Some reputations rest upon a lifetime of public work. That of Ann Griffiths rests upon seventy-three surviving stanzas, a handful of letters and the extraordinary memory of another woman.
She held no religious office, published nothing in her own name and died before reaching thirty. Her life was spent almost entirely around Dolwar Fach, the Montgomeryshire farm where she was born. Yet from that seemingly narrow setting came some of the most concentrated and original religious poetry in the Welsh language.
Ann Griffiths was not simply a gifted hymn writer who happened to emerge from the Methodist revival. Her importance lies in the way she brought together the intellectual discipline of Calvinistic theology, the imagery of the Welsh Bible and an intensely personal awareness of Christ. Her poems are learned without being academic, emotional without becoming sentimental, and mystical without losing their doctrinal foundations.
They also preserve something of the religious world of rural Wales at a decisive moment, when the old culture of parish, fair and noson lawen was beginning to encounter the more disciplined spiritual culture of Methodism.
Dolwar Fach and its world
Ann was born Ann Thomas at Dolwar Fach in April 1776 and baptised at Llanfihangel-yng-Ngwynfa parish church on 21 April. She was known locally as Nansi Thomas and did not become Ann Griffiths until the last year of her life.
Dolwar Fach stood within a landscape of upland farms and deeply rooted Welsh-speaking communities. It was rural, but it was not isolated from the wider world. Routes towards Llanfyllin, Oswestry, Shrewsbury and Chester connected northern Montgomeryshire with the English borderlands, while the road westward and the tracks over the Berwyns led towards Bala, one of the great centres of Welsh Methodism.
Ann’s family was comfortably placed by the standards of the locality. Her father, John Evan Thomas, could read and write and served as churchwarden and overseer of the poor, offices which carried both responsibility and local standing. The family appears to have been hospitable, sociable and prominent in the cultural life of the neighbourhood. Ann therefore grew up in a household where religion, poetry, music and community affairs were already familiar parts of life.
Her early years should not be imagined as an unbroken preparation for sainthood. The family attended the parish church, but also enjoyed dancing, harp music, fairs and the noson lawen. Later Methodist accounts remembered Ann as lively, eloquent and fond of social entertainment. She could even turn that eloquence against the Methodists, who were still treated with suspicion and ridicule by many respectable church-going families.
This matters because her conversion was not simply the continuation of an exceptionally pious childhood. It involved a break with much of the social culture in which she had been raised.
Ann’s mother died in January 1794, when Ann was seventeen. With her elder sisters already away from home, she became mistress of Dolwar Fach. This was a substantial practical responsibility. She supervised the domestic work of the household and its servants, helped with milking and dairy production, prepared food and took part in the processing and spinning of wool.
At the time of her death, the farm possessed around eighty sheep, five spinning wheels and a loom. Dolwar Fach was therefore not merely the picturesque background to Ann’s spiritual life. It was a working household within the mixed agricultural and domestic economy of upland Montgomeryshire. Her religious meditations were formed amid butter-making, wool, livestock, servants, visitors and the recurring demands of the farming year.
The coming of Methodism
The Welsh Methodist revival had begun in south Wales during the 1730s through the work of Howell Harris, Daniel Rowland and William Williams Pantycelyn. By the later eighteenth century it had spread strongly into the north, particularly through the preaching and educational work associated with Thomas Charles of Bala.
Welsh Methodism was not an offshoot imported from England. It developed as an indigenous Welsh evangelical movement, predominantly Calvinistic in theology and, during Ann’s lifetime, still formally contained within the Established Church. It did not separate from the Church of England and begin ordaining its own ministers until 1811, six years after her death.
In practice, however, the Methodists had already created much of the structure of a separate religious community. Their members met in local societies known as seiadau, attended monthly meetings and travelled to the great quarterly associations. Preachers circulated across wide districts, carrying news and religious ideas between communities which were geographically scattered but spiritually connected.
The seiat was particularly important. It was not simply a prayer meeting. Members were encouraged to examine their inner lives, speak about temptation and assurance, and submit their religious experiences to the judgement of the group. This produced a culture in which ordinary men and women acquired an unusually precise vocabulary for discussing the movements of the soul.
Methodism entered the Dolwar Fach household through local and family connections. Ann’s brother John joined first, followed by other members of the family. Ann resisted for longer. The movement’s rejection of familiar entertainments and its searching attention to personal sin may initially have appeared joyless and excessive.
The decisive change began at Llanfyllin during Easter 1796. According to the most credible surviving tradition, Ann had gone there for the holiday festivities and encountered an open-air sermon by Benjamin Jones of Pwllheli. His preaching disturbed her. What followed was not an instant and uncomplicated conversion, but months of spiritual unease.
Ann initially considered joining the Congregationalists at Llanfyllin rather than the Methodists whom she had previously mocked. Eventually she attended Methodist preaching at Pontrobert. The experience overcame her remaining hostility, and in about 1797 she joined the local seiat. She was then twenty or twenty-one.
The change spread through the whole household. Methodist meetings had probably begun at Dolwar Fach by about 1798, and the farm was formally licensed for public worship in 1803. A place associated with music, dancing and sociability became one of the meeting points of the local revival. In this small transformation can be seen something of the much larger religious change then taking place across Wales.
