TOMOS GLYN COTHI (THOMAS EVANS, 1764–1833): BEAUTY OF THE BILINGUAL MIND

Tomos Glyn Cothi (Thomas Evans, 1764–1833) was one of the radicals who transported the ideas of the French Revolution of 1789 to Wales, created a political vocabulary for them, and disseminated them in radical periodicals, pamphlets, sermons and songs. A self-educated weaver from Brechfa and friend of Iolo Morganwg’s, he became one of the translators of Unitarianism to Wales and Welsh, published the radical periodical Y Drysorfa Gymmysgedig, was imprisoned for singing a seditious song, became the Unitarian Minister of Hen Dŷ Cwrdd in Aberdare in 1811, and was almost forgotten until the 1920s. This article explores the working of his bilingual mind on the basis of surviving unpublished and published work in the context of the communities in which he lived. The substantial manuscript ‘Y Gell Gymmysg’ and connected publications demonstrate that in the long 1790s, Tomos combined reading with coining vocabularies, translating, and reformulating for his Welsh audience almost immediately. When, broken by imprisonment and persecution, he moved to Aberdare, this process is no longer apparent. His surviving diaries held at the National Library of Wales bear testimony to the hard life of this Minister of religion, who moonlighted as a labourer to make ends meet and whose bilingual mind was succumbing to the influence of the English political culture and texts he absorbed. His notes provide valuable insights into the daily life of the women and men of Aberdare after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and perhaps into the processes by which personal and communal bilingualism turned dangerous for Welsh culture as early as the 1830s.

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