Religious revivals are often remembered through their most dramatic moments. Crowds gather, preachers acquire an almost legendary reputation, and familiar communities appear briefly transformed by an intensity that seems capable of remaking society. Yet enthusiasm alone seldom creates institutions. If a revival is to outlive its founding generation, it must be organised, taught, printed and passed from one community to another.
This was the particular achievement of Thomas Charles of Bala.
Howell Harris supplied much of the early Welsh Methodist movement’s organising energy. Daniel Rowland gave it an extraordinary preaching ministry, while William Williams Pantycelyn placed its theology and emotional life into hymns that could be carried into farmhouses, chapels and fields. Charles belonged to a later phase. He inherited a movement already rich in preaching and spiritual experience, but still uncertain in its structures and its relationship with the Established Church.
His importance lay in giving that movement permanence.
From Bala, Charles developed schools, trained teachers, prepared catechisms, edited religious literature and worked to secure an adequate supply of Welsh Bibles. He also helped to guide Calvinistic Methodism through the difficult transition from an evangelical movement within Anglicanism to a separate Welsh denomination. His influence rested less upon one great public act than upon the patient construction of a religious culture.
The Wales that emerged from his work was a country in which ordinary people were encouraged to read, discuss, memorise and interpret Scripture in their own language. This was devotional work, but it was also cultural work. Charles helped to make the Welsh chapel not merely a place of worship, but a school, debating chamber, library and centre of communal discipline.
From Carmarthenshire to Oxford
Thomas Charles was born on 14 October 1755, probably at Longmoor in the parish of Llanfihangel Abercywyn, near St Clears in Carmarthenshire. He was the son of Rees Charles, a farmer, and his wife, Jael Bowen. His background was rural, but not wholly without connections or opportunity. Jael’s father, David Bowen of Pibwr Lwyd, had served as High Sheriff of Carmarthenshire.
The landscape of Charles’s childhood was also important. He was raised close to Llanddowror, the parish associated with Griffith Jones, whose circulating schools had carried Welsh-language literacy into communities poorly served by conventional education. Charles therefore grew up within reach of one of the most important educational experiments in eighteenth-century Wales.
From the village school at Llanddowror, he proceeded in 1769 to Carmarthen Academy. During these formative years, he came increasingly under the influence of Welsh Methodism. He later associated his decisive spiritual awakening with a sermon preached by Daniel Rowland at Llangeitho in January 1773.
This did not initially turn Charles away from the Church of England. Welsh Methodism had not yet become a separate denomination, and its leading clergy continued to regard themselves as reformers working within the Established Church. In 1775 Charles entered Jesus College, Oxford, an institution with long-standing Welsh associations. He graduated in 1779.
His time in England brought him into contact with the wider evangelical movement. During a summer vacation he stayed with John Newton at Olney, where he encountered a religious world extending well beyond Wales. Newton, the former slave-ship captain who became an Anglican clergyman and hymn writer, belonged to an influential network of evangelical clergy and lay patrons. Through such connections, Charles came to see the Welsh awakening as part of a larger British evangelical revival.
He was ordained deacon in 1778 and priest in 1780. Several curacies in Somerset followed, but his evangelical convictions sat uneasily within parts of the late Georgian Church. After his marriage and removal to Wales, he attempted to obtain work at Llangynog, Llandegla, Bryneglwys and Llan-ym-Mawddwy. None provided a secure future. His style of preaching and his Methodist associations made Anglican advancement increasingly unlikely.
The break was gradual rather than theatrical. Charles did not suddenly reject the Church in which he had been ordained. Instead, its structures ceased to offer him a workable ministry.
Sally Charles and the Making of Bala
Charles’s settlement in Bala cannot be understood without Sally Jones.
He had met her during an earlier visit to the town and, after a prolonged courtship, they married at Llanycil on 20 August 1783. Sally was the daughter of a Bala shopkeeper and was already involved in the family business. She was determined to remain in the town, and Charles accordingly made his life there.
This domestic arrangement had consequences far beyond the marriage. Sally’s shop provided the household’s principal financial support and gave her husband a degree of freedom that few poorly paid itinerant preachers could have enjoyed. While Charles travelled, preached, taught and wrote, Sally maintained the commercial foundation upon which much of that activity depended.
Her contribution belongs within a wider history of women and Welsh Methodism. Religious movements were publicly represented by male preachers, but their work was frequently sustained by women’s property, trade, hospitality and domestic labour. Sally Charles was not simply the wife waiting at home while history happened elsewhere. Her decision to remain in Bala determined the geographical centre of her husband’s ministry, while her business helped to finance it.
