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Lambeth and those of "MS. Salt apud Stafford". Out of respect, however, to J.R.'s assiduous (?) labours it must be admitted that, taking the whole Province as a unit, his ratios of Conformists to the two schools of Dissenters combined remain practically unaffected by the corrections. He worked out the proportions at 19 of the former to every 1 of the latter. Bishop Sherlock, reviewing the situation as it stood at and before the census, said that "Nonconformists of all sorts (including Papists as well as the others) were computed to be in proportion to the numbers of the Church of England in the year 1676 as one to twenty ?'-J.R.'s exact result was "1 to 19 R 1906". As Sherlock died in 1761 he must have had access to the returns more than a century before J.R. undertook his work of counting up. To confine this arithmetic to the four dioceses of Wales, the corrections mean some material differences in the ratios (mainly on account of the mysterious Llandaff miscalculation): on J.R.'s figures Nonconformists stand as 1 to 45 Conformists, on the actual figures, 1 in 36; on his figures all Dissenters were 1 to 35, on the actual figures, 1 in 29.

It is all-important to distinguish the inaccurate "general summary" at the beginning of the Salt MS. from the many hundred folios of parochial returns which follow it. The scribes of the latter, no doubt copying the official lists of the bishops which lay before them, have seen well to add up at the end of the Llandaff and St. Asaph entries the full totals for the two dioceses respectively. For Bangor they have preferred to do the same service deanery by deanery, but forgetting to supply the "summae totales;" to all appearances they found the extensive limits of St. David's too fatiguing to traverse, and blandly proceeded to the next diocese. With what exactness their computing work was done for Llandaff, St. Asaph and Bangor may be deduced from the following parallels:

1 "Test Act Vindicated" (1718). The same quotation is given, but from a later edition, in the Original Records of Prof. Lyon Turner (iii, 58). ="Remainder after division".

2 R:

(A) TOTALS AS CALCULATED FROM THE SEPARATE PAROCHIAL ENTRIES IN THE SALT MS.

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(B) Totals supplied by the Salt MS. Scribes.

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Here again the supplied totals of Conformists are in each case lower than the actual totals. J.R. and the scribes agree as to the Papists in the three dioceses and as to the Nonconformists of two of them; in two columns of the diocese of Bangor they, J.R., and the MS. itself happen all to agree; only in St. Asaph do J.R. and the Salt scribes agree throughout, and in that agreement they do not agree with the real figures. To give an example of the miscalculations in the MS., let us take the Llandaff diocese2 deanery by deanery :

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But the MS. mathematicians say "In All 9263/551/895".

1 These have been found by adding up the totals of the individual

deaneries as given at the foot of the MS.

2 Salt MS., ff. 418-425.

And this how they count up the deanery totals of the diocese of Bangor' :

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*This ought to be 2996, .. 900 short. † This ought to be 3656, .. 200 short. .. Full total short by 1100.

Proof of this sensational underestimate of the conformists of Arfon and Estimaner is readily forthcoming from the exact parochial entries:

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But the MS. has only 2096 at the foot of col. 1.

1 Salt MS., ff. 400-408.

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But the MS. has only 3456 at the foot of col. 1.

So we arrive at this accumulation of negatives: the first column entered in the MS. opposite a given parish might represent either persons or families; J.R.'s calculations on the loose leaf obey principles of casting only known to himself and the nameless general' summarist; the ready reckoners of the Salt MS. have made grievous mistakes on their own account: in such an atmosphere it is only too likely that the eye of the present writer has occasionally been lulled to sleep.

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The tragic obsession of inaccuracy is not even yet done with. Though Theophilus Jones mistook the year 1673 for 1676 and seemed to have no clear idea for what purposes the numbers were required by the Lord Archbishop, he did ultimately get his Nonconformist column added up correctly. Ultimately, not at the first attempt: on the right-hand margin of p. 33 of his note-book preserved in the National Library is written 411 + 363 774, representing an effort to arrive at the total by dividing the parishes of Brecknock into two sections. It ought to read 319 + 363 = 682, as it appears in the printed Appendix to the History'. Very naturally Dr. Thomas Rees, the author of the History of Protestant Nonconformity in Wales', fastened voraciously on this Appendix, and without any knowledge of the contents of the Salt MS. argued that on this Brecknock proportion Wales would have between 15 and 16,000 Nonconformists at this period.2 * 1883 ed., p. 176.

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1 Addit. MS. 235 D.

He hastily concluded that the Puritanism of Anglesey was as vigorous as that of Brecknock, the dissenters of St. Asaph as numerous as those of Llandaff. The Salt total for Wales is 4193, not 16,000. There were more Protestant Nonconformists in Brycheiniog than in the whole diocese of St. Asaph, and not far from three times the number in the whole diocese of Bangor. The sanguine Doctor miscalculated rather badly.

Though they have no direct bearing on Wales, something should be said of certain deductions about the census which presented themselves to Professor Lyon Turner. In discussing the results obtained by Sheldon's queries he purports to have discovered that some bishops -in especial Dr. George Morley of Winchester, one of the most powerful personalities in the Anglican Church— were tired out with the Archbishop's perennial questionnaires, and were content in 1676 with copying out figures already entered in the conventicle returns of 1669, the third column of which was expressly set aside for the numbers of those who attended secret meetings of dissenters.' For the diocese of Winchester, says the Professor, the conventicling total was 7904, "if only we take the larger figure where alternative numbers are given"; it very wonderfully happens that 7904 is the identical figure for sectaries in the Winchester census of 1676. With all due respect to Lyon Turner's calculations for 1669 on the basis of the higher alternative figure, the real total is not 7904 at all, but 8598, without counting in the "some hundreds of all sorts" found at Gosport conventicles, besides various small meetings of Anabaptists and Quakers at Portsmouth, the exact number in all these cases not having been ascertained. Therefore the bold assumption that Bishop Morley never responded to Sheldon's new queries, but only refurbished the numbers of seven years before, is proved baseless, without having recourse to the argument that any calculations based on the airy figures of 1669 are altogether absurd. And it is certainly piquant to contrast Turner's theory that the

1 Original Records, iii, 149.

4

A good example of such "alternative numbers" is given in the 1669 report for Llangwm (Monmouth)-"Sometimes 200, 100, 60, 30" [Lamb. MS. 639, f. 188b].

3 Lambeth MS. 639, f. 270.

• Ibid., f. 262b.

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