A History of Christianity in Wales

David Ceri Jones, Barry J. Lewis, Madeleine Gray, D. Densil Morgan

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781786838230
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Britische Geschichte

Christianity, in its Catholic, Protestant and Nonconformist forms, has played an enormous role in the history of Wales and in the defining and shaping of Welsh identity over the past two thousand years. Biblical place names, an urban and rural landscape littered with churches, chapels, crosses and sacred sites, a bardic and literary tradition deeply imbued with Christian themes in both the Welsh and English languages, and the songs sung by tens of thousands of rugby supporters at the national stadium in Cardiff, all hint at a Christian presence that was once universal. Yet for many in contemporary Wales, the story of the development of Christianity in their country remains little known. While the history of Christianity in Wales has been a subject of perennial interest for Welsh historians, much of their work has been highly specialised and not always accessible to a general audience. Standing on the shoulders of some of Wales's finest historians, this is the first single-volume history of Welsh Christianity from its origins in Roman Britain to the present day. Drawing on the expertise of four leading historians of the Welsh Christian tradition, this volume is specifically designed for the general reader, and those beginning their exploration of Wales's Christian past.

Chapter 1

Roman Beginnings,
c.AD 1–c.AD 400

BARRY J. LEWIS

The origins of Christianity lie many hundreds of miles away from Wales, in Palestine, where Jesus was born around the year now designated AD 1. At that time, Jesus’ homeland lay at the eastern fringe of the territories ruled by Rome. Westwards from the Holy Land the Roman empire stretched in an unbroken expanse all around the Mediterranean Sea and up through Gaul (modern France) as far as the Atlantic Ocean. Beyond this western shore, the island of Britain was largely still unconquered in Jesus’ time; indeed, to most Romans and other Mediterranean people, Britain was so remote as to be little more than a rumour. And yet, within a few centuries, Christianity managed to span this great distance to reach Wales in the far west of the island. How that happened will be the subject of this first chapter.

One difficulty we must confront at once is that Wales, as a country or even as a concept, did not yet exist. Neither, for that matter, did England or Scotland. The familiar division of Britain into three parts lay in the future. Instead, our historical sources refer either to the whole island or to individual peoples who inhabited it, such as the Atrebates, the Catuvellauni or the Silures. Wales, being divided between several of these peoples, was not a unit, nor was it distinct from the rest of Britain. It is hard to write the history of a country that was not recognized and did not have a name, and we run the risk of distorting the past if we do so. For this reason, the story of these early centuries cannot be told without overstepping the familiar boundaries of Wales. A second difficulty is the thinness of the historical record for the Roman era. An acute shortage of documents makes it far from easy to trace the course of events. Richer material is offered by archaeology, and unlike historical sources, it keeps on growing as new finds are made. Unfortunately, archaeological evidence poses great problems of interpretation. Bluntly put, we know precious little about the spread of Christianity into what we now call Wales, and we can form only an incomplete idea of its progress and character until records begin to become more abundant; that is, at the end of the eleventh century. Unavoidably, therefore, the first few chapters of this book will contain many gaps, uncertainties and hesitant suppositions.

Wales in Roman Britain

Greek and Roman authors grouped together everybody who lived in Britain as one ethnicity, the Britons; for Romans, the island was Britannia and its people were Britanni. Of course, classical commentators lived far away and were liable to make generalizations about a region that most of them had never visited. Yet the Greek and Latin names for the island and its inhabitants were borrowed from the Britons themselves, who do, therefore, seem to have shared some sense of common identity. One thing that held the Britons together was their language. British, also called Brittonic, was spoken through much if not all of Britain. It is the ancestor of Welsh, Cornish and Breton, and a close relative of the Gaulish language spoken by the Britons’ neighbours across the Channel. Both British and Gaulish belonged to the Celtic language group, and there were very close cultural and political ties between the Britons and the Gauls, maintained by much travel and trade across the Channel. To the west, in Ireland, yet another Celtic language was spoken. Neither Britons nor Irish, however, seem to have thought of themselves as Celts, even though they certainly shared a cultural inheritance with continental Celtic peoples like the Gauls.

