bit of attention this year, something not at all unexpected given that his two best-known works, A Geographical, Historical, and Religious Account of the Parish of Aberystruth (1779) and A Relation of Apparitions of Spirits in the Principality of Wales (1780) are two of the best sources for eighteenth-century Welsh supernatural folklore. He received several mentions in the promotion of the Cardiff University Library Special Collections’ exhibition ‘Neighbourly Devils / Cythreuliaid Cymdogol’, for instance, as well as in the promotion of my scholarly edition of his ‘Spiritual Botanology’ earlier this month.

The fact that Jones, total ‘ledge’ though he was, has not exactly been fully embraced by the ‘Year of Legends’ isn’t surprising. After all, the main purpose has been to promote Wales to tourists in a way which is inoffensive but recognisable, drawing on the gaudy tropes which have dominated that sector for the last 300 years. This includes downplaying otherness and stressing the picturesqueness and antiquity of the land and people. Jones’s ‘superstitions’ (as they were regarded) as living beliefs rather than quaint fireside stories are already pushing the envelope a bit. And the aim is to remind tourists of things they already know in connection with Wales rather than present new characters. This is why on Visit Wales’s website promoting Welsh authors, Beatrix Potter is presented as Welsh because she holidayed there,[1] while many, many authors with stronger Welsh bona fides are not.

But beyond that, dealing with the legendary Jones would mean dealing with his biography, the dominant theme of which is his role as one of the most prominent Nonconformist religious leaders of the eighteenth-century Great Awakening in Wales. In this respect, we can just look at how the ‘Year of Legends’ largely ignored William Williams, Pantycelyn, one of Wales’s greatest and most influential religious and literary figures, the tricentenary of whose birth was also in 2017. Williams has a statue among the Welsh pantheon in Cardiff City Hall and his hymnology is so ingrained in Welsh culture that ‘Bread of Heaven’ is heard at every Welsh rugby match. Still, legend though he is, Williams received none of the fanfare that Roald Dahl (who only lived in Wales in early childhood) did last year.

Edmund Jones is recognised within Welsh historiography for two main reasons. First, as has already been noted, he is well known for his writings which provide a unique window into historical Welsh culture and society. His works are one of the main sources for ghost- and fairy-beliefs in eighteenth-century Wales, written by a believer but containing a great number of personal accounts and stories. His writings are also rather idiosyncratic. His Apparitions of Spirits was written largely after such books (and the views they represented) had fallen out of fashion, while, conversely, his Parish of Aberystruth is somewhat cutting-edge, one of the first Welsh works in the genre of local (parish/county) history, an approach to history writing popular in the latter eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Secondly, he is well-known for his role in the eighteenth-century Great Awakening in Wales, being one of the architects of the Nonconformist Wales which would dominate nineteenth-century Welsh identity, culture, and politics. Jones’s labours and accomplishments within the eighteenth-century religious revival were impressive. As he noted in Parish of Aberystruth, he largely began the Revival in Monmouthshire through his invitation to the Methodist exhorter Howell Harris to preach there. In addition to his own congregation at Ebenezer Chapel in Pontnewynydd, Jones also helped found, foster, and minister to revivalist societies and congregations throughout Wales, particularly south Wales. This was part of his intense (legendary, even) preaching itinerancy throughout Wales, which he undertook until extremely late in his very long life. At the age of eighty, he undertook a 400-mile preaching tour of north Wales, preaching twice a day. All of this effort was undertaken without remunerative reward, and Jones and his wife led a life of noted penury, often depending largely on the Lord to provide. Given this indefatigable commitment to his ministry, combined with his eccentric beliefs, forceful personality, and deep, steadfastly-held convictions, it is little surprise that Jones has long attracted the attention of Nonconformist historians.

But Jones’s story has always been more than mere biography. An eccentric, well-travelled character who believed strongly in the supernatural and who was regarded as having prophetic powers (as his epithet ‘The Old Prophet’ attests) is bound to gather a few apocryphal stories. And Jones has more than his fair share, propagated both within local folklore and even by his biographers. The fact that several of these stories appear in a biography written by one of Jones’s friends a year after his death attests to how Jones was imbued with legendary qualities even by his contemporaries. Further evidence of this is shown in Gleanings through Wales, Holland, and Westphalia (1795) by Samuel Jackson Pratt (who deserved his surname). Pratt records meeting a clergyman, described as ‘a little cracked’ who was almost certainly Jones, with whom he discussed the fairy-folk before being informed by the man who introduced them,

I have known him to run on about the fairies, till he has foamed at the mouth like a mad dog, and sworn that there were then a thousand in the room with him, visible only to himself, on account of his great respect for them, and I remember once, on our townsfolk laughing at him, in one of these fairy-fits, he fell into a passion, and said, he would make these little mischiefs pinch and haunt them by day and night, for their tauntings: and, … upon two of the company snapping their fingers and saying, they neither cared for him, nor the fairies, he made them both repent it: for that very night, and all the next day, the poor men were so tormented by these little devils, God forgive me, that they were obliged to make interest with Parson [Jones] … to get them off the premises. (p. 138)

This is, of course, not a story with which Jones would have identified, as he would have seen it as allying with the spirits of darkness (as he regarded fairies), but it does go a good way in showing that he had a reputation.

