Welsh Journals

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ceased in 1875; there had been nothing in the legal documents founding or endowing the church to secure it as a Welsh church. After much controversy another Welsh church the original Eglwys Dewi Sant was built in Howard Gardens in 1890-1. Mr Brown has written upon a subject with several significant aspects. There have lately been several studies of the Welsh-speaking community in Cardiff; we now have another chapter in the story of this previously neglected minority. Especially revealing is the information given here about the different attitudes of Welsh-speaking people towards their native language. Someone is urgently needed who will investigate and interpret the whole subject of the Welsh as they actively colonised this corner of their own country in the nineteenth century. Mr Brown's new book also underlines what is in general well known, namely the difficulty experienced by the Church of England in promoting church extension within the constraints of ecclesiastical and statute law and the stranglehold of the parochial system. It seems to have been doubly difficult to provide a specifically Welsh language church in a town where English was the predominant language, where therefore the Act of 1563 could not be invoked. At the height of the struggle to found Eglwys Dewi Sant, Bishop Richard Lewis could point ruefully to the thirteen nonconformist chapels in Cardiff in which the services were either wholly or almost wholly Welsh. Brian Ll James, University College, Cardiff