Williams was previously Bishop of Monmouth and Archbishop of Wales (making him the first Archbishop of Canterbury in modern times not to be appointed from within the Church of England and the first bishop to serve as primate of two provinces of the Anglican Communion) and had spent much of his earlier career as an academic at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford successively. His primacy has been marked by much speculation that the Anglican Communion (of which the Archbishop of Canterbury is symbolic head) is on the verge of fragmentation and by Williams's attempts to keep all sides talking to one another.