By 1100 Christianity had been established in Wales for over six centuries. How far this early medieval inheritance influenced the development of the church and religion in the later middle ages, and how far it was swept aside by the combined forces of reform and conquest, are questions that lie at the heart of any assessment of Welsh ecclesiastical history between 1100 and 1500. That major changes took place in this period, especially in the twelfth century, cannot be denied. The formation of dioceses with clearly defined boundaries and their subjection to the authority of the archbishop of Canterbury, the creation of parishes and the introduction of Benedictine monasticism (most notably the Cistercians) all served to bring Wales into line with wider European patterns of ecclesiastical organization and provision. Likewise the popularity of cults of universal saints, reflected, for example, in devotion to the Virgin Mary and in pilgrimages to Rome and Compostela, or the proliferation of roods and rood-screens in the later middle ages, show that piety in Wales had much in common with that practised elsewhere in western Christendom. Yet this narrative of modernization or ‘Europeanization’ requires immediate qualification, for it is complicated by the durability of institutions, customs and mentalities originating in the preNorman period which helped to ensure that the church in medieval Wales retained some distinctive characteristics.
The impact of both European reform and English political domination is a central theme of Glanmor Williams’s seminal study of the Welsh church from the Edwardian conquest of 1282-3 to the Reformation, first published in 1962. The wide range of its coverage, embracing the secular church, religious houses, religious literature and ecclesiastical architecture as well as popular beliefs and practices, is all the more remarkable given the lack of certain kinds of source material that historians of the church in much of the later medieval West can take for granted. For example, no medieval episcopal registers survive from Llandaff and St Asaph, those of St David’s begin only in 1397, and Bangor is represented by a fragment from 1408-17; parish registers are entirely lacking; Welsh ecclesiastical court records are extremely rare.1 A hallmark of Williams’s book is its pioneering approach to the problems of interpretation posed by the nature of the extant evidence, in which a thorough analysis of those records that are available (particularly the thirteenth-century papal taxations and the Valor Ecclesiasticus of 1535, papal letters and English chancery enrolments) is combined with a sensitive reading of religious poetry and prose in Welsh, sources previously studied mainly by literary scholars.
For the formative period from the late eleventh to the late thirteenth century the fullest treatment remains that of J. Conway Davies, in the introductory chapters to a collection of calendared documents published in the 1940s. Though it retains much of value and its scope has yet to be superseded, Conway Davies’s work has worn less well than Williams’s - partly because its coverage is less comprehensive, partly because important aspects of it require revision in the light of subsequent studies. The historiography of recent decades has thus paid significantly greater attention to twelfth - and thirteenth-century developments than to those of the later period. One characteristic of this more recent work has been the close study and re-evaluation of particular bodies of source material, including the Book of Llandaff, the writings of Gerald of Wales, episcopal acta, compilations of Welsh customary law and religious literature. Such studies have been accompanied by, and indeed helped to sustain, a diversification of the historiographical agenda. Thus, for example, in addition to a continuing preoccupation with the distinctiveness of the Welsh church as reflected by the survival and adaptation of native institutions within a changing framework of ecclesiastical organization, important work has been published on monasticism and, especially in the 1990s, on the cults of female saints.
World History