Bala itself proved an ideal base. It was a small market town, but its position made it accessible to Methodist communities across a wide area of north and mid Wales. Charles formally joined the Methodist society there in July 1784. During the following decades, his presence turned the town into one of the principal centres of Welsh Calvinistic Methodism.
For a substantial period he was also the only Anglican priest ministering regularly among the Methodists of north Wales. This gave his communion services particular importance. People travelled considerable distances to Bala because only an ordained clergyman could lawfully administer the sacraments. The monthly communion became both a religious observance and a gathering point for a dispersed movement.
By the 1790s, Bala was no longer merely Charles’s home. It had become a centre of Methodist authority.
A Revival in Need of Readers
Charles was deeply troubled by the limited knowledge of Scripture he encountered in north Wales. This was not necessarily evidence of indifference. Many people lacked schools, books and the leisure in which to acquire formal education. Rural communities were scattered, incomes were low, and instruction beyond the household or parish church remained uneven.
The problem, as Charles understood it, was therefore both spiritual and practical. People could not study a Bible they could not read, and they could not read a Bible they could not obtain.
His first response was to revive the circulating-school model associated with Griffith Jones and Bridget Bevan. Teachers trained by Charles moved between communities, usually remaining for six or nine months before passing to another district. Children, young people and adults were taught to read Welsh, with the Bible serving as both textbook and object of instruction.
The teachers were poorly paid. Early salaries of around £10 a year were met through collections among the Methodist societies of north Wales. Yet the system expanded rapidly. Charles did more than endorse the idea from Bala. He trained teachers, visited schools, examined pupils and maintained the network through correspondence and personal supervision.
These schools were instruments of evangelism, but they also carried literacy into communities in which educational opportunities were scarce. They showed that instruction need not depend upon an endowed grammar school or a resident clergyman. A teacher could arrive in a rural district, gather pupils from several social groups and leave behind people capable of reading Welsh for themselves.
The weakness was continuity. Once the teacher departed, the community needed some means of preserving what had been learned.
The Sunday School as a Welsh Institution
Charles found that continuity in the Sunday school.
He did not invent the Sunday school, either in Britain or in Wales. Robert Raikes had promoted such schools in England, while other Welsh pioneers were already experimenting with Sunday instruction. Charles’s contribution was different. Through sustained organisation, regular visitation and the production of suitable reading material, he placed the Welsh Sunday-school movement upon a durable foundation.
The institution that developed in Wales was not simply a children’s class attached to worship. Adults attended alongside children. Servants and labourers who could not enter a weekday school were able to learn on the one day ordinarily free from work. People read aloud, answered questions, memorised passages and were publicly examined in their knowledge.
At first, the innovation met resistance. Some regarded teaching on a Sunday as a violation of the Sabbath. Others doubted whether one day’s instruction could compensate for six days without it. Charles nevertheless persisted, and Sunday schools gradually followed the circulating teachers into village after village.
Their consequences extended beyond the immediate purpose of Bible reading. The schools fostered habits of concentration, public speaking and collective study. They gave ordinary men and women experience of teaching and organisation. They also created a body of lay leadership from which the chapels could draw teachers, elders, deacons and preachers.
In this respect, the Sunday school helped to democratise certain forms of knowledge without overturning the religious discipline in which that knowledge was contained. Charles was not attempting to produce political radicals or freethinkers. His educational programme was explicitly Christian and doctrinal. Yet by teaching people to read, question and explain, it inevitably enlarged the intellectual resources available within Welsh-speaking society.
Creating a Welsh Religious Reading Public
Literacy required books. Charles therefore became a writer, editor and publisher as well as a preacher and educational organiser.
In 1799, working with Thomas Jones of Denbigh, he began publishing Trysorfa Ysprydol, or The Spiritual Treasury. It was the first Welsh denominational religious magazine. It supplied Methodist preachers, teachers and readers with theological and devotional material, and represented an important stage in the growth of the Welsh periodical press.
Charles subsequently produced a Welsh spelling book, rules for the conduct of Sunday schools, catechisms and other instructional works. His Hyfforddwr yn Egwyddorion y Grefydd Gristionogol, published in 1807, became one of the most influential Welsh religious manuals of the nineteenth century. It passed through more than eighty editions.
