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Anglican Worship in Late Nineteenth-Century Wales: a Montgomeryshire Case Study
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
In 1910, the Royal Commission on the Church of England and the Other Religious Bodies in Wales and Monmouth revealed that the Church of England was the largest religious body in Wales, and attracted over a quarter of all worshippers. This indicated a significant improvement in the Church’s fortunes in the previous half century, and a different picture from that which had emerged from the 1851 Census of Religious Worship, which had suggested that the established Church had the support of only twenty per cent of Welsh worshippers. The purpose of this paper is to shed some light upon the Church’s improving fortunes between 1851 and 1910 by exploring the liturgical patterns which were evolving in a particular Welsh county, Montgomeryshire, in the late nineteenth century. Montgomeryshire is part of the large rural heart of mid-Wales, bordered by Radnor to the south, Cardigan and Merioneth to the west, Denbigh to the north, and Shropshire to the east. The paper considers the annual, monthly, and weekly liturgical cycles which were developing in the county, and how the co-existence of the Welsh and English languages was expressed in different styles of church music and worship.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Studies in Church History , Volume 35: Continuity and Change in Christian Worship , 1999 , pp. 408 - 418
- Copyright
- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1999
References
1 Royal Commission on the Church of England and the Other Religious Bodies in Wales and Monmouthshire, 8 vols in 9, Parliamentary Papers, 14 (London, 1910-11), 1, p. 20.
2 Bell, P. M. H., Disestablishment in Ireland and Wales (London, 1969), p. 236 Google Scholar; Davies, E. T., A New History of Wales: Religion and Society in the Nineteenth Century (Llandybic, 1981), pp. 27–34 Google Scholar; Price, D. T. W., A History of the Church in Wales in the Twentieth Century (Pcnarth, 1990), p. 2 Google Scholar; Cragoc, Matthew, An Anglican Aristocracy: The Moral Economy of the Landed Estate in Carmarthenshire 1832-1895 (Oxford, 1996), p. 191 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, ‘A question of culture: the Welsh Church and the bishopric of St Asaph, 1870’, The Welsh History Review, 18 (1996), p. 228.
3 Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales [hereafter NLW], St Asaph Parochial Records [hereafter St APR]: Bettws Cedewain 93, Service Register 1895-1901 (no foliation). All the material relating to Bettws Cedewain has come from this service register.
4 R. W. Ambler, The transformation of harvest celebrations in nineteenth-century Lincolnshire’, Midland History, 3 (1975-6), pp. 298-306.
5 NLW St APR: Bcrriew 119, Berriew Parish Magazine, Nov. 1880.
6 The desire to celebrate the harvest was not restricted to the countryside. Jeffrey Cox has shown that harvest festival was also the most popular service in inner Lambeth at this period. See Cox, Jeffrey, The English Churches in a Secular Society: Lambeth 1870-1930 (Oxford, 1982), pp. 103–4 Google Scholar.
7 NLW St APR: Llanllwchaiarn 12, Service Register 1884-1901 (no foliation).
8 Throughout the period from 1827 to 1897 more of the students admitted at St David’s College Lampeter were the sons of farmers than any other occupational category. See D. T. W. Price, A History of St David’s University College Volume I: to 1898 (Cardiff, 1977), pp. 207-10. See also Parry-Jones, D., Welsh Country Upbringing (London, 1948), pp. 77–8 Google Scholar for an account of Anglican harvest celebrations in Carmarthenshire in the 1890s.
9 Henry Scott Holland, A Bundle of Memories (n.p., 1915), p. 250. Cited by Cox, English Churches in a Secular Society, p. 103. Cox makes the point that Scott Holland was gently ridiculing the clergy who took this position, not expressing the view as his own.
10 NLW St APR: Llanmerewig 7, Service Register 1890-1905 (no foliation).
11 Owen, Trefor M., Welsh Folk Customs (Cardiff, 1959), pp. 41–7 Google Scholar; Parry-Jones, , Welsh Country Upbringing, pp. 75–6, 78–9 Google Scholar.
12 See Frances Knight, The Nineteenth-Century Church and English Society (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 35-6, 81, 203, for a discussion of this phenomenon.
13 NLW St APR: Llanwddyn 5, Service Register 1899-1907 (no foliation). Many of the service registers contain communicants’ registers at the back, and they were often diligently completed by the clergy.
