Wales

Abstract

This chapter argues that the chief features which distinguished Welsh Anglicanism from English in this period were its poverty, its remote position, and its almost entirely rural nature, at least until the rapid expansion of population associated with the Industrial Revolution. It argues that Anglican clergy in Wales in this period were generally Welsh and Welsh-speaking, and that they enjoyed good relations with their Dissenting neighbours until the last decades of the eighteenth century. It compares and contrasts the effects of the two eighteenth-century Evangelical revivals and describes the attempts to educate the poor, especially through circulating schools. Finally, it discusses the leading role played by Anglicans in the romantic revival of Wales’s Celtic culture and traces the hardening of relations with Dissenters, especially in the somewhat wealthier north, from about the 1790s.