sponded with him on questions of British antiquities as well as official business. He was sufficiently trusted by Cecil to be able to tender strong advice as to the filling up of Welsh bishoprics, to warn him against men ‘utterly unlearned in divinity,’ and to press the claims of his own allies for preferment. He failed, however, to obtain the see of Bangor for his friend Huet, precentor and head of his chapter. Another great ally of Davies was Walter Devereux, earl of Essex [q. v.], who, with the possession of the old episcopal mansion of Lamphey, had acquired great influence in Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire, and was a strong friend of the reforming principles to which the bishop also was devoted. In 1576 the foundation of Carmarthen grammar school was due to the efforts of Essex and Davies, who, with some of the townsfolk, petitioned the queen with this object. When the earl died in Dublin, Davies preached an eloquent funeral sermon in Carmarthen church. The sermon was printed at London in 1577 by H. Denham, ‘for the benefit of the young earl absent,’ and threw a clear light on the state of the diocese over which Davies ruled so long. As a councillor as well as a bishop he could complain of the careless and bad justices and sheriffs, the timid and superstitious churchwardens, who thwarted all his efforts for reform. But he had to deal also with great earls and courtiers, greedy for church spoils and contemptuously intolerant of the church's rulers. It was noted as a proof of uncommon boldness that he ‘stoutly confronted’ Sir John Perrot, the president of Munster, a Pembrokeshire gentleman of large estate, as well as a prominent statesman (Wynne, Gwydir Family, p. 94, cf. Archæologia Cambrensis, 3rd ser. vii. 118). Again, he struggled to vindicate the rights of the see against a ‘commission of concealment’ granted to one Carey, a groom of the queen's chamber, who, not contented with an advantageous lease by which it was attempted to buy him off, obtained the verdict of a jury that Llanddewibrevi was a ‘college concealed,’ and robbed the see of the patronage of that important living, and of twelve other churches annexed to the prebends of the dissolved college as well. Carey afterwards claimed the churches of Llanarth and Llanina as parcels of Llanddewi, and, not daunted with a first defeat in the law courts, persevered until he obtained a new verdict in his favour. Even after Davies's death he sued his widow for the arrears of rent due when the property was in her husband's unquestioned possession (Strype, Annals, iii. i. 175, iii. ii. 226–8; Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1547–80, p. 328).
On another occasion Davies was involved in a quarrel with the Earls of Leicester and Pembroke. In four peremptory letters they bade the bishop accept a Mr. Bowen as their presentee to an advowson to which there were already two pretenders with stronger claims. Bowen produced as evidence documents ‘counterfeit and devoid of truth,’ with only the chapter seal, ‘and that arbitrarily set on and taken from some old writing.’ So much was the bishop alarmed, that he tried to persuade Mr. Gwynne, the lawful holder, to resign that he might present Bowen himself. But Gwynne's refusal, the discovery of another claimant in the person of Samuel Ferrar, son of Davies's martyred predecessor, and a violent letter of the earls, rebuking him for injustice and chiding him for his delay, combined to give the bishop courage to resist. He piteously complained to Parker of their bad usage, and lamented how, in conjunction with ‘insatiable cormorants in his own diocese,’ his powerful enemies ‘defamed and denounced him.’ All the consolation he got from the archbishop was, ‘Better shall ye finally satisfy wise men by constancy to truth and justice than be tossed up and down at the pleasure of others; expertus loquor’ (Parker Correspondence, pp. 226, 279, Parker Soc.).
In the administration of his diocese Davies found more obstacles in the passive resistance of ignorance, vice, and indifference than from the more direct antagonism of catholic and puritan. In 1577 he was able to inform Cecil that there were no recusants in his diocese (Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1547–80, p. 564). In 1570 Davies forwarded to Cecil a detailed account of the ‘state of his diocese with suggestions for remedying the same’ (State Papers, Dom. Elizabeth, R. O., lxvi. 26 and 26, 1; Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1547–80, p. 362). In this document, which sheds a good deal of light on the state of the Welsh church at the time, Davies specially urges the council to provide competent stipends for vicars in the numerous parishes impropriated to the crown, whose condition had become far worse than before the suppression of the monasteries.
Davies set himself energetically to work to provide a vernacular theological literature for his country. He enlisted the co-operation of his neighbour in the Vale of Conway, William Salesbury [q. v.], to whose almost single-handed efforts had been already due the first books printed in Welsh. In 1563 an act of parliament was passed (5 Eliz. cap. 28), enjoining the four Welsh bishops and the bishop of Hereford, under penalty of 40l. each, to procure to be printed before 1566 Welsh versions of the Bible and Book of Common Prayer, copies of which were to be placed in every