As the Romans became better acquainted with Britain, they came into contact with the many diverse peoples of the island. Before the conquest no single people or ruler was dominant, and political and economic development varied hugely from region to region. In the south and east were major kingdoms with close ties to the Continent and long experience of living alongside the Roman empire. For the peoples of the west and north, though, relations with Rome were more distant or did not exist at all. The area which we know as Wales was shared by several such peoples. In the south-east, roughly modern Glamorgan and Gwent, lived the Silures. West of them were the Demetae. North and mid-Wales seem to have been the domain of the Ordovices. We cannot draw the boundaries of these territories on a map, because we do not know where they ran. There were more peoples along what is now the border, namely the Cornovii in Cheshire and Shropshire, and the Dobunni in Gloucestershire. It is quite likely that the territories of these groups extended into Wales: the Severn valley, for example, may have belonged to the Cornovii. Finally, the Deceangli of north-east Wales may have been a subgroup of the Ordovices or the Cornovii.

The inhabitants of late Iron Age Wales were not hunter-gatherers or nomadic herders. They were settled farmers who grew cereals as well as raising animals. They lived in permanent homesteads in a landscape that had long been cleared and parcelled out into fields; the land was well populated and thoroughly exploited. There was trade in iron and other valuable materials, often over long distances, and craftsmen such as metalworkers were often itinerant too. A social hierarchy operated, as is revealed by the larger settlements – hill-forts and defended enclosures – dotted among the more humble farms. These belonged to an armed elite who lived off the labour of the rest of the population and doubtless fought amongst themselves for the privilege. Nevertheless, these were societies that had no concept of city life, and for Roman observers that marked them out as inferior. Roman terms for such peoples – gens or natio – often had dismissive connotations, like the English word ‘tribe’. But Romans also used a third term, civitas, whose basic meaning was ‘political community’, and it could be applied to any polity from the Ordovices of western Britain right up to their own mighty city.¹ They recognized, in short, that even the Ordovices and the Silures were organized communities with their own social structures, laws, identities and sense of belonging.

The civitates of south-eastern Britain had been under loose Roman domination since the 50s BC, when Julius Caesar twice took his army to Britain.² Just under a century later, in AD 43, the emperor Claudius (r. AD 41–54) decided to finish what Caesar had started. Much of lowland Britain was quickly incorporated into a new province of Britannia. But as the Roman forces pressed further west and north, they encountered tougher resistance. The civitates of western Britain seem, from the Roman accounts, to have violently opposed the conquest, the Silures and Ordovices being particularly stubborn. It was not until AD 77 or 78 that the last resistance in Wales was crushed, when the Roman governor Agricola occupied Anglesey.³ For some decades after that, the western civitates were heavily garrisoned through a network of forts. Some of these can still be seen today, as at Segontium, now Caernarfon, or the Gaer a little to the west of Brecon. They were typically placed at intervals of a day’s march and linked by newly built permanent roads. At Chester in the north-east, and Caerleon in the south-east, larger fortresses were founded to house the elite troops, the legions. This heavy military occupation seems to have been needed for about half a century. Gradually, though, the garrisons were wound down and the civitates were allowed to govern their own internal affairs, like hundreds of similar communities elsewhere in the empire. We know this for certain in the case of the Silures, whose administrative centre was Caerwent. Here we have the solid evidence of an inscription set up by decree of the ordo or ‘council’ that governed the res publica civitatis Silurum, the ‘republic of the civitas of the Silures’.⁴ For the Demetae the evidence is indirect: a city was founded at Moridunum (Carmarthen) which, along with the closing of the forts in their territory, indicates that they too had a civilian government of their own from around the time of the emperor Hadrian (r. AD 117–38). More signs of peaceful conditions are Romanized farms and estate centres, the so-called villas. They are most common in lowland Gwent and Glamorgan, where the agricultural and trading economy was strongest, but there is a scatter through southern Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire too. In 2003 a modest villa was discovered at Abermagwr near Aberystwyth, much further north than any previously known in Wales. It is a sign that central Wales too was capable of supporting an aspirational, if modest, Roman lifestyle for its elite.⁵

