A History of Christianity in Wales , livre ebook

A HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY IN WALES
A History of Christianity in Wales
Barry J. Lewis, Madeleine Gray, David Ceri Jones and D. Densil Morgan
© Barry J. Lewis, Madeleine Gray, David Ceri Jones and D. Densil Morgan, 2022
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C ONTENTS
The Authors
Foreword Rowan Williams
Preface David Ceri Jones
Chapter 1. Roman Beginnings, c . AD 1– c . AD 400 Barry J. Lewis
Chapter 2. The Age of Conversion, c .400– c .600 Barry J. Lewis
Chapter 3. The Definition of Christian Wales, c .600– c .800 Barry J. Lewis
Chapter 4. Vikings to Normans, c .800– c .1070 Barry J. Lewis
Chapter 5. The Age of Definition and Hierarchy, c. 1066– c. 1200 Madeleine Gray
Chapter 6. Conquest and Apocalypse, c. 1200– c. 1420 Madeleine Gray
Chapter 7. Y Ganrif Fawr : Christianity in Late Medieval Wales, c. 1420– c. 1530 Madeleine Gray
Chapter 8. Reformation Wales, 1530–1603 David Ceri Jones
Chapter 9. Securing a Protestant Wales, 1603–1760 David Ceri Jones
Chapter 10. Building a Nonconformist nation, 1760–1890 D. Densil Morgan
Chapter 11. Adapting to a Secular Wales, 1890–2020 D. Densil Morgan and David Ceri Jones
A Guide to Further Reading
T HE A UTHORS
Barry J. Lewis is a native of Welshpool, Montgomeryshire. He worked in the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies in Aberystwyth (2001–14), and now holds a professorship in the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. His research focuses on medieval Welsh language and literature, especially poetry. In addition, he is interested in hagiography. He has edited the works of several medieval Welsh poets and is the author of Medieval Welsh Poems to Saints and Shrines (2015). He is currently working on an edition of the genealogies of the Welsh saints.
Madeleine Gray is Professor Emerita of Ecclesiastical History at the University of South Wales. She has close links with a number of heritage and community organizations, and is an honorary research fellow of the National Museum of Wales. She has published extensively on late medieval and early modern history with a particular focus on visual and material evidence for the history of religious belief and practice. She is currently working on a survey of medieval tomb carvings in Wales.
David Ceri Jones is Reader in Early Modern History at Aberystwyth University. His most recent publications include: The Fire Divine: Introducing the Evangelical Revival (2015); as co-author, The Elect Methodists: Calvinistic Methodism in England and Wales, 1735–1811 (2012); and as co-editor, George Whitefield: Life, Context and Legacy (2016); Making Evangelical History: Faith, Scholarship and the Evangelical Past (2019); and Evangelicalism and Dissent in Modern England and Wales (2020).
D. Densil Morgan is Emeritus Professor of Theology at the University of Wales, Trinity Saint David, Lampeter. Previously he was Professor of Theology at Bangor University and Warden of Coleg Gwyn, the North Wales Baptist College. An ordained Baptist minister, he has written extensively on Christianity in Wales, aspects of modern Church History and the theology of Karl Barth. Among his publications are the two-volume Theologia Cambrensis: A History of Protestant Religion and Theology in Wales, 1588–1900 (2018 and 2021), The Span of the Cross: Christian Religion and Society in Wales, 1914–2000 , 2nd edition (2011), Barth Reception in Britain (2012) and The SPCK Introduction to Karl Barth (2010). He is a Member of The Center of Theological Inquiry at Princeton, and a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.
F OREWORD
The history of Welsh Christianity and the history of the Welsh language in any recognizable form begin at very much the same point, and it is not surprising that they continue to be deeply interwoven. Until the last quarter of the last century, most of the population of Wales – churchgoing or not, Welsh-speaking or not – would have taken for granted a cultural hinterland deeply imbued with the Christian imagination, especially as crystallized in the tradition of hymnody. ‘Hymns and arias’: it’s a folk memory that lingers even in the very secularized environment that is contemporary Wales. But how many under sixty now know (let alone sing) the words of those hymns? In a very postmodern twist, more people at rugby internationals probably know the words of Max Boyce’s nostalgic evocation of communal singing at sports events than know the hymns themselves. That most formidable of twentieth-century Welsh Anglophone poets, R. S. Thomas, famously wrote of living under ‘The last quarter of the moon / of Jesus’ (‘The Moon in Lleyn’).
The waxing and waning of public faith in Wales, though, is not a new thing. In post-Roman Britain, Christian teachers and ascetics salvaged from the wreckage of imperial rule a remarkably vigorous Christian culture which consolidated the identity of highland Britain, especially Cornwall, Wales and Cumbria, as a bastion of Christian truth against barbarian incursions. A rich and intellectually lively cultural commonwealth united Wales with Ireland and indeed with continental Europe, before the trauma of the Viking age, and the destruction of the greatest centres of learning by raids from outside and local wars within regions. A brief period of recovery was interrupted by the Norman conquest and the total reorganization of church administration; a native tradition of learning and spirituality was edged aside by the importation of foreign clergy at the most senior level. Yet some of these imported leaders and their successors were drawn into projects and dreams that affirmed Welsh identity (think of Gerald of Wales). ‘Foreign’ religious orders like the Cistercians became in many areas indispensable allies of the indigenous rulers and even patrons of the bardic tradition.
The brutalities of the thirteenth-century suppression of independence and the universally shared devastation of plague in the fourteenth century left church and society alike deeply damaged; yet the fifteenth century saw a further flowering of writing and the visual and monumental arts. The Welsh church on the eve of the Reformation is not exactly a beacon of discipline, learning and ascetical piety, but it is very far from being (as some historians were once wont to suggest) a morass of superstition and illiteracy. The Reformation, when it arrived, started badly, with Welsh language and tradition being readily identified by some zealots with religious reaction; but the extraordinary generation of Protestant humanist scholars who promoted the translation of Bible and Prayer Book into Welsh saved the country for Reformed Christianity and began to lay the groundwork for popular literacy and a popular religious literature aimed at a new and wider public.
Poverty, the dissolution of traditional social patterns, and an often demoralized, undereducated and inadequately supported clergy had led, by the early eighteenth century to a widespread pessimism about the spiritual condition of the people at large, despite all the effort of the preceding century (including initiatives from some of the much-maligned bishops of the era, not all of whom were indifferent English placemen). The fields were ripe for a harvest of new educational and evangelistic labour; and – ironically – projects designed to reinforce the hold of the Anglican church helped to prepare the ground for the unexpected and unparalleled outpouring of energy and devotion from the mid-eighteenth century onwards which led to the majority of the Welsh population abandoning the Established Church. Nonconformity came to be seen as the religion of the people, as against the hen estrones , ‘the old foreigner’, a Church of England that seemed distant from the bulk of the population, especially the Welsh-speaking population. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Nonconformity and national identity were deeply intertwined, and the language was a vehicle for this alliance, with enormous quantities of Welsh-language theology and devotional material appearing from Welsh presses. The disestablishment campaign reflected this confident and expansive spirit; yet its eventual triumph on the eve of the First World War left a legacy of sour hostility and a degree of exhaustion. Nonconformity began its twentieth-century decline, increasingly precipitous after the Second War. Anglicanism, briefly and often tactlessly triumphant in the mid-twentieth century, followed suit, as the country became both more politically self-conscious and more culturally diverse.
R. S. Thomas’s poem stops and turns on itself about half-way through, with the challenge, ‘Why so fast, / mortal?’ We are constantly tempted to premature closures in any human story. The history is already one of advance and r