Law Society’s Gazette, February 1960

Gentlemen of the LawWalter Powell was born in 1581 the son of a small landowner at Penros in Monmouthshire… Powell was a most conscientious man and even frequent bouts of illness failed to keep him from his travels. In 1621 he ‘fell sick of the small pocks for 6 dayes’, but four days later he was attending a commission at Hereford… It is quite remarkable how often he met with accidents on these journeys. These mishaps were usually the result of falls from his horse and their frequency rather suggests that he was a poor horseman.

Apart from his legal work Walter Powell owned or leased a good deal of farm land and kept a mill. Like so many of his contemporaries he enclosed common land whenever he could, and thereby incurred a good deal of unpopularity. [One person hamstrung his cow, another smashed his fences and a third threatened to stab him. He prosecuted the latter, who was captured and imprisoned.]

Friendship with the great did not give Walter Powell social aspirations above his station in life. His five sons were all sent to the free school at Monmouth where they learnt their Latin grammar alongside the sons of neighbouring squires and local tradesmen. Making provision for his children must have been a problem, for he had nine by his first wife Margaret. After her death he married again and had five more children. One of his sons was apprenticed to a dyer; a daughter he married off at the age of ten to a boy of twelve, ‘both yonge’ as he admitted! Indeed it is surprising to find a man of his standing encouraging child marriage at this date, even in the remoter parts of the country.

The outbreak of the Civil War threw the legal world into utter confusion. The Chancellor carried off the Great Seal to Oxford while most of the judges and court officials remained in London. No one knew whether the courts should sit because the necessary writs had not been received… Eventually the king sent a messenger with writs adjourning the sittings but he was captured and hanged as a spy because he was not accompanied by a trumpeter.

Michael Birks, M.A.