Howell Harris (1714–1773): The Making of Evangelical Wales

On 21 July 1773, Howell Harris died at Trefeca, the Breconshire home from which, nearly forty years earlier, he had begun carrying religious revival along the roads of Wales.

He left no great body of theology. His surviving hymns never acquired the national place of those written by William Williams Pantycelyn. As a preacher, he did not command the enduring reputation of Daniel Rowland of Llangeitho. He had never been ordained, despite repeatedly seeking admission to holy orders, and his career had been damaged by theological controversy, personal scandal and a bitter separation from his fellow Methodists.

Yet it is difficult to imagine the Welsh Methodist Revival without him. Harris possessed a rare capacity to turn conviction into movement. He travelled, preached, corresponded, recorded, admonished and organised with an energy that astonished his contemporaries and eventually exhausted him. Converts were gathered into societies. Local societies were joined through Associations. Letters carried news between districts and connected Wales with a wider British and international evangelical world.

The National Library of Wales calls him the organiser of the Methodist Revival in Wales and the creator of its “societies” and “associations.” That judgement is substantially correct, but it is not the whole man.[1]

Harris could gather people because he first overwhelmed them. His organisational authority arose from personal intensity, and the force that helped him construct a movement could also make him overbearing, suspicious and divisive. His achievement and his failure came from much the same source.

An awakening at Talgarth

Howell Harris was born at Trefeca, near Talgarth, on 23 January 1714. He was the youngest son of Howell Harris and Susanna Powell and was educated at Llwyn-llwyd before working as a schoolmaster at Llangorse and Llangasty between 1732 and 1735.[2]

His family background is worth pausing over. The Talgarth parish register described his father as “Howell Powell alias Harris”, a man who had come from Llangadog in Carmarthenshire to the Talgarth district around 1700 and married Susanna Powell of Trefeca-fach in 1702.[2] The household produced three sons whose lives travelled in strikingly different directions. Howell became the evangelist. His elder brother Joseph Harris, originally trained as a blacksmith, went to London, came to the attention of Edmond Halley, sailed to the West Indies to test navigational instruments, and eventually became Assay Master at the Royal Mint. He wrote on navigation, optics, money and coinage and moved within the scientific and administrative world of eighteenth-century Britain.[10]

The other brother, Thomas Harris, also left rural Breconshire for London. Beginning as a tailor, he made a substantial fortune from army clothing contracts, later purchased the Trefeca and Tregunter estates and served as High Sheriff of Brecknockshire in 1768.[11] The contrast is revealing. The Harris family was rooted in a Welsh rural community, but it was not socially static. Science, commerce, government service, landownership and evangelical religion all emerged from the same household.

His early life offered no clear indication that he would become one of the central figures of eighteenth-century Welsh religion. The decisive change came in 1735, after he heard Pryce Davies, the vicar of Talgarth, preach on the necessity of receiving Holy Communion.

The conversion was not a single instantaneous event. The sermon, preached shortly before Easter, was followed by weeks of severe self-examination. By Whitsun, Harris had become convinced that mercy had been extended to him through Christ. What followed was not a gentle intellectual adjustment but an experience of judgement, release and inward assurance which he interpreted as transforming the entire direction of his life.[2]

Like many early evangelicals, he came to regard the Christian faith not principally as inherited membership of a church, but as a personal encounter with sin and redemption.

Once persuaded that he had received mercy, he felt compelled to speak about it. That compulsion transformed his life.

At the urging of his brother Joseph, Harris matriculated at St Mary Hall, Oxford, intending to prepare for ordination. He remained there for only a few days. Returning to Wales, he began an itinerant lay ministry in houses, fields and other places beyond normal parish control. The bishop of St Davids refused to ordain him on four occasions because Harris would not abandon his irregular preaching in the open air and in private houses.[1]

He remained technically a member of the Church of England throughout his life. Nevertheless, his ministry challenged one of its practical assumptions: that public religious instruction belonged principally to ordained clergy. Harris did not wait for institutional permission. He believed that divine necessity had already supplied it.

A country ready to hear

The success of the revival cannot be explained by portraying eighteenth-century Wales as irreligious. Parish worship continued, conscientious clergy existed, older Nonconformist traditions survived and Griffith Jones’s circulating schools were already combining literacy with Christian instruction. The problem was less an absence of religion than its uneven reach.

Large rural parishes, difficult roads and a shortage of Welsh-speaking pastoral provision left many communities only lightly connected to the established Church. Formal worship did not always answer a desire for intimate spiritual experience or sustained communal belonging.

Harris entered this world with a language of startling immediacy. Salvation was not remote. Judgement was not theoretical. The soul’s condition could not be postponed until Sunday or delegated to a clergyman.

