Welsh Journals

THE DIOCESE OF LLANDAFF IN 15631 Madeleine Gray The 1563 survey of St. Asaph, published in the first volume of this Journal, was compiled by a bishop who had been in office for only two years, though in that time he had completed a visitation of his diocese and inspected the letters of institution and collation of many of the clergy." The survey of Llandaff, by contrast, was compiled by or on behalf of a bishop who many felt had been in office for too long. Anthony Kitchin was in his late sixties when he was appointed to the diocese in 1545. He served the see through the religious turmoil of the mid-sixteenth century and was the only Marian bishop to accept the Elizabeth settlement, though he made his disagreement with it plain in the House of Lords. By 1563 he was old and frail, and was said to have been too ill to attend the Convocation in the spring of that year. It is impossible to tell from the Lords Journals whether he attended any of the debates there: he certainly appointed several proxies, including, rather oddly, Edmund Grindal. The diocesan struture of Llandaff was peculiarly weak. The archdeaconry was a sinecure, held by an absentee. There was no dean of the cathedral, and no rural deans. This, with the absence of exempt jurisdictions, would have given considerable powers to an energetic and effective resident bishop but placed a considerable administrative burden on him. In the absence of a formal diocesan hierarchy, an unofficial group of elite clergy can be traced in the diocese in the sixteenth century. Successive cathedral treasurers and a small group of prebendaries appear as executors and overseers of each other's wills and sureties for each other's payment of first fruits. One of this group, Henry Morgan of Pencoed, may have helped his father Sir William Morgan with the diocesan returns for Valor Ecclesiasticus; another, Hugh Jones, rector of Tredynog and prebendary of Baschurch, may have compiled the survey published here. The most obvious unofficial deputy in Kitchin's last years would have been William Evans, son of a gentry family from north Gwent, incumbent of St. Fagans and Llangatwg Feibion Afel. As chancellor