The hand-written bibles handed down through centuries, in pride of place in a Welsh country house library
At Treberfydd House in Brecon, a magnificent hand-written bible has been handed down through the generations. John Goodall tells its story.
Sally Raikes sits in the library with a manuscript copy of the Bible bound in three large volumes. As a note in the front of the first explains, they were ‘The gift of Elizabeth Armstrong to her grandchildren, written by herself’.
The same hand has added the date ‘1823’ with a different pen and continued: ‘To be given to Robert Raikes my grandson when Thomas Raikes (my son in law) pleases to part with them.’
It proved an appropriate gift. Robert was a wealthy young man from a Yorkshire family who fell under the High Church spell of John Henry Newman and John Keble when at Oxford in the 1830s and became a Tractarian. He and his wife, Frances, purchased the Treberfydd estate in the 1840s, and, with Gothic Revival architect John Loughborough Pearson, rebuilt the local church, established a school and created a new house for themselves.
The text is written in an even copperplate hand and — presumably to make it palatable to children — punctuated with engraved illustrations taken from other books. Compiling the manuscript must have been a massive task.
‘These volumes are a physical expression of the High Church spirit that brought my great-great great-grandfather here and created the house,’ says Sally.
‘It is interesting that his namesake and kinsman, Robert Raikes, was the founder of the Sunday School Movement.’
The library at Treberfydd was featured in Country Life 60 years ago, in 1966, when it was described as the 'one of the least altered rooms in the house'.
See more about the house at the Treberfydd website.
This feature originally appeared in the June 17, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.