His meetings offered ordinary people an active place in religious life. They could testify, pray, examine their conduct and encourage or admonish one another. Christianity became a shared discipline rather than a service received at intervals. That was the beginning of something larger than a preaching campaign.

Taking the revival onto the road

Harris became an indefatigable traveller. He crossed Wales on horseback, preached repeatedly in a single day and entered communities where Methodist exhorters could expect mockery, intimidation and sometimes physical violence.

His private records reveal the scale and inner pressure of this existence. The National Library of Wales preserves a remarkable sequence of diaries running from 1735 to 1772, together with memoranda, prayers, Association minutes, correspondence and records relating to the affairs of Trefeca.[4]

The diaries are more than a record of mileage and meetings. They show a man continually watching himself. Harris scrutinised his motives, spiritual condition, bodily sensations, relationships and failures with exhausting attention. That habit of examination passed into the culture he helped create.

Harris wanted his hearers to do more than respond emotionally to a sermon. He gathered converts into local societies where enthusiasm could be tested through continued conduct. Members met for prayer and exhortation, but also for moral oversight. The converted life was to be practised, observed and sustained. This was the foundation of Harris’s organisational importance. A crowd could disperse. A society met again.

Harris and Daniel Rowland

In 1737 Harris met Daniel Rowland, the curate whose preaching at Llangeitho was already attracting considerable attention. Their alliance brought together two unusually powerful but very different personalities.

Rowland possessed the greater pulpit gift. His sermons combined theological seriousness, imaginative force and an ability to move large congregations. Harris was more restless and expansive. He travelled incessantly, discovered new adherents, maintained correspondence and imposed structure upon what might otherwise have remained a succession of local awakenings.

Among those drawn into their circle were Howell Davies and William Williams Pantycelyn. Organisational consolidation was already under way in 1742, but the first formal General Association of the Welsh societies met at Watford, near Caerphilly, on 5 and 6 January 1743. George Whitefield presided, and those present included Rowland, Harris, Howell Davies, William Williams and a body of clergy and lay exhorters.[5]

The significance of the Watford meeting lay not simply in bringing prominent revivalists into one room. It established machinery. Exhorters were to be tried and approved, their spheres of work regulated, and reports on individual societies brought to subsequent Associations. The gathering also insisted that members should continue receiving Holy Communion within the Established Church. Harris understood the achievement as the bringing of the movement under discipline.[5]

The movement did not yet understand itself as a separate denomination. Its leaders were attempting to renew Christian life while maintaining an uncertain relationship with the Church of England. The Association therefore embodied a central paradox of early Welsh Methodism. It created structures outside ordinary Anglican parish government while formally insisting that the people using them should remain within the Church.

Harris’s own connections crossed national and theological boundaries. He knew George Whitefield and the Wesley brothers and spent considerable periods in England. Surviving correspondence between Harris and John Wesley shows that they discussed the danger of division, the doctrine of election and the organisation of Methodist activity beyond Wales. While Welsh Methodism developed its Calvinistic identity, Harris continued to hope that the divided evangelical parties might somehow be held together.[6]

His efforts made the Welsh revival part of something wider than a national religious episode. Letters, printed works, visiting preachers and personal friendships connected Wales with evangelical networks extending across Britain and the Atlantic world. The correspondence preserved among the Trefeca papers is especially important because it reveals the revival not as a sequence of isolated sermons, but as a dense network of people exchanging news, doctrine, encouragement and criticism.[4]

Yet the same instinct that made Harris a builder of connections also encouraged him to imagine himself as their indispensable centre.

Authority and its dangers

Harris was not an easy man. The Dictionary of Welsh Biography describes his temperament as “cross-grained and dictatorial.”[2] The language is severe, but his own records leave little doubt that spiritual certainty could harden into personal command.

He demanded intense commitment from himself and expected it from others. Disagreement was not always treated as honest difference. Because Harris understood the revival as the work of God, resistance to his judgement could appear to him as resistance to the work itself.

His relentless travelling and preaching also brought him close to physical and emotional exhaustion. By the later 1740s, tension within the Methodist leadership had grown around doctrine, discipline, competing understandings of authority and the relationship between Calvinistic and Wesleyan Methodism. Harris’s desire to keep channels open towards John Wesley and the wider Methodist movement added another strain to relations within the Welsh leadership.[1]

Moravian spirituality exerted a powerful influence upon him. Some of the language he adopted concerning the wounds and blood of Christ, and especially his expressions about God suffering or dying at Calvary, alarmed colleagues who considered them doctrinally dangerous. There was also his relationship with Sidney Griffith of Cefnamlwch.

