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Lhwyd, Edward

(1660–1709)

Lhwyd was born into a well-established Welsh family and educated at Jesus College, Oxford, where he became a friend of Dr. Robert Plot, philosopher, antiquarian, and first keeper of the ashmolean museum. Lhwyd assisted with the development of the natural science collections of shells and botanic specimens and became interested in the study of fossils, or “formed stones.” He was convinced they were the petrified remains of organisms that had died long ago, and like the eminent Oxford scientist Robert Hooke thought they might be evidence of huge changes to the earth. Lhwyd identified, classified, and published a large range of fossils in the Ashmolean’s collection in 1691.

Lhwyd’s interests broadened from fossils to include stone implements and British antiquity in general, and he became friends with the antiquarian john aubrey. He was recruited in 1693 to contribute to Edmund Gibson’s revised edition of william camden’s Britannia, the first attempt at an update of this great work since it had been translated into English in 1610 and gone out of print in 1637. Lhwyd eventually becameresponsible for researching and writing about the whole of Wales, and he undertook an antiquarian tour in support of this task during the summer of 1693.

Lhwyd’s additions to the Welsh sections of Britannia were outstanding. Indeed, his additions transformed the Welsh sections from a rather inadequate sketch of unfamiliar terrain to the most rewarding part of the new volume when it was published in 1695. In his contributions Lhwyd did more than any of his predecessors to enlarge the understanding of the societies that inhabited Britain before the Romans. He formed a picture from material remains supplemented by folklore and Classical reports, and drew attention to the high degree of social organization and technical prowess needed to erect the great stone complexes. He made it clear, too, that the Britons had considerable metalworking skills, noting the discovery of several caches of weapons, axe-heads, bolts, daggers, and swords.

Lhwyd’s research for Britannia inspired him to undertake a work that would bring together his knowledge of Celtic languages and ancient British antiquities and his interest in natural history. In 1707 he published his Glossography, the first part of the projected larger Archaeologia Britannica, which confirmed Lhwyd’s preeminence as a Celtic scholar. The Glossography was a substantial folio and a remarkable achievement of comparative philology. Lhwyd demonstrated the relationship between the Celtic languages surviving in western Europe, and he included Welsh and Irish dictionaries and a Cornish grammar. He was able to make some progress in reconstructing the ancient Gallic language spoken in Gaul in Roman times. Lhwyd’s travels between 1697 and 1701 were an impressive testimony to the thoroughness of his research. He made the first antiquarian tour of the Scottish highlands and visited Scottish antiquaries. He collected Gaelic manuscripts and local customs and folklore. He recorded local dialects and details of towns, villages, and local place names. He sought information about barrows, burial chambers, standing stones, and inscribed stones. He looked at coins and brass utensils, flint arrowheads, and prehistoric implements and fossils.

Unfortunately much of the vast store of information Lhwyd accumulated was lost. After the Glossography his heath failed and he never completed the second part of the Archaeologia Britannica, the proposed great compendium of the Celtic culture of western Britain. He died in 1709 and his papers were dispersed, and many of them were later destroyed by fire. Because of the limited appeal of the Glossography and its incomplete status Lhwyd’s reputation was not as great as it should have been. Yet his work is a lasting record of his exceptional powers as an interpreter of prehistoric remains and proves his worth as an incomparable topographer and local historian. His philological research effectively laid the foundations for all later study of the Celtic languages of the British Isles and Brittany.

Graham Parry