Welsh Journals

because the episcopal church has played a relatively minor role in the Christian life of some parts of modern Wales, at least as measured by the number of its adherents and buildings. The real centre of interest in recent centuries is the creation of a chapel-based culture in an industrial society, the character of spirituality and social organisation which prevailed there, and then (when we come to our own century) that decline in the influence of the chapels which is now far advanced. The scheme of the book does not allow this striking and distinctive society to be adequately discussed and it must be said that the work becomes less interesting as it approaches the present day. This does not appear to be the fault of the writers, who show themselves fully aware of these issues and have interesting incidental comments on them, but of the mandate which they were given. I have stressed this one element of weakness precisely because these are essays of high quality, which are both scholarly and readable. They are brief, but they have the merits of brevity, for the writers are often able to highlight the main facets of a period. Thus, Dr. David Walker stresses the fact that the Normans found in England a monastic and diocesan structure broadly similar to the continental pattern, whereas the prevailing Welsh church order was wholly unfamiliar to them. They never understood it, and imposed in Wales an organisation which was essentially derived from outside. Dr. Tudur Jones is particularly interesting on the extent of co-operation in the seventeenth century between Anglicans and dissenters (if indeed those terms may properly be used), especially in the provision of literature in Welsh, and both he and Canon Owain Jones are clearly aware of the domestic or family character of religion in the periods which concern them. Liturgy and authority were relatively less important than the cultivation of personal piety. These are only a few examples of many; all the writers contribute to the interest of the collection. The central theme lies in the tension between the general and the local. This tension is almost always evident in ecclesiastical history, but in Wales it was present in a special way and with a special intensity. For much of its history, the Welsh church did not succeed in securing any organisational identity of its own. It was part of the province of Canterbury, subject to the influence or the control of the Crown, governed by the same bishops as they climbed the ladder of promotion, and influenced by the same spiritual movements: the Reformation, Dissent, Methodism. These influ- ences were at work in a context very different from that of England, with a distinctive social structure and language, and as a result Welsh Christianity always displayed special features of its own. There were, as this volume shows, often people in authority who were sensitive to the special needs of Welsh society, and even those bishops who stressed most firmly the English connection were sometimes actively concerned to provide Welsh-speaking pastors and religious literature in the vernacular. At the same time what emerges from these pages is a sense of the inappropriateness of the eccles- iastical structures through which, for much of its history, the local churches were governed. The diocesan organisation and the pattern of monasticism had been devised outside Wales for the needs of a quite different society; they were imported by the Normans and the English, and were to a serious extent exploited by them. From the decline of the clas churches to the rise of the chapel-based culture of the nineteenth century, Wales had a church