Smugglers’ revels on St Patrick’s Day in Glamorgan

St Patrick’s Day was kept with revels on the Glamorgan coast, where smugglers, wreckers and dealers in contraband held high revelry in the seaboard parishes. Strict people complained that St David’s Day and St Patrick’s Day, so close together, gave a good excuse for holding the Mabsant. A man from South Glamorgan remembered a song praising both saints, which told of a Welsh boy carried off by the Irish and claimed by them though he was pure Welsh.