Episkopo William Morgan

…de la Daily Post:

Never has the Welsh language been done a better turn than when Conwy’s William Morgan translated the Bible into our ancient Celtic tongue.

And perhaps this explains how Welsh has managed to keep going while its bedfellows, Cornish, Breton, Manx and Gaelic have all but died out.

On the orders of Elizabeth I, Morgan of Penmachno not only translated the Old and New Testaments from Greek and Hebrew but did so into a beautiful, eminently readable Welsh.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, Daily Post readers have judged him to be one of our top 30 Great North Walians.

The Archdeacon of St Asaph, the Venerable Bernard Thomas, is unequivocal about the enormous influence Morgan’s work had.

“It saved the Welsh language without a shadow of a doubt and the style of William Morgan’s translation in 1588 established the style of Welsh literature thereafter,” says Mr Thomas, himself a Welsh speaker...