Harris had married Anne Williams of Yscir in 1744, and they had two daughters, one of whom died in infancy. During the late 1740s, however, he formed an intense attachment to Sidney Griffith, the estranged wife of a Caernarfonshire landowner. Harris attributed prophetic insight to her and brought her into Methodist gatherings with a prominence that disturbed his colleagues and humiliated his wife.

The attachment was not damaging merely because contemporaries suspected impropriety. Harris became increasingly willing to treat Griffith’s supposed spiritual discernment as authoritative, and the episode exposed how far his ordinary critical judgement could be overridden when personal attachment and religious certainty reinforced one another.[7]

The surviving evidence does not permit every aspect of the relationship to be reconstructed with certainty. Its consequences are clearer. Harris’s judgement appeared compromised, scandal spread and his colleagues became increasingly unwilling to submit to his leadership.

In 1750 George Whitefield excluded him from the English Calvinistic Methodist organisation. Harris and Rowland then separated, dividing the Welsh movement between their followers. William Williams remained with Rowland, while Harris withdrew with a smaller body of loyal adherents.[7]

It was not merely an argument between two difficult men, nor can the rupture be reduced to Sidney Griffith alone. The separation exposed disagreements about doctrine, discipline, personal authority and the future direction of the movement. It also revealed a problem present in many revival movements: authority founded upon personal charisma can mobilise people rapidly, but it can be difficult to restrain when the leader’s judgement fails.

Harris had helped build the movement’s discipline. He had not learned how readily that discipline could become domination.

Teulu Trefeca

After the separation, Harris turned increasingly towards Trefeca. There, from 1752, he developed the religious community known as Teulu Trefeca, the Trefeca Family.

This was more than a refuge for disappointed followers. It was an attempt to embody evangelical religion as a complete social order.

Members worshipped, worked and lived under a common discipline. The settlement included agricultural activity, workshops, a bakery and a printing press established during the 1750s. It cared for the sick and sought a degree of economic self-sufficiency. Harris occupied the position of spiritual father, directing both the religious and practical affairs of the household.[8]

The experiment reflected Moravian and other European Pietist influences, but it also grew from Harris’s own instincts. He had spent years organising scattered converts. At Trefeca he attempted to gather religion, labour, education, welfare, production and domestic life into one governed community.

There was imagination in this project. There was also control. The Family offered security, purpose and companionship, but its order was exacting and Harris’s authority extensive. Trefeca therefore reveals both sides of his religious vision. He understood that belief required social form, yet his preferred form placed the community beneath a commanding personality.

Trefeca also belonged to the eighteenth-century culture of “improvement”. Harris’s concern with ordered religion extended to productive labour and the use of land. He was associated with the establishment of the Brecknockshire Agricultural Society in the 1750s, while his scientifically minded brother Joseph was also interested in schemes of economic and agricultural improvement.[9][10] For Harris, a disciplined Christian household was not intended to be spiritually fervent but materially idle. Work, cultivation and useful employment formed part of the order he was trying to create.

The physical development of Trefeca reflected the same ambition. The family house was enlarged to accommodate the expanding community, so that the site itself became an expression of Harris’s attempt to give institutional and domestic form to revival religion. Trefeca was not simply the place from which he preached. It became the landscape in which he tried to build his religious ideal.

The preacher in uniform

One of the less familiar episodes in Harris’s life came during the Seven Years’ War. Amid fears of French invasion, he became involved with the Brecknockshire militia and served as an officer. The episode can look anomalous in the life of an evangelical preacher, but to eighteenth-century Protestant eyes military defence, national survival and religious identity could sit closely together.

Harris did not cease being an evangelist when he put on a uniform. During militia service in England he continued to preach, effectively turning military movement into another preaching circuit. John Wesley later remembered Harris preaching while stationed in East Anglia and noted the unusual protection his military status afforded him.[12]

The episode is characteristic. Harris repeatedly refused to keep the compartments of his life separate. Religion entered travel, correspondence, agriculture, communal labour and military service. He was simultaneously a preacher, organiser, communal patriarch, agricultural improver and militia officer. His ambition was not simply to win converts, but to order life around an evangelical understanding of Christian duty.

Reconciliation without restoration

Harris returned to his former Methodist associates in 1762. His return came during a renewed period of revival in Wales, particularly associated with Llangeitho, Daniel Rowland and the hymns of William Williams. Harris again attended Associations, visited societies and preached, but he did not recover the authority he had possessed during the revival’s first years. The movement had changed.

A new body of lay exhorters had emerged, and they were less willing to accept his direction. Chapels were being erected. The Association was acquiring a more definite governing role. Welsh Methodism was slowly developing the institutions that would eventually carry it beyond the Church of England.

