Welsh Journals

The Church in Glamorgan during the Interregnum Part One: An Introduction* Philip Jenkins In 1714 the Revd John Walker published a detailed account of the persecutions which he believed had been inflicted on the orthodox clergy of the Church of England during the Interregnum. By good fortune the materials which he collected for this massive project survive to this day in the Bodleian Library, and they show that the work he published contains only a part of the information that can be gleaned from this collection. This is especially true of the county of Glamorgan, where Walker had the good fortune to find two conscientious informants, who carried out extensive interviews as the basis for their written accounts of the 1650s. The Walker manuscript on Glamorgan is there- fore doubly valuable; it is an essential source for the history of the Interregnum, but also for the years in which the materials were being collected, during the religious controversies of Queen Anne's reign.1 The text of Francis Davies' and Edward Mansell's accounts, with commentary, will appear in two further parts in volumes 4 and 5 of this Journal. 1 The Glamorgan section is found in Oxford, Bodleian Ms, Walker C4, fols 65-72, here reproduced by kind permission of the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Works used throughout this discussion include: