It was probably to get rid of this mischievous custom that the Norman conquerors and the English barons who occupied castles in Wales turned such benefices as they could lay their hands on into vicarages under monasteries. Then the abbots or priors appointed some of their monks to minister in these parishes, and these men were entirely detached from all family ties in the place, and could attend to its spiritual charge and to that only. But till this new order of things came in--and it came in slowly and by degrees, and was forced on a reluctant people--the genealogies of the saints and of their kin were preserved with the utmost care. People were much more anxious to remember their pedigrees than the stories of the lives of the founders. The pedigrees were the title deeds to the enjoyment of valuable rights to land and other endowments. In the Latin Church a saint was remembered for what he had done, for his holy life; in the Celtic Church all that was nothing--he was valued for the land he had acquired, and which he transmitted to his posterity. In the Welsh Church, saints, bishops, abbots, clergy, as a rule, were married, and took care to transmit their benefices parcelled up among their sons. When the Latin ecclesiastics condescended to write the lives of the Celtic saints they suppressed this fact. Thus Gildas the historian, Abbot of Ruys, and a reformer of the Irish Church after the reaction to paganism that followed the death of Patrick and his devoted band, was a married man, and the father of some half a dozen children. He had two biographers. Neither says a word about this; each asserts that from boyhood he was “crucified to the world and the world to him”; that he “scorned transitory things,” and lived a life of severe self-abnegation. His son Cenydd, or Keneth, was a hermit in Gower, and he also had wife and family. But those terrible genealogies, so carefully preserved by the Welsh, tell us facts not quite in harmony with the statements of these “Lives,” just as parish registers and the wills in probate courts make sad havoc of some of the pedigrees of our gentle families as given in “Burke” and in county histories.