In August 1805, the Calvinist Methodist minister John Hughes chose his text for Ann Griffiths’ memorial service in Pontrobert church: ‘For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.’ It’s possible Hughes chose these words because Ann herself had written about them in a letter to John’s wife, Ruth. The hope they point towards must have been comforting for the congregation who gathered that morning to mourn the loss of a 29-year-old woman, two weeks after the death of her newborn daughter and only child. In that time of grief, John Hughes reminded those gathered of Ann’s faith and pointed them to her Saviour and all she had ‘gained’ through death.
Family life
Ann Thomas was born in 1776 on her family’s farm, Dolwar Fach, near Llanfyllin in Montgomeryshire. Ann was the fourth of five children born to her parents, John Evan Thomas and Jane Theodore. Both of her parents were born and raised in Montgomeryshire, with families in the area dating back for generations. Ann’s father, John, was a well-known and respected figure in the community. He, along with the rest of the family, attended the local Church in Wales, with John serving as a churchwarden and in other offices over time.
Ann was christened in Llanfihangel-yng-Ngwynfa parish church on the 21st of April 1776. From that day forward, Ann would become a regular attendee of that church in the company of her parents and siblings. Ann’s father, being able to both read and write, also conducted family devotionals at home. Here, especially, Ann had the opportunity to hear the Welsh Bible being read and a Welsh translation of the Common Book of Prayer. So, from an early age, Ann heard about Jesus and had the opportunity to ask questions and explore the answers for herself. This inquisitiveness would be fully displayed in Ann’s adulthood through her friendship and letters to John Hughes.
Poetry
Alongside growing up in a home where church attendance and Bible reading were commonplace, Ann’s home was filled with poetry. Locally, poetry was a popular form of entertainment, and people regularly gathered in Dolwar Fach in the evening to recite poetry and perform new pieces. The poems Ann grew up surrounded by were traditional Welsh poetry, such as the englyn, along with ballads and carols. A feature of these traditional Welsh poems was a strict rhyming structure, and the practice that these poems could be sung as well as read. They could also be extremely spiritual, for example, the plygain carols. Ann grew up hearing the story of God’s salvation plan from creation through to the incarnation and Christ’s resurrection through songs and poems. The blending of emotionally deep poetry and biblical truth would have a huge impact on Ann’s own writings.
Growing up immersed in this culture, it’s not surprising that Ann would attempt her own poetry. At the age of ten, she was able to write her own englyn. While none of Ann’s earliest poetry survives, some of her father’s writings and a collection of works by local poets exist in the ‘Llyfr Dolwar Fach’/‘The Book of Dolwar Fach’, in the National Library of Wales.
Perhaps Ann’s poetry remained on the sidelines because Ann was concerned with things closer to home. When she was seventeen, her mother died. With her older sisters married and moved out of the family home, Ann became mistress of the farm. She cared for her father and brothers, and maintained the home and the maids they employed. A big part of her daily routine would have been spinning wool. Indeed, at the time of Ann’s death, there were five spinning wheels, along with a loom and 80 sheep on the farm producing the wool needed to supplement the family’s income. For the most part, Ann lived a quiet and yet busy life.
Ann’s faith
Like the rest of Wales, and indeed the UK, Llanfihangel-yng-Ngwynfa was touched by the Great Awakenings in the latter half of the eighteenth century. While Ann was at first sceptical of the Welsh Calvinist Methodists, in the space of a few years in the 1790s, half of Ann’s immediate family would become Methodists, including Ann herself. For Ann, the decision to join the local Methodist seiat came after a year of spiritual experiences when she was twenty. After the Easter of 1796, Ann started attending the Methodist meetings in Pontrobert, and would do so for the remainder of her life.
Here Ann met John Hughes, a local weaver who had joined the Methodists a year before Ann and would go on to become a preacher and Ann’s spiritual mentor. Ann described her spiritual experiences to John. Ann described how she became overwhelmed by the weight of her sin and became gripped by fear of God’s authority. John would later recall that this weighed on her so heavily she would sometimes sink to the floor, unable to bear the burden. Ann’s religious experiences went both ways. While she was sometimes struck down by the weight of sin, other times she was unable to stop herself from rejoicing in the mercy of God and the salvation he offered.
Ann channelled these feelings, along with her biblical knowledge and her familiarity with Welsh ballads, into her own poetry. Sadly, very little of her work survives. Only one letter and one stanza are available in her own hand. Another eight letters were copied by John Hughes, and 70 hymns were recited by Ruth for her husband to record. Ruth had been a maidservant at Dolwar Fach until her marriage to John Hughes. She had heard many of Ann’s poems from Ann herself and learnt them. After Ann’s death, Ruth recited those she remembered as her way of ensuring that her friend’s life and work were not forgotten. Together, Ruth and John gathered up what they could of Ann’s writings, and John began writing an account of her life. In 1846, he published ‘Y Traethodydd’/‘The Essayist’, which remains the best source of information about Ann’s life and works.
Ann died when she was only 29. She had married Thomas Griffiths in October 1804. Thomas was a Methodist leader from a neighbouring parish. After they married, Thomas moved into Dolwar Fach with the rest of Ann’s family. Ann’s health had never been strong. She’d suffered from rheumatic fever three times in her life and was thought of as slightly frail. Initially, Ann survived pregnancy and childbirth, and her daughter Elizabeth was born on the 13th of July 1805. Elizabeth was a visibly weak baby and was baptised on the day she was born. Sadly, Elizabeth died when she was two weeks old, and Ann, who never recovered from the birth, died a fortnight later.
Despite living such a short life and with so little of her writings surviving, Ann has nonetheless gone on to become a significant figure in Welsh poetry. Her faith, and the amazement and joy she found in the gospel message, live on through her poetry.
May we all, like Ann, have our longings captured by the power of Jesus, to love the cross and bear it daily this Easter.
Hymn XIV
Earth cannot, with all its trinkets,
Slake my longings at this hour;
They were captured, they were widened,
When my Jesus showed his power.
None but he can now content me,
He, the Incomprehensible;
O to gaze upon his Person,
God in man made visible.
Let my days be wholly given
Jesus’ blood to glorify,
Calm to rest beneath his shadow,
At his feet to live and die,
Love the cross, and bear it daily,
(’Tis the cross my Husband bore,)
Gaze with joy upon his Person,
And unceasingly adore.
Ann Griffiths, translated by H. A. Hodges.
