Celtic Folklore: Welsh and Manx (Volume 1 of 2)

At times one of the fairies was in the habit, as I was told by more than one of my informants, of coming out of Ỻyn Corwrion with her spinning-wheel (troeỻ bach) on fine summer days and betaking herself to spinning. While at that work she might be heard constantly singing or humming, in a sort of round tune, the words sìli ffrit. So that sìli ffrit Leisa Bèla may now be heard from the mouths of the children in that neighbourhood. But I have not been successful in finding out what Liza Bella’s ‘silly frit’ exactly means, though I am, on the whole, convinced that the words are other than of Welsh origin. The last of them, ffrit, is usually applied in Cardiganshire to anything worthless or insignificant, and the derivative, ffrityn, means one who has no go or perseverance in him: the feminine is ffriten. In Carnarvonshire my wife has heard ffrityn and ffritan applied to a small man and a small woman respectively. Mr. Hughes says that in Merioneth and parts of Powys sìli ffrit is a term applied to a small woman or a female dwarf who happens to be proud, vain, and fond of the attentions of the other sex (benyw fach neu goraches falch a hunanol a fyđai hoff o garu); but he thinks he has heard it made use of with regard to the gipsies, and possibly also to the Tylwyth Teg. The Rev. O.

Davies thinks the words sìli ffrit Leisa Bèla to be very modern, and that they refer to a young woman who lived at a place in the neighbourhood, called Bryn Bèla or Brymbèla, ‘Bella’s Hill,’ the point being that this Bella was ahead, in her time, of all the girls in those parts in matters of taste and fashion. This however does not seem to go far enough back, and it is possible still that in Bèla, that is, in English spelling, Bella, we have merely a shortening of some such a name as Isabella or Arabella, which were once much more popular in the Principality than they are now: in fact, I do not feel sure that Leisa Bèla is not bodily a corruption of Isabella. As to sìli ffrit, one might at first have been inclined to render it by small fry, especially in the sense of the French ‘de la friture’ as applied to young men and boys, and to connect it with the Welsh sil and silod, which mean small fish; but the pronunciation of silli or sìli being nearly that of the English word silly, it appears, on the whole, to belong to the host of English words to be found in colloquial Welsh, though they seldom find their way into books. Students of English ought to be able to tell us whether frit had the meaning here suggested in any part of England, and how lately; also, whether there was such a phrase as ‘silly frit’ in use. After penning this, I received the following interesting communication from Mr. William Jones, of Ỻangoỻen:—The term sìli ffrit was formerly in use at Beđgelert, and what was thereby meant was a child of the Tylwyth Teg.

It is still used for any creature that is smaller than ordinary. ‘Pooh, a silly frit like that!’ (Pw, rhyw sìli ffrit fel yna!). ‘Mrs. So-and-So has a fine child.’ ‘Ha, do you call a silly frit like that a fine child?’ (Mae gan hon a hon blentyn braf. Ho, a ydych chwi’n galw rhyw sìli ffrit fel hwnna’n braf?) To return to Leisa Bèla and Belenë, it may be that the same person was meant by both these names, but I am in no hurry to identify them, as none of my correspondents knows the latter of them except Mr. Hughes, who gives it on the authority of the bard Gutyn Peris, and nothing further so far as I can understand, whereas Bèla will come before us in another story, as it is the same name, I presume, which Glasynys has spelled Bella in Cymru Fu.

So I wrote in 1881: since then I have ascertained from Professor Joseph Wright, who is busily engaged on his great English Dialect Dictionary, that frit27 is the same word, in the dialects of Cheshire, Shropshire, and Pembrokeshire, as fright in literary English; and that the corresponding verb to frighten is in them fritten, while a frittenin (= the book English frightening) means a ghost or apparition. So sìli ffrit is simply the English silly frit, and means probably a silly sprite or silly ghost, and sìli ffrit Leisa Bèla would mean the silly ghost of a woman called Liza Bella. But the silly frit found spinning near Corwrion Pool will come under notice again, for that fairy belongs to the Rumpelstiltzchen group of tales, and the fragment of a story about her will be seen to have treated Silly Frit as her proper name, which she had not intended to reach the ears of the person of whom she was trying to get the better.

These tales are brought into connexion with the present day in more ways than one, for besides the various accounts of the bwganod or bogies of Corwrion frightening people when out late at night, Mr. D. E. Davies knows a man, who is still living, and who well remembers the time when the sound of working used to be heard in the pool, and the voices of children crying somewhere in its depths, but that when people rushed there to see what the matter was, all was found profoundly quiet and still. Moreover, there is a family or two, now numerously represented in the parishes of Ỻandegai and Ỻanỻechid, who used to be taunted with being the offspring of fairy ancestors. One of these families was nicknamed ‘Simychiaid’ or ‘Smychiaid’; and my informant, who is not yet quite forty, says that he heard his mother repeat scores of times that the old people used to say, that the Smychiaid, who were very numerous in the neighbourhood, were descended from fairies, and that they came from Ỻyn Corwrion. At all this the Smychiaid were wont to grow mightily angry. Another tradition, he says, about them was that they were a wandering family that arrived in the district from the direction of Conway, and that the father’s name was a Simwch, or rather that was his nickname, based on the proper name Simwnt, which appears to have once been the prevalent name in Ỻandegai. The historical order of these words would in that case have been Simwnt, Simwch, Simychiaid, Smychiaid.

