Edward ab Evan, 1648, and a farm called Cae’r Llan.

Edward ab Evan died in 1648. We know this because his will, dated the eighteenth of April that year, survives in a transcribed form in the Brecknockshire diocesan papers, and because his name and the year are inscribed — though no longer easily legible — on a flat ledger-stone in the south aisle of St Gwrthwl’s. Beyond that we know very little, and what we have inferred is the kind of inference a small charity ought to handle with both hands. He was a yeoman of the parish. He held the farm of Cae’r Llan. He had no surviving sons; his bequest passes the rent of the farm to ‘the use of the poor of Llanwrthwl, whom the parish shall judge in greatest need’.

That last clause is what we work with today. The wording is striking for its time. Most early-modern hardship bequests in Wales and the Marches are tied to specific categories of poor — the deserving widow, the named almsman, the orphan apprentice. Edward ab Evan’s bequest leaves it to the parish to judge. He trusted his neighbours, in effect, to look after his neighbours. The trust deed of 1903, which the Charity Commission drew up to consolidate the parish’s scattered bequests, retains that delegation. So does the present scheme. The trustees do the judging. The judging is the thing.

What we have inferred

Cae’r Llan farm sits on the slope above the lane that runs from the bridge up towards the head of the Elan. The house standing there now is not the seventeenth-century house — that one, like most of the long farmhouses of the upper Wye, will have been rebuilt in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century — but the walls of the lower yard are old, and the orchard on the south side has been an orchard since at least the 1840s. I have walked that yard once a year for the last thirteen years, on the way to discuss the rent and the tenancy with the present occupier. I am told, on good authority, that Edward ab Evan kept sheep on the high ground at Drygarn and barley on the lower fields. I have no document to prove that, but I have no reason to doubt the parishioner who told me, whose family has farmed the next holding for two hundred years.

What is harder to know is what Edward ab Evan looked like, who he loved, whether he was a member of the Penuel congregation that pre-dates the chapel of 1832 or a quiet conformist of the older parish church, whether he was on the parliamentary or royalist side of the long civil decade he lived through. There is no portrait. There is no memorial inscription beyond the name and the year. The trustees, over the centuries, have not pressed too hard on these questions — and I want to say, in this essay, why I think that has been the right discipline.

He trusted his neighbours, in effect, to look after his neighbours. The judging is the thing.

What we have left alone

Small charities, particularly old ones, are often pressed to ‘tell their story’ in a more vivid way. Funders ask. Local historians ask. I once received a polite letter from a doctoral student at Aberystwyth asking whether we would commission a biography of the founder, perhaps as part of an anniversary year. We declined. We declined because the story Edward ab Evan left to be told is not his own; it is the story of the parish’s judgement of need. Every time we have tried to put more of a face on him, we have ended up putting less of a face on the parish.

I think there is something general here for old charities. The founder is the door; the parish is the room. You can either spend your time looking at the door, or you can spend it in the room.

What we will note in 2048

The four-hundredth anniversary of the bequest falls on the eighteenth of April, 2048. None of the present trustees will, in the ordinary course of things, be the person who opens the meeting that month. I have written, in a sealed envelope kept with the ledgers, a short note to whoever chairs the trust in that year. It says, in effect, the only thing I have wished a previous chair had said to me thirteen years ago, when I came in: that the work is small, that the parish is small, that the records are small, and that it is, every January, exactly enough.

— G.T.