Welsh Journals

CHURCH RECONSTRUCTION IN BRECONSHIRE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY* By I. G. JONES Writing in 1853 a contributor to the Edinburgh Review remarked that the progress which the Church of Wales [had] made in the last few years [was] most creditable to those who had been instrumental in affecting it'. This improvement, he thought, had been chiefly in the more civilised districts', but that even among a peasant clergy in the Church in the mountains many of the blemishes which had disfigured the establishment for so many generations had been, or were in process of being, removed.1 There was evidence to sub- stantiate this judgement in abundance in the masses of official papers generated annually by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, and anyway the evidence was there to be seen in new and restored churches, in a more efficient hierarchy, in a new sensitivity to liturgical propriety and, generally in a heightened awareness of the role of the Estabished Church in society. What is interesting in the writer's analysis is the distinction he makes between the more civilised districts' and the church in the mountains', and the implication that the progress of reform was necessarily different in the one and the other. It is the difference between c urban and rural' that he has in mind, and one of my aims in this paper is to explore some of those differences and to enquire whether such a disjunction is as helpful as it sounds or whether we should not rather distinguish between different kinds of' urbanity and different kinds or rural- ism'. I shall concentrate on the latter, in particular on the church in the mountains and only touch on the church in the rural valley, the church in the towns and the church in industrial societies, partly because we know more about the latter, but more importantly because I have long been of the opinion that the key to the understanding of the adaptation of the church to social change is to be found in the rural parishes. Breconshire lends itself perfectly to this task, for though it is almost entirely rural its southern extremities were regions of the most intensive industrialization. Church reconstruction and extension were of the essence of the revival of the Church in the nineteenth century. Even as the Hanoverian Age, so it was believed, had been preeminently the age of ecclesiastical dilapidation so the Age of Victoria was the age of church reconstruction, and consciously so and with a sense of achievement comparable to the pride of the age in its technical *I wish gratefully to acknowledge the unfailing kindness of Mr. John Fellows, LL.B., Secretary to the Incorporated Church Building Society for the assistance he has given me and for permission to quote from the Society's archives. I also wish to thank Dr. E. G. W. Bill, Librarian of Lambeth Palace Library for giving me access to the Society's archives in their possession.