There is an irony here. Harris returned to a movement that bore much of his organisational imprint but no longer required his personal control. The societies, correspondence networks and Associations he had helped establish had acquired lives of their own.

Harris resisted the tendency towards denominational separation. For all his irregular preaching and practical independence, he remained attached to the established Church and opposed the movement’s gradual drift away from it. This apparent contradiction was not unique among early Methodists. They could criticise the Church’s failures, organise outside its ordinary structures and still regard formal departure as a step too far.

In 1768 Harris supported the Countess of Huntingdon when she established a training college for evangelical preachers at Trefeca Isaf. Yet his health was failing, and the movement no longer depended upon him as it once had. He died on 21 July 1773 and was buried near the altar rails in Talgarth church.[2]

The burial was fitting. The layman whom bishops had refused to ordain four times, and whose ministry had strained the boundaries of Anglican order, remained within the Church to the end.

What Harris changed

Harris did not create Welsh Nonconformity by himself. Its history reaches backwards into Puritanism, Dissent, circulating schools and older traditions of Welsh-language devotion. Nor did he single-handedly convert Wales. Rowland, Williams, Howell Davies and many lesser-known exhorters, society leaders and women supporters were indispensable. His distinctive achievement was to give early Welsh Methodism movement and memory.

He carried the revival between communities that might otherwise have remained isolated. He organised converts into societies. He connected those societies through Associations. He corresponded across borders and recorded the movement with an intensity that has left historians an extraordinary archive.

The later chapel culture of Wales cannot simply be read backwards into Harris’s societies. Nineteenth-century Nonconformity developed under different political and social conditions. Even so, Harris helped demonstrate that ordinary Welsh people could sustain religious institutions through voluntary association, lay responsibility and mutual discipline.

Those habits would travel beyond religion. Chapel life eventually nurtured speakers, organisers, teachers, reformers and politicians. It provided communities with institutions not controlled by the landed interest or the established Church. Harris did not design that later civic culture, but he helped create some of the practices from which it grew. His legacy is therefore larger than a list of societies or journeys.

He helped alter where authority could be found.

A founder without a halo

There is a temptation, when writing about religious founders, either to preserve the saint or expose the fraud. Howell Harris permits neither simplification.

Harris is most useful historically when neither sanctified nor dismissed. His diaries show courage, energy, vanity, spiritual anxiety and a strong appetite for authority, sometimes within the same period of his life. Those contradictions shaped both the societies he built and the conflicts that eventually weakened his leadership.

This combination of energy and control explains why Harris could be indispensable to the movement’s early growth and still become a source of division within it.

His lasting importance lies less in comparison with Rowland or Williams than in the organisational culture he helped establish: travelling networks, correspondence, local societies and Associations that continued after individual sermons had ended.

The survival of his papers adds a final dimension to that legacy. Harris’s almost compulsive habit of recording his experiences left diaries, memoranda, prayers, Association minutes and material relating to Trefeca across the greater part of his adult life. The man who sought constantly to examine both himself and the movement thereby left later historians unusually well equipped to examine him in return.[4]

The movement eventually outgrew his control, but it retained many of the habits of association, correspondence and organisation that he had helped establish.

Sources and Further Reading

1. National Library of Wales, Howell Harris biographical and archival record
2. Dictionary of Welsh Biography, “Harris, Howell (1714–1773), religious reformer”
3. E. Wyn James, “Harris, Howel(l) (1714–73),” Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church
4. National Library of Wales, Howell Harris Diaries and Manuscripts, including diaries, memoranda, prayers, Association minutes and Trefeca papers
5. Eifion Evans, Daniel Rowland and the Great Evangelical Awakening in Wales, for the early Associations and Methodist organisation
6. David Ceri Jones, A Glorious Work in the World: Welsh Methodism and the International Evangelical Revival, 1735–1750
7. Geraint Tudur, Howell Harris: From Conversion to Separation, 1735–1750
8. Methodist Heritage, Howell Harris Museum and the Trefeca Family
9. National Library of Wales, Calvinistic Methodist Archive and Trefeca papers
10. Dictionary of Welsh Biography, “Harris, Joseph (1704–1764), Assay-master at the Mint”
11. Dictionary of Welsh Biography, “Harris, Thomas (1705–1782)”
12. John Wesley, Journal, references to Howell Harris and his preaching during militia service
13. M. H. Jones, The Trevecka Letters, or the unpublished MSS. correspondence of Howell Harris and his contemporaries (1932)
14. Martin Griffiths, Joseph Harris: An Eighteenth-Century Welsh Polymath, University of Wales Press, 2025