Cylchgronau Cymru

RICHARD DAVIES, BISHOP OF ST. DAVIDS, 1561-81. By GLANMOR WILLIAMS. RICHARD DAVIES is best known as William Salesbury's colleague in that triumph of early Welsh Protestantism, the translation of the New Testament and the Prayer Book into Welsh for the first time. His participation in that great enterprise is still his chief claim to fame and veneration. Nevertheless, his tenure of the largest of the Welsh sees during a long and critical period in Elizabeth's reign forms a significant chapter in the history of the Reformation in Wales, and it is with this aspect of Davies's achievements that this study is primarily concerned. Of necessity, his work as a translator cannot rightly be divorced from his pastoral activities, still less subordinated to them, so that if less attention is paid to it in what follows, this is not due to any attempt to discount its significance, but because it has already received the careful study it deserves.1 Davies was born the son of a parish priest, Dafydd ap Gronw, curate of Gyffin, near Conway. Both his parents were of good stock, and could proudly trace their lineage back over many generations. As of so many others of his contemporaries, some of them far more famous than he, little is certainly known of the details of his early life. The date of his birth can be given with no greater precision than some time during the first decade of the sixteenth century. We can only guess where he was educated possibly he went to school at the Abbey of Aberconway, if indeed there was one or he may have gone to a seminary nearby, orginally founded by Edward I, and perhaps still in existence or he may have been educated at home. At all events, he learned enough to be able to enter the University of Oxford, where he took the degrees of M.A. (1530) and B.D. (1536). No record of his doings between 1536 and 1549 has as yet been uncovered. In 1549, he appeared as rector of Maidsmorton, and in the following year as vicar of Burnham. He remained in Buckinghamshire until 1553, when he was deprived of his livings. Two years later, he removed to the Continent where he remained until the accession of Queen Elizabeth. On his return to England fortune smiled on 1 Archdeacon Thomas in his Life of Davies and Salesbury, the only biography of Davies, other than the valuable article in D.N.B., did not ignore Davies's activities as a bishop, but he did treat them as incidental to his main purpose, which was to show the extent of Davies's contributions to the translations. 1 For further details, see Glanmor Williams, "The Deprivation and Exile of Bishop Richard Davies," Journal Hist. Soc. of Church in Wales, I (1947), pp. 80-90.