Welsh Journals

THE CHURCH IN GOWER BEFORE THE REFORMATION1 by W. R. B. ROBINSON UNTIL the establishment of the diocese of Swansea and Brecon in 1923, the archdeaconry of Gower formed part of the diocese of St. David's. The archdeaconry is a nineteenth-century creation, but territorially it corresponds very closely with the former rural deanery of Gower, whose boundaries had been established in the early medieval period. The rural deanery covered the whole of the Gower peninsula and the large upland area between the Tawe and the modern boundaries of Breconshire and Carmarthenshire, together with the parish of Betws opposite Ammanford and the parish of Llansamlet to the east of the Tawe.2 It comprised twenty-five parishes, a few of them large, such as Llangyfelach and Llan- giwg, but mostly quite small, especially in the south and west of the peninsula. This variation in the size of parishes reflects the wide differences in physical conditions found within the deanery, ranging from fertile well-drained lands in parts of the peninsula to wet high moorlands in the inland parishes. The documentary evidence relating to the late medieval church in Gower is sparse, as it is for most other parts of Wales. The two main sources are the incomplete series of registers of 1 I am indebted to Mr. T. B. Pugh for helpful comments on this article. 2 For a map showing the boundaries of the lordships of Gower and Kilvey (which were the same as those of the deanery except that the latter included the parish of Betws), see W. Rees, South Wales and The Border in the XIV Century (Ordnance Survey, 1932), S. W. Sheet and C. A. Seyler "The Early Charters of Swansea and Gower" Archaeologia Cambrensis, vol. lxxix, map facing p. 299. For a map of parishes in the Gower peninsular, within the lordship of Gower, see below, page 68.