Joshua Thomas (1719-1797) served as the pastor of the Baptist church at Leominster in Wales for almost 45 years. His history of the Baptists in Wales was published in the Welsh language in 1778. He published an English edition of his history in 1795. His history was considered a well-researched edition of Baptist history. Acccording to Hywel M. Davies in "Transatlantic Brethren" (p.142), Joshua Thomas insisted that the Welsh Baptists "were the direct inheritors of the legacy of pure, primitive British Christianity--the spiritual and ethnic descendants of the pre-Augustinian Celtic Christians, historically free from the taints of popery." This would take this strain of Christianity back to the time when the Roman Empire ruled Britannia; back before Augustine of Canterbury brought Catholicism to the Germanic Anglo-Saxon tribes that conquered England after the Romans had retreated. There was always a remnant of true believers even throughout the darkest of the Dark Ages. Some of those believers were in Wales.