WELSH
584
WELSH
just referred to, connecting St. Augustine with the
Welsh bishops. Pope Gregory the Great twice com-
mitted the Briti.sh Church to the care and authority of
St. Augustine and the latter accordingly invited them
to a conference upon the matters in which they de-
parted from the approved Roman custom. They asked
for a postponement, but at a second conference the
seven British bishops present altogether refused to
accept Augustine as their archbishop or to conform in
the matter of the disputed practices. The points
mentioned by Bede prove that the divergences could
not have been at all fundamental. No matter of
dogma seems to have been involved, but the Britons
were accused of using an erroneous cycle for deter-
mining Easter, of defective baptism (which may
mean, it has been suggested, the omission of confirma-
tion after bapt ism) , and thirdly of refusing to join with
Augustine in any common action for the conversion
of the Angles. There were also other pecuharities,
as, for example, the form of the tonsure and the use
of only one consecrator in consecrating bishops, as well
as the employment of the Celtic Rite in the Uturgy;
but all these were matters of discipline only. None
the less the failure of all attempts at concihation was
complete and Bede attests that this attitude of hostil-
ity on the part of the British bishops lasted dowTi to
his own day. It may have been partly as a result of
this uncompromising hatred of the Saxons and the
Church identified with them, that we read during all
this period of a more or less continual emigration of
the Britons to Armorica, the modern Britanny. We
hear about the year 470 of twelve thousand Britons
who came by sea to settle in the country north of the
Loire (Jonandes, "Getica", c. 45) and it is only in the
sixth century apparently that the north-western
regions of Gaul came to be called Britannia. The
Gallo-Roman inhabitants of these districts welcomed
the fugitives with much charity on account of their
common Christianity (Ermoldus, "Carmina III"),
but the Britons requited them but ill, and seem to
have behaved with the same ruthless tjTanny of might
over right which marked the conquests of the Anglo-
Saxons in the land from which they had been driven.
No doubt, as time went on, the British saints like SS.
Samson, Pol de L6on, Malo, Brioc, etc., who emigrated
with them, exercised a restraining effect upon the
settlers, and the Church in Britanny seems to have
been in a flourishing state from the sixth century
onwards.
During the Saxon and Norman Periods (681- 1295). — The last British titular King of Britain is said to have been " Cadwalader the blessed" who, according to the " Brut-y-Tywysogion ", "died at Rome in 681 on the twelfth day of May: as Myrrdin had previously prophesied to Vortigern of repulsive lips; and hence- forth the Britons lost the crown of the kingdom and the Saxons gained it". This pilgrimage to Rome is, however, generally held to be ai)ocr>-phal. Possibly there has been some confusion between Cadwalader of Wales and CaedwaUa, King of Wessex, who un- doubtedly did die in Rome in 689. At a later date, however, journeys of the Welsh princes to Rome became common, that of Cyngen, King of Powys, in S.')4 being one of th(> earliest examples. During this whole period the ]>olitical aniagoiiisni between Anglo- Saxons and ^'clsh seems always (o have caused the ecclesiastical relations between the two countries to be strained, though the Welsh acce))ted the Roman lOasler before the end of the eighth century, and though in 871 we hear of a Saxon Bishop of St. Da- vids. No doubt also attempts were made to establish friendly relations. Asser, the famous biographer of King Alfred, was a Welshman who came to the English court in 880, seeking protection from the t yranny of his nat ive .sovereigns, sons of Rhodri Mawr. This incident nnisl be typical of many similar ca.ses, and there were times, for example under Eadgar the
Peaceable, when some sort of EngUsh suzerainty over
the principahty seems to have been acquiesced in.
When Edgar was rowed on the Dee by eight under-
kings in 973, five of the eight were Welsh, and this
fact is even admitted by a Welsh annalist, the com-
piler of the "Brut-y-Tywysogion", who however
transfers the scene of the episode to Caerleon-upon-
Usk. To detail the incidents of the six hundred years
which preceded the final absorption of Wales poUti-
cally and ecclesiastically into the English system,
which took place in the reign of Edward I, would not
be possible here. It must be sufficient to notice that
even before the close of the Saxon period, various
Welsh prelates are alleged to have been consecrated
or confirmed by English archbishops, while under the
Norman kings a direct claim to jurisdiction over the
Welsh Church was made by various archbishops of
Canterbury beginning apparently with St. Anselm.
The most important matter to notice is that the
attempt to claim for the Welsh medieval Church any
position independent of Rome is as futile as in the
ease of England or Ireland. Speaking primarily of
the days of St. Augustine, the most recent and authori-
tative historian of Wales remarks: "No theological
differences parted the Roman from the Celtic Church,
for the notion that the lat ter was the home of a kind of
primitive Protestantism, of apostolic purity and sim-
phcity, is n-ithout any historical basis. Gildas shows
clearly enough that the Church to which he belonged
held the ideas current at Rome in his day as to the
sacrifice of the Eucharist and the privileged position
of the priest" (J. E. Lloyd, "Hist, of Wales", I, 173).
And this remained true during the centuries which
followed, as anyone who acquaints himself with such
original sources as the chronicles, the Lives of the
Welsh saints and especially the Welsh laws formu-
lated in the Code of Howel the Good (a. d. 928), will
readily perceive. In the preface of this same code
we read that when the laws were drafted, Howel the
Good and his bishops "went to Rome to obtain the
authority of the Pope of Rome. And there were read
the laws of Howel in the presence of the Pope and the
Pope was satisfied with them and gave them his
authority" (Haddan and Stubbs, I, 219). In this
code religious observances such as the veneration of
relics, the keeping of feasts and fasts, confession,
Mass, and the sacraments are all taken for granted.
The respect shown in the preface for the authority of
the Holy See is of special importance. So far as this
respect was at any time less prominent, this is due, as
J. E. Lloyd points out, to Celtic i-solation, and not to
any anti-Roman feeling. The Irish missionary
Columbanus, "sturdy champion though he was of
Celtic independence in matters ecclesiastical", never-
theless says of the popes: "By reason of Christ's twin
Apostles [Peter and Paul] you hold an all but celestial
position and Rome is the head of the world's Churches,
if exception be made of the singular privilege enjoyed
by the place of Our Lord's Resurrection" (Hist, of
Wales, I, 173). The rest of St. Columbanus's letter
to Pope Boniface IV (613) gives proof of an even more
absolute dependence upon the guidance of the Bi.shops
of Rome whom he calls "our masters, the steersmen,
the mystic pilots of the ship sjiiritual". It should
perhaps be mentioned (hat the repudiation of papal
supremacy attributed to Dinoth, .-Miliol of Bangor-
is-Coed, is now universally aihnitied to be a ixist-
Reformation forgery (Haddan and Stubbs, I, 122. and
cf. (^lougaud, "Les chrctientes celli(]ues", 211).
Again the imi)utation, founded on a passage in the
Gwentian text of the "Brut-y-Tywy.sogion" and
suggesting that the obligation of celibacy wa.s rejected
on ])rinciple by the priests of thi^W Clsli Cluirch, runs
counter to all the smnulcr evi(l<-ncc. rndoulitcdly
the gravest abuses ])revaile<l in Wales regarding this
matter, Inil in priiuiple clerical celibacy was accepted.
The Gwentian text referred to is of no value as evi-
