Morgan · 1588
The 1588 Welsh Bible
William Morgan's complete translation of the scriptures into Welsh — the single text that kept the Welsh language alive when the other Celtic languages did not survive.
Draft entry · awaiting review
By the late 16th century the Reformation had created a new test for European vernaculars: a language that did not have a printed Bible would not survive the press of state-language administration around it. Cornish and Manx had no Bible. Both languages were extinct as community vernaculars within two hundred years.
William Morgan was rector of Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant in Powys, on the Welsh-English border. He had been working on a translation of the Old Testament since the 1570s, building on Bishop Richard Davies and William Salesbury's 1567 New Testament. The complete Bible — the first ever in Welsh — was printed in London in 1588 in a run of around eight hundred copies, one for every parish church in Wales by royal order.
The translation worked. The Welsh of the 1588 Bible became the standard literary register of the language for the next four centuries. Welsh-speaking children learned to read on it, ministers preached from it, the language modernised around it without fracturing into mutually-incomprehensible regional variants. When the 19th-century industrial revolution dragged hundreds of thousands of Welsh speakers into Glamorgan and Monmouthshire, they sang from Morgan's text in their chapels and their children kept the language for another two generations.
Welsh today has roughly 900,000 speakers. Cornish has about 600. The difference is, in significant part, this book.