ABSTRACT
This thesis examines Gregynog as an ancient landed estate in a Welsh border county, and evaluates its place in the social history of Wales from the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth century.
Today, Gregynog Hall is noted for its connection with philanthropists and art collectors Gwendoline (1882-1951) and Margaret (1884-1963) Davies, the Gregynog Press, and later as a University of Wales study centre. But until 1913 the mansion presided over a landed estate in the Welsh border county of Montgomery, with roots in the fifteenth century.
The distinctive character of the Gregynog estate (its evolution and inheritance; the genealogy, nature and politics of its landlords; its agents; its location in the former March of Wales; its relations with its tenantry and local communities and its response to economic, religious, political and social change) offers new perspectives on traditional perceptions of Welsh identity and society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially in relation to the role of the landowning classes in the evolution of a new social order in late Victorian Wales. The transition of ownership in the 1790s from the homely squire, Arthur Blayney, last of a native Welsh dynasty, to Charles Hanbury-Tracy of Gloucestershire and Monmouth, a man looking for a theatre for his social and political ambitions, ensured that Gregynog’s identity as an important Montgomeryshire estate survived the ‘crisis of community’ at the end of the eighteenth century. But its cultural identity as a Welsh estate had perforce to evolve as it faced the economic and political pressures of a new era.
Landed estates such as Gregynog were central to the building and sustaining of the social, cultural and economic infrastructure of a neighbourhood, and played a key part in shaping the landscape and built environment. How such estates dealt with matters such as recurring crises in the agricultural industry, enclosures, rent rises and arrears, opposition to the payment of tithes and the treatment of the rural poor, must be evaluated in relation to proprietors’ needs to retain not only their social pre-eminence but the respect and loyalty of their tenants, labourers and all those who depended on the estate for a livelihood.
The Whig and Liberal allegiances of the nineteenth-century inheritors of the Gregynog estate enabled them to identify themselves with progressive movements in Montgomeryshire associated with the growth of nonconformity and campaigns for church disestablishment, the demand for wider access to education, political emancipation following the widening of the franchise, and the rise of Liberal party politics in the county, in all of which the Hanbury-Tracy family played a leading part. But these attitudes were to change after the 1880s when the traditional hierarchies of Wales appeared to be threatened by demands for land reform which landowners feared would destroy their rights and privileges as property owners. Nonetheless the family remained highly respected as good landlords, who also invested heavily in the Newtown textile industry.
Gregynog did not escape ‘the decline of the great estates’ of late Victorian Britain. Bankruptcy occurred in 1892, and the estate was sold to the receivers, to the great regret of the population as recorded in the local press. Nonetheless, the farms themselves survived; in the final sale of 1913, many were sold to their sitting tenants.
Throughout the nineteenth century the Hanbury-Tracy family played their part in the county’s economic and political evolution, as their successors the Davies family of Llandinam were to do in the twentieth century; reinforcing the identity of Gregynog, in a county influenced by Welsh and English, liberal and conservative traditions, as a unifying but essentially patriarchal institution in the historically diverse culture of this Welsh border county.