These figures speak for themselves, and so does the parallel case of Abergavenny. A stronghold of Baptists, it is true, but also the centre at which Thomas Holmes the Quaker made a "sund" [sound] on his first appearance in South Wales, and where a son-in-law of the great Independent leader Walter Cradock had his home. Sixty Baptists kept up a conventicle here in 1669;' in 1676 vicar Greenhaugh and his churchwardens could only account for forty-one Dissenters there, all told. In the midst of this sad accumulation of untrustworthiness it is pleasant to record a case where the Anglican authorities in 1676 corrected an egregious underestimate of 1669. In the town and parish of Oswestry-a town in which Oliver Thomas had preached to the Welsh, where John Evans had proved one of the greatest of Puritan schoolmasters, where Rowland Nevett had to be content in the days of the Protectorate with preaching to 300 at the Town Hall, when he could secure an audience of thousands were there a building large enough in the town to hold them'-only thirty Puritans attended conventicles in 1669, reinforced (say the informers) by some strangers who came in from other parishes.' Seventy is the number given in 1676,5 and even this seems surprisingly low for a centre which had four licensed meeting-houses in 1672, one of them being a "large roome over the Markett "." Was it not in a farm outside Oswestry that Charles Edwards lived (when he was not away in Oxford or London getting his books through the press), and was there not issued to him on 10 August, 1672, a "general" licence as Presbyterian preacher "att Oswestree"? Oswestry was thus associated with at least four of the more prominent names in the annals of Welsh Puritanism. 6 To proceed with the charge of underestimation. Though, on account of the presence of children of uncertain age, it is too dangerous to oppose the numbers attending the nine conventicles of Netherwent in 1669 to the corresponding numbers for the same parishes in 1676, yet it must be clearly understood that the context of the Lambeth MS. suggests strongly that adults were far in the majority. 1 Lamb. MS. 639, f. 186. 3 Cal. St. Pap., 1657, p. 32. 5 Salt MS., f. 413. 2 Salt MS., f. 420. + Lamb. MS. 639, f. 139b. St. Pap. Dom., Chas. II, Entry Book 38A, p. 218. From the loose wording of the third column in that report of 1669 it may fairly be concluded that the frequenters of each of these conventicles-each, be it emphasised-were "some times 200 or more, some times lesse ". Supposing the lesser number to be 100, the Puritan conventiclers in this deanery would mount up to 900. Only 195 Nonconformists the combined clergy of 29 parishes could find in 1676. This at once implies, and that very significantly, that the informers of 1669 did not after all mean the 200 to be attending each of the nine conventicles, but merely a cumulative computation for the whole number. In turn, this implication introduces a new difficulty-are we to believe that the flat lands of Gwent Iscoed, the historic headquarters of early Puritanism in Wales, with its memories of Wroth and Erbery and Cradock, could only produce after a lapse of forty years a paltry residuum of 195? It is not long from 1676 to 1687, when the clergy and gentry of Monmouthshire expressed their delight that Thomas Barnes, the Puritan preacher of Magor, advised his flock to abjure the Indulgence of James II.' By that time, however, a pretty persistent persecution must have told severely on the ranks of the 195. That being so, why should the great men of the county trouble themselves about the attitude of such a remnant? Accepting the 195 without protest means also accepting a miserable total of 4 Nonconformists for Llanfaches itself Llanfaches, the Puritan Antioch of gentile Wales. 4 Since we are in the diocese of Llandaff, perhaps this is the natural context for examining again those returns made in 1603 with their mysterious statement that 394 "non-communicants ", besides the 381 " recusants", were found in the diocese, 257 in Monmouth and 137 in Glamorgan. Non-communicants? One would convincingly read into this term the abandoned degenerates of the early 17th century, did not the endorsement on the MS. refer to "Recusants of both sorts in Llandaff Diocese ", that is, Popish and Protestant. This forces the conclusion that even in 1603, years before Wroth had been instituted vicar of Llanfaches, Elizabethan Puritanism had worked its way into south-eastern Wales across the Severn waterways and along the lowlands bordering on 1 Lamb MS. 639, f. 186b. 3 Noncon. Mem. (1803), iii, 505–506. 2 Salt MS., ff. 419-420. the Bristol Channel-a conclusion not hitherto accepted by the historians of religion in Wales. And yet in 1676-notwithstanding the ample freedom of the Parliament's supremacy, the fructifying milieu of Propagation and Protectorate, the development of Independent polity under Cradock, the rise of the strict Baptists under Miles in Glamorgan and North Monmouth, the irruption of the Quakers into Gwent Uwchcoed along the highways of the March-only 905 Nonconformists appear in the Llandaff third columns of the Salt MS. The large parish of Merthyr Tydvil and some others are not reported, it is true-Merthyr being probably the most Dissenting district in the whole of Wales (the lowest estimate of its conventiclers in 1669 was put down as 300, the highest 600 "some times"). When this highest estimate of 600 is added to 905, even then the new sum-total of Puritans in 1676 is only sufficient to reduce it to absurdity as a gauge of the penetrating dynamic of a great religious upheaval. The 195 of Netherwent and the 905 of the whole diocese must go. They cannot possibly be accepted as authoritative. Before