14 Cragoe, Anglican Aristocracy, p. 244. See also Owen, Welsh Folk Customs, p. 33, where it is noted that in Caernarfonshire, Merionethshire, and Montgomeryshire the parish church plygain attracted both church and chapel people, this being one of the few days when religious differences were laid aside.
15 NLW St APR: Llanwddyn 4, Service Register 1891-9. Accounts at the back of the register reveal how much was spent on the choir.
16 NLW St APR: Llanwddyn 48, Church Choir Book 1893-6 (no foliation).
17 NLW St APR: Bettws Cedewain 93, Service Register 1895-1901 (no foliation).
18 NLW St APR: Newtown 8, Parish Council Minute Book 1878-85, entry for 25 Aug. 1884.
19 See Owen, Welsh Folk Customs, pp. 28-35 for the plygain. Traditionally associated with Christmas morning, in late Victorian Montgomerysliirc it more usually took place in early January.
20 NLW St APR: Manafon 6, Ready Reference Register 1905-14 (no foliation).
21 NLW St APR: Llanwddyn 48, Church Choir Book 1893-6 (no foliation).
22 Peter Crosslcy-Holland, ‘Wales’, in Stanley Sadie, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London, 1980), 20, pp. 159-71, states that the Newtown Festival began in 1920. Presumably the choral festival of the 1870s was a precursor of the later festival, helping to lay the foundations for the town’s musical tradition.
23 NLW St APR: Newtown 8, Parish Council Minute Book 1878-85. Entries for 6 June 1878, 14 Aug. 1879.
24 Ibid., entries for 7 April, 23 June, 8 Aug. 1881.
25 Ibid., entry for 20 Aug. 1883.
26 Data derived from Icuan Gwyncdd Jones, ed., The Religious Census of 1851: A Calendar of the Returns Relating to Wales, Vol. II North Wales (Cardiff, 1981). The 1851 Census did not ask a question about the language in which services were conducted, but this deficiency has been overcome in Jones’ edition of the Census by means of the incorporation of data taken from a government report of 1849, entitled Number of Services performed in each Church and Chapel [in Wales]. See Icuan Gwyncdd Jones, ed., The Religious Census of 1851: A Calendar of the Returns Relating to Wales, Vol. I South Wales (Cardiff, 1976), p. xxxii.
27 Ibid., p. 83. It is also worth noting that 85% of the parishes in Montgomeryshire are recorded as holding two or more Sunday services in 1851.
28 NLW St APR; Berriew 101.
29 Royal Commission on the Church of England and Other Religious Bodies in Wales and Monmouthshire, 1, p. 20.
30 Cragoc, ‘Question of culture’, p. 231.
31 Ibid., pp. 230-2. See pp. 231-44 for a discussion of the way in which the relationship between Welsh identity and the Church changed in the period from the 1840s to the 1870s.
32 Commenting on Hughes’s appointment, the Globe remarked that it was not by ‘pandering to the Dissenters’ love of extempore preaching’ that people would be bought back to the Church, but by ‘gratifying the national taste for music and singing’. Both Churchmen and Dissenters would be attracted to ‘a hearty choral Church Service’. Quoted in The Times, 18 March 1870, and cited by Cragoc, ‘Question of culture’, p. 252.
33 Jones, Ieuan Gwynedd, ‘Language and community in ninctccnth-ccntury Wales’, in Jones, Ieuan Gwynedd, ed., Mid-Victorian Wales: The Observers and the Observed (Cardiff, 1992), pp. 59–63 Google Scholar.
34 Ibid., p. 56. Jones makes the point that due to overall population growth, there were still more people who could speak Welsh in 1901 than there had been in 1801.
35 Ibid., p. 67.
36 This is apparent from NLW St APR: Berriew 101.
37 Jones, Religious Census 0/1851, Vol II, p. 38 and NLW St APR: Berriew 101. The switch of language may have occurred in 1854 when Henry James Marshall of Corpus Christi Oxford became vicar. See D. R. Thomas, A History of the Diocese of St Asaph (London, 1874), p. 319.
38 NLW St APR: Berriew 101.
39 NLW St APR: Llanwddyn 4, Service Register 1891-9 (no foliation).
40 NLW St APR: Llangadfan 6, Service Register 1910-31 (no foliation).
41 Ibid.
42 NLW St APR: Manafon 6, Ready Reference Register 1905-14 (no foliation).