His Geiriadur Ysgrythyrol, or Scriptural Dictionary, was more ambitious still. Published in parts from 1805, it offered Welsh readers an extensive guide to the people, places, doctrines and natural world of the Bible. It was not merely a reference book. It attempted to furnish readers with the intellectual equipment required to understand Scripture without abandoning their own language.
Charles also recognised the importance of controlling the means of production. In 1803 he encouraged the printer Robert Saunderson to establish himself in Bala. Printing, education and religious organisation were thus drawn together in the same small town.
The effect was cumulative. The school created the reader. The magazine, catechism and dictionary developed that reader’s knowledge. The chapel provided a community in which reading could be practised and discussed. The printed Welsh word bound scattered societies into a shared religious culture.
Mary Jones and the Scarcity of Welsh Bibles
Yet one essential book remained difficult to obtain.
The demand for Welsh Bibles repeatedly exceeded the available supply. The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge had assisted Charles, and a substantial edition appeared in 1799, but the shortage persisted. Charles’s educational success had helped to create thousands of potential Bible readers without creating an adequate system for supplying them with affordable books.
It was against this background that Mary Jones came to Bala in 1800.
Mary was the fifteen-year-old daughter of a poor widowed weaver from Llanfihangel-y-Pennant, beneath Cadair Idris. Having learned to read at one of the schools associated with Charles’s movement, she saved for years to purchase a Bible of her own. She then walked more than twenty miles to Bala to obtain it from Charles.
The surviving copy, now held among the Bible Society archives at Cambridge University Library, confirms the substance of the story. Mary’s journey was not merely a sentimental Victorian legend. It arose from the real poverty of rural households, the scarcity of Welsh books and the intense value that newly literate readers could place upon a volume of their own.
Later retellings made Mary’s walk the decisive inspiration for the British and Foreign Bible Society. The history is more complicated. There is no contemporary evidence that Charles recounted her story at the London committee meeting of December 1802 where the need for Welsh Bibles was discussed. He knew of many people who had struggled to obtain the Scriptures, and his campaign had begun before Mary arrived at his door.
Her importance should not therefore be exaggerated into a single moment of institutional creation. Nevertheless, there is early evidence that one particular young woman had made a strong impression upon Charles, and Mary remained connected to his educational movement. Her experience embodied the case he took to London. It demonstrated what the shortage of Welsh Bibles meant in the life of an actual person.
On 7 December 1802, Charles addressed a committee of the Religious Tract Society on the need for an assured supply of inexpensive Welsh Bibles. The discussion eventually widened beyond Wales. If a new organisation were to provide Scriptures, why should it not serve other countries and languages as well?
The British and Foreign Bible Society was formally established in March 1804. Charles was not its sole founder, but his Welsh campaign was one of the principal circumstances from which it emerged. The Society’s early work included a Welsh New Testament in 1806 and a complete Welsh Bible in 1807, both prepared under his supervision.
A shortage encountered in rural Wales had contributed to the creation of an international institution.
Authority, Orthodoxy and Organisation
Charles was an educational innovator, but he was not a theological liberal. His Calvinism was orthodox, disciplined and cautious. He believed that knowledge required boundaries and that a religious movement needed recognised doctrine as well as spiritual enthusiasm.
This conservatism could make him severe. In 1791 he played a leading part in the expulsion of the biblical commentator Peter Williams, whose views were suspected of tending towards anti-Trinitarianism. To modern readers, the dispute can appear narrow and punitive. To Charles, however, doctrinal uncertainty threatened the integrity of a movement whose cohesion depended upon shared belief.
His organisational reforms were similarly practical rather than democratic in any modern political sense. Around 1800 he encouraged Methodist societies to elect their own leaders, later known as elders, rather than having them appointed centrally. This gave local congregations greater responsibility while also creating a more reliable structure of oversight.
He defended the Methodists against accusations of political subversion. In The Welsh Methodists Vindicated, published in 1802, Charles answered claims that the movement encouraged Jacobinism. In an age overshadowed by the French Revolution, popular gatherings, itinerant speakers and organisations outside established institutions could easily arouse suspicion. Charles sought to present Methodism as orderly, loyal and morally beneficial.
He was building a disciplined religious society, not a revolutionary one.
The Reluctant Separation of 1811
The question that most tested Charles’s conservatism was ordination.
