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ROMANO-BRITISH AND WELSH CHRISTIANITY: CONTINUITY OR DISCONTINUITY? PART I A NEW view has recently been finding favour concerning the manner in which the Christian Faith first came to those parts of Britain which now form the principality of Wales. It used to be thought that there was unbroken continuity between the church in Roman Britain and the church in sub-Roman Wales. Lately the old orthodoxy has been challenged; there was, it is now thought, a discontinuity, the church in Roman Britain failed to survive the Saxon onslaught, and Christianity re-entered Britain afresh in sub- Roman times by the western seaways. This, it is said, can be inferred from the epigraphy of the early Christian inscriptions, and from the geographical distribution, predominantly westerly and coastal, of the monuments upon which they are inscribed. It is proposed in this paper to examine this new view in the light of the surviving literary evidence. It will be useful to start with a brief summary statement of the orthodox doctrine. This is that the church in Roman Britain is attested by the presence of British bishops at the Council of Aries in 314 and the Council of Rimini in 359.1 In the later fourth century the church in Britain was sufficiently robust to nurture the famous heresiarch, Pelagius, whose floruit, in Rome and afterwards Jerusalem, covered the first two decades of the fifth century. In 429 a contemporary chronicler, Prosper of Aquitaine, records that owing to the spread of Pelagianism in Britain, Pope Celestine, at the instigation of Palladius the deacon, sent Germanus of Auxerre to Britain to strengthen the Britons in their faith. After that the voice of contemporary witnesses is virtually stilled; but a consistent tradition, alike in insular Britain and in the new continental Brittany in what had been Roman Armorica, traces the subsequent develop- ment of the church in these lands to the mission of St. Germanus. When the coming of St. Augustine to England at the close of the sixth century brought to light differences between the customs of the contemporary Roman church and those of the Celtic churches of For a recent review of the evidence for Romano-British Christianity, see 'Christianity in Roman Britain' by J. M. C. Toynbee in Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 3rd ser.. XVI (1953), 1 ff.; and W. H. C. Frend, 'Religion in Roman Britain', ibid.. XVIII (1955), 1 ff.