Wales, as a separate people of definite historical characteristics, owes its origin under God to the accidental results of an invasion of Britain by pagan peoples from overseas. From statements by Tertullian and Origen, not to mention many other later Christian continental writers, it is safe to say that Christianity had reached Britain before the close of the second century. Its introduction is not to be ascribed to any of the pious personages who figure in the earlier or later fanciful medieval tales of Glastonbury, such as Lucius, but has to be credited in sober fact to innumerable and unknown Christians, travellers and immigrants from the Continent for the most part. These travellers and those religiously influenced by them, gradually, it is clear, formed themselves into Christian communities, each with its own bishop and presbyters and deacons. These communities of simple folk sowed the seeds of the Christian religion in many parts of Britain while Borne was still a power in the land.

The members, and still more the founders, of these British Churches were not monks, for the very simple but cogent reason that the day of continental, much less British, monasticism had not yet arrived. Monasticism was a forward movement within an existing church. It originated in Egypt in the third century; it spread westwards through Italy and Spain into Gaul (modern France), and thence through the disciples of St Martin of Tours and the influence of Larins and Marseilles, it came to Britain about A.D. 420 or soon afterwards. (Cf. Introduction to The History of Wales, A. H. Williams, Vol. I.)

The present revival of Catholicism in Wales would be incomplete without the old devotion to the early Welsh Saints, of whose constant intercession for their native land we now begin to see the fruit. Though their cultus was forbidden at the Reformation, they have kept their place in the affection of the Welsh people; and the increased knowledge of their lives gained by modern scholars is a valuable help in restoring their rightful place in popular devotion. To the historian their chief importance is their formative influence on the Welsh nation, which, as is being increasingly recognised, grew out of Celtic monasticism, of which these Saints were the founders. Under Roman rule British Christianity had its centres in the cities and its organisation was interwoven with that urban life which was the framework of the imperial system. The decay of urban life after the departure of the Legions induced a period of stagnation in British Christianity from which it was rescued only by the monastic movement, which introduced a new organisation better able to adapt itself to the tribal system now replacing imperial administration. Thus it was Celtic monasticism which fused the British tribes and the remnants of Roman culture into a spiritual unity so that, from being a merely geographical term in Roman times, by the 8th century Britanni had become the name of a nation. That its ethos even today is essentially religious is the enduring legacy of the early Welsh Saints. It is not surprising, therefore, that the increasing study of their lives by modern scholars has been prompted by historical rather than by religious motives.

The achievement of which St David has become the symbol and patron stands out like a mountain massif on a starlit night. The detail is obscure, but the patient work of historians, geographers, archaeologists, philologists and the experts in place-names, church dedications and folk-lore are gradually having their effect. The main peaks are already clear and unmistakable. Furthermore, this achievement, as we consider it, serves to emphasise that truth on which wisdom has always insisted—the futility of paying attention to the ignis fatuus of immediate success and failure. First, however, the setting must be grasped. By the year 400 Stilicho had pacified and reorganised Britain; he then withdrew the regular legionary troops. The problem of the western hill-country, much of which had been occupied by Goidelic pirates and settlers, was left, it would appear, to Cunedda, who probably held the office of the Dux Britanniarum. He was, it would seem, the commander of a corps of foederati who had been settled beyond the Wall of Hadrian. His father, grandfather and great-grandfather all bore Roman names. His grandfather, Paternus, was surnamed Bais rudd, of the Red tunic, which denoted probably the official purple of Rome; and it has been suggested that his great-grandfather, Tacitus, had been a protege of Constantine the Great. The mixture of Celtic and Roman names appears among his sons.

Cunedda’s expedition was a success. In conjunction, probably, with the Ordovices of Powys, he and his sons expelled the Goidels from the greater part of Wales.

Speaking last year at the centenary celebrations of St David’s church, Swansea (which was also about the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Swansea mission), the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster remarked on the fact that ‘so little has been written of the history of Catholicism in Wales’. Having undertaken some years ago to write a popular account of the Church in Wales, the present writer knows from very practical experience how little that little is; and he hopes that the few pages that follow—to say nothing of all the other pages in this issue of Blackfriars—may perhaps encourage others, better qualified than himself, to put their hands to the work of filling this deficiency in the religious and ecclesiastical history of these islands, a deficiency which may be partly due to the fact that for a century and more the overwhelming majority of Catholics in Wales have not themselves been Welsh.

