Don’t believe all you read about Quakers’ Yard

by Christine Trevett

Do you know the Yard – the small, walled burial space at the heart of Quakers’ Yard village where Quaker burials happened until 1891? It’s a graveyard – gravestones now removed, all but one that is, which is flat to the ground and very understated, in Quaker fashion. If you’ve read about the burial ground on local websites or in older accounts of Merthyr history it’s as well to know that not everything you might read about it is accurate.

Among those things which are clearly odd is the claim that it was ‘opened’ in 1665 by someone called William Howe from Bristol. Odd, too, are some of the dates given for Quakers having supposedly worshipped clandestinely with other dissenters at Berthlwyd Farm, above Quakers’ Yard village.

Firstly the ‘opening’ of that burial ground … a date of 1665 makes no sense. The piece of “walled about” land (as it’s described in the legal documents) was not given to the oversight of some named local Quakers until 1667. Yes, it was for Quakers to have burials in and then the gift of it “for a thousand years” to “the people of God called Quakers’’ was ratified in the freeholder’s will of 1670. Both of the documents were linked with the Quaker and widow Mary Chapman. She owned the Pantanas (or Pantannas) estate of which that burial ground  land was a part. The documents are in the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth and at the time Mary Chapman lived in St. Mellons. But “opened” by a man from Bristol in 1665? I don’t think so.

The story makes no sense on other grounds too. In 1665 when the burial ground was allegedly opened Quakers were a newly-created sect. It had been under a decade and a half since their public emergence in England and in the 1660s they were much opposed by the authorities under Charles II. There had even been a Quaker Act in 1662, “for preventing mischiefs and dangers that may arise by certain persons called Quakers and others refusing to take lawful oaths”. The fact was that Quakers were widely suspected by “right thinking” people and this hardly tallies with some notion of them organising a formal “opening” of a very small  burial area, given that the land  was being set aside because of Quakers’ rift from the established church and the church’s refusal of ‘consecrated ground’ to such people. Presumably they wouldn’t have been inviting the local vicar to the ceremony!

In any case, the idea of such formality would have held no appeal for Quakers of those times and had there been no gifted land they would otherwise just have buried a loved one in whatever spot was available. Usually that was on their own land, while also refusing to acknowledge that any bit of earth was more ‘consecrated’ than the next one.

This was a troubled, messy time in the history of these islands and in Merthyr parish some Quakers had already been imprisoned for their nonconformity. In the 1660s, according to  the Diocese of Llandaff’s account of ‘conventicles’ (i.e. illegal gatherings apart from the established church) the houses of some named men in Merthyr parish were being described as venues for “the mixt rabble” of dissenting preachers and those who agreed with them. Those named men, Quakers, had been among the ones incarcerated previously and/or they were recipients of the ground from Mary Chapman. These seemed more like outlaws in the eyes of the authorities than people wanting freedom of conscience and freedom of worship. All things considered, I can’t see these times as ones in which local Quakers would be  getting a man in from Bristol for a nice opening of a burial ground.

And then there was Berthlwyd Farm … which was one of several places which have figured in Merthyr region’s history where religious dissent was concerned. Berthlwyd was sufficiently remote in those days to deflect prying interest and so it fitted the pattern of such places. The problem is, though, that it is claimed quite often that Quakers, with Baptists and other dissenters, were gathered together in Berthlwyd Farm “by 1650”. Yet that is impossible. There wasn’t a Quaker in Wales “by 1650”. The first Welsh person living in Wales to identify as Quaker did so in 1653, and he’d travelled to seek them out in the north of England. In South Wales it was later still for converts to Quakerism. Some of those worshippers up at Berthlwyd Farm who were religiously dissatisfied may have morphed in due course into the Quakers of the mid 1650s and 60s in Merthyr parish. In the 1640s, though, we should not number Quakers among Merthyr’s dissenters, as sometimes happens.

Some of the kind of imperfect information which gets repeated seems to come from local writers in the 19^th century. They were also well confused about the Fell family. Lydia Fell was probably buried at Quakers’ Yard in 1699 and hers seems to have been the Quaker name best remembered in local folklore. She is said to have had some role in the early history of the burial ground too but misinformation and confusion about that, and about her, has also got around.

Christine Trevett was born in Susannah Place, where Treharris runs down to Quakers’ Yard.   That gave her a nagging interest in Quaker history as a hobby even though the day job required that she researched other things. She’s published quite a lot on Quaker history, including Women and Quakerism in the 17^th Century and Quaker women prophets in England and Wales 1650-1700. Her look at Dowlais Educational Settlement and the Quaker John Dennithorne will be published by Merthyr Tydfil Historical Society in 2022.