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Penal Times and After

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 October 2024

Donald Attwater
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Extract

Speaking last year at the centenary celebrations of St David’s church, Swansea (which was also about the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Swansea mission), the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster remarked on the fact that ‘so little has been written of the history of Catholicism in Wales’. Having undertaken some years ago to write a popular account of the Church in Wales, the present writer knows from very practical experience how little that little is; and he hopes that the few pages that follow—to say nothing of all the other pages in this issue of Blackfriars—may perhaps encourage others, better qualified than himself, to put their hands to the work of filling this deficiency in the religious and ecclesiastical history of these islands, a deficiency which may be partly due to the fact that for a century and more the overwhelming majority of Catholics in Wales have not themselves been Welsh.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Blackfriars , Volume 29 , Issue 336 , March 1948, pp. 132 - 139
Copyright
Copyright © 1948 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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References

1 These notes are mostly taken from my Catholic Church in Modern Wales (London, 1935), by kind permission of the publishers, Messrs Burns, Oates and Washbourne.

2 Cf. on Dr Roberts an excellent article by D. Rhys Phillips in Pox (Caldey, 1917; Nos. 51–52).

3 A local record of 1649 at Carmarthen refers to ‘that bloody 0. Cromwell’— himself of Welsh descent.

4 But at this time Catholics were still widely scattered: e.g., in one area, around the Monmouthshire Black Mountains, 3 at Clodock, 3 at Oldcastle, 3 at Llanigon, 2 at The Hay, 15 at Cwmyoy. There were still a few in the last-named remote village in 1839.

5 Menevia is the Latin form of Mynyw, the Welsh name of the District called in English Saint Davids.

6 It is nearly a quarter of a century since I was at Coed Anghred. It is to be hoped that the cemetery is no longer in the shocking state of neglect that it was then.

7 Various registers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have survived and have been printed, with valuable notes, by the Catholic Eecord society, viz., Perthir 1758–1818 (Vol. I), Holywell 1730–1829 and Llanarth 1781–1838 (Vol. III), Monmouth 1601–1826 (Vol. IX), Abergavenny 1740–1838 (Vol. XXVII). The paucity of material about penal-times in Wales is partly due to the fact that in 1780, during the Gordon Biots, the mob burned the house of Bishop Walmesley at Bath and all the archives of the Western district perished.

8 For Owen, see J. E. Lloyd's Owen Glendower, pp. 157-58. A strange figure with a curious career was Chevalier J. Y. W. Lloyd, Clochfaen (d. 1887).

9 See an article by Father Illtud Evans, O.P., in Blackfriars (Supplement—March, 1945).