The Society of Jesus in Wales, c.1600–1679

Abstract

This article will analyze and evaluate the surviving volumes from the Cwm Jesuit Library, seized and brought to Hereford Cathedral by Bishop Herbert Croft in 1679 at the height of the national hysteria attending the alleged Popish Plot.1 Located originally at the Cwm, on the Herefordshire-Monmouthshire border, the headquarters of the Jesuit College of St. Francis Xavier (a territorial missionary district rather than an educational establishment), the library lay at the heart of the seventeenth-century Welsh Jesuit mission.2 Unanalyzed since 1679, the Cwm collection is the largest known surviving post-Reformation Jesuit missionary library in Britain and, as such, reveals a great deal about post-Reformation life in Wales and the English borderlands. This paper will reveal fresh information about the importance of the Welsh mission to the successes of the Jesuits in England and Wales.