The definition of ‘the gentry’ in seventeenth and eighteenth century Wales was rather elastic, and encompassed many families of rather modest means. The dignity of being a ‘gentleman’ mostly attached to the ownership of freehold land, however small the piece of land in question was; and if it could be backed by a pedigree showing descent from some ancient prince or member of the old uchelwyr class, then so much the better. As A. H. Dodd observed, in Tudor and Jacobean times the concept of the proud but impoverished Welsh gentleman, ready in an instant to recite the contents of his “card”, as the home-compiled genealogical tables were known, was sufficiently familiar to become a staple of stage comedy.

There were a number of families of this type in Brymbo. Many of them are recorded in John Norden’s 1620 survey of landowners, and a few survived until well into the eighteenth century. Ffrith and Gwernygaseg, the Pentre and Penycoed, all once had occupants of this freeholder class. Of those on a slightly higher rung of the ladder, the Powell family of the Gyfynys are a typical example, although much of their land was held under the peculiar type of tenure called copyhold rather than freehold. Even further up the social scale, the Griffith family of Brymbo Hall laid claim to a coat of arms and the title “Esquire”; even so, the few records remaining of the last of them, Robert, show that his possessions and day-to-day concerns were simply those of a farmer. Down in Wrexham, the younger sons of the gentry were put into various trades and for a while all manner of craftsmen and merchants in the town could boast of their good breeding.

Another of these long forgotten gentry families appears to have farmed in the corner of the township adjoining Ffrwd and the Gyfynys, and eventually adopted the surname “Jones”. The originator of this name was recorded as “Johannes Rees ap Hugh” in Norden: the surveyor would have consulted with him directly, as he was another member of the manorial jury alongside John Griffith of Brymbo Hall, William Twissingham of Glascoed and John Matthews of Ffrith. John or Sion owned two main landholdings : one messuage, and cottage, with about 18 (modern) acres of attached land in parcels called cae nessa’r ty, y hirdir issa, y hirdir ucha, erw lleucu fechan and erw lleucu issa, and another four parcels, covering about 20 acres, called y hirdir ucha, y hirdir issa, y hirdir hirid, and weirglodd fechan. “Erw Lleucu”, “Lleucu’s Acre”, is an interesting survival of a female personal name attached to enclosures. “Hirdir” means “the longland”, perhaps a sign of long strips enclosed from the earlier common fields of which John’s ancestors would have had a share. The latter parcels are particularly interesting as Norden describes them as having formerly been held by Gruffydd ap Edward ap Morgan, the grandfather of John Griffith who then owned Brymbo Hall. A John ap Rhys is also recorded as the tenant of a further 40 acres in Brymbo belonging to William Robinson of Gwersyllt, so if this was the same man, he farmed the best part of 80 acres in the township.

Thanks to that obsession with pedigree mentioned earlier, we know that John probably had a son called Bartholomew, who continued to live at Brymbo, and adopted the surname Jones. His marriage to Magdalen Jones, a daughter of the prestigious Jones family of Llwyn Onn in Abenbury, was carefully recorded in one of the local manuscripts of genealogy (from where it was eventually taken by the Chevalier Lloyd for his exhaustive, if occasionally fanciful, History of the Princes, the Lords Marcher, and the Ancient Nobility of Powys Fadog) and Bartholomew is here explicitly said to be the son of John ap Rhys ap Hugh.

I cannot discover if Bartholomew and Magdalen had any children, but what is clear is that by the 1660s the lands were owned and occupied by a man called John Jones, gent. Given the usual tradition, in the period, of eldest sons being named after grandfathers, it seems reasonable to suggest that John Jones was Bartholomew’s son. John, however, seems to have lost the appetite for living in Brymbo, for a deed of 1666 records him as “formerly of Brymbo” but living in Allington, close to the border. The deed is a grant of land – with field names for the most part identical to those recorded by Norden – to Richard Parry of Coedmarchan, gent. Other parties to the deed are Ann Jones and Katherine Sutton, both “of St. Martins le graund, London, spinsters“; Katherine Sutton was presumably something to do with the Sutton family of Gwersyllt, but perhaps Ann was a sister or aunt of John Jones. Her residence in London indicates that the world of these small gentry was not really as parochial as it might appear at first glance.

At this point the Jones family disappears, and though Alfred Palmer made a very thorough survey of Allington in his History of the Parish of Gresford, he does not mention a John Jones. However, even if the fate of John Jones can no longer be traced, that of his land can. A few years later, John Parry, the son of Richard, mortgaged the Coedmarchan properties to Sir Nathaniel Curzon. Parry must have failed to repay the mortgage, as Curzon later took possesion of the estate and sold it to the Myddeltons of Chirk Castle, including the land in Brymbo. Some of it, as the farm called Penygroes on Brymbo hill, was still part of the Chirk Castle estate in the 19th century, but the other part, including several of the fields named hirdir, were eventually bought by the ironmaster John Thompson, and became a part of the works at Ffrwd.