Traces of Catholicism in Welsh Folklore and Custom

Extract

Wales is the lost Brittany of Catholicism in this island. The Reformation was ill-received by the people, and for some considerable time the loyalty of the Welsh to the old religion was a force on which the leaders of Catholicism could rely. For a generation or more after the accession of Elizabeth the religious opinions and prejudices of the greater number of Welshmen are best represented by the forceful lines of the schoolmaster-poet, Richard Gwyn of Llanidloes :

Adam, the first man had
But one Paradise;
And there is but one Church, upon a hill.
Where there is right communion.
She is conspicuous as the sun,
. . . . .
And she is dowered beyond price,
Though smoke mounts from Satan’s pit,
Between the blind man and the sky.

In the end Catholicism in Wales perished, for the most part rather from inanition than from any very positive process of conversion to Protestantism.

Strype, speaking of the middle of the sixteenth century, says:

In Wales the people ordinarily carried their beads about with them to church and used them in prayer. And even at Carmarthen, while the Bishop was at the communion table bareheaded, doing his devotions, the people kneeled there and knocked their breasts at the sight of the communion, using the same superstitious ceremonies as they had used in times past before the mass. They brought their corpses to be buried with songs and candles lighted up about them. And one Doctor Hughes ministering the Communion in the Cathedral Church of S. David’s, did after the popish manner break the host into three pieces, putting one of the parts into the cup, and giving a whole cake to the communicant without breaking the same.