The Eagles is an early eighteenth century building which originated as two cottages (the south-west one being single-storeyed possibly), knocked into one for the foundation of a charity school in 1735 following a bequest in the will of Sir Arthur Owen of Bodowen. The ground floor had the boys schoolroom on one side and the schoolmasters kitchen and living room on the other, while the first floor had the girls schoolroom (reached by external stairs), and the schoolmasters bedroom. Sir Arthur Owen had prescribed a 'school for the teaching and instructing of youth in the Welsh language', but it is known that the first master, John Beaver, was a Londoner, and a later commissioner's report stated that the school was not using the language that had been proscribed.
The name The Eagles is thought to be a corruption of Eglwys, as it is reputed to stand on the site of the chapel of the Princes of Gwynedd, although there is no evidence to support this. When a new village school was built in 1859, the building reverted to being a dwelling, and radical alterations were made to the layout during renovation work in the 1980s. The preachers Richard Owen and Jubilee Young are reputed to have stayed at the house.
It is a two storeyed building of rubble stone, externally rendered and with irregularly spaced windows. The openings are generally small with the main doorway offset from centre, and the modern slate roof has three rendered ridgestacks. At the right (south-western) end of the street elevation is a set of external stone steps leading to the first floor schoolroom.
Internally the first floor is reached by a set of winding stairs, with the north-east room fomerly having a small, Victorian grate and a 'gwely wainscot' dividing the main part of the room from a storage space. Also within this room is a cupboard of eighteenth century date, with lozenge lock-plates, a moulded cornice, and geometric fretwork panels in the upper doors. The former schoolroom on this floor has its two front windows blocked, while of the two rear windows, one is shuttered and the other has wooden louvres opened by projecting cams in the central octagonal mullion. The trusses are low pitched collar beams.
Source: Cadw listing description
Survey by A.J.Parkinson, RCAHMW, 18/02/1982
S Fielding, RCAHMW, 17 June 2005.
Information relating to the use of the building as a public house received from an ancestor of Robert Evans:
"The date when it became a dwelling again [is] much earlier. The first reference I have found in the records of the Eagles is the burial of William Rowland at Aberffraw on 10.02.1819. This record describes William as aged 64 and of the Eagle & Child Aberffraw. The 'Eagles & Child' and the 'Eagles' can be shown to be the same building from the continuity of the records. According to the 1820 to 1826 baptismal records of Robert's youngest children Robert and his family were living at the Eagles. Although it is thought that Robert had a licence to sell ale at the Eagles from the time he took the tenancy in 1820, the first record is not until the marriage of daughter, Anne, in 1838, when the church register describes him as an innkeeper at the Eagles. A further record is the 1841 census which describes Robert as a publican. The marriage record for his daughter, Mary, in 1843 refers to him as a farmer and publican. Robert died in 1846. His descendants continued to live at the 'Eagles' until 1979 although there is no record of it being used as a public house from the time of his death.
October 2020.