Melvin spent his formative years on his family’s farm in northern Montgomeryshire. At Swansea University he undertook a PhD on ‘Rural Society in Eighteenth-Century Montgomeryshire’ under the supervision of Dr David W. Howell, which was examined by the late Professor G. E. Mingay. This thesis underpinned the publication of The Crisis of Community: Montgomeryshire, 1680-1815 (Cardiff, 1996), which remains a key text in the historiography of eighteenth-century Wales and one of the foundational studies informing and inspiring the research programmes developed by Bangor University’s Institute for the Study of Welsh Estates. Melvin served as editor of The Montgomeryshire Collections from 1987 to 1999, and contributed a number of articles to that journal.
After a successful career in local government, Melvin is now making use of his retirement to revisit and reignite long-term scholarly interests, and is developing an important research and publication portfolio centred on the social, economic and cultural histories of Montgomeryshire, and in particular the influence exerted by the county’s landed families and estates. This includes a series of publications on Montgomeryshire houses: Garth: Estate, Architecture and Family(2020), Plas Newydd and the Manor of Talerddig (2022), and Llwyn: A Welsh House with Three Histories(forthcoming). A University of Wales Press contract for a book as part of its new series on Race, Ethnicity: Wales and the World edited by Prof. Charlotte Williams and Dr Neil Evans is entitled Bryngwyn and Old Hope Pen: A Story of Wales and Jamaica.
In its heyday, Powis Castle was at the centre of one of the largest and most significant estates in Wales. Its archive is the largest single estate archive held at the National Library of Wales, with other huge and associated collections at Shropshire Archives, The National Archives and the British Library. Working with Murray Ll. Chapman and with the support of Viscount Clive and the National Library, in 2022 Melvin listed the contents of about 250 uncatalogued boxes of Powis Castle material held by the library. Melvin is currently compiling a history of the Powis estates, the castle and the family that has owned them from about 1660 to 1811, with Murray Chapman concurrently preparing a history of the earlier period from about 1560 to 1660. This is a hugely diverse and ambitious study covering several interrelated disciplines. It ranges from the Herbert family’s near loss of their patrimony owing to their support for James II; the remarkable losses they incurred during the ‘Mississippi Bubble’ of 1719-20, to the endemic indebtedness that shadowed them throughout the late-eighteenth century. There are chapters on the development of Powis Castle as a mansion, its gardens and the perceptions of both that are given by early tourists. There is a particular chapter on the related family of the Herberts of Cherbury, with their estates in Wales and their beleaguered plantation in south-western Ireland. There is also a chapter on Robert Clive and his son, and their formation of the Clive patrimony that eventually merged with the Powis estates. There are also chapters on estate administration, the family’s obsession with lead-mining, their manipulation of their political interests, and the immense additions to their estates that resulted from parliamentary enclosure.