A Bodwell family story · Bardsey Island (Ynys Enlli), North Wales · 516–1979
The Island of Twenty Thousand Saints
How a Welsh gentleman came to own a holy island — and what he did with it
On 15 April 1553, a royal clerk sat down to enrol a licence in the Patent Rolls, the crown's permanent record of grants and favors. Among the dozens of routine entries that spring, one stands out to a Bodwell: it allows the grant of an entire island, "the site of Bardesey monastery, co. Carnarvon, with the houses, barns, etc., therein, the island in the sea," to "John Wyn ap Hugh of Bodwell, co. Carnarvon, gentleman, his heirs and assigns." Look closely at that last place name. The clerk spelled it with a w. More than a century before the family's American branch took root in Massachusetts, the crown's own records had already written down our name the way we spell it today.
The island 516 onward
Bardsey Island, Ynys Enlli in Welsh, sits roughly two miles off the tip of the Llŷn Peninsula, across a stretch of water so fierce in spring tides that it is known as Bardsey Race. The Welsh name is usually translated "island of the currents." The English name, Bardsey, is traditionally read as "bards' island," and the monks who lived there called it, more simply, the island of the saints. It covers only about 430 acres, with a single hill, Mynydd Enlli, rising 167 metres.
Its sanctity is very old. Tradition has Saint Cadfan, a monk from Brittany, founding a monastery on the island in 516, and for the next thousand years Enlli was one of the great pilgrimage destinations of Wales. By the early Middle Ages the saying went that three pilgrimages to Bardsey were worth one to Rome. The island became known as the burial place of twenty thousand saints — a number nobody has ever been able to verify and nobody has ever been willing to give up. In one Welsh legend it was even the real Avalon, where King Arthur was carried to recover from his wounds, rather than Glastonbury. Edward I made a pilgrimage there in 1284. By the thirteenth century the old Celtic community had become St Mary's Abbey, a house of Augustinian canons, and a bell tower rose above the monastery.
The island changes hands 1536–1553
Then came Henry VIII. The Dissolution of the Lesser Monasteries Act of 1536 swept away the abbey the following year, its buildings stripped and left to ruin, and its lands passed to the crown, which leased and re-leased them for years. Bardsey was exactly the kind of asset the Tudor court handed out to men it needed to reward or to keep loyal. Edward VI came to the throne in 1547 as a boy of nine; real power lay with his regents, first the Duke of Somerset and, from late 1549, John Dudley, Earl of Warwick — created Duke of Northumberland in 1551.
Warwick's great moment had come on 27 August 1549, when his army crushed Kett's Rebellion, a rising of Norfolk farmers against land enclosures, at the Battle of Dussindale. According to Sir John Wynn of Gwydir, historian of the neighboring Gwydir family and later a relative by marriage, John Wyn ap Hugh of Bodvel carried the royal standard that day and, though unhorsed and wounded, still "upheld the great standard of England." That is the story the family has told ever since: Bardsey Island, the reward for valor on a Norfolk field.
The document makes for a more interesting story than the legend. The roll is a licence, carrying a fee of 37 shillings, allowing the Duke of Northumberland to grant the site; it also notes that the monastery site had earlier been leased to a Ralph Dodd, alias Body, and a Thomas Johns. The History of Parliament entry for John Wyn ap Hugh points out that the grant, as it was enrolled, makes no mention of his valor in the field at all. What it does have is a date. The licence, issued to Northumberland to make the grant, was enrolled on 15 April 1553, only two weeks after the close of the March 1553 Parliament in which John Wyn ap Hugh sat as knight of the shire for Caernarvonshire.
The historians' reading is that he was not simply being rewarded for something he did four years earlier. He appears to have used his seat in Parliament to extract the grant from Northumberland, who may well have seen it as a way of securing a useful Welsh ally. His father-in-law, Sir John Puleston, had served as steward of the abbey's lands until his death in 1551, which meant Wyn already knew exactly what was there and who held the leases.
Timing is everything April–August 1553
The date turns out to have been remarkably lucky. In April 1553, Edward VI was gravely ill with what was probably tuberculosis, and Northumberland was racing to secure his own position. On 6 July the fifteen-year-old king died. Northumberland's attempt to put his daughter-in-law Lady Jane Grey on the throne collapsed within days; Mary Tudor took the crown, and on 22 August 1553 Northumberland was executed for treason. A man who owed his island to a duke now facing the block might have had cause for alarm. John Wyn ap Hugh's solution was practical: he sued out a pardon from Mary and served her loyally in Caernarvonshire, and the island stayed with his family. The Bodvels kept Bardsey; the Duke who granted it did not live to see the summer's end.
The wealth of an island 1553–1576
What did a Caernarvonshire gentleman actually get? The licence covered the monastery site, its buildings, the island itself, three meadows and pastures, and the associated liberties and franchises. Together with the former abbot's house at Aberdaron on the mainland, it made up a compact, valuable estate sitting astride one of the most important sea lanes on the Welsh coast. Bardsey had farmland, fishing, and seabirds, but its true value was strategic: a defensible harbor-side base two miles from the mainland on a coast with few other anchorages.
