Swansea and Glamorgan Herald, and South Wales Free Press. — 1863-05-02 (Swansea, West Glamorgan, Wales)

CLASSROOM. gave notice that he would, on that day fortnight, move that the districts be re-arranged as recommended by the committee. The relief cases were then disposed of.  It is evident that the district was °nee inhabited 67 Welsh-speaking population. Most of its parishes, and many of its farmhouses, are called by Welsh names; names which, by-the-bye, are cruelly murdered in the mouths of the present inhabitants. We are told that, about the year 1110, Henry I. admitted into England great numbers of Flemings, who, by the inundation of the sea in their own country, were ! compelled to seek elsewhere for new habitations. He planted them at first in the waste parts of Yorkshire ; but upon complaints made to him after his return from France, he removed them to the country conquered from the Welsh about Howse and Pembroke. There are unmistakeable evidences that the people of Gower are of the earns origin as those of the south of Pembrokeshire ;• but the fact that there are so many places in the former beating Welsh names, while in the latter such places are few and far between, makes it quite clear that they had settled in Pembrokeshire very long before their advent into Gower. Perhaps there were later immigrations of Flemings, who settled as near as they could find room to their countrymen who had preceded them, or it may be that those in Pembrokeshire, increasing in numbers and straitened for room, pushed eastward along the coast as far as Swansra and Gower. Be this as it May, they are to the present time a people by themselves, and have manners, customs, and traits of character which distinguish them from the Welsh, and prove them to be of foreign extraction. It does not seem that all the Welsh were expelled from Gower at the time of the Flemish immigration, for there still remains in the language of the inhabitaws here and there a Welsh word. Their annual parish merry-making was called a " mabsar.t" while it continued to be observed, and it was not given up until very recently ; indeed, we believe that 's ghost of it is kept up under that name in one village to the present day. It is not a "hob" that they have at the side of their fire-place, but a " pentan ;" and when they have a tooth extracted, they feel a "glues." There may be more such words, but these are all the ruins of the ancient language which we have been able to discover among them. A line extending in a westerly direction from Swansea to Penelawdd on the Burry Estuary would pretty nearly mark the boundary between the Welsh and Engiish languages. To the north of that line there is very little of the latter, while to the south of it there is scarcely any of the former. It passes through a little village in which the pariah peund of Llanrhidian Higher is situated. It would seem that when it was built, the people on either side contended With each other for the honour of giving it a name; that those on the south would have it called a "pound," while those oil the north stood out for " ffald," and that they compromised the matter by calling it " poundffald." The dispute, if it over existed, hhs long been forgotten, and it is by that duoglot name, the last syllable of which is only a repetition of the first in another language, that the place is known tit the present day.  • The following writer, however, is of a different opinion:—" According to Csradoc of Llancarvon, Swan- ' sex Castle wa, built in the year 1099 by Henry Beaumont, Earl of Warwick, who, acting on the syitem of the other Norman freebooters of the age, made war upon the sons of Caradoc op lestyn, who then held the district of Gower, ii erder to enrich himself by the spoils he might be able to wrest from them. After tbn subjugation of Gower, Henry Beaumont, brought over a co,ony I of English settlers from Soinersetshire, to whom he give a large proportion of the lands. Their descendants yei remain here, separated by their Is guage and raanoers from the native population, with whom, like the Flem ings in Pembrokeshire, they scarcely ever intermarry." —" Description of South Wales," by Rev T. Roes, 1619, p. 726.