There is a general impression that the Welsh Nonconformist tradition is hostile to the introduction of religious instruction into education, hostile to denominational schools, and is the ally of secularist principles in education. This article can be no more than a note on the matter, but it may help to give Catholics working in Wales some clue to the understanding of the Nonconformist position.

Most people are aware that the Welsh Nonconformist attitude was developed during the struggle between church and chapel in the 19th century. The ‘church’ was the established Church of England, the Anglican and anglicising church of the land-owning Tory Welsh-despising gentry. The ‘chapel’ was the loose confederation of three or four dissenting bodies to which the mass of the Welsh-speaking peasantry belonged. The Catholic Church hardly came into the picture.

Indirectly, it was in it from the beginning of the struggle. It was in 1843 that the Calvinistic Methodist body confirmed its hitherto reluctant ‘dissent’ by a resolution to join the other Nonconformist bodies in the support of British schools, in which no dogmatic religion was taught, as opposed to the National schools of the Church of England. From that date the battle is engaged. The Calvinistic Methodist resolution was directly due to the progress of the Oxford Movement within the Church of England. The ‘Puseyites’ roused alarm in Wales. They seemed to herald the capture of the Church of England by Rome. Protestantism was in danger. The Catechism in the schools could be used to Romanise. The last link between the Church and the Methodists was broken, and the British school campaign was the answer of Welsh Nonconformity to the Oxford Movement.

‘Iron Curtain’ is a term well understood today, but long I before that had ever been heard of, I had learnt the meaning of the Wall of Brass. It was in the course of a, conversation with a friend—a Welshman and a countryman. He was speaking of the squire of a certain neighbourhood not far from his own home. A man who had been popular with his tenants at a time when certain others of his class in Wales decidedly had not. But he had never mastered the Welsh tongue although he was of Welsh stock and it had been the language of his forbears. ‘And do you know’, said my informant, ‘the language was like a wall of brass between him and his neighbours ‘.

Mr Saunders Lewis, in one of his collected essays, ‘Tragedy’, refers to a similar instance and one having peculiar pathos. It concerns George Powell of Nanteos, the scion of an old Welsh family that had become anglicised by the middle of last century as had so many others. This young man’s natural tastes were literary and artistic and all round him there grew and throve a living culture, soon to break forth into the Welsh literary renaissance initiated by Sir John Morris Jones and carried forward into our own day. Yet of that life and that culture he knew nothing.

Some years ago, during a classical congress which we attended, my wife in conversation with a fellow member, an intelligent woman, well connected, well read and widely travelled, happened to say that I had devoted some of my leisure to translating specimens of Welsh literature, and the reply was: “Is there any Welsh literature to translate?”’

The story was told by Sir Idris Bell in the broadcast talk he gave to introduce a series on ‘The Literary Tradition of Wales’ (reprinted in The Welsh Review, Winter, 1947), and the question is, as he says, typical and significant. Welsh is spoken today by close on a million people; its literature has more than a thousand years of unbroken tradition, and can claim poets such as Dafydd ap Gwilym and Tudur Aled who need fear no comparison with any European contemporaries; and the modem revival of Welsh writing has, in such men as T. Gwynn Jones, B. Williams Parry and Saunders Lewis, falsified any idea that Welsh is antique—and useless. Yet these facts are constantly received with incredulity. A summary account of books and periodicals that have appeared in the last few months may, then, help to complete the picture of Wales this number of Blackfriars is designed to give.

The silver jubilee in 1947 of Urdd Gobaith Cymru (The Welsh League of Youth, which has today over eighty thousand members) was an important event in Welsh life and was fittingly celebrated by the publication of Y Llinyn Arian (Urdd Office, Aberystwyth, 15s.), an anthology of original work by Welsh writers, painters and musicians, which is evident proof of the vitality of Wesh culture.