Chapels and Nonconformity

Drive through any Powys village and count the religious buildings. There will be a parish church, usually medieval, usually at the edge or on a mound. And there will be at least one chapel, usually nineteenth century, usually plainer, usually larger, and usually closer to where people actually lived.

That arrangement is the physical record of the biggest change in Welsh life between the Reformation and the First World War.

How it started

Puritan activity reached mid Wales in the 1650s under the Commonwealth, and small Independent and Baptist congregations survived the Restoration as dissenters, meeting where they could and paying for it.

What changed everything was the revival, and it started in this county. In 1735, at Talgarth parish church, a young man named Howell Harris had the experience that set him preaching. Harris was not ordained, was repeatedly refused ordination, and preached anyway, in fields and farmhouses and eventually to enormous crowds. In 1752 he founded a religious community at Trefeca outside Talgarth, where around a hundred people lived and worked communally.

Calvinistic Methodism, which grew out of that, stayed formally within the Church of England until 1811 and then left it. By then the Independents and the Baptists had grown enormously alongside it.

What the 1851 census showed

On one Sunday in March 1851 the government counted attendance at every place of worship in Britain. It was never repeated, because of what it found.

In Wales, roughly three-quarters of those who attended anything attended a nonconformist chapel. The established church, which held the tithes, the parish churches and the legal privileges, was the minority religion of the country it was established in.

That single result drove Welsh politics for the next seventy years. Disestablishment of the Church in Wales became the central Welsh political demand, and it was finally achieved by the Welsh Church Act of 1914, taking effect in 1920.

What chapels actually did

Worship, obviously. But the reason chapels matter to the history of Powys is everything else.

The Sunday school taught adults as well as children, in Welsh, and taught them to read. Literacy in Welsh in the nineteenth century was substantially a chapel achievement and it happened without any state involvement at all.

The seiat, the fellowship meeting, was a forum where ordinary people discussed, disagreed and were held to account by their peers. A generation of Welsh political and trade union organisers learned to speak in public in a chapel vestry.

Chapels ran singing festivals, eisteddfodau, temperance societies, burial clubs and libraries. In a county with no towns of any size and no institutions of its own, the chapel was very nearly the only institution there was.

The buildings

They are usually rectangular, gable-end or long-wall entrance, rendered or in local stone, with round-headed windows and a date plaque above the door. Inside, the pulpit is central and the pews face it, because the sermon rather than the altar is the point.

Denominations are often legible from the name. Bethel, Salem, Seion, Horeb, Soar, Carmel — Old Testament place names, chosen because they belonged to nobody's establishment.

Where a village has three chapels within a hundred yards, that is usually a split: a doctrinal argument, or a personality, that ended with half a congregation walking out and building.

The closing

Membership peaked around 1905, after the last great revival, and has fallen more or less continuously since. The reasons are the ordinary ones — depopulation, cars, television, the decline of Welsh in much of the county, the general secularisation of Britain — but the effect in a small settlement is disproportionate, because the chapel was doing so many jobs.

Powys is now losing chapels faster than it can record them. Many are houses. Some are workshops, galleries and holiday lets. Some are empty with the pews still in.

What to look for

Date plaques, which often record a rebuilding rather than a foundation and frequently carry two dates.

Burial grounds, which are usually more informative than the building: chapel graveyards record occupations, emigrations and infant mortality in a way parish registers often do not.

Trefeca near Talgarth, where the revival started and where the buildings survive.

And the horse mounting blocks and stables that survive beside upland chapels, which tell you how far people came.