Perhaps you know also that this early Christianity was swept away from all parts of the country, except in Ireland and Wales, by the coming of the heathen Angles, Saxons, and Danes.
We can easily understand how these two parts of what to us is one Kingdom, managed to hold the Faith. They were more or less undisturbed by the fierce invaders who came from the North of Germany and from Denmark, and who were quite content to settle down in fertile England without taking the trouble to cross the Irish Channel and fight with the savage Irish tribes, or penetrate into the wild and hilly regions of Wales.
So it came about that, while the English people were so harassed and worried with war and cruelty that they forgot all about the new doctrines which had been beginning to gain a slender foothold in their land, the people of Wales had still their Church and Bishops.
These Bishops seem to have held much the same Sees as the Welsh Bishops hold to-day. Bangor, Llandaff, Menevia or St. Davids, Llanelwy or St. Asaph, and three others with strange Welsh names, one of which was Cærffawydd, which meant the ‘place of beeches,’ and which we now know as Hereford.
For in these days Wales was larger than it is now, and was bounded by the Severn, and Cærffawydd was a Welsh town, if town it could be called, not an English one.
These Bishops were governed by an Archbishop, who is spoken of sometimes as living at Carleon-on-Usk, sometimes at Llandaff, and sometimes at Hereford.
Now, of course you have all heard about King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table; and you may have read about them in Tennyson’s ‘Idylls of the King’; about their bravery, and chivalry, and purity, and how they took an oath—
‘To break the heathen and uphold the Christ;
To ride abroad, redressing human wrongs;
To speak no slander—no, nor listen to it;’