Author: Davies, Edward
Biography:
DAVIES, Edward (1756-1831: ODNB)
The son of Edward Davies and his wife Elizabeth Owen, he was born on 7 June 1756 to a farming family in Llanfaredd, Radnorshire, Wales. His eyesight was affected by an accident when he was just six and he became blind in later life. He received very little formal education but was ordained and served as a curate at parishes in Herefordshire. He was master at the grammar school in Chipping Sodbury, Gloucestershire, from 1783 to 1799; at about this time he published several plays and his books of verse. On 24 July 1783 he married Margaret Smith at St. John the Baptist church in Gloucester; it is not known if they had children. His novel, Elisa Powell, or Trials of Sensibility, was published as “by a Welsh curate” in 1795 and Davies was paid £21 by the London publishers. According to GM, he was encouraged in his Celtic studies by George Hardinge, Chief Justice for Radnorshire, and Davies’s Celtic Researches was published in 1804, followed by The Mythology and Rites of the British Druids in 1809. From 1799 he served as curate at Olveston in Gloucestershire and perpetual curate at Llanbedr Painscastle in Radnorshire from 1802. In 1803 an application was made to the RLF for his relief and he was granted 10 guineas; his file includes a printed sheet explaining the cause of his financial distress. Davies became rector at Bishopston near Swansea in Wales in 1805. After Margaret’s death in 1814 he married Susanna Jeffreys in 1816. Davies died at the rectory in Bishopston on 7 Jan. 1831; he was buried in St. Teilo’s churchyard in Bishopston and there is a memorial in the church. (ODNB 24 June 2024; ancestry.co.uk 24 June 2024; EN1; GM 101 [1831]; RLF file 119) SR