The Age of the Welsh Saints

The sixth century in Wales is remembered as the “Age of the Saints,” the period in which the sub-Roman British church of the western peninsulas threw up the great monastic founders — Illtud, Cadoc, Teilo, Padarn, Deiniol, and David among them — whose churches still pattern the Welsh landscape. This file sets the historical ground on which David stands: the collapse of Roman Britain, the survival and re-shaping of the Brythonic church in the west, the rise of the monastic-saint as the dominant religious figure, and the llan/clas organization of the Welsh church — while flagging that the very phrase “Age of the Saints” is a later historiographical construction whose tidy outline the sources will not bear.

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

The David of the Vita and of Welsh devotion did not appear out of nothing. He belongs to a recognizable phase of British Christianity — the Christianity of the western, Brythonic-speaking lands in the two centuries after Roman authority withdrew from Britain — in which the monastery and the holy founder displaced the late-Roman city and its bishop as the chief institutions of church life. Understanding that phase, and being honest about how thin and how late most of our information for it is, is the precondition for reading anything that the hagiographers later said about David himself.

The End of Roman Britain

Roman government in Britain ended in the early fifth century. The conventional marker is the year 410, when, according to the sixth-century historian Zosimus, the emperor Honorius wrote to the British civitates telling them to see to their own defence (Zosimus, New History 6.10; on the difficulties of this passage and its date, see Charles-Edwards 2013). Whatever the precise mechanism, the apparatus of imperial administration, the regular army, and the coined money economy had effectively gone from Britain within a generation, and the island fragmented into a patchwork of successor polities (Charles-Edwards, Wales and the Britons 350–1064, 2013).

The most nearly contemporary British voice for the aftermath is Gildas, whose De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (“On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain”) was written somewhere in the first half of the sixth century — the dating is contested and bound up with his account of the British victory at Mons Badonicus (Gildas, De Excidio 26; on the date see Charles-Edwards 2013 and the essays in Lapidge & Dumville, Gildas: New Approaches, 1984). Gildas is not a chronicler but a preacher: his work is a furious sermon against the kings and clergy of his own day, and he reads the Anglo-Saxon advance as God’s scourge upon a sinful people, on the model of the Old Testament prophets (Gildas, De Excidio 1, 22–26; Winterbottom, trans., 1978). For all its rhetorical distortion, the De Excidio is the single most important written witness from within the British church of the period, and it shows that church as already Latinate, episcopally ordered in principle, and bitterly self-critical (Gildas, De Excidio 66–110, the address to the clergy; Charles-Edwards 2013).

Crucially, Britain had been Christian before Rome left. The British church sent three bishops to the Council of Arles in 314 (the bishops of York, London, and a third see, probably Lincoln or Colchester; Charles-Edwards 2013), produced the heresiarch Pelagius around 400, and received two visits from St Germanus of Auxerre (in 429 and, on the traditional account, again later) sent to combat Pelagianism, as reported by Constantius of Lyon’s Life of Germanus and by Bede (Constantius, Vita Germani; Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica 1.17–21; Colgrave & Mynors, eds., 1969). The Christianity of the Age of the Saints was therefore not a fresh missionary plant but the continuation, in altered conditions, of a Romano-British church already two centuries old (the deeper background is treated in The British Church Before Augustine).

The Survival of the Brythonic Church in the West

As Anglo-Saxon settlement spread across the lowland east and south-east of Britain through the fifth and sixth centuries, the Brythonic-speaking and Christian population was pressed into the highland west: into what would become Wales, Cornwall, Cumbria, and the British north (the “Old North,” Yr Hen Ogledd), with a major movement of Britons across the Channel into Armorica, henceforth Brittany (Charles-Edwards 2013; Wendy Davies, Wales in the Early Middle Ages, 1982). It was in these western and northern enclaves, never reached by the pagan Anglo-Saxon advance and never re-evangelized by the later Roman mission of Augustine of Canterbury, that British Christianity continued unbroken from Roman times.

This continuity matters for the way the western church developed. The British church of Wales was cut off, for generations, from direct contact with Rome and Gaul along the old land routes, and it developed its own customs — most famously a method of computing the date of Easter and a distinctive form of tonsure — which would later put it at odds with the Roman party at the Synod of Whitby (664) and in the disputes Bede records with such partisan disapproval (Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica 2.2, 5.21–22; Colgrave & Mynors 1969). These differences were matters of usage and computation, not of creed; the British church held the catholic and Nicene faith, and its isolation was geographical and political rather than doctrinal (Charles-Edwards 2013; on the later framing of “the Celtic Church,” see The British Church Before Augustine and The Orthodox Reception).

The Monastic-Saint Movement

The defining religious development of sixth-century Wales was the rise of monasticism, and with it a new kind of holy man: the ascetic founder-abbot whose monastery became the centre of a familia of churches and whose memory was preserved as that of a saint. This is the movement to which David belongs.