this digression in search of the 'non-communicants' of 1603, the base of comparison stood at 1669. Three years later came the Indulgence and its licences. Each licence pre-supposed a meeting-place, a "teacher" or preacher, and a nucleus of hearers, great or small. According to the census of 1676, no less than eight centres to which licences were granted in 1672 had not a single Nonconformist surviving in them. At Uzmaston in Pembroke two licences were granted, one for the house of John Phillips, the other for the house of Mark Gibbon'; four years later the local clergyman reported to the Archdeacon of St. David's that his parish boasted 70 Conformists, no Papists, Nonconformists 0.3 What had happened to Phillips and Gibbon in the meantime, and what 1 Lamb MS. 639, f. 187. In the Cymmrodor (xxxv, 159) the whole population of Merthyr in the days of the interregnum is put down at 500. Surely this is a misreading of the MS. quoted on page 180, which refers to "500 men and women in the parish that receive not the Lord's Supper these ten years". What was the number of those The whole good Churchmen who did receive the Lord's Supper? population would have to include them. 2 St. Pap. Dom., Chas. II, Entry Book 384, p. 173. 3 Salt MS., f. 385. had become of the persons who were glad of the King's protection to hear the gospel in their houses? And where was the other Gibbon of Uzmaston, Erasmus of that ilk and probably a relative of Mark's, who some years later than 1676 is found figuring amongst the Baptists of Rhydwilym? To touch upon a collateral problem-the writer has to confess he has spent a considerable time in trying to find out who was the occupier (not the owner) of Bodvel House by Llannor to whom a licence was granted on 5 September, 1672, his actual name being carelessly omitted from the State Paper.' So far that effort has been fruitless. Whoever he was, he had either died or otherwise disappeared or conformed before 1676, if the census of the parish (258/2/0) is to be taken as true.' Surely the curate in charge here in 1676-seeing that the rectory was annexed to the archdeaconry of Bangor and seeing that the archdeaconry since 1669 was held in commendam' by no other than the Bishop himself—would take some care to send in true particulars. Against this is the fact that the surviving parochial transcripts at the registry of Bangor have no entry of death at Bodvel House; it must also be remembered that the Bodvel licence represented not the occupier only, but a certain number of hearers as well-persons who had, without much doubt, been led into Puritan ways by Henry Maurice during the three years he was Puritan minister at Llannor up to the Restoration. We are still searching for the name of the mysterious householder. For until his movements are traced, very serious doubt rests on the Llannor return of 1676. In analysing the Rhydwilym Records at the National Library we pass from the Uzmaston and Llannor obscurities to something like demonstrable proof. These documents relate the rise on the borders of CarmarthenPembroke Cardigan from about 1667 of a rejuvenated body of strict Baptists which bade fair in course of time to revolutionise the sectarian situation in south-western Wales. The precise dates of baptisms are put down, 1 St. Pap. Dom., Chas. II, Entry Book 38A, p. 238. 2 Salt MS., f. 400. 3 It must, however, be said that the transcripts of this period only cover the years 1678, 1680, 1682, 1683 and 1685 (information kindly supplied by Mr. A. Ivor Pryce, M.A., the present Diocesan Registrar). Lambeth Aug. Books 994, f. 205; 995, p. 229. In together with references to backslidings and deaths. many cases the parishes they hailed from are duly noted, but in too large a proportion this welcome detail has most unfortunately been left out. Quietly, pertinaciously, without semblance of compromise, facing the triple opposition of Anglicans, Independents and Quakers, this wonderful body of Baptists pushed forward their rigid doctrine: they did not hesitate to baptise Janet Jenkin in 1668 though she was about 70 years of age' and Elizabeth David in 1672 being very aged', nor to dip Thomas John Tyler at the inauspicious season denoted by 26th December (this again in 1668), nor to immerse Mary Venson of Llandyfriog in the river Teify not very long after the census of 1676. Were the sheriffs or clergy aware of all these strange developments? Had Bishop Lucy sent in his report to London on 15 July, 1676, when three new proselytes were admitted to the Rhydwilym congregation by baptism and the laying-on of hands? One of these, Mary Walis, came from Wiston in Pembroke-perhaps she was one of the 6 Nonconformists reported from that parish.' In any case, without counting in these converts of July 1676, the new organisation numbered at the end of 1675 over 80 members. Two women of Cilfowyr joined the Baptist cause in 1668; there are good grounds for thinking that one of them (if not both) were on the church book in 1689: in 1676 the authorities at Manordeifi (of which parish Cilfowyr with its ruinated' chapel was parcel) failed to discover in the neighbourhood a single Nonconformist.3 Further progress with this particular method of attack is prevented by the inability to bring the names of the baptised persons into sufficiently definite contact with the parishes they lived in. It must be admitted, too, that when the parish names are given, ranging as they do from Dihewid to Amroth, the census of 1676 in nearly every case has some quota of Nonconformists. But the most sanguine of Baptist statisticians would not say, much less prove, that by the year of the census the Baptists of Rhydwilym had outrun in numbers the Independents of the west. Even before Peregrine |