Birth and the Legends of Origin

The traditions of David’s birth — his mother Non (Nonna), his father Sant (Sandde) son of Ceredig, the silencing of Gildas in the pulpit at David’s approach, and the angel who foretold David to St Patrick thirty years in advance — survive almost entirely in Rhygyfarch’s Life of David, written around 1090, some five centuries after the events. This file lays out what the Welsh and Latin Lives report of David’s origins, and insists at every step on the distinction between what the sources attest and what can be known: these are hagiographical claims pinned to a late and tendentious document, not biographical facts, and the darkest of them — that David was conceived through an act of violence — must be handled soberly and as the text’s own claim.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Celtic; patron of Wales)

Of David’s birth and parentage we have, in the strict sense, no contemporary evidence at all. Everything that follows comes from Lives composed centuries after his death — above all from the Latin Vita Sancti David of Rhygyfarch (Rhigyfarch) ap Sulien, written about 1090, and from the medieval Welsh Buchedd Dewi derived from it — and the methodological rule of this collection (METHODOLOGY §3.5) applies with full force: hagiographical claims are never reported as historical fact but are pinned to their earliest written attestation and named as the testimony of their source. Throughout, then, the formula is “Rhygyfarch reports,” “the Life states,” “first recorded in,” and not “David was.”

The Source and Its Date

The foundational text for David’s life, including everything about his birth, is the Vita Sancti David of Rhygyfarch ap Sulien, composed around 1090 (Sharpe & Davies, ed. and trans., in St David of Wales: Cult, Church and Nation, ed. Evans & Wooding, 2007; J. W. James, ed., Rhigyfarch’s Life of St David, 1967). Rhygyfarch was a member of the most distinguished ecclesiastical family of late-eleventh-century Wales: he was a son of Sulien, twice bishop of St Davids, and he wrote at Llanbadarn Fawr within the orbit of that learned dynasty (Charles-Edwards, Wales and the Britons 350–1064, 2013; Evans & Wooding 2007).

The date and circumstances are not incidental, because they shape everything the Life says. Rhygyfarch wrote in the years when the Norman conquest of England (1066) was beginning to press on Wales, and when the see of St Davids was anxious both to defend its lands and to assert an ancient, even metropolitan, dignity against external claims — claims that would later crystallize in Canterbury’s bid for primacy over the Welsh church (J. R. Davies, in Evans & Wooding 2007; Charles-Edwards 2013). The Vita Davidis is therefore a tendentious document with institutional purposes: it magnifies David, and through David the church of St Davids, and its account of his birth is the opening movement in that magnification (the politics are treated at length in The Political Uses of the Life; the text itself in The Vita Davidis). To read its birth-narrative as biography is to mistake the genre.

Later texts add nothing independent. The Welsh Buchedd Dewi is a translation and adaptation of Rhygyfarch (D. Simon Evans, ed., The Welsh Life of St David / Buched Dewi, 1988), and the Life by Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambrensis) in the later twelfth century, written in part to support St Davids’ renewed metropolitan campaign, likewise depends on the Rhygyfarchan tradition (Gerald of Wales, Vita Sancti Davidis; Charles-Edwards 2013). For the legends of origin, Rhygyfarch is effectively the single source.

The Parents: Non and Sant

Rhygyfarch names David’s parents at the outset of the Life. His father, the Vita states, was Sant (in Welsh tradition Sandde), described as a king of Ceredigion and son of Ceredig (Rhygyfarch, Vita Davidis 2–4; Sharpe & Davies, in Evans & Wooding 2007). Ceredig is the eponymous founder-figure of the kingdom of Ceredigion, so the genealogy as Rhygyfarch gives it places David in the royal line of the very region in which Rhygyfarch himself wrote and in which Llanbadarn lay — a royal pedigree of exactly the kind hagiographers regularly supplied to their saints, and one whose convenience should be noted (Charles-Edwards 2013, on saintly genealogies; Evans & Wooding 2007).

