This notable scholar was born in the parish of Lledrod in Ceredigion. Baptised Evan Evans,he was educated at Ystradmeurig School before attending Merton College, Oxford. He was ordained as a priest when he was 24 years old and for the next twenty years served as a curate in parishes in Wales and England

His determination to promote and to bring to the fore the wealth of traditional Welsh learning and culture often brought him into conflict with the Church Of England. He was a severe critic of the Englishness of the bishops of Wales, describing them as ‘Anglo-Bishops’. Unsurprisingly,he was never promoted by the Church.

After many years spent familiarising himself with obscure ancient manuscripts he published a significant work entitled Some Specimens of the Ancient Welsh Bards. It included early Welsh poetry published for the very first time, including Aneirin’s Y Gododdin - which dates back to the 6th Century when the Welsh occupied a large area of what is now southern Scotland and the north east of England. .

Gododdin was the name of the geographical area between the rivers Tyne and Forth with Edinburgh its main settlement. The lengthy poem, in a variety of metres of elegant verse, mentions the extreme bravery of the soldiers of Gododdin who went into battle against the Saxons.The outcome was a disastrous defeat: - “Gwyr a aeth Gatraeth oedd ffraeth eu llu;/Glasfedd eu hancwyn, a gwenwyn fu.”

This was translated by Joseph Clancy as :

‘Men went to Catraeth(Catterick) keen their war-band / Pale mead their potion, it was poison.’