The rest of Wales lacked cities and has revealed few villa-like or Romanized buildings away from army bases. As a result, it was long thought that northern and central Wales remained within an underdeveloped ‘military zone’ throughout the Roman period. This term, however, is misleading. Most of the forts were closed by the middle of the second century, while at the rest the garrisons were much smaller or only present now and again. Such a modest contingent of troops could not have kept the population down by force. It did not need to: archaeological evidence supports the view that Roman rule was now accepted. Roman goods were in circulation, even if not so commonly as in richer areas. Dozens of hoards of Roman coins have been found across Wales. For everyday buying and selling, people may have continued to use barter, but coins were required for paying taxes, so the coin hoards are indirect but clear testimony that taxes were being levied, and paid. Evidence is gradually accumulating for the spread of Roman building techniques and urbanization. Besides the Abermagwr villa, a substantial settlement has been uncovered at Tai Cochion on the south coast of Anglesey. It is large enough to count as a ‘small town’ and must have served a ferry crossing towards Segontium on the mainland.⁶ Further evidence for intense contact between the population of Wales and Roman culture emerges a little later, in the early Middle Ages, when we have better written records. At once we discover that many people bore names adopted from Latin, like Einion, Meirion, Edern or Padarn. Likewise, the British language absorbed great numbers of Latin words. Some, like mur ‘wall’ and melin ‘mill’, were borrowed along with new technologies, but others cover basic concepts like ‘go up’ (esgyn) and ‘go down’ (disgyn), and even ‘arm’ (braich).

Roman rule worked through co-opting local elites. The native landowners were turned into intermediaries between the population and the Roman administration. It was they who raised taxes and found recruits for the army and labour for duties like building roads. This will have been true among the Ordovices, as elsewhere. Upland Wales, with its thin soils and harsher climate, was different from the more urbanized south, but in an empire that extended from Scotland to the fringes of the Sahara desert, there were bound to be innumerable varieties of landscapes and local economies, and just as many different ways of being Roman. In the countryside as in the towns, everyone had some contact with the wider Roman world. This was true also in the sphere of religion, to which we turn next.

Religion in Roman Wales

We know very little about religious beliefs in Britain before the Roman conquest. Iron Age Britons did not use writing, so there are no texts from Britain itself. Julius Caesar described British society in the 50s BC, but he saw only the south-east, on two brief visits, and he tells us little about religion beyond the isolated fact that Britons would not eat hare, chicken or goose.⁷ Other authors who describe Celtic religion refer only to regions far away from here, like southern Gaul. Often the accounts draw on earlier authors rather than first-hand experience. It is also a problem that Greek- and Latin-speaking observers were intelligent, highly educated men who interpreted foreign religions in the light of their own beliefs. They do not, in other words, give us a plain picture of what they themselves saw. Again, Caesar provides a partial exception in that he spent much time in Gaul, but what he says about Gaulish religion need not be true of Britain.

If we do not want to rely on outsiders’ views, then we are forced back on sources produced within British society. That means the physical remains left behind by Iron-Age Britons, and the medieval literature written by their descendants many centuries later. Both raise troubling difficulties. Without written accounts to guide us, sites and objects have to be interpreted using models that may not be appropriate. Exploiting later literature is an even more fraught alternative. Medieval Welsh writings, as it happens, do mention a few figures who look as though they were supernatural beings in the distant past. In the Mabinogi stories, Rhiannon may derive from an ancient horse-goddess, and Manawydan from some kind of sea-god; his Irish counterpart, Manannán, appears in the early tale Voyage of Bran driving his chariot across the sea, which for him is a flowery plain while the leaping salmon are calves and lambs.⁸ The difficulty with this kind of interpretation is that it cannot be confirmed by texts from the actual pagan period, because we have none, and so it remains frustratingly speculative. The Mabinogi tales were composed around the twelfth century, after Wales had been Christian for hundreds of years; the Voyage of Bran is earlier but still from a medieval Christian milieu. What they give us is a medieval and Christian perspective, even if, as is plausible, some of the characters and motifs did have ancient and pagan origins.

