The history of the Pryce-Jones name

Both halves of the name are deeply Welsh, and both began as patronymics — names formed from the name of a father rather than a fixed, inherited surname.

"Pryce" is a corruption of the Welsh "Ap Rhys" — "son of Rhys". Rhys is an old Welsh personal name long associated with the sense of ardour or fiery zeal. In the older Welsh tradition a person was known by their father's name; as fixed surnames spread, the p of ap fused onto Rhys to give the settled surnames Price and Pryce. It is exactly the pattern behind other familiar Welsh names — Powell from ap Hywel, Pritchard from ap Richard.

"Jones" derives from "John" and is among the most widespread surnames in all of Wales. It too began as a patronymic — "John's son" — before hardening into a hereditary family name. That two such characteristically Welsh names sit together in Pryce-Jones is itself a small portrait of the country's naming history.

The surname Price/Pryce is found throughout Wales and the border counties of England. Because it is so common, it appears very often in compound — or "double-barrelled" — form, paired with other widespread Welsh surnames such as Jones and Thomas. This is the origin of names like Price-Jones, Pryce-Jones and Price-Thomas: a compound was a practical way to mark out one family among the many that shared a single, abundant Welsh name.

Throughout this archive the name is always written with its hyphen and is never broken across two lines, because the two halves belong together as a single family name.

The best-documented figure to carry the name is Sir Pryce Pryce-Jones (1834–1920), born on 16 October 1834 in Llanllwchaiarn, near Newtown, in the old county of Montgomeryshire. From a draper's shop in Newtown he built a business that reached customers across the world by post — and the Pryce Jones catalogue of 1861 is recognised as the first mail-order catalogue in the world.

It is worth keeping three dates apart: he began sending Welsh flannel by post in 1859; the famous catalogue dates from 1861; and the Royal Welsh Warehouse building beside Newtown's railway station opened later, in 1879. He was knighted in 1887 — and it was then that the family name took its hyphen.

His full story has a dedicated page in this archive.

The documented origins of the family lie in Mid Wales, in what was the county of Montgomeryshire (today part of Powys), and in particular around Newtown in the valley of the River Severn. This was a landscape of small market towns, hill farms and, above all, of the Welsh woollen and flannel trade — the very trade that would carry the family name out into the wider world.

Over the generations, members of the family left Mid Wales and settled in other countries. Today relatives bearing the Pryce-Jones name live across the United Kingdom and overseas.

This archive is maintained by Gerald Pryce-Jones, who lives in Chile. The family understands itself to belong to the Welsh Pryce-Jones line of Newtown; the precise chain of descent, however, has not yet been confirmed against reliable records.