A religion experienced from within
Methodism gave Ann a setting in which serious religious thought was not confined to clergy or university-educated theologians. The sermon, the Bible, the letter and the seiat all invited reflection. Ann responded to that culture with unusual intellectual and imaginative power.
She travelled across the Berwyns to Methodist gatherings at Bala, where she received communion from Thomas Charles. She also formed an important spiritual friendship with John Hughes, a weaver who became a teacher in Charles’s circulating schools and later a Methodist preacher.
Hughes lodged at Dolwar Fach around 1799 and 1800. He later remembered spending hours with Ann discussing scripture and religious experience. After he left the farm, they continued those conversations by letter. Seven of Ann’s letters to him survive, although not in her original handwriting, together with one letter in her own hand addressed to Elizabeth Evans.
These are not casual private letters in the modern sense. They belong to the disciplined language of the seiat. Ann examines the state of her soul, applies passages of scripture to her experience and discusses the condition of the Methodist cause. Hughes apparently read some of her letters aloud at society meetings for the instruction of others.
The letters show that her poetry did not arise from emotion alone. Ann possessed a formidable knowledge of the Bible. She read it as a single, interconnected account of redemption, drawing together the prophets, the Gospels, the epistles and the imagery of the Song of Songs.
Her surviving compositions are filled with biblical allusion. The references are rarely ornamental. Images from different books are placed beside one another until they illuminate the person of Christ. This was one of her greatest gifts, the ability to take a complex network of scriptural images and make it appear as a single act of vision.
Hymns composed for her own comfort
Ann appears to have begun composing most of her surviving hymns between 1802 and 1804. They were not originally written as conventional congregational hymns. They were closer to a spiritual journal expressed in verse.
John Hughes recalled that she composed when some particular matter occupied her mind. A moment of biblical meditation might produce a single stanza, which could later become part of a larger poem. Of the thirty hymns attributed to her with reasonable confidence, some consist of only one stanza, while her longest, Rhyfedd, rhyfedd gan angylion, extends to seven.
The intensely personal origins of the poems help to explain their unusual concentration. Ann was not writing to fill a hymnbook or meet the practical requirements of congregational singing. She was attempting to comprehend an experience. The hymn became a means of fixing a spiritual insight in the memory.
Her best-known opening demonstrates the quality of that vision:
Wele’n sefyll rhwng y myrtwydd
Wrthrych teilwng o fy mryd;
Er mai o ran, yr wy’n adnabod
Ei fod uwchlaw gwrthrychau’r byd.
The lines may be rendered:
Behold him standing among the myrtles,
The object worthy of my thought;
Though I know him only in part,
He is above all objects in the world.
The myrtles come from the vision in the Book of Zechariah. Ann joins that prophetic image to the language of personal devotion. Christ is at once the object she observes, the subject of scripture and the beloved upon whom her mind rests.
The next stanza names him as the Rose of Sharon, drawing upon the Song of Songs:
Rhosyn Saron yw ei enw,
Gwyn a gwridog, teg o bryd;
Ar ddeng mil y mae’n rhagori
O wrthrychau penna’r byd.
The language is sensuous, but its purpose is theological. The beauty of Christ surpasses every earthly object. Griffiths’s mysticism does not dissolve Christian doctrine into vague feeling. Its intensity comes from contemplating particular doctrines, the incarnation, atonement, resurrection and the believer’s union with Christ, until they become almost visible.
This combination of thought and feeling is central to her work. She could write of sin and judgement with the full severity of Calvinistic Methodism, but the dominant movement of her poetry is towards wonder. The redeemed soul does not merely accept a proposition. It looks, longs and is astonished.
Ruth Evans and the survival of the hymns
The survival of Ann’s work depended upon Ruth Evans, a servant at Dolwar Fach and one of her closest spiritual companions. Ruth entered the household in 1801 and possessed an exceptional memory. Ann recited many of her verses to her, and Ruth learnt them.
Some verses were already known beyond the household. Visiting preachers carried them to other societies, and individual stanzas circulated in letters. Others remained private. One tradition holds that Ann sometimes placed written verses beneath the cushion of a chair, where Ruth secretly found and memorised them.
When encouraged to preserve her work, Ann reportedly replied that she composed the verses for her own comfort and did not consider them worthy of survival. Very little in her own hand remains. The only surviving example of her poetry written by Ann herself is a stanza appended to her letter to Elizabeth Evans.
Ruth left Dolwar Fach when she married John Hughes in the spring of 1805. After Ann’s death, she recited the verses to Thomas Charles at Bala. As Ruth could not write, Charles urged John Hughes to record them. Hughes entered the stanzas into two copybooks, creating the documentary foundation upon which Ann’s literary reputation would be built.
A substantial number appeared in print within months. Around two-thirds were included in Casgliad o Hymnau, published at Bala early in 1806, while other verses appeared in connection with Robert Jones of Rhos-lan’s influential collection Grawn-sypiau Canaan.
