Welsh Journals

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Southall, in an important book published in 1892, sought to further the claims of a genuine bilingual policy in Welsh education and he supported the arguments with another survey of contemporary linguistic conditions. His data, like that of his predecessors, was obtained by visits to localities in the borderland between Wales and England and was supplemented by replies to a short questionaire from local informants.6 The works of Ravenstein, Ellis and Southall refer principally to contemporary situations but their observations on methods of collecting data short of a full census are particularly valuable. Moreover, all three commentated on conditions previous to their own surveys. More recently, better equipped scholars have attempted to interpret the relative importance of the two languages historically. In the 1930s, D. T. Williams introduced the concept of language divides7 which was enthusiastically taken up and further explored by William Rees in the 1940s.8 In addition, there have been numerous studies concentrating on local conditions: A. H. Dodd, for instance, ventured to trace the ebb and flow [of linguistic conditions] over a period of eleven centuries or so which separate King Offa's time from ours .9; and Goronwy Edwards, recognizing that Flintshire has long been the meeting place of two peoples, of two traditions has outlined the main cultural differences in that county as they had evolved by the mid-nineteenth century.10 Almost all these studies emphasize the definition of a crude boundary line running through the borderland between Wales and England, separating areas where Welsh or English was the dominant language at various points in time. Yet, if indeed industrialism eventually brought significant shifts in the location of the linguistic divide, then as Welsh communities became anglicized, it should be possible to delineate a transitional zone where both languages were of roughly equal currency at particular points in time. In this paper, therefore, we shall consider one major group of sources which, although touched upon by William Rees, has not been fully exploited hitherto. The languages used in Anglican services Amongst the Church in Wales manuscripts now deposited at the National Library of Wales are to be found a remarkable series of documents relating to episcopal visitations in individual parishes throughout Wales. In addition, for St. Asaph Diocese there survive a whole series of reports on parochial affairs which were compiled and sent in to the bishop by rural deans. The visitation returns encompass a wide range of detailed information as to the state of the church locally and contain numerous references to the language or languages used in public worship. Where they survive, the reports from rural deans often provide even fuller