classes, and until the intense appeal of Puritanism had been heard in the land, that Wales became, what it continued afterwards to be for two centuries and a half, a country in which religion was the primary concern of all the people. Nor is it right to say that the dissolution of the monasteries inflicted a cruel blow upon Wales. It is perfectly true that, in the Middle Ages, the Welsh monastery had been, on the whole, favourable to the cause of national independence, in contradistinction to the bishop, who was almost invariably an English agent. But the day was long past when the monastery was the school, the hospital, the alms-house, and the common friend of the whole country-side. It is possible, though by no means certain, that the tenant of monastic land enjoyed an easier existence than his neighbour on the land of a lay lord; but that was the sole benefit which remained, a {148} singularly poor excuse for the considerable endowments held by the monks. The truth is that the dissolution of the monasteries was a good thing in itself; the blunder and the crime consisted in the use to which the confiscated property was put. This might have gone to found schools, to endow charitable institutions, and to provide land for the landless; instead of that it was recklessly bestowed upon courtiers, upon the new families who were serving the Tudor sovereigns so well, and upon nobles whose estates were already sufficiently large. There were no really wealthy monastic foundations in Wales at all: their revenue was under £200 a year; and they were consequently dissolved with the smaller monasteries. The agents sent to Wales by Cromwell for the purpose of putting down superstitious practices, and removing idolatrous emblems, performed their task with the minimum of tact, and sometimes with shameful rapacity and greed. One of the worst was Bishop Barlow, who was sent to the diocese of St. David's, the most hallowed ground in Wales. Himself a time-serving cleric of the type of Cranmer, he had no sympathy with persons who were unable to keep pace with his own religious instability. The religious sentiment, {149} which had gathered for centuries about the Cathedral of St. David, meant nothing to him. He sought to transfer the see to Carmarthen. At one moment he insulted the memory of St. David, at another he denied that such a man had ever existed. He tore the roof from the beautiful Bishop's Palace, and with the proceeds provided marriage portions for his five daughters, all of whom were married to bishops. So consistent was he in his thieving, that it is with considerable suspicion that one reads his lamentations about the "barbarity," and the "idolatry," of the people for whom, he argues, it would be waste of money to repair churches.