ABSTRACT
For nearly a year, from the autumn of 1587 until the late summer of 1588, Dr William Morgan, a clergyman from the village of Llanrhaeadrym-Mochnant in north-east Wales, was staying in London. During those months the realm held its breath at the prospect of a Spanish invasion, and the religious implications of that threat had their bearing - at least indirectly - on William Morgan's presence in London at that time. For he was in the metropolis to supervise the printing of his translation of the Bible, including the Apocrypha, into Welsh. The printing was the responsibility of George Bishop and Ralph Newbury, deputies of the royal printer Christopher Barker, and William Morgan made his way daily to the press, in St Paul's Churchyard, from the deanery in Westminster. There he stayed as the guest of Dean Gabriel Goodman, himself a native of north Wales. In a postscript to the Latin address with which he prefaces the translation, William Morgan thanks Goodman for his hospitality and many other kindnesses: vir re et nomine valde bonus, 'truly a good man, in deed as well as in name'. He also thanks the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift, for offering to accommodate him, but adds (with a nice glimpse of sixteenth-century London) that staying at Lambeth would have necessitated crossing the Thames every day, an undertaking which clearly did not appeal to one brought up in the mountain fastnesses of Snowdonia.
