Welsh Journals

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PATRONS, PARISHES AND APPROPRIATIONS IN THE DEANERY OF ABERGAVENNY IN THE EARLY-SIXTEENTH CENTURY' IN August 1906 the vicar of Aberdare completed a little book entitled Notes on Churches in the Diocese of Llandaff and arranged for it to be printed, no doubt at his own expense, by a local printer and stationer.2 The book was subtitled Part I. The Cathedral Group and in his preface the author announced that it was intended to be the first of three parts, the second of which was to contain the story of the churches attached to abbeys and other monastic institutions and the third 'if it is ever reached' was to review the churches which had always been in private patronage. Despite the author's reservations, both Part II and Part III, subtitled The Conventual Group and The Manorial Group, were printed in 1907 and offered for sale at 3s 6d and 2s respectively. As might be expected with a privately-printed work of specialised interest, the number of copies printed seems to have been very small, perhaps no more than a few hundreds. At any rate the work, which has never been reprinted, has long been scarce and this may partly explain why it is not often cited by ecclesiastical historians. The author was, however, later to achieve eminence in his own profession, as he was the Reverend Charles Green, who became bishop of Monmouth (1921), bishop of Bangor (1928), and archbishop of Wales from 1934 until shortly before his death in May 1944.3 Green was forty- three when he completed Notes on Churches in the Diocese of Llandaff and the book was his first major publication, reflecting the scholarship which became apparent to a wider readership in 1937 when he published his authoritative work on The Setting of the Constitution of the Church in Wales. Given its austere style and presentation, it is not surprising that his earlier work did not become as widely known as it deserved,4 but it remains a work of permanent value for Welsh church historians. As its title indicates, the greater part of Green's book consists of notes on individual churches, with particular emphasis on parishes, patrons, incomes and endowments. A distinctive feature of the book is that churches in Parts I and II are grouped for discussion on the basis of common patronage rather than on a geographical or deanery-by-deanery basis, so that, for instance, the churches of which St. Peter's Abbey, Gloucester, was patron are included in a separate chapter although the parishes concerned were situated in more than one deanery. This treatment shows the relative importance of the various ecclesiastical corporations as patrons of parish churches and is especially useful in studying the arrangements made when ecclesiastical corporations appropriated part of the revenues of parish churches in their patronage for their own maintenance, generally by establishing a vicarage for the maintenance of the parish priest. The purpose of the present article is to study the relations between parish churches and their patrons in the deanery of Abergavenny in the reign of Henry VIII and particularly the arrangements made when churches were appropriated.5 The deanery of Abergavenny is a convenient