The impulse is part of the wider spread of monasticism out of the Egyptian and Syrian deserts through Gaul — the Life of Antony, the foundations of Martin of Tours and the island community of Lérins, and the writings of John Cassian were the channels by which the desert reached the West (on this transmission see Welsh Asceticism and the Desert, and the sibling collections of St Martin of Tours and St John Cassian). In Britain that impulse took on a markedly austere and communal form, and it was carried by a network of teachers and pupils that the hagiographers, writing centuries later, organized into tidy genealogies of discipleship.

The figure who stands behind much of this in the south Welsh tradition is Illtud (Illtyd), credited with the great monastic school of Llanilltud Fawr (Llantwit Major) in Glamorgan, remembered as the teacher of a generation of saints (the Life of Samson of Dol, one of the earliest Welsh-related Lives, calls Illtud “the most learned of all the Britons”; Vita Samsonis 7; Charles-Edwards 2013). From this milieu the later Lives derive a constellation of founders:

Cadoc (Cadog) of Llancarfan, whose late-eleventh-century Life by Lifris of Llancarfan is, like Rhygyfarch’s Life of David, a document with institutional interests of its own (Wade-Evans, Vitae Sanctorum Britanniae et Genealogiae, 1944).
Teilo, associated with Llandeilo Fawr and later claimed by the see of Llandaff, whose rivalry with St Davids colours the surviving records (the Book of Llandaff / Liber Landavensis; J. Wyn Evans, in St David of Wales, ed. Evans & Wooding, 2007).
Padarn (Paternus) of Llanbadarn Fawr in Ceredigion, whose Life likewise advances the claims of his church (Wade-Evans 1944).
Deiniol of Bangor in the north.
and David (Dewi) himself, of Mynyw (Menevia, St Davids) in the far south-west of Dyfed.

It is essential to register that almost everything we “know” of the relationships among these saints comes from Lives written in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, four to six hundred years after the events, and shaped by the property disputes and metropolitan ambitions of the churches that produced them (Charles-Edwards 2013; the essays in Evans & Wooding 2007; on Rhygyfarch’s Life specifically, The Vita Davidis and The Political Uses of the Life). The “school of Illtud,” the chains of teacher and pupil, and the synchronisms that have David meeting this or that contemporary are hagiographical scaffolding before they are history.

“The Age of the Saints” as a Category

The phrase “the Age of the Saints” is itself a modern coinage, and a problematic one. It names the sixth and early seventh centuries as the great age of Welsh (and more broadly insular Celtic) sanctity, on the strength of the enormous number of churches dedicated to native founder-saints and the body of Lives that celebrate them. But the category imports several assumptions that the evidence does not support.

First, the evidential gap. The contemporary written sources for sixth-century Wales are almost non-existent: Gildas, a handful of inscribed stones, and little else. The Lives that populate the “Age of the Saints” with personalities and incidents were composed centuries later and are, by genre, devotional and polemical rather than historical (Charles-Edwards 2013; Wendy Davies 1982). To narrate the sixth century from twelfth-century Lives is to read the period through the institutional needs of a much later church.

Second, the foreshortening of dedications. A church called Llanddewi (“the llan of David”) need not have been founded by David, or even in his lifetime; dedications accreted over centuries, often as expressions of a mother-church’s claims rather than as records of a historical foundation (Heather James, on the dedication evidence, in Evans & Wooding 2007; Charles-Edwards 2013). The map of “Davidic” churches is in large part a map of the medieval cult, not of the sixth-century man.

Third, the construct served later interests. The image of a golden age of native saints was congenial both to medieval Welsh churches asserting ancient autonomy and to later Welsh national and antiquarian sentiment; “the Age of the Saints” is as much a story Wales has told about itself as a neutral period-label (on this self-fashioning, see the discussion of the cult and nation in Evans & Wooding 2007, and Legacy and Assessment). The sober course, followed throughout this collection, is to use the phrase as a convenient shorthand for a real religious phenomenon — the monastic transformation of the British church — while refusing the false precision that the Lives invite.

[Disputed: the chronology and even the relative sequence of the major Welsh saints are not securely fixed. The traditional “floruit” dates (e.g. David c. 500–589) derive ultimately from the late Welsh annals and the eleventh-century Lives; Charles-Edwards (Wales and the Britons, 2013) treats the sixth-century framework as broadly plausible but the individual synchronisms as unreliable, whereas earlier scholarship (e.g. parts of Nora Chadwick, The Age of the Saints in the Early Celtic Church, 1961) was more willing to build a connected narrative from the hagiographical synchronisms.]

The Llan and the Clas: How the Welsh Church Was Organized

The institutional form of the Welsh church in this period differs sharply from the diocesan, city-centred model of the late-Roman Mediterranean, and the difference is written into the Welsh landscape and language.

