Welsh Journals

BYE-GONES FOR i874. January 7, 1874. NOTES, QUERIES, and REPLIES on subjects interesting to Wains and The Borders will be thankfully received. Communications must be accompanied by name and address of sender, for insertion or otherwise- Authorities, wliere possible, must be quoted, with date and page of books from which extracts are taken. Great care will be taken of MS.S., pamphlets, &c, sent for the purpose of making extracts. Communications for this column, and for this column only, to be addressed " Bye-gonbs, Croeswylan, Oswestry," The Column appears every Wednesday in the Oswestry Advertizer and, in the Cambrian News every Friday. BYE-GONES, with additions, are reprinted, quarterly, in magazine form. Subscription for 1874, post free, 3s 6d. THE SIEGE OF OSWESTRY. Introductory. First of all we must dismiss from our minds all ideas of modern Oswestry, with its water-mains, gas-lamps, illu¬ minated clocks, plate-glass windows, and handsome dwel¬ lings, and picture to ourselves a mere village of barns and huts, with perhaps a few more pretentious houses oj timber, something in the style of the one remaining at the junction of The Cross with Bailey-street. Something like that, I say, because it is just possible that the place now occupied by Mr Taylof was in the days of which I have to write the very best house in the town. Oswestry readers will have noticed on its front a medallion representing what looks like a split eagle—suggesting Austria and Wynnstay. That figure represents the ' bearing' of the Lloyds, of Llanforda, once a notable family in the town. The most famous of them—Maurice Doyd—" finding him- seli much oppressed by the English laws, did kill one of the judges and hanged divers other officers on oak trees at • Uch-dulas,' on which he had to take refuge within the ' sanctuary of Halston.' " There he wras under the protec¬ tion of John Fitzalan, Lord of Oswestry, who about that time became Earl of Arundel, and commanded the English forces. With such a patron and protector, the Majesty of the Law in those Good Old Times could, for a while at least, be set at defiance, but perhaps Lloyd did a prudent thing to get clear of the country and go Crusading. It is of the time of Richard the First that I am writing, and our hero, who thus took the law into his own hands by hanging its administrators, was made captain over a number of soldiers gathered in the Marches of Wales, and with these he set off on his sanguinary travels. In the siege of Acre he did deeds so notable, and was so serviceable to one of the allies of Cceur de Lion, that " the emperor gave him the X x coat of the house of Austria." Thus the Austrian Eagle figures on the house in The Cross ; and it is also carved on the font in our Old Church, and was found on a tombstone over the family vault of the Lloyds, in the North Chancel, when the restorations commenced, with the following in¬ scription under it :— " Who bore her sexe with peril of her life A loyal subject and a loving wife Her God and King restored her heart run o'er More than brimful with joy could hold no more." The date of this is 1661, but the name is obliterated, so we can only infer the goed lady was the wife of one of the Lloyds—perhaps of the Governor of Oswestry Castle at the time when the Siege of which I am about to speak was on the eve of accomplishment. There is no doubt that the old house in The Cross existed at the time of the siege, and I have assumed that it was one of the best in the town ; I must now say some¬ thing of the probable state of the town itself at the com¬ mencement of the Civil Wars. Small and mean as it was, it had won the praises of a poet as far back as the reign of the strong-minded " Queen Bess." Old Churchyard, the Shrewsbury rhymster, calls " Ozestry a pretty town full fine Which may be loved, be liked, be praised both It stands so trim, and is maintained so clean, And peopled is, with folk who well do mean, That it deserves to be enrolled and shrined In each good breast, and every manly mind." The compass of the town was small indeed; a walk from the White Horse in Church Street to the New Wesleyan Chapel in Beatrice Street, and from the top of Castle Buildings in Willow Street to the Coney Green, would include the whole of it ; and it was surrounded so strongly with walls, that the only methods of ingress and egress were at four gates, situated respectively at the four points 1 have just enumerated. Probably on every side there were straggling houses without the walls—indeed we know there were in one direction, for the Hollinshead Chronicles tell of a great fire as early as the 22ad of April, 1567, when two hundred houses were destroyed, and of these "there were three-score without the suburbs," and from Price's History of Oswestry we learn that these suburbs included what is now Church Street, and Pentre- poeth, the latter getting its name (which means' Burnt End of the Town') on this occasion. Camden, by the way, gravely attributes this fire, and one even more disastrous in 1542—when two streets were consumed—to " Eclipses of the Sun in Aries !" The walls, which are described as being only a mile in extent, took a somewhat erratic course, and are in the pre¬ sent day so built over that we can only follow them in the