XIX

THE CHURCH IN 1714

359

and short though the time was in which he held office and great as his infirmities were, he left a memory of encouragement and refreshment to the Church in Wales. The period closes, at St. David's, with Adam Ottley, a zealous, earnest, and active prelate, who set himself to restore the cathedral church, dilapidated and despoiled.

At Llandaff a curious, and in some ways typical, figure is that of William Beaw, who held the see from 1679 to his death in 1706. He had fought, like Peter Mews, in the Civil Wars on the king's side. He was rewarded at last with "a little bishopric," from which he was always anxious to be moved to a better," but he remained at Llandaff to the end, doing his duty with soberness if not diligence. Under him it seems clear that the priests ordained to Welsh titles were almost always of Welsh blood, and that Nonconformity was neither popular nor strong.

Conclusion

of the

period.

But the Church had not really recovered from the experience of disestablishment and confiscation, or from the effects of the action of the State. At the close of the period the primary charge of Bishop Fleetwood to the diocese of St. Asaph in 1710 shows the evils from which the Church was increasingly to suffer to have already attracted the attention of reformers. The one was non-residence, the other neglect of preaching, particularly in Welsh. They were not new. Bishop Morgan in 1666 had called attention to the same evils. In spite of Bishop Bull's earnest advice to the clergy as to the use of Welsh, it became more and more neglected, with the natural results. Where so many of the churches were served by the poorly-paid curates of non-resident incumbents, it is not surprising that services were cut down or omitted, and that parochial visitation almost ceased. The complaint of decay of preaching was an old one, perhaps not more common in Wales than in England. It was heard often before the wars; it did not cease during the Commonwealth or at the Restoration. It was the same with the other abuse, non-residence. William Lucy, Bishop of St. David's from 1660 to 1683, began, say contemporary authorities, the encouragement or sanction of non-residence among his cathedral clergy. "From hence," says Browne Willis, came all the calamities of St. David's, under which herculean

labour Bishop Watson sank in extricating and restoring the cathedral church." He, or Bishop Thomas, proposed indeed to remove the see to Carmarthen, near which, at Abergwili, he was himself resident. Happily the protests of the people of Dewisland prevented so disastrous a breach with the famous past.

Thus we have the Church in Wales struggling still after the years of worst stress were over. Though the number of University graduates ordained has been shown to have been declining, the standard of learning among the clergy was not low. During the seventeenth century Wales gave four bishops to English, four to Irish sees, as well as the eighteen Welshmen who became bishops in their own land. But the political influences of the eighteenth century went far to undo much of the good work that had been done in the seventeenth. Here the similarity with England is close; and, indeed, as we close our survey we are struck by the importance of the ties which bound the Church together in different parts of our island. Unity, the lesson that the Caroline divines never wearied of preaching, was attained in the English Church in a way which under Elizabeth might well have seemed impossible.

AUTHORITIES.-State Papers, Domestic; Laud, Works, especially his diary and reports of his province to the King; MSS. of the chapter of St. David's, notably the chapter register, the Collectanea Menevensia of Canon Payne, and the valuable (eighteenth century) note-books of Archdeacon Yardley; Prynne, Canterburie's Doome; muniments of the Bishop of St. David's (preserved in 1894, when I inspected them, at Abergwili); Browne Willis, Surveys of the Cathedral Churches: of St. David's (1717), Llandaff (1719), St. Asaph (1720), Bangor (1721); Jones and Freeman, History and Antiquities of St. David's (1856); Walker, Memorials, etc.; E. J. Newell, Llandaff; W. L. Bevan, St. David's; D. R. Thomas, St. Asaph (each in Diocesan Histories); Nelson, Life of Bishop Bull; on Adam Ottley see the MS. poem of Browne Willis quoted by Jones and Freeman, pp. 334-5; Reliquiæ Baxterianæ, 1676; Prichard, Canwyll y Cymry, 1646; Life and Death of Rev. Vavasor Powell, 1671.