For decades the Calvinistic Methodists had occupied an uncertain position. Their societies, preaching meetings and associations increasingly resembled a separate church, yet the sacraments could still be administered only by clergy ordained within the Church of England. As the movement grew, the limited number of sympathetic Anglican clergymen became an increasingly serious problem.
Pressure mounted for the Methodists to ordain ministers of their own. Charles initially opposed the proposal. His Anglican ordination mattered to him, and he retained an attachment to the Established Church long after any realistic prospect of advancement within it had disappeared.
His resistance also reflected temperament. Charles mistrusted precipitate change. He feared both disorder and an irrevocable division within Welsh Methodism. For around two years he stood against the demand for ordination.
Eventually, practical necessity overcame his reluctance. In 1811 the Calvinistic Methodist connexion ordained its first ministers at meetings in Bala and Llandeilo. Charles was commissioned to prepare the form of ordination. Once the decision had been made, he supported the new ministers and insisted that reluctant societies recognise their sacramental authority.
The ordinations marked the effective separation of Welsh Calvinistic Methodism from the Church of England, although the denomination’s later institutional identity took time to develop. Charles did not enter that new future eagerly, but he helped to make it workable.
That hesitation is important. It reveals him not as a simple denominational founder, but as a man standing between two religious worlds. He had been formed within Anglicanism, transformed by revival and finally compelled by circumstances to accept that the movement he served had become a church in its own right.
Death and Achievement
Thomas Charles died at Bala on 5 October 1814, nine days before his fifty-ninth birthday. He was buried in the churchyard at Llanycil, the parish church where he and Sally had married thirty-one years earlier. Sally died later that same month.
By then the revival Charles had joined as a young man had changed profoundly. It possessed schools, publications, elected local leaders, ordained ministers and a far more secure denominational structure. Bala had become a centre of Welsh religious life, while the demand for Welsh Bibles had helped to produce an organisation of international reach.
Charles’s influence cannot be reduced to the familiar image of a kindly clergyman giving a Bible to a poor girl. That encounter was significant, but his greater achievement was systemic. He connected preaching with teaching, literacy with publishing, and individual conversion with durable institutions.
There were limitations to his vision. His theology allowed little room for dissent, and his educational work was intended to produce disciplined Christian readers rather than independent critics. Nor did he create Welsh literacy from nothing. He built upon the work of Griffith Jones, Bridget Bevan and others whose schools had already transformed substantial parts of eighteenth-century Wales.
What Charles supplied was continuity. He took methods that had proved effective, adapted them to the needs of north Wales and placed them within a network capable of surviving him.
Conclusion
Thomas Charles was one of the makers of modern Wales because he understood that belief requires institutions if it is to endure. A sermon might awaken a congregation, but a school could shape a generation. A revival might fill a chapel, but a Bible, catechism or periodical could enter the home and remain there.
His life also demonstrates that the making of Welsh Nonconformity was not solely the work of great preachers. It depended upon shopkeepers and teachers, printers and subscribers, travelling schoolmasters and voluntary instructors. It depended upon women such as Sally Charles, whose commercial labour supported a public ministry, and upon readers such as Mary Jones, whose determination exposed the gulf between spiritual hunger and material provision.
If Howell Harris was the movement’s organiser, Daniel Rowland its commanding preacher and William Williams Pantycelyn its poetic voice, Thomas Charles was the builder who gave the revival an educational and institutional inheritance.
The nineteenth-century Welsh chapel, with its Sunday school, library, periodical culture, lay leadership and attachment to the Welsh Bible, owed much to the foundations he laid at Bala.
Sources and Further Reading
John Aaron, Thomas Charles of Bala, Banner of Truth, 2022.
D. E. Jenkins, The Life of the Rev. Thomas Charles, B.A. of Bala, three volumes, 1908.
D. Densil Morgan, ed., Thomas Charles o’r Bala, University of Wales Press, 2014.
E. Wyn James, “Bala and the Bible: Thomas Charles, Ann Griffiths and Mary Jones”, Cardiff University.
John Roberts, “Thomas Charles (1755–1814), Methodist Cleric”, Dictionary of Welsh Biography.
Geraint H. Jenkins, The Foundations of Modern Wales, 1642–1780, Oxford University Press, 1987.
D. Densil Morgan, The Span of the Cross: Christian Religion and Society in Wales, 1914–2000, University of Wales Press, 1999.
Cambridge University Library Special Collections, “The Return of Mary Jones’s Bible to Bala”.
National Library of Wales, “Denominational Magazines”, including Trysorfa Ysprydol.