John Wyn ap Hugh was already one of the most active land-collectors in Caernarvonshire. He held a 21-year lease on townships in the Llŷn Peninsula granted shortly after Dussindale. He took the farm of the tolls of Pwllheli and the town fields. He disposed of some of his lands to Sir Humphrey Gilbert, the famous Elizabethan colonizer. He served as sheriff of the county in 1550–1 and again in 1559–60, sat as a justice of the peace for twenty-six years, and married into the Puleston family, which tied him to the rising house of Gwydir. By the 1560s, by the account of the Star Chamber complaint itself, he was a man of such standing and influence in the county that ordinary neighbors could not easily touch him.
That kind of land-grabbing made enemies. One of his grants was challenged in the Court of Augmentations by more than a hundred people who said he had thrown them out of their holdings on Bardsey and at Aberdaron, and who claimed a prior lease from Henry VIII. The lawsuit shows the other side of a Tudor fortune: for every gentleman who gained an island, there were tenant families who lost the ground they had farmed for generations.
The pirate question 1565–1569
Elizabeth I's first dozen years on the throne were years of rampant piracy in the waters around Britain, and the Privy Council was repeatedly occupied with the problem. The Welsh coast, Ireland, and the southwest of England were the worst-affected areas, and the scholarly consensus is that piracy flourished only because it had friends on land: local officials, magistrates, and gentry who bought cheap cargo, supplied the ships, looked the other way, or shared in the profit. Cardiff became notorious for it, with pirates like John Callis operating almost openly while the region's officials failed to stop them.
In 1565, the crown named John Wyn ap Hugh one of the commissioners for the suppression of piracy in Caernarvonshire. Four years later, in 1569, he was hauled before the Court of Star Chamber on the charge of doing the opposite. The accusation, first raised around 1567 by a man named Morgan ab Ieuan, was that Wyn used Bardsey as a depot for pirates, kept a factor on the island to ship the stolen goods to Chester, and drew his less careful neighbors into legal trouble while he himself escaped prosecution. The Dictionary of Welsh Biography summarizes the charge as the use of Bardsey as "the headquarters of a highly-organized nest of pirates."
Nothing in the sources I found records a conviction. Whether that is evidence of innocence or of influence is something the surviving records cannot settle. What is clear is the pattern: a man commissioned to catch pirates, who owned the best natural hiding place on the coast, who held the tolls of the nearest market town, and whose family later developed a small port on the mainland near Cwrtwith for shipping produce to Chester. The Bodvel estate lay on the road between Pwllheli on Cardigan Bay and Nefyn on Carnarvon Bay, and travelers and traders passed through it. If any family on the Llŷn was positioned to profit from the sea trade, legal or otherwise, it was this one. He went on to sit in one more Parliament and died in 1576, with the island still in his family.
Where the island went 1576–1979
Bardsey stayed with John Wyn ap Hugh's descendants. His line, the Bodvels of Bodvel and the Wynns of Bodvean who descended from him, eventually became the Barons Newborough, and the island remained part of the Newborough estate for generations. Between 1870 and 1875 Lord Newborough rebuilt its farmhouses, many of which still stand, and in 1875 added a small chapel. The population stood at around a hundred in 1901, then fell sharply after 1925 as most islanders moved to the mainland. The island even had its own "kings" — three in all, according to the Bardsey Island Trust — a charming Newborough-era tradition.
The island was sold out of the family estate in 1972, and in 1979 the Bardsey Island Trust bought it after a campaign backed by the Church in Wales and Welsh scholars. The trust has managed Bardsey as a nature reserve and pilgrimage site ever since. Of St Mary's Abbey, only a Grade I listed bell tower survives, standing in a graveyard beside a Celtic cross raised to the twenty thousand saints. Pilgrims still make the crossing.
Saint Cadfan founds a monastery on Bardsey, according to tradition.
Edward I visits the island on pilgrimage.
St Mary's Abbey dissolved under Henry VIII's Act of Suppression.
Battle of Dussindale; John Wyn ap Hugh bears the royal standard for the Earl of Warwick.
Licence enrolled allowing Northumberland to grant Bardsey to John Wyn ap Hugh of "Bodwell."
Edward VI dies; Lady Jane Grey's brief reign collapses; Northumberland is executed.
Wyn named a commissioner for the suppression of piracy in Caernarvonshire.
Charged in Star Chamber with using Bardsey as a pirates' depot.
John Wyn ap Hugh dies; the island passes to his heirs.
Lord Newborough rebuilds the island's farms and builds a chapel.
The Bardsey Island Trust buys the island.
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The family name in a royal record.
The 1553 Patent Roll spells the place and the family "Bodwell," showing that the spelling the American branch eventually settled on was already in use by crown clerks in Edward VI's reign.
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A grant that outlived its giver.
The Duke of Northumberland who arranged the grant was executed four months later, but the grant stood, and Bardsey stayed with the family through the change of monarch.
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Legend and record don't quite match.
The family tradition that Bardsey was a reward for valor at Dussindale is not supported by the enrolled licence, which says nothing of the kind. The timing points instead to political horse-trading in the spring of 1553.
A Welsh gentleman gets an island because he knew the right duke at the right moment. He is then accused of running pirates from it, is never convicted, and dies rich. Four centuries later, the island belongs to a charitable trust and a scattering of pilgrims, and the family that once held it is spread across two continents. All that is left of the transaction is one line in a calendar of royal grants, with our name misspelled the way we spell it now.