THE DIFFUSION OF THE 'WELCH' CIRCULATING CHARITY SCHOOLS IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY WALES

In this article we have explored the regional development of the Welsh-medium circulating charity schools introduced by Griffith Jones, Llanddowror, and continued after his death in 1761 by his friend and collaborator Madam Bevan. The classic innovation and diffusion model, as articulated by geographers, has been drawn on to explain the spread of the schools throughout Wales in relation to principal language zones c. 1750. What, then, is the significance of this analysis? The growth of the Welch circulating charity schools was essentially a cultural as well as a spatial process that was to have many religious consequences - especially in the 1740s, and especially in north-west Wales. Moreover, the impact of the schools has echoed down the decades and this movement was to be very influential in the major educational developments that culminated in late-nineteenth-century Wales. The diffusion model has provided a most telling analytical framework concerning the spread of the schools. We have been able to identify likely centres of innovation in the adoption of the charity school idea in different parts of the country - though distance and overland remoteness meant fewer schools in north-east and central Wales. Perhaps the most significant findings are threefold in nature. First, many schools had been started in south-west Wales long before the first reports appeared in Welch Piety, probably around 1730 or earlier. Secondly, eighteenth-century Wales was a very different country from nineteenth-century Wales, and very different indeed from the Wales of our own times. The population distribution of pre-industrial Wales differed markedly from that of later periods and this must always be borne in mind when we try to understand how it was that Griffith Jones and Madam Bevan were so successful in running a massive operation to educate the poor. Thirdly, the schools and their diffusion throughout the country are of considerable significance from the geographical viewpoint. In effect, by teaching the poor to read, the circulating schools effectively worked for the maintenance of Welsh identity before the tremendous changes that were to be ushered in during the later eighteenth century, the growth of towns in the early nineteenth century and the profound regional movements of people that came with industrialization.