Welsh Journals

Miles Salley Bishop of Llandaff Robert W Dunning Nearly thirty years ago David Walker remarked on the obscurity which then surrounded the medieval diocese of Llandaff, and he noted in particular, largely because of the total absence of administrative registers, the peculiar obscurity of its bishops in the later Middle Ages. He and others remarked that the practice of appointing either friars or members of monastic orders was common to all four Welsh sees, and commented that at Llandaff and Bangor there was an almost unbroken succession of friars from the 13th century until the Reformation. One exception to that rule at Llandaff was Miles Salley, bishop from 1500 to 1517, a Benedictine monk at Abingdon in Berkshire and later abbot of Eynsham in Oxfordshire. During the course of the Parliament of 1489 an act of conviction and attainder was passed against John Sant, abbot of Abingdon, and others for having conspired in January 1487 against the Crown and in favour of the earl of Lincoln. Among the group was Miles Salley, a monk of Abingdon and evidently Sant's close associate he is called "comen to the same abbot" who delivered to Christopher Swan, another conspirator, an undisclosed sum of money. Salley himself was not convicted of treason, but was ordered to forfeit his goods. Four years later, on 22 January 1491, the bishop of Salisbury, in whose diocese Abingdon lay, ordered the already restored Abbot Sant to receive Salley back into the community after imprisonment for the crime of lese majeste. He presumably returned, and in March 1492 he received a general pardon from the Crown. At an unknown date before November 1499 Salley was transferred 1 D Walker, "The Medieval Bishops of Llandaff", Morgannwg 6 (1962) 5-32. 2 D Knowles, The Re li go us Orders in England, I 321-2; II 369-71; III 492-3. Salley was unaccountably omitted. 3 Rotuli Parliamentorum, IV 436-7. 4 Ibid, 437. 5 The Register of Thomas Langton, Bishop of Salisbury, ed D P Wright (Canterbury and York Society), 475. 6 Calendar of Patent Rolls 1485-94, 381; Public Record Office, C82/91/15.