02 — The Monastic Founder
David of Wales (Dewi Sant, c. 500–589) is remembered above all as a founder and lawgiver of monks: the establisher of the great house at Mynyw (Menevia) in Glyn Rhosyn, the Vale of Roses, in the far south-west of Wales, and the author of a rule so severe that his monks were nicknamed the “Watermen” and he himself Dewi Ddyfrwr, “David the Water-drinker.” Almost everything later tradition knows of this monasticism descends from Rhygyfarch’s Vita Sancti David (c. 1090), a tendentious text written to defend St Davids’ metropolitan claims, so that the founder and his rule must be read through that lens. This section sets out the foundation and the rule as the Vita describes them, and weighs how literally so interested a source should be taken.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Celtic; patron of Wales)
David belongs to the age of the Welsh saints, the sixth-century flowering of British monasticism along the Irish-Sea seaways, and his enduring fame rests on his work as a monastic founder rather than on any surviving writing of his own. The picture we have is almost wholly Rhygyfarch’s: David plants monasteries across southern Britain — twelve in the schematic count of the Vita — and settles at last in the remote hollow of Glyn Rhosyn, where he imposes a discipline modelled on the Egyptian desert. The two files in this section treat the two halves of that legacy. The first follows the foundation at Mynyw: the winning of the site from the chieftain Boia, the catalogue of twelve houses, and the reasons a place at the very end of the land became one of the great cult centres of medieval Britain. The second sets out the rule of the “Watermen”: water only and no wine, the monks yoked to the plough in place of oxen, the renunciation of all property down to the books they used, silence, fixed prayer, and a diet of bread, vegetables and salt — an austerity self-consciously Eastern in its ideals. Throughout, the details are pinned to Rhygyfarch as their source, and the genuine scholarly dispute over how far his picture reflects sixth-century practice or eleventh-century reform is named where it bears.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Monastery at Mynyw | The foundation at Mynyw (Menevia) in Glyn Rhosyn, the Vale of Roses, at the site of present-day St Davids; David as founder of multiple monasteries (Rhygyfarch’s twelve); the remote, hard-won site and the conflict with the chieftain Boia in the Vita; and why the western tip of Wales became a great cult centre. |
| The Rule of the Watermen | The Aquatici, the “Watermen,” and David’s byname Dewi Ddyfrwr; the extreme asceticism Rhygyfarch describes — water only, hand-ploughing, no private property (“not even a book is ‘mine’”), silence, fixed prayer, a diet of bread, vegetables and salt; the deliberately Egyptian-desert character of the rule, and the question of how literally to read it. |
See Also
- Welsh Asceticism and the Desert — the desert ideal behind David’s monasticism
- The Political Uses of the Life — why Rhygyfarch’s Vita magnified the founder
- St John Cassian — the transmitter of Egyptian monasticism to the Celtic West
- St Benedict of Nursia — the great Western monastic legislator, for comparison with David’s rule
- Monasticism — the Orthodox monastic tradition within which David is read
References
- Rhygyfarch (Rhigyfarch). Vita Sancti David (c. 1090). Edited and translated by Richard Sharpe and John Reuben Davies in J. Wyn Evans and Jonathan M. Wooding, eds., St David of Wales: Cult, Church and Nation. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007.
- James, J. W. Rhigyfarch’s Life of St David: The Basic Mid-Twelfth-Century Latin Text. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1967.
- Evans, J. Wyn, and Jonathan M. Wooding, eds. St David of Wales: Cult, Church and Nation. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007.
- Charles-Edwards, T. M. Wales and the Britons 350–1064. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
- Davies, Wendy. Wales in the Early Middle Ages. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982.