Born at Trawsfynydd, a remote lake-side village in North Wales, in the year 1577, John Roberts was, in the words of T. P. Ellis, ‘heir of a thousand years of “Welsh history and Welsh Catholicism'. The awareness of historical continuity displayed by the martyr at his death sprang, no doubt, from the impressions made upon the child John, not only by the stories he must have heard of the kings and princes of whom he was a direct descendant, of the saints who had sprung from the same line as himself, but also from the history implicit in the country-side around him, from the nearby and ruined abbey, and from the desecrated altars of the parish church. Thehistory of Trawsfynydd, a village bearing one of the Welsh names for the cross, embodies in itself the whole history of Wales.