The printed texts were not always faithful to what Ruth had remembered and Hughes had recorded. Thomas Charles, Robert Jones and perhaps Hughes himself edited wording and combined stanzas into new arrangements. Further pieces appeared during the nineteenth century, often in revised form. The manuscript versions in Hughes’s copybooks were not published in full until 1905.
Ann Griffiths’s legacy was therefore created through several stages, composition, recitation, memory, manuscript and print. At every stage another person could influence the form in which the work survived. That history does not diminish her achievement. It reveals the communal and oral world in which Welsh religious literature was made.
Marriage, childbirth and death
Ann’s father died in February 1804, leaving Ann and her brother John responsible for Dolwar Fach. On 10 October that year she married Thomas Griffiths, a farmer from Meifod and a member of the Methodist movement. Thomas moved to Dolwar Fach, rather than taking Ann away from the household over which she had presided since her mother’s death.
Their married life lasted only ten months. Ann gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth, on 13 July 1805. The child was weak and died after two weeks. Ann herself did not recover following the birth and died in August, aged twenty-nine. She was buried at Llanfihangel-yng-Ngwynfa on 12 August 1805.
Later accounts naturally interpreted the events through the tragedy of the infant’s death, but the surviving evidence does not justify a detailed medical diagnosis or a romantic account of grief carrying Ann to the grave. What can be said is stark enough. Within eighteen months, Dolwar Fach lost Ann’s father, welcomed her husband and child, and then lost both mother and baby.
Her brother John died early in 1807. Thomas Griffiths followed in April 1808. In only a few years the household which had sustained Ann’s life and work was largely broken apart.
A woman’s voice in Welsh religious culture
It is tempting to describe Ann Griffiths as a woman who overcame the exclusion of her sex by becoming a public theologian. The truth is subtler. She did not preach, seek publication or openly challenge the structure of Methodist authority. Her hymns emerged from private meditation and the shared spiritual life of the seiat.
Yet those very circumstances make her survival remarkable. Women were central to Welsh Methodism. They hosted meetings, provided food and lodging for travelling preachers, raised children within the movement and took part in the searching discussions of the societies. Much of their religious knowledge was expressed orally and disappeared with them.
Ann’s voice survived because another woman recognised its value. Ruth Evans was not simply a passive carrier of the hymns. Through attention, memory and determination, she became the first custodian of Ann Griffiths’s work. John Hughes supplied the writing, and Thomas Charles helped bring the verses into print, but without Ruth there would have been little to record.
Their story offers a glimpse of the intellectual life which could exist within an early nineteenth-century Welsh farmhouse. Neither woman possessed institutional power. One composed while managing a working farm household; the other preserved the compositions while serving within it. Together they transmitted one of the major achievements of Welsh religious poetry.
The making of a Welsh icon
Ann Griffiths’s reputation grew steadily during the nineteenth century as her hymns entered Methodist collections and Welsh Nonconformity became one of the principal forces shaping national life. She came to represent the spiritual seriousness, biblical literacy and poetic richness of the chapel tradition.
Her reputation cannot, however, be explained by Nonconformist reverence alone. The small body of work she left continues to withstand close literary examination. Saunders Lewis regarded Rhyfedd, rhyfedd gan angylion as one of the majestic achievements of European religious poetry. Her hymns have been translated, studied and sung far beyond the Montgomeryshire societies for which they were first remembered.
The best known, Wele’n sefyll rhwng y myrtwydd, later became closely associated with John Hughes’s tune Cwm Rhondda. That setting was composed more than a century after Ann’s death, but the union of words and music carried her vision into the common inheritance of Welsh congregational life.
Ann Griffiths belongs to several histories at once. She is part of the history of Montgomeryshire farming, of women’s religious experience, of the Methodist revival, of Welsh biblical culture and of the transmission of literature through oral memory. To reduce her to any one of these would miss the breadth of her significance.
Her life was geographically confined and chronologically brief, but her imagination was neither. From a farm in northern Montgomeryshire she contemplated sin, grace, incarnation and eternity in language of exceptional clarity and force. She possessed no pulpit, university or public platform. What she had was the Welsh Bible, the Methodist seiat, an extraordinary mind and a friend who remembered.
That was enough to give her a voice which Wales has never entirely ceased to hear.
Sources and Further Reading
- E. Wyn James, The Ann Griffiths Website, Cardiff University.
- “Griffiths, Ann (1776–1805), hymn-writer”, Dictionary of Welsh Biography.
- National Library of Wales, “Ann Griffiths”.
- E. Wyn James, ed., Rhyfeddaf Fyth: Emynau a Llythyrau Ann Griffiths (Gwasg Gregynog, 1998).
- E. Wyn James, “Cushions, Copy-books and Computers: Ann Griffiths (1776–1805), Her Hymns and Letters and Their Transmission”, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, vol. 90, no. 2, 2014.
- A. M. Allchin, Ann Griffiths: The Furnace and the Fountain (University of Wales Press, 1987).
- H. A. Hodges, ed. E. Wyn James, Flame in the Mountains: Williams Pantycelyn, Ann Griffiths and the Welsh Hymn (Y Lolfa, 2017).