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JOHN HUGHES THE ANTIQUARY (1776-1843) By R. T. JENKINS, C.B.E., D.LITT., LL.D., F.S.A. Professor Emeritus, University College of North Wales THE following pages are an adaptation of an address which I was invited to deliver to the Historical Society of the Welsh Methodist Connexion, and which was printed in the 1950 number of that Society's journal Bathafarn. The occasion, the place, and the subject were alike appropri- ate. The occasion was the 150th anniversary of the "Welsh Wesleyan Mission"; the place was Pendref Chapel, Denbigh-the first Welsh Wesleyan chapel in Wales the subject, the Rev. John Hughes of Brecon, one of the first two missioners, who in fact preached at the opening services of Pendref in 1802. Nor are Breconians at all likely to forget the founder of that Mission, Dr. Thomas Coke of Brecon. Yet, John Hughes the missioner has not been too favourably handled by the older historians of Welsh Wesleyanism. Born on 18 May 1776, he was accepted as preacher in 1796, sent up to North Wales on mission in 1800, and laboured in it till 1806. In that year, he fell out with the authorities of the Mission, and was "exiled" (apart from one short interval in 1809) to English circuits he married in 1811 Edith Clarke, of Knuts- ford retired in 1832, and died on 15 May 1843 at Knutsford, the little town famed in literature as "Cranford." There he was buried-and at Knutsford too (in the graveyard of the picturesque little Unitarian chapel) Elizabeth Gaskell's grave may be seen. John Hughes's career was in some sense disappointing. We are told that he was an indifferent preacher in Welsh, and further that he was over- anxious for primacy. So say the older Welsh Wesleyan writers. Well, on the former charge the curious thing is that John Hughes (with John Bryan) was responsible for most of the mission-work in Welsh in the first days of the Mission. His senior colleague Owen Davies (175 2-1 830), a Wrexham man who had moved to London and whose ministerial career up to 1800 had been in circuits in England, had very little Welsh-John Hughes on one occasion reports with a grin in his "journal" (N.L.W. MS. 3501-now printed by Mr. A. H. Williams in Bathafarn 1956-7) that "Mr. Davies gave out the hymns as if he had been a pen Cymreigiwr." Still, it is clear that people did complain of John Hughes's preaching. The explanation, I think, may well be given in his own words. In Yr Eurgrawn in 1842 he refers to some. who taunted him thus "you cannot pronounce Shibboleth, and you defile the language of our fathers of old"