Welsh Journals

reveals his low opinion of farming practice in the county. A Cardiganshire Land- lord's advice to his tenants, published six years later bilingually by his contemporary Thomas Johnes, shows a similar exasperation revealed in the patient explanation of the most simple agricultural practices. 'I am sorry,' Colonel Lloyd writes, 'truth compels me, to make such a report to your board, of the agriculture of this county.' Of fallowing, he continues, 'if ploughing the ground three or four inches deep, and suffering it to remain all the summer, full of cough grass and other noxious weeds, can be called fallowing, we have fallows.'5 He describes the poor construction and siting of farm buildings, the ill-made ploughs, the inefficient use of manure and the miserable living conditions of the peasantry. He also pinpoints what he believes to be a major cause of the lack of investment in and application to the land, the custom of annual leaseholdings: Security for life gives energy to action, and as few men live so long as they wish or expect, improvements are carried on to the last; hope comforts the tenant, un- certainty the landlord.6 This enlightened gentleman died in 1807, thirteen years before the birth of his grandson, the builder of Bronwydd. Sir Thomas Lloyd was educated at Harrow and at Christ Church, Oxford; he then joined the Thirteenth Light Dragoons and later served in Canada with the Eighty-Second Foot Regiment, commanding a detachment at Ottawa. In 1845, aged twenty-five, he returned to Wales on the death of his father and took over the running of the estate. A year later he married Henrietta Reid of Bunker's Hill, Jamaica and in 1851 they had a son, Marteine Owen Mowbray Lloyd. Sir Thomas served as J.P. and as Deputy Lieutenant in Pembroke and Carmarthen as well as Cardiganshire. He was High Sheriff of the county in 1851 and in 1863 was created a baronet. Between 1865 and 1868 he sat as M.P. for Cardigan county, and between 1868 and 1874 for the Cardigan boroughs, both times as a Liberal. He died in 1877, aged 57. Next to this record of public service there is Sir Thomas's reputation as a land- lord. As well as continuing the family's tradition of benevolence to the chapels and churches of the area, he was personally renowned for his courtesy and generosity to tenants. Many witnesses before the Royal Commission on Land in Wales of 1894 remembered and testified to this. The following statement is typical: There were no middlemen in those days and mischief-makers had not the ears of the landlords. An old saying, still current in the neighbourhood, is credited to the 'old Lloyd' [Sir Thomas] of Bronwydd. It is 'cursed be the first Lloyd who will evict a tenant.' I have not heard of a single eviction ever having occurred on that estate.