Native religion was focused on individual sacred places and a multitude of divine spirits. Votive offerings to deities, with the sacrifice of animals and even human beings, seem to have been important. There was a tradition of depositing valuable objects in water, apparently as offerings to whatever spirits dwelt there. A famous example is the ironwork from Llyn Cerrig Bach on Anglesey, placed in a lake along with signs of animal and human sacrifice.⁹ We also know that there was a class of religious experts, the druids. Caesar gives us a detailed account of these men, although he was describing Gaul, not Britain.¹⁰ Druids presided at sacrifices, interpreted religious laws, and judged legal cases and political questions. They wielded the sanction of banning people from sacrifices, which Caesar describes as the worst punishment conceivable to Gaulish society. They were exempt from tax and from warfare. They studied astronomy and other aspects of the natural world, taught that the soul was immortal and took apprentices, whose training might last twenty years. To judge from this description, the Gaulish druids must have dominated the religious sphere and wielded great political power besides. Was this true in Britain too? According to Caesar, the druid order originated in Britain, and Gauls would travel to the island for advanced training in druidism. The later Roman historian Tacitus mentions druids here as well, so it may be legitimate to extend Caesar’s account to Britain.

About Roman religion we are much better informed. Romans worshipped numerous gods. By the first century AD their city abounded in cults, some ancient, others more recently introduced. It was essential for the whole of society to maintain a good relationship with these gods, for only in that way could peace, prosperity and social harmony be preserved. Rome’s extraordinary success in conquering most of the known world was taken as evidence that the gods remained favourable, but it was a tense equilibrium, riven by fear that the vast, fragile edifice of empire might collapse. To keep the gods happy, Romans performed traditional rituals, at the heart of which was the sacrificing of animals. Sacrifices were performed at every level of life, from the highest offices of the state down to individual households. But within this framework there was some freedom. Individuals could choose particular deities for devotion, without denying the claims of others, and their choice could vary greatly depending on their gender or social class, or what part of the empire they came from. In general, the worship of Roman gods was not demanded from non-Romans. Anyone who received Roman citizenship, though, was expected to adopt some cults of the city of Rome, and there would be strong incentives for many provincials to do so too as they adapted to the new order. Furthermore, all inhabitants of the empire were expected to acknowledge the emperor somehow in their religious devotions, through praying to his divine spirit, or honouring dead emperors as gods. This is the set of behaviours that historians loosely call the ‘imperial cult’; it became an important symbol of loyalty to the state.

With conquest, Roman religion was abruptly thrust into space where only native beliefs had been known. In Wales, the soldiers and officials based in the forts must have been the main protagonists in this encounter. The army had a very marked religious identity of its own. It followed a common calendar of festivals and worshipped a range of strongly Roman deities in classically Roman ways, as we see from the altars preserved at Caerleon: for instance, a dedication made in AD 244 to the divine spirits of the emperors and the genius of the Second Legion.¹¹ It is safe to assume that most of the dedicators came from outside Britain. At the other extreme of the religious spectrum, native farmers may have continued to worship nameless spirits in traditional numinous places, just as their ancestors had done. But over time, the brutal colonial division of the conquest period gave way to more complex and sy...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• The Authors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Roman Beginnings, c.AD 1–c.AD 400
• Chapter 2: The Age of Conversion, c.400–c.600
• Chapter 3: The Definition of Christian Wales, c.600–c.800
• Chapter 4: Vikings to Normans, c.800–c.1070
• Chapter 5: The Age of Definition and Hierarchy, c.1066–c.1200
• Chapter 6: Conquest and Apocalypse, c.1200–c.1420
• Chapter 7: Y Ganrif Fawr: Christianity in Late Medieval Wales, c.1420–c.1530
• Chapter 8: Reformation Wales, 1530–1603
• Chapter 9: Securing a Protestant Wales, 1603–1760
• Chapter 10: Building a Nonconformist nation, 1760–1890
• Chapter 11: Adapting to a Secular Wales, 1890–2020
• A Guide to Further Reading
• Notes