Other stories endured through the years ­– Evan Jones (Ieuan Gwynedd) (1850) records stories about Jones which were told by Thomas Price (Carnhuanawc) and later Edgar Phillips (Trefîn) (1959), Roy Palmer (1998), and John Harvey (2004) all note that folk-stories about Jones were told in living memory. Some accounts concern his prophetic powers. Ebenezer Chapel was supposed to be named for Jones’s prediction that its next minister would be named Ebenezer (it was Ebenezer Jones). He was also supposed to have predicted the industrial canals which were constructed in the years following his death by telling a companion that before long ships would be seen sailing through the mountains of up-land Monmouthshire. On another occasion two men who had planned to visit Jones in secret arrived at his door only to hear him praying for their safe arrival. Other stories concern his ministry. Once he met a congregation which wanted to build a meeting-house, for which two sites had been proposed. Called in to arbitrate, Jones shouted for the congregation to kneel and began to pray. After a painfully long prayer session, he led the congregation out, marching them up and down a hill until a bird fluttered down from a tree and settled on Jones’s shoulder, settling the location and the matter.

Jones’s travels and his extreme penury also generated stories. His wife, Mary, also appears in these stories, and indeed their marriage was itself somewhat legendary. George Whitefield was supposed to have decided to marry after seeing Edmund and Mary’s harmonious union, although, thankfully, this is not true and blame for the trials and tribulations of Elizabeth Whitefield cannot be laid at the Jones’s doorstep. There are a couple of stories about Jones’s charity on the road. Having been given some money so that he could buy malt to brew his winter beer, Jones passed through a village on his way home where, hearing the cries of the poor, he distributed all he had been given to the inhabitants. When he got home he told his Mary, who applauded his charity and showed him a sack of malt which a neighbour had providentially given them. Similarly, he once gave the clothes off his own back to clothe a poor beggar, only to arrive home to find that a full roll of flannel had been given to his wife.

Naturally, several stories about Jones concern his combat with evil spirits and the Devil. Many of these were recorded by Jones himself, in additional material intended for a second volume on apparitions. On one preaching excursion he was haunted three times, once in a room where a book he was reading was repeatedly knocked to the ground, once after a farmer had removed a Roman gravestone which Jones had examined, and once by the Devil himself who disturbed his sleep. He and his wife also met with diabolical trouble within their own house (which was haunted), and Jones records that Mary was tormented and even physically attacked by the Devil himself while he was on a preaching tour in north Wales.

One of the striking things about Edmund and Mary’s dealings with the diabolic is how they contrast and complement one another. In one story about Edmund, he is portrayed as refusing to pray at the bedside of an old woman who he regarded as a witch, leaving another minister to pray while he waited outside the door. However, overcome by the spirit of the other minister’s prayer, he began to cry out ‘amen’ and ‘bendigedig’ which attracted the attention of the woman’s giant mastiff, who poked his head out the window and set to howling in accompaniment to the ‘Old Prophet’. Seeing the dog, Jones yelled that ‘Old Nick’ had come to claim his servant, and ran off, terrified, down the street with the very confused hound at his heels. This humorous timidity contrasts with stories about Mary which portray her no-nonsense bravery. In one version, while visiting a friend she elects to stay overnight, which is only reluctantly granted by her host who explains that the guest room is haunted. Undaunted, Mary announces that she would take the room and, bringing a candle and a bible, retires for the night. Sure enough, the Devil appears to torment to her, telling her ‘Your faith is in that candle’. At this, the sensible, forthright Mary merely tells Satan that he’s a liar and blows the candle out, upon which, defeated, he disappears! In another, more earthy account, she is in the cellar, attempting to pour a pint for her husband but the beer will not flow. On looking up, she sees the Devil sat astride the cask, leading to the same exchange over faith and candles with the same effect. Of course, this timid, superstitious Jones and his confident, straight-talking wife are only one aspect of stories about the Joneses within their larger folk- and historical characterisation. Jones is presented elsewhere as a forceful figure, able to break up a wild barroom brawl by simply walking in and shouting ‘Let peace be in this house’.

Edmund Jones has a bit of everything for the Year of Legends. He is a notable historical figure, of importance within Welsh religious, cultural, social, and national history. He wrote books which provide excellent sources for the legends and folklore of eighteenth-century Wales, but also engaged actively with those legends beyond the page, living within a supernatural worldview which brought him into conflict with the supernatural. In his written works, he also demonstrates a great regard for Wales itself, and especially his own milltir sgwar, writing boldly on Welsh subjects and about Welsh locations, communities, and people, in a self-consciously Welsh way. But above all, Edmund Jones was and became a legend, an enduring character in local folklore and in projects of Nonconformist myth-making. He is, therefore, a perfect subject with which to end 2017, a total Welsh legend.

[1] To get an idea of this ‘Welsh’ author’s opinion of her (supposed) people, here she is on Machynlleth in 1888: ‘Machynlleth, wretched town, hardly a person could speak English.’ Not exactly views I would expect to be promoted by Visit Wales!

Further Reading

Adam Coward, ‘The Life and Times of the “Old Prophet”: Saint-like Attributes of the Rev. Edmund Jones (1702–93)’, in Madeleine Gray (ed.), Rewriting Holiness: Reconfiguring Vitae, Re-signifying Cults (London: King’s College London Centre for Late Antique & Medieval Studies, 2017), pp. 205–225.

[Jones, Evan (Ieuan Gwynedd)], ‘Edmund Jones a’i Amseroedd’, Yr Adolygydd. 1: 1, 3 (1850), 100–118, 277–301.

Roy Palmer, The Folklore of (Old) Monmouthshire (Little Logaston: Logaston Press: 1998), pp. 53–56.

Edgar Phillips (Trefîn), Edmund Jones ‘The Old Prophet’ (London: Robert Hale Limited: 1959).