language, and is also highly important because it was the first instance of separate legislation in Church matters for Wales during the nineteenth century. The Act (6-7 William 4, c. 77) recites that, in 1835, two separate commissions were issued, to consider the state of the several dioceses in England and Wales, and that the Commissioners had made four several reports bearing date respectively the 17th of March, 1835, the 4th of March, the 20th of May, and the 24th of June, 1836. The Commissioners had recommended in these reports (inter alia), that upon the first avoidance of the sees either of Saint Asaph or Bangor, the Bishop of the other see should become the bishop of the two sees, which were to be united, and that thereupon he was to become seized and possessed of all the property, advowsons, and patronage belonging to the see so avoided.
The Act of 1836 first established the permanent body now known as the "Ecclesiastical Commissioners of England," having the control of considerable funds derived from a rearrangement and suspension of ecclesiastical revenues. One central corporation was thus substituted for the many local and independent corporations of the Church, so far as the management of property was concerned a constitutional change of great importance, regarded as having made a serious breach in the legal theory of ecclesiastical property. The Commissioners were directed to prepare a scheme best adapted to prevent the appointment of any clergyman not fully conversant with the Welsh language to any benefice with cure of souls, in any parish in Wales, the majority of the inhabitants of which did not understand the Welsh language.
A.D. 1838.—The Pluralities Act of 1838 (1 and 2 Victoria, c. 106) repealed that part of the Act of 1836 relating to the scheme propounded by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners as to preventing the appointment of any clergyman not fully conversant with the Welsh language to certain benefices in Wales, and in lieu thereof provided that the Bishops of the Welsh dioceses could refuse institution or licence to any
