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Richard Fenton (1747-1821), travel writer, poet, lawyer and antiquarian, was a significant Welsh cultural figure who lived in Fishguard from 1793.
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Richard Fenton (1747-1821), travel writer, poet, lawyer and antiquarian, was a significant Welsh cultural figure who lived in Fishguard from 1793. One of his most influential publications was an edition of the writings of the Tudor historian George Owen of Henllys (1552-1613), which he produced from the manuscript owned by Fenton’s great-grandfather, John Lewis of Manorowen.
In 1796 Fenton published a complete version of Owen’s A Description of Pembrokeshire, making this important historical text accessible to the reading public for the first time, and shaping the direction of subsequent historical research in the county. Owen’s ideas about Pembrokeshire’s linguistic ‘Landsker’ line, for example, and about Flemish settlement, rapidly became part of the accepted history of the county.
But it was in the Cambrian Register for 1795 that Fenton gave readers a first taste of Owen’s distinctive style, with a bloodthirsty account of the legendary north Pembrokeshire game of knappan (also spelt ‘cnapan’). In Owen’s day the game was still played around Easter in parishes up the coast north of Fishguard. Over several pages, he describes the ‘unruly play’ in all its ferocious detail, with men from competing parishes sometimes wounded or killed fighting over a wooden ball of ‘box, ewe, crabb or holy-tree [...] boyled in tallowe for to make it slippery, and hard to be holden’.
And in this sorte you shall in an open feeld see 2000 naked people follow this boule backwarde and forwarde, Est, West, South, and North; soe that a straunger that casuallie should see such a multitude soe ranging naked, would thinke them distracted…in the furie of the chase, they respect neither hedge, ditch, pale, or walle, hille, dale, bushes, river, or rocke…
Fenton also drew on and shared Owen’s writings when compiling his own copious Historical Tour of Pembrokeshire (1810/11). He also wrote two witty satires, A Tour in Quest of Genealogy (1811) and Memoirs of an Old Wig (1815), both published anonymously. He died at Glynamel in 1821 and was buried at Manorowen, where he is remembered with a plaque inside the church.
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