His mother, Rhygyfarch reports, was Non (Nonna), later herself venerated as a saint, with her own cult and dedications in Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany (chapels and wells of St Non near St Davids and elsewhere; Charles-Edwards 2013; on the cult landscape, Pilgrimage to St Davids). The Welsh tradition that she was a nun is part of the later devotional accretion around her figure and is not a secure historical datum but an element of her cult.

The Manner of the Conception — Handled Soberly

Here the rule of sober, source-pinned reporting is most necessary. Rhygyfarch’s Life relates that David was conceived when Sant, travelling through the region, encountered Non and lay with her; in the Latin of the Vita the encounter is recounted as an act forced upon her — that is, the text describes David’s conception as the result of a rape (Rhygyfarch, Vita Davidis 2–4; Sharpe & Davies, in Evans & Wooding 2007; discussed in Charles-Edwards 2013).

Several things must be said about this, carefully. First, it is a claim of the Life, not an established fact, and it is reported here only as what Rhygyfarch’s text attests (METHODOLOGY §3.5). Second, within the logic of the hagiography it functions not as a piece of biography but as a literary frame: the saint’s holiness is shown to shine even from a sinful origin, and Non’s purity and the child’s sanctity are vindicated against the circumstances of his begetting — a motif with parallels in the broader hagiographical tradition (Charles-Edwards 2013; Evans & Wooding 2007). It is told to glorify David and Non, not to record a crime. Third, the modern reader rightly feels the gravity of what the text describes, and the appropriate response is neither to repeat it as a salacious fact nor to suppress it, but to name it precisely as the Life’s own claim and to read it as the source-critical and devotional object that it is. The text is the witness; the wonder it means to convey is the holiness that, on its telling, was present from the beginning.

The Prophecies of David’s Birth

Rhygyfarch surrounds the birth with a cluster of prophecies, each of which works to establish David’s pre-eminence over an earlier or rival figure. They are best read together, as a single hagiographical strategy.

The Angel and St Patrick

The Life relates that, a full thirty years before David was born, St Patrick came to the place called Vetus Rubus (the Old Bush, Hen Fynyw / Glyn Rhosyn, the future site of David’s monastery) and wished to settle there; but an angel of God told him that this place was reserved for a child not yet born, who would be called David, and directed Patrick instead to his mission in Ireland (Rhygyfarch, Vita Davidis 3; Sharpe & Davies, in Evans & Wooding 2007). Patrick, the Life says, was at first aggrieved but submitted to the divine plan.

This is a synchronism, not a chronology. It serves to subordinate even Patrick — the apostle of Ireland — to David, reserving the holiest ground of Wales for the Welsh saint, and it binds David into the prestigious Irish hagiographical world (on the Irish connections, see The Age of the Welsh Saints and the sibling collection on St Patrick of Ireland). The “thirty years” is a hagiographical number marking David’s predestination, not a datable interval; the episode tells us about the ambitions of eleventh-century St Davids, not about the fifth-century saint Patrick.

Gildas Silenced in the Pulpit

A second prophecy concerns the preacher Gildas. Rhygyfarch reports that while Non, pregnant with David, entered a church where Gildas was preaching, Gildas was suddenly struck dumb and could not continue; asked why, he explained that he could not preach in the presence of the child in her womb, whose future greatness so exceeded his own that the unborn David had silenced him (Rhygyfarch, Vita Davidis 4–5; Sharpe & Davies, in Evans & Wooding 2007). Gildas, on this telling, then withdrew, yielding the field to the saint who was to come.

The choice of Gildas is pointed. Gildas was the one genuinely sixth-century British author whose work survived (the De Excidio; see The Age of the Welsh Saints), and to show him silenced by the unborn David is to assert David’s supremacy over the most authoritative voice of the British church (Charles-Edwards 2013; Evans & Wooding 2007). Like the Patrick episode, the story is a claim of precedence dressed as a miracle; it is reported here as Rhygyfarch’s testimony, not as an event.