The basic unit is the llan. Originally meaning an enclosure (cognate with English “land” and Welsh llannerch, a clearing), llan came to denote a consecrated enclosure containing a church and burial ground, and then the church-settlement itself; the thousands of Welsh place-names beginning Llan- followed by a saint’s name (Llanddewi, Llanilltud, Llandeilo) record this pattern of foundation (Wendy Davies, Wales in the Early Middle Ages, 1982; Charles-Edwards 2013). The llan was as much a kin-and-property institution as a parish: founded under the patronage of a saint and often held within his spiritual familia, it tied land, lineage, and cult together.

The greater churches were organized as a clas (plural clasau): a mother-church served by a community of clergy — a college of canons or monks under an abbot or, in some cases, a bishop — holding substantial endowments and exercising authority over a network of dependent churches (Wendy Davies 1982; Charles-Edwards 2013). The clas is the institution that lies behind Rhygyfarch’s St Davids: a major monastic-collegiate church with extensive lands and dependent foundations, whose interests his Life of David exists to defend. The early Welsh church therefore knew bishops, but its bishops were frequently abbatial figures attached to great monastic churches rather than rulers of territorially defined dioceses on the continental pattern — a structure that has been compared, with due caution, to the abbot-bishop arrangements of early Ireland (Charles-Edwards 2013; on David’s own foundation, The Monastery at Mynyw).

Contacts with Ireland and Brittany

The western British church was not a sealed world. The Irish Sea, far from being a barrier, was a busy highway, and the seaways bound western Britain to Ireland on one side and to Brittany and Gaul on the other.

The traffic with Ireland ran in both directions. Irish dynasties settled in west Wales — the kingdom of Dyfed, in which St Davids lay, had a partly Irish (Déisi) ruling line, and the bilingual Latin-and-ogam inscribed stones of the region attest a mixed British-and-Irish Christian population (Charles-Edwards 2013; the Latinus and related inscriptions). In the other direction, the great age of Irish monasticism drew on British teachers: Irish tradition makes Finnian and others students of British masters, and David’s name is woven into Irish hagiographical memory. Rhygyfarch’s Life duly reports an angelic prophecy to St Patrick concerning David thirty years before David’s birth (Rhygyfarch, Vita Davidis 3; ed./trans. Sharpe & Davies, in Evans & Wooding 2007) — a synchronism that is a literary device asserting David’s stature, not a datum of chronology, and one treated in its place (see Birth and the Legends of Origin; on the wider Irish connections, the sibling collections of St Patrick of Ireland, St Columba of Iona, and St Brendan the Navigator).

The traffic with Brittany was the traffic of the British migration itself. The settlement of Armorica by Britons in the fifth and sixth centuries carried British saints’ cults across the Channel, and the earliest substantial Life of any saint of this milieu — the Life of Samson of Dol, written in Brittany — is a Breton product (Charles-Edwards 2013; Flobert, ed., La Vie ancienne de saint Samson de Dol, 1997). David’s cult, too, reaches into Brittany and Cornwall, part of a shared hagiographical world spanning the Brythonic-speaking lands on both shores. These contacts are the channels through which both the desert ideal reached Wales and the Welsh saints’ fame travelled outward (see Pilgrimage to St Davids and The Orthodox Reception).

References

Charles-Edwards, T. M. Wales and the Britons 350–1064. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. (The standard modern history of the period; the end of Roman Britain, the survival of the western church, monastic organization, the llan/clas, Irish and Breton contacts, and the cautionary reading of the hagiographical evidence.)
Davies, Wendy. Wales in the Early Middle Ages. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982. (Church organization, the llan and clas, land and kindred.)
Evans, J. Wyn, and Jonathan M. Wooding, eds. St David of Wales: Cult, Church and Nation. Studies in Celtic History 24. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007. (Essays on Rhygyfarch’s Life, the dedications and cult — including Heather James on the dedication evidence — and the relations of St Davids with Llandaff and other churches; edition and translation of Rhygyfarch’s Vita Davidis by Richard Sharpe and J. R. Davies.)
Gildas. The Ruin of Britain and Other Works (De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae). Ed. and trans. Michael Winterbottom. London and Chichester: Phillimore, 1978. (The earliest British voice for the post-Roman church.)
Lapidge, Michael, and David Dumville, eds. Gildas: New Approaches. Woodbridge: Boydell, 1984. (On the date and interpretation of Gildas.)
Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum). Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (Germanus and the Pelagian crisis at 1.17–21; the British church’s separate Easter and the disputes at 2.2 and 5.21–22.)
Chadwick, Nora K. The Age of the Saints in the Early Celtic Church. London: Oxford University Press, 1961. (The classic statement of the “Age of the Saints” category, now read critically.)
Wade-Evans, A. W., ed. Vitae Sanctorum Britanniae et Genealogiae. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1944. (Latin Lives of Cadoc, Padarn, and other Welsh saints.)