Llantrisant has produced many remarkable people, but none more remarkable than Dr William Price. Born in 1800, he practised as a doctor, was active in Chartism and Welsh radical politics, and became a passionate believer in what he took to be the ancient religion of the druids. He let his hair and beard grow long, dressed in a scarlet waistcoat and green trousers with a fox-fur hat, and held druidic ceremonies at the Rocking Stone on Pontypridd Common. He was an outspoken opponent of orthodox religion.
In his eighties he had a son and named the child Iesu Grist, Jesus Christ, apparently to provoke the churchgoers of Llantrisant. The baby died at five months. On 18 January 1884, as people were coming out of church, they found Price trying to burn the body on a hillside. He was arrested.
At his trial he argued that no law in England and Wales actually forbade cremation, as long as it caused no nuisance. The judge agreed. Price was acquitted. The judgement was a key step towards the legal acceptance of cremation, which Parliament regulated in the Cremation Act 1902.
Price died in 1893 and was himself cremated, watched by a crowd estimated at twenty thousand. Marie Trevelyan, writing a few years later, remembered him in her chapter on healers: "The late celebrated Dr. Price of Llantrisant, Glamorgan, had marvellous magnetic powers, and was known to cure people by a touch of the hand and by the strong power of his will."
There is nothing supernatural about the cremation itself, but Price's druidism, his reputation as a healer and the scene on the hillside have made him part of Llantrisant's folklore.
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