Now Simwnt seems to be merely the Welsh form given to some such English name as Simond, just as Edmund or Edmond becomes in North Wales Emwnt. The objection to the nickname seems to lie in the fact, which one of my correspondents points out to me, that Simwch is understood to mean a monkey, a point on which I should like to have further information. Pughe gives simach, it is true, as having the meaning of the Latin simia. A branch of the same family is said to be called ‘y Cowperiaid’ or the Coopers, from an ancestor who was either by name or by trade a cooper. Mr. Hughes’ account of the Smychiaid was, that they are the descendants of one Simonds, who came to be a bailiff at Bodysgaỻan, near Deganwy, and moved from there to Coetmor in the neighbourhood of Corwrion. Simonds was obnoxious to the bards, he goes on to say, and they described the Smychiaid as having arrived in the parish at the bottom of a caweỻ, ‘a creel or basket carried on the back,’ when chance would have it that the caweỻ cord snapped just in that neighbourhood, at a place called Pont y Ỻan. That accident is described, according to Mr. Hughes, in the following doggerel, the origin of which I do not know—

Curiously enough, the same caweỻ story used to be said of a widely spread family in North Cardiganshire, whose surname was pronounced Massn and written Mason or Mazon: as my mother was of this family, I have often heard it. The caweỻ, if I remember rightly, was said, in this instance, to have come from Scotland, to which were traced three men who settled in North Cardiganshire. One had no descendants, but the other two, Mason and Peel—I think his name was Peel, but I am only sure that it was not Welsh—had so many, that the Masons, at any rate, are exceedingly numerous there; but a great many of them, owing to some extent, probably, to the caweỻ story, have been silly enough to change their name into that of Jones, some of them in my time. The three men came there probably for refuge in the course of troubles in Scotland, as a Frazer and a Francis did to Anglesey. At any rate, I have never heard it suggested that they were of aquatic origin, but, taking the caweỻ into consideration, and the popular account of the Smychiaid, I should be inclined to think that the caweỻ originally referred to some such a supposed descent. I only hope that somebody will help us with another and a longer caweỻ tale, which will make up for the brevity of these allusions.

We may, however, assume, I think, that there was a tendency at one time in Gwyneđ, if not in other parts of the Principality, to believe, or pretend to believe, that the descendants of an Englishman or Scotsman, who settled among the old inhabitants, were of fairy origin, and that their history was somehow uncanny, which was all, of course, duly resented. This helps, to some extent, to explain how names of doubtful origin have got into these tales, such as Smychiaid, Cowperiaid, Pellings, Penelope, Leisa Bèla or Isabella, and the like. This association of the lake legends with intruders from without is what has, perhaps, in a great measure served to rescue such legends from utter oblivion.

As to a church at Corwrion, the tradition does not seem to be an old one, and it appears founded on one of the popular etymologies of the word Corwrion, which treats the first syllable as cor in the sense of a choir; but the word has other meanings, including among them that of an ox-stall or enclosure for cattle. Taking this as coming near the true explanation, it at once suggests itself, that Creuwyryon in the Mabinogi of Math ab Mathonwy is the same place, for creu or crau also meant an enclosure for animals, including swine. In Irish the word is cró, an enclosure, a hut or hovel. The passage in the Mabinogi28 relates to Gwydion returning with the swine he had got by dint of magic and deceit from Pryderi, prince of Dyfed, and runs thus in Lady Charlotte Guest’s translation: ‘So they journeyed on to the highest town of Arỻechweđ, and there they made a sty (creu) for the swine, and therefore was the name of Creuwyryon given to that town.’ As to wyryon or wyrion, which we find made into wrion in Corwrion according to the modern habit, it would seem to be no other word than the usual plural of wyr, a grandson, formerly also any descendant in the direct line. If so, the name of an ancestor must have originally followed, just as one of the places called Bettws was once Betws Wyrion Iđon, ‘the Bettws of Iđon’s Descendants’; but it is possible that wyrion in Creu- or Cor-wyrion was itself a man’s name, though I have never met with it.

It is right to add that the name appears in the Record of Carnarvon (pp. 12, 25, 26) as Creweryon, which carries us back to the first half of the fourteenth century. There it occurs as the name of a township containing eight gavels, and the particulars about it might, in the hand of one familiar with the tenures of that time, perhaps give us valuable information as to what may have been its status at a still earlier date.