[Disputed: the relationship and relative dating of David and Gildas cannot be established. The Rhygyfarchan “silencing” episode (Rhygyfarch, Vita Davidis 4–5, ed. Sharpe & Davies in Evans & Wooding 2007) is a hagiographical assertion of precedence, not evidence of contact; Charles-Edwards (Wales and the Britons, 2013) treats both the chronology of Gildas and these saintly synchronisms as insecure, so that whether the two were even contemporaries is undetermined rather than settled either way.]

Birth, Baptism, and Naming

Rhygyfarch reports that David was born at the place by the sea later marked by the chapel of St Non, near the future St Davids, amid signs: a storm raged everywhere except at the spot of the birth, and a stone on which Non leaned in her labour was said to have split or retained the impress of the event (Rhygyfarch, Vita Davidis 5–7; Sharpe & Davies, in Evans & Wooding 2007). At his baptism, the Life continues, a spring of water miraculously appeared, and a blind man named Movi, who held the infant, received his sight and saw — these healing wonders at the font being, again, reported as the testimony of the Life (Rhygyfarch, Vita Davidis 7; Sharpe & Davies, in Evans & Wooding 2007).

The name itself carries a tradition. The saint is universally known in Welsh as Dewi, the regular Welsh development corresponding to the Latin and biblical David; Rhygyfarch latinizes him as David, assimilating the Welsh saint to the king and psalmist of Israel, while Welsh devotion keeps Dewi (the Welsh form and its later epithet Dewi Sant; Charles-Edwards 2013; Evans & Wooding 2007). A further epithet preserved in tradition, Dewi Ddyfrwr, “David the Waterman,” belongs to the ascetic legends of his monastic discipline rather than to his birth (treated in The Rule of the Watermen).

How to Read the Legends of Origin

The birth-narratives of the Vita Davidis form a coherent literary overture rather than a record of events. Their consistent work is to establish David’s predestination and pre-eminence: an angel reserves the holiest site of Wales for him over Patrick; the foremost British writer is silenced before him; miracles attend his conception, birth, and baptism; and even a violent and sinful origin cannot stain the sanctity that, on the telling, was present from the womb. Each motif is at home in the conventions of medieval hagiography, where the saint’s greatness is regularly foretold and his future stamped upon his beginning (Charles-Edwards 2013; Evans & Wooding 2007).

For the historian, then, these chapters yield almost nothing about the sixth-century man and a great deal about the eleventh-century church that made him its patron and its title to land and dignity (see What Can Be Known and The Political Uses of the Life). For the Orthodox reader, the proper posture is the one the methodology prescribes: to receive the Life as the Church’s later memory and devotion, told to glorify a saint, and to keep always legible the distinction between that devotion and the slender historical record beneath it (METHODOLOGY §3.5; on the transmission of these Lives, The Latin and Welsh Lives).

References

Rhygyfarch (Rhigyfarch) ap Sulien. Vita Sancti David (Life of St David), c. 1090. Edited and translated by Richard Sharpe and J. R. Davies in St David of Wales: Cult, Church and Nation, ed. J. Wyn Evans and Jonathan M. Wooding (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007). (Cited by chapter: the parents Sant and Non and the conception at 2–4; the prophecy to Patrick at 3; the silencing of Gildas at 4–5; the birth, baptism, and the blind Movi at 5–7.)
James, J. W., ed. and trans. Rhigyfarch’s Life of St David. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1967. (The older critical edition and translation of the Latin Vita.)
Evans, D. Simon, ed. The Welsh Life of St David (Buched Dewi). Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1988. (The medieval Welsh Buchedd Dewi, derived from Rhygyfarch.)
Evans, J. Wyn, and Jonathan M. Wooding, eds. St David of Wales: Cult, Church and Nation. Studies in Celtic History 24. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007. (Edition and translation of Rhygyfarch’s Vita Davidis; essays by J. R. Davies and others on the political context and the cult.)
Charles-Edwards, T. M. Wales and the Britons 350–1064. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. (Rhygyfarch and his family; the tendentious character of the Life; the insecurity of the David–Gildas chronology and of saintly genealogies and synchronisms.)
Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambrensis). Vita Sancti Davidis (Life of St David), later twelfth century. (A reworking of the Rhygyfarchan tradition in support of St Davids’ metropolitan claims.)